The Alexandra Limp and Other Affectations of Posture

In the 1860s, when Queen Alexandra, then the Princess of Wales, suffered a painful attack of rheumatism in her knee which, in time, resulted in a permanent limp, high society women London, keen as ever to stay on trend with the day’s fashion, began to sycophantically imitate it. It became ridiculously popular and was known as the Alexandra Limp, although it was ‘widely derided’ by, well, by anyone with any sense probably. John Stephen Farmer called it “an erstwhile fit of semi-imbecility” by “a crowd of limping petticoated toadies”.

Be that as it may, the fad was followed by a similar curiosity of posture in the USA, namely, The Grecian Bend, which saw women apparently go about their business whilst bent oddly at the waist. Albert Jones Bellows describes in a sighting in Boston:“She waddled a few rods past the store, and then turned round, smiling, or rather smirking, complacently on her ‘crowd of admirers,’ with an expression of face which seemed to say, … ‘All my torture is repaid by the admiration I excite.’”

[Sources: Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (p.25) | Futility Closet  | Telegraph | Wikipedia]

Dance Cards

Originating in the 18th century, but growing in popularity throughout the 19th century, dance cards were small, decorative notebooks used by women to record the names of the men who had promised them a dance at a ball.

As can be seen in the fan-shaped example above, the names of each dance that will be played at the event are noted already on the blue “Dances” sections, whilst the “Engagements”, or the names of the men with whom the woman intends to dance, are marked in ink beside them. Apparently the men would just have to remember by heart with whom they had promised the dance.

The dance cards came in particularly handy at the massive 19th century balls of Vienna, especially those during Fasching, just before Lent. Most dance cards incorporated a pencil and a cord to attach to the woman’s wrist, however, more elaborate dance cards of the elite were sometimes decorated with precious metals or jewels.

(Source: Wikipedia)

The Horsey Horseless

The advent of motorised vehicles in the late 19th century had the unfortunate side-effect of terrifying their predecessors - horses. As horse drawn carriages and these new-fangled automobiles whizzed past one another on busy streets, the horses would be so startled by the speed and noise of the machines that their owners would threaten to shoot the drivers there and then!

Enter Uriah Smith. An inventor from Michigan, in 1899 Smith proposed a solution in the form of the Horsey Horseless carriage; a motorised vehicle with a wooden horses head attached to the front, so it somewhat resembled a typical horse and carriage. He reasoned that, upon witnessing this monstrosity, “The live horse would be thinking of another horse and before he could discover his error and see that he had been fooled, the strange carriage would be passed.”

It is not know whether any Horsey Horseless carriages were ever actually made.

[Sources: A Touch of Knowledge | Time]

The Great Stink

The Great Stink was a time in the summer of 1858 during which the smell of untreated human waste was very strong in central London. At the time house waste was permitted to be carried to the Thames via the sewers, so human waste was dumped into the Thames and then potentially pumped back to the same households for drinking, cooking and bathing.

Furthermore, there were over 200,000 cesspits in London. Emptying one cesspit cost a shilling - a cost the average Londoner could ill afford - thus, most cesspits added to the airborne stench. The introduction of flush toilets also contributed to the problem as they dramatically increased the volume of water and waste that was poured into the cesspits. These often overflowed into street drains designed originally to cope with rainwater, but now also used to carry outfalls from factories, slaughterhouses and other activities, contaminating the city before emptying into the River Thames.

The summer of 1858 was unusually hot. The Thames and many of its urban tributaries were overflowing with sewage; the warm weather encouraged bacteria to thrive and the resulting smell was so overwhelming that it affected the work of the House of Commons (countermeasures included draping curtains soaked in chloride of lime, while members considered relocating upstream to Hampton Court) and the law courts (plans were made to evacuate to Oxford and St Albans).

Heavy rain finally ended the heat and humidity of summer and the immediate crisis ended. However, a House of Commons select committee was appointed to report on the Stink and recommend how to end the problem.

[Image Source]

(Source: Wikipedia)

Victorian Pictogram Puzzle

Pictograms were a popular form of entertainment in the Victorian era and some came with an especial incentive to solve them - like the promise of an ‘Earthly paradise’ or the chance to win £30,000.

The above poster was designed by Thomas Bish, who pioneered new ways of advertising lottery tickets before the lottery was abolished by parliament in 1826. It reads:

“Catch Fortune when you can.  As every man would rather get money than not, the attention of all is called to the New Lottery, in which, by a small risk, they may get an independent fortune. They should hasten to the nearest lottery office, and then, by purchasing even a share, they may secure what they desire, and which cannot fail to make the mare go, and place them (if money be their deity) in an earthly paradise.”

And the address at the bottom is for BISH, 4 Cornhill and 9 Charing Cross, London.

[Secret Lives of Objects]

Jack Black, Her Majesty’s Rat-catcher

By the mid-19th century it was well understood that rats carried diseases, however, sanitation within large cities still left a lot to be desired and rats infested sewers and homes alike. As a result, rat-catching could prove a rather lucrative profession. Rat-catchers would capture rats by hand, often with specially-bred vermin terriers, or traps, and payment would be high for catching and selling rats to breeders.

Most famous amongst these rat-catchers was Jack Black: rat-catcher and mole destroyer by appointment to Her Majesty Queen Victoria. Black is best know through his interview in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, Vol. 3, where he tells of his work and experiences.

Black cut a striking figure in his self-made “uniform” of scarlet topcoat, waistcoat, and breeches, with a huge leather belt inset with cast-iron rats. He was reported to be “the most fearless handler of rats of any man living”, on one occasion, at a public display, placing half a dozen rats taken directly from the sewers inside his shirt while delivering a sales pitch on the rapid effects of rat poison. His face and hands were covered in scars from bites and by his own account there were numerous occasions on which he had almost died from infection following being bitten.

When he caught any unusually coloured rats, he bred them, to establish new colour varieties. He would sell his home-bred domesticated coloured rats as pets, mainly, as Black observed, “to well-bred young ladies to keep in squirrel cages”. Beatrix Potter is believed to have been one of his customers. The more sophisticated ladies of court kept their rats in dainty gilded cages, and even Queen Victoria herself kept a rat or two. Black also supplied live rats for rat-baiting in pits, a popular mid-Victorian pastime.

[Sources: Wikipedia (Jack Black) | Wikipedia (Rat-catcher) | History House]

No Nose Clubs

Worn by a mid-19th century women who lost her nose to syphilis, an STI which can cause the bridge of the nose to collapse, the above contraption is testament to an era when sexual promiscuity was far more abundant than the Victorians would have liked us to believe. 

In fact, so common was it to encounter a noseless fellow that people began to form clubs, as The Star reported in a February 1874 article entitled “The Origins of the No Nose Cub”:

Miss Sanborn tells us that an eccentric gentleman, having taken a fancy to seeing a large party of noseless persons, invited every one thus afflicted, whom he met in the streets, to dine on a certain day at a tavern, where he formed them into a brotherhood … This club met every month for a whole joyous year, when its founder died, and the flat-faced community were unhappily dissolved. 

It is questionable whether Miss Sanborn’s account is entirely true, although a version with little variation also exists in A Compleat and Humorous Account of all the Remarkable Clubs and Societies in the Cities of London and Westminster (1756) by Edward Ward. Whatever their veracity, however, there seems to be little doubt that these clubs existed as places where those who had “unluckily fallen into the Egyptian fashion of flat faces” might “show their scandalous Vizards” without fear of mockery.

[Sources: Prospect Magazine | The Telegraph | Papers Past | Science Museum | Edward Ward]