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Life in the Victorian era

Top facts about the Victorian era

Did you know

Victorian era gallery

About life in the Victorian era

Names to know from the Victorian era

Videos about Victorian life

Just for fun

Books about Victorians for children

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Quick quiz about Victorian life

What was life like in Victorian times?

Living in the Victorian era was exciting because of all the new inventions and pace of change and progress, but it was a hard time to live in if you didn’t have much money. Even very young children had to work if their family needed them to. However, life had improved a lot for people by the end of the Victorian era. Laws were put in place that made working conditions a bit better in factories and mines, and that stopped young children from working by requiring them to go to school instead. More people were living in cities, but hygiene and sanitation was more important thanks to people like Florence Nightingale . Plus, the Victorians started the Christmas traditions like sending cards and decorating trees that we know and enjoy today!

Top 10 facts

The inventions of machines in factories replaced jobs that people used to do, but people were needed to look after the machines and keep the factories clean.
Factories were built in cities, so people ended up moving to the cities to get jobs. Half the population in Britain lived in cities by the end of the Victorian era.
Cities became crowded, busy and dirty, but discoveries about hygiene and sanitation meant that diseases like cholera were easier to prevent.
People in the Victorian era started to use electricity for the first time , and to listen to music by playing records on the gramophone.
Steam trains made travel a lot easier, and rich people started to go on holidays to the seaside in places like Blackpool and Brighton.
There was a big difference between rich and poor in Victorian times . Rich people could afford lots of treats like holidays, fancy clothes, and even telephones when they were invented.
Poor people – even children – had to work hard in factories, mines or workhouses. They didn’t get paid very much money.
By the end of the Victorian era, all children could go to school for free. Victorian schools were very strict – your teacher might even beat you if you didn’t obey the rules.
The way we celebrate Christmas was begun in Victorian times – they sent the first Christmas cards and made Christmas crackers.
Charles Dickens was a famous Victorian author who wrote A Christmas Carol , Oliver Twist and other famous novels.

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Did you know?

At the beginning of the Victorian era in 1837, most people would have used candles and oil or gas lamps to light their homes and streets. By the end of the Victorian era in 1901, electricity was available and rich people could get it in their homes.
Poor people could work in mines, in mills and factories, or in workhouses . Whole families would sometimes have to work so they’d all have enough money to buy food.
Children in poor families would have jobs that were best done by people who weren’t very tall. They would have to crawl in small spaces in mines, or underneath machines in textile mills. It was very dangerous!
Rich people didn’t have dangerous jobs like these. In fact, some didn’t even have to work! They could afford to buy the new inventions coming out like the telephone, the gramophone (for playing music) and electric light bulbs.
Rich Victorians were the first to go on seaside holidays – some of the places they’d go are spots where we go on holiday too, like Blackpool, Brighton and Southend.
Victorian children loved it when their mum and dad let them see a magic lantern show. This was a slideshow of pictures that told a story – the machine that showed the pictures was called a magic lantern.
Almost all families in Victorian times – except for the very poor ones – would pay people to be servants who would do their household chores for them. This included cooking, cleaning, washing and even serving dinner. Women who were servants were called maids, and men were called footmen. The head servant would be a man called a butler.
There was a rule for everything in Victorian times – even about the sorts of clothes you’d wear in the morning or evening, and when in the city or in the country!
All men wore hats in Victorian times (rich men wore top hats, poor men wore caps). When a man wanted to say hello to a lady, it was good manners to tip the brim of their hat down, then push their hat back onto their head.
It was bad manners if a man spoke to a woman he didn’t know without someone else introducing them first.
Children always had to say ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ to their family members every time the child came in or went out of a room. Try doing that for a day in your home!
Children were not allowed to shout, complain, interrupt or disagree with anyone . They had to do as they were told, and be cheerful and quiet all the time.

Victorian gallery

A railway poster advertising Brighton and Volk’s Electric Railway
Women in a Victorian workhouse
Clothes that a wealthy Victorian man would have worn
Victorian dresses with bustles (Credit: Lovelorn Poets via flickr)
A Victorian hoop skirt
How children dressed in the Victorian era
A Victorian magic lantern
An early Christmas card
A Victorian living room
A Victorian kitchen
A Victorian-style pushchair

