While the “Separate Spheres” aimed to keep women in the parlor and men in the counting-house, a daring collective of rebels realized that the patriarchy’s greatest weakness was its own dress code.

If one could master the cravat, one could, it seemed, master the Empire.

I. The Mechanics of the Metamorphosis

Living as a different gender in 19th-century Britain was less about a convincing baritone and more about mastering the era’s spectacular obsession with elaborate costuming. To navigate a world that viewed an exposed ankle as a civic crisis, these individuals employed a variety of practical, if uncomfortable, deceits.

The “Trousers” Strategy (Passing as Male):

• The Bound Chest: Before the invention of modern compression fabrics, the “androgynous” look was achieved through tightly wrapped bandages or modified corsets designed to minimize rather than emphasize. Dr. James Barry famously wore oversized, towel-padded coats to square off a slight 5-foot frame.

• The Great British Beard: The Victorian obsession with dense facial hair provided a forest of cover for soft jawlines. For those lacking natural assistance, high starched collars and “toothache” bandages served as effective masks for a missing Adam’s apple.

• The “Split” Secret: Managing biological realities required ingenuity. Many used “split-crotch” drawers, a standard undergarment of the time that allowed them to use public “halting stations” without needing a private room or revealing their anatomy to the local constabulary.

The “Molly” Strategy (Passing as Female):

• The “Slap” (Makeup): In an age of minimal cosmetics, rebels used heavy theatrical greasepaint to hide “five o’clock shadows.”

• The Hourglass Illusion: Achieving the required shape relied on tight-lacing corsets, detachable hip pads, and bustle pads to create that “unnatural” jut of the hips so beloved by the era’s fashion plates.

• Breast Forms: Individuals used hand-sewn bags stuffed with cotton, wool, or sponges. By 1874, patented forms used air-filled rubber to simulate natural movement.

II. British Profiles in Defiance

The Inspector General: Dr. James Barry (c. 1789–1865)

Born Margaret Ann Bulkley in Cork, Barry’s transformation was a family conspiracy to ensure he could receive the medical education denied to women at the University of Edinburgh.

• The Career: Barry rose to Inspector General of Hospitals, the second-highest medical rank in the British Army. He performed the first successful cesarean section by a European in Africa.

• The Persona: To compensate for his stature, Barry adopted a notoriously abrasive personality, once challenging a fellow officer to a duel for mocking his voice. Even Florence Nightingale described him as a “brute.”

• The Discovery: His secret held for over 50 years. Only after his death in London did a charwoman discover his biological sex, claiming to have found stretch marks on his abdomen—a final, silent “I told you so” to the British Army.

The Shipyard Legend: James Allen (1787–1829)

A shipyard worker from London who lived as a man for 21 years and was legally married to a woman, Mary Allen, for over two decades.

• The Life: James was a well-respected laborer known for his physical strength in the docks. His marriage was described by neighbors as remarkably stable, adhering to all the traditional roles of a Victorian household.

• The Discovery: James’s identity was only revealed following a fatal accident at a shipyard. When his body was taken to St Thomas’ Hospital, the discovery caused a national sensation, with London newspapers obsessing over how he had managed to “deceive” a wife for 21 years without a hint of suspicion.

The “He-She Ladies”: Fanny and Stella (1847–1913)

Ernest Boulton (Stella) and Frederick Park (Fanny) lived a flamboyant existence in London’s West End.

• The Performance: They lived daily in gowns, attending the opera and social galas. Stella even lived as the “wife” of Lord Arthur Clinton, an MP who reportedly treated the relationship as a legitimate marriage.

• The Trial: Arrested in 1870, they faced humiliating medical examinations as the state tried to prove “unnatural acts.”

• The Acquittal: The jury found them not guilty, accepting the defense that they were simply “young men with an eccentric taste for amateur theatricals”—a verdict that essentially legalised “doing it for the bit.”

III. The Molly’s Toolkit: A Polari Glossary

Underground queer circles gathered in Molly Houses and used Polari to speak openly in front of the Lily Law (police).

IV. Modern Echoes: Reclaiming British Queer History

• • Albert Nobbs (2011): Set in 19th-century Ireland, a woman lives for decades as a male butler to survive economic hardship, only to have her world challenged by a house painter with a similar secret.

  • Gentleman Jack (BBC/HBO): While Anne Lister lived as a woman, she reclaimed masculine power through her “gentlemanly” wardrobe (top hats, hitched-up pants) and business conduct, explicitly constructing a butch sapphic identity.

  • Tipping the Velvet (2002): Follows Nan Astley, who begins her journey as a “male impersonator” in Victorian music halls. The series explores how performing as a man allows her to navigate different social strata and sexual subcultures.

  The Victorian Underground (Molly Houses & Subculture)

  • Harlots (ITV/Hulu): Features a vivid depiction of a Molly House, showing a safe haven where men dressed in gowns, held “mock births,” and formed a protected family-like community.

  • Fingersmith (2005): While focused on a sapphic romance, it explores the gritty Victorian underworld where identity is a performance used for survival and deception.

  Suppression and Legal Erasure

  

  • Wilde (1997): Documents the fall of Oscar Wilde, illustrating the exact legal shift that made the “hidden” queer life of the mid-Victorian era a prosecutable crime.

V. Conclusion: The Legacy of the Border-Crossers

The gender rebels of the 19th century were not “eccentric” outliers; they were the first to demonstrate that the Victorian “Separate Spheres” were not walls, but permeable membranes.

For women like Dr. James Barry and James Allen, living as men was an act of radical agency. By refusing to be “feme covert,” they proved that womanhood was socially constructed. For the Mollies, the performance was one of authenticity. They traded the “protection” of the patriarchy for the peril of the pillory, proving that even in the most repressed century in history, there were those who refused to be anything other than bona.

Prologue

The Angel Can Stay in the Bloody House

To understand the 19th century, you first have to understand the “Ideal Woman”—a creature so mind-numbingly boring it’s a wonder the human race didn’t simply fall asleep and go extinct in 1850. According to the “Doctrine of Separate Spheres,” men got the fun stuff (politics, gin, and running the world), while women were relegated to the “Private Sphere,” a fancy term for staying home and making sure the curtains didn’t get dusty.

The handbook for being a “Proper Lady” was essentially a manual on how to disappear while still standing in the room. In 1854, Coventry Patmore published The Angel in the House, a poem that basically argued a wife’s only job was to be a saintly, self-sacrificing doormat. Then there was Sarah Stickney Ellis, the era’s resident joy-killer, who wrote in The Women of England that a woman’s highest calling was “humility” and “disinterestedness.”

Translation: Don’t have opinions, don’t have a personality, and for heaven’s sake, don’t raise your voice.

Legally, the situation was even bleaker. Under the principle of Coverture, once a woman said “I do,” she effectively ceased to exist as a legal entity. She couldn’t own property, she couldn’t sign a contract, and she was essentially the legal equivalent of a particularly well-dressed piece of furniture. To be a “Lady” was to be a silent, demure, porcelain doll, waiting for a man to tell you what to think.

And now, forget all that. Meet Lady Wilde, the ultimate powerhouse and Oscar Wilde’s mom.

Treason in a Bonnet: The 1848 Courtroom Mic-Drop

Standing at (or slightly over) six feet tall and draped in enough jewelry to sink a small merchant vessel, Jane Wilde didn’t just break the Victorian mold—she melted it down and turned it into a tiara. While her peers were perfecting their “sacred silence,” she was busy writing under the pseudonym Speranza, churning out nationalist calls-to-arms so spicy the British government tried to charge her editor with treason.

The peak of her audacity came during the 1848 Young Ireland Rebellion. She penned an editorial titled “Jacta Alea Est” (The Die is Cast), featuring lines that made the Attorney General’s blood pressure skyrocket:

“The stars in their courses fight against the Saxon!... One bold, sudden blow for freedom!”

When the government hauled her editor, Charles Gavan Duffy, into the Green Street Courthouse to face a potential hanging, the prosecution read her bloodthirsty prose to the jury as proof of Duffy’s guilt. In a move that would make a modern PR agent weep with joy, Jane stood up in the crowded gallery and shouted, “I am the culprit! I wrote that article!” The British legal system, trapped by its own rules of “chivalry,” couldn’t bring itself to arrest a “Lady” for treason in public. They simply ignored her, but the legend was born: Jane Wilde was more dangerous than a battalion. Vanderbilt University

Living for the Aesthetic (and the Banshees)

To Jane, being Irish wasn’t just a nationality; it was a gothic performance. She viewed the Irish as a race of “fallen kings,” and she spent her life obsessively documenting Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland. She didn’t just collect folklore; she conducted field research for the soul of a nation, gathering oral traditions directly from the rural Irish who still spoke the “ancient tongue.”

She shuttered her windows at noon to host candlelit “salons,” treating the sun like a tacky social climber. In these darkened rooms, she whispered of the Banshee—the “Spirit of Death”—which she claimed followed the Wilde family specifically. Her collection was a survival guide for a magical world, recording charms for everything, from “curing a fever with nine hairs from a stallion” to mystical spells intended to break the psychic weight of British occupation. For Jane, the supernatural was the only thing big enough to match her ego.

Liability or Legend? The One-Farthing Scandal

While most Victorian wives would have retreated to a darkened room with a damp cloth over their eyes at the first hint of a husband’s infidelity, Jane Wilde decided to go to war. The antagonist was Mary Travers, a young woman who had been a patient of Jane’s husband, Sir William Wilde. Mary claimed that Sir William had drugged her with chloroform and taken “liberties”—a claim she publicized by printing up pamphlets and handing them out at Sir William’s own lectures.

Most women would have sued for divorce or hidden in shame. Jane? She wrote a blistering, sarcastic letter to Mary’s father, a prominent police magistrate, calling his daughter a “disreputable” extortionist and a “social parasite” who was essentially stalking her husband for money.

Mary, sensing a payday, sued Jane for libel. The trial became the hottest ticket in Dublin:

• The Defense: Jane took the stand and was the embodiment of “stately” arrogance. She didn’t deny writing the letter; she simply acted as if Mary Travers was a minor inconvenience beneath her notice. When asked why she didn’t believe the rape allegation, Jane essentially shrugged and suggested that if it had happened, Mary certainly didn’t seem too bothered by it at the time.

• The Verdict: The jury was in a bind. Technically, Jane had libeled the girl. But they were so exhausted by Mary’s dramatics and so intimidated by Jane’s sheer presence that they delivered a verdict that remains a legal punchline: they found Jane guilty, but awarded Mary exactly one farthing in damages.

In the 1860s, a farthing was the smallest possible unit of currency—the 19th-century equivalent of being awarded one cent. It was the jury’s way of saying, “You’re technically right, but your reputation isn’t worth the paper this verdict is written on.” Jane walked out of the Four Courts as if she had been coronated, having successfully defended her husband’s career and her own pride for the price of a single crust of bread.

Don’t Be Boring: How to Raise a Wilde

Before she was the matriarch of the aesthetic movement, Jane had to navigate a marriage that was, by any standard, a chaotic intellectual circus. In 1851, she married Sir William Wilde, a world-renowned eye surgeon who treated the King of Sweden while secretly funding the education of three illegitimate children. Jane didn’t respond with a quiet sob in the parlor; she treated their home at 1 Merrion Square as a high-stakes intellectual stage. She reportedly welcomed William’s “extra-curricular” children into her circle, refusing to play the “wronged wife” because that role was simply too cliché.

She raised her eldest, Willie Wilde, to be the quintessential man of the world—a journalist and a wit who inherited his mother’s flair for the dramatic and his father’s fondness for a stiff drink. Willie was Jane’s first attempt at crafting a public icon, but he lacked the diamond-hard discipline required to survive the relentless “Wilde” brand. He lived his life as a high-speed draft of a masterpiece that was yet to come.

And then, there was Oscar…

If Willie was the draft, Oscar Wilde was the event Jane had been planning since she first picked up a pen. She didn’t raise him to be a “gentleman” in the stifling, English sense; she raised him to be a protagonist. From the moment he could speak, Jane sat him at her feet during her candlelit salons, letting him soak in the talk of revolution and ancient spirits. She fed him a diet of Greek tragedies and Celtic myths, teaching him that life was not something to be lived, but something to be performed. When Oscar eventually started wearing velvet suits, he wasn’t rebelling—he was finally wearing the uniform she had designed for him.

The true depth of their bond was tested during Oscar’s infamous 1895 downfall. As the legal walls closed in, his friends begged him to take the boat to France. Jane, the nationalist who had stared down British judges in 1848, was horrified. She delivered the ultimate “Main Character” ultimatum:

“If you stay, even if you go to prison, you will always be my son. If you go, I will never speak to you again.”

To Jane, a Wilde in chains was still a Wilde, but a Wilde in hiding was a ghost. She chose his legacy over his safety, a decision that eventually broke her heart but solidified his place in history.

The Final Act: Correspondence from the Abyss

By 1895, the “stately” life at Merrion Square was a memory. Jane was living in a cramped, drafty London flat, her health failing and her finances non-existent. Yet, her letters to Oscar in Reading Gaol remained remarkably focused on the Wildean legacy. She wrote to him not as a victim, but as a martyr-in-waiting, reminding him he was the son of Speranza. Her letters didn’t ask him to apologize; they asked him to endure.

In early 1896, as Jane lay dying of bronchitis, she sent a final, desperate petition to the Home Office. She didn’t ask for his release; she asked for a single hour of his presence so she could say goodbye. In an act of peak Victorian petty-mindedness, the Prison Commissioners refused her.

Jane died in February 1896 and was buried in a commoner’s grave at Kensal Green. There were no gilded laurels—just the quiet exit of a woman who had spent seventy-four years refusing to be quiet. Oscar later wrote in De Profundis that her death was a blow from which he would never recover, describing her life as a “long, tragic battle.” It wasn’t until 1999 that the Oscar Wilde Society finally placed a plaque at the site, ensuring that the “Angel in the House” would never get the last word over the Banshee of Dublin.

Primary Works by Lady Wilde (Speranza)

• Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland (1888): Her magnum opus of folklore, featuring the banshees and charms she swore by.

• Ancient Cures, Charms, and Usages of Ireland (1890): The follow-up for those who needed a more practical guide to Celtic magic.

• Poems by “Speranza” (1864): The collected nationalist verses that made the British government reach for their smelling salts.

• “Jacta Alea Est” (The Die is Cast): The 1848 editorial published in The Nation that almost triggered a revolution and a treason charge.

Biographies & Academic Studies

• Mother of Oscar: The Life of Jane Francesca Wilde by Joy Melville: The gold standard for understanding her transformation from a clergyman’s daughter to a nationalist icon.

• The Wildes of Merrion Square by Patrick Byrne: A deep dive into the chaotic, brilliant family dynamic in Dublin. National Library of Ireland

• Speranza: A Biography of Lady Wilde by Horace Wyndham: An older but essential look at her public persona and “stately” eccentricities.

• Wilde’s Women by Eleanor Fitzsimons: An excellent modern exploration of the women who shaped Oscar, starting with his formidable mother.

Contextual & Legal Resources

• The Trials of Oscar Wilde: Detailed records of the 1895 downfall and Jane’s role in the aftermath, archived by the British Library.

• The Women of England by Sarah Stickney Ellis (1839): Read this to understand exactly what Lady Wilde was rebelling against. Internet Archive

• Married Women’s Property Act of 1882: The legal milestone Jane championed, which finally allowed women to be something other than “well-dressed furniture.”

The “Oscar” Connection

• De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: His letter from Reading Gaol where he delivers his final, heartbreaking tribute to her “noble and intellectual” character.

The story of Winchester College begins not with a building, but with a crisis. In 1382, England was a kingdom of ghosts, hollowed out by the Black Death. William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester and a man with a visionary’s eye for talent, realized that if he didn’t train a new generation of clever bureaucrats and priests, the country would be run by people who couldn’t spell “liturgy.”

He established a “Dual Foundation”—a nursery school at Winchester to feed his second great creation, New College, Oxford. To guide his students, he gave them his personal motto: Manners Makyth Man.

In an age of inherited titles, this was a radical, meritocratic strike: it suggested that a person’s worth was defined by their conduct, character, and intellectual ambition, rather than the size of their father’s castle.

I. Architecture: Flint, Mortar, and Survival

Wykeham didn’t just build a school; he built an academic fortress. Chamber Court, completed in 1394, has been continuously occupied ever since, proving that if you build with enough knapped flint and limestone, you can survive everything from the Reformation to the invention of TikTok. This court was the first of its kind, designed by master mason William Wynford (the man responsible for New College, Oxford) to be a self-contained universe where scholars could live, eat, and “mug” without ever needing to leave.

At its heart lies Seventh Chamber, arguably the oldest schoolroom in England. Originally, this single room housed the entire teaching operation of the college. It remains a masterclass in medieval efficiency, featuring three tiers of stone window seats where prefects sat like hawks to detect offenders, and a massive fireplace that was the only thing standing between seventy boys and a very chilly Hampshire winter.

The Chapel remains a Gothic masterpiece, dominated by a towering Perpendicular vaulted ceiling designed by Hugh Herland, the same royal carpenter who built the hammer-beam roof of Westminster Hall. It was a “timber fan-vault,” a daring architectural experiment that predates the famous stone fan vaults of Henry VII’s Chapel by over a century.

The Chapel’s famous stained glass, featuring the Tree of Jesse designed by Thomas of Oxford, nearly met its end during the English Civil War. Legend has it that a Wykehamist officer in Oliver Cromwell’s army, Nathaniel Fiennes, stood at the doors with a sword. A descendant of the founder himself, Fiennes reportedly informed his own troops that while they were busy overthrowing the monarchy, any hand laid on the Chapel’s glass would result in a “detention” from which they wouldn’t walk away. He famously declared: “I know we’re overthrowing the monarchy, but if you touch the stained glass, you’re getting a detention you won’t walk away from.” Thanks to his stand, Winchester’s medieval glass survived the iconoclasm that shattered so many other English windows.

Adjacent to this medieval core stands the War Cloister, a site of profound gravity. Designed by Sir Herbert Baker and dedicated in 1924, it is the largest private war memorial in Europe. It is an open-air square where the names of over 500 Wykehamists who fell in the Great War are carved into the stone. Every “Man” who enters the school must pass through it, a permanent architectural reminder that “manners” are not just about politeness, but about the ultimate sacrifice.

For those who didn’t fall in battle but merely fell ill, there was the “Bethesda” Sick House. Built in the 1640s, this brick sanctuary was a rare early example of a purpose-built school infirmary. It allowed the sick to be quarantined in peace, far from the drafty chambers of the main court, ensuring that the “Mother of Public Schools” kept her children alive through the many plagues that followed the Black Death.

“History here isn’t a subject; it’s the wallpaper. You mug at a desk carved in 1650 and walk through cloisters where scholars have paced since the era of Chaucer.”

II. The Secret Language of the “Man”

Winchester is famous for its “Notions”—a private vernacular designed to baffle the uninitiated and bind the community in a shared, linguistic secret. To an outsider, a conversation between two Wykehamists sounds less like English and more like a glitch in the Matrix.

At Winchester, you don’t “study at a desk”; you “mug at a toy.” A “toy” is actually a large wooden cubicle (derived from “treen-ware”) where a Man keeps his books. You aren’t “lazy”; you are “thoking”—to be idle or to lie in bed when duty calls. And, most importantly, you are never a “boy”; you are a “Man.” Even a thirteen-year-old in his first half (term) is a “New Man,” for at Winchester, the transition to adulthood begins the moment you pass Ad Portas.

To truly understand the social hierarchy, one must realize that a New Man spends his first months in a state of perpetual linguistic anxiety, terrified of sporting a false notion in front of a Prefect. If you’re caught thoking when you should be mugging at your toy, you won’t just be gated (confined to the flint walls); you’ll be the subject of a very cud—which is to say, distinctly unpleasant—conversation with the Informator (Headmaster) himself.

The Linguistic Labyrinth

• A Junket: Not a trip, but a celebration involving food, usually to toast a prize-winner.

• Bibler: A term for a historical public flogging, now preserved in the school’s “disciplinary archaeology.”

• Custos: The College Porter, the gatekeeper of the flint fortress who knows exactly who sneaked out after lock-up.

• Shover: A term of mild derision for a day boy who “shoves” his way in from the outside world each morning.

This eccentricity extends to the sports field, where the refusal to modernize has preserved a living fossil: Winchester College Football (affectionately known as “Winkies”).

The game is played on a pitch called a “canvas,” enclosed by high netting. The rules are a chaotic holdover from the 1800s:

• The “Hot”: Instead of a scrum, players engage in a “hot”—a mass of pushing bodies where the goal is to out-shove the opposition until the ball squirts out.

• No Dribbling: You are strictly forbidden from touching the ball twice in succession. You must kick it hard, and you must kick it once.

• The “Plants” and “Behinds”: The pitch is bounded by posts; if the ball goes out between them, it’s a “Plant” and triggers a new Hot. If you kick it over the “worms” (the end line) untouched, you score a “Goal” (3 points). If it’s deflected, it’s merely a “Behind” (1 point).

It is a world where the “Mugging Hall” is silent as a tomb, but the “Canvas” is loud enough to wake William of Wykeham himself.

III. “Div” and the Modern Plot Twist

While the rest of the UK’s education system obsesses over “teaching to the test” and the soul-crushing efficiency of A-level modules, Winchester prides itself on “Div”. Short for “Division,” this is the school’s intellectual heartbeat—a non-examined, mandatory subject that occupies up to five hours of the weekly timetable.

In a Div session, the syllabus is effectively whatever the “Don” (teacher) and the Men decide is worth knowing. A morning might begin with a line-by-line dissection of Homeric epics in the original Greek, veer into the geopolitics of the South China Sea, and conclude with a heated debate on the ethics of generative AI. It is an academic playground designed to foster “cultural literacy” rather than “exam technique.” This unscripted rigour has produced a dizzying array of alumni, from the mountaineer George Mallory—who likely sharpened his “because it is there” logic in a Div room—to former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and even the creator of The Avengers, Joss Whedon.

However, the most seismic shift in the school’s 640-year history arrived in September 2022. After six centuries as a bastion of brotherhood, the College implemented the “Winchester College in the 21st Century” plan, admitting girls into the Sixth Form for the first time. This wasn’t merely a logistical change; it was a philosophical evolution. By welcoming day girls and boarding girls, the school acknowledged that William of Wykeham’s vision of producing leaders was incomplete if it excluded half the population.

This modernization continues apace. In 2025, the College finalized a historic merger with The Pilgrims’ School, the cathedral choir school that has long shared its geography. This move creates a seamless educational journey from age four through eighteen, ensuring the “Wykehamical” style of thinking is ingrained from the first sprouted tooth.

The reform proves that while the flint walls are fixed, the minds within them are not. By leaning on a gender-neutral motto—Manners Makyth Man—the school has successfully argued that character, intellect, and the pursuit of “Div” are not confined to a single sex, but are the right of anyone with the “notion” to pursue them.

IV. The Scholar’s Path: A Survival Guide

To join the elite seventy Scholars in College, one does not simply apply; one survives “Election.” This is a grueling three-day academic marathon held in the spring, where the brightest minds from across the globe compete for a place in the original 14th-century chambers.

The exam is designed to break the “over-tutored” mind. You won’t find multiple-choice questions here. Instead, you might be asked to translate an unseen passage of Medieval Latin or face a General Paper question that sounds more like a Zen koan than a test: “How would you go about writing a History of Smell?” To pass, you must demonstrate that you can think from first principles, argue with flair, and remain “cud” (pleasant) under extreme intellectual duress.

The Wykehamist Survival Tips:

• Wear the Gown: If you are “elected,” you will spend your days in a long black cloth gown. It is a 600-year-old badge of brilliance that marks you as a member of the Founder’s original seventy. Wear it with pride—it’s essentially an academic superhero cape that hasn’t changed since the reign of Richard II.

• Respect the Scob: Your desk is a “scob”—a double-lidded oak chest that has served Scholars for centuries. While the tradition of carving your name into the wood is tolerated, remember: you are competing with the knife-work of boys who grew up to be Archbishops and Viceroys in the 1600s. If your calligraphy isn’t up to 17th-century standards, perhaps stick to a pencil.

• Master the “Hot”: On the football pitch, don’t try to be fancy. When the “Hot” forms, put your shoulder in and push. A Scholar is expected to be as formidable in the mud of the Canvas as they are in the silence of the Mugging Hall.

• Be “Cud”: In an environment filled with high-functioning geniuses, the ultimate status symbol isn’t your grade—it’s being “cud.” In the local Notions, this means being agreeable and well-mannered. In a school of 700 potential Prime Ministers, being the person everyone actually likes is the hardest task of all.

From the 2025 merger with The Pilgrims’ School to the ancient, flint-strewn walls of Chamber Court, Winchester College remains a place where the 14th century and the 21st century hold a very long, very polite, and very clever conversation. It is a world where history is not something you read in a book, but something you sit on, sleep in, and—if you’re lucky—eventually write.

Our story begins not in a quiet cottage, but in the echoing chambers of the Epsom Grandstand. Imagine, if you will, a house overflowing with twenty-one children—a veritable sea of pinafores and muddy boots! Isabella, the eldest of this small army, was no frail flower; she was a “Petticoated General” forged in the fires of domestic chaos. She watched as her mother managed the “living cargo” of siblings amidst the roar of the racecourse, learning early that a household without order is like a ship without a rudder.

She grew into a woman of singular discipline—proficient at the piano, fluent in the tongues of the Continent, and possessed of a spirit that viewed a disorganized cupboard as a moral failing. She believed the mistress of a house was nothing less than the “Commander-in-Chief of an army,” and she set about writing the manual of arms for every kitchen in the Empire.

