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Weirdest Bits Of Victorian Etiquette You Won't Believe People Actually Observed
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Apr 14, 2025
The Victorian era saw the advent of numerous political reforms, social changes and the world’s first industrial revolution. However, the Victorians had some other, stranger customs whose common observance died out long ago. These weird bits of etiquette range from the mostly harmless to the straight-up appalling and they paint a pretty clear picture about how far the Victorians were willing to go in the name of what they considered decorum.
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The Victorian era saw the advent of numerous political reforms
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social changes, and the world's first industrial revolution. However, the Victorians had some other, stranger customs
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whose common observance died out long ago. These weird bits of etiquette range from the mostly harmless
0:17
to the straight-up appalling, and they paint a pretty clear picture about how far the Victorians were willing to go
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in the name of what they considered decorum. Today, we're going to take a look at the weirdest bits of Victorian etiquette you won't believe people actually observed
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Throughout history, aphrodisiacs that can make one person lust after another have been highly sought after
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Similarly in demand were anaphrodisiacs, or substances that would curtail that same libidinous energy
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And in the 19th century, cornflakes, or more specifically, Kellogg's brand cornflakes
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were considered a must-eat item for those looking to suppress their natural, well, horniness
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What seems like the oddest marketing choice in history, John Harvey Kellogg himself described
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the famously wholesome breakfast cereal as a healthy, ready-to-eat, anti-masturbatory morning meal. With that established in the public mind, it became good form for well-bred gentlemen to
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be seen consuming it. Seriously, we are not making this up. This bizarre state of events was premised
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on the then popular understanding that lascivious foods bred lascivious habits. If I know you, and I think I do, you're probably
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eager to find out which foods they considered the lascivious ones. The answer is basically anything spicy
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or excessively rich and flavorful. This includes items like curry and heavy French sauces
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among many, many others. Anyway, Kellogg probably wasn't the guy to be going to for advice on these matters
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He was the kind of man who counseled young girls to douse their privates with carbolic acid
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in order to burn off their desire. And cornflakes obviously had no effect on the libido
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Fruit loops, on the other hand. Voluptuous women with curves have been popular in many eras
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and the Victorian era was one of them. This preference notwithstanding, the well-bred and fashion-conscious ladies of the day still
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made efforts to slim themselves down where they could. In modern times, if you want to lose weight, most doctors would tell you to make adjustments
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to your diet and level of exercise. In Victorian times, however, they would just wait to swallow a giant tapeworm and wait
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for it to devour their fat from the inside out. The procedure, which sounds a bit like a Lovecraftian ritual, is, to put it mildly, utterly terrifying
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and gross. It starts by taking a pill that contains a tapeworm egg The egg eventually hatches and the parasite then grows inside of the host body ingesting whatever the host eats This in theory allows the dieter to shed excess pounds
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without ever having to worry about their caloric intake. But that's not all
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There's more to this alien face grabber story. The tapeworm larvae were also believed
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to help women cultivate proper table manners, since a woman with a tapeworm in her gut
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would never rise hungry from the table, yet she would continue losing weight
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Weight loss and free etiquette lessons, and all for the low, low price of implanting a living parasite in your intestines
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It sounds like a deal. In Victorian times, as much as in modern ones, everyone loved a beautiful smile
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But while modern folks enhanced their pearly whites through advanced dental care
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Victorians would simply find a dead person with nice teeth and then harvest them from the cadaver
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Why let a good smile go to waste, right? These secondhand chompers often look quite good
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but they weren't without their drawbacks, especially when they came from questionable donors
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which was often the case. Teeth might be taken from exhumed bodies
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executed prisoners, dentist patients, and even sometimes from animals. This meant they were often rotten, worn down
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or caked with syphilis. Young, healthy teeth could also be acquired by pillaging them from bodies left behind on battlefields
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And we think veterans care is lacking today. Nobody dreams of being trapped in a loveless marriage where listless, passionless sex is the norm
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But in Victorian times, they thought there was more at stake than mere emotional unhappiness
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It was actually believed that any sex that wasn't founded in true love would produce ugly, spiritless offspring
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Those who wanted good-looking, energetic kids were warned not to have sex that was faintly or drowsily performed
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So much for the bar scene. It was also thought that making love on a flight of stairs was a bad idea
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because, according to the Daily Mail, a child that was begat upon a set of stairs is most likely to be born with a crooked back
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and given in no small way to the fault of staring. So conceive on the stairs and your child will have a staring problem
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I see what you're saying, but they're homonyms, people. They mean totally different things
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Those are two different stairs. Once again, we are not making this stuff up
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Anyway, the sum total of Victorian wisdom on the topic basically states that if you want
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good-looking kids who aren't great at staring contests, you should crush it on a flat surface
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Modern folks try to keep a youthful appearance with a variety of cosmetic products
