Victorian Dress Lifter

Basically tool kits masquerading as jewelry, “chatelaines” allowed Victorian women to keep quotidian essentials at the ready, in the graceful style the era demanded. Consisting of functional pendants attached to a clip, these accessories were worn at the waist. 

The above artifact would be hung on the chatelaine alongside other day-to-day necessities such as make-up, pencils, needles, and perfume. Women relied on these little tongs to hoist up their skirt hems when crossing dirty streets.

[Source: Country Living | See Also]

Lady Revivers

As aforementioned, Victorian women were, for one of a number of possible reasons, frequently afflicted by fainting fits. Whilst indoors this might be easy enough to remedy, however, a sudden fit whilst out and about might prove more perilous. Thus, Police constables of the era were equipped with small vials of smelling salts in small containers adorned with a crown - called Lady Revivers - to revive women in the streets.

[Sources: BBC | See Also: io9]

Legend of the Hartlepool Monkey 

During the Napoleonic Wars the French were, for obvious reasons, persona non grata throughout Britain. Indeed, it was such concern about French infiltrators and spies that provided the basis for the legend of the Hartlepool Monkey.

Some time in the early 19^th century a French warship was supposedly wrecked off the coast of Hartlepool in North East England. The only survivor was a monkey, dressed up in French military uniform apparently for the purpose of entertaining the doomed crew. 

Not knowing what a Frenchman might look like, the Hartlepool locals assumed they had apprehended one, and held a trial for him in the town centre. Unsurprisingly, the monkey was unable to answer their questions and was duly sentenced to death by hanging.

There is also another, more sinister, interpretation of the legend which states that the survivor of the wreck might not have been a monkey at all, but rather a French boy employed as part of the ship’s crew, “After all, the term powder-monkey was commonly used in those times for the children employed on warships to prime the cannon with gunpowder.”

[Sources: Monkey Hanger | Hartlepool | This is Hartlepool | Many thanks to itcouldbeamazing/itcouldbepeachy, who you really should be following]

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]

Drapetomania, or the Disease Causing Negroes to Run Away

Drapetomania was a supposed mental illness described by American physician Samuel A. Cartwright in 1851 that caused black slaves to flee captivity. Cartwright described the disorder – which, he said, was “unknown to our medical authorities, although its diagnostic symptom, the absconding from service, is well known to our planters and overseers” – in a paper delivered before the Medical Association of Louisiana that was widely reprinted.

He stated that the malady was a consequence of masters who “made themselves too familiar with [slaves], treating them as equals”.In Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race, Cartwright points out that the Bible calls for a slave to be submissive to his master, and by doing so, the slave will have no desire to run away.

In addition to identifying drapetomania, Cartwright prescribed a remedy. His feeling was that with “proper medical advice, strictly followed, this troublesome practice that many Negroes have of running away can be almost entirely prevented.” In the case of slaves “sulky and dissatisfied without cause” – a warning sign of imminent flight – Cartwright prescribed “whipping the devil out of them” as a “preventative measure”. As a remedy for this “disease,” doctors also made running a physical impossibility by prescribing the removal of both big toes.

While Cartwright’s article was reprinted in the South, in the Northern United States it was widely mocked. A satirical analysis of the article appeared in a Buffalo Medical Journal editorial in 1855, whilst Frederick Law Olmsted, in A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856), observed that white indentured servants had often been known to flee as well, so he satirically hypothesised that the supposed disease was actually of white European origin, and had been introduced to Africa by traders.

[Read “Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” by Dr. Cartwright here | Image Source | Thanks to Vintage-Royalty]

(Source: Wikipedia)

Sin-Eater

Up until the late 19^th century various villages throughout England maintained a curious ilk of beggar known as a sin-eater. These men would be summoned, naturally by the lure of a handsome pay cheque, to eat bread, partake of alcohol and recite ritual over a fresh corpse, in the belief that by these means the sin-eater would take into his body the sins of those who had died without chance to repent. The sin-eater would receive his pay and the deceased would enjoy an easy ascension to the heavens.

An account of Richard Munslow (d.1906)^[1], the last sin-eater of England, reads thus:

By eating bread and drinking ale, and by making a short speech at the graveside, the sin-eater took upon themselves the sins of the deceased. The speech was written as: “I give easement and rest now to thee, dear man. Come not down the lanes or in our meadows. And for thy peace I pawn my own soul. Amen.

In Funeral Customs (1926) Bertram S. Puckle tells of a Welsh sin-eater in 1825 who, “Abhorred by the superstitious villagers as a thing unclean … cut himself off from all social intercourse with his fellow creatures … he lived as a rule in a remote place by himself, and those who chanced to meet him avoided him as they would a leper. This unfortunate was held to be the associate of evil spirits, and given to witchcraft, incantations and unholy practices; only when a death took place did they seek him out, and when his purpose was accomplished they burned the wooden bowl and platter from which he had eaten the food handed across, or placed on the corpse for his consumption.”^[2]

Unapproved of by the church the practice faded out towards the end of the 19th century.

[Image Source]