A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain

by Michael Paterson

  Sobriety

  By the nineties much of the colour noticed by Sala had departed, for sobriety rather than flamboyance had come to be regarded as appropriate for those who handled the nation’s funds or ran its government. Black, dark grey and dark blue were the shades favoured by all but the wantonly eccentric. In London’s financial quarter:

  every City man [is] strapped into a frock coat one size too small and let into a pair of trousers one size too large. There are collars – four inchers – that lap the whole way round with the neat 4s 6d black silk tie (‘all cut from the Spitalfields square’) sometimes restrained by black-headed pins. There are top hats that have to be seen to be believed, for each of them is a shining mirror to reflect the virtue beneath and is sent to the hatter’s each morning to reflect it. If you buy one, it runs you into one guinea if you want one of the best, although there is an inferior quality at 15s 6d, much affected by office-boy adolescence. For the silk hat means a certain ‘five bob a week rise’. It is the insignia of success.2

  As for coats, the same account states that ‘if you are an employer, you wear the frock coat’, and that if you are a clerk, you wear a blue lounge suit, ‘Navy serge, all indigo-dyed’, with a bowler. If you were somewhere in between, you might wear a ‘morning coat’ – the tail coat still seen at weddings – which was a descendant of the Regency swallowtail. These too were uniform in colour, though they might vary in style:

  Some morning coats have tails which cling like the wing-cases of a beetle to the waists and nether parts of the wearers, finishing at the bend of the knee. Some, however, the very smart Johnnies, have their tails coming nearly half-way down the calf, and look rather like out of work waiters. But all wear black or grey mixture for the coat, whether frock or morning, and all wear the grey striped or dark mixture of nondescript trousers.3

  Accessories

  The only brief touches of colour might be found in small accoutrements such as ties:

  A few of the ultra-ultras have ‘bandana’ ties, yellow horrors with red erysipelas spots; they wear their striped cashmere trousers turned up about three inches; and their buttoned boots are varnished, not polished, every morning. Over their arms they carry umbrellas, bamboo-handled with gold or silver studs. And for gloves, they wear lavender or pale yellow kid.4

  The author concludes by describing the remaining articles in the gentleman’s wardrobe. Since he specifies that this is summer costume, we can only wonder how wearers survived the heat of August:

  And, of course, what with the impervious vests of thick white linen, the strait waistcoat of a shirt that has a front and cuffs like armour plate (the soft shirt is yet unknown except by ‘low workmen’), and the thick woollen undershirt and underpants – every male walks about in a bath of perspiration.5

  Before the advent of central heating it was necessary, during the cooler seasons, to wear this much clothing to keep warm in an office.

  Shoes

  Footwear was as prone to change as any other item of clothing. In the thirties men still wore pumps, with buckles or laces, as they had in the Regency, though ‘Wellington boots’ of the kind worn by military officers were also widespread. By the middle of the reign, boots had gained ascendancy. They were often square-toed and, as readers of Tom Sawyer will know, there was a fashion in the forties for having the toes on these curl upwards. Vain young men who wanted to achieve this effect had to force their footwear into the required shape by sitting for long periods with their toes pressed against a wall. The most ubiquitous type of boot, from the fifties to the nineties, was the ankle-length, elastic-sided model. This – revived in the 1960s as the ‘Chelsea Boot’ – could have either a flat sole or a heel. By the ‘nineties, lace-up boots, or boots with buttons up the side of the instep, had become extremely common, and were worn in preference to shoes by millions of men (pictures that show the roadways of Victorian cities, with their heaps of horse dung, will explain why boots were more popular). Buttoned shoes, which were even more commonplace among women and children than men, were very laborious to put on, requiring a ‘button hook’ for the fiddly task of doing them up. Nevertheless, they had their devotees. Winston Churchill, another man whose tastes were formed by a Victorian upbringing, continued to wear them until well into the 1930s.

  Toppers and Bowlers

  Among men, those who were clearly gentlemen wore the top hat. Others, whether gentlemen or not, might wear any one of dozens of type of cap. From the Regency and the Napoleonic Wars had been inherited a number of semi-military forms of headdress – caps with chin straps and peaks and cocked hats of hardened felt. By the middle decades another style had arrived: the round, flat-topped pork-pie hat. A version of this with a small peak that sat flat against the forehead was much more common, and was called a ‘cheese-cutter’. These were everywhere during the forties and fifties. They were worn as part of both naval and military officers’ uniform, and appear in photographs of Crimean soldiers, though they were even more associated with civilians. They were extremely popular with boys, whether barefoot urchins in city streets or the Queen’s children photographed at Osborne. David Livingstone was pictured with one, as was Colin Campbell of Indian Mutiny fame. After Queen Victoria began to spend holidays at Balmoral, her sons were often shown in pictures wearing Highland dress, and this led to another fashion in headgear. Many Sassenach children might not have been willing to put on a kilt, but the Glengarry bonnet with its trailing ribbons became eminently wearable. It was worn, as part of uniform, even for English soldiers. It was popular with men as an informal hat to wear when bicycling, fishing or walking in the country. It was deemed especially suitable for small boys, and became part of childhood for millions of them. It made such an impact that it is still worn by some members of that most Victorian body, the Boys’ Brigade, which was founded in 1883.

