A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain

by Michael Paterson

  Below Stairs

  The brothers of the Bryant and May match-girls might well have been employed as casual labour at the London docks. They would earn considerably less than the four shillings or so that were paid, in a good week, to their sisters, for they would make threepence a day. They had no guarantee of getting work loading and unloading cargoes, and each morning had to wait for the dock gates to be opened – the signal for a stampede to get in first and be taken on. The same scene would have taken place in Liverpool or Glasgow.

  Given working conditions like these – and that agriculture was in a state of depression for much of the nineteenth century – it was fortunate that another possibility existed. Domestic service was a huge field of employment. In a wealthy age in which the property-owning classes were expanding, there was a constant need for servants (it was estimated that a third of the population of London was made up of servants, though in other towns this would have been less). They worked both indoors and outside. In large households there would be a hierarchy, reaching from the butler at the top through the footmen to the ‘boots’ – a boy, doubtless destined to be a footman once he was big enough to fit a livery, who cleaned the shoes. Among the women the housekeeper was at the top, with below her a cook and a range of ladies’ maids, chambermaids and kitchen maids. Outside there would be a head gardener and a number of helpers, varying in expertise down to young boys who gave general assistance. The keeping of a carriage would require further staff – a coachman and at least one groom. Naturally, comparatively few households could run to this number of servants (though the 1881 census shows a moderately wealthy Kent doctor to have had a ‘page’ as well as a maid. The young man’s job would have been to run errands.). It was more common, further down the social scale, to have only a maid, and even the most modest lower-middle-class household would usually have a single servant – a young girl of thirteen or so from the local board school or workhouse. Such labour was very cheap, and at a time when domestic appliances were still expensive it would have been extremely difficult to run a home without it.

  Most servants began this life in their early teens. Those who worked in cities frequently came from the country, having been recommended or found places through a network of acquaintances or previous employers. In larger households they might be more or less anonymous, their names unknown to their employers. In smaller establishments they could well be treated as one of the family, confided in or trusted with money for shopping. The hours they worked were usually long, for they had to be up very early to light the stove, heat water and prepare breakfast. They could not go to bed until the day’s work was over, which might mean clearing up after a dinner-party in the small hours of the following day. They lived in whatever accommodation was available – typically they occupied small bedrooms on the top floor of a house and took their meals in the basement kitchen, the bottom floor being regarded as their domain. They would usually have only one afternoon off each week, and therefore had little opportunity to explore their surroundings or increase their circle of friends. Females were often recruited on the understanding that they had ‘no followers’, and if a servant married she would be expected to leave. Otherwise, domestics could spend decades – their entire working lives – with the same employer. In the best instances, being a servant in such a household gave men and women a sense of belonging to a close-knit, family-like group. It could provide security, shelter and enough to eat until they were too old to continue. Once they reached that age, it was possible that their grateful employers would make provision for them.

  The stereotypical image of Victorian servants is of dumbly obedient, resigned men and women, loyal enough to their masters to spend years in menial work. The reality was less straightforward. Good servants were extremely difficult to find, and would-be employers often despaired of the applicants they interviewed. Their domestics were frequently lazy or insolent. Middle-class books and periodicals – Punch is, as ever, an invaluable reflection of this – lament their propensity to pilfer, to break ornaments, to dawdle on errands, to help themselves to the wine-cellar and to mock their betters. It was so difficult to find good ones that often a certain amount of leeway had to be granted in order not to lose them. Servants did not necessarily feel any loyalty to a household, and might leave at very short notice if offered better prospects elsewhere. They might also flounce out if they took offence at the hours or the tasks expected of them. Cooks were notorious for this, for they knew they could blackmail their mistress by threatening to leave just before a dinner-party.

  Darkest England

  The Victorians, who believed themselves to be civilizing the wider world, cared with equal passion for the disadvantaged at home. The scale of social problems had no parallel in history. There was no quick remedy. Nevertheless a great deal of work was done, by individuals and societies, to alleviate specific evils, and by the middle decades of the reign there were more than five hundred organizations devoted to charity, an effort that was maintained throughout the Victorian era. Contemporaries were horrified by the observation of the commentator Charles Booth that a third of the British population lived in want, and in 1890 the seminal study In Darkest England by his near-namesake William Booth coined the phrase ‘the Submerged Tenth’ to describe the estimated 3 million people who were ‘living in such conditions of misery and destitution, vice and crime, as put them outside the limits of civilised society’6 He himself founded one of the principal bodies that sought to help this group – the Salvation Army. It was an immediate success, spread all over the world and is still doing very valuable work.

  Since alcoholism was the single greatest scourge, the temperance movement came into being. Rather than simply disapproving of drink, it offered wherever possible practical solutions – establishing reading rooms and coffee rooms to give workmen more wholesome places of resort than public houses, awarding temperance medals to soldiers who abstained and persuading many thousands to ‘sign the pledge’ – a promise that was often taken seriously for years or decades afterwards by those who did so.