Victorian inventions like the steam engine and innovations like steel-making led to machines being made that could produce lots of the same thing at once. Factories were filled with machines like these. While it used to be that one person would be a weaver and make cloth, machines could now do that job instead and make cloth that didn’t cost as much. So, what did people do if machines did all the work? Well, the machines needed looking after, and factory owners wanted people who could do that as well as take care of other little jobs around the factory. Since factories were usually built in large towns and cities, and people needed new jobs, most people moved to where the factories were. By the end of the Victorian era, half of the people living in Britain lived in cities. This meant that cities were crowded and dirty . If you were poor and couldn’t afford to live in a very nice place, it was easy to get sick. There was a large outbreak of cholera in London in 1853-1854 that killed 11,000 people. Most people thought that the disease was coming from areas that just smelled nasty and got passed around through scents in the air, but Dr. John Snow worked out that the disease was actually spreading because of a cesspit that was leaking into a water pump where people drank from. By the end of the Victorian era, London had a better sewage system and sanitation was a bigger concern – plus, people knew more about how diseases are passed from one person to another. Other famous Victorians who believed that proper hygiene and sanitation were needed to be healthy were Florence Nightingale and Dr. Joseph Lister. Dr. Lister was a surgeon who discovered that cleaning wounds and surgical instruments prevented infections. Jobs that people had in Victorian times included usual ones like lawyers, doctors, teachers and vicars, but there were other jobs too:

Engineers were needed to build bridges, buildings and machines
Miners to get coal, iron and tin
Mill workers to keep machines running and produce textiles
Farm workers to tend and harvest crops
Railway porters to sort out passengers’ luggage
Navvies who broke ground for railway tracks to be laid down
Nightmen to clear out the sewers in crowded cities
Maids, butlers, cooks and other servants in the home

Steam engines needed coal to run them, so mining coal was very important . Working in coal mines was hard, and sometimes entire families would do it just to earn enough money. There were also mines for iron and tin in different parts of Britain. Only poor people would work in factories and mines, and both were pretty unhealthy places to be. The air would be thick with dust from the mines or from the cotton being spun for cloth, and working hours were long. If someone didn’t have a home (or money to afford a place to live), they could go to a workhouse , which was a place that provided food and beds in exchange for doing work. While this sounds pretty handy, it wasn’t very nice. Men, women and children all had to live separately, so families couldn’t stay together. The food wasn’t very good, and children weren’t taught how to read and write. Everyone had to wear the same uniform, and breaking any rules would mean strict punishment. If you were rich, then life was completely different! Rich Victorians lived in large houses that were well heated and clean. Children got a good education either by going away to school or having a governess who taught them at home (this is usually how girls were educated). Wealthy people could also afford to buy beautiful clothes. All women in Victorian times wore dresses with long skirts, but rich women could get the latest fashions that needed special underclothes to wear properly. They wore dresses that needed hoop skirts underneath to make the dresses spread out in a dome shape around their legs. Or, they wore skirts that lay mostly flat but that poofed out a bit around their bottom – this was called a bustle. All men, whether rich or poor, wore waistcoats. Rich men also wore top hats and carried walking sticks.

Names to know from the Victorian era:

Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) – Florence was the founder of modern nursing; she knew it was important to keep hospitals clean and well-run. Charles Dickens (1812-1870) – a famous Victorian author who wrote A Christmas Carol , and many other books about life in Victorian times Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) – a Victorian author from Scotland who wrote the famous children’s stories Treasure Island and Kidnapped . Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) – a popular Victorian poet; one of his poems was ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’, which was about the Crimean War. Thomas Barnardo (1845-1905) – founded children’s charity Barnardo’s in 1870 as a home for children who were orphaned or didn’t have a place to live, which meant they didn’t have to go to a workhouse Mrs Isabella Beeton (1836-1865) – an author who wrote a famous book about cooking and housekeeping that many people in Victorian times used Charles Darwin (1809-1882) – a Victorian naturalist who wrote On the Origin of Species and came up with the theory of natural selection, which led to scientific research into evolution . Joseph Lister (1827-1912) – Lister was a surgeon who introduced the idea of keeping surgical instruments free from germs, and disinfecting wounds.

Just for fun...

Take a quiz about Victorian life
See a map of the British Empire in Victorian times
Explore a Victorian painting
What can you learn about life in Victorian times from looking at the census ?
Organise a Victorian Experience Day in your own school!
Can you spot what differences there were between homes for rich people and homes for poor people ?
Find out about Washday Monday and domestic life in a 19th century weaver's cottage
How to make Victorian Christmas crackers and Victorian Christmas tree ornaments.
Try your hand at Victorian cookery with recipes like beef stew with dumplings (Hodge Podge), roast goose and apple batter pudding
Learn to play some Victorian parlour games
Read some Victorian poetry like The Owl and the Pussy Cat by Edward Lear or The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Sing 'Hurrah, the Nineteenth Century' , a KS1 learning song

Best books about Victorians for children

Find out more about Victorian life:

