Historian Answers Victorian England Questions

Hi, I'm Dr. Bob Nicholson and I'm a historian.

I'm here to answer your questions from the internet.

This is Victorian England Support.

[groovy drums music]

Way_ward_Witch asks,

So I looked up if people actually ate mummies.

And not only did they eat them,

they had the unwrapping parties

and also just [beep] did cannibalism.

What was happening in the Victorian era?

It is true that mummies were eaten,

consumed as a form of medicine,

and that had been going on for a millennia.

So it's not something

that Victorians just invent out of thin air.

And it is true

that the Victorians had mummy unwrapping parties.

So mummies would be, you know, shipped over from Egypt

and then unwrapped sometimes in front of an audience

that was a bit like a sort of scientific lecture.

But in some instances, rich people would do it

as a form of dinner party entertainment

and you would unwrap the bandages.

But I don't wanna give you the impression

that people were then kind of rocking up

with a plate like they were a buffet

and just taking a big bite out of a mummy.

So in part, it is driven by a genuine fascination

for ancient Egyptian history and culture,

but also I think a real lack of reverence for respecting

that culture by, you know, leaving it where it belonged.

Sometimes they were grinding them up

and using them in paint.

There is a particular pigment called mummy brown

that was used by several artists in their work at the time.

CholeraMeBadd asks,

You think when a man saw a woman's bare legs

back in Victorian times, that was considered porn?

Well, yeah, kind of.

So legs, feet and ankles were really heavily eroticized

during the 19th century.

And it kind of makes sense,

because at this point, women didn't wear trousers.

So even the kind of outline

or shape of their legs is something

that you wouldn't ordinarily see in everyday life.

They would've been covered by skirts.

And we do tend, I think,

to eroticize the things we can't see.

It's not too surprising that they were into legs.

This is a period where things like CanCan dancing

was incredibly popular,

and it was because it gave a glimpse of people's legs.

There's a common myth about the Victorians

that they were so prudish about legs

that they would cover up the legs of tables and pianos

because they were just too scandalous.

This isn't really true.

I mean, in fact, it starts as a rumor about Americans

who were considered more prudish in the 19th century

and gradually then becomes one

that was told about the Victorians.

I don't wanna give you the impression though

that all Victorian pornography was that vanilla,

'cause if you actually look at the, you know,

the properly hardcore stuff, you'll see all sorts of things

from sex toys to orgies, gay sex, you know,

all manner of kind of role-play.

So it wasn't all about legs,

but it was definitely a big part of their sexual culture.

HistoricalFun asks,

It's amazing how many times

Queen Victoria survived assassination attempts.

She's actually faster than a speeding bullet or a Jedi.

She did survive run-ins with seven different assassins.

Each of them, she came out largely unscathed.

Now you mentioned a speeding bullet,

and that's actually the real heart of many of these cases.

So the first guy who shot at Queen Victoria in 1840,

he fired at her carriage.

Everybody saw him do it.

They heard the gunshot and at the end of it he said,

I am the one who did it.

But Victoria wasn't harmed, her carriage drove on.

And he was, of course, prosecuted,

but the government couldn't prove

that his gun was definitely fully loaded.

He was using what were known as muzzle-loading pistols.

And to load them, you would have to sort of tip

a bit of gunpowder in, you would force in a bullet

wrapped in some wadding and then you'd fire it.

But if you did all of that without loading the actual bullet

and you fired the gun, it would still go up.

But no projectile would fire out.

So after the assassination attempt,

the police spend days looking for the bullet,

but they can't find it.

So when the case gets to court, the jury are not convinced

that the assassin's guns were actually loaded

to kill and they find him not guilty.

Unfortunately for him, his defense did too good a job

at convincing the jury that he was mad.

So he was then committed to an asylum

where he spent the next 27 years,

even though doctors reported every year

that he was perfectly sane.

Thepixelpaint asks,

Was it very difficult to wear a bustle?

Could they be put on and taken off without assistance?

Could you sit on a chair

or ride in a carriage while wearing one?

Did they complicate using a bathroom?

Did you have to be extra aware of your surroundings,

so as to not to knock stuff over all the time?

Right, well, full disclosure, I've never worn a bustle,

but I have spoken to historical reenactors who do,

and I've got some answers for you on this.

