Facts About Victorian England That Definitely Weren’t In The History Books

The Elegant Yet Disgusting Victorians

When most people think of the Victorians, they think of demure women and dapper men. The women are dressed in corsets and huge skirts and the men in top hats and tails.
However, behind the elegant appearances were people with access to modern conveniences and sanitation like we have nowadays. Just wait until you see what they used for toothpaste in the next slide..

Victorian Toothpaste

Victorians weren’t around for the invention of toothpaste as we know it today so they used their own homemade ‘dentifrices’. This was made up of things like chalk, bleach, charcoal, and honey. I can’t imagine it being the best for your teeth!

Just wait until you see what they did when one of their loved ones passed away in the next slide!

Victorian Mourning

Victorian people took the death of their loved ones very, very seriously. They saved hair from the dead and wore it in their jewelry and even collected their tears in vials just like these ones.
You won’t believe the ‘shocking’ things that Victorian doctors did to their patients as you’ll see in the next slide.

‘Shocking’

With the beginning of the industrial revolution, many new inventions started being built and the field of medicine wasn’t exempt from these new-fangled machines. These machines were used by doctors to shock everything from gout to arthritis and in later years mental ailments out of patients. As you can imagine, medicine has evolved well past these primitive methods.
The next slide shows another rather unorthodox and soggy medical treatment used by Victorians.

Hydrotherapy

If perhaps you didn’t feel like being electrocuted, you could always try hydrotherapy! Hydrotherapy was pretty much exactly as it sounds, you soaked your arms and legs in the water. This was used to treat baldness in men and ‘hysteria’ in women.
The next slide talks about the downright disgusting things that the Victorians called delicacies.