Creepy Things That Were Normal in The Victorian Era

There’s one thing that hasn’t changed since Queen Victoria’s time in power. People are still seriously messed up, but in different ways. Yes, the world probably thought it was out of the dark ages and into the Middle Ages by the time Victoria took the throne. It was all nice and modern and stuff, but in reality, not at all.

The Victorian age was really crazy. Some of the strangest things people did in the Victorian era that you don’t know about. Death photography. People in the Victorian era were very interested in death. It sounds crazy, but it makes sense when you think about how many diseases Victorians had to deal with, like measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria, rubella, typhus, and cholera.

Every day, kids and people alike ran through what looked like a death maze. Fear of death and a sense of loss made people keep momento mori items which means remember you must die in Latin. These items included hair pieces and pictures of the dead. Keep in mind that pictures were still pretty new technology and they weren’t really cheap until the middle of the 1800s which is why people often didn’t think to take pictures of their loved ones until something terrible happened.

That led to the very creepy trend of taking pictures of dead bodies. In times of grief, the bodies were often kept at home and photos were staged with not only the dead person, but also their parents or brothers, sometimes posing as if everyone was still alive. Kids sat with a parent who had died. Parents hugged their dead kids and so on.

There are even pictures of people whose faces were painted to look like they have eyes open, unsettling, creepy, and very sad. Especially when you think about how these pictures are the only chance many grieving families had to get a picture of their loved ones. Child immigrations. People who like Victorian era movies have probably seen the cute but dirty kids that live in the streets and steal things and generally cause trouble.

In 1869, about 30,000 children were living on the streets of London. According to writer and historian Sarah Wise via Spittlefield’s life, the suffering of orphan children was very real. Rich people who wanted to help like Miss Annie McFersonson did. McFersonson opened some schools to help teach the kids important things, but the problem got too big.

So, she changed her mind and became a supporter of immigration, the cruel practice of taking kids off the streets and out of workhouses and sending them to British countries abroad. Many of them worked as farm hands or housekeepers afterward. And by 1904, McFersonson had sent 12,000 children to Canada by himself.

A report from the maritime archives and library of the National Museum’s Liverpool says kids were also sent to Australia and New Zealand. In the years 1870 to 1914, 80,000 kids were sent to Canada alone. Even back then, the practice was very controversial because the agencies that sent the kids away rarely checked in on them.

And investigations showed that despite the high hopes of the immigration groups, the kids’ lives rarely got better. The supposed causes of mental illness were insane. Bodman Hospital in Cornwall says that the number of people living in England’s mad asylums exploded in the 1800s. It looked like most of the patients fit into three groups.

Those who were hyper, those who were depressed, and those who had dementia. People with the big three had a range of symptoms, and they weren’t the only bad reasons someone could be locked up. Also, England wasn’t the only place that went a little crazy with all the crazy. The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia kept records of the most common mental illnesses among patients who were admitted between 1864 and 1889.

The records are like a college student’s to-do list or a Great Friday night. They put crimes like being lazy, reading novels, superstition, living an immoral life, drinking too much, and all kinds of self-pleasure on their list. Women weren’t left out either. And some of the strangest things that can cause mental sickness are also listed.

These include imaginary female trouble and hysteria as well as rumor of husband murder and fits and desertion of husband. Oh no. You could make a living as a grave robber. We can all agree that medical students should learn on dead bodies before they start messing around inside live people.

But schools in the Victorian era had a problem. According to historic UK, the only bodies they could properly dissect were those of people who had been put to death for a crime. In 1823, Britain passed a law that made fewer crimes punishable by death. The doctors to be still had to learn, which meant they had to find other places to put the body.

That other place was the graveyard. If you want to read something very sad, you can find it in the diary of a resurrectionist. He gives a great look at the daily life of a resurrectionist, which is the name for people who dug people out of their grave. It was written by James Blake Bailey of the Royal College of Surgeons of England.