So firstly, a bustle was kind of adding

that you would wear at the bottom of your back

and it would kind of extend an almost kind of hump out

from your hips to kind of make them look

sort of wider at the back.

And it would've looked sexy and desirable

and fashionable to wear these kind of clothes at the time.

The point of it was to accentuate your curve.

They're actually much more flexible than you might think.

So they bend, you can sit down on them.

They're not kind of rigid and hard kind of iron cages.

The big question is definitely about using the toilet,

but the practicalities of it actually

are not that difficult.

So firstly, Victorian women's underwear

would often be kind of parted at the crotch,

or maybe there'd be a little a flap that you would unbutton.

So you wouldn't have to sort of pull your underwear down.

And for the most part, you would use a chamber pot,

which you could pick up and, you know, lift your dress up,

insert between your legs and do your business.

And Victorian women would've done this so often

that it would've been second nature to them.

While they certainly weren't a fashion

that made it easy to do some of these things,

it didn't completely prevent Victorian women

from going about in public,

sitting down or going to the toilet.

Eddietheshoe asks, When did the Victorian age begin?

Victoria didn't come to the throne until 1837, did she?

Yeah, that's absolutely right.

So the Victorian era begins in 1837 and ends in 1901.

So well over 60 years.

It's a really long time period.

And a lot of big changes happened during that time.

So in some ways, it doesn't really make sense

to talk about it as a single historical period.

It would be like imagining the 1950s

and the 1990s were identical.

And by the end of the period,

you've got people looking back nostalgically

to a simpler time in the 1840s.

Things changed quick during Victoria's reign.

Commissarroach asks, What are some of

your favorite Victorian era technological innovations,

inventions and why?

Seeing as we're filming a video, let's go for the camera.

Well, let me show you actually one of my favorite forms

of Victorian photography.

It's basically 3D photography, stereoscopic photography.

And you can see in an example of it here

where you have two images side by side that look identical,

but they're taken with two lenses,

your eyes whipped apart, mimicking the way that we see.

And you put them into a device like this,

which is a stereoscope viewer,

and you would look into them,

slide the image to focus them,

and suddenly it pops into 3D.

And in this case, it looks like I'm suddenly immersed

in a flock of birds.

It really like reminds me

of a modern virtual reality headset.

And these were really popular in the 19th century,

and they were invented almost as soon as the first cameras.

You could buy packs of photographs that would show you,

let's say, a travel around ancient Egypt.

You could get ones of celebrities,

you could even get slightly saucier pornographic ones.

So brace yourself here.

But in this one, the lady does have her ankles out,

and she is smoking a cigarette.

So you know, deeply scandalous stuff

that you could look at in the privacy of your own home.

ClassicalFuturist asks,

How did Victorian style, like fashion, architecture,

et cetera, become the spooky style?

Buildings that were built in largely the first half

of the 19th century were inspired by the medieval period.

So the Victorians were kind of looking back

to the medieval era as a time of the supernatural

and the spooky when designing their buildings.

And now we look at those buildings

and think of them as Victorians.

So it's a kind of chain reaction almost

of historical periods looking back in time.

The Victorian period is also when some of our most famous

and most beloved ghost stories

and horror stories were first written.

Think about, you know, the work of Edgar Alan Poe

or, of course, Bram Stoker's Dracula.

All of them, I guess, have that classic Victorian aesthetic

that we're still recycling in horror movies today.

So Traditional-Stop2498 says, Explain like I'm five.

How did newspapers in the 1700s

and 1800s get up-to-date stories from all over the world?

So in the 1700s and the first half of the 19th century,

news can really only travel

as fast as the person carrying it.

So that might mean that actually news from America

might take well over a week to reach Britain.

As time goes on though, the key invention

that really transforms this is the telegraph line.

It allows information to be sent all across the world,

sort of, you know, buzzing down telegraph lines in seconds.

In fact, at the time it was called

the eighth wonder of the world.

And there's a great example of this.

Abraham Lincoln is assassinated in 1865.

It takes well over a week for that news to reach Britain,

by which point America is already in crisis.

But when President Garfield is shot,

there is a cable running underneath

the Atlantic Ocean carrying news.

So in the space of 15 years,

we go from America being over a week away

to feeling the pulse of a dying president.