  The Ragged School movement, another instance of tackling a social evil head-on, sought to educate street children who had neither the time nor the means to attend school. Lessons were taught to them by volunteers, using whatever premises could be cheaply rented, and classes were held in the evenings to enable them to continue earning their livings during the daytime. Because they often arrived hungry, meals began to be provided for them. Because they suffered from the usual urban lack of fresh air, annual holidays were arranged for them. Because many of them had no prospects of useful employment, numbers of them were trained as shoe-blacks and deployed in the streets as a smartly uniformed, distinctive body. This movement opened new vistas for entire generations of the poor.

  The fact that some people today smile at this Victorian earnestness – and at the outlandish names of charitable societies (‘The Society for Returning Young Women to Their Friends in the Country’, the ‘Ladies’ Association for the Benefit of Gentlewomen of Good Family, Reduced in Fortune Below the State of Comfort to Which They Have Been Accustomed’, and the painful-sounding ‘National Truss Society for the Relief of the Ruptured Poor’) – does not detract from the importance of the work that was done by organizations of this sort.

  It says much about the climate of the times that philanthropists should have become national celebrities, but this was true of Dr Barnardo, who devoted his life to helping the ‘waifs and strays’ of London, of Quentin Hogg, who devoted his life to the betterment of boys through the London Polytechnic, and of Lord Shaftesbury, the greatest friend to the poor that the era produced – a man so popular for the legislation he brought before Parliament (the Mines Bill of 1842 and the Ten Hours Act of 1847) and for his personal commitment to a host of charitable initiatives that, at his funeral in 1885, the streets were lined with thousands of paupers. Philanthropy was one of the major preoccupations of the Victorian era, and one of its greatest achievements.

  Garro
tters and Hooligans

  Nor should we imagine that Victorian streets were safer than ours: quite the contrary. There had been anarchy before the advent of modern law enforcement (beginning with the founding of the Metropolitan Police in 1829), and it took several decades to bring both manpower and methods to a level of efficiency that made them effective. Cities abounded – as readers of Dickens will know – with pickpockets, kidnappers, confidence tricksters and assorted criminals who made it their business to prey on the gullible, the young and the weak. The struggle to live was so desperate for the poorest that anything might be stolen from those who were not careful. There was a practice, for instance, of luring lone children off the streets and stripping them of their clothes to sell – there were, in other words, entire sub-species of criminal that have thankfully since become extinct. In the centre of cities there were whole districts that it would be dangerous to enter in daylight and suicidal at night. Anyone leaving London’s Drury Lane Theatre late in the evening would have to hail a cab at once. The surrounding alleys teemed with men waiting to rob those who set out to walk the few yards to the Strand.

  The suburbs were not necessarily safer. Street lighting was poor, and there were numerous opportunities for attackers to lurk in shrubbery or on waste ground. In 1862 – during what was perhaps the decade of greatest elegance, and therefore the one that most typifies the ‘mid-Victorian calm’ – there was a much-publicized outbreak of suburban mugging known as ‘Garrotting’. This was carried out by groups of three. Two would surround a victim, pinioning his limbs while a third – known as ‘the nasty man’ – applied pressure to prevent resistance. A magazine article described the process:

  The third ruffian flings his arm around the victim, striking him smartly on the forehead. Instinctively he throws his head back, and in that moment loses every chance of escape. His throat is fully offered to his assailant, who instantly embraces it with his left arm, the bone just above the wrist being pressed against the ‘apple’ of the throat. At the same moment the garrotter, dropping his right hand, seizes the other’s wrist, and draws his back upon his breast and there holds him. His burden is helpless from the first moment, and speedily becomes insensible.7

  Though this probably occurred less frequently than the newspapers implied, it still represented a notably vicious outbreak of premeditated crime, and for a time brought fear to the comfortably off. In 1898, during another decade that is popularly associated with confident complacency, there was a rash of gang violence so severe that a new term – ‘hooligan’ – was invented to describe those responsible. Like the skinheads, ‘hoodies’ and similar groupings of a later century, hooligans were instantly recognizable by their dress. It was described by a newspaper:

  No hat, collar or tie is to be seen. All of them have a peculiar muffler twisted around the neck, a cap set rakishly forward, well over the eyes, and trousers very tight at the knee and very loose at the foot [what would later be called ‘flares’]. The most characteristic part of their uniform is the substantial leather belt heavily mounted with metal. It is not ornamental, but then it is not intended for ornament.8

  The response to this was a penal system that was both harsh and humane. It included transportation to Australia (until 1867), flogging in prison (though a doctor was present, and could stop the punishment if the victim were suffering too much) and the wearing of masks by prisoners to prevent them recognizing each other. Child criminals were incarcerated with adults and given the same punishments. In some sample cases seen at Wandsworth Prison in 1872, fourteen-year-old William Trimmer was sentenced to ten days’ hard labour and five years in a reformatory for stealing two bottles of lemonade. James Hempson, a year younger, received four days’ hard labour and ten strokes of the birch for purloining a box of figs. James Leadbeater was given a whipping and four days’ labour for the theft of celery worth a shilling, and John Morrells twenty-one days’ hard labour for stealing a glass worth sixpence.9 It was widely felt that sentences for serious criminals were not sufficiently harsh, and the return to the streets of paroled (‘ticket-of-leave’) prisoners was seen as dangerous folly. The ‘ticket-of-leave man’ was a particular bogey.