Not only did they get a price for each one, but they also got paid to hold the job. And again, after the delivery went well, there was also a huge market for selling teeth, mostly to doctors. People wanted bodies that were as fresh as possible. When graves put up guards and watchtowers, body snatchers had to come up with new ways to get bodies.

As the most well-known snatchers of the time, William Burke and William Hair, some of them just killed people to get the freshest samples. There’s no need to dig. A beauty routine included ammonia, arsenic, and lead. Different generations may have different ideas about what is beautiful, but Victorian beauty habits sound like they came from the near back of a chemistry book where they list all the things that will kill you.

The “ugly girl papers” or hints for the toilet was the name of a piece in Harper’s Bazaar. While it did give useful beauty tips at the time, we would now see it as insanely dangerous. In order to get white skin, women would wash their faces with ammonia and then paint them with lead-based paint. Do not think you could go bare-faced at night either because the column said to rub some opium on your face before bed to keep that fresh-faced look.

An item called “Dr. Campbell’s safe arsenic complexion wafers” was sold at Sears and Roebuck for people who were really determined. They were made with arsenic and women were told to eat them. If you happen to have thin eyebrows and eyelashes, putting mercury on them every night might help. Also, when we talk about eyes, wet eyes were everywhere for some reason.

Women could put lemon juice, cologne, or belladonna in their eyes to get that look. Of course, the second one did make people blind, but people have been suffering for beauty for a very long time. Men sold unwanted wives since divorce wasn’t a thing. People in England couldn’t get a divorce until the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857.

But marriage problems have been around since people have been getting married. People had to find another way out because they couldn’t just sign some papers and be free. So selling your wife as a bride became a legal way to get out of a marriage. This practice kept going strong well into the 19th century, especially in country Britain.

A study by Lauren Padet at Leeds Trinity University found that wife sales could happen in public or in private. However, the public sales were quite a show. Most of the time, the husband tied his unwanted wife up with some kind of leadline, took her to a public square, and asked for offers.

On the same level as eBay, but with your wife instead of an old phone. Records show that the wife could stop the sale, and sometimes it was for cash. One wife was sold in Selby in 1862 for a pint of beer, but others seemed to have gone for a good amount of money. Peter Leon, an economist, told Motherboard that it wasn’t always a bad deal for the women.

They could trade up into a marriage where they were valued, which could be with a rich older guy who wasn’t in the typical marriage pool. It also gave them a way out of a bad situation. So, yay, selling your wife almost. Love was a crazy cult. People think that Victorians were at least a little closed off. So, you can only guess what most people must have thought when a crazy free love group showed up in 1846.

Henry Prince, who used to be a priest, started getting followers by getting them to donate all their money to him so he could build what he called the abode of love. His followers were mostly wealthy women who were not married. The Telegraph says that home was a group of houses surrounded by a 12-ft wall. The official name of the community was Agapemone and it was mostly funded by the wills of five single sisters whom Prince set up to marry some of his followers.

The prince himself moved into a 16-bedroom house. He told his followers to be chased and abstinent, but he was busy with community members in public events that he said were extremely important. Even though Prince said he would live forever, he died in 1889. When John Hugh Smith Pigot became the new leader of the cult, he left the community’s property to say that he was the second coming of Christ.

He was quickly run out of town and back to the safety of the community. He lived there as a heavenly bridegroom with his soul brides until he died in 1927 and showed that he wasn’t really invincible, as he had said. It took the group a little longer to go away. It wasn’t until 1956. Corpse medicine was still a thing.

The term corpse medicine means exactly what it sounds like. For hundreds of years, people thought that eating certain parts of a dead person would cure any illness. People often took human skull as a cure all, and it was thought that mixing it with chocolate would help with apoplexy.