So Vladith asks, What sort of humor would be unacceptable

to a 19th century audience?

Do we have any edgy jokes from that period?

Well, we first gotta start with the elephant in the room,

which is this old myth that the Victorians were not amused.

That is completely wrong.

They absolutely loved comedy.

They produced enormous numbers of joke books like these.

They printed jokes in every weekly newspaper.

So they definitely had a sense of humor.

And I've got here a joke book

entirely filled with punts, 300 pages.

It's called Puniana, they're eye-wateringly bad.

Let me read out one of my favorites.

So here it is.

If you were to kill a conversational goose,

what vegetable would it allude to?

Asperagoose or asparagus.

Yeah, not great, right?

But they loved these kind of jokes.

They were known as conundrum jokes

and they were really popular at dinner parties.

They also liked jokes about social situations,

jokes about mother-in-laws, lawyers.

And actually they particularly loved jokes about poets.

So here's one of my favorites.

A young poet goes to see a fortune teller

and he says to her, you know, I'm poor, I'm hungry.

The world doesn't recognize my genius.

What is gonna become of me?

And the fortune teller gazes into a crystal ball and says,

You will be very poor until you are 30 years old.

And the poet gets really excited and says, you know,

And what then?

Then, she says, then you will get used to it.

Which kind of feels very relatable

from when I was a poor grad student several years ago.

They also quite liked jokes where men would be trying

to flirt with Victorian women

and the woman would kind of put them down brutally.

So one of them goes, a man goes up to a woman and says,

Oh darling, how I wish I were that book

that you clasp so lovingly.

The woman looks up from the book and says,

Yes, how I wish you were so I could shut you up.

So yeah, they loved comedy.

The idea that the Victorians was terminally serious

and dour and not amused is not true.

Equal-Temporary-1326 argues,

Is Jack the Ripper so well remembered

because it happened in London during the Victorian era

where the newspaper business had been just invented shortly

before the murders occurred?

So newspapers go back way before Jack the Ripper,

but this was certainly a time

when kind of mass journalism was absolutely taking off.

The media are absolutely central

to the myth of Jack the Ripper.

So it's absolutely true

that five women were brutally murdered

in the East End of London.

But the truth is, we know almost nothing about the person

who did it, except their capacity for violence

and the fact that they wanted

to enact that violence on women.

The Jack the Ripper that you might be imagining

is largely an invention of the press.

Journalists covered the story in extraordinary detail.

They were publishing details almost every day

about the search for the murderer.

The media pours all of its fears,

its fantasies about London,

and that's where we start to get all these kind of rumors.

But almost all of this has been invented by

and stoked by the newspaper press,

all desperate for a story.

The name Jack the Ripper is, in all likelihood,

invented by a journalist working

for a newspaper called The Star,

who we think now fabricated some of those letters

that were supposedly sent by Jack the Ripper,

that's been built on since by the movie industry,

by the Chamber of Horrors.

So yeah, that's the reason

that Jack the Ripper is still with us today.

He is not really a creature of flesh and blood,

but like a monster conjured out of paper and ink.

Mulisareloaded asks, What do you know about

the Great Stink of London in 1858?

So this is a point where the city

of London had been expanding rapidly.

Many people were losing their jobs in rural areas

due to the mechanization of farm work.

So people were flocking into London

and the infrastructure of the city couldn't keep up.

So you've got people's homes, businesses,

factories, slaughter houses,

all pouring out filth into the River Thames,

and it would pile up on the embankments.

You know, sometimes they were several feet deep.

And it was a particular summer in 1858,

it was really hot weather, the river had dropped

and the stench of it was absolutely unbearable.

I mean, there were stories of people, you know,

vomiting as they got too close,

of them being unable to work in the houses of Parliament.

It was, you know, truly, horrifically bad.

And their solution was to build

an astonishing new sewer system led by Joseph Bazalgette,

one of the heroic engineers of the 19th century.

They laid about 1000 miles of new sewers

beneath the streets of London,

many of which are still in use today.

It is one of the most astonishing feats

of engineering in the whole 19th century,

and it largely solved the problem.

So a Quora user asks,

How did English literature change

throughout the Victorian era?

