In the 19th century, The United Kingdom went through a notorious era that nearly everyone
is familiar with, a period of time that saw the transition from a country completely dedicated
to agriculture to a fully industrialized one.
It was commonly known as the "Victorian era" and was ruled by Queen Victoria I for 64 years.
Unfortunately, this era was not as we currently imagine it, not everything was long dresses
of fine ornate fabric and dances to show them off.
This period was much more and not exactly for the better.
Due to the early age in which the advances in medicine were found, this era could be
defined more by the stench of its streets and its inhabitants that populated them.
Today, we will learn how the ladies of that time dealt with their own smell and at the
same time tried to look their best, welcome to Copernicus’s Galaxy.
How did Victorians go to the bathroom in their big dresses?
The pleasure of wearing a beautiful and stunning dress has always brought about a series of
problems for women, especially when it comes to tending to their needs, but any of them
will tell you that the effort is worth it and it is undeniable that those ruffles made
their beauty stand out even more.
Now, we have all kinds of dresses.
Short dresses, which reach the knee or even some that seem designed to "mop" the floor,
there are tight fitting ones and some that are quite loose, with or without a neckline.
Depending on the style of dress you choose, it will give you some problem one way or another,
which in some cases is a challenge of ingenuity and skill to use the bathroom, however, the
ladies of the Victorian era did not have much choice.
Because of the length and heaviness of their dresses, women in those days tried to eat,
drink and exercise every day at the same time to try to get their bodies used to expelling
in the mornings or evenings, by which time they would usually be out of their beautiful
but annoying clothes.
In spite of this, the body is capricious and there is always a day when, even with all
the previous training, your bladder or bowels let you down, therefore, the best kept trick
for those ladies was a wide underwear that had no crotch.
It was divided so that if the maiden urgently needed to go to the bathroom, she could do
it just by lifting the long and heavy skirts, adopting the typical squatting pose.
Now, if in order to relieve themselves, they needed both hands to lift the dress...
How did they clean themselves afterwards?...
The answer is quite simple, if the lady had only urinated she did not bother to clean
herself and if she had defecated she excused herself with some ailment and left to be able
to clean herself.
Toilet paper did not start to be produced until mid-century, but nobody wanted it, they
thought it was throwing money away together with excrement.
Europeans preferred to opt for having a bidet, which was a kind of pot or bench with water
and a sponge to clean themselves, while Americans used to use magazines and newspapers or even
cut and moistened corn cobs ... better to not even imagine it ....
Victorian women used their own urine to wash their laundry
Until the 1880s, there were no washing machines to soak, scrub, rinse and wring out our dirty
clothes for us, let alone dryers to get our clothes clean in less than two hours, all
these steps had to be done by someone, which was no easy task.
For a small farm alone, the washerwoman would have to wash approximately over 150 pounds
of laundry, first filling the kettle with about 20 gallons of water before lighting
logs placed underneath to heat it.
Once boiling, the dirty clothes would be put in, and then for 15 minutes they would be
stirred with a special paddle up to 3 feet long, which required a strong arm to use.
As you can imagine, there were no products such as detergents or softeners to restore
the color to their old garments, which forced Victorian women to do their best to preserve
the white of their dresses.
Some manuals of the time even recommend repeating the rinsing step up to 3 times to get rid
of stains.
The best laundromats had their own secret concoctions to remove any kind of dirt, while
those Victorians who preferred to wash clothes at home tried literally everything to achieve
the same results, from sour milk to remove iron oxide from white clothes or ox bile liquid
freshly extracted from the animal at the butcher's to help preserve the colors, to their own
urine that served to whiten any percured garment thanks to the ammonia in its composition...
honestly we don't know if that really counts as "washing"...
To avoid going through this type of process so often, they used underwear that covered
most of the body, thus protecting the wool and silk garments from body fluids such as
sweat, gaining a couple of more uses before sending them back to be soaked in foreign
substances.
The Victorian Dentist: From cuttlefish toothpaste to sulfuric acid
Although people of the Victorian era really cared about keeping their teeth as healthy
and clean as they could, the reality is that with such primitive dentistry and the lack
of toothpaste, you'd most likely find that the vast majority would sport a yellowish
or hollowed-out smile.
