A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain

by Michael Paterson

  Men and women, and most especially boys, purchase their meals day after day in the streets. The coffee-stall supplies a warm breakfast; shell-fish of many kinds tempt to a luncheon; hot eels or pea soup, flanked by a potato ‘all hot’, serve for a dinner; and cakes and tarts, or nuts and oranges, with many varieties of pastry, confectionery, and fruit, woo to indulgence in a dessert; while for supper there is a sandwich, a meat pudding or a ‘trotter’.9

  Coffee stalls were everywhere. Mayhew estimated that the capital contained over three hundred in the forties, and in the following decade he made the calculation that they sold about 550,000 gallons a year – far more than stalls that sold chocolate or tea. Both coffee and tea stalls remained open all day. Some were not so much money-making ventures as attempts to reform social habits: the temperance movement sponsored a number of them to ensure that alternatives to strong drink were available. They were doing business at roadsides from early morning, for many people depended on them for sustenance on their way to work. The coffee, costing a halfpenny a cup, was made in large cans over a charcoal burner, and would be drunk on the spot from a china cup and saucer that would be returned and – it is to be hoped – rinsed before it was offered to the next customer. The drink itself might well be adulterated, containing more acorn or carrot than coffee beans. Piled on the stall would also be hard-boiled eggs, perhaps hot or cold bacon, rolls and bread and butter. The latter was a staple that Victorians seem to have appreciated more than we do, for it was always popular.

  Another item that to us seems somewhat bland was the ham sandwich. There were stalls that dealt in nothing else, and Mayhew computed that almost half a million of them were sold in London every year. They were eaten for breakfast, but were also much in demand outside theatres in the evenings. These would not, of course, have been the thin and neatly triangular affairs that are found in supermarkets today, but made with thick ‘doorsteps’ of bread and with meat that would have been cut from joints in front of the customers.

  Fish and chips is often considered to be the most traditional of British ‘convenience foods’, but it does not have a long pedigree. Strips or chunks of fried potato were introduced from the Low Countries (where they remain an emblematic national dish to this day), and it was a Belgian who first sold them from a street barrow, in the 1850s, at Dundee in Scotland. Initially they were served with peas, and it was only later that the notion of combining them with fried fish was tried. Potatoes already had a place on the streets, though the trade in them dated only from the 1830s. Roast potatoes were sold in paper bags or twists of newspaper, baked ones could be bought individually for a halfpenny. Heated at a bakehouse, they were carried in, and sold from, metal cans, although as the trade developed it became more common to use portable ovens. Once ready, the potatoes were impaled on metal spikes attached to the top of the oven, where their aroma would tempt passers-by. After years of eclipse, the baked potato has re-emerged as a popular snack, though the Victorians did not, as we do, stuff them with assorted fillings. Saveloys, a type of spicy sausage still found in chip shops, were also warmed in these ovens and sold by dealers in potatoes.

  Pies were the traditional British fast food, and numerous varieties could be bought both from stalls and from ‘pie-men’ who carried trays on their heads. Ham, beef, mutton, veal and eel pies cost about a penny. With no procedures for testing the authenticity of the contents, meat might well not be what it pretended to be, and it was widely suspected that dogs and cats ended up in some of them. Pies were also filled with whatever fruit was in season – apple, gooseberry, rhubarb, plum, cherry.

  Oysters were such a staple of the nineteenth century poor that in Mayhew’s time they could be had for a penny a dozen. By the later years of Victoria’s reign they were more than a penny each, though still within reach of the poor. They were sold from barrels at stalls and eaten, standing up, from the shell. They were on sale from 25 July, the beginning of the oyster season, and this was celebrated by children, who sought to collect coppers from passing adults by holding out empty shells.

  A number of other items were also sold from trays carried about the streets. The muffin man, who traditionally bore his wares on his head, and the signal of whose approach – the ringing of a handbell – was one of the most joyous sounds in a Victorian childhood, continued in business until the Second World War. Cakes, pastries and puddings, such as bread pudding and ‘spotted dick’, were also sold in this manner.

  Ice-cream was something of a latecomer to the streets. Although it was available by the time of the Great Exhibition, it became common only in the eighties, when portable freezing equipment was invented by Agnes Bertha Marshall, the principal of a London cookery school. The author of books on the subject of ice-cream, she made it with a mixture of cream, egg yolks and caster sugar. Placed in an aluminium and wooden drum, these ingredients were mixed and frozen by rotating a handle, a process that took about ten minutes. It was she who invented the cone in the late eighties. Prior to that, ice-cream had often been frozen onto metal rods that had to be returned after it had been licked off!

  The streets were fairly flowing with drink, then as now. Gin was favoured as the cheapest narcotic, but beer was the universal thirst quencher and was highly useful, given that water was often unsafe to drink. Lemonade and ginger beer were the most popular in hot weather. Both were sold by vendors from barrels on a stall or from portable cans that were simply put down at a kerbside. Before there were such things as disposable cups, the customers drank on the spot and returned the glass.

