Why is the victorian era creepy

This crime prompted Parliament to pass an act against the selling of bodies by grave robbers, this had not been recognised previously as a crime as a body was not property. It was then arranged that any cadaver not claimed in 48 hours could be lawfully dissected if no objection had been stated by the deceased. A nightwatchman disturbs a body-snatcher who has dropped the stolen corpse he had been carrying in a hamper, while the anatomist, William Hunter , runs away.

Etching with engraving by W. Austin, Some welcomed the idea of their insides and remains being on view. Half is in the Hunterian Museum; the other half is pickled in a jar on display at the Science Museum. Many brains of great men were kept in the nineteenth century. The lack of bodies supplied from public executions was the reason the trade in corpses began.

There were so many spectators on hanging Monday that sometimes some were crushed to death. The last public execution was in , but capital punishment behind closed doors continued until It had been believed that poverty was a moral failure on the part of the poor who were unable to grasp the lessons of the free market; that unemployment was due to being lazy and that only way to make these lazy people work was to make the alternative — the workhouse- as unpleasant and degrading as possible, thus making poorly paid employment a better alternative.

Anyone who died in the workhouse ended up on a dissecting table. There were some awful jobs that the poor did to avoid going into the workhouse such as the Pure Finder who collected dog poo for the tanneries; leech collectors who used themselves as human traps; Toshers who sifted through raw sewage to find any valuables despite noxious gases, crumbling tunnels, swarms of rats and tides which could drown them.

This horrific disease caused their jaw bones to glow in the dark. At dinner, St Marylebone Workhouse, London, circa From Living London, Vol. II, by George R. Artist: Unknown. Disease was widespread in the nineteenth century. This was a century of huge social change. In approx. By approx. The Industrial Revolution bought wealth to some and poverty, squalor and disease to others. Cholera made an appearance in and had four major outbreaks spreading rapidly and indiscriminately during the Victorian period.

The physical effects were repulsive, many victims spending their last moments in massive quantities of diarrhoea their bodies a shade of blue. Water born diseases were prolific as the water supply being consumed by Londoners was mixed with the contents of the sewers, slaughterhouses, hospitals, industrial waste, decomposing vegetation and animals.

In a Soho general practitioner, Snow, realised that the cholera outbreak in his parish was due to the water pump, not the commonly believed miasma notion. The Metropolitan Board of Works, a government body, was responsible for the reform of sanitation. In it decreed that all newly built houses had to be connected to public sewers. Two years later the overloaded River Fleet literally exploded showering Holborn and Clerkenwell with sewage.

Cesspits in private houses were banned resulting in more than three million Londoners disposing of their excrement through the four hundred drains going into the Thames. There were no longer fish in the river, storms caused jets of raw sewage to flood nearby houses and during the hot summers the river level dropped, and the banks were lined with rotting excrement.

Parliament had to close for several weeks because of the Great Stink. Finally, in they commissioned Joseph Bazalgette to sort out the problem. They were attacked by groups of rats or could be drowned in sewage if the flood gates opened. Putting up with these appalling conditions they were among the highest paid working-class people. Death rows on the Thames Image in Public domain.

Sanitation became a national issue; personnel hygiene attitudes began to change, and toilets began to be part of ordinary life. The virtues of cleanliness and godliness led to many public baths being opened in working-class districts in the late nineteenth century.

Victorians enjoyed looking at victims of mental illness or natural freaks and would pay for the privilege of doing so.

In Parliament passed an Act requiring all local authorities to build asylums for their lunatics and those seen to have deviant behaviour. Those like Bedlam made extra money by charging the public to come and see their inmates. Before medical supervision was not a legal requirement in an asylum, nor was good care. Asylums varied in quality, a few were small and charged a fortune for their inmates to live in relatively comfortable conditions whereas others were hell holes plagued by corruption and cruelty where using whips and chains for therapy was acceptable.

The assumption that the mad were like wild beasts requiring brutal taming, stock therapies and drugs prevailed. Newspapers reported cases of sadistic violence. Some attendants were dismissed for direct maltreatment, but generally it was difficult to prove. Victorian asylums generally had their own mortuaries, and some had their own burial grounds. They had the right to sell the corpse to an anatomy school if not claimed within 48 hours, as did hospitals and the workhouse.

Madness was a commodious and flexible label used by some husbands to lock away the wives they were tired of. Commercial exploitation of midgets, bearded ladies and the macabre display of skeletal anorexia sufferers made for a day out.

Male doctors always found ways to deal with this illness that afflicted women, the most novel was in the practice of Robert Dalrymple whose very successful treatment was achieved by inducing orgasms- this led to the Victorian invention of the vibrator. Many medics, with their often-barbaric practices, were the cause of death for their patients who died from shock, post-operative infections and lack of aftercare. Surgery and spectacle went hand in hand, in the first anatomically correct model of a man wet on display in London complete with removable buttocks.

