Latest features Living and eating in the Victorian era

Date Published:

27/06/2008

Victorians were a complicated bunch of puritans, pioneers and very dirty birdies

Population

In 1851, 20.88 million people inhabited the 120,000 square miles of the British Isles (including 6.51m in Ireland). In 1871 this had risen to 26.16 million (5.40m in Ireland) and, 1891, 33.12 million (4.68m in Ireland). At the end of the Victorian period, in 1901 the UK population was 37.09 million (including 4.45m in Ireland).

In 1860, 12 per cent of the population lived in Lancashire drawn by employment in its cotton mills and factories.

Find out what they eat up North.

Tilling the land

In 1841, manufacturing workers made up 44 per cent of the work force, agricultural workers 22 per cent and domestic servants 18 per cent.

In 1860, the average income per head of the population was £44 a year.

In 1873, four-fifths of the land was held by 7,000 individuals, mainly aristocrats.

When the earl of Yarborough died in 1875, his stock of cigars was sold for £850, the equivalent of 18 years' pay for the impoverished agricultural labourers on his estate.

Find land to flex your own green fingers with Landshare

Who's coming to dinner?

Class rules in Victorian society. When one Victorian gentleman, Arthur J Munby, fell for commoner, Hannah Cullwick, it took 18 years of courtship, before he married her and even this was done in secret.

Their romantic theatre date involved meeting outside, pretending not to know each other and entering by a side door that takes them up to the gallery, where the working class sit.

There was one decent victory for equality in the Victorian period; all classes were affected by bad breath because of poor dentistry.

Posh or peasant? Read our tips for high society dinner parties and dining without the rules.

The Victorian credit crunch

In 1815, Parliament, passed the Corn Laws, which placed a high tariff on foreign grain, making it unprofitable to import. The aim was to protect British farmers from being undersold by cheaper grain but in practice it drove up the price of British wheat, resulting in bread shortages and hunger for the working classes until the bill was abolished by Prime Minister Robert Peel in 1846.

New ingredients

The British Empire under Queen Victoria included territories as diverse as Ireland, India, New Zealand and South Africa. Exotic food from the colonies found its way to London and the queen herself was reported to have been a fan of curry.

Hunting

The aristocrats loved a spot of hunting, shooting and fishing on their country estates. The catch of the day became part of elaborate feasts and tables groaned with mountains of sweetmeats.

Get in the game with our guide to what to shoot for dinner

Celebrity chefs

In 1861, at the tender age of 25, Mrs Isabella Beeton published her 'Book of Household Management', a treasury of cooking advice, instructions and recipes. In keeping with Victorian principles of philanthropy, Mrs Beeton opened a soup kitchen at her house for the poor children of her neighbourhood, during the harsh winter of 1858.

The birth of the supermarket

In 1868 John James Sainsbury opened his first grocers in Drury Lane, London. By 1900 he had a chain of 47 stores.

Food scares

During the 19th century, much of the food consumed by the working classes was contaminated by chemicals or fouled by animal and human excrement. By the 1840s, the practice of home-baking bread had died out among the rural poor while in the small tenements of the urban masses, which had no ovens, it had never existed. Victorian food contained several poisonous additives, some of the most alarming include:

- Strychnine in rum and beer
- Sulphate of copper in pickles, bottled fruit, wine and preserves
- Lead chromate in mustard and snuff
- Sulphate of iron in tea and beer
- Copper carbonate, lead sulphate, bisulphate of mercury and Venetian lead in sugar confectionery and chocolate
- Lead in wine and cider

In 1862, the Privy Council estimated that one-fifth of butcher's meat in Britain came from animals that were 'considerably diseased' or had died of pleuro-pneumonia or other diseases.

In 1877, the Local Government Board found that about a quarter of the milk it examined contained excessive water, or chalk, and 10 per cent of butter, 8 per cent of bread and 50 per cent of gin contained copper to heighten the colour. Red lead gave Gloucester cheese its 'healthy' red hue. In the long run, these additives resulted in chronic gastritis and, often, fatal food poisoning.

Even the rich were not safe. The London county medical officer discovered the following in ice cream: cotton fibre, lice, bed bugs, bug's legs, fleas, straw, human hairs and cat and dog hairs. Such contamination can (and did) cause diphtheria, scarlet fever, diarrhoea and enteric fever.

As the 19th century progressed, diet improved among the masses and working people's regular meals of bread, potatoes and beer were increasingly supplemented by meat, milk and vegetables.

Discover more from our food past with Heston's Feasts

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