I feel like if I was a literary scholar,

I would probably tell you all about writers like,

well, like Charles Dickens or the Brontes,

Bram Stoker and all those kind of greats.

I wanna tell you about a different form

of Victorian literature.

I'm talking about popular newspapers and magazines,

the kind of things you'd pay a penny for every weekend

that will be filled with curious stories, cartoons,

odd human interest stories and competitions.

And one of my favorites is this newspaper here,

which was called Ally Sloper's Half Holiday.

And it stars this character, Ally Sloper,

is a kind of odd heroic figure.

And every week, he would get involved

in some kind of misadventure,

usually with some kind of moneymaking scheme.

And of course, it always goes wrong,

but we kind of love him.

And we think of him really now as one of the very,

very first recurring comic book characters.

And he had an absolutely enormous fandom,

hundreds of thousands of people

who bought this paper every week.

In fact, he was so popular

that he had his own line of merch.

So you could win Ally Sloper pocket watches

with his face engraved on the back.

You could buy, this is an Ally Sloper vesta case.

If I pop it open, you can see,

it's where you keep your matches.

And people started to act almost as if he was a real person.

They would write him letters as if he was a real character.

And so he's a product of this new wave

of basically cheap periodical literature

that took the Victorian world by storm.

So for me, it's not necessarily your big canonical writers

that you might learn about at school

or read about at university.

It's actually kind of cheap Victorian literature

that really sets the tone for the century.

So a Quora user asks,

How did people entertain themselves in the 1800s?

So let's imagine you're in Victorian London

and you wanna go on a night out.

Maybe you go to the music hall

and see a singers, acrobats, performing animals there.

Maybe you go, if it's a nice summer's evening,

you'll go to a pleasure garden

and there'll be drinking and dancing and music.

One time in the late Victorian period,

they turned an exhibition center

into a miniature version of Venice, complete with canals

and gondolas where you could sort of sail around

and eat Italian food.

Or you could go to an American bar in London

where you would be served American cocktails,

all sorts of opportunities for a grand night out.

If you wanted to be entertained at home,

we had a few options there too.

It might be pretty simple things like reading,

playing music, if you were able to.

Victorians also loved parties with a bit of organized fun

and some parlor games.

My favorite bit of those games actually were the forfeits.

So the forfeit might be something like kiss the woman

that you most admire, but find a way to conceal it.

And they suggest the only way to do it

was to kiss every woman in the room.

So plenty of fun to be had

whether you're at home or out in the city.

Marcxiss8 asks, Anne with an E made me curious

about hygiene during the Victorian era.

Urine to wash clothes? Stank.

Yeah, so like throughout history, urine has been used

to clean things, including clothes,

and that's because it contains ammonia,

which actually we still use

in all sorts of cleaning products today.

But I don't wanna give you the impression that, like,

Victorian families were just, like,

loading up their weekly laundry wash in a massive,

you know, barrel of pee.

They did use hot water and soap just like we would today.

And in fact, you know, cleanliness was really important

to the Victorians.

You open up any Victorian newspaper

and you will find advert after advert for soap products

and other hygiene products.

Yeah, while urine was used to clean things,

it certainly wasn't the main way

that people kept their clothes clean.

Mad_Season_1994 asks, Why was homelessness, low pay

and child labor so rampant in Victorian England?

And was the economy overall better

or poorer during her reign?

This is a time of enormous economic growth.

We've got mass industrialization, global trade expanding,

and of course, you know, the colonization of the empire

that brought with it a lot of economic benefits

for some people in Britain.

For ordinary, working-class folks,

it was a much more mixed picture.

And there could be much more of the whims

of changes in the economy.

So in the 1840s, as sometimes known as the hungry '40s,

plenty of poor people lived right on the edge of starvation.

And of course, things were horrifically bad

in Ireland during the famine of that period.

So the question then is, well, why?

I mean, one of the reasons is that we don't really have

a welfare state in the Victorian period as we do now.

So no national health service,

no unemployment insurance, no minimum wage.

And that meant that a lot of people lost out

and worked for very, very low wages.

But plenty of Victorians also managed to earn a living,

keep a roof over their head.

It wasn't quite as relentlessly bleak

as some of the stories you might read from Charles Dickens.

He was really on a mission to expose

some of the social problems in Victoria and Britain.

