Surviving in Victorian Britain

On 20 June 1837, Alexandrina Victoria was crowned as queen of Great Britain, and the nation entered into a new era. The industrial revolution started in the country in the early 1820s and was in full swing by the time Victoria took the throne, and though her reign the United Kingdom gained an enormous amount of wealth and power. The problem was that all this money was only shared by a very small percentage of the country, with the rich being immensely wealthy and the poor barely being able to feed themselves.

(Queen Alexandrina Victoria, 24 May 1819 – 22 January 1901)

For the average person, life during this time would have been very hard and would consist of nothing but work and trying not to fall ill to one of the many diseases rampaging round the country at the time. Even though technology had moved on a long way since the medieval period, life for the average person could be considered similar in terms of how hard it was to survive.

Jobs in the Victorian era

The first thing to understand about workers rights during this era was that they didn’t have any. If your boss wanted to fire you for no reason at all then they could and there wouldn’t be a single thing you could do about it. If you refused to work insanely long hours or do a double shift with a minutes notice, your boss would simply tell you to get out and wouldn’t pay you for that day, knowing they could get away with it and there would be a huge line of other people all looking for a job who could start immediately.

There were also things that employers did to try and trap people into an endless cycle of non-stop work, such as handing out wages in a place they would immediately be spent. In the larger work places, the employees wages would be taken to the local pub on a Friday and the workforce would have to go there to collect their wages. After a full week of hard labour, it would be very tempting to spend all your money on food and drink, with your employer hoping you would do so, making you even more reliant on your job and even further under their control.

(Many parents couldn’t afford to send their children to school, so they found them any job that would take them)

If you were lucky and had a skilled trade, you’d be able to earn a little more money, but life would still be very hard. If you were unskilled, as most of the population was due to a lack of school placements available, you’d be stuck with doing anything you could. There are many examples of terrible jobs, but one that stands out is called “the one legged dancer” who would be responsible for powering a potters wheel. The wheel itself would be spun by a series of cogs that are powered by someone pressing a large peddle up and down, which is the job of the one legged dancer. A 40 to 60 hour week would consist of nothing more than moving your foot up and down all day on a peddle while someone shouts at you for going to fast or slow.

Age and sex discrimination were also major factors of finding work, with an employer only hiring people who looked strong or were young enough to be healthy, or only men for physical jobs. All of this discrimination, low pay and poor employee treatment led to a number of riots and protests across the country, but none of them made any real difference, and it would take decades for things to slowly improve, which isn’t much use to someone with a deformed leg powering a potters wheel.

How much money would you earn in the Victorian era?

Money was in a pre-decimal format and looks extremely complicated to anyone who didn’t grow up with it. The pound was still in service but it didn’t work on a percentage, instead having 240 pence to the pound. This was further complicated with other coins like the shilling, guinea, florin, silver sixpence, gold sovereign and three penny bit, but if you were working a regular job the ones you would be most familiar with would be the pound (L), shilling (S) and pence (D). These were the most common coins and often written in the format of L,S,D when it came to working out a price for something, such as an expensive suit being marked up as £1/18/7 for example.

As for the cost of living and how much you’d actually have to spend compared to your earnings, this varied massively around Britain and the average wage in England was almost twice that of Scotland and Wales. During the 1880s, the average yearly wage for someone in England was £46/12/- but this number was an average between all employed people in the country and would have included wealthy business owners, making the actual average for a regular person much lower.

The average weekly wage for an unskilled labour was sometimes less than £1 a week, which was only 20 shillings. Rent for a standard home would be between 5 and 8 shillings a week on average depending on where you lived. It would also cost about the same again to feed yourself for the week, and then you’d have to spend money on clothes, coal or firewood and anything else you needed after the roof over your head and food to eat. Just the rent and food alone would easily take up all your money, and if you had to collect your wages at the end of the week from the local Inn, a single drink would immediately put you into debt.

Skilled jobs could earn between £1 and £3 pounds a week during their peak seasons, but this would often be seasonal and leave them much less whenever they weren’t on a job. These jobs would include masons, carpenters and anyone who made something above the standard level. Women who couldn’t find employment anywhere else would often end up making food or clothes to be sold, but these would sell for very little and after the cost of the materials and the time it took to make them, they would be earning less than they would in a factory.

Walking into an Inn to buy a meal would cost around 1 shilling on average, but would be very basic and wouldn’t exactly be a treat. There are 20 shillings to the pound so if this is all you earned in a single week, this would allow you to eat 20 meals down the local Inn, but then you wouldn’t have a single penny to go towards your rent or other bills.