  Though the Victorians, as a whole, may have been less fastidious than we are regarding both hygiene and ingredients (Mrs Marshall, of ice-cream machine fame, called the items proffered by vendors ‘poisonous filth’), we can only conclude that the taste-buds of our nineteenth-century ancestors functioned differently from ours. Mrs Marshall herself included in a cookery book the recipe for a Parmesan ice flavoured with Leibig’s meat extract, and the peckish could find themselves tempted by frozen curries in cups of aspic.10 Though we have much to learn from the Victorians, their eating habits are not worthy of our admiration.

  4

  TASTE

  Georgian Afterglow

  In the nineteenth century Britain was able to enjoy the benefits of the Industrial Revolution on a grand scale. Despite an economy that often veered between boom and bust, this meant a steadily rising standard of living for the middle classes as well as a huge rise in their numbers. It also meant a vast increase in technology. Not only did domestic conveniences – such as piped water – make houses more comfortable, ornaments and furnishings became far more inexpensive and readily available. ‘Taste’ therefore became something that many millions could afford to exercise for the first time.

  In the Georgian era, items such as wallpaper, carpets and furniture had been extremely costly, and beyond the reach of most. It had also been a matter of taste to devote attention to the outside of a house rather than the interiors in order to make a good impression on others. Inside, even in the homes of the wealthy, decoration was simple and even severe. Since the Greeks and Romans, the inspiration for all things Classical, were perceived as having lived in sparse surroundings, this fashion was blessed by historical precedent. When Victoria came to the throne there was no sudden alteration in the way things were designed or laid out. Regency taste continued to dominate architecture and interiors for well over a decade after her accession.

  Clutter

  By then, however, technology had made it possible to produce more elaborate décor, and to do so without enormous cost. It became a sign of moving with the times to cram one’s home with the marvels, fripperies and luxuries created by industry, and people began to seek status symbols that could be displayed inside their homes. Victorians filled their parlours with ornament and utilities not only to enjoy these things but to show visitors that they possessed the currently modish objects and styles. The simplicity of the Georgians was turned on its head, for a room with empty stretches
of wall, or corners bereft of tables and ornaments, was considered poor taste – a classic example of one generation reacting against the outlook of the last.

  The desire for a wealth of ornament reached its apogee in the fifties, for the Great Exhibition at the start of that decade acted as a huge market-place for domestic furnishings, showing the public what was available not only from British manufacturers – who constituted by far the largest element – but from overseas. However, this taste for heavy, elaborate, machine-made furniture and ornament had scarcely begun to make an impact when it was challenged by designers and thinkers, most notably John Ruskin and William Morris. Though cluttered homes continued to be characteristic of Victorian living right to the end of the era, the accepted notions of popular taste were under constant, often spirited attack, and alternatives were found. No sooner, in other words, had the industrial era reached its high point than a reaction against it began. The Queen Anne revival later in the century led the way to styles of building and furnishing that were a direct repudiation of those which dominated the mid-Victorian years. Taste went from simple to elaborate and back to simple.

  Because it was there that status and wealth were displayed, the home became the focus of unprecedented and increasing attention. As opportunities expanded for planning, decorating and furnishing houses, these matters developed into a national preoccupation, somewhat similar in scale to the present-day interest in do-it-yourself and renovation. The trend was reflected in the number of books and periodicals produced throughout the reign. The best-known was Charles Eastlake’s Hints on Household Taste, which was first published in 1868. Other titles that sold well included Shirley Hibberd’s Rustic Adornments for Homes of Taste (1857), Robert Edis’ Decoration and Furniture of Town Houses (1881) – which became a standard text for the Queen Anne movement – Mrs Mary Haweis’ The Art of Decoration (1881), and Mrs Lucy Orrinsmith’s The Drawing-Room, its Decoration and Furniture (1877). In addition there were multi-volume reference works such as Cassell’s Household Guide (1869 onwards) and The Cabinet-Maker, a Journal of Designs (1868). By the end of the century there were influential periodicals such as The Artist and, most famously, The Studio, which, instead of setting out the mores of taste for readers to follow, offered through their articles continuous and updated information about developments in Britain and abroad. Decorative ideas in vogue in Germany, Scandinavia or Russia, for instance, could be disseminated through text and illustrations, and thus quickly incorporated into British homes. It is worth noticing, incidentally, given our notions of how little scope Victorian ladies had for earning income or following careers, that much of this material was written by women. As with the equally lucrative books on etiquette, household management and domestic economy, ladies were seen as the natural repository of wisdom in this area. Some of them made considerable names, as well as incomes, from their pens, though none of them matched the degree of fame achieved by Mrs Beeton.

  The home was not only a showplace for one’s taste and possessions but a contrast to the violence and uncertainty outside. The Victorian wealthy, and middle classes, saw themselves as surrounded by a sea of poverty, crime and disturbance. There was always the threat of robbery, but during the unrest of the thirties and the upheavals of the forties, there was an additional likelihood of civil disorder and they felt physically endangered by political mobs. The Duke of Wellington, despite being a national hero, had felt sufficiently at risk during the Reform Bill riots to have the windows of his town house in Piccadilly fitted with bulletproof iron shutters (thus gaining his nickname ‘the Iron Duke’). In the following decade the Queen and her family fled London before the Chartist rally on Kennington Common in expectation of widespread violence.