  There were, of course, many other styles. The shovel hat, which was shallow-crowned and broad-brimmed and which was much seen on clergymen, was for some years known as a ‘Pickwick’ because Dickens’ hugely popular character wore one. At the other end of the reign, in the nineties, the ‘Trilby’ – a brimmed hat with an indented crown – was named after another fictional character, though Trilby was a young woman and the hat got its name through being worn in the 1895 stage production of the novel.

  The top hat maintained its dominance throughout the century. It had first been worn in London in 1797, causing such outrage by its strange appearance (no less than four women fainted on seeing it in the street) that its owner, John Hetherington, was charged with breach of the peace and ordered by a magistrate not to appear in it again. Within a very few years it had become universal both in Britain and abroad. The version worn by gentlemen was of beaver pelt – which was prohibitively expensive – but by the start of the Victorian era hatters had discovered the secret of using hardened silk instead. Prince Albert popularized the silk ‘topper’ which, over a decade or so, effectively killed off the beaver hat.

  Toppers varied in style. In the mid-century – the era during which Albert, Brunel and Abraham Lincoln are pictured wearing them – they became higher in the crown (the ones owned by Lincoln were seven inches high, though they looked taller when seen on him) and earned the nickname ‘stovepipes’ for their resemblance to ‘chimney tops with a border’. They had both advantages and drawbacks. Being tall, they blew off very easily, and made it necessary to remember to duck constantly both indoors and out. If sitting taking notes, however, they made an ideal ‘desk’ when placed on the knees, and they were very useful for storing things in – papers, and even books could be put inside them, and Dickens once encountered a man who kept a large meat pie in his.

  In the first half of the century, the top hat in one form or another had been worn even by the poor, and was certainly seen on the heads of policemen, postmen, labourers, street sweepers and young boys. These cheaper models were made from felt or rabbit fur and appeared, when new, acceptably smart. Once rained upon, they quickly looked bedraggled and th
e fur became shaggy. It was even possible to buy a soft, collapsible and very cheap version that could be stuffed in the pocket. By the time the stovepipe disappeared in the seventies, top hats had become more exclusive, for they had become the symbol of the office clerk and of those above him in society. The notion that those who did not wear a top hat were somehow outside the polite world is one that crops up in Victorian writings. A periodical reviewing a ‘decadent’ play when it was performed in London sniffed that it was likely to appeal only to ‘long haired, soft hatted, villainous or sickly-looking socialists’,6 and when looking back on the Queen’s reign at the time of the Diamond Jubilee, the Illustrated London News cited as evidence of creeping informality (or, if readers preferred, the country having gone to the dogs) this observation on the House of Commons: ‘In the time of Mr Canning, the Minister always came down in silk stockings and pantaloons or knee breeches, and even in the last generation members thought it essential to dress for Parliament at least as well as for a Society call or a garden party. But in recent days unconventionality has been the rule, and low hats and short jackets are quite common.’7

  By 1897 the top hat had already largely been relegated to formal wear, because another type of headgear had become the customary wear of office clerks. This was the ‘bowler’, though it was called a Derby in the United States (Americans first encountered it at Epsom) and its inventors, the firm of Lock in St James’ Street, called it – as they still do – a Coke. This was a narrow-brimmed hat of pressed felt with a rounded crown. The first of these had been ordered in 1850, from Lock’s, by William Coke, the Norfolk estate owner who was later Earl of Leicester. Coke had sought a more hard-wearing hat with which to equip the gamekeepers on his estate, for their top hats were constantly knocked off by low branches. When a prototype was made for him, he visited the shop and tested it by stamping several times on the hat. It withstood his weight, and he ordered more of them. Widely worn in the countryside, the bowler was soon taken up by urban office-workers, and became something of a symbol of the nineties. Sherlock Holmes’ assistant, Doctor Watson, was often depicted wearing one.

  Whiskers

  The hair styles concealed – or set off – by these forms of headgear varied as much as would be expected over a period of sixty-four years. In the thirties beards were almost unheard of and were deeply unfashionable, as they had been all through the eighteenth century. Moustaches were not worn except by foreigners or by somewhat rakish Englishmen (Prince Albert had one, but does not seem to have started a trend). Since before the beginning of the reign, men had had a habit of wearing their hair parted vertically down the back of the head and combed forward at the sides. This style, which can sometimes be seen in old photographs, gave their faces a look that is entirely of the age. Pictures of old men at the end of the century often show them with this hair style, so deeply engrained was the habit that they never broke it. In Dickens’ time these side-combed locks, grown long and trained into points thrust forward like horns, were sported by young street-corner men, as can be seen in Cruikshank illustrations.