  The Victorians were as afraid of crime as any people before or since. One reason for their preoccupation was – as we have found in our own age – that better communications mean more incidents are reported. A climate of fear, fed, in their case, by journals of the Police Gazette variety, could create periodic hysteria. In fact, Victorian law enforcement was highly effective. Prior to the Queen’s accession the Army had been used as a matter of course to quell civil unrest. That this became extremely rare during her reign indicates how successful the police were in maintaining order.

  Serious crime was no better or worse than was to be expected among a crowded and expanding population that experienced both frequent recessions and the temptations of flaunted wealth.

  3

  WHAT THEY ATE

  Beef and Beer

  The British had always prided themselves on their diet. While Frenchmen, Italians and assorted foreigners lived on pastries, fricasees and all manner of fripperies, and the other inhabitants of the British Isles on a basic diet of oats and mutton (the Scots), toasted cheese (the Welsh) and potatoes (literally the only thing eaten by large numbers of Irish peasants), the English dined on beef. This was, at least, the stereotype, for the beefsteak was as much an emblem of their country as it would later be of the United States. This meat, which gave them their nickname among the French – les rosbifs – symbolized the nation’s prosperity, and implied that their solid and nutritious feeding made the English happier and more successful – at winning wars or undertaking trade or running a parliamentary democracy – than the wretched inhabitants of other nations. In caricatures from the Napoleonic Wars the English, whether personified by the comfortably paunched John Bull or the brawny, cutlass-wielding Jack Tar, were shown as well fed. Despite the famine and depression that followed these wars, this image was perpetuated throughout the century. Punch and other publications continued to symbolize England in the same way after the Second World War.

  Tea and Margarine

  The reality was, as always, very different. A modern observer looking at the people in a Victorian street would be struck by the thin, wizened and unhealthy appearance of large numbers of them. Throughout the century, the very poor lived principally on a diet of bread and tea, the latter being drunk without milk or sugar. A possible addition to this diet was margarine (originally called ‘butterine’), invented in the sixties and widely sold by the mid-seventies. Not only did this lack of vitamins – and ‘vitamins’ were a concept discovered and named at the end of the Victorian era – make them vulnerable to diseases like scurvy and rickets, it also meant that comparatively few of them achieved even a modest robustness; when men volunteered for service in the Boer War, many had to be rejected as failing to meet even the minimum fitness requirements, and the situation had not greatly improved half a generation later in 1914. Friedrich Engels, observing in 1844 conditions in the industrial cities of the north, recorded that the only meat that many saw was:

  A small bit of bacon cut up with the potatoes; lower still even this disappears, and there remain only bread, cheese, porridge and potatoes, until on the lowest round of the ladder, among the Irish, potatoes form the sole food.1

  Slightly higher up the social scale, among those who had regular work and were therefore free from absolute want, it was possible with careful management to live on basic but wholesome food. A Scottish artisan with a wife and four children, earning just over £2 a week, listed the dinners in his household for a typical week in February 1892:

  Sunday – Apple tart and tea (no meat as a rule, partly to leave the mother leisure for church, etc.)

  Monday – Soup, meat and potatoes; half pound of boiling meat.

  Tuesday – Stewed meat and vegetables and potatoes; three-quarters lb. stewing meat.

  Wednesday – Soup made with bone, and remain
der of apple tart left from Sunday.

  Thursday – Collops, vegetables and potatoes; three-quarters lb. stewing meat.

  Friday – Soup and semolina pudding.

  Saturday – Stewing meat and potatoes; three-quarters lb. meat.2

  He added that ‘Children get no butcher’s meat; they get the sauce and potatoes, and a piece of bread after, and mother and I have always a cup of coffee after dinner.’ Their weekly outlay on food was thirty-seven shillings. Though they were able to eat healthily, the amounts they consumed were probably less than a modern nutrition expert would prescribe.

  Adulteration

  This family was fortunate in having a garden to grow vegetables. Millions of others among the poor and moderately well off could do the same, and therefore ensure a supply of essential vitamins. The absence of ‘quality control’ for foodstuffs during the early part of the reign in many cases meant that adulteration was commonplace. Any commodity could be made more profitable for those selling it by making it go further. Milk was therefore watered down as a matter of course. It would also sell more readily if it looked attractive, so it was whitened by adding chalk. This was at least preferable to the traditional means of whitening bread – which was done with ground bones – though alum and even plaster of Paris were also used. Coffee was adulterated with acorns, sugar with sand, pepper with pea-flour, cocoa with brick-dust. The froth on beer might be the result of adding green vitriol. Tea, whether China or India, was one of the things most commonly interfered with. The former, which was green, was often counterfeited by using thorn leaves treated with verdigris. For the latter, which was dark in colour, black lead could be used. It was in any case possible to ‘recycle’ tea by obtaining used leaves – or floor sweepings – from commercial premises and repackaging them. The results of adulteration could be unpleasant at best and lethal at worst.