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But in Victorian times you only really needed one a piece of raw animal flesh tied to your face Yeah folks back then believed that the youthful essence of the raw meat would infiltrate their own bodies through the skin And there were numerous applications
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For example, wrinkles that resulted from the use of harsh, freckle-eliminating methods
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like steeping one's skin in carbolic acid, could be counteracted by sleeping with raw steak
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on one's face or by smearing any animal fat on the skin, sheep's fat, veal, or lard
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Mm-mm. Sexy. Well-bred ladies of the era always aimed to have snow-white complexions
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since tans were a sign that one labored outside, like a peasant
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If it took a sacrificial lamb, or any other sacrificial farm animal, to maintain that whiteness
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it was considered a small price to pay. Mourning has long been associated
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with wearing the color black. But for fashion-conscious women in Victorian times
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it was also associated with shearing off a lock of your dead husband's hair to wear as a piece of jewelry. The initial stages of mourning
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actually called for nothing but heavy black veils and shrouds, but one could eventually graduate
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into wearing sentimental keepsakes. It was so popular that hair jewelry eventually transitioned
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into an everyday accessory. Wreaths made from the hair of a dead person were considered objects of
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mourning, whereas wreaths made from the hair of multiple people were thought of more like
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sentimental family trees, like a leather-faced family Christmas. This tradition, which many still find romantic and fairly poignant, has echoes in the contemporary
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trend of having oneself tattooed with ink that has been mixed with the ashes of a loved one
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While many believe that so-called respectable women in the Victorian era eschewed the use
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of cosmetics, the truth is actually more complex. In fact, those women were merely cutting corners by discreetly ingesting their beauty regiments
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In fact, in the late 19th century, it wasn't uncommon to see advertisements in U.S. newspapers
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for all sorts of ingestible beauty products. According to National Geographic, this included tins of wafers that, if eaten
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promised to remove freckles, pimples, and other facial marks. These products contained poisonous arsenic, but the companies never tried to hide it
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In fact, the words arsenic complexion wafers were typically printed right on the packaging
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Eating the arsenic wafer did give one a fashionable, if deadly, pallor
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but the long-term effects included things like skin discoloration, rotten teeth, and hair loss
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The bottom line is that while vampire chic is always a cool look, killing yourself for it may not be the healthiest approach
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During the Victorian era, breastfeeding was generally left to wet nurses, at least in wealthy upper class households
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While the well-bred biological mother was also known to participate from time to time it was never without the discreet and proper aid of a nipple shield During the 18th and 19th centuries these devices were typically made from materials like ivory wood or most commonly silver The dangers of lead poisoning were known at the time
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but products containing lead were still manufactured and sold with assurances that
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they were in no way dangerous to the infant. Predictably, many of the infants who were exposed
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to these products developed lead poisoning. Advertisements for nipple shields could be
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bizarre and whimsical. Take, for example, the phrasing from an 1892 advertisement, which claims
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that their shields were easy to wear, holding on like limpets. It further promised that sore nipples
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heal whilst reposing in the bath of milk secreted within the shields. Basically, they were promising
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a milk bath or sore nips. In the Victorian era, single women were strongly discouraged from
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indulging in any behavior that might lead to being kissed or handled by a man in basically any way
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That doesn't really sound like much fun for the ladies, but for what it's worth, the gentleman
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also had to observe strict behavioral rules. For example, imagine a man wanted to admire his
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companion's lovely necklace. In no case whatsoever was he allowed to inspect it while she wore it
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around her neck. A gentleman would ask the lady to first remove the necklace and hand it to him
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for inspection instead. This allowed the two to maintain enough distance and avoid, well, let's say, awkward social misunderstandings
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Modern folks think of dating in terms of making matches, but to the Victorians, it was more important
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that a couple clashes, at least in an aesthetic sense. When it came to one's paramour, one
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of the most important considerations was to make sure your hair, eye, and complexion
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were different in a complementary way. So, for example, a person who had red hair and a flushed complexion was considered to have an excitable and hot-tempered personality
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They would be encouraged to marry someone with a different temperament, such as someone with jet black or brown hair
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Two redheads marrying would be a recipe for disaster, at least according to this theory
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While it seems old-fashioned to us, the Victorian custom of swooning in response to bad news
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moral scandal, or just about anything else that was deemed too unseemly to be handled
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was arguably way ahead of its time. A hundred years later, gaggles of teen girls would be doing
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the exact same thing over rock stars like Elvis Presley, The Beatles, and The Rolling Stones
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That being said, some theorists think that there's a little more to it than that
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They believe that for the Victorians, passing out wasn't about being overwhelmed as it was about expressing oneself in a socially acceptable fashion
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In that time and place, some women felt passing out was their only real option for letting others know what was on their mind
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