It's easy to romanticize the past, especially the Victorian era. It's been given so much Hollywood gilding in films such as “The Portrait of a Lady” and “The Age of Innocence,” depicting it as a time of great civility, manners and grace.
.jpg)
Author and pop historian Therese Oneill once dreamed about life as an aristocrat of the Victorian age, stepping into a hoop skirt and gliding across a ballroom. But then, curiosity got the better of her, and she found herself wondering: How did women use the bathroom in those things? And did the Victorians have toilet paper? The result of her research is “Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady’s Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners.”
As Oneill writes, it was a time when even the most elegant lady wore crotchless undergarments so she could easily squat over a bedpan without having to lift up pounds upon pounds of clothing. To clean herself up, she used old newspapers, leaves or corncobs.
Oneill is an eager tour guide: “You’ll arrive in the 19th century in the guise of a young woman of some wealth, European descent and living in either America or Western Europe,” she writes.
Oneill has good reason for placing her reader in the company of the upper crust; Unlike her less fortunate peers, a lady of status would have time to think about matters beyond survival. These matters — such as hygiene, beauty and relationships — would dominate a well-heeled woman’s pre- and post-marital life. She would go to the doctor, read women's magazines, peruse advertisements and become fluent in the fine points of etiquette, all with the goal of making herself presentable to the opposite sex.
This was an uphill task. As Oneill is keen to point out, the Victorian era was a decidedly filthy period in Western history, when public sanitation hadn't caught up with the major mechanical advances brought on by the Industrial Revolution.
That's one detail those tantalizing Hollywood period pieces invariably leave out: the smell.
“There’s no such thing as ‘fresh air’ in the larger cities,” Oneill writes. “Every home and business needs energy, so you must burn something, like wood or coal. . . The result is the soot and smoke of hundreds of thousands of fires saturating the sky.”
The cities reeked of sulfur, and thank goodness for that, because it covered another malodorous problem: The streets and rivers all overflowed with a sloppy mix of rainwater, animal and human waste. “By 1860, the Thames, for instance, was visited by thousands of tons of fecal matter every day from all the pipes and runoffs that emptied into it. “Imagine the smell on a hot day.”