The Victorian era is known for fancy clothes, wacky mustaches, and society-wide sexual repression.
But it should probably also be known for being the time when actual, literal mummies were
ground up and used in paint.
Yup: the Victorian era was extremely messed up.
Orphan exports
If you've ever seen any Victorian period piece, you've seen the adorable but filthy children
that live in the streets, picking pockets and causing a general sort of trouble.
The plight of orphan children was very real, and estimates suggest that there were around
30,000 children living on the London streets in 1869.
So what was Victorian England to do?
Round them up off the streets and send them overseas to work as farm hands or servants
in British colonies, of course!
Between 1870 and 1914, 80,000 kids were sent just to Canada, while plenty more orphans
were shipped off to Australia and New Zealand.
Even worse, the agencies that mailed these kids overseas as indentured servants rarely
followed up on them, and the childrens' lives rarely improved as a result.
Surprise!
Going crazy in a sane world
According to Cornwall's Bodmin Hospital, the population of England's insane asylums skyrocketed
through the 19th century.
Apparently most of the patients fell under three extremely broad labels: the manic, the
melancholic, and those with dementia.
But those weren't the only messed up reasons you could be committed — nor was England
the only place that went a little crazy with all the crazy.
West Virginia's Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum's records of common causes of mental illness
for patients admitted between 1864 and 1889 reads like either a college student's to-do
list or a really good Friday night.
On their list were offenses like laziness, novel reading, superstition, an immoral life,
and intemperance...along with every single kind of self-pleasure you can imagine.
Women weren't left out, either, and there are some equally bizarre possible causes of
mental illness.
Those include things like "imaginary female trouble" and "hysteria," along with "rumor
of husband murder" and "fits and desertion of husband."
Yikes.
Pretty poison
Standards of beauty might change from generation to generation.
But Victorian beauty routines read like something out of a chemistry textbook - specifically
the part near the back where they list all the stuff that'll kill you.
White skin was all the rage, and women achieved that by washing their faces with ammonia,
then covering them with lead-based paint.
Meanwhile, Sears & Roebuck sold a product called Dr. Campbell's Safe Arsenic Complexion
Wafers.
Yes, they were made of arsenic, and yes, women were instructed to eat them.
And no… they were almost certainly not "safe."
And if you were unlucky enough to have thin eyebrows and eyelashes?
A nightly smear of mercury could help with that.
Mummy smearest
The whole 19th century was defined by a messed-up British obsession with all things Egyptian,
and mummies were front and center when it came to the Victorians' weird fetish.
Want proof?
Well, Victorian paint-makers used actual ground-up mummies as one of the ingredients in brown
paint named - what else?
- Mummy Brown.
The paint was hugely popular throughout the Victorian era, even though some people thought
making paint out of mummies - you know, which are actual dead human bodies - was wrong.
Meanwhile, other critics said Mummy Brown made for poor quality paint… because priorities.
Hell's kitchen
The Royal Society of Chemistry says food safety and industry regulation really got its start
in the Victorian era, thanks to the tendency to use potentially deadly additives.
Chalk and alum were sometimes added to dough to make bread whiter, and it wasn't unheard
of to have things like pipe clay, plaster of Paris, or sawdust added to the mix.
Brewers sometimes added strychnine to their beer so they could cut back on hops, and lead
was everywhere.
Lead was added to cheese, cider, mustard, wine, and candies.
As for Victorian ice cream, the stuff you'd get on the street sometimes wasn't made with
milk, but just a water-and-chalk mixture.
The Abode of Love was a crazy cult
The Victorians have a bit of a reputation as being at least slightly repressed.
"I wish I could share your optimism…"
"Oh!
Excuse me!"
So you can only imagine what most people must have thought when a crazy free-love cult popped
up in Somerset, England, in 1846.
The group was founded by Henry Prince, a one-time Church of England clergyman who started recruiting
followers - mostly rich, unmarried women - by convincing them to "donate" all their cash
to him so that he could build what he called "The Abode of Love."
That abode happened to consist of a group of cottages protected by a 12-foot wall.
From there, Prince moved into a 16-bedroom house, and while he insisted on chastity and
abstinence from his followers, he was getting busy with members of the community in very
public ceremonies he claimed were completely necessary.
He also insisted that he was immortal… until he died in 1889.
"Not so immortal, huh, dude?"