It was advisable to brush the teeth with castile soap, a paste, powder or liquid dentifrice
that was commonly scented with rose, mint or vanilla essence, but many preferred to
make their own homemade recipes that included chalk, camphor, quinine, soot, coral, alum
and even charcoal, the latter was not one of the most recommended, but became extremely
popular due to its incredible work whitening the teeth.
Unfortunately in the long term it inflamed the gums and caused periodontal diseases.
Dentists offered a bleaching service in which they applied chemicals such as oxalic acid,
dilute nitric acid, sodium chloride or potassium cyanide, solutions which were very harmful
to any surrounding tissue if not applied by a qualified specialist.
Some fell for the lies of pilgrim dentists who offered a product that cleaned the teeth
immediately, leaving them shiny white, but lost their teeth when they became black and
extremely sensitive after a few days due to the sulfuric acid present in the solutions
used by the false dentists.
As for how toothbrushes came about, the story goes back to 1780 when William Addis was imprisoned
for looting.
During his confinement, he found no better way to pass his time than to create a toothbrush
out of calf bone, which he drilled holes in at the top and filled with boar hair attached
to a wire.
After his release, he began marketing them as the first mass-produced toothbrush.
A Victorian woman's beauty routine
The women of these times used to take only 2 full body baths a month, the other days
they simply washed their hands, face, armpits and crotch with cold water and vinegar.
Those people of low income often only had a small basin and a jug to wash themselves.
The tubs with hot water were reserved for higher social strata.
Since shampoo did not exist as such, most people washed their hair and body with the
same soap, which left both their hair and scalp very dry, so it was recommended that
they wash their hair at least twice a month.
To keep it shiny, they used treatments based on ammonia diluted in water, which was highly
corrosive, or onion juice, which had a powerful and unpleasant odor.
Given the few baths that could be taken, the most effective way to camouflage the body
odor of sweat and dirt was to spray liters of perfume.
A popular one was the ambergris fragrance, created from liquid recovered from the intestines
of a dead sperm whale.
To have perfect skin was also an issue for Victorian women.
For this, they had cosmetics that did their job quite well, but at a high cost.
Most of them were made with lead, which clogged the pores causing a lethal mineral imbalance.
Those with freckles were recommended to rub lemon juice or even carbolic acid on them
and then take a sunbath until the freckles burned off.
This caused premature wrinkles which in turn were treated with slices of raw meat before
going to sleep.
The stereotype of beauty in the Victorian era was a woman who was neither too thin nor
too obese, and of course they had their own treatments.
The ones dedicated to weight loss being the most harmful because they contained potentially
deadly ingredients.
What a stench!
The day the Parliament almost left the capital
Let's imagine the unpleasant aroma that surely most of us have had to breathe when passing
a garbage dumpster for just a few seconds, now let's combine it with the stench coming
from a sewage canal... ready?
disgusting, right?
Now multiply that at least by 10 and imagine that it is omnipresent, it is everywhere and
at all times.
That was the essence of London during the nineteenth century thanks to a bad plumbing
system that caused leaks and threw everything directly into the Thames River where excrement
to animal carcasses and even humans were stored in its depths.
This, also combined with the poor sanitation of its streets was a major source of infection.
The inhabitants of this city learned to live with it in the same way they did with their
own stench and that of their neighbors.
To mask the odors, they used to use perfumes in abundance, but unfortunately this did not
work on hot summer days when the intensity of the sun and the exponential increase of
the city's inhabitants accentuated the putrid aroma.
During this period some people still used a well system in their bathrooms where their
waste was stored until someone had to take it away.
That was the job of the gong farmers, who usually worked at night so as not to bother
people with the foul smell they gave off from their work.
In 1858 significantly low water levels were recorded in the River Thames due to evaporation,
leaving huge banks of muddy debris exposed to the heat, this forced members of Parliament
to consider fleeing to Oxford or St Albans because of the pervasive stench that reached
them first hand as they were situated right on the river's edge.
In the end, this event was necessary for the city government to invest in better sewage.
Honestly, we need to be thankful that today we have decent sanitation processes and a
facility to maintain our hygiene and health that any man or woman of the Victorian era
would envy, although who knows... maybe in the future people will see our habits and
cleaning systems as not very efficient.
We will see what the technological and social advances to come will offer us here, at Copernicus's
Galaxy.