The boundary between medical learning and sexual pleasure was blurred. Those born with deformities such as Lord Byron with his club foot, were often believed to be sexually voracious. Coffee, tea and tobacco were seen to be a prospective cure and the threat of disease. Tobacco smoke was blown through a specially developed bellows up the anus as a cure for drowning.

The contraption was available at various points along the Thames. The nineteenth-century production of cigarettes claimed medicinal properties and a defence against flu and consumption.

Sir Alfred Cooper was a fashionable medic who specialised in venereal disease, which gave him an interesting overview of Victorian aristocrats and their morality. The first, combining industrialisation and urbanisation, had acutely visual effects. Just as important was the expansion of print culture, which provided a vehicle for such images as well as a growing and captivated audience.

The third ingredient, equally crucial, was the emergence of a reforming spirit among the social elite from the s onwards.

Grave images of deprivation were circulated precisely because reformers such as Dickens, Disraeli and Gaskell, plus journalists and MPs, wanted to remedy such social problems.

But was life truly miserable? Did the labouring poor believe they were living in exceptionally tough times? Social historians have worked hard to give voice to those at the bottom, uncovering new evidence and taking a fresh look at old material related to five aspects of life.

In doing so, they have challenged the very grimmest portrayals of urban Victorian Britain…. Workers toiled in dangerous factories or mines — but conditions improved substantially. The mention of work in the Victorian period rarely fails to conjure up an image of an imposing factory or a bleak mine, run by a merciless employer, in which employees — including small children — are forced to work long hours, often in poor light, using dangerous machinery.

But is it accurate? Not entirely. Industrialisation in the early 19th century did drive down wages and lead to an increase in the employment of women and children, especially those of a very young age, in the manufacturing sector. Work in factories and mines certainly could be dangerous. They stood or squatted before me in all the shapes of the letters of the alphabet.

However, from the s onwards, legislation was introduced to restrict child and in some cases female labour, to improve conditions and to regulate working hours. Reforms were limited, but often by the realities of working-class life.

Take child labour, for example. While it offends our 21st-century sensibilities, it was not necessarily socially detrimental — after all, the wages that children brought in could raise the standard of living for the entire family. Days were controlled by the clock, but they were not necessarily longer than those of agricultural labourers.

Clocking in and out, combined with the physical separation of work and home, could be more attractive than the endless days of domestic servants — another expanding industry. For every merciless master there existed at least one paternalistic employer who cared about his workers.

Not only did some workers enjoy protection for traditional holidays raucous St Monday festivities continued as late as the s in the West Midlands but time for leisure increased: the working day was limited to 10 hours, and the Saturday half-day was introduced.

Many employers organised trips for their workforces to the seaside. At the same time, industrial unrest and popular narratives of factory accidents subsided because the majority of working people became more comfortable with new patterns of work and industrial capitalism. Not all paupers were condemned to hellish workhouses. One of the most enduring images of the Victorian period is entirely fictional: the painfully hungry Oliver Twist begging the tyrannical workhouse beadle, Mr Bumble, for gruel.

Charles Dickens wrote his novel in the wake of the New Poor Law of , legislation that aimed to reduce government spending on welfare by deterring the poor from seeking assistance. Local relieving officers were tasked to send those in need to the workhouse, where families were split up. All were subjected to a harsh disciplinary regime. Some workhouses were abhorrent institutions.

Local penal authorities were convinced that paupers deliberately tore their uniforms or smashed windows in order to be sent to prison — where both accommodation and food were better. The workhouse also held a special attraction to journalists eager for explosive copy. These beds were placed close together… In not a few cases two gentlemen had clubbed beds and rugs and slept together.

But how helpful are such portraits in understanding the experience of poverty in Victorian Britain? The story has a uniquely unsettling tone, and is quite unlike her later stories.

It showcases a unique thread of New Zealand gothic. Take this quote for example: "There is no twilight in our New Zealand days, but a curious half-hour when everything appears grotesque—it frightens—as though the savage spirit of the country walked abroad and sneered at what it saw. Even Katherine's other work that sits in a less gothic genre has a similar feel about it — for example the eerie boat journey in 'The Voyage'. Modern media has continued this brand of Victorian gothic aesthetic.

Courtesy of Universal Pictures. Maybe the reason Victorian gothic resonates so much with modern readers is the amount we have in common with our Victorian counterparts. Many Victorian concerns are ones that we still share — increasing pollution, urban migration and rapidly changing technology.

Victorian culture is often viewed as stuffy, stagnant, boring. However, imagine all the aforementioned aspects in play: moving from the country to the city, encountering strange labyrinthine buildings, electricity for the first time ever, actual human beings captured in photography on the walls, with tales of spirits and afterlives abounding. Not to mention the rise of mass media and growing relationship between the news and crime — with Jack the Ripper, Lizzie Borden and Minnie Dean all whipping up public hysteria.

It would have been a strange time to live in. Living in the technology age we take change for granted given the constant and rapid change in technology around us.

But for the Victorians it was new and overwhelming, and this is strongly reflected in the fiction of the time.