7 Things You Should Blame Victorians For

For 65 years, the Victorians saw a massive change in their lives. The Industrial Revolution was rampant, crowded cities, and improper sanitization, which led to outbreaks and millions of deaths due to avoidable obstacles. We can thank the Victorians for many things, but here are ten reasons we should blame them.

1. Consumer Market & Adverting

Victorians in their time saw a rapidly expanding empire. Global markets and goods were arriving from magical destinations such as India and China. Silks from abroad became cheaper than those made in Devon, England, where the silk used in Queen Victoria's wedding dress hailed the finest English silk ever made. Many factories for textiles and silk in England began to modernize or shut down due to the rapid import of Chinese silks.

Curry found its way to Britain around this time. The discovery of luxury spices from India used in many dishes caused great fanfare to include them in most cooking or making a British version of spicy dishes that carried on the latest Indian curry craze. Chicken Tikka Marsala comes to mind as an Indian dish, but it is a British one.

While there was a market for spices and silks, many inventions for home life and medicinal use became popular to find in magazines and advertisements posted on local boards around Victorian communities. But while adverts can help many consumer goods, there was no proper safety and regulation of ingredients or usage of these consumer products. Breast pumps contained lead and tainted the breast milk supply for babies and children, leading to a high infant mortality rate. There were even Victorian methods for controlling teething that contained toxic metals or opium to help babies.

Corsets were a fashionable item to help women get into formal fitting gowns. They provided for their breasts, loose skin from multiple pregnancies became deadly with the invention of the metal eyelet. It stopped the fabric from tearing. However, it didn't stop the women from wanting it laced tighter to look like the fashion portrayals of the day. Women became so obsessed with tightly laced corsets that smelling salts became a common thing to carry around. These foul-smelling bottles of salts would revive the woman who fainted from their extremely tight corsets.

The invention of gas and then electricity was also heavily commercialized. The only problem with the adverts of the Victorian period was that no wording showing harm or potential compensation would be allowed. These additions were more likely to take the companies to civil courts and cause bankruptcy or worse. It wasn't until near the end of the Victorian period that regulation for advertising, marketing, and regulating consumer goods came into play after thousands of deaths caused by improper control of medicinal ingredients, fashion designs, and home installations.

2. Labor Laws & Industrialization

Labor laws were something relatively new. They didn't so much emerge in the Victorian period as they did in the Edwardian period. Child labor was especially a problem and was never controlled or abolished until the later Victorian period. You could work long hours for meager living wages. There were no breaks or lunch, except with children, and you had to ensure you showed up on time and continued your work diligently. Novelist Charles Dickens wrote about many of his observations of the workers and labor force of the Victorian period. He even wrote about the popular ideals that we glamorize to some degree of a very cramped and horrid life in Victorian cities. If you make constant mistakes, drink, get married, get pregnant, you were out of the workforce for good. Only men who could control their drink or had a family and wife to support were the continual labor force of the country. Single women could go into shop keeping or servitude if they needed to help out with the family expenses.

Working conditions were poor quality. Several people often died due to incidents at work that caused gangrene or other ailments. Working in damp and moldy conditions caused Tuberculosis, Diphtheria, or Typhus. Sometimes they would die in the hospital because there was no proper sanitization or lose their income from a permanent disability they encountered while working. There was no disabled compensation or acts to help those disabled these people died in workhouses, on the streets, or in lunatic asylums. Being disabled in Victorian times was a life sentence.

Industrialization was due to harvesting inventions and the usage of fossil fuels discovered in Victorian times. Coal was mined and sold for heating, cooking, and providing energy to steam-powered ships and trains. The Tamar River in England is an example of industrial pollution. It became so heavily polluted with residue from industrial waste that fish died. All the salmon and trout became poison to eat within a span of a few years. Eventually, regulations for industrial waste came near the end of the Victorian period and were refined well into the modern era. The use of steel for railways and shipbuilding caused a massive boom in commercial development. The use of the horse died out with the rapid increase in motor development for cars and tractors. A surviving draft from around the 1820s showed the discovery of chemical elements, such as hydrogen to be used in industrial machines such as tractors and early cars, displayed the interest of many Victorians in modern technology.

Pollution became a chronic problem concerning sanitization and health. Soot and smog made it difficult to breathe inside the city. Windows and houses had to be cleaned constantly because of using coal in the kitchen or family fireplace. When gas came into the home, it often leaked out or was kept open. Any flames or enclosed spaces became deadly from explosions or carbon monoxide poisoning.

3. Sanitization & Population Growth

Population growth meant a change in the way goods and services had to change with the times. Around the time Queen Victoria came onto the throne, the 1840s were rife with economic instability and famine. Several people died from starvation or being unable to afford a job or income to keep them alive. Several working and lower class starved to feed their families or ate food reserved for farm animals such as chicken feed. The diet for most Victorians focused on bread and potatoes. If you could afford a little bit of milk and butter, it would help add more nutrition to the diet. Those who were middle and upper-class Victorians could afford not just bread and potatoes. Middle and Upper-class Victorians could afford meat, cheese, milk, and veg to help diversify their diet.