Then came Samuel Beeton, a man of great ambition and even greater waistcoats. He was a dreamer of books, a man who saw the world in columns of type. When he took Isabella’s hand in marriage in 1856, he gained a partner in the Great Engine of Victorian Industry. While the rest of London slept, Isabella sat amidst a mountain of letters and scraps of paper. She was not a cook herself—heaven forbid!—but she was something far more formidable: An Organizer. She gathered recipes like a tax collector gathers pennies, standardizing them into a format that brought light to the dimmest scullery.

“Pray, look here!” she might have said, her quill poised like a conductor’s baton. “A pudding is not a mere trifle of chance; it is a calculation of the soul.” Take, for instance, her famous Baroness Pudding. She would not simply tell you to ‘add some fruit’; she demanded the stretching of the suet and the stoning of the raisins with the rhythm of a marching drum.

She listed the ingredients first—a miracle of clarity!—and dictated the “Mode” of preparation with the precision of a clockmaker. “Boil it for four and a half hours,” she commanded, for she knew that time is the only currency that cannot be minted. She even recorded the Average Cost (1s. 4d.) and the Seasonableness (best in winter), for she believed that “short reckonings make long friends” and that a wife must understand her accounts as if the solvency of the Crown depended upon them.

“A place for everything,” she whispered to the scratch of her quill, “and everything in its place.” Within her great book, she scattered gems of wisdom to sustain a nation. She championed the Toast Sandwich—a piece of dry toast between two slices of buttered bread—proving that even in poverty, one could maintain the dignity of a set table. She spoke of “bad smells” from sink pipes with the gravity of a plague doctor, declaring cleanliness the only shield against the “dangerous vapors” of the city. To Isabella, a well-kept home was a fortress against the darkness of the world.

But alas, the Great Author of All Things had a shorter chapter written for Isabella than her readers would have liked. In 1865, at the tender age of twenty-eight, just as her name was becoming a household word, the fever took her. She left behind a world that was cleaner, better fed, and infinitely more organized than she found it.

Samuel, poor soul, was so struck by grief—and perhaps a touch of business sense—that he kept her passing a secret. For years, the public believed Mrs. Beeton was still testing puddings in her parlor, when she was, in fact, resting beneath the quiet earth of West Norwood Cemetery.

And so, dear reader, when you look upon a recipe today and see the ingredients listed neatly at the top, spare a thought for the girl from the Epsom Grandstand. She proved that while a man may build a house of brick and mortar, it takes a woman with a sharp quill and an iron will to turn it into a Home.

Sir Edward Elgar was one of the greatest British composers and one of the leading European composers of his generation. Although Elgar is often regarded as a typically English composer most of his musical influences were not from England but from continental Europe. Elgar’s best works include the Enigma Variations, The Dream Of Gerontius, the Pomp and Circumstances Marches, concertos for violin and cello, and two symphonies.

Elgar was largely self-taught as a musician and composer and felt himself to be an outsider, not only in musical circles dominated by academics but also socially. He struggled to achieve success until his forties when, after a series of moderately successful works his Enigma Variations, composed between October 1898 and February 1899, marked his breakthrough as a composer of national importance. His reputation was consolidated the following year with the oratorio The Dream Of Gerontius regarded as one of the greatest English choral pieces of all time. Elgar achieved even greater national recognition for his Pomp and Circumstance Marches – the first of these includes ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ which became an unofficial English national anthem. His last masterpiece was the Cello Concerto, completed in June 1919. After the death of his wife in 1920 he went into virtual retirement however he was working on a third symphony, a piano concerto, and an opera when he died in 1934.

Salut d’Amour

Edward Elgar composed Salut d’Amour, one of his best-known works, in 1888 when he was romantically involved with Caroline Alice Roberts and he gave the piece to her as an engagement present. The dedication was in French: “à Carice” – “Carice” was a combination of his fiancée’s names, Caroline Alice, and the name given to their daughter born two years later.

Serenade For Strings

Elgar’s Serenade For Strings is a piece for string orchestra in three short movements and one of the composer’s best pieces. Written and first performed in 1892 it was dedicated to the organ builder and keen amateur musician Edward W Whinfield. It was reportedly the first of Elgar’s works that he professed himself satisfied. The work remains among the most frequently performed of all his music.

Enigma Variations

It was Elgar’s Enigma Variations, composed between October 1898 and February 1899, that catapulted the composer to international renown relatively late in life when he was in his early forties. The enigmatic theme is understood to be a famous melody that, if played along with the Enigma Variations, would fit perfectly and many suggestions have been made regarding the identity of the hidden theme. The best-known of the Variations is No. 9, ‘Nimrod’, a musical portrait of Elgar’s publisher and friend August Jaeger.

Sea Pictures

Sea Pictures is a song cycle consisting of five songs, based on five poems by different authors, about the sea, including one by Elgar’s wife Alice. Elgar composed Sea Pictures in 1899, following the success of his Enigma Variations, for the acclaimed contralto Clara Butt, who gave the premiere dressed as a mermaid! It is the only song cycle Elgar wrote for voice and orchestra.

Gerontius

The Dream Of Gerontius, composed in 1900, is widely regarded as Elgar’s finest choral work and some consider it his masterpiece. The work is based on a Victorian poem by Cardinal John Henry Newman which tells the story of the journey of a pious man’s soul from his deathbed to his judgment before God and settling into Purgatory. On the last page of the manuscript, Elgar wrote “this is the best of me” and the work is considered to be one of the greatest Oratorios.

Pomp and Circumstance Marches

The Pomp and Circumstance Marches are a series of five marches (a sixth was intended but never completed) for orchestra composed between 1901 and 1930. The marches were composed over a period of almost thirty years and include some of Elgar’s best-known works. Each march is dedicated to a particularly close friend. The first in the set, in D major, is the most famous and includes ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ which became an unofficial English national anthem.

Symphony No. 1

Elgar’s Symphony No. 1 in Ab major was hailed as the best British symphony ever written when it debuted in 1908. The symphony was an immediate success and nearly 100 performances were given around the world within a year. Symphony No. 1 remains a standard of the classical repertoire and is still performed regularly today. Elgar explained, “The is no programme beyond a wide experience of human life with a great charity (love) and a massive hope in the future.”

Violin Concerto

Elgar’s Violin Concerto, one of his best works, was composed for the violinist Fritz Kreisler, regarded as one of the greatest violinists of all time. Kreisler gave the premiere, which Elgar conducted, in London in 1910. Elgar was a severe self-critic but thought very highly of this work and admitted, “It’s good! Awfully emotional! Too emotional, but I love it.” The concerto is dedicated to Kreisler but Elgar wrote an inscription in Spanish, “Aqui está encerrada el alma de …” (“Herein is enshrined the soul of …”), a quotation from the novel Gil Blas by Alain-René Lesage, and several names have been proposed to match the mysterious inscription.

Symphony No. 2

Elgar’s Symphony No. 2, completed in 1911, was officially dedicated to the memory of King Edward VII, who had died in May 1910, but many scholars believe his close friend Alice Stuart Wortley, with whom he was rumoured to have a romantic liaison, was the inspiration. Although relatively well received Symphony No. 2 lacked the immediate success of earlier works and Elgar complained the audience “sat there like stuffed pigs”. It was not until after the First World War that Symphony No. 2 was fully appreciated and it is now acclaimed at least as much as his First Symphony.

Cello Concerto

Edward Elgar composed his Cello Concerto in E minor, one of his best works, in the aftermath of the First World War and a deep feeling of melancholy pervades the work. The first performance of Elgar’s Cello Concerto in 1919, under the composer’s baton with Felix Salmond as soloist, was a disaster because of inadequate rehearsal time. The work did not achieve wide popularity until the 1960s when Jacqueline du Pré’s recording of Elgar’s melancholy masterpiece caught the public imagination. The Cello Concerto was Elgar’s last major work and in the remaining 15 years of his life he wrote very little.

Victorian Poems: Death

1. from “The Old Astronomer to His Pupil” by Sarah Williams (1837–68)

Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light;

I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.

[These are the most famous lines in the poem Williams was most known for in her short life. They’re frequently chosen as an epitaph by astronomers.]

2. From “The Sands of Dee” by Charles Kingsley (1819–75)

‘O Mary, go and call the cattle home,

And call the cattle home,

And call the cattle home

Across the sands of Dee;’

The western wind was wild and dank with foam,

And all alone went she.

3. From “AN INVITE TO ETERNITY” BY JOHN CLARE (1793-1864)

Wilt thou go with me sweet maid

Say maiden wilt thou go with me

Through the valley depths of shade

Of night and dark obscurity

Where the path hath lost its way

Where the sun forgets the day

Where there’s nor life nor light to see

Sweet maiden wilt thou go with me

4. From “Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam” by Ernest Dowson (1867–1900)

(The brief sum of life forbids us the hope of enduring long —Horace)

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,

Love and desire and hate:

I think they have no portion in us after

We pass the gate.

5. from “Carthusians” by Ernest Dowson

We fling up flowers and laugh, we laugh across the wine;

With wine we dull our souls and careful strains of art;

Our cups are polished skulls round which the roses twine:

None dares to look at Death who leers and lurks apart.

6. from “Wake: The Silver Dusk Returning” by A.E. Housman (1859–1936)

Clay lies still, but blood’s a rover;

Breath’s a ware that will not keep.

Up, lad: when the journey’s over

There’ll be time enough to sleep.

7. From “When I Last Came to Ludlow” by A.E. Housman

When I came last to Ludlow

Amidst the moonlight pale,

Two friends kept step beside me,

Two honest lads and hale.

Victorian Poems: Love

8. From “The Memory” by Lord Dunsany (1878–1957)

I watch the doctors walking with the nurses to and fro

And I hear them softly talking in the garden where they go,

But I envy not their learning, nor their right of walking free,

For the emperor of Tartary has died for love of me.

9. From “Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae” by Ernest Dowson

(I am not as I was under the reign of the good Cynara —Horace)

Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine

There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed

Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;

And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

10. from “Great Things” by Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)

Love is, yea, a great thing,

A great thing to me,

When, having drawn across the lawn

In darkness silently,

A figure flits like one-a-wing

Out from the nearest tree:

O love is, yes, a great thing,

A great thing to me!

11. from “Chimaera” by Rosamund Marriot Watson (1860–1911)

The spring sun shows me your shadow,

The spring wind bears me your breath,

You are mine for a passing moment,

But I am yours to the death.

12. from “Stella Maris” by Arthur Symons(1865–1945)

What shall it profit me to know

Your heart holds many a Romeo?

Why should I grieve, though I forget

How many another Juliet?

Let us be glad to have forgot

That roses fade, and loves are not,

As dreams, immortal, though they seem

Almost as real as a dream.

It is for this I see you rise,

A wraith, with starlight in your eyes,

Where calm hours weave, for such a mood

Solitude out of solitude;

For this, for this, you come to me

Out of the night, out of the sea.

13. from “Cousin Kate” by Christina Rossetti (1830–94)

O Lady Kate, my cousin Kate,

You grow more fair than I:

He saw you at your father’s gate,

Chose you, and cast me by.

He watched your steps along the lane,

Your sport among the rye;

He lifted you from mean estate

To sit with him on high.

14. from “The Counsels of O’Riordan, The Rann Maker” by T.D. O’Bolger

The luck of God is in two strangers meeting,

But the gates of Hell are in the city street

For him whose soul is not in his own keeping

And love a silver string upon his feet.

My heart is the seed of time, my veins are star-dust,

My spirit is the axle of God’s dream

15. From “Sonnet 43” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–61)

How do I love thee?

Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of being and ideal grace.

Victorian Poems: Magic

16. From “The Night is Darkening Round Me” by Emily Brontë (1818–48)

The night is darkening round me,

The wild winds coldly blow;

But a tyrant spell has bound me,

And I cannot, cannot go.

17. From “The Fairy Child” by Lord Dunsany

From the low white walls and the church’s steeple,

From our little fields under grass or grain,

I’m gone away to the fairy people

I shall not come to the town again.

18. From “The Warnings” by Alice Furlong (1866–1946)

I was milking in the meadow when I heard the Banshee keening:

Little birds were in the nest, lambs were on the lea,

Upon the brow o’ the Fairy-hill a round gold moon was leaning—

She parted from the esker as the Banshee keened for me.

19. from “The Stolen Child” by W.B. Yeats (1865–1939)

Where the wave of moonlight glosses

The dim grey sands with light,

Far off by furthest Rosses

We foot it all the night,

Weaving olden dances

Mingling hands and mingling glances

Till the moon has taken flight;

To and fro we leap

And chase the frothy bubbles,

While the world is full of troubles

And is anxious in its sleep.

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

20. from “The Fairy Lover” by Moireen Fox

They tell me I am cursed and I will lose my soul,

(O red wind shrieking o’er the thorn-grown dún!)

But he is my love and I go to him to-night,

Who rides when the thorn glistens white beneath the moon.

He will call my name and lift me to his breast,

(Blow soft O wind ’neath the stars of the south!)

I care not for heaven and I fear not hell

If I have but the kisses of his proud red mouth.

21. from “The Love-Talker” by Ethna Carbery (1894–1902)

I met the Love-Talker one eve in the glen,

He was handsomer than any of our handsome young men,

His eyes were blacker than the sloe, his voice sweeter far

Than the crooning of old Kevin’s pipes beyond in Coolnagar.

I was bound for the milking with a heart fair and free —

My grief! my grief! that bitter hour drained the life from me;

I thought him human lover, though his lips on mine were cold,

And the breath of death blew keen on me within his hold.

I know not what way he came, no shadow fell behind,

But all the sighing rushes swayed beneath a faery wind

The thrush ceased its singing, a mist crept about,

We two clung together—with the world shut out.

22. from “The Fairies” by William Allingham (1824–89)

They stole little Bridget

For seven years long;

When she came down again

Her friends were all gone.

They took her lightly back,

Between the night and morrow,

They thought that she was fast asleep,

But she was dead with sorrow.

They have kept her ever since

Deep within the lake,

On a bed of flag-leaves,

Watching till she wake

Victorian Toys - Hoops. Date: 1883 © Archivist - stock.adobe.com

You can still find them in auctions, vintage fairs and antique shops if you keep an eye out.

There are also lots to see in museums such as the Edinburgh Museum of Childhood, Pollocks Toy Museum in London, or Young V&A (formerly the V&A Museum of Childhood) in London.

In the Victorian Era (1837 - 1901), there was a wider range of toys available to more children than ever before.

Even so, most of the Victorian toys in this article would have belonged to middle-class or upper-class Victorian children.

Girls playing with a Doll © LiliGraphie via Deposit Photos

Poor and working-class children would have been too busy working, or helping around the home and would have had limited time for play.

Toys were generally handmade from metal or wood and were far more expensive than the mass-produced plastic toys of the 21st century, so poor Victorian families wouldn’t have been able to afford toys, which would have been considered expensive luxuries.

We hope you enjoy this collection of some of the most popular toys in Victorian times:

Hobby Horse

The hobby horse consists of a toy horse head mounted on a long stick, usually with a shorter stick at 90 degrees.

Victorian Toy Catalogue 1897 © LiliGraphie via Deposit Photos

The rider holds the horse’s head up in front of them facing forwards, and “rides” the hobby horse by running along with one leg on either side of the long stick.

Luxury versions have a set of small wheels that will run along the ground.

Also known as a stick horse, the hobby horse has been around since at least the 1500s, but was certainly popular in Victorian times.

Rocking Horse

Staying with the equestrian theme, the ultimate toy in an upper-class Victorian nursery would be the rocking horse.

Rocking Horse in Pollock’s Toy Museum © Pettifoggist via Flickr

Traditionally a carved wooden horse on bow rockers, the rocking horse originates in the 17th century but became popular among the wealthy as a child’s toy in Victorian times.

In the late 19th century an American inventor (sources don’t agree on his name) designed the glider mechanism which is much safer and stops the rocking horse moving around the nursery when rocked.

Dolls

Dolls are as old as civilisation itself, and were usually made from wood or fabric.

Victorian Doll © Dario Lo Presti via Deposit Photos

Bisque porcelain dolls with their delicate and lifelike faces became popular (with the wealthiest families) during Victorian times.

The dolls’ porcelain faces were made in Germany from the 1860s, hand painted and the dolls often had real human hair for extra realism.

Porcelain doll © xmen - stock.adobe.com

These expensive toys were dressed in elaborate and fashionable clothes made from the finest fabrics.

Doll’s House

Doll’s houses are hundreds of years old, but they were originally for adults planning interiors, or teaching girls how to run a household.

Antique Dolls House © Margo Harrison - stock.adobe.com

As doll’s houses were not mass-produced until much later, it was only towards the end of the Victorian era that even the wealthiest children would have had a doll’s house as a toy.

Antique Dolls House © David Gallun - stock.adobe.com

You’ll find a fascinating collection of Victorian doll’s houses at Young V&A - (formerly The V&A Museum of Childhood).

Toy Soldiers

Like many toys, model soldiers have been around for centuries, but they were mainly used by adults for military planning as they were too expensive to be used as toys.

Miniature tin soldiers © Jethra Tull - stock.adobe.com

It wasn’t until 1893 that British toy company William Britain started producing hollow-cast toy soldiers which could be sold more cheaply, and their popularity as toys took off.

Spinning Top

The spinning top was a popular toy in Victorian times. Usually made of wood, the simplest spinning tops were set in motion with a flick of the fingers.

Old fashioned wooden toys © David Pimborough - stock.adobe.com

For faster and longer spins you would wind a string around the top and pull it to set the top spinning.

Skipping Rope (Jump Rope)

Skipping ropes, also known as jump ropes, have been used as toys since the 16th century, but were certainly popular with Victorian children.

The ropes were purpose-made with wooden handles (for wealthier children) or just discarded lengths of old rope (for poor kids).

Either way, there was singles and doubles skipping and a variety of skipping games and rhymes, just as there are today.

Wind-up Toys

Although clockwork wind-up toys date back to the 15th century, these were costly novelties for wealthy adults - not for children to play with.

Wind-up Monkey Toy © Karen Perhus - stock.adobe.com

It was only in Victorian times - in the 1880s - that clockwork tin toys were mass-produced at a price that made them accessible to the children of wealthy households.

Clockwork animals, dolls and carousels were among the most popular Victorian wind-up toys.

Puppet Theatre

In the days before films and TV, theatre was a popular form of entertainment.

Puppet show © Natalya Lys - stock.adobe.com

A puppet theatre allowed children’s imaginations to run wild, creating performances of their favourite stories and fairy tales.

Glass Marbles

Glass marbles first appeared in the early Victorian period - around the middle of the 19th century.

Boat, tops, marbles and dominoes © soupstock - stock.adobe.com

It is thought that they were first made by glass makers using leftover glass to make toys for their children.

Glass marbles were not mass-produced by machine until 1915 - well after the end of the Victorian era - so they would have been relatively expensive and unusual toys for Victorian children.

Toy Train

The toy train set is very much a Victorian invention as the first mass-produced toy trains were made by Märklin in Germany in 1891.

Victorian Toy Catalogue 1897 © LiliGraphie via Deposit Photos

Märklin specialised in doll’s house accessories which were becoming popular with girls, and they were wanting to develop a product that would appeal to boys.

Early toy trains were made from tin which was stamped out and lithographed.

Electric toy trains first appeared 6 years later in 1897.

Tea Set

The miniature toy tea set became a popular toy for upper and middle-class girls during Victorian times, as tea sets began to be mass-produced from the middle of the 19th century.

Girl with Doll and Teaset © Klanneke via Deposit Photos

Playing with a tea set prepared girls for their role in Victorian society.

Boys were encouraged to play rougher more masculine games outdoors.

Hoop

Hoops have been around since at least 500 BC and have enjoyed periods of popularity such as the introduction of “hooping” in Britain in the 1300s, and the “hula hoop” craze in the 1950s.

They were popular in Victorian times too - and no picture of a Victorian street scene is complete without a child bowling a wooden hoop along the road with a stick.

Kaleidoscope

The kaleidoscope consists of a tube containing mirrors that reflect coloured glass fragments into beautiful patterns.

The kaleidoscope was invented by Scottish scientist Sir David Brewster in 1816, and it became a popular novelty item for the whole family after American Charles Busch promoted it in the 1870s.

Musical Toys

Highly prized by Victorians, a music box would have been entertaining for children and adults alike.

Toy bird in a gold musical cage © MyTopShelf - stock.adobe.com

Music boxes, often made of rosewood, would contain figures that would dance and spin as the music played.

Turning a crank or winding the clockwork mechanism on the side of the box was all it took to create sweet music.

Teddy Bear

Finally, here’s one toy that you might think is Victorian, but isn’t:

Although teddy bears seem like Victorian toys, they actually originate from the year after Queen Victoria died - so they are in fact Edwardian:

The name and popularity of the teddy bear date from November 1902 when US President Theodore Roosevelt refused to shoot a bear cub on a hunting trip.

Of course, some children had stuffed toy animals during the Victorian period, including bears, but the popularity of actual teddy bears took off in Edwardian times.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this selection of some of the most popular toys from the Victorian era.

Despite competition from phones, tablets and consoles, most of them are still available to buy today.

Snap-Apple Night by Daniel Maclise, 1833.

Despite their reputation for straight-laced sobriety, the Victorians celebrated Halloween with great enthusiasm—and often with outright abandon. Victorian Halloween parties were filled with fun, games, and spooky rituals, some of which still feature at Halloween parties today. Many of the games had origins in pagan religion or medieval superstition. Others were merely a means of making merry with one’s friends. Regardless, Halloween parties of the 19^th century were an occasion for indulging in what author Hugh Miller describes in his 1876 book Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland as:

“….a multitude of wild mischievous games which were tolerated at no other season.”

For an example of a Victorian Halloween party, we need look no further than Queen Victoria herself. In 1876, the queen, along with Princess Beatrice and the Marchioness of Ely, celebrated Halloween at Balmoral Castle on a grand scale. Preparations took place for days in advance and, on the night of the celebration, the turnout included farmers and tenants who had come from miles around. When darkness fell, the festivities began. The November 6, 1874 edition of the Staffordshire Sentinel reports:

“Her Majesty and the Princess Beatrice, each bearing a large torch, drove out in an open phaeton. A procession, formed of the tenants and servants on the estates, followed. All carried high torches, lighted. They walked through the grounds and round the castle, and the scene as the procession moved onwards was very weird and striking.”

“Halloween at Balmoral” from
The Staffordshire Sentinel, 1874.
(©2015 British Newspaper Archive)

When the procession arrived in front of the castle, a huge bonfire was lit. It was at this point that the proceedings began to take on a distinctly pagan air. As the Staffordshire Sentinel writes:

“When the flames were at their brightest a figure dressed as a hobgoblin appeared on the scene, drawing a car surrounded by a number of fairies carrying long spears, the car containing the effigy of a witch. A circle having been formed by the torchbearers, the presiding elf tossed the figure of the witch into the fire, where it was speedily consumed. This act of cremation over, reels began, and were danced with great vigour to the stirring strains of Willie Ross, her Majesty’s piper.”

A ball was meant to follow this celebration, however, owing to the high spirits of the crowd, the proceedings were, instead, continued outdoors with the bonfire burning well into the night.

Of course, not everyone could celebrate Halloween in as magnificent a manner as Queen Victoria. For those of more modest means, indoor party games were quite popular. Many of the games were a means of foretelling the future, especially in relation to discovering the sort of gentleman whom one would eventually marry. In fact, the emphasis on matchmaking at these parties frequently overshadowed the more sinister associations of the holiday, such as witches and witchcraft or communing with the dead.

The Ride Through the Murky Air.
The Lancashire Witches, 1848.

PARTY GAMES

In her 1893 book How to Amuse Yourself and Others, author Linda Beard lists some of the most common Victorian party games (popular both in England and America). The first involves melting lead in order to determine the occupation of one’s future husband. Beard describes the game as follows:

“Each girl, in turn, holds a door-key in one hand, while with the other hand she pours the melted lead, from an iron spoon or ladle, through the handle of the key into a pan of cold water. In the fanciful shapes the lead assumes can be traced resemblances to all sorts of things. Sometimes it is a sword or gun, which indicates that a soldier will win the fair prize; again, traces of a ship may be seen: then the favored one is to be a sailor; a plough suggests a farmer; a book, a professor, or perhaps a minister; and when the lead forms only drops, it seems to mean that the gentle inquirer will not marry, or if she does, her husband will be of no profession.”

Another game called “Three Luggies” derives from a game mentioned in Robert Burns’ 1785 poem Halloween. It reads in part:

In order, on the clean hearth-stane,

The luggies three are ranged;

An’ ev’ry time great care is ta’en

To see them duly changed.

The game of Three Luggies requires three bowls – one filled with clear water, one with milky water, and the last one empty. The three bowls are placed on the hearthstone and the young lady who wishes to play is blindfolded and led up to them. As Beard describes:

“She is then told to put her left hand into one of the bowls. If she dips her fingers in the clear water, she will marry a bachelor; if in the milky water, a widower; and if into the empty bowl, it is a sure sign that she will live in single blessedness all her days. This ceremony must be gone through with three times, and the hand be dipped twice in the same bowl, in order to make the prediction of any value.”

There is a version of this game for gentlemen as well. It is nearly identical, except that, according to the 1832 Book of Days, one of the bowls is filled with “foul water.” If the gentleman dips his fingers into the clean water, he is destined to marry a maiden. If he dips his fingers into the foul water, there is a widow in his future. And if he encounters the empty bowl, he is fated to end his days a bachelor.

Another popular game involved roasting nuts in order to test friendship or compatibility. This particular game is mentioned in many books and articles of the era. In it, two nuts are chosen and placed side by side on the grate or on a shovel that is held over the fire. Beard explains:

“If they burn quietly, it is prophetic of a long and happy friendship kept up by both parties; but if in roasting they burst with a loud report and fly apart, they are decidedly uncongenial, and should not seek much intercourse. The movements of the nuts while heating are closely watched, for the tempers of the persons for whom they are named is said to be thus revealed.”