Watch a kids' video about Victorian life: BBC History: Day In The Life Victorians
Details of the household staff at Shibden Hall , including the butler, the housemaid and the under-housemaid
Watch BBC Bitesize videos about life in Victorian Scotland: school in Victorian Scotland , home life in Victorian Scotland , work in Victorian Scotland and holidays and leisure in Victorian Scotland
Make your own Victorian Christmas
See Victorian toys like zoetropes, tiddlywinks and samplers
Listen to short audio dramas about the lives of children in Victorian times on BBC Schools Radio
Information about lots of different aspects of Victorian life: health , entertainment , crime and punishment and transport and travel
Find out about Victorian buildings and houses in an architecture podcast from FunKids
Children's information about Victorian schooling , Victorian fashion , Victorian workers and Victorian families
Read facts about health and food in Victorian times
Immerse yourself in fiction books set in Victorian times
Discover life in a Victorian weaver's cottage the interactive way: listen to and watch the looms and imagine living without heating or electricity
Find out about 7 innovations which changed Victorian England , including central heating
Find out about how children worked in Victorian mines and Victorian cotton mills
Information about Victorian homes : workers' housing and upper class houses
See a photograph of a Victorian swimming costume
The life of Michael Marks , entrepreneur and founder of M&S!
See logbooks from a Victorian school , digitised by Year 5 and Year 6 children

Explore lots of places with Victorian history See life as it was more than 100 years ago at Blists Hill Victorian Town Learn about coal mining in Victorian times at the National Coal Mining Museum for England Visit Tyntesfield , a Victorian stately home in Somerset See writer Thomas Carlyle’s house in Chelsea, decorated as it would have been in Victorian times Explore a Victorian workhouse , and learn about the people who would have lived and worked there Visit the Victoria and Albert Museum in London to see clothes that upper class Victorians would have worn Take a tour of the Charles Dickens museum , which is in a house where the famous author used to live Embark on a virtual tour of the Crystal Palace, site of the Great Exhibition of 1851 organised by Prince Albert , to see its beautiful and innovative design and discover amazing facts about the exhibition it housed

Quick quiz about Victorian life!

Read this page and answer the questions below:

Q: Why might it have been exciting to live during the Victorian era?

Q: Why might it have been difficult to live during the Victorian era?

Q: Name an important invention from the Victorian era

Q: Name a famous Victorian author and at least one of their books.

Q: What laws changed during the Victorian era?

Q: What is a work house?

Q: What was Florence Nightingale known for?

Q: Where did poor people work?

Q: What is a magic lantern show?

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The Victorian Era Primary Resource

Learn all about this period of amazing inventions and discoveries.

This history primary resource explores Britain’s Victorian period in a fun, colourful comic. Join max the mouse on his time-travelling journey to discover the significant events that occurred during this exciting period in British history. When was the Victorian era? How did the British empire expand during Queen Victoria’s reign? What were the ground-breaking inventions of the Victorian era?

Pupils will learn about the key social, political and cultural changes that occurred during Britain’s Victorian period in this National Geographic Kids history primary resource.

The teaching resource can be used in study group tasks for discussion about the Victorian era and 19th century Britain, It could be used as a printed handout for each pupil to read themselves, or for display on the interactive whiteboard, as part of a whole class reading exercise.

Activity : In the same way that Queen Victoria dedicated monuments to her husband Albert, ask pupils to design a monument dedicated to someone they love or feel inspired by. They could also design their own postage stamp/s, inspired by their favourite people, places and things. Once finished, get the children to present their work to the class, or write a short description explaining their designs.

N.B. The following information for mapping the resource documents to the school curriculum is specifically tailored to the English National Curriculum and Scottish Curriculum for Excellence . We are currently working to bring specifically tailored curriculum resource links for our other territories; including South Africa , Australia and New Zealand . If you have any queries about our upcoming curriculum resource links, please email: [email protected]

This History primary resource assists with teaching the following History objectives from the National Curriculum :

Know and understand the history of these islands as a coherent, chronological narrative, from the earliest times to the present day: how people’s lives have shaped this nation and how Britain has influenced and been influenced by the wider world.
Gain historical perspective by placing their growing knowledge into different contexts, understanding the connections between local, regional, national and international history; between cultural, economic, military, political, religious and social history; and between short- and long-term timescales.

National Curriculum Key Stage 1 History objective:

Pupils should be taught: significant historical events, people and places in their own locality
Pupils should be taught: the lives of significant individuals in the past who have contributed to national and international achievements. Some should be used to compare aspects of life in different periods [for example, Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria, Christopher Columbus and Neil Armstrong]

National Curriculum Key Stage 2 History objective:

Pupils should be taught a study of an aspect or theme in British history that extends pupils’ chronological knowledge beyond 1066

This History primary resource assists with teaching the following Social Studies Second level objective from the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence :

I can discuss why people and events from a particular time in the past were important, placing them within a historical sequence
I can compare and contrast a society in the past with my own and contribute to a discussion of the similarities and differences

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