Sanitary standards at the time were little at best. Most Victorians in the countryside composted their waste with that of the animals on the farm. They then used that waste for manure to help plants and crops grow in fields. Rapid growth and expansion within the cities, the need to press everyone on top of each other came to some counteractive solutions. We use roughly 50 gallons of water to flush a toilet. Some scientists today say that is a big waste of water that could to drinking. The sewage regulations at the time only worked for small or medium-sized cities. Many who lived in areas of improper sanitization lived in desolate conditions. But it wasn't always like that. Eventually, solutions to spread waste further out towards large rivers and oceans came into fruition. Scotland became one of the most hygienic countries in the Victorian period.

4. Christmas

Prince Albert was the man who saved Christmas. As many English traditions of Christmas began to die out, he brought the Christmas traditions such as Christmas Trees and Gingerbread from Germany. It caught on with the Victorians. Soon everyone was decorating and buying presents, cards, and trinkets for Christmas. The earliest known Gingerbread recipes were cakes and small cookies, not the famous Gingerbread men we often know of today. But they did come later when the commercialization of Christmas took off. Christmas crackers could be bought or made at home. Christmas crackers made for spinsters, unmarried women, which contained wedding trinkets like wedding bands when they were pried open, were a popular item to sell around Christmastime.

We spend so much money on presents and decorations for Christmas that we waste time and money on trivial things we don't need. Christmas eventually led to a massive materialistic view of life. The next time your child cries about not getting that expensive Barbie dollhouse, you can tell them that the Victorians are to blame for their horrible attitude at Christmastime.

5. Addiction

Addiction is something no one thinks about with Victorians. Opiates from China became common to find in everyday prescriptions at the Victorian pharmacy. Any use of opiates was highly encouraged. If you had a toothache, your child was teething, or you are in low spirits, anything they made would contain these powerful narcotics.

Drinking was another addition. The temperance movement was founded during the Victorian times to combat the morality of drinking. Liquors and spirits were often the leading cause of drinking problems because of the refined taste in the alcohol. The novel Gone With The Wind mentions whiskey as a liquor to help women recover from a swooning episode during Victorian America. Yet Scarlett O'Hara was often drinking this "swooning whiskey" repeated basis throughout the novel. Sobriety was a virtue in the Victorian period. Yet liquors and spirits often lead down the dark path of drinking. The use of Absinthe was also recorded in this time and was common among Gypsies and red-light districts.

6. Racism & Social Class

Racial categories and exposure to foreign people were also happening at this time. The use of racial categories became common. In the 1850s, a German scientist came up with three distinct groups: Mongol, White, and Negro. Many races were disproportionally racialized based on their characteristics. It is where systemic and institutional racism came into play in the modern era. Jack the Ripper, the infamous Victorian serial killer, was often considered a foreign character that hated women.

Marrying higher into social class was still highly prized for most women. Men often married within the same status circle. The rising middle class during Victorian times led to the need to staying within class systems. But there were several accounts of women marrying higher from middle to upper class if they had the proper education and reserve to act noble. The examples of Pride & Prejudice or Downtown Abbey come to mind. Even though the family who lived in Downtown were of nobility, they were still somewhat low in the pecking order and had to marry higher for income purposes.

10. Marriage & Religion

The Victorians also had a hand in how we see marriage today. Marriage was the center of everyone's life. Girls could marry between the average ages of 18-23 in the upper class, but the average age for most marriages was close to 25. Women after 30 were considered spinsters and were often out of the marriage pool due to the average life span of the Victorian period in cities being less than 30 years old. Many of our wedding and engagement etiquettes come from this time. Finances and money, as well as an inheritance for most women, became the husbands after marriage. The suffragette movement wanted to ensure women had equal rights to property, children, and votes. Voting acts around the world, allowing women to vote, finally came in place within the 1920s. One of the famous scandals of the Victorian time was the marriage of the great art critic John Ruskin. He married a young girl named Effie Gray, who later married his former portrait painter and was a lady in waiting to Queen Victoria. Divorce was still taboo but more common in certain parts of Victorian social class. Women could seek a divorce based on: impotence and non-consummation of marriage (meaning that the bride was still a virgin after the wedding and the husband could not perform an erection), adultery, cruelty, or desertion. Effie filed for divorce, which was difficult before 1857, and won her case that her husband had no desire or interest in consummating the wedding. She waited for a brief time before marrying again because the stigma of divorced or separated women at the time was against them seeking another chance. After Effie later married Ruskin's portrait painter and became Lady in waiting to the Queen. Effie was able to have a happy marriage and several children. On the Queen's deathbed, she asked for Effie regardless of the social standards of the time.

Religion changed during this time due to the Second Great Awakening and the focus on the human spirit. In later periods of the Victorian Era, doubt came into play as more medical and scientific advances occurred. The need for proof and strong ethics made it difficult for churches to adopt any scientific or medical study. Eventually, the adopting view of having religion and science form ethics and moral doubt, justifiable to the individual and society, became more commonplace. The phrase Evolution versus Enlightenment started from this concept of Victorian doubt and fear.

Works Cited:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4594476/Scientists-claim-Victorians-ruined-world-live-in.html

https://lithub.com/do-we-have-victorians-to-thank-for-consumerism/

https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/victorians-life-happy-was-it-bad-slums-dirt-crime/

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zx7mxnb/revision/3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Victorians_Did_for_Us