A slightly different version of this game is related in the Book of Days. It states:

“It is a custom in Ireland, when the young women would know if their lovers are faithful, to put three nuts upon the bars of the grate, naming the nuts after their lovers. If a nut cracks or jumps, the lover will prove unfaithful; if it begins to blaze or burn, he has a regard for the person making the trial.”

Halloween Greeting Card depicting the Magic Mirror game, circa 1904.

Games with mirrors were also a favorite. The Book of Days describes a particular “spell” which involved eating an apple in front of a mirror. If the spirits were amenable, the young lady would be able to see the reflection of the gentleman she would one day marry “peeping over her shoulder.” Beard mentions another game in which a mirror was used to discern how many incidents of good fortune would befall a person in the coming year. In order to do this, Beard explains:

“The conditions are that the person wishing to know how bright her prospects are shall go to an open window or door from which the moon is visible, and, standing with her face in-doors, hold her mirror so that the moon will be reflected in it. The number of moons she sees there betokens the number of times something pleasant will happen to her before the advent of another Halloween.”

You will notice that most of these games were geared toward young ladies. This was fairly common in the Victorian era. However, this did not mean that there was no entertainment available for young gentlemen. Bobbing for apples has always been one of the most popular games at Halloween parties and the 19^th century was no exception. Miller writes:

“…a large tub filled with water, was placed in the middle of the floor of some outhouse, carefully dressed up for the occasion; and into the tub every one of the party flung an apple. They then approached it by turns, and placing their hands on the edges, plunged forward to fish for the fruit – with their teeth.”

In order to succeed at this game, one generally had to submerge their head and neck in the water. For this reason, it was far more popular with the young men than with the young ladies. As Beard states:

“The girls can seldom be induced to try their luck in this game, but usually content themselves with looking on, immensely enjoying the frantic endeavors of the boys to succeed at any cost.”

Ducking for Apples on Halloween.
The Book of Days, 1832.

Another Halloween party game that a gentleman could play was the game of “Trying for a Raisin.” In this game, a good-sized raisin was strung onto the middle of a yard long cotton string. The two competitors then took one end each of the string into their mouths and began to chew. The first person to reach the raisin was the winner.

And then there was the rather perilous “Apple and Candle” game. The game involved hanging up a stick horizontally by a string and attaching a lit candle to one end and an apple to the other. The Book of Days explains:

“The stick being made to twirl rapidly, the merry-makers in succession leap up and snatch at the apple with their teeth (no use of the hands being allowed), but it very frequently happens that the candle comes round before they are aware, and scorches them in the face, or anoints them with grease.”

Finally, no party was complete without the game that Beard calls “The Ghostly Fire.” In this game, salt and alcohol were put into a dish with a few raisins and lit on fire. When the flame was at its highest, the partygoers linked hands and danced around the table on which the fire burned. Beard writes:

“The dance was not prolonged, for it was our duty, before the fire was spent, to snatch from the flames the raisins we had put in the dish. This can be done, if one is careful, without as much as scorching the fingers, and I never knew of anyone burning themselves while making the attempt.”

Of course, some forms of outdoor Halloween merrymaking were exclusively the province of rowdy young gentlemen. Miller reports a particularly raucous tradition in the North of Scotland:

“After nightfall, the young fellows of the town formed themselves into parties of ten or a dozen, and breaking into the gardens of the graver inhabitants, stole the best and heaviest of their cabbages. Converting these into bludgeons, by stripping off the lower leaves, they next scoured the streets and lanes, thumping at every door as they passed, until their uncouth weapons were beaten to pieces. When disarmed in this way, all the parties united into one, and providing themselves with a cart, drove it before them, with the rapidity of a chaise and four, through the principal streets. Wo to the inadvertent female Whom they encountered!”

PARTY FARE

The Incantation.
The Lancashire Witches, 1848.

When it came to food and drink at the Victorian Halloween party, sweets were not the primary attraction. According to The Book of Days:

“Nuts and apples are everywhere in requisition, and consumed in immense numbers. Indeed the name of Nutcrack Night, by which Halloween is known in the north of England, indicates the predominance of the former of these articles in making up the entertainments of the evening.”

And in the 1841 Medii Ævi Kalendarium, author R. T. Hampson writes:

“Nuts, ale and apples compose the chief materials of the entertainment on this night…Every house abounds in the best viands they can afford.”

Nuts could be roasted, while apples were often glazed by dipping them in a syrup made of sugar, water, and butter and then browning them on the fire. In addition to fruit, nuts, and ale, there were baked goods to consume. Some of these even played a part in Halloween ritual. An 1891 edition of Ingalls’ Home and Art Magazine provides the following recipe and magical instructions for “Halloween Dumb Cake.” It reads:

“Make according to any good recipe for a plain cake; not a word must be spoken after the work begins; three or four girls beating eggs, measuring, sifting, etc., in perfect silence. When it is poured into the pan, some married lady takes it, and, unobserved, hides in it a ring, a coin, and a button. It is iced thinly and placed in the oven again, after baking, for the icing to brown. When served it is cut into as many pieces as there are guests (unmarried of course). Every branch of the work — secreting the tokens, icing and cutting, must be done in perfect silence. Every slice must be eaten or crumbed in silence until the tokens are found and displayed, when the spell is broken. The finder of the ring will be married first; the coin betokens wealth, while a life of single-blessedness falls to the finder of the button.”

For larger parties, a set menu was sometimes desirable. To this end, Home and Art Magazine offers a “choice bill of fare for a large dancing party.” It includes such autumn favorites as roast turkey and chestnut stuffing.

Menu for a Halloween Party.
Ingalls Home and Art Magazine, 1891.

IN CLOSING

Today, especially in the United States, Halloween is synonymous with costumes and candy. Most of us do not have big country houses in which to hold giant parties. Fear of a lawsuit (and plain old common sense) prevents us from allowing young people to melt lead in our living rooms and city ordinances prohibit us from lighting giant, pagan bonfires in our suburban backyards. However, that does not mean we must forego all Victorian tradition. Some 19^th century games are both safe and inexpensive. For those of you who would like to incorporate a few into your upcoming Halloween party, I hope this article has been useful. For those who would like to recreate the riskier Victorian Halloween games, I leave you with the following 1896 newspaper article as a warning:

“Hallowe’en Caused her Death” from The Canterbury Journal, 1896.
(©2015 British Newspaper Archive)

Sources

Beard, Linda. How to Amuse Yourself and Others. New York: Scribner & Sons, 1893.

Chambers, Robert. Ed. The Book of Days. London: W. R. Chambers, 1832.

Hampson, R. T. Medii Ævi Kalendarium. London: Henry Kent Causton, 1841.

“Halloween at Balmoral” Staffordshire Sentinel. Staffordshire, England. Friday 06 November 1874.

“Hallowe’en Caused Her Death.” Canterbury Journal, Kentish Times and Farmers’ Gazette. Kent, England. Saturday 29 February 1896 ,

Ingalls’ Home and Art Magazine. Vol. IV. Nov. 1890 to Oct. 1891. Lynn, Mass: J. F. Ingalls, 1891.

Leslie, Frank. Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly. Vol. 40. New York: Frank Leslie Publishing, 1895.

Miller, Hugh. Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland. Edinburgh: Adam & Charles Black, 1876.

Father Christmas © Oberholster Venita via Pixabay

Imagine a Christmas with no Christmas tree, no Christmas crackers, no Christmas cards, no traditional Christmas decorations and no time off work!

Many of these Victorian Christmas traditions were introduced to English society by Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert.

Christmas Tree © Prawny via Pixabay

Being from German aristocracy, Albert was used to the custom of bringing a fresh fir tree into the home and decorating it on Christmas Eve, so he had the first victorian Christmas tree brought toWindsor Castle in the 1840s.

The Introduction of Victorian Christmas Decorations

The burning wax candles and decorative Christmas baubles were a focal point of Victorian Christmas decorations and quickly the idea became fashionable in Victorian parlours everywhere.

Santa and his Sleigh © Prawny via Pixabay

Electric lights for Christmas trees were invented by Thomas Edison’s assistant, Edward Johnson, in 1882.

However, they did not become mass-produced and affordable to the general public for many more years.

The Introduction of Victorian Christmas Crackers

In 1846, Thomas J. Smith, a London confectioner, had a great idea for selling more sweets at Christmas.

He wrapped a bon-bon in a twist of coloured paper, added a love note, a paper hat and a banger mechanism which was said to have been inspired by the crackle of a log fire!

This new idea took off, and ironically the bonbons were eventually replaced with a small toy or novelty.

Christmas Cards

The annual tradition of sending Christmas cards came about almost by accident in 1843. Due to prohibitive costs the idea was slow to catch on and it was at least 20 more years before Victorian Christmas cards were commercially mass produced.

The First Christmas Cards

The first Victorian Christmas cards were designed by artist John Callcott Horsley at the suggestion of his influential friend Sir Henry Cole, who was the first director appointed to the Victoria and Albert Museum.

These Christmas cards were a limited edition, produced by Jobbins of Warwick Court in London and printed using a process called lithography.

The outlines then had to be hand-coloured by a professional colourer.

They were sold for a shilling each, which incidentally was far more than the daily wage for many Victorian workers at that time.

The first Victorian Christmas card measured just over 5x3 inches and in the centre was the sketch of a merry family feasting, with two scenes of charity on either side: feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. The single sided card was finished with a printed greeting, “A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to You”.

Mass Production

Other picture makers followed suit but the idea of Christmas cards only really blossomed when Charles Goodall & Son began to mass produce them in 1866. He was a publisher of visiting cards, which were commonly used when a person paid a formal call and left their card as a reminder of their visit.

Goodall expanded this idea to four designs of Christmas cards designed by C.H. Bennett which featured holly, mistletoe and robins with a cheery Christmas greeting. Surprisingly for a Christian event, early Victorian Christmas cards did not feature any religious reference at all.

Cheaper Postage

In 1870, the Royal Mail reduced the cost of postage to a half penny per ounce and cheaper colour lithography was developed to lower printing costs. This heralded the spread of the Victorian Christmas card and by the early 1870s the custom had also become popular in America.

Soon artists, printers, engravers and writers saw the potential and by 1880 they began to be commercially mass produced. One London print firm, S Hildesheimer & Co, ran a competition in 1881 for the most artistic designs.

Many great artists submitted their designs hoping to win a share of the generous prize of five hundred guineas. Poems and flowery greetings were written and the era of the Christmas card finally dawned.

From 1866 to 1895 Marcus Ward & Co monopolized the Christmas card market with their lithographed cards designed by noteworthy artists such as Kate Greenaway, Thomas Crane and his son Walter. They featured cute Victorian figures, snow scenes, cherubs and naked angels in typical Victorian style. Many of these designs have been reproduced in later years and Victorian Christmas cards remain very collectible.

They began to be sold by booksellers and stationery shops in the 1880s and then expanded to tobacconists, toy shops and even drapery shops. However, by 1895 many publishing firms of early Victorian greeting cards were forced out of business in London as more affordable German-produced Christmas cards flooded the market.

Victorian Christmas Card © Oberholster Venita via Pixabay

© Oberholster Venita via Pixabay

Holly, Ivy and Mistletoe

These common plants all produce winter berries and were held to be “magical” long before Victorian times.

Holly © Lum3n via Pixabay

The holly berries were said to repel witchcraft and a berry-laden sprig would be carried into the Victorian house by a male and used to decorate the Christmas pudding.

Mistletoe had pagan origins and in Victorian times it was not allowed in churches.

However, kissing under the mistletoe was popular in Victorian homes.

Mistletoe © Clement BB via Unsplash

After each chaste kiss a white berry had to be removed from the sprig until there were none left - and no more kisses were to be had.

Victorian Christmas Services

Although Christmas songs had been sung by wassailers from the 15th century, it was only at Christmas in Victorian times that they began to be sung in churches.

Christmas Meal © Martin Prieto via Pixabay

Silent Night, for example, was written in Austria and was only translated into English in 1871 when it was added to the Methodist hymnal.

Christmas Day in Victorian Times

Traditionally the Victorian Era Christmas began on Christmas Day when church bells called everyone to church for scripture readings interspersed with carols.

Christmas dinner was a grand family affair for those who could afford it with a goose, chicken or roast beef. Turkey became popular in the late 19th century.

Christmas Pudding © James Petts via Flickr

Christmas pudding was served then crackers were pulled and everyone exchanged gifts before playing parlour games.

And now, a tiny surprise for you.

An Authentic Victorian Christmas Pudding Recipe from the 1880s:

Ingredients
Breadcrumbs (5 cups, real and fresh)
Sultanas, currants and raisins (at least 2 or 3 cups of each)
Grated carrot and apple (to keep the pudding moist and dark)
Golden Syrup (1 cup)
Treacle (1 cup)
Eggs (2 to 6 or more)
Flour (2 cups)
Brown sugar (3/4 cup)
Almonds (1/4 cup)
Pecans (1/4 cup)
Chopped dates (1/2 cup)
Candied Peel (1 1/2 cups)
Grated Nutmeg (1 tsp.)
Suet (1 1/4 cups)
Porter (1/2 to 1 cup of dark, sweet beer - Guinness is fine, or brandy or sweet sherry can be substituted)

Optional: mixed spice, ground ginger, juice of an orange.

Quantities are very vague. The original recipe says: “As much as you need….”

Method
Mix as much as you need of all the above ingredients, plus any others you can think of, into a glutinous mass and keep stirring until your arm almost drops off (the whole family should join in this activity). In the old days a silver threepenny piece (a tiny coin about half the size of a dime) was secretly dropped into the mix. Whoever broke their tooth on this would have good luck all year. Wrap tightly in a double layer of cheesecloth, or place in a covered bowl, and steam for at least 7 - 8 hours. When done, keep in a cool dark place for at least a year to mature, and get this year’s pudding from a catalog.

The pudding should be served smothered in warm brandy and ignited. Notify your local fire department before doing this.

Enjoy))

Decorating our homes with greenery is a Christmas tradition ingrained in our national consciousness. The Christmas tree is, of course, the most well-known, but it is equally hard to imagine Christmas without wreaths, holly and mistletoe. But when and why did such traditions emerge?

It’s a suprisingly difficult question to answer, as Christmas traditions are generally deep-rooted and undocumented. They have also been adapted and changed over time and are riddled with regional differences and personal interpretations. In this article we delve into the history of Christmas greenery to try to find the origins of some much loved traditions.

Wrest Park decorated with greenery for Christmas in 1915, when the house was being used as a hospital during the First World War

© Private Collection

Evergreens

Throughout history decorations in the festive season have strongly centred on the use of evergreens. By the late Middle Ages almost all surviving church records include entries for the purchase of holly and ivy in the winter. For Christians evergreens symbolised eternal life and the promise of the return of life in the spring. We know that private homes would also have been dressed in greenery at this time of year. The 16th-century London historian John Stow found an account from 1444, which explained that in London:

every man’s house and also his parish church was decked with holme, ivie, bayes, and whatever the season of the year afforded to be green.

The carol ‘Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly’ originated in Wales in the 16th century, showing the continued use of holly within Christmas decorations. Other carols of this period also mention ivy and holly as decoration.

In the Victorian period holly and fir garlands were strewn on the mantelpiece. Charles Darwin, writing from his home at Down House in 1877, believed that a scarcity of bees in the spring had resulted in fewer berries on holly that winter. He wrote:

we cannot decorate our Christmas hearths with the scarlet berries of the Holly, because bees were rare during the spring.

Wreaths

In ancient Rome wreaths were used as rewards for military success and excellence. Wreaths made of laurel or olive branches were also used to crown winners of the Olympic Games. Kalends, the New Year festival celebrated by the Romans, included the exchange of wreaths, garlands and other small tokens.

It is believed that Advent wreaths may have been first used by Lutherans in Germany in the 16th century. The first record of this custom, however, is from 1833, when a Lutheran clergyman lit a candle in a wreath every Sunday and told the nativity story. This custom spread to homes and churches and continues today.

During the 19th century wreaths were made to hang on the front door. These wreaths were also known as ‘welcome rings’ and usually consisted of holly, ivy, pine cones and ribbons.

Mr Pickwick kisses a lady under a mistletoe bough in ‘Christmas Eve at Mr Wardle’s’, an illustration by ‘Phiz’ (Hablot Knight Browne) for Charles Dickens’s ‘Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club’, originally published in London, 1836–7

© Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Kissing Boughs

Kissing boughs are a Christmas decoration consisting of two or four crossed hoops forming a spherical shape. They were traditionally decorated with whatever greenery was available. Boughs can measure up to a metre and a half across and are often hung on walls or over doorways as a gesture of goodwill – to welcome guests into the home. It is not certain when kissing boughs were first introduced in England although they are often considered to have been a popular Christmas decoration in the Tudor period.

In the Georgian period kissing boughs were more elaborate, including greenery decorated with apples and oranges, and described as containing ‘bits of coloured ribbons and paper roses’ and other ‘various brightly coloured ornaments’.

Tradition says that gentlemen could pluck a berry from the bough and kiss a lady on the cheek. When there were no more berries, no more kisses could be given. This may be where the tradition of kissing under the mistletoe comes from.

Painting of a young woman cutting mistletoe from the branches of a tree on Christmas Eve, by Jessie MacGregor, around 1820

© Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Mistletoe

Pliny the Elder (AD 23/24–79), the Roman author, described how Druids in Gaul ceremonially harvested mistletoe when they found it growing on oak trees, which they revered. In the 19th century antiquarians interpreted this to mean that these ceremonies had also taken place in Britain and at Christmas time, although Pliny made no mention either of Britain or the season.

The poet Robert Herrick (1591–1674) is the first known source to associate mistletoe with Christmas in his poem Ceremonie upon Candlemas Eve (the day that Christmas greenery was removed) with the lines:

Down with the Rosemary, and so, Down with the Baies, & mistletoe.

What we don’t know is whether the association between Christmas and mistletoe was a 17th-century invention, or if earlier references were just not recorded.

In England, the tradition of kissing under the mistletoe is thought to have been first recorded in the comic-opera Two to One, written in 1784:

When at Christmas in the hall
The men and maids are hopping...
Cry, ‘What good luck has sent ye?’
And kiss beneath the mistletoe.

The Christmas tree at Osborne House in 1873. On Christmas eve that year, Queen Victoria wrote in her journal ‘at 6 we had our tree and presents in the dining room’

© The Royal Collection, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

Christmas Trees

Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s consort, is usually credited with having introduced the Christmas tree into England in 1840. However it was actually ‘good Queen Charlotte’, the German wife of George III, who set up the first known tree at Queen’s Lodge, Windsor, in December 1800.

Christmas trees became very popular with the upper classes, especially for children’s gatherings. Any handy evergreen tree might be uprooted for the purpose and they were usually candle-lit, decorated with trinkets and surrounded by piles of presents.

In December 1840, Prince Albert imported several spruce firs from his native Coburg, in Germany, to serve as Christmas trees. But it was not until a few years later, when periodicals such as the Illustrated London News, Cassell’s Magazine and The Graphic began to depict and describe the royal Christmas trees every year, that the custom of setting up such trees in homes really caught on amongst the general public in England.

Crowds gather in Trafalgar Square for the Christmas countdown in front of the first Christmas tree given to London from the people of Norway, 1947

© National Archives of Norway

By 1860 Christmas trees were very popular with the middle classes. They would have had a Christmas tree in their parlour or hall, covered with candles, sweets, fruit, homemade decorations and small gifts.

Real Christmas trees were still the norm in the early 20th century, but the first bristle-style artificial tree was made by Addis Housewares Company in 1930.

Since 1947, every year Norway has given a large Christmas tree to Great Britain which is displayed in Trafalgar Square, London. During the Second World War, the Norwegian king and government fled to London when their country was occupied. The tree, therefore, is given as a token of gratitude to the people of London for their assistance. This annual tradition shows the great symbolic importance of Christmas trees in Britain today.

Stephen was a son of the lawyer, judge, and philosopher Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, and a first cousin to Virginia Woolf (née Stephen). Both cousins had symptoms of bipolar disorder. Stephen was a member of the Apostles intellectual society. He served a term as President of the Cambridge Union Society in 1880, and he was made a Fellow of King’s College in 1885.

In 1883, Stephen was chosen as the tutor and companion of Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale (nicknamed Eddy), the son of the Prince of Wales, and was expected to help raise the prince’s poor academic standing before he attended Trinity College, Cambridge. Stephen was initially optimistic about tutoring the prince, but by the time the party were to move to Cambridge he had concluded, “I do not think he can possibly derive much benefit from attending lectures at Cambridge ... He hardly knows the meaning of the words to read“.

Some biographers have suggested Stephen had romantic feelings for Albert Victor, but the nature of his relationship with Albert Victor is open to question. In 1972, writer Michael Harrison claimed that a sexual relationship began between tutor and pupil, ending when Prince Eddy was gazetted to the 10th Hussars on 17 June 1885 and resulted in a scandal of which, apparently, little evidence remains.

Accident

Stephen suffered a serious head injury in an accident on 29 December 1886 while staying with Felix Cobbold, at Felixstowe. He suffered a blow to his head and although his physical injuries soon healed, he nevertheless showed signs of psychological injury, exhibiting erratic emotional and mental behaviour. The injury may have exacerbated his bipolar disorder, a condition also affecting his cousin, Virginia Woolf. Separate descriptions of the accident exist. Virginia Woolf’s biographer, Quentin Bell, says that the family tradition was that Stephen was struck in the head by some object from a moving train. Others claim that Stephen was injured when a horse he was riding shied and backed him into the moving vane of a windmill.

While Stephen originally appeared to have made a complete recovery, it was later discovered that his brain had been permanently damaged and his behaviour became increasingly erratic. Bell relates incidents of Stephen plunging the blade from a sword stick into bread; becoming deluded that he was a painter of great genius; rushing about dangerously in a hansom cab; and “’on another occasion he appeared at breakfast and announced, as though it were an amusing incident, that the doctors had told him that he would either die or go completely mad.’”

Stephen became a patient of physician Sir William Gull, but his rapid mental and physical decline saw him drift from one project to the next with little focus or interest – outside of completing two volumes of poetry – before he was finally committed to a mental asylum.

In 1891, Stephen became a published poet under the initials J.K.S. with the collections Lapsus Calami and Quo Musa Tendis both released that year. Rudyard Kipling called him “that genius” and told how he “dealt with Haggard and me in some stanzas which I would have given much to have written myself”. Those stanzas, in which Stephen deplores the state of contemporary writing, appear in his poem ‘To R. K.’:

Will there never come a season
Which shall rid us from the curse
Of a prose which knows no reason
And an unmelodious verse:
When the world shall cease to wonder
At the genius of an Ass,
And a boy’s eccentric blunder
Shall not bring success to pass:

When mankind shall be delivered
From the clash of magazines,
And the inkstand shall be shivered
Into countless smithereens:
When there stands a muzzled stripling,
Mute, beside a muzzled bore:
When the Rudyards cease from Kipling
And the Haggards Ride no more.

“The Last Ride Together (From Her Point of View)” parodies Robert Browning‘s “Last Ride Together”; Lord Byron is parodied in “A Grievance”; and William Wordsworth in “A Sonnet”:

Two voices are there: one is of the deep;
It learns the storm-cloud’s thunderous melody,
Now roars, now murmurs with the changing sea,
Now bird-like pipes, now closes soft in sleep:
And one is of an old half-witted sheep
Which bleats articulate monotony,
And indicates that two and one are three,
That grass is green, lakes damp, and mountains steep:
And, Wordsworth, both are thine.

Stephen also took a satirical and occasionally nostalgic approach to his academic life and colleagues. Stephen wrote a satirical pastiche of Thomas Gray‘s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College“ pillorying Eton for being Tory. Stephen was at Cambridge at the same time as the distinguished antiquarian and writer of ghost stories, M. R. James, and mentions him at the end of a curious Latin celebration of then-current worthies of ‘Coll. Regale’ (King’s College):

We played together in football weather,
And messed together for years:
Now one of them’s wed, and the other’s dead
So long that he’s hardly missed
Save by us, who messed with him years ago:
But we’re all in the old School List.^[18]

A poem which gave him a reputation as a misogynist is “Men and Women,” where he describes two people, a man and a woman, whom he does not know but to whom he takes a violent dislike. The first part, subtitled “In the Backs” (The Backs is a riverside area of Cambridge), concludes

...I do not want to see that girl again:
I did not like her: and I should not mind
If she were done away with, killed, or ploughed.
She did not seem to serve a useful end:
And certainly she was not beautiful.

On 24 November 1891, Stephen’s landlady found him standing naked at the window of his rooms in 18 Trinity Street, Cambridge. He had thrown his possessions into the street and was screaming, convinced that he was facing imminent arrest. His brothers Herbert and Harry came from London and accompanied him to St Andrew’s Hospital, a mental asylum in Northampton, where he was committed.^[3][19] In January 1892, Stephen heard that his erstwhile pupil, the 28-year-old Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, had died of pneumonia at Sandringham, after contracting influenza.

On hearing the news, Stephen refused to eat, and he died 20 days later, aged 32. The cause of death, according to the death certificate, was mania.

Stephen’s outstanding record in the Eton Wall Game has become part of school legend: unverified accounts suggest that in his final year, he held up the whole of the opposing team single handed for five minutes until the rest of College Wall made it to the furrow. Ever after, the King’s Scholars of Eton College have honoured his memory with a toast at the Christmas Sock Supper and other festive occasions – in piam memoriam J.K.S. – “to the pious memory of James Kenneth Stephen”.

