Life In Victorian London

London was the growing capital of an expanding empire. The largest and richest city in existence. Each year the city grew by the population of a small town.

It had the finest architecture and the river made London a centre of international trade.

The population had seen massive growth and the streets thronged with wealth and squalor side by side.

With no adequate sanitation many streets ran with the waste from houses and businesses. The Thames could not cope with the sewage from the millions of Londoners and the tides simply pushed the waste upstream forming a massive cesspool.

In the summer of 1858 the houses of parliament had to close because the smell had become overpowering.

There were 13,000 street traders in London, many of which were children. The police estimated 20,000 children were being trained as pick-pockets and criminals.

This was the London that Dickens detested and helped slowly change through his novels ‘Oliver Twist’, ‘Pickwick Papers’ and ‘Bleak House’.

In 1861 London saw a revolution in sanitation brought about by a major sewer project. The sewage finally ran below the streets and under the Thames embankment. The project was completed in 1866.

Fashion in the 1800’s was less a palette for self- expression than a means of ostentatiously displaying your wealth and social status.

The advent of the sewing machine in 1851, invented by Isaac Merrit Singer, enabled women’s fashion to move faster than ever before. The illustration below of London Christmas fashions for 1878 shows this change; advertising numerous dresses, materials and patterns, they are clearly set up for mass production on a scale that would have been impossible before Singer’s machine arrived.

The dresses most women wore were dictated by the latest styles produced by couturiers like Charles Worth, an Englishman who worked in Paris. As with fashion today, these styles, seen on royalty and members of the aristocracy, were copied and cheaper versions of them worn by the less wealthy and the working class. The originals though were beautifully made in luxurious combinations of silks, taffetas, velvets and brocades.

Magazines produced illustrations (such as these seen here) to inspire their readers. Victorian codes of public morality meant that women had to cover up; and they certainly took this advice, wearing layer upon layer of clothing, and creating dramatic silhouettes with enormous bustles and corsets so tight that they endangered their health!

The poster, below, was published in the Young Ladies’ Journal and advertises the latest dresses available from D Nicholson & Company of 50-53 St Paul’s Churchyard and Paternoster Row, Corner of Cheapside, London. They describe themselves ‘as silk mercers to the Queen and outfitters to all parts of the World’, stating that ‘all the goods represented in the above illustrations, as well as prices and particulars may be had gratis upon application’. They offered ‘1,000 patterns of newest silks and dress materials sent post free’.