Strange Things The Victorians Did That Would Not Be Allowed Today
The Victorians may have been a pretty straight-laced lot in many ways, but they also had a few habits that will astonish and in some cases appall you. From snacking on sheep’s trotters and limping in the name of fashion, to sending gratuitously insulting Valentine cards and wearing dead people’s teeth, the Victorians actually engaged in some truly bizarre behavior. Read on at your own peril to find out about some of the weirder things your Victorian ancestors were getting up to... and don't say we didn't warn you.
Why were they limping?
Limping in pursuit of fashion? That would be crazy, right? Not to Victorian women in Britain! The bizarre fad even had a name: the “Alexandra limp.” It was all about mimicking royalty. In 1863 Princess Alexandra of Denmark married Queen Victoria’s son and heir Albert Edward, later King Edward VII. The unfortunate princess suffered a bout of rheumatic fever resulting in a limping walk. Some of the fashion-conscious citizenry began to copy her gait. Women even wore mismatching shoes to achieve the desired effect. Pretty soon, shoemakers started to make ill-matched footwear specially designed to cause limping. Extraordinary.
Vinegar Valentine cards
When you send a Valentine card, it’s usually to declare your love for someone. This was not always the case in Victorian England. In fact, there was a whole trend of sending “Vinegar Valentines,” which were meant to be rude and offensive! One example, published by Smithsonian magazine, shows a woman dousing a man with a bucket of water. The caption goes, “It says as plain as it can say, Old fellow you’d best stop away.” Hardly Shakespeare, but the message is clear enough! Astonishingly, by the middle of the 1800s, nearly half of all Valentine cards were of the vinegar variety.
Feel the bumps
It was called “phrenology,” and it’s got to be one of the most crackpot “scientific” theories you’ll ever come across. It involved examining the lumps on someone’s head to reveal certain character traits. A German doctor, Franz Joseph Gall, came up with the theory, and it was immensely popular during the Victorian era. It even spilled into the 20th century before it was comprehensively debunked. The whole thing would be entirely laughable were it not for the fact that people genuinely were classified according to the contours of their skull. Some Victorian men even turned to phrenology to help them choose a wife!
Rat poison runners
Nowadays, we’re all too familiar with headlines about athletes and performance-enhancing drugs, but it’s actually nothing new. The difference in the Victorian era was that nobody made any effort to hide it! And the range of chemicals and intoxicants used is staggering. The most startling of those treatments must surely be injections of strychnine, more familiar as rat poison. One example came in the 1904 Olympics, when American runner Thomas Hicks won the marathon after two strychnine injections — one of which was actually administered during the race!