Stephen was recalled less honourably in a play by former Eton housemaster and Old Etonian, Angus Graham-Campbell, entitled Sympathy for the Devil. It premiered at the Eton Drama Festival in 1993 and was based on the notion that Stephen could have been Jack the Ripper.

Renewed interest in the 1888 Whitechapel murders had exploded in 1970 when British physician Thomas E. A. Stowell, allegedly working from the papers of Sir William Gull, made the veiled suggestion that Stephen’s former pupil Prince Albert Victor, named only as “S”, was the culprit. In 1972, writer Michael Harrison, working from this sensational theory, had come to the conclusion that “S” was not the prince, but actually Stephen who was committing the murders “out of a twisted desire for revenge” because of the dissolution of an alleged homosexual relationship between the two. Harrison contends that the breakup of the relationship with Eddy, combined with his mental decline, provoked Stephen to act out his own poem “Air: Kaphoozelum”, in which the protagonist kills 10 harlots.

Forensic psychiatrist David Abrahamsen identified Stephen as matching his psychological profile of Jack The Ripper, claiming that Prince Eddy was an accomplice in his crimes and that the two enjoyed a mutually dependent relationship, with Stephen as the dominant partner.

This and similar theories have been dismissed on a number of counts, with some citing that Stephen would have been unable to commit any murders in London and return to Cambridge in time for lectures the following morning.

Harrison had also connected Stephen’s handwriting with the Ripper letters “From Hell” and “Dear Boss”, and that the internal style of some of Stephen’s poems matches some of the anonymous Ripper letters. This connection was rebutted by Thomas J. Mann in an article in the Journal of the World Association of Document Examiners (June 1975) in which Mann determines that only the Lusk letter is likely to be genuine and that the connection between Stephen’s handwriting and that letter was minimal: “The overwhelming evidence is that the two do not match; and if the author of the Lusk letter was indeed Jack the Ripper, then J.K. Stephen was not that man.”

The literary scholar Jane Marcus has suggested that Stephen was the model for the character of Percival in Virginia Woolf’s 1931 novel The Waves.

Stephen was indeed, a tragic figure - and I mention him here not only because of his connection to the Royalty, but because he was once an acquaintance of Montague Druitt - not a close one, mind you, but they met several times. Monty wasn't the part of the Apostles, as his alma mater was not Cambridge, but Oxford, and he was, in my opinion, too careful with his relationships, especially after 1885 Lawrence Adamson scandal.

Nevertheless, their names both became entangled in the Jack the Ripper conspiracies, which, to my mind, is atrocious and very wrong, in its essence,as the dead cannot argue or defend themselves against slander and libel.

That is precisely the reason I don't condone any JTR theories, especially the Royal theory. But I pity Stephen, as noone deserves to die at such young age and that tragically.

Alexander’s life as a young barrister revolved around his links to other men in the profession – his flatmate, his mentor, his clerk, his friends – relationships deliberately cultivated by the Inns of Court. The purpose of the Victorian Inns, in essence professional societies, was not to instruct students in the technicalities of law nor to hone essential legal skills such as oratory but to instil in students the values and attitudes appropriate to British barristers. The Inns promoted these attitudes through a culture of fraternity, encouraging members to take part in dining rituals, socialization in common spaces and volunteer drill corps. Given the societies’ emphasis on sociality, methodologically this chapter departs from traditional works on the professions that examine education, training or formal processes to focus instead on professional culture.² It approaches the legal profession through the lens of cultural history in order to explain why the bar remained a preserve of elite white men long after formal barriers to women and minorities had been cleared away. Its analysis centres on masculinity.³ Unlike most studies, this chapter holds that the bar’s 500-year male-only tenure was not incidental and that the very paradigm of ‘barrister’ was constituted by performances of gentlemanly professionalism. This particular form of masculinity was learned through socialization between junior and senior members of the bar, practised via embodied rituals in the historic spaces of the Inns and necessarily repeated across generations of successive members to reiterate barristers’ elite standing and authority. By uniting analysis of material culture, the built environment and homosociality, this chapter accounts for entrenched and enduring conservatism in the legal profession and suggests a methodology for unpacking similar resistance to change across a range of historical – and contemporary – institutions.

The Inns of Court epitomized a homosocial culture of affective same-sex bonds. An expansive term coined by Eve Sedgwick, ‘homosocial’ leaves room for erotic desire in relationships between men but does not necessarily assert claims of homosexuality.⁴ Historians have deployed Sedgwick’s concept of the homosocial to analyse a variety of same-sex social interactions and institutions, such as public schools and universities, sports teams and gentlemen’s clubs.⁵ These fraternal worlds and activities would have been familiar to many members of the Inns; in fact, the societies would have been one of many homosocial spaces inhabited by law students and barristers.⁶ Like other Victorian homosocial spaces, the Inns were elite, all-male, focused on ceremonies and rituals which touted their ancient origins, and populated by the same cast of characters. But unlike the universities, for instance, whose all-male environs were connected to late adolescence, membership at and participation in the masculine world of the Inns of Court spanned a man’s adult lifetime. Another counterpart to the Inns, gentlemen’s clubs, likewise shared similarities with the societies. Membership at the Inns overlapped with that of London clubland, but clubs strictly removed professional life from fraternization. Whereas clubs prohibited all talk of ‘business’, socialization at the Inns – by design – forged professional solidarity.⁷ Law resembled other gentlemanly professions like politics or medicine that drew men of means. But neither politics nor medicine demanded the same centralized training across the country and empire as did law. To practise as a barrister in England or most of its colonies, one had to spend three years at one of the Inns; in comparison, medical schools abounded. Likewise, women in the nineteenth century made inroads into medicine as nurses and even doctors and achieved some success in local politics. Law excluded women from both the upper and lower branches until parliamentary intervention in 1919.⁸ Before then, as Leslie Howsam’s chapter in this volume shows, women could undertake legal work that did not require formal qualification, but such women were few in number and their positions might hinge on the goodwill of barristers or solicitors inclined to feed them (and take credit for their) work.⁹ Thus the culture of the bar – concentrated, enduring and pertinaciously masculine – stands as an example par excellence of the gendered operations of Victorian professional life.

For the Victorians, the Inns of Court were a multivalent cultural symbol, an impressively ancient but sometimes fusty preserve of Old London. In the 1840s and 1850s, newspapers, guidebooks and fiction by Charles Dickens and other luminaries noted the antiquated infrastructure and decaying grounds of the Inns.¹⁰ These authors characterized the societies as physical manifestations of their ‘shabby genteel’ residents. In reality, the nineteenth-century middle-class exodus to London’s suburbs reduced the number of mildewing residences and their mouldering occupants at the Inns.¹¹ Historians have outlined the growing spatial separation between home and work for middle-class professionals.¹² As part of this trend, chambers that had once been home and office alike increasingly came to be used by barristers as office alone. Middle-class professionals required the spaces they occupied to provide what historian Patrick Joyce terms ‘liberal infrastructure’, the material conditions that created the possibility for these individuals to function as self-disciplining liberal subjects.¹³ As such, mid-nineteenth-century tenants demanded running water and other modern amenities necessary to cultivate professional respectability and the Inns responded by gradually renovating their deteriorating buildings.

Calls for modernization and improvements did not, however, diminish the importance of the past for members of the Victorian Inns. A wide variety of scholars have examined the Victorian fascination with the past as it manifested in everything from literary and artistic movements to capitalist enterprise.¹⁴ For the legal societies, whose privileges stemmed from their ancient roots and the role of precedent in common law, the past legitimized their very existence. Architecture was critical. The Inns of Court cast their environs as remains of Old London, their medieval church and Elizabethan hall as material evidence of their ancient origins. Following their valuation of these buildings, the Inns deliberately shaped the rest of their built environment to reflect this particular lineage. Architectural renovations and new constructions purposely evoked the medieval and the Elizabethan, high points in the societies’ history and extremely popular periods within Victorian culture more broadly.

Furthermore, the Inns’ material environs did not just house but actively contributed to the societies’ affective culture. As theorists Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja insist, not only do people make and remake space, but space in turn shapes its occupants.¹⁵ The Inns’ architectural spaces and embodied practices inducted members of the bar into a resolutely English, masculine sociability. As historians and literary critics argue, whether manifested in the Hellenistic friendships of Oxbridge aesthetes or in the robust comradeship of martial activities, idealized male affect occupied a privileged place in Victorian society.¹⁶ At the Inns, the societies relied on fraternization with older generations, rather than codified rules, to inculcate new members with the priorities of the legal profession. Sara Ahmed and others have explained ‘how emotions become attributes of collectives’, arguing that social groups can deploy affective rhetoric and praxis to mark insiders and outsiders.¹⁷ In letters, diaries and memoirs, barristers defined legal culture as one in which men studied together in the library, chatted in the common room, drilled with the Volunteer Rifle Corps in the garden and, most importantly, dined together in the hall. This latter practice was intended to instil a sense of brotherhood in members by enacting a series of formal rituals of medieval or early modern origin revived or re-emphasized by the Victorian societies.¹⁸

The Inns of Court may have asserted their role as preservers of history, but developments in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries forced the societies to respond and adapt to the growth of the capital and the empire – concurrent cultural shifts – and the ravages of war. An increasing number of men from across the empire came to study at the Inns of Court, bringing with them unfamiliar religious, sumptuary, dietary and cultural needs and practices. Urban development projects, such as Victoria Embankment, disturbed the solitude of the Inns with the noise of construction, trains and traffic. The City remained the preserve of masculine professionals, but the West End, a short walk from the Inns, blossomed into a cosmopolitan pleasure zone. A variety of spaces still offered men the comforts of all- male company, but an increasing number of heterosocial spaces – music and dance halls, theatres and eventually cinemas – helped to change the expectation that men and women would socialize apart.¹⁹ The Boer War brought members of the Inns of Court Rifle Volunteers into active service for the first time, and a decade later the First World War depopulated legal London of young students and barristers. At war’s end, the 1919 Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act opened the legal profession to women for the first time in history.

Unlike most of the historical actors in this volume, then, white male barristers experienced professional precarity not because they were outsiders but because the forces of metropolitan modernity threatened the homogeneity of the bar. In the face of these disruptions, tradition and precedent became more important to legal culture than ever before. Indeed, the trope of the Inns, their occupants and their rituals as a ruin of Old London endured and gained force in the twentieth century, as a new generation of writers figured the Inns as a bastion of continuity with the past. Beginning in the 1890s and peaking just after the First World War, members of the societies published works entirely devoted to the Inns of Court. Drawing on mid-Victorian literary depictions, these works were steeped in nostalgia for a pleasingly deteriorated version of the Inns. Rather than the fragmented and fraught relations between men depicted in modernist literary works, members of the Inns focused their attention on a rosier, more Victorian notion of idealized friendship.²⁰ The books ignored or dismissed male outsiders to this world, particularly colonial subjects. They prized and reaffirmed the value of friendship between men and propagated a culture deeply resistant to women. Given the dissipation of formal barriers to women and minorities at the bar, late-Victorian and interwar members redoubled the emphasis on precedent, adopted a retrospective gaze and wielded historicism as an effective tool for maintaining a conservative status quo within the culture of the legal profession.

In the Victorian metropolis, the Societies of the Inner and Middle Temple were located on the City of London’s western border, just north of the Thames; Lincoln’s Inn and Gray’s Inn lay a short distance north in Holborn. Thus, the Inns of Court were not only among the oldest professional societies in England, but they also occupied some of the most ancient – and by extension, prestigious – real estate in the capital. Law was a particularly metropolitan profession. The concentration of lawyers in London stemmed in part from the centripetal nature of training at the Inns, which required students from across England and the empire to spend three years in the capital. Even after calls to the bar, most lawyers practised in the two square miles surrounding the Inns of Court; they made twice-yearly pilgrimages to serve provincial legal needs via the circuit courts. As a response to overcrowding in the profession, a small but growing number of barristers made a living in larger provincial cities or colonial outposts, but these options were viewed as inferior to practice in legal London. The exception came in the form of law students from the empire, the majority of whom returned to practise in their countries of origin.²¹

By the mid nineteenth century, the buildings and grounds of the Inns included a medieval church, an Elizabethan hall and row upon row of Georgian brown-brick chambers.²² Chambers primarily provided barristers and law students with offices and residences, making the Inns a majority-male enclave. Renting a set of chambers was customary rather than compulsory, but a successful barrister was likely to have chambers at his Inn. Residential chambers housed a dwindling population of barristers and law students, a number of clerks, a few tradesmen, some civil servants and house servants, known as laundresses.²³ Families were not unknown, but residents were overwhelmingly bachelors or widowers. Single women in residence tended to be servants, widows or the daughters of male tenants.²⁴ Chambers at the Inns thus provided the fellowship of other single men unrestrained by the tenets of conventional domesticity.

Throughout the nineteenth century, for a variety of reasons, the Inns experienced a decline in their rental rates. Members increasingly chose to live in purpose-built mansion flats or outside the city centre in growing suburbs like Islington, Kensington or Belgravia.²⁵ By the 1850s, there emerged a new professional practice of sharing chambers between several barristers, it being more ‘convenient and more economical, for two or three to take a set of Chambers’ rather than to each rent their own.²⁶ Such a strategy may have been necessary for members of a profession whose numbers at mid-century exceeded the demand for practitioners. Significantly, the trend of sharing not only chambers but also secretaries, clerks and cases grew to become standard practice for barristers by the twentieth century. As Raymond Cocks argues, practising together presented senior barristers with new means of regulating the conduct of young initiates and gave junior barristers greater impetus for seeking the approval of senior members.²⁷

The Inns’ steady decline in occupants in part came about because of the disastrous state of their buildings at mid-century. The societies’ descriptions of these ‘very wretched’ wooden structures conjured up images closer to the ramshackle housing stock of the city’s poor than the homes and offices of the professional elite.²⁸ Chafing at the attendant discomforts of life at the Inns, mid-century residents complained of bleak conditions. In 1857, for example, a tenant explained that his chambers had become ‘so ruinous and unsafe for habitation’ that three years prior he had removed his ‘furniture and books … to a place of safety’.²⁹ Other members decried the failure of material interventions, such as heating and ventilation, to ensure the uninterrupted mental labour of the middle-class professional. In 1855, George W. Hastings claimed that he had suffered a serious illness from a cold caught in the Middle Temple Library, ‘a cold and draughty room’.³⁰ Men of learning, members charged, could not carry out cognitive tasks in rooms that failed to provide for their basic bodily requirements.

Aware that their buildings were both insalubrious and unappealing to tenants, the societies undertook a great number of renovations and expansions between the 1850s and 1890s. The Victorian societies stressed the modern amenities with which these buildings would be equipped. When the Inner Temple replaced its 1678 hall with a neo-Gothic building in 1870, for example, the society ensured that the structure was fitted with lavatories, gas lighting, hot water, heating and the ‘latest modern appliances’ in the kitchen.³¹ The cost of modern amenities marked wealth and status for the societies and their members. Equally important, these features rationalized the bourgeois interior, allowing for the greater subdivision of spaces according to their function and the removal or rapid elimination of waste and dirt from the body and the home.³²

At the same time, the Victorian societies deliberately chose architectural forms that would reflect the Inns’ importance and the grandeur of their past. The medieval and Elizabethan eras had been high points for the societies, and the Inns embraced historicist architectural styles that represented these moments. In 1842, for example, the Inner and Middle Temples collaborated to restore the Temple Church to a medieval appearance. Originally constructed in the twelfth century, the church had been remodelled by the societies in 1682 to conform to the hybrid classical and baroque style (or English baroque) characteristic of the buildings of Sir Christopher Wren, the royal architect. The trustees of the Victorian Inns rejected English baroque in favour of Gothic Revival, which rose to prominence for the construction of churches in the nineteenth century as it highlighted the long tradition and history of Christianity.³³ In an attempt to realize a perfect medieval ideal, the project’s architect mercilessly removed all traces of Wren from the church.³⁴ He laid a solid-coloured floor, installed new stained-glass windows and commissioned the colourful painting of the walls and ceiling.³⁵ Covered in bright images of the Gospels and elaborate scrollwork, they stood in sharp contrast to the formerly imageless and muted walls. The renovation received glowing praise from the press, which extolled the church’s ‘pristine beauty’, its ‘mystic and quaint devices’. Newspapers wasted no ink mourning the former Wren fittings, instead devoting paragraphs to the restoration’s colours, paintings and stained glass. The Inns, papers contended, had done ‘all lovers of antiquity’ a great service in restoring the church to an ancient appearance ‘unparalleled in modern days’.³⁶

The Inns of Court’s topography significantly shaped members’ activities and the culture of the bar. Parts of the Inns abutted the City of London, for example, but the societies fiercely policed these boundaries. Such enforcement preserved the Inns as a local authority, but physical divisions also reiterated the symbolic distinction between the commercial city and the gentlemanly Inns. Indeed, much of barristers’ professional identity was defined by what a gentlemanly professional was not and did not do. Legal etiquette forbade barristers from engaging in trade, for example, and from working – or even having worked – as a solicitor. Barristers were paid an honorarium, not wages. They did not advertise in newspapers or court briefs from solicitors. Such behaviours were beneath the dignity of the profession, and barristers who engaged in them could be censured or disbarred by the Inns. Some barristers found the line between the permissible and the prohibited unclear. After all, legal etiquette was based on custom and precedent rather than codified rules. It was not written down until the second half of the nineteenth century, and then incompletely so.³⁷ This meant that a student could learn law from reading textbooks, but to learn the rules of the legal profession he absolutely had to socialize with established members of the bar.

A variety of activities forged homosocial relationships at the Inns – informal common-room chats, chess, lawn tennis, the debating and musical societies – but without a doubt members placed the greatest weight on dining in hall. In the mid nineteenth century, the only requirement for students to be called to the bar was to ‘keep term’ by dining in the societies’ halls at least three times each quarter. For some social commentators, this practice was a source of derision, a way of becoming ‘gastronomically-learned in the law’.³⁸ Mid-Victorian barristers, however, defended the dining requirement on professional grounds. Some of the highest-ranking members of the bar, including the vice-chancellor, insisted that ‘dining together not unfrequently [sic] in Hall’ gave students the ‘considerable advantage’ of ‘social intercourse’. Such opportunities were all the more important, he contended, given that ‘Members of the Inns of Court have … ceased to reside in their precincts or vicinity’.³⁹ Dining in commons, legal luminaries argued, allowed students and young barristers to connect with older and more established members of the profession, even if those members had taken residence in some of London’s new suburbs.

Other barristers maintained that dinners functioned as a conversational space for students to reinforce what they had learned from their law books and tutors. William Lloyd Birkbeck, the 1854 Reader on Equity, explained, ‘it is impossible to fix a subject of such extent as Law upon [students’] memory without that sort of repetition which is induced by conversation’. The Middle Temple Treasurer likewise emphasized the importance of association for learning ‘professional conduct’.⁴⁰ In encouraging conversations about law and professional practice, the Inns of Court significantly differed from counterparts like the gentlemen’s clubs of the West End, where such topics were prohibited.⁴¹

In addition to dining in hall, members underscored another great source of pride: joining and drilling with the Inns of Court Volunteer Rifle Corps, or the ‘Devil’s Own’. According to a recruiting pamphlet, the corps had first been formed in 1584 to fight at Tilbury – a suspiciously grand beginning – and over the centuries had traditionally disbanded and reassembled as necessary.⁴² The Victorian corps re-formed in 1859 as part of the then popular Volunteer Movement, and remained in existence until its transformation into an Officers’ Training Corps early in the First World War.⁴³ Less than a year after its re-formation, the Inns of Court Volunteer Rifle Corps had upwards of 260 members.⁴⁴ Featuring patriotic displays of robust masculinity, participation in the corps signalled the vitality of both its members and the nation. The societies supported the corps, allowing them to drill in the gardens and to dine later than usual in hall and providing headquarters and training space at Lincoln’s Inn. They hung Devil’s Own banners from the reign of George III in the societies’ halls, sponsored cups for shooting matches and hosted the corps’ balls and events.

Drilling with the corps, ‘a delightful brotherhood within the brotherhood of lawyers’, reimagined legal fraternity as common physical exertion beyond the boundaries of the Inns.⁴⁵ Though the Volunteers sometimes drilled in the Temple or Lincoln’s Inn, they most frequently gathered at the Deer Park in Richmond, far beyond London’s bounds. William Grantham recorded frequent shooting practices with friends there, and Lord Justice Paul Ogden Lawrence, then a young man at the bar, recalled rowing away from camp with a friend or two to fish and drink beer. Drill could also be an important place to make connections with more advanced members of the profession, especially as ‘distinctions of ranks were not observed’. Lawrence fondly recalled a lunch with the corps: ‘I remember being frightfully thrilled that a Lord Justice … should be handing me (a young law student) potatoes’.⁴⁶ Equally important for promoting this fraternal atmosphere was time spent roughing it in the outdoors. Grantham described a ‘splendid day’ as one in which he had to ‘skirmish through a forest of juniper bushes’ and ended up ‘covered with mud if not with glory’. Yet despite mud and brambles and gruelling twenty-mile marches, almost every diarist or memoirist recorded singing together in the evening, noting favourite songs or vocalists.⁴⁷

When the Second Boer War began in 1899, fewer than fifty members of the Devil’s Own shipped out to South Africa. These men experienced little action and few casualties, but newspaper contributors marked their participation in actual warfare as a significant departure from the past.⁴⁸ Fifteen years later, hundreds of members of the Inns volunteered or were drafted into the Great War. Almost all ‘the young barristers’, explained memoirist Stephen Coleridge, ‘voluntarily joined the fighting forces’ and ‘vacat[ed] their chambers’. He lamented the Temple’s ‘temporary loss of character’ brought about by the ‘intrusion of a crowd of tenants having no connexion with the law, nor any personal distinction’. Coleridge also noted disturbances to the material Inns. The Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve drilled in the gardens, and a gun was mounted to the Victoria Embankment to fire at raiding German planes. At the end of the war, Coleridge was much relieved to find ‘the reverend buildings [returned] to their proper and dignified purposes’.⁴⁹ He imagined the societies as having successfully resisted dramatic changes wrought by the war on almost every other aspect of British life, making them a mainstay of continuity with the past.

The emotional resistance to change evident in Coleridge’s memoir likewise informed much of the literary output from the twentieth-century Inns, as members published works devoted to the societies, nostalgic for fusty Victorian days. These works began to appear as early as the 1890s but were published with increasing frequency after the First World War. Authors most often categorized their works as histories of the Inns, though in reality the books spanned genres, incorporating aspects of antiquarianism, memoir and topographic guidebook. Like tourist guides, histories of legal London highlighted landmarks, legends and literary references of interest to visitors, but they fused this content with authors’ memories of the pre-war Inns, musings on the present-day societies and short pieces of fiction. Unpreoccupied by accuracy or authenticity, the works connected the Inns to eminent political, literary and artistic moments and figures in Britain’s past to claim prestige for the societies. In the face of the broad upheavals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, authors accentuated references and practices that figured the Inns as unchanging homosocial preserves.

Late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century histories of legal London invoked romanticized images of serenity and decay from mid-Victorian literary depictions of the Inns and their environs. Members regularly quoted poems by William Makepeace Thackeray and Tom Taylor – who shared chambers at the Inner Temple – to cast the societies as a homey refuge of fraternity inhabited by impoverished, literary bohemians. An even greater number of these histories referred to Charles Dickens’s description of the Middle Temple’s Fountain Court in Martin Chuzzlewit: ‘Merrily the Fountain leaped and danced.’⁵⁰ Dickens’s animated language lent the Inns a playful, spirited atmosphere. Significantly, authors omitted his more ambivalent references to the societies in his other works, or even those within Martin Chuzzlewit, which described the Inns as lonely, decaying and haunted.⁵¹ By highlighting only select passages, authors capitalized on the cultural cachet of Dickens’s London without sacrificing the picturesque image of the Inns.

Histories of legal London also ignored the modern amenities added to the Inns and conflated Victorian historicist renovations with surviving medieval and Elizabethan architecture. In The Temple (1914), Hugh Bellot imaginatively positioned the painted walls of Temple Church as a backdrop for mysterious medieval legends and secrets, even though its neo-Gothic interior had been created in the 1840s.⁵² Similarly, interwar histories obsessed over the Inns’ Elizabethan moment, a period marked by monarchical favour and a population of fashionable gentlemen dilettantes.⁵³ The Elizabethan period tied the Inns to legends, events and figures that formed part of a British national heritage and identity. Histories of legal London lauded the Elizabethan Inns for their revels, festivals and plays, including the first performance of Twelfth Night.⁵⁴ Connecting Shakespeare to the Inns was one way that authors catapulted the societies from the local to the national, collective British past. Using material artefacts to attach Elizabeth I to the Inns also tied the societies to a national heritage. Many authors declared the benchers’ table in Middle Temple Hall to be made of wood from Drake’s Golden Hinde, referencing a triumph of Elizabethan imperial navigation.⁵⁵ These authors amalgamated archival research and oral or written legend, including in their works stories without historical evidence, so long as their connection to the Inns was long-standing.

