If there’s one thing I know to be true, it’s that there’s nothing sexier than
an exposed table leg. The curvy pieces of wood were so suggestive, so provocative, that
upper-class Victorians kept them covered to hide the scandalous furnishings. Or so the
story goes. Some Victorians might have covered their table legs—but only because they liked
to accessorize their homes and wanted to protect their belongings from dust and damage, not
because they were so prude that a bare piece of furniture could corrupt their innocence.
The notion of needing to cover table legs actually started as a quip about Americans.
A former British navy captain named Frederick Marryat wrote about a brief encounter he had
with an American woman who chided him for even mentioning the word leg in the presence
of a lady. He poked fun at American culture by noting he once saw a piano with its legs
covered to protect women’s purity. After British media picked up the story, the facts
became blurred, and the whole tale eventually snowballed into a rumor that it was the Victorians
themselves who were so scandalized by their own furniture that they had to keep it covered.
Hi, I’m Justin Dodd, welcome to Misconceptions. The sexiness of table legs is just
one misconception about the Victorian Era I’ll cover today, or, uncover. Unless that
makes you uncomfortable than I will cover it? I don’t know what to do here, so I'll
just play the intro
The Victorians have a reputation for being overly prude and sex-averse, largely thanks
to Queen Victoria’s buttoned-up public image. But their art and literature says otherwise.
Queen Victoria herself had an entire collection of nude paintings. She and her husband, Prince
Albert, delighted in giving each other risqué artwork as birthday gifts. According to her
own diaries, Victoria was a pretty passionate lover. When writing about her wedding night,
she said, “I NEVER, NEVER spent such an evening! MY DEAREST, DEAR Albert sat on a
footstool by my side, and his excessive love and affection gave me feelings of heavenly
love and happiness I never could have hoped to have felt before.” She did not, as the
saying goes, just “lie back and think of England.” And Victorian literature featured
its fair share of eroticism. One particularly famous book was My Secret Life, which was
filled with a man’s vivid accounts of his sexual adventures. There were even how-to
books: one, subtitled An Infallible Guidebook for Married and Single Persons, In Matters
of The Utmost Importance To The Human Race was essentially the Victorian version of Sex
for Dummies. The book, which is filled with some pretty dubious advice and information—such
as suggesting married couples hoping to conceive a child should move to a colder climate—even
encouraged married couples to have passionate sex, claiming that any children conceived
would be most like the parent who had the most intense orgasm. Which, I mean, I….
wow I finally understand the meaning of speechless.
Speaking of orgasms: Another common misconception claims a Victorian doctor invented the vibrator
to help “hysterical women.” According to popular myth, doctors cured women of “hysteria”
by manually bringing them to orgasm. One doctor, his hands tired from having to sexually stimulate
so many women, created a vibrating device to make his job easier. But there isn’t
much evidence to support the idea that Victorian doctors used vibrators—or masturbation at
all—for hysteria. A Victorian doctor is credited with inventing the electric vibrator,
but not for genital stimulation. Joseph Mortimer Granville came up with the buzzing contraption
in the 1880s. This first vibrator was basically an early version of the muscle massage guns
people use today. It could supposedly cure a whole assortment of ailments like pain and
spinal disease, but it was meant for men. Granville didn’t suggest using the vibrator
on hysterical women—or any women at all. This whole myth basically stems from a 1999
book, and the book’s author has since said it was never intended to be taken as a fact.
Little tip for the author of that book from someone who works in the world of YouTube,
the LAND of questionable facts, don’t assume people know you aren’t being serious, put
a disclaimer up, would ya.
According to legend, Prince Albert pierced his penis with what was then known as a “dressing
ring.” He, and other fashionable men, would supposedly hook these rings to one side of
their trousers to prevent any “unsightly bulging” when they wore tight clothing.
It’s also said Prince Albert used the ring for hygienic purposes. However, there’s
no actual proof the Prince Consort ever had such a piercing. The origin of this legend
remains unknown. One person who we do know helped spread it? Doug Malloy, a big piercing
proponent in the 1960s and 1970s. Malloy printed the story in his pamphlet Body & Genital Piercing
in Brief—which, it should be said, contained more myth than fact—and the tale continued
to spread from there. Once again, guys, you can’t go around spouting nonsense as facts,
although I suppose if that rule had always been followed, this show would not exist.
Nevermind, as you were.
In addition to supposedly being prude, it’s often said that Victorians had no sense of
humor. But they were just as fond of a good joke as people are today. The magazine Punch,
which was founded in 1841, was entirely dedicated to humor and satire. Newspapers, books, and
the theater all featured various jokes and puns. Some punny Victorian-era zingers to
try at your next open mic night include: “Who is the greatest chicken-killer in Shakespeare?