So he highlighted like the conditions

of the poorest areas of the city

because he was attempting to get people to drive change.

So the appropriately named victoriporn asks,

Did you know the Victorians invented the vibrator?

It was for doctors to use on female patients

to quote, cure hysteria.

Right, okay, so this is one of the most enduring myths

about the Victorians.

So they did invent electric vibrators in the 19th century,

but they were marketed almost exclusively at the time

for men and to treat kind of, like, muscular injuries.

Now that's not to say

that people might have got a bit creative with them,

but if you read Victorian pornography,

you never see a vibrator in it.

And they had loads of stories about dildos.

So I think if people were using electric vibrators sexually,

it must have cropped up in one of those at some point.

The other side of this then is the idea

that doctors were basically bringing their female patients

to orgasm as a cure for hysteria.

But yeah, the idea that every doctor

was spending every day basically, you know,

bringing their female patients to orgasm and was so tired

that they needed an electric vibrator to help out,

yeah, this is not true.

So the word hysteria comes

from the Greek word hystera, meaning uterus.

So it is, you know, very closely associated with women

and used as a way to, you know,

explain what people perceived as, like,

irrational women's behavior.

So yeah, classic bit of Victorian misogyny at play there.

Marippe asks, What was everyday life like

for middle class teenagers during the Victorian era?

Well, it would really depend.

So if you were a teenage boy,

I guess you would spend quite a lot of your teenage years

in some form of education.

You wouldn't be expected to work a job at that point,

at least certainly not to support your family.

And at the end of your teenage years,

you might be expecting a career in a profession

like a doctor or a lawyer, maybe the clergy.

And as a man, you would have actually quite a lot of freedom

to move around the city, to go to musical halls, to pubs.

If you were a teenage girl, your world would be narrower.

So you wouldn't necessarily have as much schooling.

You certainly wouldn't go on to university.

Your life would be more focused

on developing the skills needed to be a wife and a mother.

But that's not to suggest that

that Victorian teenage girls didn't have fun as well.

But yeah, their experiences would really depend

on their gender.

TheCopperOwl1 asks, Can anybody recommend movies

that take place in Victorian London?

I love the setting of the two 'Sherlock Holmes' movies

and would like to watch things with similar vibes.

This is really hard because whenever historians watch films,

we always like nitpick at the tiny details

and get really annoyed at the stuff they do wrong.

But let me give you some examples

that I think are pretty good,

particularly if you like those Sherlock Holmes's movies.

I actually, I really recommend a TV series

called Ripper Street that came out a few years ago.

It's not just about Jack the Ripper, but about the police

and kind of Whitechapel in that era.

It's kind of, like, a fun version of a Victorian textbook.

If you love Sherlock Holmes,

the classic Sherlock Holmes series from. I think,

the '80s and '90s starring Jeremy Brett.

It's a bit dated, but I still kind of love it.

I also really like a film called The Invisible Woman,

which is about Charles Dickens starring Ralph Fiennes

and it's all about his extramarital affair.

So if you wanna see a slightly different side to Dickens,

I heavily recommend that.

Oh and look, I've gotta recommend the best one.

Of course, it's The Muppet Christmas Carol,

every Victorian historian's favorite film.

The best adaptation of Dickens by far

is the one with Gonzo and Kermit and Miss Piggy.

I watch it every year, I absolutely love it.

And not just 'cause it's the Muppets,

it also gets Dickens right.

Dickens was an incredibly sentimental writer.

It's one of the things

that people often find really annoying about about him,

but the Muppets are sentimental too.

They're a perfect match for Dickens.

It is a fantastic piece of work.

So the thing that annoys me the most in Hollywood films

is that they always get the newspaper props wrong

when they do things set in the Victorian period.

The newspapers will always have

these massive headlines on the front.

Things like, you know, Jack the Ripper strikes again

in massive font where actually

if you look at the front cover

of the vast majority of Victorian newspapers,

like this copy of the Times from the 1840s,

they look like this.

It is an absolute wall of text and it is all tiny adverts.

Not even news on the front page, nevermind headlines.

The Times look like this until the 1960s.

You just didn't get headlines or images

or anything like that on the front cover of newspapers.

So here's my message to film directors.

If you wanna put headlines

or news stories in your Victorian set film,

what you need is a newsboy crying it out.

