That Little Dickens!

From Channel 4's Victorian Passions website:

"Born in Portsmouth in 1812, the young Charles Dickens should have had a safe and secure childhood on his father's wages as a navy pay clerk. But John Dickens was plagued by money troubles. This culminated in 1824, when he was arrested and imprisoned for debt.

The young Charles, possibly on the very day of his twelfth birthday, was immediately sent to work, sticking labels on pots of shoe blacking in a rat-infested warehouse on the banks of the Thames. He earned a mere 8 or 9 shillings a week, visited his family in prison at weekends, and had, as he later put it, 'to undertake the whole charge of my own existence'."....

In 1857, acting in a play by his friend and novelist, Wilkie Collins, Dickens met and fell in love with an actress, Ellen (or Nelly) Ternan (pictured). She was 18 he was 45. Their meeting was to spark the most extraordinary and explosive mid-life crisis in Dickens and to change both of their lives for ever. In a matter of months, Dickens broke up his marriage of twenty years, quarrelled with many of his friend and began a relationship with Nelly that led to a double existence for the remainder of his life.

The secret lover
Although he never publicly acknowledged her (except briefly in his will), Ellen became the centre of Dickens' emotional life until his death in 1870. We still do not know for certain whether it was a sexual relationship or not, but it is quite possible that they had a child (or even children) together, although any hard evidence of this, and of so much else about their relationship, has been lost or destroyed.

The Myth of the Victorian Patriarchal Family

if anyone is interested, I would like to recommend the following ...

The myth of the Victorian patriarchal family, by Eleanor Gordon (a Department of Economic and Social History, University of Glasgow, 4 University Gardens, Glasgow G12 8QQ, Scotland, UK) and Gweneth Nair (Department of Applied Social Studies, University of Paisley, Paisley UK)

It has been available online 22 January 2002

The Abstract on this study is as follows ...

Conventionally, the Victorian middle-class family has been regarded as a social and economic unit usually headed by a married man. The woman's role within this unit has been associated with service and dependency.

However, a study of a middle-class area of Glasgow based upon the census returns of 1851–1891 suggests that the widely held image of the Victorian middle-class family as headed by a paterfamilias may be misplaced. The high incidence of female-headed households and the range of kin, both male and female, which they contained, indicate the diversity of experience among middle-class women, the degree of their social and residential independence, and, thus, the dangers of viewing women's lives through the filter of Victorian domestic ideology.

again ... this whole myth around a woman and her role in the Victorian Era is simply that ... a myth ... it never existed
I can give several examples from my own family and that of my husband's family during the Victorian Era that dispel these myths ... these women were NOT that unusual ...

~ from the notes of Lady Victorian Historian

Famous Disgruntled Youths? Things Were Better Out West!

Jack the Ripper

there are some theories that Jack's spree is related to some of the stuff I have talked about ...

interesting that you have made the connection between Jack and mega-controlling parents ... there is one theory that Jack the Ripper was one of Queen Victoria's sons




Horatio Alger, Jr

one major theory at this point in time that most folks do not realize is the Unitarian author that wrote the Horatio Alger's stories was a pedophile ...

this is not well known because book sales would have slumped off incredibly ... but even these stories had to have a thin veneer of respectability to them

(I have used 2-3 of these stories to point out certain issues to my own children ... like being melodramatic or histrionic is not the way to go! ... I tend not to enjoy drama queens & kings ... anyway, the guy that wrote Horatio Alger did around 119 books ... there are only 4-5 plot lines for all of them ... so, if you have read 1-2 and most definitely 3-4 you will know the plots for all the rest of the stories)



Annie Oakley (a stark contrast!)

from what I have seen, US crime rates were similar ... except out west ... the reason for that is because most women were shooting game to feed their families (Annie Oakley was only exceptional in a couple of areas ... she worked for the wild west show and did trick shooting) ... women out west tended NOT to put up with such nonsense ... more often than not a man would have been too scared to try to physically abuse most women because she could handle herself (thank you very much) ... in fact, out west the gals received the right to vote and hold public office long before the rest of us

Have you read Louis L'Amour stories? (A good place to start)

~ from the notes of Lady Victorian Historian

The Self-Righeous Victorians

Martin Luther's (1483-1546) statement ...

‘Sin doesn’t harm us as much as our own righteousness.’