Placing new value on longevity and connection with the past, authors linked the Inns’ ancient architectural spaces to the historic practices they housed, especially dining to keep term. While mid-Victorian members emphasized the practicalities of this custom, late-nineteenth- and early- twentieth-century authors defended keeping term as a historic ritual. For Edwardian and interwar members of the Inns, the societies and their rituals represented physical and embodied manifestations of valued pasts.⁵⁶ Histories detailed the Elizabethan features of the Middle Temple Hall, especially the dark wood panelling, elaborately carved screen and double hammer-beam roof, to impress on readers the hall’s great age. At the Middle Temple, authors noted, dinner began with the sounding of a medieval summoning horn. A 1919 article in the Globe proudly described this as ‘London’s oldest custom’. Whether or not this was true, the article substantiated its claim by referencing William George Thorpe’s Middle Temple Table Talk (1895), itself a mixture of archival research and oral legend. According to the Globe, before the start of the meal, an usher in a purple gown knocked twice on the floor with his staff. The seated barristers and students, in black gowns, rose and ‘“dress[ed]” shoulder to shoulder, in military fashion’. The benchers then processed into the hall, led by the bearer of the ceremonial mace. While the other Inns had let such formalities go, the article lauded the Middle Temple for ‘scrupulously’ preserving the Inn’s ancient rituals.⁵⁷

The same historic rituals and traditions that marked insider status for British members of legal London, however, equally denoted outsider status for foreign members of the Inns, a fact glossed over by most interwar authors. As early as 1885, 12 per cent of barristers and an even greater proportion of law students hailed from overseas, and their numbers only grew in the early twentieth century.⁵⁸ To a limited extent, the Inns made concessions to overseas students’ varying sumptuary, dietary, religious or cultural backgrounds. In the 1890s, the Inner Temple agreed to provide more satisfying vegetarian meals for Mohandas Gandhi than the bread, boiled potatoes and cabbage he had been resigned to while dining in hall. The societies permitted foreign students to substitute other ancient languages for the Latin examination. In 1909 the India Office thanked the Middle Temple for their ‘concession in regard to the wearing of Turbans’ rather than wigs for Sikh students called to the bar.⁵⁹

Even with these concessions, overseas students nevertheless faced difficulties at the resolutely English Inns. Gandhi recalled that he and other married students from the subcontinent passed themselves off as bachelors to hide the shame of ‘child marriages’.⁶⁰ While some law students, both English and colonial, claimed that all students intermingled, others maintained that English and colonial students kept apart. When asked by interviewers from the India Office if overseas students participated in the social life of the Inns via activities such as the Hardwicke Debating Society, B. S. Vaidya, an Indian law student at Lincoln’s Inn, replied that they did not. Their primary means of contact with English students was, he claimed, through dining, when they sat together ‘quite freely’. Even so, he admitted, though he went to court and dined in hall, he did not know any barristers ‘personally’.⁶¹

For their part, English memoirists rarely mentioned interactions – let alone friendships – with overseas students. Those who did described overseas students at the Inns as exotic others, not quite unwelcome but decidedly separate. Gilchrist Alexander, for example, noted the diversity of the Middle Temple, populated by ‘English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Colonial and others, with hundreds from India’s coral strands and Afric’s [sic] sunny fountains’. Alexander treated overseas members as a curiosity, recounting their ‘woolly heads’ in rows at the library as he might animals at the zoo.⁶² Few authors noted much socialization between Anglo-British and overseas students, barristers or residents. Some writers contended that while dining in hall men of all backgrounds ate with one another, but self-interest motivated these interactions. Diners in hall were divided into ‘messes’ of four people, and each mess allotted a certain portion of wine. As one author quipped, ‘for this reason a Mohammedan … is welcomed eagerly in any mess, for his unconsumed portion goes to augment the never sufficient allotment of the other members’.⁶³ As histories of legal London made clear, Anglo-British and international students did not dine together to share in cultural exchange. In fact, though foreign cuisine reigned supreme in the nearby restaurants of the West End, with the Inns’ menus of ‘soup or fish, a joint with potatoes and vegetables, apple or gooseberry tart, cheese, bread, and butter’, the cuisine and culture within them remained reassuringly English.⁶⁴

Histories of legal London also contrasted their enduring, all-male professional world with caricatures of new female white-collar employees elsewhere in London. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, women made inroads into the business sector as secretaries and stenographers, but they remained shut out of work at the Inns. Authors like C. P. Hawkes compared ‘the shingled “lady-stenographer” with her long French heels and her wide English simper’ with the ‘Barrister’s clerk, discreet, omniscient, and with an air of well-deserved responsibility’.⁶⁵ Hawkes set stereotypes of the frivolous New Woman against the contained body of the responsible, male clerk. He also reaffirmed existent professional relationships and power dynamics between barristers and barristers’ clerks. A good clerk knew how to win the best cases from solicitors for his barrister. In return he was paid a varying percentage (between 2.5 per cent and 5 per cent) of the barrister’s fees. Thus, the success or failure of a barrister and a barrister’s clerk was mutual. As a result, successive generations of barristers and clerks from the same families often had close ties and working relationships.⁶⁶ Men outside the bar might cultivate professional relationships with women, but histories of legal London celebrated barristers’ perpetuation of a time-tested, thoroughly masculine work environment.

Authors of these histories uniformly ignored the most significant change in women’s professional presence at the societies, the admission of women to the Inns of Court in 1919. Almost none of the histories of legal London written in the 1920s or 1930s acknowledged women barristers and law students at the Inns, despite women’s presence there being highly publicized in the press.⁶⁷ As challenges to both precedent and the Inns’ homosocial culture, women members disrupted the continuous traditions that authors intended their works to convey. Hawkes alone included an ambivalent section on ‘Portia’, in which he pondered whether women could adjust to the ‘masculine religion d’avocat of the English Bar’. For Hawkes, women’s integration into professional life was not impossible, but it required ‘time and mutual understanding’ to ‘solve the difficulties of comradeship of men and women on circuit and in chambers’. Tellingly, Hawkes concluded his section by paraphrasing The Merchant of Venice: ‘Portia may confidently trust that “The four winds blow in renownèd suitors [sic] ” (perhaps not only in the legal sense of the word) “in plenty to her chambers”’.⁶⁸ By invoking a Shakespearean female lawyer, Hawkes reminded readers of the connection between the bard and the Inns, and subtly indicated that women barristers were not entirely unprecedented. His parenthetical interjection about personal rather than professional suitors, however, conveyed his hope that women barristers would find husbands, presumably to carry them safely back to the domestic realm.

Histories of legal London ignored or denigrated women’s presence at the Inns, but letters and diaries reveal that many members of the societies took advantage of the increased facility of interacting with women in their personal if not their professional lives. The Inns of Court Rifle Corps, that brotherhood within a brotherhood, offered a variety of new heterosocial activities that encouraged interactions between men and women. When members of the mid-Victorian corps mentioned women at all, it was usually on those occasions when women materialized to admire men in uniform. In 1860, for example, William Grantham marvelled at his ‘good luck to win a lady’s ticket … to see [the] Volunteer Review’. Sir Paul Ogden Lawrence’s 1878–82 diary mentioned several occasions on which female friends came to Richmond to watch drills on ‘ladies day’. By the end of the century, however, the Volunteer Rifle Corps was sponsoring annual concerts, dinners, balls and, perhaps the most whimsical of heterosocial events, the yearly gymkhana. In addition to regular jumping competitions, this event included horse races forcing riders to dress in drag, collect potatoes or smoke cigars. Certain races required competitors to partner with a lady who would have to draw an animal or guess a whistled tune before the rider could finish the race.⁶⁹ Unlike the solemn volunteer review, at the gymkhana women could laugh at the antics of their male peers or even participate in the comedy themselves.

The most noticeable changes to the Inns of Court came during the Second World War; when members left for the armed forces, the societies had neither funds nor staff to serve dinners in hall and German bombs transformed the Inns from figurative to literal London ruins. After the war, however, the societies gradually re-established their resolutely English, masculine character. Like their Victorian predecessors, the post-war Inns embraced historicist architecture, replacing bombed-out Georgian brick with new brick, neo-Gothic facades with newer neo-Gothic facades. Dining rituals resumed, and English male barristers and law students – temporarily in the minority – became the majority once more.⁷⁰

To this day, women and minorities at the bar are under-represented, particularly among senior counsel and the judiciary.⁷¹ For example, women and men are admitted to the profession in almost equal numbers, but despite improved maternity leave policies and support for flexible working, women are not equally retained. In a 2016 survey by the Bar Standards Board, two out of every five women said they had suffered harassment and discrimination at the bar, though only one in five had reported it, for fear of negative career impact. The survey concluded that, rather than it being an issue with particular policies, it was ‘elements of the culture of the Bar and legal profession more generally’ that created a ‘barrier to the retention of women’.⁷² Some contemporary commentators argue that the gradual increase in the number of women and minority barristers will slowly equalize the imbalances in the profession. This assurance, however, ignores the centuries-old fraternal logics of legal culture that persist and organize professional practice.

R. Pepitone, ‘Brother barristers: masculinity and the culture of the Victorian bar’ in Precarious Professionals: Gender, Identities and Social Change in Modern Britain, ed. H. Egginton and Z. Thomas (London, 2021), pp. 87–105. License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

¹ G. Alexander, Middle Temple to the South Seas (London, 1927); The Temple of the Nineties (London, 1938); and After Court Hours (London, 1950).

² D. Duman, The English and Colonial Bars in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1983); R. Cocks, Foundations of the Modern Bar (London, 1983); History of the Middle Temple, ed. R. O. Havery (Oxford and Portland, Oreg., 2011); W. Joseph Reader, Professional Men: the Rise of the Professional Classes in Nineteenth-Century England (New York, 1966); H. Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880 (London, 1989).

³ For a similar approach to gender discrepancies in the contemporary bar see R. Collier, ‘Fatherhood, gender and the making of professional identity in large law firms: bringing men into the frame’, International Journal of Law in Context, xv (2019), 68–87.

⁴ E. Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985).

⁵ P. Deslandes, Oxbridge Men: British Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience, 1850–1920 (Bloomington, Ind., 2005); E. Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin-de-Siècle (New York, 1990); A. Milne-Smith, London Clubland: a Cultural History of Gender and Class in Late-Victorian Britain (New York, 2011).

⁶ Duman, English and Colonial Bars, p. 24; Alexander, After Court Hours, p. 65; A. Munby, Munby, Man of Two Worlds, ed. D. Hudson (Boston, 1972), p. 10.

⁷ Milne-Smith, London Clubland, p. 13.

⁸ R. Pepitone, ‘Gender, space, and ritual: women barristers, the Inns of Court, and the interwar press’, Journal of Women’s History, xxviii (2016), 60–83.

⁹ See also M. Mossman, ‘“The law as a profession for women”: a century of progress’, Australian Feminist Law Journal, xxx (2009), 138.

¹⁰ C. Dickens, Great Expectations [1860–61] (Oxford, 1993), pp. 340, 311; Martin Chuzzlewit [1842–4] (London, 1966), p. 612; Sketches by Boz Illustrative of Every-Day Life and Every-Day People [1836] (London, 1852), p. 142.

¹¹ Census of Great Britain, 1851; Census of England and Wales, 1881, 1891.

¹² L. Davidoff and C. Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London, 1987); J. Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, Conn., 2007).

¹³ P. Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (New York, 2003).

¹⁴ P. Mandler, The Rise and Fall of the Stately Home (New Haven, Conn., 1997); B. Melman, The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past, 1800–1953 (New York, 2006); Representing the Nation: a Reader, ed. D. Boswell and J. Evans (New York, 1999); M. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (New York, 1981); R. Mitchell, Picturing the Past: English History in Text and Image, 1830–1870 (New York, 2000); P. Readman, ‘The place of the past in English culture c.1890–1914’, Past & Present, clxxxvi (2005), 147–99.

¹⁵ H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge, 1991); E. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: the Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (New York, 1989).

¹⁶ E. Sedgwick, Between Men and Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, Calif., 1990); L. Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, NY, 1994); C. Lane, The Burdens of Intimacy: Psychoanalysis and Victorian Masculinity (Chicago, 1999); Deslandes, Oxbridge Men.

¹⁷ S. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd edn (Edinburgh, 2014), p. 2; L. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, (Durham, N.C., 2011), p.16; S. Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, Mass., 2012), p. 98.

¹⁸ For similar practices in other contexts see E. Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction’, in The Invention of Tradition, ed. E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (New York, 1983), pp. 1–14; D. Cannadine, ‘The context, performance and meaning of ritual: the British monarchy and the “invention of tradition”, c.1820–1977’, in The Invention of Tradition, pp. 101–64.

¹⁹ J. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago, 1992), and Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London (New Haven, Conn., 2012); P. Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1885 (London, 1978); Metropolis, 1890–1940, ed. A. Sutcliffe (Chicago, 1984); L. Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven, Conn., 2000).

²⁰ S. Cole, Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War (Cambridge, 2003).

²¹ Duman, English and Colonial Bars, pp. 1, 85, 122–3.

²² G. Tyack, ‘The rebuilding of the Inns of Court, 1660–1700’, in The Intellectual and Cultural World of the Early Modern Inns of Court, ed. J. E. Archer, E. Goldring and S. Knight (Manchester, 2011), pp. 200–203.

²³ Census of Great Britain, 1851; Census of England and Wales, 1881.

²⁴ G. Alexander, ‘The modern outlook at the bar’, Law Times, 20 Oct. 1950; Census of Great Britain, 1851; Census of England and Wales, 1861, 1871, 1881.

²⁵ W. Whateley, Esq., QC, Inner Temple Treasurer, in Inner Temple Archives, London (hereafter ITA), Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Arrangements in the Inns of Court (London, 1855), p. 47; C. Hamnett and B. Randolph, Cities, Housing and Profits (London, 1988), pp. 17–20; J. White, London in the Nineteenth Century (London, 2007), pp. 77–90. For the British love of semi-detached houses see Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, pp. 357–97; S. Marcus, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (Berkeley, Calif., 1999), pp. 83–134.

²⁶ Duman, English and Colonial Bars, p. 4.

²⁷ Cocks, Foundations of the Modern Bar, p. 9.

²⁸ ITA, Report of the Commissioners, 1855, p. 47; Middle Temple Archives, London (hereafter MTA), MPA 1 1858, fo. 383.

²⁹ MTA, MPA 1 1857, fo. 177.

³⁰ ITA, Report of the Commissioners, 1855, p. 136.

³¹ ‘New hall of the Inner Temple’, Illustrated London News, 12 Feb. 1870.

³² Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, pp. 382–3; J. Flanders, Inside the Victorian Home (New York, 2004), pp. 324–40.

³³ A. Sutcliffe, London: an Architectural History (New Haven, Conn., 2006), pp. 36, 101, 106.

³⁴ W. R. H. Essex and S. Smirke, Illustrations of the Architectural Ornaments and Embellishments and Painted Glass of the Temple Church, London, with an Account of the Recent Restoration of the Church (London, 1845), as quoted in G. Noel, A Portrait of the Inner Temple (Norwich, 2002), p. 81.

³⁵ K. Baedeker, London and Its Environs: Handbook for Travellers (Leipzig, 1911), p. 86.

³⁶ ‘The Temple Church’, Morning Chronicle, 21 Nov. 1842; ‘The Temple Church’, Illustrated London News, 5 Nov. 1842; ‘The Temple Church’, Ipswich Journal, 29 Oct. 1842.

³⁷ C. Shaw, The Inns of Court Calendar (London, 1878); A. V. Dicey, ‘Legal Etiquette’, Fortnightly Review, ii (1867), 175; Duman, English and Colonial Bars, p. 43; R. Cocks, ‘The Middle Temple in the nineteenth century’, in History of the Middle Temple, p. 328.

³⁸ H. Mayhew and J. Binny, The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of London Life (London, 1862), p. 72.

³⁹ ITA, Report of the Commissioners, 1855, p. 9.

⁴⁰ ITA, Report of the Commissioners, 1855, p. 122.

⁴¹ Milne-Smith, London Clubland, p. 13.

⁴² ‘The Inns of Court Volunteers’, Law Journal, 14 Dec. 1895, p. 748; London Metropolitan Archives (hereafter LMA), CLC/527/MS17671, ‘Inns of Court Officers Training Corps’, Press Notices, undated, probably 1915.

⁴³ J. C. Jeaffreson, ‘A book about lawyers’, London Quarterly Review, xxviii (Apr. and July 1867); LMA, CLC/527/MS17631, Notes from Colonel Errington’s Anecdote Book, 1928/9.

⁴⁴ ‘The Volunteers’, Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle, 13 May 1860.

⁴⁵ For the growing emphasis on a more robust masculinity see Deslandes, Oxbridge Men, p. 155; B. Shannon, The Cut of His Coat (Athens, Ohio, 2006), p. 183.

⁴⁶ LMA, CLC/527/MS17651, extracts from the diaries of Sir Paul O. Lawrence, 1878–1882.

⁴⁷ LMA, CLC/527/MS17631, ’Memories of the “Devil’s Own” by W. Valentine Ball O.B.E.’; CLC/527/MS17651, extracts from the diary of W. W. Grantham, later Mr Justice Grantham. Emphasis in original.

⁴⁸ LMA, CLC/527/MS17669, Scrapbooks of Inns of Court Cyclist Section, 1900–1901.

⁴⁹ S. Coleridge, Quiet Hours in the Temple (London, 1924), pp. 101–2.

⁵⁰ Coleridge, Quiet Hours in the Temple, p. 17; C. P. Hawkes, Chambers in the Temple (London, 1930), p. 4; M. Bowen, The Story of the Temple and Its Associations (London, 1928); Colonel R. J. Blackham, Wig and Gown: the Story of the Temple Gray’s and Lincoln’s Inn (London, 1932); H. Ringrose, The Inns of Court: an Historical Description of the Inns of Court and Chancery of England (Oxford, 1909); W. J. Loftie, The Inns of Court and Chancery (Curdridge, 1893); W. M. Freeman, A Pleasant Hour in the Temple (London, 1932); H. Bellot, The Inner and Middle Temple: Legal, Literary and Historic Associations (London, 1902); H. Bellot, The Temple (London, 1914).

⁵¹ Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit, p. 612.

⁵² Bellot, The Temple, p. 38.

⁵³ Bellot, The Temple, p. 28.

⁵⁴ E. A. P. Hart, The Hall of the Inner Temple (London, 1952), p. 8. See also A. Poole, Shakespeare and the Victorians (London, 2004).

⁵⁵ Bellot, The Temple, p. 146; Coleridge, Quiet Hours in the Temple, p. 42; Freeman, A Pleasant Hour in the Temple, p. 10.

⁵⁶ Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction’, in The Invention of Tradition.

⁵⁷ ‘London’s oldest custom: Middle Temple’s ox-horn summons to dinner: romantic relic of 1184’, Globe, 14 June 1919. See also Hawkes, Chambers in the Temple, pp. 145–7.

⁵⁸ Duman, English and Colonial Bars, p. 10.

⁵⁹ MTA, MPA 1, 1909, fo. 8.

⁶⁰ M. Gandhi, An Autobiography (Boston, Mass., 1957), p. 93.

⁶¹ British Library, IOR/Q/10/3/4, 14 July 1921.

⁶² Alexander, Temple of the Nineties, pp. 66, 78.

⁶³ Hawkes, Chambers in the Temple, pp. 146–7.

⁶⁴ Alexander, After Court Hours, p. 73.

⁶⁵ Hawkes, Chambers in the Temple, p. 10.

⁶⁶ C. Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London (New York, 1970), iv, Part 1, p. 38.

⁶⁷ R. Pepitone, ‘Gender, space, and ritual’.

⁶⁸ Hawkes, Chambers in the Temple, p. 74.

⁶⁹ LMA, CLC/527/MS17651, extracts from the diary of W. W. Grantham, later Mr Justice Grantham, 1859–1864; CLC/527/MS17651, extracts from the diaries of Sir Paul O. Lawrence, 1878–1882; CLC/527/MS17783, miscellaneous papers, 1896–1937.

⁷⁰ ‘Restored again after the damage of War’, Illustrated London News, 9 July 1949; B. Abel-Smith and R. Bocking Stevens, Lawyers and the Courts (London, 1967), pp. 247, 315, 358.

⁷¹ R. L. Abel, The Legal Profession in England and Wales (Oxford, 1987), pp. 79–85; ‘A current glance at women in the law’, American Bar Association (Feb. 2013); ‘Trends in the solicitors’ profession: annual statistics report 2012’, Law Society (2013); ‘Statistics’, Bar Council, 2006–10.

⁷² My emphasis. Bar Standards Board, ‘Women at the bar’, pp. 4, 58 <https://www.barstandardsboard.org.uk/media/1773934/women_at_the_bar_-_full_report_-_final_12_07_16.pdf> [accessed 27 Sept. 2018].

Warburg’s tincture was well known in the Victorian era as a medicine for fevers, especially tropical fevers, including malaria. It was considered, by some, to be superior to quinine.

Warburg’s Tincture was a secret, proprietary remedy. The formula was not published until 1875. Later, it was included in the first edition of Martindale: The Extra Pharmacopoeia. Warburg’s Tincture included an array of ingredients, including quinine.

Synonyms

List of alternative names by which Warburg’s Tincture was known or referred to:

• ‘Warburg Tincture’

• ‘The Warburg Tincture’

• ‘Warburg’s Fever Tincture’

• ‘Warburg’s Fever Tincture and Tonic Medicine’

• ‘Warburg Fever Tincture and Tonic Medicine’

• ‘Warburg’s Vegetable Fever Tincture’

• ‘Dr Warburg’s Vegetable Fever Drops’

• ‘Warburg’s Vegetable Fever Drops’

• ‘Dr Warburg’s Tincture’

• ‘Dr Warburg’s Fever Tincture’

• ‘Warburg Drops’

• ‘Warburg’s Drops’

• ‘Warburg’s Fever Drops’

• ‘Dr Warburg’s Fever Drops’

• ‘Dr Warburg’s Drops’

• ‘Tinctura Warburgi’

• ‘Tinctura Warburgii’

• ‘Tinctura antifebrilis Warburgi’

• ‘Tinctura antifebrilis Warburgii’

• ‘Tinctura Antiperiodica’

• ‘Antiperiodica Tincture’

• ‘Warburg’ (informal)

Appearance and format

As its name implies, Warburg’s Tincture was originally available only in liquid form. It was deep brown to golden yellow in colour; its taste was bitter and not very palatable. It was sold in small bottles of unique design, containing about one ounce. The label affixed to each bottle bore the registered trademark, which depicted an image of the bottle accompanied by a facsimile of Carl Warburg’s signature. By 1888 the drug was available in tablet form.

History

Warburg’s Tincture was invented by Dr Carl Warburg in 1834, in British Guiana (now Guyana). It was introduced into Europe in 1839. Warburg’s Tincture received medical trials in British Guiana in the 1830s, and then elsewhere around the world in the 1840s and 1850s. In 1846, Warburg’s Tincture was extensively trialled in Austria and, the following year, it was adopted as an official medicine by the Austrian Empire, by imperial order.

Warburg’s Tincture was sold as a secret, proprietary medicine for over forty years, and was marketed and manufactured by Carl Warburg for many decades. He wanted the British Government to procure the formula of Warburg’s Tincture from him, but such an arrangement never came to fruition. Nevertheless, the British Government was a significant client, procuring Warburg’s Tincture for military forces serving overseas in India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka); in Africa, in Gold Coast (now Ghana), Gambia and Sierra Leone; in the West Indies; and in Cyprus, Corfu, Mauritius and China. In 1867, in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, Sir Robert Anstruther, 5th Baronet asked the Secretary of War why Warburg’s Tincture was not being supplied in larger quantities to troops in India.

Writing in 1870, Carl Warburg lamented that his eponymous drug was “comparatively unknown”. The formula was disclosed by him in November 1875 when it was published on his behalf in The Lancet and The Medical Times. In 1855, it retailed at 6s/6d a bottle.

Famous users

Famous Victorians who are documented to have used Warburg’s Tincture include:

• Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton - explorer and diplomat

• General Charles George Gordon of Khartoum - senior army officer and colonial administrator

• Dr David Livingstone - missionary and explorer

• Dante Gabriel Rossetti - Pre-Raphaelite artist.

• Frederic Shields - artist and illustrator.

Medicinal uses

Medicinal claims

Warburg’s Tincture was promoted by its inventor, Dr Carl Warburg, as a medicine suitable for treating all types of fevers, but especially tropical fevers, including malaria and yellow fever; and that it could also be used as a tonic in debility and convalescence. He claimed that his eponymous tincture was superior to any other antipyretic, including quinine. “I assert that for perfect safety, for efficacy, rapidity of action, and for economy, my tincture has no rival, nor any approach to it”. He also stated that quinine only “relieves”, whereas Warburg’s Tincture “cures”. He advocated that Warburg’s Tincture could be employed at all stages of fever, as well as a prophylactic.

“ [Warburg’s Tincture] is an unfailing remedy in all cases of Intermittent, Continued, Continued-Remittment, Nervous and Typhus Fevers; Cholera, Diarrhoea, and Dysentery; Scrofula in all its forms; Incipient Consumption, Chronic Bronchitic Cough, Want of Appetite, Delirium Tremens, Morbid Digestion, arising from excess in the use of spirituous drinks, Scurvy and every disease of a scorbutic character. “

Official advertisement, 1855

19th century

In the Victorian era Warburg’s Tincture was principally employed in the treatment of tropical fevers, including malaria, yellow fever and typhus. It was therefore an antipyretic, and an antimalarial drug.

20th century

Warburg’s Tincture was vaunted as being superior to quinine in the treatment of malaria by many in the Victorian era. Quinine remained the first-line antimalarial drug of choice until the 1940s, when other drugs replaced it. Until recently Chloroquine was the most widely used antimalarial drug. Warburg’s Tincture was included in Burroughs Wellcome & Company‘s tabloid medicine cases of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

“There is now no exact equivalent of Warburg’s Tincture ....The most similar modern preparation is ammoniated tincture of quinine. This omits aloes and rhubarb, whose function was a laxative to ‘purge’ the patient’s system, an approach to fever treatment now redundant. Ammoniated tincture of quinine last appeared in the British Pharmaceutical Codex of 1963, but still remains an official preparation that could be prepared if necessary....it was popular as an over the counter medicine for colds until c. 1980, but is now rarely used.”

