We have a Victorian Tea Party coming up next weekend and I’m in charge of the program for the day’s festivities since two of my favorite historical topics are Victorians and Tea (also, I don’t mind public speaking, I bet that has something to do with it)
The Victorian Period was one of immense change- The Great Internet Brain (Google) says that the Victorian period lasted from June 20, 1837 to January 22, 1901, which was when Queen Victoria began her reign until she died. I’d say the period itself ended a little after 1901 because travel and communication was still slow ish at the time, and when it comes to historical periods, very rarely does one completely end and another one begin. There’s a lot more blurring that happens. Some historians say the Victorian Period wrapped up closer to 1915 or even as late as 1920. Anyway, those are the dates for the test at the end of this post.
When it comes to periods of massive change, people like to find some sort of safe harbor where things are, well, less crazy. The craziness of the Victorian Period extended through basically every social class and caused some serious upheval, but what is mostly remembered today are the weird rules that came about during the period, like how you can’t wear white after labor day. This is Murica, I do what I want you weird history people. Good news for us, the upheaval and the weird rules are connected in a pretty reasonable (ish) way.
So here’s the thing- industrialization happened extensively in the Victorian Period. Let’s start from the bottom- and keep in mind that this is a bit England-centric, but you do see similar things happening particularly in the American Northeast, which became the industrial capitol of the US.
If you were some dude out in a rural town in England, it was pretty likely that for a long time you raised your animals, and your crops, and you sold your extra stuff to some neighbors. Maybe you had some extra wool that you sold to the cute neighborlady who could turn it into yarn that someone else could make into a real nice sweater.
Then, one day, a shop opens up in town, let’s call it “OldeMart” that has that sweater for a quarter of the cost. The shop owner picked them up from a steam powered mill where a hundred people could pump out hundreds of those awesome sweaters a day. A few weeks later, the cute neighbor lady announces that she’s moving to go work in the mill. Darn. Guess she won’t be having 15 of your babies. The OldeMart guy makes a killing selling his inexpensive goods and opens OldeMarts across England. He even does mail orders. 30 day shipping, for anywhere in England, what a deal!
Let’s say OldeMart guy decides to invest some of his cash into a railroad that’s being built to connect England, perhaps the railroad is called “Thames”. He makes a heck of a lot of money off the success of the railroad, which transports the cheap goods from factories to OldeMarts across the country. OldeMart Guy is now well into the wealthy classes- he would be considered upper middle class. He was part of the group who made their money from industry, a relatively new class of person compared to the upper crust folks who inherited their money from their great uncle who married his cousin to strengthen family ties and everyone has a strikingly similar nose…
Now we have a ton of people losing their cottage jobs in the country and moving to cities to work in these factories. There’s no OSHA at this point, and the work was, well, brutal. Tons of people died in workplace related incidences. Don’t even get me started on workhouses. That’s for another time when I rant a bit about how Capitalism Strikes Again.
So OldeMart Guy has the fancy clothes, and wants to hang out with the other ritzy folk, who already have their own ways of operating (see Downton Abbey for some great examples of all this). But it’s not that easy to just be “in”. After all, didn’t that guy used to be the Chauffer? People have their place, you know, and for centuries that was just generally how it was. Social Mobility? Pshh. It was going to take more than some fancy dinner clothes to make other people accept you if you were newly part of the “in” crowd, if they ever accepted you at all.
With new wealthy folks on the scene, the current ones wanted to be sure that their place was secure and you knew who was on your side and from a similar background as you. Hence, rules. If you saw someone wear white after Labor Day, you could easily identify them as a person who didn’t know what was in, out, up or down. Bye Felicia. Keep up with the Joneses, OldeMart Guy.
These social rules exploded throughout the Victorian Period, volumes and volumes of books offered advice that changed by the year for folks to figure out how to behave. People who were well off enough to study ettiquette all day could quickly separate themselves out from those working folks who didn’t have time for that. The writings were heavily influenced by religion, and enforced really strict rules on how not only men and women should behave on their own, but when it was ok for them to interact, how they should interact, who else should be present, all of that. These rules began institutionalizing the ideas of a men’s sphere and a woman’s sphere of existence.
When you grew up walking from place to place with no indoor plumbing working on a farm owned by your family for generations and the world is literally now at the point where you can now travel at 40 miles an hour across certain parts of the country in a train (unless you were a woman, in which case your innards might fall out if you went that fast so you have to stay home) and steam can allow you to make more sweaters in one year than you could make in your life, you start grasping at straws to find some kind of continuity and reliability in your life. Telling people how to live their lives so they can be accepted and maybe grow their business connections is a great way to do that.
In the context of big changes, it makes a bit more sense that people grasped to weird rules to find out who was part of the “in crowd”. These rules, while they seem a bit ridiculous to us today, provided a foundation that a lot of our present day world is built on and that many people are trying to buck- a “woman’s place being in the home” and gendered ideals of how people are supposed to exist. They’ve also created a great foundation for TV drama so… there’s that.
Katie Buesch 