There was a lot of corpse medicine in the 16th and 17th centuries, but the Smithsonian magazine says it was still going strong in the Victorian age. There were medical books that told you which morsels are good for which illnesses. And there were also cooking books that told you how to make the pieces. One book from 1847 says that people with epilepsy should mix a piece of skull, the skull of a young woman, with treacle.

It didn’t work. People also thought that a thief’s candle could paralyze people if you were interested in that kind of thing. They were made with human fat, and they were still being made in the 1880s. Executioners were often connected to body medicine, and it wasn’t unusual for them to sell pints of warm blood from very recently deceased clients while also bringing people to death.

Even if you don’t like your doctor, at least he will send you to a pharmacy to get your medicine instead of hanging you. Mummies were used for all kinds of disturbing things. The British had a crazy obsession with all things Egyptian in the 19th century, and you can still see the effects of this in the building of the time.

Victorians had a strange obsession with mummies, and putting them in a museum wasn’t enough. The Journal of Art in Society says that groundup mummies were one of the materials in mummy brown paint, which is a good name for the color. During the Victorian era, it was very popular, even though some people thought it was wrong to turn mummies into paint and others said it made bad paint because priorities.

Mummies were also used for some other strange things. In 2007, a forensic scientist worked on the contents of a jar that was found in a Paris drugstore from the Victorian era in 1867. The sign said that the inside was made up of the remains of Jonvar. That didn’t seem likely, but the test results showed that it was made of mummy from the 3rd to 7th centuries BC, which was even less likely.

It was likely prepared not long before it was found. They were also used to draw people to ads. In 1886, a mummy that was said to be that of the pharaoh’s daughter who had saved baby Moses’s life was put on display in a candy shop in Chicago. Because there’s nothing better than having a mummy watch you choose your candy. Food additives were insane.

When we talk about the worst things that could be found in Victorian England’s food, we won’t even talk about cleanliness. Well, we will say that cooks often needed dough with their feet because that needs to be said. Let’s talk about the things that people used to put in food on purpose. The Royal Society of Chemistry says that the use of possibly dangerous additives in Victorian times was a big reason why food safety and industry regulation got their start.

People sometimes mixed chalk and alum into the dough to make it whiter. Other things like pipe clay, plaster of Paris, and sawdust were also sometimes added. They would sometimes add strychnine to their beer instead of hops and lead was everywhere. Vassar College professor Anthony S. Wohl says that red lead was used to color Gloucester cheese and that lead was also added to food like cider, mustard, wine, sugar, and sweets.

Copper sulfates were used to keep fruit, jams, and wine fresh, and mercury was used to make sweets. Let’s talk about ice cream, which university professor Dr. Bruce Rosen says became popular in the 1880s. You could sometimes get stuff on the street that wasn’t made with milk, but with water and chalk. It was bad enough that you had to worry about cholera, typhoid, and diphtheria, but your food made things even worse.

Amelia Dyer and the baby farmers. How much worse can things get for people? Let’s look at the baby farmers from the Victorian age. The information is in Psychology Today. Most people didn’t know how to avoid getting pregnant at the time, and when they did, it could ruin their lives forever. A whole group of women made a living by taking care of these useless kids or helping to find them good homes for a fee.

Some of them were kind and really helped the mother and baby. Some not so much. Each news story talks about a different number of deaths that were linked to the worst baby farms. These were women who would take the child and their fee for finding them a new home, but then they would just leave the baby.

During trials, dozens of infanticides were named. Amelia Dyer was one of the worst that we know of and helped desperate mothers for more than 30 years. The BBC says she charged what would be $10,000 today and that she took in an average of six kids every day when she was caught. She was found guilty after Helena Fry’s body was found in the Thames.

She told police that every person she killed with tape was “one of mine.” We don’t know how many she killed, but it was at least a few hundred. Hysterectomy was used to treat mental illness. In the Victorian era, there were many reasons a woman might end up in a mental hospital. But what were the doctors supposed to do with her once she got there? Dr. R.

