Life in the Victorian era (2024)

Top 10 facts

1. The inventions of machines in factories replaced jobs that people used to do, but people were needed to look after the machines and keep the factories clean.
2. Factories were built in cities, so people ended up moving to the cities to get jobs. Half the population in Britain lived in cities by the end of the Victorian era.
3. Cities became crowded, busy and dirty, but discoveries about hygiene and sanitation meant that diseases like cholera were easier to prevent.
4. People in the Victorian era started to use electricity for the first time, and to listen to music by playing records on the gramophone.
5. Steam trains made travel a lot easier, and rich people started to go on holidays to the seaside in places like Blackpool and Brighton.
6. There was a big difference between rich and poor in Victorian times. Rich people could afford lots of treats like holidays, fancy clothes, and even telephones when they were invented.
7. Poor people – even children – had to work hard in factories, mines or workhouses. They didn’t get paid very much money.
8. By the end of the Victorian era, all children could go to school for free. Victorian schools were very strict – your teacher might even beat you if you didn’t obey the rules.
9. The way we celebrate Christmas was begun in Victorian times – they sent the first Christmas cards and made Christmas crackers.
10. Charles Dickens was a famous Victorian author who wrote A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist and other famous novels.

Did you know?

• At the beginning of the Victorian era in 1837, most people would have used candles and oil or gas lamps to light their homes and streets. By the end of the Victorian era in 1901, electricity was available and rich people could get it in their homes.
• Poor people could work in mines, in mills and factories, or in workhouses. Whole families would sometimes have to work so they’d all have enough money to buy food.
• Children in poor families would have jobs that were best done by people who weren’t very tall. They would have to crawl in small spaces in mines, or underneath machines in textile mills. It was very dangerous!
• Rich people didn’t have dangerous jobs like these. In fact, some didn’t even have to work! They could afford to buy the new inventions coming out like the telephone, the gramophone (for playing music) and electric light bulbs.
• Rich Victorians were the first to go on seaside holidays – some of the places they’d go are spots where we go on holiday too, like Blackpool, Brighton and Southend.
• Victorian children loved it when their mum and dad let them see a magic lantern show. This was a slideshow of pictures that told a story – the machine that showed the pictures was called a magic lantern.
• Almost all families in Victorian times – except for the very poor ones – would pay people to be servants who would do their household chores for them. This included cooking, cleaning, washing and even serving dinner. Women who were servants were called maids, and men were called footmen. The head servant would be a man called a butler.
• There was a rule for everything in Victorian times – even about the sorts of clothes you’d wear in the morning or evening, and when in the city or in the country!
• All men wore hats in Victorian times (rich men wore top hats, poor men wore caps). When a man wanted to say hello to a lady, it was good manners to tip the brim of their hat down, then push their hat back onto their head.
• It was bad manners if a man spoke to a woman he didn’t know without someone else introducing them first.
• Children always had to say ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ to their family members every time the child came in or went out of a room. Try doing that for a day in your home!
• Children were not allowed to shout, complain, interrupt or disagree with anyone. They had to do as they were told, and be cheerful and quiet all the time.

Victorian gallery

• A railway poster advertising Brighton and Volk’s Electric Railway
• Women in a Victorian workhouse
• Clothes that a wealthy Victorian man would have worn
• Victorian dresses with bustles (Credit: Lovelorn Poets via flickr)
• A Victorian hoop skirt
• How children dressed in the Victorian era
• A Victorian magic lantern
• An early Christmas card
• A Victorian living room
• A Victorian kitchen
• A Victorian-style pushchair

Gallery

About

Victorian inventions like the steam engine and innovations like steel-making led to machines being made that could produce lots of the same thing at once. Factories were filled with machines like these. While it used to be that one person would be a weaver and make cloth, machines could now do that job instead and make cloth that didn’t cost as much.

So, what did people do if machines did all the work? Well, the machines needed looking after, and factory owners wanted people who could do that as well as take care of other little jobs around the factory. Since factories were usually built in large towns and cities, and people needed new jobs, most people moved to where the factories were. By the end of the Victorian era, half of the people living in Britain lived in cities.

This meant that cities were crowded and dirty. If you were poor and couldn’t afford to live in a very nice place, it was easy to get sick. There was a large outbreak of cholera in London in 1853-1854 that killed 11,000 people. Most people thought that the disease was coming from areas that just smelled nasty and got passed around through scents in the air, but Dr. John Snow worked out that the disease was actually spreading because of a cesspit that was leaking into a water pump where people drank from. By the end of the Victorian era, London had a better sewage system and sanitation was a bigger concern – plus, people knew more about how diseases are passed from one person to another.

Other famous Victorians who believed that proper hygiene and sanitation were needed to be healthy were Florence Nightingale and Dr. Joseph Lister. Dr. Lister was a surgeon who discovered that cleaning wounds and surgical instruments prevented infections.

Jobs that people had in Victorian times included usual ones like lawyers, doctors, teachers and vicars, but there were other jobs too:

• Engineers were needed to build bridges, buildings and machines
• Miners to get coal, iron and tin
• Mill workers to keep machines running and produce textiles
• Farm workers to tend and harvest crops
• Railway porters to sort out passengers’ luggage
• Navvies who broke ground for railway tracks to be laid down
• Nightmen to clear out the sewers in crowded cities
• Maids, butlers, cooks and other servants in the home

Steam engines needed coal to run them, so mining coal was very important. Working in coal mines was hard, and sometimes entire families would do it just to earn enough money. There were also mines for iron and tin in different parts of Britain.