School was not made mandatory until the 1890s, but it was available before then to anyone who could afford to send their children there, which typically were very few people. Because money was so tight, children would often work throughout the day but weren’t trusted enough, strong enough or had the skills to work in many of the placements available, so they did whatever they could to make money. These jobs were usually basic jobs in factories like weighing balls of clay to be made into pots or fetch-and-carry jobs and delivering things. The pay would only be a few pence per job or a few shillings per week, but it definitely helped. An especially popular activity for children was to follow the coal wagon around town on its deliveries, because if a piece fell onto the floor they would be allowed to take it, spending a whole day walking after a cart and picking up pieces of coal without gloves to put in your pocket, but this was the level of desperation some families would face.

Homes during the Victorian era

At the start of the 19th century, only around 20% of the population lived within the City of London, but by the middle of the century, this number would be closer to 50%. Many other cities round the country also saw massive population increases and none of them were able to deal with so many people at once. This led to housing being cramped and backstreets being made too narrow for a truck to drive down, it also meant that building planning was usually rushed and city layouts weren’t the same as the square, block-like layouts they have now.

(Cramped terraced homes was the usual style of living, with no running water or electricity)

The lack of space meant that most homes would be terraced houses, with 2-brick wide walls that did little to drown out all the noise from next door. In the areas of higher population such as London, it wasn’t uncommon for someone to rent out a single room to an entire family, and with the levels of poverty and desperation people were in, this happened all the time.

Homes would also be without many of the utilities we take for granted today. There would be no running water and no sewage system for most people, with many houses not being able to afford electricity or having it wired up to the property in the first place. All light would either come from the sun or a fireplace, which made it especially difficult for the many thousands of women making clothes who also had to buy candles or firewood just so they could see well enough to do their job.

(llanerchaeron, one of the large Victorian mansions that still stands in Wales. Complete with servant quarters and a courtyard round the back filled with working buildings that provided everything from butter to new shoes)

Houses would often share a pump for fresh water, and there would be a communal waste disposal point for each street or housing section. The usual method of getting rid of waste was to either take it somewhere and bury it, or wash it into the sea, but when you have hundreds of tons of raw sewage needing to be disposed of every day, the usual methods no longer worked. The Victorian era saw the creation of a huge underground sewage system that’s still in place today. The tunnels were made much bigger than most modern day countries make their sewage tunnels, which allowed for very effective waste disposal, but the powers that be didn’t build them out of kindness, but rather to stop the many diseases living in piles of sewage from killing the population.

(The hot water heating system at llanerchaeron. A poor house maid would have to fill up metal buckets with hot water, then run into the house and pour them into the bath)

Homes for the rich were considerably better, mostly because the gap between the rich and the poor was much bigger than it is today, and people who were considered “rich” were typically immensely wealthy and often didn’t need to work their whole lives. The rich could enjoy things like personal house pumps to act as taps, flushing toilets and electric lighting, with everything else being done by their servants. One of the best examples of a Victorian era luxury house is called Llanerchaeron in Wales. It comes with its own working yard that contains a number of service buildings for the main house, such as its own dairy, tailor, laundry and hot water heating room which consisted of large iron heating vessels a servant would have to tap into a bucket and run into the house with to fill a bath.

Victorian food

The best way to describe Victorian food would be that it was very basic. The average person could barely able to afford to feed themselves, so things like bacon and joints of meat were off the menu. With people living so closely together in the cities, this left no room for vegetable gardens so everything had to be paid for, and the only food within people price range were standard vegetables. Potatoes, beans, peas, onions and cabbage were the most commonly available vegetables, and these would have been supplemented by grain and fish which was the most commonly eaten meat.

Chickens were also an uncommon sight in within city limits because people had the same problem with space, and other hungry people stealing them. Soups and stews with bread or plain boiled vegetables would be the most common meals, with everything else simply out of most people price ranges. Dairy products were mass-produced and people would always have access to milk and butter, but the problem was being able to pay for it.

Personal life and entertainment

Most homes didn’t have electricity, so all the entertainment media we enjoy today simply didn’t exist. Life would have been much more social back then and an Inn could be found on almost every street within a large town or city. Working hours would have been exceptionally long and tiring, so the daily life of many people would consist of nothing more than wake up, eat some boiled vegetables and then go to work for up to 16 hours, leaving little time for anything other than sleep.

The various forms of public entertainment available like the theatre were too expensive for most people, so the vast majority of socializing would take place down the local Inn. A number of card and board games were invented during the era, and reading was popular for anyone who could read, but most people would just spend the little time and money they had getting drunk and trying to forget how bad their lives were.