The Victorians
Welcome to Victorian Britain
The Victorian Age! A time of adventure and exploration! Wondrous new inventions! Where a man can be anything he wants to be and a woman can be a…woman! It’s an Empire on which the sun never sets, and Britannia truly does rule the waves!
Of course all that sounds marvellous, doesn’t it? But while the wealthy were experiencing riches as never before, the Empire was being run by the back-breaking work of ordinary people. And those were the lucky ones; if you were poor and too old or sick to work, or you couldn’t find a job, then you were destined for a life of extreme poverty in a workhouse, or worse.
The Victorian age is a time of extremes. If you were born in the same year as Queen Victoria (1819) and lived the same 81 years as she did until she died in 1901, you would have seen inventions and discoveries in every area of science. Light bulbs and petrol engines, steam trains and telephones, electricity and X-rays – even the flushing toilet! All were invented or developed in the Victorian age.
Possibly the most important Victorian development was public water works. Making clean water available to city dwellers and taking sewage safely away did more for public health than any other single invention of the time.
To learn more about life in Victorian times, try your hand at some of these activities!
Famous Victorians
Here are some famous Victorians you should really know about. Can you match the person to their achievements?
In Service
For a Victorian man, the world was your oyster. Depending on your wealth and level of education, you could become anything from a labourer to a doctor, a lawyer to a craftsman. If you had enough money you could go to University or travel the world.
However for women, the choices were somewhat more…limited.
Work was not seen as a suitable pass-time for a well-off young lady. Most women would have been expected to get married to man of similar wealth and give him heirs. If you wanted a career? Ha! If you really insisted, and could read and write, then perhaps you could be a primary school teacher. Although women who taught were not allowed to be married, so if you wanted to get married you had to give up your career.
Universities did not accept women until the 1860s, and even then they had to take special exams “for women”. Women were not allowed to take the same exams as men until 1875. Even when Universities did allow women to enrol, doctors feared that too much education would affect a woman’s ability to have children, and so many families did not allow their daughters to attend!
So well-off women learned at home. They studied things like sewing, music, art, singing, and perhaps another language. Things that would make them a good and dutiful wife.
Why not cooking, you ask? Surely if they were to be a wife, they should have learned cooking and cleaning?
No, that was the job of the servants!
A woman who was not well off was likely to find herself “in service” i.e., a servant to a wealthy family in a big house. This could be anything from the scullery maid to the head cook, or even a ladies maid, depending on how big the household was.
With the lack of the household appliances we take for granted these days, any large house needed a small army of staff to keep it running!
Hannah the Housemaid
Meet Hannah the housemaid as she takes us through one of her most labour intensive jobs – laundry day.
Dress like a Victorian
Washday Blues
A Victorian Kitchen
Every Victorian kitchen would have a dresser. Here are some things you might find in a typical Victorian kitchen. Can you match the item to its spot on the dresser?
Make your own clothes pegs
Make your own Victorian clothes peg.
Uses a sharp knife – Adult supervision required!
A Housemaid’s Day
Isambard Kingdom Brunel
Apart from a really odd name, what is Isambard Kingdom Brunel famous for?
The Great Western Railway
The Great Western Railway Company employed Brunel to make a Railway line between London and Bristol to cut the journey time down. It would take 13 hours by postal coach to reach Bristol from London and a postal coach could only take 6 passengers at a time.
Brunel wanted to limit the number of hills as this would slow the train down and increase the journey time.
The work was started in 1835 and wouldn’t be finally finished till 1886. Upon completion the journey time from London to Bristol by train was only 4 hours.
The SS Great Eastern
The SS Great Eastern was the largest ship built in Victorian England.
She was designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel and built in a London dock yard. She was launched in 1858 and could carry 4000 people on board.
Below is a picture of the SS Great Eastern just before she was dismantled. Use the words to label the different parts of the ship.
The SS Great Britain
The SS Great Britain was one of the first iron hulled ships to be built in Britain and was the largest ship afloat. The building was finished in 1845 and built in the ship yards of Bristol.
She was 322ft long, 3,400 tons in weight and had 4 decks.
She was originally designed as a passenger ship and could carry 360 people and it took a crew of 120 people to crew her.
The engines that drove the 6 bladed propeller, which was quite a new technology at the time, used a coal fired boiler and it took 1000 tons of coal to get to America. She did have 6 masts and sails as backup in case the engines failed.
Unfortunately on her first trip to America there were only 45 passengers on board so it wasn’t considered a huge success.
Now scroll down to hide this text and see if you can answer the questions below about the SS Great Britain!
Time for School!
Poverty and Pestilence
The Workhouse
One of the great achievements of the Victorian era was the workhouse.
Sorry, what?
Well, despite what you may have heard, workhouses weren’t the Dickensian hell holes you might be imagining.
Ok well most of them weren’t.
Some of them.
Alright, fine. Some of them were horrific. But some were run by people who were kind and fair.
Whereas today people who are not able to find work can claim benefits, no such thing existed in Victorian times. That’s where the workhouse comes in.
If you were sick, orphaned, disabled, or just down on your luck, you could go to the workhouse and at the very least you wouldn’t starve to death in the streets. Workhouses were not in any way luxurious, not even pleasant to live in. But it was a way to survive when you had nothing else. People in desperate circumstances could get food, shelter and clothes, children could go to school, and the sick would be cared for. In return people were expected to work if they were able. It was dull, repetitive and hard work, but it was a way to survive.
Regulations were very strict, diets extremely basic, and the conditions in some workhouses were unimaginable by today’s standards.
How do you think it would feel to live in a workhouse? Use the images below for inspiration, and then write your own account of a day in the workhouse.