Macbeth, because he did murder most foul” and “What is the difference between a butcher
and a flirt? One kills to dress; the other dresses to kill.” A big reason people think
the Victorians were so humorless is because their jokes didn’t always age well. A lot
of the content featured in Punch, for example, may not make sense to those unfamiliar with
the political events being satirized. And some of the era’s jokes were downright offensive,
as they could have pretty racist, sexist, or classist themes.
When a lot of people think of serious Victorians, they think of the unsmiling people often found
in photographs. There were some exceptions to this stern rule—photos of smiling Victorians,
including Queen Victoria herself, exist in the archives—but it is true that most photographs
of the era show close-lipped subjects. There are a few theories as to why. A common one
is that in the 19th century, having your photo taken involved more than the quick click of
a button—posing for a daguerreotype in the 1830s meant a person had to be still for around
a minute and a half; that exposure time had shortened dramatically to under 10 seconds
in the 1850s. As such, people didn’t smile in pictures because it was difficult to hold
the pose for a long stretch of time. But by the late 19th century exposure time had gotten
pretty short and people still weren’t smiling, which leads to another theory behind the somber
stares: Early photography was similar to painting, which also saw its subjects favoring grim
looks over plastered grins. Back then, a big toothy smile was more associated with lewdness
and loudness—not traits the aristocrats wanted to portray in their portraits. Yet
another theory proposes that people didn’t smile so they could hide their unattractive
teeth. This idea has some critics, though. This was a time before widespread dental healthcare,
so having a mouth full of gnarly teeth was normal, and not something people felt the
need to hide.
One more note on Victorian-era photography and long exposure times. If you look at the
right (or, debatably, wrong) sources online, you’ll see a lot of images claiming to be
post-morterm shots—that is, deceased subjects propped up for one last photo opp. While this
was a real practice, it wasn’t nearly as widespread as some corners of the Internet
might have you believe. A lot of those supposedly dead subjects are just standing really still
to avoid a blurry image. You try to hold the same exact pose for 10 seconds and see if
you don’t end up with a case of resting-corpse-face.
Misconception: Queen Victoria Embodied Priggishness
Queen Victoria has a reputation as a particularly humorless monarch. After all, the quote “We
are not amused” is attributed to her. According to one 1887 book, a group of people were laughing
and chatting when Victoria grimly proclaimed “We are not amused!” But the most popular
legend claims she said it in response to a raunchy joke. Alternate versions of the story
exist, but none come from a primary source; each version is relayed as if the story had
previously been passed onto the writer by someone else. But it’s likely the queen
never said that line at all—in a 1976 interview, her 93-year-old granddaughter Princess Alice
said Victoria herself told her she never said it.
A lot of Queen Victoria’s reputation as a somber, serious woman comes from the decades
she spent mourning Prince Albert’s death. Albert died on December 14, 1861, at the age
of 42. Doctors originally suspected the Prince Consort had died of typhoid fever, though
modern scholars have debated that diagnosis. Albert’s untimely demise devastated Queen
Victoria. She spent the next 40 years publicly and privately mourning her late husband. One
thing she didn’t use while mourning her husband: Glass tear bottles. It’s said that
grieving Victorians would weep into these "tear catchers," and once the pool of tears
they collected had evaporated, their mourning period would end. People did have an assortment
of fancy little glasses and vials, but they used them to store perfume. This myth probably
came about because some romantic past scholars found similar glass bottles, or lachrymatories,
in old Greek and Roman tombs, and proposed they were used to store tears.
Modern tests, however, showed that even those ancient bottles were used for scents.
Queen Victoria has a long association with the color white. She did, after all, popularize
the white wedding dress. But she wasn’t the first public figure to wear white on her
wedding day. More than two decades before Victoria’s wedding, there’s an account
of Princess Charlotte’s wedding dress describing it as “a slip of white and silver.” And
Victoria didn’t choose the color to showcase her purity, as many believe. White fabric
was more expensive to maintain and clean, so if anything, wearing white was a symbol
of her social status. Back then, only the wealthy could afford to maintain pristine
white clothing. According to one biographer, Victoria also chose white to better show off
her gown’s delicate lace.
Corsets were pretty common throughout the Victorian era. They were not the deadly torture
devices often portrayed in period film pieces—though of course, some people did cause damage by
cinching them too tight. But if a typical corset hurt the person wearing it, that simply
meant it hadn’t been fitted right. Women also didn’t need a whole flock of assistants
to fasten them into a corset—they were often perfectly able to slip into the garment themselves.
Too-tight corsets also didn’t cause women to frequently faint. Contrary to popular belief,
women weren’t constantly flopping onto fainting couches because their clothes were suffocating
them—and back then, fainting couches weren’t even a thing; that type of furniture was called
a day bed. Honestly, there are too many different pieces of furniture, you get a good couch,
that thing can be your day bed, night bed, office chair, you name it. Oh god. I’ve
been working from home for too long.
That’s all the misconceptions we have for you today. The Victorian Era, not as uptight
as you perhaps thought. Comment below what other time periods you’d like to see us
cover in a future episode. I’ll see ya next time.