Victorian Adverts

Charles Dickens was one of the key authors of Victorian times. The descriptions in his books, like A Christmas Carol and David Copperfield, can help us to understand what Victorian life was really like, especially for poor people. Through his books, he taught people moral lessons about being generous and treating poor people well. Charles Dickens worked as a court reporter after teaching himself shorthand and was impressed by politicians who seemed genuinely interested in changing the country for the better. He began to contribute articles on social reform (making life better for people) to radical newspapers while also covering the issues in his books. Books like Oliver, A Christmas Carol and Great Expectations covered subjects which Dickens felt needed to be looked at such as pickpockets and the way the poor lived compared to the rich. The stories Dickens wrote not only helped to raise these issues in Victorian times but also give the modern world a view of life in that era.

During Victorians time pets began to be as popular as they are today. It was said that no house was a home without a dog or cat. Sometimes, Victorians showed their love of their animals in ways that we would think strange: when your dog died you might have him stuffed so that he could sit in the parlour and be with you forever! Also, funerals for your dog or cat could be more posh than human ones, with hymns and poems. There were pet graveyards in some parks as well as at many stately homes. As well as dogs and cats, Victorians kept birds, parrots, goldfish, rats and mice, much like today.

The Victorians loved inventions and stories of adventure. A popular series of books was about The Reade Family, who were a family of inventors and explorers. The family, Frank Senior, his son Frank Junior, and his son, Frank III and daughter Kate made a lot of amazing inventions, firstly powered by steam and then by electricity. For example, they had made a steam man, which was made of metal and powered by steam and was shown in a drawing as running around pulling a cart with Frank Snr and Frank Jnr in it! He was more than three and a half metres tall, that's about twice the height of a tall man, and had a top hat which poured out smoke, lamps for eyes and a huge belly where the fuel went. He could run, pulling his cart, at about 35 miles per hour. And Kate had made a steam horse, which was also made of metal. The steam horse once raced the steam man and the horse won! The family in the story invented helicopter airships; battery powered flying suits, armoured buses, and several yachts and ships that could also travel underwater. Many stories like this were published. In America they were called Dime Novels or in England, Penny Dreadfuls because they cost a penny and were usually a murder mystery with lots of gruesome details!

You might think the phrase "mad as a hatter" comes from the character in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, written in 1865. Actually it comes from a disease of the hat making industry of the time. A mercury solution was used in hat making, or millinery as it is called, to turn fur into felt. Mercury, also called quicksilver, is a very poisonous metal and workshops were very badly ventilated. Hatters would breathe in the fumes of the mercury all day and this would lead to terrible shakes, clumsiness, odd behaviour and loss of memory. They called this "mad hatters' syndrome".

Dracula is the biggest selling novel in the world and has actually sold more copies than the Bible. It has also influenced more than 700 plays and films. It was written in 1897 by a man called Bram (short for Abraham) Stoker. Stoker was not the first person to write about vampires: legends of these creatures had been around for centuries, but he was one of the first to learn about these stories and write them into a full length book that became well known. He liked horror stories because when he was a child he was often ill in bed, and to entertain him his mother would tell him horrible stories of her own childhood in Ireland. The stories were horrible because when she was little, many people had died from an illness called cholera, and she told him all the details of their deaths. Although the book was well known, Bram Stoker never made very much money from it, or from the other short stories and books that he wrote.

The discovery of dinosaurs and dinosaur bones was very exciting for many people. The name dinosaurs was given to them by Richard Owen, and means "terrible lizard". Owen was a dinosaur expert and his lectures were very popular. In fact, "dinomania" became a Victorian obsession and even Prince Albert was a big fan. Richard Owen had life-size models made from his drawings of what he thought the dinosaurs looked like and put them in a park for people's education (you can still see them in Sydenham park in London). However, these models were not quite right because Richard did not have a complete skeleton to work with and so he made some of the details up! One scientist even put a dinosaur together back to front and showed it in a picture with its head on the end of its tail. When a rival pointed out the mistake he was really embarrassed and had to try to buy back all the copies of his picture that had been published!

In a Victorian house a lot of the drinks would be home made. In the summer, you could drink lemonade (which was not always fizzy), dandelion and burdock, and ginger beer. Victorians also made their own beer and wine, and men often drank beer just to refresh themselves, not to get drunk. Drinking beer was so popular that in 1876 every adult in Britain was estimated to be drinking an average of 34 gallons of beer a year! Because of this, church leaders and others thought that people should make an effort to drink less or even stop drinking. They got a lot of followers and even tried to make it illegal to drink alcohol - although this law was not passed.

The first railways were local, covering only a small area, a bit like the distance that you can travel on a local bus today. But in the 1840s hundreds of miles of railway tracks were laid, connecting up Britain so that for the first time a journey that would normally take days took only hours. Before the railways, different parts of Britain even had different times, so it might be 5pm in Derby but 6pm in Bristol. The need for a standard timetable meant that the time became the same all around the country. Railways meant that people could take holidays to other parts of Britain they thought that they'd never see, and also meant that a business owner did not just have to run one business only in the town where he lived, he could open up branches in many towns. This is how chain stores started. One man called Charles Bartholomew owned Turkish baths in seven different towns, and he said that he was traveling 700 miles by train every week to inspect them.

In Victorian times people became very interested in finding out everything they could about the world and how it worked. Explorers and scientists were finding out new things every day, and everybody wanted to know about them. They did not have televisions to show them documentaries, and so they went to lectures instead. The lecturer stood at the front and talked and demonstrated a topic while the audience listened. The lectures were about a lot of different things. People could watch scientific experiments being conducted and explained to them. They could also watch medical dissections being done on dead people, and operations on living people as well as other gruesome sights.

The eldest son of Queen Victoria, Prince Edward, liked to eat and drink more than anything else. In fact, it is surprising that he had time to do anything else! When he woke up he drank a glass of milk in bed. Then for breakfast he had bacon and eggs, fish and chicken, toast and butter. As a mid-morning snack he had some hot turtle soup. Then he had lunch. Then at around 4pm, his band would play tunes as he ate poached eggs, preserved ginger, rolls, scones, hot cakes, cold cakes, sweet cakes and shortbread! Dinner was at 8.30pm and had at least 12 courses, with wine to go with each different dish. Prince Edward would always tell his guests to make sure they had a good supper before going to bed - he recommended grilled oysters which were his favourite. He slept with a cold roast chicken next to his bed in case he got hungry at night. Unfortunately, his love of good food and wine didn't mean he had a long life and he died of a heart attack at the age of 68.