Reputation and efficacy

‘Warburg’s Tincture’ was a well-known drug in the Victorian era. It earned itself a well regarded international reputation in certain quarters of the medical profession, many attesting to its efficacy and value.

One of the most notable and strongest advocates of Warburg’s Tincture was Surgeon-General W. C. Maclean, C.B, (1811–1898), Professor of Military Medicine at the Army Medical School, at Chatham and later at the Royal Victoria Military Hospital, Netley, from 1860 until 1885. Maclean contributed the chapters on malarial fevers and dysentery in A System of Medicine, edited by Sir John Russell Reynolds (the latter being “an eminent and highly influential physician in the Victorian era who held the Presidencies of the Royal College of Physicians of London, and of the British Medical Association“). Maclean considered Warburg’s Tincture to be the best drug for the treatment of malaria and, in his lectures and writings on tropical diseases, he strongly recommended its use.

“ I have treated remittent fevers of every degree of severity contracted in the jungles of the Deccan and the Mysore, at the base of the mountain ranges in India, on the Coromandel Coast, in the pestilential highlands of the northern division of the Madras Presidency, on the malarial rivers of China, and in men brought to [Royal Victoria Military Hospital, Netley] from the swamps of the Gold Coast, and I affirm that I have never seen quinine, when given alone, act in the characteristic of this tincture....I have never seen a single dose of [quinine] given alone, to the extent of nine grains and half, suffice to arrest an exacerbation of remittent fever, much less prevent its recurrence, while nothing is more common than to see the same quantity of the alkaloid in Warburg’s tincture bring about both results. “

Surgeon-General W. C. Maclean, Professor of Military Medicine at the Army Medical School, Netley - The Lancet, 1875

In addition to Surgeon-General Maclean, Warburg’s Tincture was highly praised by many other eminent medical professionals of the Victorian era, including:

• Sir James Johnson M.D. - physician extraordinary to King William IV

• Sir James Clark M.D. - royal physician to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

• Sir William Henry Broadbent, 1st Baronet, M.D. - St Mary’s Hospital, London and London Fever Hospital, Physician in Ordinary to Queen Victoria and King Edward VII. (”Warburg’s Tincture has long held a high reputation in India, as a remedy of undoubted and indeed unequalled power in the treatment of the malignant malarial fevers of that country and of cholera. Testimony to its efficacy has come from men whose capability and opportunities of forming an opinion could not be disputed”, 1877)

• Dr Thomas Southwood Smith - London Fever Hospital, and recognised expert on the treatment of fevers.

• Dr Benjamin Guy Babington - Guy’s Hospital (”I consider it the most potent anti-intermittent medicine I have ever employed”, 1851).

• Dr F. C. Skey - St Bartholomew’s Hospital, and Professor of Surgery to Royal College of Surgeons of England.

• Sir James Gibson, M.D., K.C.B. - Director-General, Army Medical Department, Whitehall, London.

• Sir Andrew Halliday, M.D. - Deputy Inspector General of Military Hospitals.

• Dr Macgrath - Director-General, Army Medical Department, Madras, India.

• Dr Joseph Johann Knolz - head of the civilian medical department of the Austrian Empire

• Dr Rieken - Belgium, physician to Leopold I of Belgium.

• Count E Bylandt M.D. - physician to William II of the Netherlands.

• Dr Salgues - Dijon, France.

• Dr Uyttrhoven - Brussels, Belgium.

Detractors, secret remedy

As a consequence of Warburg’s Tincture being sold as a secret, proprietary remedy, many in the medical profession, particularly in England, derided, distrusted and dismissed it as a ‘patent medicine‘ or ‘quack medicine’, and disliked it and criticised Carl Warburg on grounds of professional ethics.

Status, entries in pharmacopoeia, formulary and other pharmaceutical compendia

• Warburg’s Tincture was adopted by the Austrian empire as an official medicine in 1847; it was added to the Austrian ‘Materia Medica’ under the name ‘Tinctura Warburgi’.

• Warburg’s Tincture appeared in the first edition of Martindale: The Extra Pharmacopoeia (now known as Martindale: The complete drug reference) in 1883, and was included until the 19th edition of 1928.

• Warburg’s Tincture was included in the National Formulary Section of The Dispensatory for the United States of America in the 20th edition in 1918, listed under the entry for ‘Tinctura Antiperiodica’.

• The Pocket Formulary, and synopsis of the British & Foreign pharmacopoeias: comprising standard and approved formulae for the preparation and compounds employed in medical practice London, by Henry Beasley. Included in various editions, e.g. 1851 (fifth edition), 1856, 1877.

• Jahresbericht der Pharmazie, 1910, Munich, Germany.

• Warburg’s Tincture is now obsolete as a medicinal drug. It last appeared in the Martindale: The Extra Pharmacopoeia in 1928.

Properties / formula

The formula of Warburg’s Tincture was disclosed by its inventor in November 1875 when it was published in The Lancet and The Medical Times on his behalf.

Ingredients and directions for preparation

The ingredient list calls for: 4 ounces each of Socotrine aloes, Rhubarb root (East India), Angelica seeds, and Confectio Damocratis (Damocrates’ Confection); 2 ounces each of Helenis root (Elecampane root), Saffron, Fennel seeds, and Prepared chalk; and 1 ounce each of Gentian root, Zedoary root, Cubelis (tailed pepper), Myrrh, Camphor, and boletus laricis (Polyporus officinalis, a fungus).

Finally, the articles states:

The above ingredients to be digested with 500 ounces of proof spirit in a water-bath for 12 hours; then expressed and ten ounces of disulphate of quinine added; the mixture to be replaced in the water-bath till all quinine is dissolved. The liquor, when cool, is to be filtered, and is then fit for use.

Warburg’s Tincture therefore contained quinine in addition to various purgatives, aromatics and carminatives.

The ingredient “Confectio Damocratis” (Damocrates’ Confection) is a complex preparation, sometimes consisting of 46 different ingredients.

The prepared chalk was used to correct the otherwise extremely acrid taste of the tincture.

Dosage

A bottle of Warburg’s Tincture contained about one ounce of liquid. The drug was to be administered in two equal doses, a few hours apart.

References and notes

1. Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, 1913

2. Warburg, Carl (1870, London), Warburg Tincture: Statement proving by numerous official documents its remarkable curative powers in fevers...

3. Maclean, C.B. (November 13, 1875). “PROFESSOR MACLEAN, C.B., ON THE TRUECOMPOSITION AND THERAPEUTIC VALUE OF WARBURG’S TINCTURE”. The Lancet. pp. 716–718. Retrieved August 21, 2024.

4. British Medical Journal, 1957-01-31

5. the dublin quarterly journal of medical science vol xlvii

6. The Lancet, 1851

7. Warburg, Carl (1839, London), Specific for fever, now first introduced into Europe, pamphlet

8. Medical Times, edition, 1851-1-4, pp. 700–702, letter from Carl Warburg

9. archives of joint stock companies, National Archives, Kew.

10. The British Medical Journal, edition 1888-12-01, p. 1232

11. The medico-chirurgical review and journal of medical science, Volume 34, p. 658, 1839

12. Hansard, 1867-5-28

13. Medical Times and Gazette, November 1875

14. official advertisement, 1855

15. Burton, Sir Richard Francis, and Cameron, Verney Lovett (1883) To the Gold Coast for gold; a personal narrative, pp. 231–232, 239.[1]

16. article Burton, Sir Richard Francis, ‘Gold on the Gold Coast’, Journal of the Society of the Arts, edition 1882-6-2.

17. The Times, edition 1878-08-28, letter from Burton, Sir Richard Francis.

18. Burton, Sir Richard Francis, The Lake Regions of Central Africa, pp. 388–389 [2]

19. The Life of Capt. Sir Richard F. Burton

20. The True Life of Capt. Sir Richard F. Burton, Georgiana M. Stisted, p. 395 [3]

21. The Life of Gordon, Vol. 1 (2009) by Boulger, D. C

22. Note by David Livingstone, 1860-11-28

23. British Medical Journal, edition 1861-06-29

24. letter from Rossetti to Frederic Shields, dated 1869-8-27 - The life and letters of Frederic Shields [4].

25. Official advertisement for Warburg’s Tincture, 1855

26. The Medical Times – Pharmaceutical Number, December 1844, pp. 182–184.

27. correspondence from the Museum of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain to Roland Sparkes, December 1998.

28. The Chemist and Druggist, edition 1890-6-14, letter from Sir Sydney Holland

29. Dr Alexander Silver, minutes of meeting of Harveian Society, The British Medical Journal, edition 1868-02-29, p. 206

30. Cantlie, James, Some Tropical Diseases and the Remedies required for their Treatment and Phrophylxis, pp. 23–24, 1908, Royal Society of Medicine [5]

31. Dr William Henry Broadbent, article, The Practitioner, edition February 1877, pp.196–202.

32. obituary, The British Medical Journal, 1898

33. The British Medical Journal, 1899-07-29

34. article by JSG Blair, Army Medical Corps journal, 2005, pp.49–50

35. M.J. Eadi, article, ‘The neurological legacy of John Russell Reynolds(1828–1896)’.[6]

36. ‘Malarial Fevers’ by Dr W. C. Maclean, A System of Medicine, 1866, edited by Sir John Russell Reynolds [7]

37. The Times, edition 1878-9-18, letter from Surgeon-General W.C. Maclean

38. The British Medical Journal, edition 1890-09-18, correspondence

39. advertisement, 1851

40. The Lancet, 1851-04-19

41. Martindale: The Extra Pharmacopoeia – various editions

42. United States Dispensatory 20th Edition, p. 1834, 1918, Joseph P. Remington et al.

43. Brown, M.D., T.E.B. (March 1, 1877). “The Confectio Damocratis”. The Indian Medical Gazette. p. 66. S2CID 27860915.

Further reading

• Owen, William, “Warburg’s Tincture in Indian Fevers”, article, Dublin Journal of Medical Science, 1879. pp. 11–16.

Secondary/tertiary sources

• Wootton, A. (1910), Chronicles of Pharmacy, pp. 206–208.

• Poser, Charles M.; Bruyn, G. W. (1999), An Illustrated History of Malaria, p. 87.

• Sparkes, Roland - article, ‘Dr Carl Warburg, his Belmont laboratory, and his famous fever drug’, 2003/2009

Due to its black colour and easy translation into mourning costume, jet is a material which suffers from mourning connotations, when however it is one of the oldest jewellery constructing materials used and a fashionable material to wear. In actuality, mourning has a very small role to play in jet jewellery when one considers the scale of the industry and contemporary fashions, hence why it’s not a subject I cover often on Art of Mourning. However, it is a fascinating material and it does have a strong role to play if your focus is on 19th century mourning, so an analysis of jet is important for historian and collector.

What is Jet?
Jet is actually a type of brown coal, or fossilised wood of an ancient tree, containing around 12% mineral oil with aluminium, silica and sulphur. The trees which grew to produce this were similar to modern Araucaria trees and date from around 180 million years ago. Upon its death, a tree which fell/was carried to a body of sea water would become broken and waterlogged, then sink to the bottom and remain there to be covered by sediment. As it remained there, it would become compacted by the pressure and over time the wood would convert to jet. Chemical analysis has shown that jet was formed under sea water, however it has been suggested that softer jet was formed under fresh water.

Despite the names of ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ jet, there is not a great difference in density between soft and hard, simply that soft jet is quite brittle and often cracks when heated.

The Romans coined the term ‘black amber’ for jet, as in the 19th century they had considered jet to be a hard resin. Jet conducts static electricity when rubbed on silk or wool and is also light, but under intense magnification, jet shows its origins as a product of wood.

Found in Russia, Germany, Turkey, France, Spain, Portugal, North America and of course, England, various densities of jet were mined and used, however the finest is considered to be from Whitby. Mining jet in Whitby began c.1840 and lasted to 1920, peaking in the 1870s with between two hundred and three hundred miners.

Early History

‘It is black, smooth, light and porous and differs but little from wood in appearance. The fumes of it, burnt, keep serpents at a distance and dispel hysterical affections… A decoction of this stone in wine is curative of toothache…’ – Pliny, Natural History, 1st century AD

Jet’s history dates to the prehistoric, as it was a material used for various artefacts (amulets, shaped as animals, beads, combined with amber, bones, teeth, etc) dating back 10,000 years in the France, Germany, Switzerland regions. More complete pieces have been found from Yorkshire to Scotland from 4500 years ago.

Romans used jet for rings, bracelets, dagger handles, necklaces, hairpins and die and excavations have found workshops dedicated to jet production in York (Eburacum). Pieces of possibly York origin have been found and are on display in Cologne.

In America, Pueblo Indians (around the Utah and Colorado regions) produced jet jewellery, combining it with shell and turquoise, which, in light of the Spanish jet industry, pre-dates the Spanish arrival in the area.

As a popular and reasonably simple material to carve and construct items from, jet never completely disappeared as a usable material. It leant itself well to medieval construction, due to its properties of keeping away evil spirits and ecclesiastical jewellery used jet as a material liberally. By the 14th century, a jet industry emerged in, Schwäbisch Gmünd, Germany. Jet turners and carvers formed separate guilds, producing mostly ecclesiastical jewellery, declining only by the point of the Reformation.

Late History
Despite the lack of a large jet industry in Whitby post-Roman times, jet was known and referenced during the 18th century, but products tended to be mostly crude.

Muller argues that the transition from lighter Regency-era dresses to the heavier crinolines and larger styles of the 1850s and 1860s required larger jewellery to work with them, hence jet’s lightweight appeal and larger size provided to perfect accompaniment. Jet was presented to the public at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and its popularity grew exponentially, facing almost immediate Royal patronage from France, Bavaria and of course, England. Thomas Andrews was the ‘jet ornament manufacturer to HM the Queen’ from 1850, and this would be a most prodigious position to hold, as upon Albert’s death in 1861, Queen Victoria only allowed jet jewellery to be worn at court. Society followed on from court etiquette and mourning fashion and culture swiftly became part of mainstream culture.

By the 1870s, the annual turnover of the Whitby jet industry was said to be over one hundred thousand pounds, with a jet craftsperson earning between three and four pounds a week. From 1832, there were only two shops employing twenty-five people to 1872, where two hundred shops employing fifteen hundred women, men and children, taking over the landscape of Whitby. Development of machinery, such as the lathe, also helped to facilitate the growth of jet production meeting the high public demand for jet pieces. However, demand was so high that soft jet was imported from Spain and France, mainly for beading (as previously mentioned, soft jet tended to crack and many surviving pieces reflect this today), giving the jet trade what was considered to be a ‘bad name’, hence the attempt in 1890 to trademark ‘Whitby’ as a quality of jet. Jet was also seeing great competition in lesser-quality imitations which were far cheaper and by 1936, only five craftsmen were left. By 1958, the last Victorian trained jet carver had passed on.

But was it just the competition of imitation jet that started its decline? The entire mourning industry was in a decline from the mid 1880s – an entire generation of a culture with once fluid fashion changes had been living under the shadow of mainstream mourning culture from 1861, due mostly to a queen perpetually in mourning. By 1887, for Victoria’s golden jubilee, she had started to lessen the mourning restrictions and re-emerge in public, but there was even a cultural shift that had begun with women who lived as the centre of household mourning starting to rebel against the older ways. Style had remained largely consistent with little movement since the 1860s, though women’s clothing had lost the heavier crinolines, bold mourning jewels remained bold and prominent. This female paradigm shift had started to become an outward rebellion, with some women even wearing their veils backwards as an act of defiance. The Art Nouveau movement emerged as a breath of fresh air, with its opulent, organic, styles, using nature as its dominant motif, rather than retroactively mining the past for revival styles. Jet was not conducive to this new art movement and did not adapt. Black stones used as a material following this period in Art Deco were often onyx or glass, which became, and remains, popular to this day.

Use in Mourning Costume
Jet was a wonderful material for use in mourning, obviously for its black nature and how that relates to the 19th century stages of mourning. First mourning lasted one year and a day, outdoor garments for this would be shown by the plainness and amount of crape, jet jewellery was permitted. After one year and a day, Second stage was introduced. This involved less crape and its application to bonnets and dresses became more elaborate. It was frowned upon if this period was entered into too quickly and it lasted nine months in all. The Third stage (or Ordinary stage), introduced after twenty-one months, involves the omission of crape, inclusion of black silk trimmed with jet, black ribbon and embroidery or lace were permitted. Post 1860, soft mauves, violet, pansy, lilac, scabious and heliotrope were acceptable in half mourning. This period lasted three months. The English Woman’s Domestic Magazine stated that ‘many widows never put on their colours again’ and this was quite a statement for the identity of the woman, which was held under the veil of mourning and family symbolism for the rest of her life. Hats, shawls, mantles, gloves, shoes, fans all changed during mid century, and pagoda sleeves from 1850-70 were fashionable, designed to be stitched to the outer sleeve to cover modesty from the lower arm and wrist. Wide skirts from the 1850s-70s, tie back fashions of the late 1870s and the ‘S-bend’ look of the early 1900s all were adapted to mourning fashion, without a clear definition of difference between them. Throughout the post 1880s decline, in the 1890s, women would wear their veils at the back of the head only, showing hair beneath bonnets at the front for first stage mourning. This defiance was quite bold and marked a large turning point for mourning structure.

Use in Jewellery

One thing that is important to note is that jet wasn’t simply a mourning material, which is often a common misconception. It was another jewellery material and quite fashionable, hence giving tokens made from jet doesn’t in any way denote death. Often its black nature and use in early stage mourning gives the impression that it automatically defaults to death. However, brooches from the 1870s, pendants, lockets, trim, beading, necklaces and personalised mementos (such as pins) are quite commonly found as love tokens and items held in high fashion, with only a small percent being used directly for mourning. Jet was also used as a secondary material in many rings, such as jet beading surrounding a ring’s hair memento, creating wonderful embellishments. The ability for jet to be highly polished made it a lustrous and attractive material.

What to Look For
One of the problems with jet come from the multitude of imitations made to replicate it. Once can discover the origins of a jet piece, as it produces a brown streak when rubbed against porcelain, is warm to touch (as it is a poor conductor of heat and a glass imitation would be cold in comparison) and if you heat a needle and put it to a piece, it will give off the faint smell of sulphur. Look for imitations of jet where the piece looks like it’s moulded – jet was carved and couldn’t take the obvious rounded shapes of horn or Vulcanite.

Bakelite vs Jet

Bakelite is worth noting in the series of jet and its imitations, but the use of Bakelite in mourning and sentimental jewels is negligible enough to not worry about it as a direct competitor to jet for collecting.

Developed between 1907 and 1909 by Dr Leo Baekeland, Bakelite is a plastic, consisting of a thermosetting phenol formaldehyde resin, formed from an elimination reaction of phenol with formaldehyde filler. Be sure to test for Bakelite by scratching and receiving a black streak and powder residue. Often the word ‘patent’ is stamped on Bakelite pieces and the hot needle test, which, when applied, will give off the smell of phenol.

Bakelite was widely used in many household and industrial products of the time, becoming a commercial success. It was cheap to produce, strong and easy to mould, making it an ideal material for the commercial demand for home products in the 20th century. Unfortunately, Bakelite did not hold its colour as well as other plastics over time, so its use was abandoned.

Bakelite was used for mourning, memorial and sentimental purposes. During the 1930s and 1940s, there was a brief period where photographs were placed inside Bakelite/Celluloid rings, so it became quite an important material in its own right and shouldn’t be seen as a jet imitation.

The following explores Victorian men’s fashions from the pre-victorian 1830s to the late 1890s. It is sourced from Victorian Costume and Costume Accessories by Anne Buck, published in 1961.

Men’s garments of the Victorian period have survived in far less quantity than women’s. Throughout the period, the dress of men was generally a suit composed of coat, waistcoat and trousers, not always of matching material. A coat or cloak was added for outdoor wear. At any time, two or three variations of each garment would be in general use for each occasion of wear. Then one variety would become dominant, the others continuing for some time as old-fashioned wear, or being relegated to a definite and more limited use.

Victorian Men’s Trouser Pants

Of these garments, trousers are the rarest survivors. Waistcoats survive in quantity, coats are not scarce, but trousers are more rarely found. At the beginning of the period, trousers had just become well-established for general wear and breeches had almost disappeared, except for their survival in court dress and for riding.

1842 Prince Albert coat, brown jacket, yellow vest, check brown trousers

Pantaloons, which were tight-fitting garments reaching the calf or ankle, had been worn since the beginning of the century and were still worn, particularly with evening dress; but narrow trousers, with straps under the instep, were taking their place, and pantaloons were seldom worn after 1850. The straps under the instep also disappeared in the early 1850s.

For most of the period the trousers were narrow, with slight variation of width, but in the late 1850s and early 1860s the “peg-top” trouser, wide at the top of the leg and tapering to the ankle, was a distinctive fashion.

1859 catalog for mens pantaloons

At the beginning of the period, a fall-front was still in use, but the fly front was becoming increasingly used, and was general by 1850.

Knickerbockers, a loose form of breeches, appeared for sport and country wear in the 1860s and continued for this use until the end of the century.

1868 knickers (breeches) and straight trousers

The pantaloons and trousers for evening wear at the beginning of the period were black cloth, and black trousers continued to be the only style for evening wear to the end of the century.

For daytime wear the trousers were usually of a contrasting color to the coat; white, fawn or pale grey in a fine milled cloth were fashionable, and striped, checked and plaid materials for less formal wear. The stout cottons, nankeen and drill, were still used for summer wear, although they were less common after the middle of the century.

The use of one material for coat, trousers and waistcoat appeared in the 1860s, particularly for the informal suit with the lounge jacket.

1876 knickers and long pants

Victorian Suits, Jackets, Coats

The frock coat was the usual coat form for day dress at the beginning of the reign. It was cut with a long waist and a short full skirt. It could be double-breasted or single-breasted. It was the dominant coat form for the 1840s and early 1850s and continued to be worn until the end of the century.

1840 coats -morning coat, cutaway coat, frock coat

During the 1840s, its fastening rose higher, shortening the lapels. The double- notched “M” lapel went out of fashion on frock coats by about 1850.

1861 frock coats

In the 1860s, there was less shaping for the waist, and the sleeves were wider at the shoulder, tapering towards the wrist. The sleeves thus repeated the line of the “peg-top” trousers and showed the same wide shaped form as women’s sleeves of the 1860s.

1871 men’s coats

By 1870 they had lost the shoulder fullness and were less shaped, falling straight to the wrist, where the cuff became more defined, closing with two buttons. The waistline rose in the 1890s and the lapels lengthened.

1876 Frock Coat, The Paradise

Although the frock coat was worn throughout the century, it lost its dominant position in the 1850s, when the morning coat began to replace it. A frock coat, with the skirt cut away in front in a curve from the waist, was worn as a riding coat in the 1830s and 1840s, and this shaping was adapted for a coat which gradually came into use as an alternative to the frock coat.

1857 men’s fashion

A jacket shorter than the frock coat or morning coat appeared by about 1850. Unlike these coats, it had visible pockets. It was a garment of informal wear for country or seaside, and it became general in the 1860s. Like the frock and morning coats, it had a sleeve wide at the shoulder and a straight loose line. It was made in both double-breasted and single-breasted forms.

1868 mens cutaway and frock coats

By the end of the 1860s, this jacket had also become accepted for general daytime wear. A belted form, with the jacket cut full and pleated back and front, was fashionable for country wear and was known as the Norfolk jacket. In the 1880s, the single-breasted forms had rounded fronts, a shaping which continued until the end of the century.

1899 made to measure cutaway suit

The tailcoat, with fronts cut away to waist level, which had been a style for both day and evening wear before 1830, had by the beginning of the reign become mainly a style for evening wear. It still appeared for formal daytime wear in the 1840s, but by 1860 it was an evening style only, and it remained the style of evening dress to the end of the century and beyond. It could be single- or double-breasted.

1840s dancing in a tailcoat

The evening dress form had long lapels revealing much of the waistcoat; the day dress coat, for as long as it was worn, had higher buttoning. The lapels were notched and the double “M” notch continued in the evening coat into the 1860s.

In the 1880s a style with roll collar appeared as an alternative to the separate collar and lapel, the roll collar curving low to reveal a large expanse of shirt front; both styles were worn in the 1890s. Sleeves wide at the top, and tapering to the wrist, also appeared in these coats in the 1860s.

1873 dinner tuxedo jacket

In the 1880s another type of coat appeared for the less formal evening occasions. It had the new roll collar of the tailcoat of this decade, and the short form of the lounge jacket which had been adopted for day wear. By the end of the century it was known as a dinner jacket.

The evening coats were made of fine, milled cloth and from the beginning of the period were usually black or navy blue. Brown, dark green and mulberry color might still appear but, by 1860, a black tailcoats was the universal evening uniform.

1894 evening dress in tailcoats

The frock coats were black, blue, brown or mulberry color, but by far the greater number of surviving examples are black or blue. Most are a finely milled cloth, but they were made in twilled and other cloth.

The lounge jacket had a much wider range of materials, including the lighter worsteds and tweeds. Dark grey was popular during the 1890s for all coats but the evening coat. Velvet collars appeared on dress and frock coats, particularly before i860. A fine cord edging is characteristic of coats from the beginning of the reign to about 1850.

Men’s Victorian Waistcoats / Vests

Most of the color and ornament of men’s dress was concentrated in the waistcoat, a garment which has survived in larger quantities than any other man’s garment of this period.

Most of the color and ornament of men’s dress was concentrated in the waistcoat, a garment which has survived in larger quantities than any other man’s garment of this period. Until the 1860s it showed the fabrics and colors and the woven and printed designs fashionable in the materials of women’s dress.

The tradition of embroidery for waistcoats, much of it now by the amateur, continued. The type of fabric and the degree of ornament depended on the occasion of wearing, but until the 1860s the waistcoat was usually indefinite but harmonizing contrast to coat and trousers, not only in color but in the texture of its material.

