Victorians didn't play around when it came to the importance of fun, according to Hugh Cunningham's "Leisure in the Industrial Revolution: c. 1780- c.1880." Pastimes blossomed among members of the middle and upper classes. H. A. Bruce acted as one of the biggest advocates for leisure time, giving regular speeches on the subject. In 1855, he argued, "Next to the deep-pervading sentiment of religion, I know nothing of more importance to the well-being of a people than well-ordered amusements."
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But hard labor also proved foundational to the era's notions of improvement and progress, per Hartford Stage. After all, the Industrial Revolution remained in full swing, and Great Britain dominated the globe through extensive trade networks, a powerful navy, empire-building activities, and manufacturing (via Britannica). To maintain this dominance, the lower classes covered the jobs no one else wanted while the middle and upper classes dabbled in less mundane pursuits.
Members of the Victorian middle-class even hoped that pastimes might act as a unifying balm of "class conciliation." (For the middle and upper classes, that is.) Despite these ambitious hopes, many leisure activities chosen by Victorians look downright bizarre from our modern perspective. They explored everything from anthropomorphic taxidermy to seaweed scrapbooking, human-hair jewelry to freak shows, and even post-mortem photography. Here are some of the strangest free-time activities of the 19th century.
Taxidermy is usually the purview of museums and hunters today. But during Victorian times, many people collected anthropomorphized stuffed animals arranged in whimsical tableaux (via Atlas Obscura). These pieces represented the perfect mix of two interests espoused by Victorians: the love of natural history and whimsical fantasy. For example, Victorians collected scenes such as weddings attended by kittens, playgrounds full of frogs, and ice-skating hedgehogs.
As strange as these deceased dioramas look, they required a serious amount of skill and hours of meticulous work. No artist of anthropomorphic taxidermy better personified the possibilities inherent in the craft than the German taxidermist Hermann Ploucquet. He worked for the Royal Museum in Stuttgart, expertly combining his artistic talents with a love of science. Ploucquet enjoyed widespread commercial success, "dazzling" everyone from Charlotte Bronte to the two Victorian "Charles" — Darwin and Dickens. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert endowed over Ploucquet's work, and the queen later wrote in her diary that it was "really marvelous."
Another noted taxidermist, Ferenc Mere of Hungary, devoted 10 years of his life to catching, killing, and stuffing frogs, as reported by National Public Radio (NPR). After skillfully preserving them, he posed them like humans and dressed them in clothes, recreating countless scenes from daily life. Mere's work can still be viewed at Froggyland in Split, Croatia.