The Victorian Era seems to embody self-righteousness ... they made up all these crazy rules & regulations

It was a cookie-cutter type of Christianity that was in many respects becoming irrelevant to the world around them and society at large


I keep hearing Christ's words in my head that he that would be first shall be last


REAL Christianity ... however ... is never irrelevant (at least in my opinion)

~ says Lady Victorian Historian

Victorian Micro-Management Parenting and Lizzie Borden

Hyper Reactionary Offspring Response to Victorian Era Parental Micro-Management Styles

who hasn't heard the jump rope rhyme ...

Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
And when she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one.

Lizzie was a real person.

Lizzie Borden (1860-1927) was very active in church, taught Sunday School, member of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and more.

She was from a wealthy, "proper" Victorian family.

From all reports, it would appear her father & stepmother were VERY controlling & allowed very little (if any) freedom to the children in making life choices

Interestingly, she was acquitted of the hatchet murders of father & stepmother on 4 August 1892 (Lizzie allegedly commited these murders when was a grown woman of 32) ...

Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
And when she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one.

~ from the notes of Lady Victorian Historian

Victorian Era: The Golden Age of Poisoning

Many consider the Victorian Era as the
Golden Age of Poisoning.

Poisoning was an easy form of murder to get away with because it could be done in secrecy. Moreover, the proof necessary to convict someone in a court of law tended to rely on circumstantial evidence.




It was a popular homicide weapon because ...

• poison was readily available to the common person
• there was a new incentive called life insurance
• it produced little evidence — no marks, blood, or noise
• it could be done in secrecy
• evidence for poisoning was circumstantial in court of law

Some say poisoning was a common female defense against abusive husbands. During this era, approximately forty women were tried for poisoning their husbands. Then, as now, folks new this number was very underreported. As a result, Parliament restricted poison sales in 1851.

Poison most often used = arsenic

• arsenic use in rat poison & used in most homes
• women used arsenic for cosmetic purposes
• no one asked questions when a woman got arsenic from a shop in town
poison examples:

• Belle Gunness = long line of disappearing (rich) suitors found buried all over her farm = used arsenic with great gusto

• Madeleine Smith, an aristocratic young Glasgow woman, accused of poisoning lover with arsenic

• Thomas Young

• Donald Harvey = killed with cyanide

• Dr Harvey Crippen ... Even though this case was shortly after the Victorian era, it still had a Victorian committing the murder. He was married to Cora Turner but having an affair with his secretary, Ethel Le Neve. Cora disappeared. His mistress moved in with him and began to wear his wife's jewelry and clothing. Raised suspicion. Police began to investigate. Crippen panicked & moved to Canada. He almost got away with murder.

The Golden Age of Poisoning during the Victorian Era was the reason why toxicology as a field of medicine developed. As a science, toxicology became increasingly important ...

~ from the notes of Lady Victorian Historian

Christian Women's Temperance Movement

The Victorian Era had an unrealistic and idealized vision of a family which led to and/or exacerbated a great many social ills. Opium use by females was considered “genteel” and “feminine” while public intoxication was deeply frowned upon.

[Note: As I documented earlier, the Victorians were well aware of the many problems associated with opium usage.]

Some went so far as to sterilize those that habitually consumed alcohol. In an 1897 Medico-Legal Society gathering, a Brooklyn doctor recommended women "be desexualized ... whether maid or matron” if they failed to respond to treatment.

[This practice was continued in the eugenics movement which emphasized the sterilization of “the unfit” & was picked up on by the Nazis approx. 33 years later in the 1930s]

The Women's Christian Temperance Movement was a Christian-based group. President Francis Willard, in 1874, began to push for prohibition. Earlier Temperance societies wanted to "temper" those using alcohol to socially accepted levels of alcohol consumption.

Problem: The more Christian women began to get involved in the issue, the more they realized how much women were being physically abused by their alcohol induced spouses leaving scares on their bodies and more.

1888: Dr. Lucy Hall studied 204 women under her care at the Reformatory Prison in Sherborn, Massachusetts. The majority began drinking before the age of 21 & over 1/3 of the married women had scars on their heads as a result of beatings from their drunken husbands.

Francis Willard, a brilliant strategist, pushed for prohibition. It is no coincidence that the 19th Amendment (prohibition) and the 20th Amendment (women's vote) passed within a year of each other. Her group was a major force behind prohibition, banning prostitution, and recreational drugs.

~ from the notes of Lady Victorian Historian