  Whiskers became fashionable at the time of the Crimean War. Partly because the officers in the field were too busy, or too ill-equipped, to shave every day, a certain carelessness in this respect became stylish. The Army had for some time worn moustaches, and in the severe Crimean winter beards were permitted. Dandies in England began to sport facial hair in the hope of being mistaken for returning heroes. Such adornments had, in any case, been out of fashion for so long that it was inevitable they would return. By the sixties no self-respecting ‘swell’ would be seen about without a pair of ‘dundrearies’. These were a combination moustache and side-whiskers, the latter often so long that they hung down to the chest. The name derived from a character – Lord Dundreary – in Tom Taylor’s 1855 play Our American Cousin. The style, which became as emblematic of the 1860s as the platform shoe was of the 1970s, became particularly associated with foppish, drawling, lady-killing ‘mashers’ who filled the pages of novels by the then popular author George Whyte-Melville. By the following decade full beards were more common, and these were often worn for the whole of their lives by men of the generation that grew up in the eighties and nineties. By the latter decade small, neat moustaches were considered more suitable, and hair – which in the middle decades had often been grown over the ears (one thinks of John Ruskin) – became neat and short, as it would remain until the 1960s.

  Earning a Living

  Men commuted to work in several ways. The wealthiest travelled in their own carriages or in hired cabs. Others went by omnibus, though this was initially too expensive a conveyance for the many to use. In the early decades of the reign, when a clerk might make seven shillings a week, the cost of a single journey was a shilling. Only gradually, with the advent of the tram and the Underground, would a majority of London commuters travel on wheels. Prior to that, crowds of them walked to work – a daily journey that might well take an hour or more. One of the sights of the capital was to see them pouring in their thousands through the turnstiles on Waterloo Bridge, paying the toll as they went.

  The Counting House

  And what of the places of work to which they repaired? The office was an environment that changed between the beginning and end of the reign as completely as it has changed between 1901 and the present. The word ‘office’, today a catch-all term for any work space that contains a desk, was not applied to commercial premises, where the place for doing paperwork was called the ‘counting house’. Readers of Dickens will be familiar with early nineteenth-century clerks – whether Uriah Heep or Newman Noggs – and with the surroundings in which they toiled. Many firms – though they might well be important and successful – were extremely small. Before the monstrous growth of such modern paraphernalia as marketing, human resources and user support departments, a business might, indeed, consist of a single man, who dealt with all the paperwork himself. Equally common would be a proprietor and a single clerk (Bob Cratchit was Scrooge’s sole employee), and even this man might be temporary or part-time. A study carried out in Liverpool in the 1870s estimated that the average number of clerks in a firm was four.

  A large enterprise, such as a government department, the Bank of England or the East India Company, would have dozens of clerks, and so would a shipping company in any major port. These men often worked in large rooms that allowed even less privacy than the open-plan offices of today. Darkness and cold were familiar problems, for lighting would be provided only by candles or oil lamps, and the stove or fireplace might well be at the far end of a long room. For a clerk to keep his scarf on, as Cratchit did, would not have been unusual. Desks were high and sloping, like that of an old-fashioned schoolteacher, and in a large office could be long enough for half a dozen men to sit side by side, perched on high, backless stools (spinal pain and rounded shoulders were endemic) and perhaps facing a similar row of clerks. Whatever else was to change in the course of the century, offices furnished in this way were to continue in use throughout the reign of Victoria and beyond.

  Despite their numbers, the places in which these clerks laboured would have had the stillness of a church, for there was no machinery to create noise. Many counting houses were extremely cramped and unhealthy, for they might be squeezed into back courts in a crowded commercial district like the City of London or, in industrial premises, they might be too close to the noise and fumes of factory machinery. In either case there were no ‘health and safety’ regulations to ensure access to minimal daylight or fresh air.

  Documents were written out in the ‘court hand’ that the men learned and practised, and a glance at surviving ledgers or letters, in which not a single error can be spotted among the rows of precise lettering, bears witness to their skill. They were required to be equally meticulous in adding columns of figures and entering these in cash books. In an era when the majority of people could not read or write, these abilities represented a valuable asset, and clerks were a small, exclusive fraternity (
in 1851 they made up less than 1 per cent of the population). With the coming of compulsory education in the seventies, they were to feel they had lost both professional mystique and status.

  They had a life that was relatively secure, but normally without excitement. They were recruited into their positions while in their early or mid-teenage years. A majority came by personal recommendation (a vital element in any Victorian dealings), by family precedent (a great many people of both sexes followed their parents’ occupations) or by advertisements in newspapers – a tactic resorted to by both employers and those seeking positions. The notices always asked for the same thing: ‘must write a good hand’. The applicant must also, as for any respectable position, furnish testimonials. Once accepted, he might well remain with the same firm for the whole of his working life, for the ethos of the time involved a very high degree of mutual loyalty between employer and employee. Relations within an office might well be highly personal, for companies were family-run to a vastly greater extent than is the case today, and both the proprietors and those who worked for them might bear the same surname for generations. A clerk who served a single family for the whole of his working life was not much different in outlook from a domestic servant who did the same.