Jack the Ripper strikes again

in the voice of a newsboy, it's totally fine.

Do not put it on the front cover

of a newspaper or I'm coming for you.

So a Quora user asks, Could sewer-powered gaslights,

like in the old days in London, be used to save energy?

So this is true.

So there were attempts to try

and vent off the gas that would build up in sewers,

actually could explode if it was left out unchecked.

And to kind of funnel it up to street lamps

that would just be on the streets above the sewers

where it would then be burned and used for gaslight.

They were kind of a mixed success

in terms of how well they worked.

But an amazing bit of ingenuity,

and I believe there's still one around that you can go

and see on the Strand in London today.

XCJM asks, Why did Victorians think penny-farthings

were a good idea?

And I know why you're asking,

because when you see those bicycles,

they look absolutely mad,

because we are used to a particular image of the bicycle

where both wheels are the same size.

But the penny-farthing was an important milestone

in the invention of the bicycles we know today.

And the reason that they were a good idea

is that they allowed you to ride faster.

So every rotation of the pedal with a massive wheel

makes you travel a further distance

than if you had a really, really small wheel.

So actually, once you were up there

and you knew how to ride them,

you could go at a pretty good speed.

It's only a few years later in the late 19th century

when the so-called safety bicycle was invented with gears

and a chain that would kind of replicate

that big wheel effect,

that you no longer needed a penny-farthing.

And I guess it's also worth remembering when we see them,

you know, up there on these bicycles.

This is also a time when people were much more used

to the idea of mounting a horse.

So the idea of kind of mounting a high bicycle like that

perhaps wouldn't have been that unusual.

It was pretty dangerous though.

The new bikes were called safety bikes for a reason.

Seifely asks, How did Victorians even court one another?

Must have a much jollier time than just texting

and social networking I can tell ya.

Courting in the Victorian era would really depend

on your social circumstances.

So if you're middle class, you know, you might be introduced

to someone through your friends and family.

You might go along to the house of a woman

that you admired to kind of pitch woo to her and try

and sort of, you know, convince her to marry you.

But you'd have to do it in full view of her family

who would maybe be sitting in the living room

with you kind of watching all this happen.

And you'd maybe be hoping, oh, maybe they'll go upstairs

and we can kiss or have a bit of fun.

There are lots of other examples

of Victorians going out courting,

going dancing, going to shows.

In terms of meeting each other though,

there are actually things Victorians did

that are not so different

to the way we do it now using dating apps.

So if you couldn't find a partner for your friends

and family, you could, if you wanted,

put an advert in something called a matrimonial column.

So I remember when I found where a man who was promising

to whisk away his new bride to his tea plantation in India.

And his only criteria for her was that, quote,

Plumpness was essential.

You would exchange photographs with each other,

decide if you like the look of each other,

exchange a few letters as well,

a little bit like messaging on a dating app.

And at the end of it all, if it worked out, you would meet.

So yeah, not actually that different from texting

and social networking after all.

Let me show you an example.

So here we go.

A young gentleman, age 23, good-looking, tall and dark,

and in good position wishes to correspond with a young lady

with a view to matrimony, enclosed photo,

which will be returned to and his pseudonym, Minnesota.

I wonder if he ever found love.

Daisy-Fluffington is looking

for a user-friendly Victorian slang guide.

And she's in luck, because the Victorians

actually kept loads of different slang dictionaries.

And there were some really great Victorian slang terms

that I kind of think we should maybe bring back

into everyday usage.

So one I saw the other day was to say, I've got the mobs,

which apparently meant that I was depressed,

which I could absolutely see people using now.

What else was there?

Oh yeah, sausages were known as bags of mystery,

which I think is kind of, you know,

probably a little bit too close to the bone

if you've ever seen how sausages are made.

We tend to think of the 19th century as the time when,

you know, the queen's English was the main thing

that was spoken.

And Americanisms didn't come in until, I don't know,

Hollywood movies, but it's not true.

The Victorians loved American slang term.

The phrase, to go the whole hog,

which we use regularly in Britain now,

that's an Americanism.

If we say the word skedaddle, meaning to runaway,

that comes from the United States.