Only poor people would work in factories and mines, and both were pretty unhealthy places to be. The air would be thick with dust from the mines or from the cotton being spun for cloth, and working hours were long.

If someone didn’t have a home (or money to afford a place to live), they could go to a workhouse, which was a place that provided food and beds in exchange for doing work. While this sounds pretty handy, it wasn’t very nice. Men, women and children all had to live separately, so families couldn’t stay together. The food wasn’t very good, and children weren’t taught how to read and write. Everyone had to wear the same uniform, and breaking any rules would mean strict punishment.

If you were rich, then life was completely different! Rich Victorians lived in large houses that were well heated and clean. Children got a good education either by going away to school or having a governess who taught them at home (this is usually how girls were educated).

Wealthy people could also afford to buy beautiful clothes. All women in Victorian times wore dresses with long skirts, but rich women could get the latest fashions that needed special underclothes to wear properly. They wore dresses that needed hoop skirts underneath to make the dresses spread out in a dome shape around their legs. Or, they wore skirts that lay mostly flat but that poofed out a bit around their bottom – this was called a bustle.

All men, whether rich or poor, wore waistcoats. Rich men also wore top hats and carried walking sticks.

Names to know:

Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) – Florence was the founder of modern nursing; she knew it was important to keep hospitals clean and well-run.
Charles Dickens (1812-1870) – a famous Victorian author who wrote A Christmas Carol, and many other books about life in Victorian times
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) – a Victorian author from Scotland who wrote the famous children’s stories Treasure Island and Kidnapped.
Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) – a popular Victorian poet; one of his poems was ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’, which was about the Crimean War.
Thomas Barnardo (1845-1905) – founded children’s charity Barnardo’s in 1870 as a home for children who were orphaned or didn’t have a place to live, which meant they didn’t have to go to a workhouse
Mrs Isabella Beeton (1836-1865) – an author who wrote a famous book about cooking and housekeeping that many people in Victorian times used
Charles Darwin (1809-1882) – a Victorian naturalist who wrote On the Origin of Species and came up with the theory of natural selection, which led to scientific research into evolution.
Joseph Lister (1827-1912) – Lister was a surgeon who introduced the idea of keeping surgical instruments free from germs, and disinfecting wounds.

Related Videos

Just for fun...

• Take a quiz about Victorian life
• See a map of the British Empire in Victorian times
• Explore a Victorian painting
• What can you learn about life in Victorian times from looking at the census?
• Organise a Victorian Experience Day in your own school!
• Can you spot what differences there were between homes for rich people and homes for poor people?
• Find out about Washday Monday and domestic life in a 19th century weaver's cottage
• How to make Victorian Christmas crackersandVictorian Christmas tree ornaments.
• Try your hand at Victorian cookerywithrecipes likebeef stew with dumplings(Hodge Podge), roast goose and apple batter pudding
• Learn to play some Victorian parlour games
• Read some Victorian poetry like The Owl and the puss* Cat by Edward Lear or The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• Sing 'Hurrah, the Nineteenth Century', a KS1 learning song

Best books about Victorians for children

Find out more about Victorian life:

• Watch a kids' video about Victorian life: BBC History: Day In The Life Victorians
• Details of the household staff at Shibden Hall, including the butler, the housemaid and the under-housemaid
• Watch BBC Bitesize videos about life in Victorian Scotland: school in Victorian Scotland, home life in Victorian Scotland, work in Victorian Scotland and holidays and leisure in Victorian Scotland
• Make your own Victorian Christmas
• See Victorian toys like zoetropes, tiddlywinks and samplers
• Listen to short audio dramas about the lives of children in Victorian times on BBC Schools Radio
• Information about lots of different aspects of Victorian life: health, entertainment, crime and punishment and transport and travel
• Find out about Victorian buildings and houses in an architecture podcast from FunKids
• Children's information about Victorian schooling, Victorian fashion, Victorian workers and Victorian families
• Read facts about health and food in Victorian times
• Immerse yourself infiction books set in Victorian times
• Discover life in a Victorian weaver's cottage the interactive way: listen to and watch the looms and imagine living without heating or electricity
• Find out about 7 innovations which changed Victorian England, including central heating
• Find out about how children worked in Victorian mines and Victorian cotton mills
• Information about Victorian homes: workers' housing and upper class houses
• See a photograph of a Victorian swimming costume
• The life of Michael Marks, entrepreneur and founder of M&S!
• See logbooks from a Victorian school, digitised by Year 5 and Year 6 children

See for yourself

Explore lots of places with Victorian history

See life as it was more than 100 years ago atBlists Hill Victorian Town

Learn about coal mining in Victorian times at the National Coal Mining Museum for England

Visit Tyntesfield, a Victorian stately home in Somerset

See writer Thomas Carlyle’s house in Chelsea, decorated as it would have been in Victorian times

Explore a Victorian workhouse, and learn about the people who would have lived and worked there

Visit the Victoria and Albert Museum in London to see clothes that upper class Victorians would have worn

Take a tour of the Charles Dickens museum, which is in a house where the famous author used to live

Embark on a virtual tour of the Crystal Palace, site of theGreat Exhibition of 1851 organised by Prince Albert, tosee its beautiful and innovative design and discover amazing facts about the exhibition it housed

Also see