Date unknown, probably 1860s

1860s

The higher fastening of coats, particularly the lounge jacket in the 1860s and 1870s, concealed much of the waistcoat, and this and the development of the wearing of coat, waistcoat and trousers of the same material, or coat and waistcoat alike with contrasting trousers, or trousers and waistcoat alike with contrasting coat, meant the eclipse of the waistcoat.

1881 men’s vests

“Fancy” waistcoats were revived in the 1890s, but beside the sure harmony or vivid splendor of the 1840s and 1850s their fancy appears hesitant and characterless.

Many of the waistcoats which survive have been preserved because they were wedding waistcoats. These were often in white or cream figured silk, or white silk embroidered, although many examples have survived as wedding waistcoats which do not follow this fashion. For evening wear, also, the waistcoat was often white, in many different kinds of silk at the beginning of the period, but black evening waistcoats were fashionable in the 1860s and 1870s; only in the 1890s did white marcella or pique become the usual wear, the black waistcoat remaining with the dinner jacket.

1894 white eve vest or fancy design shawl collar vest

In the 1840s, the dress waistcoats of day wear and informal evening wear were in figured silks and satins very like the fabrics of women’s dress at the time. Plain silks and satins were embroidered, usually in a bordering pattern and on the pockets. At the beginning of the period, the liking for bright patterns on a dark background which appeared in women’s aprons, bags and shawls, appeared also in waistcoats, with cross-stitch patterns in brightly colored silks on a black or dark satin ground. Fine white or black twilled wool was also used and embroidered.

1848 waistcoat

In the 1850s, there was an increasing fashion for tartan patterning in silk and velvet and the colors grew brighter in daytime wea. Although examples of dress waistcoats in figured velvets and similar materials survive from all periods up to the last years of the century, there was, after 1860, much less use of silk, particularly for daytime wear, and even when waistcoats did not match the cloth of coat and trousers, they were often in a woollen fabric with pattern limited to a fancy weave in a single colour.

1860 straight bottom waistcoat

The waistcoats of the 1840s often show a pointed, rather long waistline. In the 1850s, the fronts were slightly cut away, a small triangular gap at the center waist.

In the late 1860s, the waistline became shorter and the line at the waist was less pointed and nearer the horizontal. This movement of shortening and straightening at the waist kept in time with the more conspicuously changing line in women’s dress.

The waistcoat lengthened a little in the 1870s and 1880s, but generally kept the horizontal line until the 1890s, when the day waistcoat again showed a small gap at the center waist.

1875 gold brocade waistcoat in the Paradise, 1874

In the 1840s, the single-breasted form was general, although the double-breasted form appeared, particularly in plainer examples for daytime wear. For day wear, double-breasted forms increased in popularity during the 1850s and 1860s. The single-breasted form was more usual for evening wear throughout the period until the last years of the century, and particularly before 1870.

For day wear, both types were worn to the end of the century. There were usually two pockets, sometimes three, until 1870; then three were usual and four occasional. Crescent-shaped pockets on waistcoats are usually a sign of an 1830s or 1840s date.

1891 men’s vests

The neck opening at the beginning of the period often had the collar continuous with the lapel, the opening being wide and deep; during the 1850s, the fastening rose a little higher and there were a larger proportion of waistcoats with a separate collar and lapel, the lapels often being wider and shorter; but the earlier form remained in fashion, particularly for evening wear.

Waistcoats buttoning high, with or without a collar but without lapels, were worn in the 1860s. A deep opening appeared again in the 1870s, mainly in double-breasted styles. In the single-breasted styles, the fastening was higher and the collar and lapels were small, or there might be no collar. A higher fastening was general on all waistcoats in the 1890s except evening waistcoats, on which the opening widened and deepened in the 1880s and 1890s.

At the beginning of the period the back of the waistcoat was usually tightened by tapes threaded through tabs sewn at the back. The tapes might be sewn d1rectly on to the waistcoat back, but this was a survival of the eighteenth-century style, which was going out of use by 1840. Tabs which have metal eyelet holes all fall within the period.

After 1845, ties were being replaced by a strap and buckle, although the older method continued in use for many years. Leather facings were used at the base of the waistcoat fronts in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Darts under the lapels appeared mostly in waistcoats of the 1840s. The back and lining were usually of glazed cotton, but silk was sometimes used for evening waistcoats. Linings of striped cotton appeared in waistcoats for day wear from the 1860s.

At the beginning of the period, and until about 1850, underwaistcoats were sometimes worn, to show at the opening of the waistcoat. These, which were a continued fashion from the 1820s and 1830s, were either collar and lapels only, or a short waistcoat.

Victorian Men’s Shirts

Linen shirts with a high collar and frilled opening were still being worn at the beginning of the period, and the frill remained on evening shirts until about 1850, when it was gradually replaced by a front section of vertical tucking or pleating, the opening being fastened by buttons or studs. This fastening was already used for shirts of day wear from the beginning of the period.

1881 men’s basic shirt

A small frill sometimes remained around the vertical section containing the buttons and buttonholes, which was a decorative feature of shirts in the 1850s and 1860s.

After 1870, shirt fronts became plain. Shirts with decorated fronts sometimes had a back fastening, and some a side fastening.

1882 casual sporty men’s shirts

After 1850, the corners of the shirt, where the seam opened at the base, were rounded. Striped cotton shirts were used for sporting and country wear from the beginning of the period, but not until the last years of the century were colored shirts accepted for formal day wear.

1880 men’s dress shirt

The collar became lower during the 1840s and 1850s, when it began to turn down over the cravat. Detachable collars were worn from this time, and collar and cuffs and shirt front show an increasing stiffness in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Collars with ends high in front were worn in the 1850s, but the collars of the 1860s and 1870s were low. They were now either single or double, the double being used only for daytime wear. The single collars were upright, with a gap at the center front, or with the corners turned down.

After 1880, the collar in all forms grew higher and, for most of the 1890s, was between two and a half and three inches high. This high collar appeared in both men’s and women’s dress in the 1890s.

Shop men’s Victorian shirts

1886 men’s shirts, collars, cravat

Victorian Ties and Suspenders

In the late 1830s, the neckcloth or cravat was still a piece of white muslin, folded into a band, wrapped around the neck in front and brought from back to front again to tie in a great variety of knots. Black silk was becoming increasingly worn for daytime, and also colored silk both plain and figured. A stiffened, made-up band, with or without a bow in front, was also worn. It was then called a stock.

1856 Charles Goodyear stock tie

By the end of the 1840s, white was unusual except for evening wear. After a period in the 1840s when black cravats were fashionable for evening wear, white remained usual for full evening dress for all the rest of the period, whatever the shaping of the cravat or tie. There was a change in the tying of the cravat in the 1840s, when the neckband was made narrow and the bow or knot very large. The cravat was sometimes knotted loosely as a scarf, fitting the opening of the waistcoat and fixed by a pin.

1860s bow ties

By 1860, the collar of the shirt had become much lower and was turning down in front. The cravat was now a narrow band of material, usually less than an inch wide, tied in a small flat bow in front or knotted and fixed by a pin. These very narrow ties are characteristic of the 1850s and 1860s.

The tie now made as a shaped band, narrow in the center for the neck, wider at the ends, was tied in a bow or knot during the 1870s and 1880s.

In the 1890s, when the collar became higher, many varieties of knot and a great variety of materials were used in ties.

1882 men’s neckwear

One of the most decorative accessories of men’s dress during the period was its braces. Braces (suspenders) of canvas, embroidered in colored silks and lined with silk, were fashionable in the 1830s and 1840s. Later they were embroidered in wool. They were made in two separate bands, with leather tabs with buttonholes, one end adjustable with a buckle.

Braces joined at the back appeared N in the second half of the century, but directions for making braces of the earlier pattern still appeared in magazines of the 1860s. “Braces form a necessary adjunct to a gentleman’s wardrobe and they are generally pleased to have them prettily worked” (English- woman’s Domestic Magazine (Patterns, Fashions and Needlework, 1865).

Braces were also made in knitted and crocheted cotton.

1883 suspenders

Men’s Victorian Jewelry & Accessories

“The man of good taste will wear as little jewelry as possible. One handsome signet-ring on the little finger of the left hand, a scarf-pin which is neither large, nor showy, nor too intricate in its design, and a light, rather thin watch-guard with a cross-bar, are all that he ought to wear. But, if he aspires to more than this, he should observe the following rules:—

• Let everything be real and good. False jewelry is not only a practical lie, but an absolute vulgarity, since its use arises from an attempt to appear richer or grander than its wearer is.

• Let it be simple. Elaborate studs, waistcoat-buttons, and wrist-links, are all abominable. The last, particularly, should be as plain as possible, consisting of plain gold ovals, with, at most, the crest engraved upon them. Diamonds and brilliants are quite unsuitable to men, whose jewelry should never be conspicuous. If you happen to possess a single diamond of great value you may wear it on great occasions as a ring, but no more than one ring should ever be worn by a gentleman.

• Let it be distinguished rather by its curiosity than its brilliance. An antique or bit of old jewelry possesses more interest, particularly if you are able to tell its history, than the most splendid production of the goldsmith’s shop.

• Let it harmonize with the colors of your dress.

• Let it have some use. Men should never, like women, wear jewels for mere ornament, whatever may be the fashion of Hungarian noblemen, and deposed Indian rajahs with jackets covered with rubies.

• The precious stones are reserved for ladies, and even our scarf-pins are more suitable without them.

– From The Gentlemen’s Book of Etiquette, 1860

1883 men’s jewelry stick pins, scarf pins, scarf rings, shirt cuff links

Victorian men wore gloves daily. Daytime gloves could be leather or cloth in dark colors – tan, grey, brown that hid dirt and germs. Evening gloves were always white. Gloves were removed while eating, smoking or generally inside. Hats and gloves were usually removed upon entry into a home.

1897 men’s button wrist gloves

Gauntlet gloves were longer cuffed gloves worn for work, driving or winter conditions. Shorter kid leather gloves were daywear types with a button over the wrist. In winter many were lined in fur. There were fur lined or knit mittens as well.

An English writer, ridiculing the whims of Fashion, says:— (quoted 1860)

“To be in the fashion, an Englishman must wear six pairs of gloves in a day:

“In the morning, he must drive his hunting wagon in reindeer gloves.

“In hunting, he must wear gloves of chamois skin.

“To enter London in his tilbury, beaver skin gloves.

“Later in the day, to promenade in Hyde Park, colored kid gloves, dark.

“When he dines out, colored kid gloves, light.

“For the ball-room, white kid gloves.”

1883 men’s gloves

Men’s Coats and Capes

Outdoor coats and capes for men are rather rare survivors. The cloak was still worn for evening, but became less general after the 1860s, although never completely out of fashion. Short cloaks and short-sleeved capes were also worn in the 1850s and 1860s.

One of these which became much used, particularly for the overcoat most generally fashionable throughout the reign was the Chesterfield. This had no waist seam and was straighter and looser than the frock coat.

At the beginning of the period it had slight shaping for the waist, but became straighter after 1860. There were both single- and double-breasted forms and also, after 1850, a style with concealed front fastening. There were also short coats, the lounge jackets of outdoor wear.

1863 mens suits and overcoat (center)

Those of the 1850s and 1860s were distinguished by very large buttons, a characteristic which was borrowed with these jacket forms by women’s dress. Overcoats of the 1860s also showed the wide, shaped sleeve, a characteristic detail of this decade which is found in the dress of both men and women. The raglan sleeve, cut up to the neck on the shoulder, appeared in overcoats in the late 1850s and 1860s and was again fashionable in the late 1890s.

1870s

The short coat of the 1880s and 1890s was the covert coat, which was a short Chesterfield, with concealed front fastenings. A very long, belted overcoat, the Ulster, appeared in the 1870s and was particularly popular as a travelling coat. In the 1890s, it was usually worn with a half-belt at the back only. The full-length coats varied in fashionable length, ending as high as the knee, or as low as mid-calf, until the 1890s, when all coats lengthened to end between calf and ankle. The heavier milled cloths and tweeds were used for these outdoor coats, mainly in black, dark blue, grey and brown shades.

1896 men’s coats

Men’s Victorian Hats

The top hat, with a high, flat-topped crown and narrow brim, was worn throughout the reign. At the beginning of the period, the crown was high, about seven or eight inches, and the sides curved out slightly at the top; the narrow brim curved up slightly at the sides. This hat was worn for all occasions in silk, beaver, felt and straw, in black, fawn, grey or white. A collapsible form was in use for evening wear. A lower-crowned, broader-brimmed style was worn in the country and unfashionably.

Victorian mens hats 1840-1890

During the 1850s, the silk form of the top hat became dominant, and the low-crowned hats were usually of felt or straw. Straight- brimmed straw hats, the sailor shape of the time, appeared for informal summer wear, and a round cloth cap was also worn for sport and in the country.

A new form, the bowler, or round-crowned, hard felt hat, was added to the hats of informal wear in the 1860s. In the 1870s, a hat with dented crown and curving brim, which later, in the 1890s, was given the name of “Trilby”, also appeared in soft felt and straw.

1884 men’s hats

The most popular informal hat of the 1890s was the straw boater, a stiffened straw with flat, round crown and straight brim. A development from the sailor shape of the middle of the century, it entered informal town wear by way of tennis and boating in the 1880s.

1887 straw hats

The deerstalker cap, a cap in tweed with flaps which could be tied over the ears or over the top of the cap, was a country and sporting fashion of the 1880s and 1890s.

There were also a number of variants of the main types of hat, such as a flat-top bowler, a stiff trilby—known as the Homburg—and a tweed helmet, with peaks at the back and front.

1897 men’s hats- tops hats, bowler, trilby, golf cap, yacht cap, homburg, gambler, and straw boaters

The top hat remained tall until the mid-1860s, when its crown lowered to about six inches. In the 1880s, the crown of this hat, and that of the bowler—which was worn with lounge suits— became higher; but in the 1890s, both were lower again.

For all formal wear, with frock coat, morning coat and evening dress, the high hat remained fashionable until the end of the century. For less formal town wear the bowler, usually also black, was the main style. Brown, grey and fawn appeared in the softer felts and, as a sign of summer, in the bowler.

Dark and speckled plaits were used in straw hats, although the natural-colored straw was the more general fashion.

Men’s Shoes & Boots

High boots, reaching just below the knee with a curving top, were known as Hessians, and with a straight plain top as Wellingtons. These still continued in wear for walking, but the shorter half-boot forms were more usual.

1855 tall boot (high boot)

The commonest form of the half-boot was the Blucher, a half-length Wellington, with front lacing. From 1837, boots with elastic gussets at the side were worn, and men also wore boots with leather toes and cloth tops, with side lacing, matching those worn by women.

After 1850, long boots disappeared except for riding. The leather and cloth boots with side lacing also disappeared, but the elastic-sided boot continued to be worn and did not entirely disappear from old-fashioned use until the end of the century.

1855 men’s boots

Button boots, which had appeared in the late 1830s, became fairly common in the 1860s, and they were particularly fashionable in the 1870s and 1880s. The front lacing boots from the late 1860s might have metal hooks instead of holes at the top, to hold the laces.

1898 mens button boots

At the beginning of the period, there were two types of shoe: one the dress shoe, which was a light low-heeled pump with a low front; and the other a shoe with latchets and lacing over the front, which was low-heeled but still suggestive of the style of the eighteenth century.

In the late 1840s, a shoe with lacing up the front appeared. Buttoned shoes came into use with buttoned boots in the 1860s and were worn during the 1870s and 1880s. Boots were, however, still the usual wear until the end of the century.

1855 men’s shoes

Boots and shoes were square-toed and rather long and narrow in shape at the beginning of the reign. They became wider in the 1860s; at the same time the toe rounded a little, and then during the 1880s became pointed. This change of shaping came to the boots and shoes of men and women alike.

1895 lace up men’s boots

Stockings were usually knee-length at the beginning of the period. They were white, black, speckled or striped, and were made of silk, wool or cotton. During the century they grew shorter. Gaiters might be worn in the country in the first half of the period, and short gaiters or spats, which covered the ankle only, were fashionable town wear from the 1870s to the end of the century.

1883 Men’s Socks

Victorian Men’s Sports Clothing

The fashions of men are more influenced by the occasion of wearing, less by the precise moment of time at which they are worn, than women’s. Evening dress preserved the early coat style with square cut-away front to the end of the period and beyond. Riding dress also kept this form until the 1850s.

1863 walking, shooting and traveling suits

The early nineteenth-century coat with curving cut-away, known as the Newmarket coat, was, on the other hand, used first for riding, and then in the 1850s came into use as the morning coat. For riding, trousers of white cord were much worn in the first half of the period; for hunting, breeches continued to be used.

The hunting coat was usually a short frock coat of scarlet cloth, although green was still worn at the beginning of the period. Shooting jackets were, at first, short frock coats, and then the shorter lounge jacket. Both forms are distinguished by a number of visible pockets.

1875 hunting outfit

The Norfolk jacket was also a fashion for shooting in the 1860s and, unlike the lounge jacket, never left the country. For cricket and tennis, short jackets with patch pockets were worn. These jackets, which were often brightly colored and by the 1890s were known as blazers, also remained limited to sporting wear.

1890 sport suits

The habit of smoking also produced its jacket, a loose lounge jacket, usually of velvet or heavy silk, sometimes quilted and trimmed with silk cord. Smoking jackets were worn from the 1850s until the end of the century. A smoking cap was sometimes worn with a smoking jacket; this was a round flat cap, made in the pork-pie shape of velvet, silk or cloth, braided or embroidered and often with a tassel. Illustrations for making and decorating these caps appear frequently in fashion journals of the second half of the century, and the caps, many obviously unworn, survive in quantity.

1887 smoking jacket

A gold and black mourning brooch with a plait of the deceased’s hair under glass.

Victorian mourning jewelry was popular during the late 1800s and was used as a tribute or memento to remind the wearer about their love for the person they had lost.

Death was a regular occurrence in Victorian times, thanks to pervasive diseases like cholera and scarlet fever. For this reason, the loss of a loved one was not a shocking event, but a sad part of everyday life.

The popularity of mourning jewelry reached its peak during the Victorian era (1837-1901). Queen Victoria was deeply in love with her husband, Prince Albert, and when he died in 1861, she fell into a long depression.

A gold mourning ring with black enamel, featuring two coffin-shaped bezels with faintly visible skeletons.

Queen Victoria spent much of the next four decades wearing black crepe dresses and mourning jewelry. She commissioned portraits, memorials, and busts of Prince Albert and other mementos that were reminders of her deceased spouse.

As Queen Victoria set the example for her court and was an admired public figure, wearing mourning jewelry became fashionable. Aristocrats and the wealthy commissioned lockets, bracelets, necklaces, and rings to memorialize their loved ones.

Common materials included jet, onyx, pearls, dark tortoiseshell, black enamel, bog oak, vulcanite, and gutta-percha (natural rubber made from the Southeast Asian tree).

A gold mourning ring featuring a painting on ivory of two women with a funerary urn.

White enamel represented the death of an unmarried female virgin or a child. Children were sometimes remembered with pearls, which represented tears.

Turquoise meant ‘thinking of you’. Richer families set precious stones into the mourning jewelry created for their loved ones.

A mourning pendant with a miniature painting depicting a grieving mourner.

Beyond the usual jewelry materials, mourning jewelry contained some unique things. Hair was used to make everything from exquisitely detailed miniature scenes in jewelry, to braided chains to hold watches and pendants, and even large framed pieces of memorial art.

By the mid-1800s, England was importing 50 tons of hair a year to supplement that of the deceased due to the popularity of memorial jewelry and art.

A gold and black mourning ring with a plait of the deceased’s hair set under glass.

A bit rarer to find in Victorian mourning jewelry, teeth also appear in some pieces – particularly rings. This was far less common than hair, and you rarely see these at auctions or antique stores.

Some pieces contain scraps of cloth or fabric, likely from the deceased’s clothing. Other designs incorporate tintype portraits or miniature paintings of the deceased.

A gold mourning brooch woven with the hair of the deceased and bearing an inscription of the name Julia.

This is common in lockets, where a photo or portrait might occupy one side of the locket and a lock of hair on the other side. Mourning brooches often included a place to keep a lock of hair or a special symbolic design.

Mourning jewelry may seem dreary to our modern sensibilities, but understanding the times when it was worn lends a different perspective. The average lifespan during the Victorian era was 40 to 45 years.

A set of onyx jewelry with gold and pearl depictions of sheaves of wheat.

Europe was in a near constant state of war, and cholera, typhoid, smallpox, and scarlet fever were common killers.

Approximately one in three children died before the age of five, and epidemics sometimes brought that number to one in two.

Simply put, death was a constant companion in the Victorian era. Mourning jewelry brought a little solace to the survivors who had to cope with frequent losses.

A tortoiseshell comb with a gold foliate scroll design.

A gold mourning ring with a ruby and diamond and the initials EF in an Asian-style script.

A bracelet made of brown table-worked hair with gold diamond findings.

Hair mourning locket.

Mourning Brooche.

Mourning ring with an embedded image.

Victorian hair mourning jewelry.

Victorian gold memorial brooch.

A memento mori pendant (circa 1540) found in England paints a vivid picture of mortality. The inscription, however, has a more solacing message: Christ’s resurrection redeems sins. (Photo: GIA).

A pearl and black chalcedony Victorian mourning pin with a floral motif reflects a gentler view of death. Thirty-six natural pearls surround the pin and seed pearls adorn the flower petals and leaves. (Photo: Robert Weldon/GIA).

This Victorian watch fob opens to reveal plaited locks of human hair. The stone on its base is very dark, almost black. These features are typical of mourning jewelry. (Photo: Valerie Power/GIA).

Although not Victorian, this late 18th Century, 18K gold memorial ring from the Georgian period incorporates small pieces of hair under the base of the urn and in the willow tree. The white enamel suggests the deceased was unmarried; the individual died on 19 January 1784 at the age of 51. (Photo: Kevin Schumacher/GIA).

A finely woven hair necklace from the Victorian Era. (Photo: Market Square Jewelers).

A miniature urn dangles from this gold mourning brooch. Photo: Market Square Jewelers).

(Photo credit: Historic New England / Gemological Institute of America (GIA) / Metropolitan Museum of Art / Wikimedia Commons / Victorian Mourning Jewelry: Unique History By Kate Miller-Wilson / The Antique Jewelry Company).

Death in the Victorian Era

Mourning jewelry may seem dreary to our modern sensibilities, but understanding the times when it was worn lends a different perspective. The average lifespan during the Victorian era was 40 to 45 years. Europe was in a near constant state of war, and cholera, typhoid, smallpox, and scarlet fever were common killers. Approximately one in three children died before the age of five, and epidemics sometimes brought that number to one in two.

Simply put, death was a constant companion in the Victorian era. Mourning jewelry brought a little solace to the survivors who had to cope with frequent losses.

Mourning Jewelry Reincarnated

You probably won’t find Victorian era mourning jewelry lining a display case of your local jeweler – though these antique jewelry pieces are prized by collectors and are exhibited in museums. But you’ll probably see skull jewelry in today’s chic boutiques. The imagery used in memento mori jewelry has been resurrected as a hip symbol of rebellion and fearlessness – and probably a subconscious meditation on the inevitable. So mourning jewelry iconography is still with us, but in another incarnation.

These contemporary cufflinks by Deakin & Francis might be a meditation on the grave. But the pavé set diamonds and pink sapphire eyes make them indisputable fashion statements. Courtesy: Deakin & Francis

In the end, perhaps mourning jewelry can be thought of more as an expression of love than of grief. Its purpose was to keep a departed beloved one near to the heart. And that is a sentiment that transcends culture and time.

That males are naturally promiscuous while females are coy and choosy is a widely held belief. Even many scientists—including some biologists, psychologists and anthropologists—tout this notion when interviewed by the media about almost any aspect of male-female differences, including in human beings. In fact, certain human behaviors such as rape, marital infidelity and some forms of domestic abuse have been portrayed as adaptive traits that evolved because males are promiscuous while females are sexually reluctant.

These ideas, which are pervasive in Western culture, also have served as the cornerstone for the evolutionary study of sexual selection, sex differences and sex roles among animals. Only recently have some scientists—fortified with modern data—begun to question their underlying assumptions and the resulting paradigm.

It all comes down to sperm and eggs?

These simple assumptions are based, in part, on the differences in size and presumed energy cost of producing sperm versus eggs—a contrast that we biologists call anisogamy. Charles Darwin was the first to alludeto anisogamy as a possible explanation for male-female differences in sexual behavior.

His brief mention was ultimately expanded by others into the idea that because males produce millions of cheap sperm, they can mate with many different females without incurring a biological cost. Conversely, females produce relatively few “expensive,” nutrient-containing eggs; they should be highly selective and mate only with one “best male.” He, of course, would provide more than enough sperm to fertilize all a female’s eggs.

In 1948, Angus Bateman—a botanist who never again published in this area—was the first to test Darwin’s predictions about sexual selection and male-female sexual behavior. He set up a series of breeding experiments using several inbred strains of fruit flies with different mutations as markers. He placed equal numbers of males and females in laboratory flasks and allowed them to mate for several days. Then he counted their adult offspring, using inherited mutation markers to infer how many individuals each fly had mated with and how much variation there was in mating success.

One of Bateman’s most important conclusions was that male reproductive success—as measured by offspring produced—increases linearly with his number of mates. But female reproductive success peaks after she mates with only one male. Moreover, Bateman alleged this was a near-universal characteristic of all sexually reproducing species.

In 1972, theoretical biologist Robert Trivers highlighted Bateman’s work when he formulated the theory of “parental investment.” He argued that sperm are so cheap (low investment) that males evolved to abandon their mate and indiscriminately seek other females for mating. Female investment is so much greater (expensive eggs) that females guardedly mate monogamously and stay behind to take care of the young.