There's a great online dictionary

called Green's Dictionary of Slang, which I recommend,

where you can look up all sorts of slang terms

from all different periods

and find out where they came from.

Raquelmckay says, It's just an accessory, they said.

She's talking here about Victorian hat pins,

and Victorian women had all sorts of really elaborate hats

that they would buy.

And they weren't the kind of things

that all would always kind of rest comfortably on your head,

so you needed to pin them in place.

But a hat pin could also be used for other things.

So in the Victorian period,

street harassment was a real problem for women.

They would often be approached by men.

Many Victorian women simply wouldn't even go out

alone without a chaperone.

But for those that did find themselves in public

and needed a way to defend themselves,

well, a sharp hat pin was a handy weapon,

the kind of thing that you would always have on you.

And that if a man was pressing his advances

a little bit too enthusiastically,

always, you know, is outright going

to potentially assault you, then, you know,

a jab with a hat pin was almost like carrying

your own little dagger.

So yeah, this was a way

that Victorian women could protect themselves

when they were out and about, or perhaps left alone

in a train carriage with a dodgy bloke.

W3rnstr0m asks, When did it become clear to the world

that America would become a superpower?

Was it only after World War II?

No, it happened way before,

and you can trace the roots of it

right into the Victorian era.

So by the 1870s, they already knew that the United States

was becoming more powerful economically.

So yeah, the Victorians were aware that their time,

you know, at the top of the tree

would probably come to an end

and that America be the one to take their place.

This is also a time when American culture

was becoming incredibly popular in Victorian Britain.

So you have guys like Buffalo Bill, a performing cowboy,

bringing his Wild West show to to Britain,

at which point Victorians fall in love

with the idea of being a cowboy

and living out in the Wild West.

You've got writers like Mark Twain

who became household names.

You've got inventors like Edison, promising new technologies

that are gonna transform people's lives.

So America was really associated with the future,

with the new, and lots of Victorians absolutely loved that.

So more than half a century before Hollywood movies come in

and show that kind of glamorous side to American life,

the Victorians were already fascinated with life

on the other side of the Atlantic.

IanSoForth says, I just read a book on Victorian forensics

and now I'm as clever as Sherlock Holmes.

Like, at least as clever.

You know what, lots of Victorians thought this too.

I think one of the things that made Sherlock Holmes

so successful and relatable is that, like, in one sense,

he's basically a superhero, right?

A kind of mega brain who will unravel any mystery

and sort of cure the city's problems.

But on the other hand, he makes it seem

as if anyone could do it as if it's all just a product

of reason and kind of rational thinking that there is,

a system that you could use to apply this kind of logic.

And Victorians absolutely loved it.

So yeah, you're not alone at thinking

you could be like Sherlock Holmes.

I think that's part of the joy of the character.

Spear_Blade asks, What were human

and women's rights like in the Victorian era?

In many respects,

women did not enjoy the same legal rights as men.

Victorian women, in some ways,

were treated almost like children in that,

certainly married women,

didn't have any property of their own,

didn't have their own bank accounts.

It was all owned by their husband,

at least, you know, in a legal sense.

And the most famous example, of course,

is that they couldn't vote,

but they also have fewer rights of a custody

of children in the event of a divorce.

And you could go on and on,

and all of this, of course,

when there was a queen on the throne.

And we might perhaps imagine

that things would change for women.

But even though Victoria was the head of state

and you know, a powerful figure,

she wasn't really a feminist.

She was very much more a traditionalist.

She wasn't leading the charge for changes to women's lives.

Jannnai asks, Why was openly showing feelings frowned upon

in the Victorian era?

I think it partly comes from the images we get

of Victorians in photography where, of course,

they had to keep incredibly still

in order to get a clear image from the camera.

And it does kind of make them look

rather sort of dour and emotionless.

Having said that though, there is definitely some truth

to that idea that particularly among the middle classes,

to be in control of your feelings

was a marker of respectability.

But I don't wanna give you the impression

that all Victorians were like emotionless robots.

Of course, they laughed, they cried, they fell in love,

they felt the full gamut of emotions.

And while they might not have put them on display publicly,

they did absolutely have

a sort of full emotional experience.

They were humans, you know, just like we are.

Well, that's everything for today.

I hope you learned some new things about the 19th century.

Thanks for watching Victorian England Support.

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