  Fortress and Sanctuary

  In the comfortably off, these circumstances perhaps induced a siege mentality. The home, or at least the notion of home life, became more important in this era than at any time before or since. It was becoming sanctified in Victorian mythology as a place of refuge from the world and its troubles, and as such it became a fortress. Sometimes, it even looked like one. The very streets in which the wealthy had their homes were often segregated from the surrounding area by hefty, though elegant, barriers. Even fairly modest homes that were built in terraces were commonly set back from the pavement behind a set of sharp-pointed railings and a ten- or fifteen-foot ‘moat’ that could only be crossed by a stone ‘drawbridge’. Arthur Schlesinger was greatly amused by what he saw as domestic premises bristling with defences, and remarked that: ‘Every English house has its fence, its iron stockade and its doorway bridge. It is exactly as if Louis Napoleon was expected to effect a landing daily between luncheon and dinner, while every individual Englishman is prepared to defend his household gods to the last drop of porter.’1 Whether they were expecting to sit out a revolution or were merely protecting their privacy, British people of the property-owning sort appeared to be suspicious and fearful of everything beyond their own fireside.

  Town houses designed in this way were not a Victorian invention. Their predecessors the Georgians had created this type of townscape in the previous century, as can be seen by any visitor to Bath. The nineteenth century expanded it – as befitted an era in which there were far more people wealthy enough to live in grand town houses – and the Victorians made it their own with a number of architectural touches and innovations. In London, the covering of facades with a coat of off-white stucco, which looks especially attractive when lit by evening sun, was first seen in the Grosvenor Estate, the building of which began in 1824 but continued well into Victoria’s reign. Instead of the comparatively simple fan-lighted Georgian doors, the builders of later generations created more imposing entrances, the doors themselves sheltered by balustraded balconies that were supported by pairs of Corinthian columns. A street uniformly filled with this architecture, such as those on either side of Eaton Square, presents a prospect of striking beauty and magnificence, an undeniable achievement of architects and builders. This style was imitated, in many thousands of smaller houses, throughout London and beyond. The spacious, ordered facades, pillared entrances and Italianate balustrades, which were in essence a continuation of eighteenth-century Classical styles and which had been refined in the Regency period, became characteristic of the Victorian era because houses of this sort continued to be built throughout the early and middle decades of that epoch. Buckingham Palace characterized this heavy Classical style, though it was not a product of the Queen’s reign. It had been begun by John Nash in about 1825 and he himself had died two years before she came to the throne, yet it became associated with Victoria because she was the first monarch to live there, moving in a month after her coronation in 1838. This type of architecture was seen as stately as well as familiar. It suggested to both natives and foreign visitors that in terms of national greatness Britons were the heirs to Ancient Rome. It also reflected the Mediterranean taste developed by architects who had either been on the Grand Tour or had studied under others who had. The fashion for Italianate buildings would continue throughout the reign. It would be seen not only in the design of private houses (the square campanile, two of which were such a feature of Osborne House, was much copied in suburban villas) but in communal and public buildings. Anyone walking through St James’ Park and Pall Mall in London will not fail to notice that the back of the Foreign Office looks as if it would be more suitable in Rome, and several of the gentlemen’s clubs seem to have been lifted directly from medieval Florence – as their designs largely were.

  Though the huge town houses of Belgravia might represent the heights of urban domestic architecture, most Victorians who needed a home belonged to social strata that could not dream of affording such splendour. Scaled-down versions of the classic town house were therefore built in vast numbers on the edges of cities. The terrace was a space-saving option which – as the architects of Bath had discovered a century earlier – enabled a whole group of dwellings to increase their elegance by being joined together in a
uniform row that had a pleasing harmony and balance. Speculators who built such houses (one of them was ‘Superior Dosset’, the founder of the Forsyte dynasty in Galsworthy’s novels) threw up these rows of houses in fields and at roadsides, where they might remain as truncated eyesores until the arrival of neighbouring – and perhaps unsympathetic – buildings joined them together to form streets. The houses of lower-middle-class families might have half-stuccoed facades in imitation of Nash’s great projects, and even these were likely to have areas (the railing-enclosed open space at basement level in front of a house) and servants’ attics, for anyone belonging to the class of small householder was likely to have a servant, even if it were only a single young girl from the local orphanage. The houses were also likely to have touches of gentility in the form of fanlights over the door or pairs of columns or pilasters framing it. In the case of especially pretentious builders there could even be niches, Classical urns or pseudo-Greek statuary on the pediment of a terrace. All of these things, like the genteel or aristocratic names often given to streets and squares by developers in bourgeois neighbourhoods, appealed to the aspirations of a society that took its cue entirely from the top and which delighted in being able to display its own modest expressions of taste and status. The advent of the railway meant that building materials could be more widely, and rapidly, distributed around the country, and therefore that Welsh slate – to name one major example – could be used to build houses in Newcastle or Brighton.