In other words, females evolved to choose males prudently and mate with only one superior male; males evolved to mate indiscriminately with as many females as possible. Trivers believed that this pattern is true for the great majority of sexual species.

The problem is, modern data simply don’t support most of Bateman’s and Trivers’ predictions and assumptions. But that didn’t stop “Bateman’s Principle” from influencing evolutionary thought for decades.

In reality, it makes little sense to compare the cost of one egg to one sperm. As comparative psychologist Don Dewsbury pointed out, a male produces millions of sperm to fertilize even one egg. The relevant comparison is the cost of millions of sperm versus that of one egg.

In addition, males produce semen which, in most species, contains critical bioactive compounds that presumably are very expensive to produce. As is now also well-documented, sperm production is limited and males can run out of sperm—what researchers term “sperm depletion.”

Consequently, we now know males may allocate more or less sperm to any given female, depending on her age, health or previous mated status. Such differential treatment among preferred and nonpreferred females is a form of male mate choice. In some species, males may even refuse to copulate with certain females. Indeed, male mate choice is now a particularly active field of study.

If sperm were as inexpensive and unlimited as Bateman and Trivers proposed, one would not expect sperm depletion, sperm allocation or male mate choice.

Birds have played a critical role in dispelling the myth that females evolved to mate with a single male. In the 1980s, approximately 90 percent of all songbird species were believed to be “monogamous”—that is, one male and one female mated exclusively with one another and raised their young together. At present, only about 7 percent are classified as monogamous.

Modern molecular techniques that allow for paternity analysis revealed both males and females often mate and produce offspring with multiple partners. That is, they engage in what researchers call “extra-pair copulations” (EPCs) and “extra pair fertilizations” (EPFs).

Because of the assumption that reluctant females mate with only one male, many scientists initially assumed promiscuous males coerced reluctant females into engaging in sexual activity outside their home territory. But behavioral observations quickly determined that females play an active role in searching for nonpair males and soliciting extra-pair copulations.

Rates of EPCs and EPFs vary greatly from species to species, but the superb fairy wren is one socially monogamous bird that provides an extreme example: 95 percent of clutches contain young sired by extra-pair males and 75 percent of young have extra-pair fathers.

This situation is not limited to birds—across the animal kingdom, females frequently mate with multiple males and produce broods with multiple fathers. In fact, Tim Birkhead, a well-known behavioral ecologist, concluded in his 2000 book “Promiscuity: An Evolutionary History of Sperm Competition,” “Generations of reproductive biologists assumed females to be sexually monogamous but it is now clear that this is wrong.”

Ironically, Bateman’s own study demonstrated the idea that female reproductive success peaks after mating with only one male is not correct. When Bateman presented his data, he did so in two different graphs; only one graph (which represented fewer experiments) led to the conclusion that female reproductive success peaks after one mating. The other graph—largely ignored in subsequent treatises—showed that the number of offspring produced by a female increases with the number of males she mates with. That finding runs directly counter to the theory there is no benefit for a “promiscuous” female.

Modern studies have demonstrated this is true in a broad range of species—females that mate with more than one male produce more young.

So if closer observation would have disproved this promiscuous male/sexually coy female myth, in the animal world at least, why didn’t scientists see what was in front of their eyes?

Bateman’s and Trivers’ ideas had their origins in Darwin’s writings, which were greatly influenced by the cultural beliefs of the Victorian era. Victorian social attitudes and science were closely intertwined. The common belief was that males and females were radically different. Moreover, attitudes about Victorian women influenced beliefs about nonhuman females. Males were considered to be active, combative, more variable, and more evolved and complex. Females were deemed to be passive, nurturing; less variable, with arrested development equivalent to that of a child. “True women” were expected to be pure, submissive to men, sexually restrained and uninterested in sex—and this representation was also seamlessly applied to female animals.

Although these ideas may now seem quaint, most scholars of the time embraced them as scientific truths. These stereotypes of men and women survived through the 20th century and influenced research on male-female sexual differences in animal behavior.

Unconscious biases and expectations can influence the questions scientists ask and also their interpretations of data. Behavioral biologist Marcy Lawton and colleagues describe a fascinating example. In 1992, eminent male scientists studying a species of bird wrote an excellent book on the species—but were mystified by the lack of aggression in males. They did report violent and frequent clashes among females, but dismissed their importance. These scientists expected males to be combative and females to be passive—when observations failed to meet their expectations, they were unable to envision alternative possibilities, or realize the potential significance of what they were seeing.

The same likely happened with regard to sexual behavior: Many scientists saw promiscuity in males and coyness in females because that is what they expected to see and what theory—and societal attitudes—told them they should see.

In fairness, prior to the advent of molecular paternity analysis, it was extremely difficult to accurately ascertain how many mates an individual actually had. Likewise, only in modern times has it been possible to accurately measure sperm counts, which led to the realization that sperm competition, sperm allocation and sperm depletion are important phenomena in nature. Thus, these modern techniques also contributed to overturning stereotypes of male and female sexual behavior that had been accepted for more than a century.

Besides the data summarized above, there is the question of whether Bateman’s experiments are replicable. Given that replication is an essential criterion of science, and that Bateman’s ideas became an unquestioned tenet of behavioral and evolutionary science, it is shocking that more than 50 years passed before an attempt to replicate the study was published.

Behavioral ecologist Patricia Gowaty and collaborators had found numerous methodological and statistical problems with Bateman’s experiments; when they reanalyzed his data, they were unable to support his conclusions. Subsequently, they reran Bateman’s critical experiments, using the exact same fly strains and methodology—and couldn’t replicate his results or conclusions.

Counterevidence, evolving social attitudes, recognitions of flaws in the studies that started it all—Bateman’s Principle, with its widely accepted preconception about male-female sexual behavior, is currently undergoing serious scientific debate. The scientific study of sexual behavior may be experiencing a paradigm shift. Facile explanations and assertions about male-female sexual behaviors and roles just don’t hold up.

Zuleyma Tang-Martinez is a Professor Emerita of Biology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis

Until the 19th century, the term ‘ophthalmia’ was used as a blanket term to describe almost any condition affecting the eye. Understanding of the anatomy of the eye was limited, and surgical interventions for eye diseases were still in their infancy. Limited understanding of the causes of eye diseases, particularly bacterial infections, meant that there were few options to cure eye complaints.

Physicians and surgeons therefore relied on accepted general treatments such as the application of leeches and bloodletting, and the use of ointments and other medicinal preparations. An examination of texts dating from 1741 to 1911 offers an insight into what kinds of treatments were being recommended for eye diseases before the discovery of antibiotics. While some of the ingredients are still recognised today as possessing either antibacterial or anti-inflammatory properties, others are now understood to be highly toxic and dangerous substances.

Bleeding

The application of leeches and bleeding was used as a catch-all remedy for many ailments until well into the 19th century. The idea originated from Galen’s theory of the four humours, which proposed that if a person’s humours (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile) became out of balance, they would become ill. Though both Andreas Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica in 1543 and William Harvey’s De Motu Cordis in 1628 challenged the theory, it remained a prominent influence on medical thinking until the 19th century.

For eye diseases, leeches were usually recommended to be applied to the temples or the neck, though occasionally a general bleeding was advised, where a fleam or scarificator would be used to let some blood out.

However, not all medical practitioners agreed on the efficacy of bleeding and the use of leeches to treat eye diseases. In 1866 bleeding was described as ‘most injurious’ by James Dixon, who was consulting surgeon at the Royal London Ophthalmic Hospital. However, in 1895, Douglas Argyll Robertson, an expert in ophthalmology who went on to make numerous significant discoveries in the field, still recommended the use of leeches in his lectures.

Poultices

Poultices are perhaps one of the earliest forms of treatment for general ailments, including those affecting the eye. The most popular recipes usually included bread and milk, and were recommended for many eye infections, particularly styes. The mixtures were usually formed into a paste which would then be applied to the affected area and covered with a bandage.

Early poultices often relied on herbal remedies which had their root in folk medicine. While many had some efficacy, such as plants like eyebright, poppy, and arnica, others would have had no benefit at all. For example, the application of pigeon’s blood, as was recommended in 1741, would likely have done little more than cause further infection.

Poultices were used for a variety of ailments until well into the 20th century and were a popular option for home remedies due to the easy procurement of the ingredients.

Tonics

Tonics were preparations that were designed to be drunk by the patient. While some of the recommended ingredients may not appear out of place in a standard recipe for herbal tea, such as burdock root, liquorice, and chamomile, others were certainly less palatable.

Alcohol formed a base for many tonics. As well as being an excellent solvent, it is also likely it helped unpleasant tasting concoctions go down a little easier. Brandy and wine were commonly used in the preparation of both tonics and poultices. Aqua vitae or ‘spirit of wine’, which was created by repeatedly distilling wine or brandy to produce ethanol, also commonly featured in medicinal preparations.

Purgatives were a standard prescription for many ailments until the advent of the 20th century. Designed to induce vomiting or diarrhoea, it was believed that the patient would expel anything that may be causing their condition. Laxatives were also useful during treatment because the opium-based painkillers used at the time had the well-known side effect of constipation.

Common purgatives included the ingestion of mercury or antimony, which had been used since ancient times to induce vomiting through the use of antimony cups (the tartaric acid in wine reacted with the metal cup and formed tartarised antimony, otherwise known as tartar emetic).

Eye Waters

Medicines of this type were intended to be applied directly to the eyes. Eye waters were usually used to flush out the eyes or lacrimal glands and could be particularly useful if the affliction the patient was suffering caused the eyes to produce pus or crust over. Ingredients such as rose water and chamomile have anti-inflammatory properties which could have helped to soothe swollen and painful eyes.

Other recommended substances were much more caustic. For example, silver nitrate was first used in the 16th century and continued to be used until the late 20th century. The Credé procedure, developed by the German physician Carl Siegmund Franz Credé in 1880, was the practice of washing newborn babies’ eyes with a 2% silver nitrate solution. While highly irritating to the eyes, silver nitrate was at the time the only effective treatment for conjunctivitis caused by untreated chlamydia and gonorrhoea, which could in turn lead to blindness.

Lead acetate was also recommended throughout the 19th century. A soluble crystalline compound, it was in use for centuries as a sweetener and preservative in wines and other foods. Unfortunately, it is also highly toxic, and certainly not something a doctor today would recommend.

Ointment

As medicine became more sophisticated and scientific understanding of chemical compounds progressed, many recipes for topical preparations began to focus on chemical rather than herbal ingredients. Compounds such as potassium alum, copper sulphate, zinc oxide, mercury chloride, and lead acetate were common ingredients for ointments and eye waters from the mid 19th to the early 20th century.

Some of the ingredients recommended during this period may still be found in treatments used today. Even if physicians during the 19th century did not understand exactly why they worked, they recognised that it was effective when treating infections, and understood the substances to be fighting whatever was causing the infection, even if they didn’t yet know that bacteria was to blame.

For example, zinc oxide is recognised for its antibacterial and anti-inflammatory properties and is the active ingredient in many modern antibacterial creams. The same is true of iodine; discovered in 1811, it was used throughout the 19th century as a general antiseptic and is still common today. Some ingredients, however, such as cyanide, arsenic, and mercury, have thankfully fallen out of use.

Conclusion

While many of the ingredients mentioned in medicines from this period may sound nonsensical or even dangerous, it must be remembered that doctors and surgeons were working with the information that was available to them at the time. Until Germ Theory was proven by Louis Pasteur, and eventually popularised by Joseph Lister during the 1860s, there was no understanding of how infections were caused – treatments were based upon observation of what appeared to work and what didn’t, based upon the accumulated knowledge of the previous centuries.

The discovery of penicillin in 1928 by Alexander Flemming was a breakthrough, and antibiotics soon became the standard treatment for bacterial infections. It not only revolutionised post-operative care, but also provided an effective first course of treatment that likely prevented many patients from having to undergo eye surgery at all.

Sources

• Charles de Saint-Yves, Treatise of the diseases of the eyes containing proper remedies and describing the chirurgical operations requisite for their cures…structure of the eye …organ of vision. By M. de St. Yves…with the author’s answer to M. Mouchard. Translated from the original French by J. Stockton. 1741

• Alexander Turnbull, A treatise on painful and nervous diseases and on a new mode of treatment for diseases of the eye and ear. 3rd ed. 1837

• Frederick Tyrrell, A Practical work on the diseases of the eye, and their treatment, medically, topically, and by operation. Volume 1. 1840

• Squire Littell, A Manual of the diseases of the eye or treatise on ophthalmology. 1846

• James Dixon, A guide to the practical study of diseases of the eye; with an outline of their medical and operative treatment. Third edition. 1866

• George Lawson, Diseases and injuries of the eye ; their medical and surgical treatment. 3rd ed. 1877

• Curt Adam, Handbook of treatment for diseases of the eye (ophthalmic therapeutics). 1911

• The Physician. No. V. On Poultices, The Belfast Magazine and Literary Journal, Vol. 1, No. 6 (Jul., 1825), pp. 567-570

• https://www.civilwarmed.org/story-of-iodine/

Have you ever heard of a surgery that had a 300% mortality rate? You probably haven’t because it has only happened once. Let’s hope no one manages to beat that. Robert Liston was known for this surgery, among other things.

He was successful in some areas, and his speed caused careless mistakes in others. Despite how his fellow surgeons felt about his surgical preferences, he was a surgeon, an inventor, and a trailblazer in his time.

With his success came a personality full of bravado and, some may say, overconfidence.

He deeply cared about his patients and was not afraid to fight his fellow surgeons if he caught wind of them misbehaving. Robert Liston was also like the real-life Derek Shepherd from Grey’s Anatomy.

He took on cases that other Doctors deemed too severe. He wasn’t afraid of lost causes.

In this article, you’ll learn about how Robert Liston was ahead of his time and how there are still risks, no matter how excellent or brilliant a surgeon is.

Robert Liston’s Impressive Speed

He was known as “the fastest knife on West End,” and his surgical time was impressive. A fast surgeon might have high mortality rates, you would think.

Despite a handful of devastating accidents during surgery, he only lost one out of ten patients. At the time, this was groundbreaking. Most surgeons lost one in four on average.

Robert Liston performed amputations rapidly, which, at the time, was the best option. The reason he had to operate with lightning speed is because it reduced the amount of pain the patient felt. It also reduced the risk of shock and blood loss.

He could do amputations in under three minutes. At one point, he did the amputation in under 30 seconds! He proudly asked his audience during the surgery to “time him.” The bravado would soon cause some horrific mistakes to occur.

One incredible instance of his speed and accuracy was when he removed an impressive-sized tumor in under five minutes. It was a 45-pound scrotal tumor. The patient had to use a wheelbarrow to carry it. The weight of that tumor was like picking up a five-gallon jug of water.

Another notable tumor removal was Maryann Griffiths.

She had a disfigured face due to the impressive size of the tumor and its being located on the superior maxillary bone. It took under 8 minutes to remove the tumor. At the time, this was a significant triumph for the 1800s.

The Freak Accident That Resulted In A 300% Mortality Rate

Robert Liston’s fixation on speed is what caused his most infamous surgery to take place. In Liston’s day, an assistant was required to hold the leg still during amputation. After the patient was prepped, the assistant held the leg.

Robert Liston immediately raised his hand with a scalpel and, in one quick motion, sliced his assistant’s fingers clean off and brushed a bystander while raising his blade again. The bystander’s coat was cut, but not his skin.

Regardless of not enduring an injury, he died from “fright.” Which meant shock was his cause of death. He dropped dead on the spot. Both the patient and Liston’s assistant died following the surgery due to hospital gangrene.

It was a common problem in the 1800s. That is how Robert Liston’s surgery is known for the highest mortality rate a surgeon ever had. Three lives equals a 300% fatality rate. Luckily, his talent and reputation persevered despite this devastating mistake.

Other Crazy Mishaps During Dr. Liston’s Career

While speed was essential in the 1800s, it caused Liston to harm one patient and even kill one by mistake.

During one surgery, he was being timed by the crowd, and in his haste to beat the clock, he accidentally severed the patient’s leg and testicles. Remember, the patient was awake for this surgery.

The next patient was a sad case. He got into an argument about a young boy. Robert Liston saw a lump on the boy’s neck and decided to remove it.

He thought it was a type of skin tumor. Liston questioned if anyone had seen an aneurysm in someone so young.

However, it was an aneurysm in the carotid artery. The young boy quickly bled to death. With all his successes, it’s no surprise his confidence is legendary.

However, this is an example of when self-doubt could have saved a child’s life.

Robert Liston Vs. Robert Knox

Knox paid for murdered people’s bodies and used them for dissections for medical students. He knowingly bought murder victims from the famous Burke and Hare killers. Knox was fond of a victim’s body, whose name was Mary Paterson.

They brought her to him for payment while her body was still warm. When Knox asked how she died, they claimed it was whiskey. Her cause of death, however, was suffocation.

She was a poor, beautiful woman, and her life was taking a turn for the better before she was suffocated by Burke and Hare.

Robert Knox bought the body, but instead of using it to practice medicine, he preserved her in whiskey and had artists draw pictures of her. She was posed in a voyeuristic way.

Knox was proud of himself for having Mary’s remains and kept her body for three months. Something unexpected happened when he went to brag about it to Robert Liston. Robert Liston punched Knox to the floor and retrieved the body.

His reason? He wanted to give her a proper burial. This is believable because Liston was a caring man who would not stand for the vulgarity or cruelty of anyone’s actions.

However, conflicting evidence supports another scenario of Knox preserving the body for three months and then dissecting it for medical purposes. What do you think happened?

What Made Robert Liston Different From Other Surgeons?

One notable difference between Robert Liston and other surgeons was his obsession with cleanliness. At the time, it wasn’t uncommon for a doctor to be covered in blood from one surgery and immediately go to the next.

At this time, no one knew about germs and how they spread. Surgical instruments were rarely cleaned.

Liston not only cleaned his tools but washed his hands frequently. He even wore clean clothes to each surgery. Undoubtedly, this was a massive reason his mortality rates were lower than the average. Not counting the famous 300% mortality rate surgery, of course.

He saved more lives than he cost. Another reason he was different was he knew the importance of surgery but understood that sometimes it’s best not to cut. In the 1800s, they would amputate your leg if it was broken. By using splints, he prevents amputations for femur fractures.

Liston was also the first Doctor in Europe to operate using anesthesia. The anesthesia was known as ether, a muscle relaxant with a long induction period. It was also highly flammable.

He was always compassionate about the level of pain his patients felt. At the time, some surgeons believed that the more pain a patient felt, the better they recovered.

Liston rejected this idea, along with the use of hypnotism for pain management. Given his interest in patient care, it’s no surprise he would be among the first to apply ether to his operations.

Inventions That Are Still Used Today

A notable creation was the Long Liston splint. While other splints existed at the time, his splint was a more innovative way to immobilize femur fractures. The hope was that doing it this way would reduce the chances of the limb shortening over time.

It involved a board from the side of the chest past the foot with intricate wrapping. It was made with easily accessible materials. Although Thomas’ traction splint was preferred, the Long Liston splint was essential during WWI due to the lack of equipment.

His splint was in several medical books for first aid up until the 1980s. There are some who, to this day, urge for the Long Liston to be included again in first aid books. This would benefit more rural areas.

He also invented a double-edged knife for amputations. It was steel with a nickel-plated handle. This was essential for preventing rust when boiling the tool.

The tool was so successful it’s still used for amputations. Jack the Ripper was fond of the Liston knife, and it was his weapon of choice for his victims.

Conclusion

While Robert Liston undoubtedly made some serious and even tragic mistakes during his career, it’s essential to recognize that he was an incredible surgeon in his day.

Yes, the freak accident that led to a 300% mortality rate in one surgery will forever be remembered as a dark mark on his record. But let’s remember that Liston’s talent and reputation persevered despite this devastating mistake.

Liston’s boldness and speedy approach sometimes led to unfortunate outcomes. But it’s also worth noting that his confidence and skill were legendary, and he had numerous successful surgeries under his name.

So, while his mistakes cannot be disregarded, it’s important to remember that he was a product of his time. He embodies the complexity of the medical field in the 1800s with a mixture of incredible skill and unfortunate blunders.

Despite his flaws, Liston’s legacy lies in his contributions to medical history and his undeniable talent. And in the end, it’s fair to say that he did more good than harm.

Sources

https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-66830590R-bk

https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co165484/liston-type-amputation-knife-london-england-1920-1930-amputation-knife

https://museumofhealthcare.blog/the-story-of-robert-liston-and-his-surgical-skill/embed/#?secret=iBFLBhhaKR#?secret=TIYcW7lCPD

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8083913/

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.33151/ajp.7.1.150

The Golden Age of children’s literature happened during the Victorian era. They focused on lessons and morals to teach children, ensuring Susie would grow up to be a well-mannered lady and John would be a proper English gentleman. But the device they used to tell these stories and morals were mythical creatures. Elves, goblins, and brownies were prominent figures in Victorian children’s stories and played a significant part in creating these novels.

These mythical creatures have a lot of powers and can create chaos from nothing. All children, no matter their century of existence, can create chaos. They experiment with boundaries, ask questions, and push back on rules. Dr. Dena Attar, author of “Why Do So Many Children’s Stories Feature Magical Creatures,” said, “They can act out the fiercest, most anarchic feelings and desires on behalf of a character, a reader or a listener, without endangering the child’s world. They can be counterparts of the invisible friends some children invent, who break things and scribble on walls, leaving the children themselves blameless.” Children can live vicariously through these creatures and see the consequences of doing these naughty things. Telling engaging and exciting stories with morals and lessons is more interesting than just saying it outright. It gives them a memorable example to remember when they encounter a situation requiring it.

One of the most mischievous creatures is the elf. While they are generally seen as pesky troublemakers, they can be helpful when they want to be. They prefer the forests and natural settings to call home. They tend to be synonymous with faeries, but they aren’t the same. Faeries are more graceful, having wings, and are generally female, while elves are typically male. There are some instances where female elves are present, but they come in the way of ballads, exciting stories told in poems or songs. Some mythologies say they’re human-sized, but English mythology says they’re tiny. Because of their impish behavior, some inconveniences were blamed on elves. Elf locks were the tangles in your hair caused by an elf messing with it. Elf stroke was some kind of paralysis, possibly sleep paralysis where you’re awake but can’t move. Elf shot was what caused maladies in people and animals.

Goblins are considered more malevolent elves. They range from dwarf height to average human height. A group of male goblins is called a “horde,” but a group of female goblins is called a “hag” or “crone.” While bigger than elves, they are frequently invisible to humans, keeping themselves out of sight and hiding their spiteful deeds. The New World Encyclopedia says that “Many scholars believe that such creatures came out of an interest in Paganism and its mysticism, especially the belief in nature spirits and magic. Goblins could possibly come from the belief that, along with virtuous pagans, there were evil ones that became evil spirits.” One of the most well-known stories involving goblins is Christina Rossetti’s poem “Goblin Market.” These goblins are visible to humans and try to seduce women and young girls to come and eat their delicious fruits, exclusive to the goblins’ market. Of course, the fruit isn’t just the most delicious ever tasted, but it creates an all-consuming need for more with dire consequences.

Brownies (also house elves) are domestic spirits from Scottish folklore. They come out at night and clean the “owners’” house, performing chores and tasks out of sight. Owners are to leave out offerings of milk and food as recognition for their work; however, owners are never to talk to or about the brownies in their house, lest it offend the brownie and it leaves. Giving them anything other than the typical food and milk will offend and anger the brownie.

In the last half of the Victorian era, Palmer Cox was a very well-known illustrator and wrote several books on brownies. His illustrations are some of the most circulated images of brownies. He described them as “imaginary sprites who delight in harmless pranks and helpful deeds. They work and sport while weary households sleep, and never allow themselves to be seen by mortal eyes.” In the 21st century, the most popular brownie isn’t even called a brownie, but an elf. Dobby from Harry Potter is much closer to a brownie than an elf. The house-elves in the Harry Potter series are very similar to brownies. They perform the domestic tasks around the house and refuse any non-food gift (Dobby seems to be the only exception, gladly accepting an accidental gift of a sock which sets him free).

The mythical creatures of Victorian children’s literature continue in other countries and folklore, having their own particular characteristics and images. The variations make for great folklore to be passed down and retold, carrying on the traditions of learning lessons and morals.

Works Cited:

Attar, Dena. “The Secret Life of Children’s Books – the Open University.” The Open University | BBC Partnership, connect.open.ac.uk/history-and-the-arts/the-secret-life-of-childrens-books.

Auctions, Heritage. “Palmer Cox. Three First Edition Books in the Brownie Series.: Lot #94032.” Heritage Auctions, historical.ha.com/itm/books/children-s-books/palmer-cox-three-first-edition-books-in-the-brownie-series-includes-the-brownies-their-book-another-brownie-book-the-total-4/a/201412-94032.s.

britishfairies, ~. “Brownies in Literature- from Mrs Ewing to Dobby.” British Fairies, 14 Apr. 2020, britishfairies.wordpress.com/2017/10/19/brownies-in-literature-from-mrs-ewing-to-dobby/.

Curi, Mitzy. “Victorian-Era Scrapbook Finds, Part I.” Mitzi’s Miscellany, mitziscollectibles.typepad.com/mitzismiscellany/2013/09/scrapbook-finds.html.

Gates, Amy. “Laura’s Lock, Goblin Market Illustrated by Arthur Rackham.” Cove Collective, 29 June 2020, editions.covecollective.org/content/lauras-lock-goblin-market-illustrated-arthur-rackham.

“Goblin.” Goblin – New World Encyclopedia, http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Goblin.