Susan in NC’s Reviews > How to Be a Victorian: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life > Status Update

“The search has also taken me down harrowing avenues of hunger, disease, overwork and abuse. The Victorian era was a catastrophic time to be poor. People’s skeletal remains provide the most graphic and incontrovertible evidence of lifelong hardship, with effects upon the body as bad as at any other point in our national history.” - Epilogue

“ The West End had a reputation for all manner of sexual transactions, and Piccadilly Circus became the acknowledged centre for male ‘cruising’. As public concerns escalated in the 1880s, homosexual behaviour was viewed as primarily a moral failing; a degrading and obscene act from a person or persons with no self-control. The notion that a person might be born homosexual was largely absent from the British psyche…”

“The first public baths to be introduced in the Victorian period were just that: baths for the public to use. They were conceived as a way of offering the latest advances in personal hygiene to those who had no access to a bathroom and possibly not even piped water in their home. The earliest public-bath buildings were often connected to a laundry room…”

“ By 1900, medical baths had become a side issue. People’s fears had been assuaged by new understandings of bacteria and viruses, and water was no longer something to be looked on with caution. If the medical efficacy of bathing was slipping away, however, it had left an enduring mark upon people’s habits. People now wanted to bathe to get clean.”

“ A hot bath had to wait until the end of the day, when the range or copper was free from other tasks and had reached a suitable temperature to heat the water. Bathing involved a vast amount of preparation, particularly when few people had dedicated bathrooms, plumbing of any kind or even bathtubs.”

“Living in a barely heated Victorian house through a whole winter and engaging in the daily physical routine of Victorian domestic and farming life, I found that my appetite and tastes temporarily changed. Foods that I would simply dismiss in my twenty-first-century lifestyle became delicious. I was able to eat with enthusiasm the bread and dripping, the pig’s trotters and the plain suet pastry with a scrape of jam.”

“ I have worn a two-piece Victorian bathing suit, as described in many of the fashion articles from the period, and it was a fantastic experience. I enjoyed not having to bare my midriff, and, while the costume was slightly heavier when wet than a modern swimsuit, it was not so heavy as to be a nuisance or to hinder my movement.”

“ One correspondent to The Times in 1872 asserted that no female could ‘follow a course of higher education without running the risk of becoming sterile’. For, as Dr Henry Maudsley (the eminent physician after whom Maudsley psychiatric hospital is named) opined, ‘When nature expends in one direction, she must economise in another.’”

“Deeply engrained within the Victorian psyche, and common to both the layperson and the medical expert, was the notion that the male body was the perfect ‘pattern’. Most female traits, therefore, were an aberration of this ideal. Menstruation, though well known to be an essential part of the reproductive cycle, was unconsciously accepted as a weakness. It was referred to in terms of illness...”