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Welcome to the Victorian era, where the concept of “convenience” took on a whole new meaning. The 19th century wasn’t all tea parties and top hats; it was also about some truly eyebrow-raising practices that could easily give today’s “extreme” trends a run for their money. Let’s wade through a few Victorian DIYs that shall perhaps make your local scandal sheets look like a walk in the park.
Chimney Sweeps: Tiny Terrors in Tiny Tunnels
Ah, the good old days of child labour, where the younger you started, the better. Were you that Victorian parent who wanted to get their child on the career ladder as early as possible? Why not send them up a chimney? The Victorian chimney was built so intricately that even a stick insect might have struggled to make its way through, so the obvious answer was to send in children as young as four.
Imagine your child’s first job interview: “Do you have experience with confined spaces? How about crawling through an 18-inch-wide tunnel covered in soot?” It was a win-win if your child survived the harsh conditions and industrial toxins that led to the charmingly named “chimney sweep cancer” you saved on hiring adult labour. It’s the Victorian version of starting a “YouTube” channel, but the views were a lot darker.
Death Portraits: Snapshots of the Afterlife
Victorian photography wasn’t only about those “picture-perfect” family moments; it’s also about documenting your most tragic events with the exact level of enthusiasm one would have toward a family vacation. Photography brought in a new kind of immortality: the death portrait.
Families would thus pose their dearly departed in life-like settings surrounded by grieving relatives who seemed to radiate all the warmth and vibrancy of a Victorian funeral. Less like a photo album and more a collection of macabre memorabilia, really. Think of it as a very early form of Instagram, whereby the trend was less along the lines of “living your best life” and more about making sure that your loved ones stayed in the limelight- even if that limelight was decidedly morbid.
Unwanted Wives: The Victorian “eBay”
Now, let’s talk of marital disputes—Victorian style. In an age where divorce was as socially acceptable as donning last season’s fashion, some men took a creative approach to “unwanted wives.” Quite literally, they would auction off their spouses in a public sale with a rope around the wife’s neck, not unlike some sort of medieval leash.
It was the Victorian equivalent of selling your used furniture on eBay. Instead of a “Buy It Now” button, there was a “Take Her Off My Hands” option. Just as on eBay, these transactions were final, and the reviews, if there were any, were decidedly harsh. This was practised until the Matrimonial Act of 1857.
The bitter irony
The sheer absurdity of Victorian practices serves as a dark reminder of just how awful life could get for women and children during that supposedly enlightened era. Where steam engines and gaslights were supposed to symbolise the pinnacle of human progress, the finer details of human rights seemed to have been misplaced somewhere. Take the child chimney sweeps, for example. These pint-sized labourers were shoved up soot-choked chimneys; “starting young” turned into a health hazard. Not a metaphor, jokes apart, “chimney sweep cancer” was very real in being a grim fact that proved childhood aspirations didn’t always hack up to a bright future but to hacking up soot all one’s life.
And then there’s the public sale of wives, a practice that makes today’s awkward Tinder dates look like a walk in the park. Imagine being auctioned off like some piece of furniture. It wasn’t some sort of freaky episode from a historical sitcom; it was a grim reality where wives were paraded around on leashes and sold off to the highest bidder. What is, if not that, a spectacularly dehumanizing way to handle marital discord? The idea of a woman’s being “disposed of” like some second-hand sofa reveals just how little agency women had. Their “rights” were as full of actual substance as the upholstery on a Victorian chaise longue: practically nonexistent.
The Victorian period was, essentially, a masterclass in juxtaposition. You had the great strides in technology and pronouncements regarding moral virtue on one hand, and on the other, you had women and children being treated in ways so ridiculously cruel that they make today’s complaints about the injustices of yesteryear almost akin to complaining about the weather. It’s a sobering reminder that, while the era might have been busy inventing the future, it was also busy inventing ways to keep women and children firmly in their place, often without any regard for their dignity or rights. So the next time one is having a breathless moment at Victorian ingenuity, remember that it came with a strong dose of societal absurdities that remind us just how far we have come, and how much further there is to go.