Maurice Bucke taught that his patients were going crazy because of their reproductive parts. So they should get rid of those. From 1877 to 1902, Bucke was in charge of the London Asylum for the Insane. According to their records, he did more than 200 surgeries on women to try to get rid of whatever was making them crazy.

There were 16 hysterectomies and 22 other surgeries to move the uterus back to where it should be because it had gotten lost. We’re not making it up at all. He talked about some of his cases like a woman named LM in a speech he gave to the American Medical Psychological Association in 1898. She was angry and had seizures.

Doctors found intense irritation of both ovaries in her body and after they were taken out she was quite well. That being said, many doctors were not sure about the idea. However, that did not change the fact that Bucke was respected as a star in both Canada and London’s medical community. Athletes used performance-enhancing drugs like strychnine.

People have always wanted to be the best at sports. That’s not strange. What is strange is that Victorian athletes use drugs to do strange sports like pedestrianism, which means walking long distances. People who walked would cover hundreds of miles in a few days by going around and around a track and around and around.

The Guardian says that an underwear story began in 1876 when an American competitor named Edward Weston tried to run 115 miles in one day. He was short by less than 6 miles. Chewing cocoa leaves to stay awake during the race was what made people so angry. Not because he used cocaine, but because he was also in a physiological study, and the results were said to be invalid because he used cocaine.

In any case, Weston’s chew was one way that Victorian sports dealt with tiredness and muscle pain. Besides drugs, they also used tonics, which could be anything from wine to strychnine. Of course, the poison is meant to kill rats, and when taken in large enough amounts, it can make a person smile while also stopping their breathing.

E09 says that athletes would take strychnine to get a similar effect to coffee, but it would be much more dangerous. Just drink coffee. Why not? Theater stampedes, fires, and deaths. You can’t go into a public building without seeing signs for emergency exits and buildings that are full. But there wasn’t a thing called safety in the Victorian era.

It took a series of terrible events for people to decide that something had to be done to stop this from happening again. 280 people died when a lantern fell on stage at the Brooklyn Theater in 1876. Standard for the time, there was nothing wrong with the building. But when fire and panic broke out, people trying to escape were trapped in a stairs.

Atlas Obscura says that 103 of the bodies were never recognized, but so many people were so sad that a monument was built over a mass grave. The Victoria Hall disaster of 1883 might have been the worst. Some traveling artists brought in about 2,000 kids, most of them between the ages of seven and 11. At the end, the group said that kids with tickets that had certain numbers on them would be getting gifts.

This caused a stampede that trapped kids in the stairwells. It took 30 minutes to clear the crowd and 183 children died. Smithsonian magazine says that this tragedy led to the creation of the pushbar emergency exit. However, this simple life-saving idea wasn’t put into use right away, and it cost a lot of money to do so.

The Iroquois Theater Fire in Chicago in 1903 could have saved the lives of 602 people. It had only been built 5 weeks before. Their new fangled gas lights were dangerous. What would it be like to be the first person on your block to have these cool new things called indoor light fixtures? We can’t. But from candles to gas-powered light fixtures inside during the Victorian era, there were huge steps forward that changed how people saw the night.

However, it came at a bad price. According to Country Life, the change started on a business level, letting workers work later and longer hours. That was the first strike. The second blow came when people started putting these lights up in their homes. There was fierce competition which led to major damage to gas lines.

When this damage happened in homes, it caused fires, explosions, and the leakage of coal gas, which was mostly made up of methane, hydrogen, sulfur, and carbon monoxide. You know those thick drapes that hang over Victorian windows, right? How quickly do you think that gas began to build up? All, or at least some of the people who passed out in the Victorian age might not have been exaggerated.

It could have been the gas. Gas lights and their dangerous fumes have also been linked to Victorian interest in ghosts, the supernatural. The gas fumes caused dreams which the Guardian says of many things that led to the growth of ghost stories and spiritualism. That’s a nice treat.