Victorian Era

[Nooriginalusername23]

If you could go back to the Victorian era for just 24 hours, what would you do? I would love to walk through east end London when Jack the Ripper was on his killing spree. Would love to feel what the atmosphere was like and life in general was like back then.

what would you do for the day if you could go back in time?

I gave this fantasy a lot whilst lying in bed. I’d open a little shop full of exotic products or gadgets from the future, or I’d be a median and predict people la future surprisingly accurately. Or I’d be a hero and be the first to start using antibiotics.

What a great question ! My great great grandfather was a detective at Scotland Yard in the Victorian era, so I’d want to go spend the day with him.
However- the romantic in me would like to spend the evening at an aristocratic ton ball !! Perhaps go to the theatre after to feel the atmosphere of what some of my favourite ones were like when they were first built.

@Alcemeg thank you for that link I haven't seen these ones absolutely fascinating aren't they. And to think how long ago these videos were filmed and obviously all the children in those videos would've grown old and now no longer be with us probably all passed away many many years ago actually.
I don't think they'll be the same fascination if people watch today's videos in say 150 or 200 years time as video is so common place now mind you it will be lovely for descendants to see videos of great great granny and grandad in many years to come that's if modern videos filmed on current smart phones will still be playable on future technology.

@TaRaDeBumDeAy I have a book about Dorset street that I’m reading. It was considered to be the worst street in London and police wouldn’t go down it alone. Scary

I’d like to experience the Music Hall too, which was a pretty raucous venue in its day. The performers had to be tough to withstand the chaotic audience, but I’d love to see the acts.

I’d also like to go to an East End pub (the rough sort) or visit one of those lavish Victorian Gin Palaces.

I'm from a bit of a no-go area of London and would like to see how it compared to today.

I'm not sure which I think would be worse.

There's a part of me that would like to get in with an artsy or lefty crowd and see what they got up to. Maybe architects or urban improvers.

Other than that, I'd like to travel to remote and unspoiled parts of the realm by train and I suppose horse and carriage, with a full set of luggage, and introductions to a lot of comfortable country houses, shooting lodges, etc.

Would love to go to some European spa or resort too, pre WW1.

Incredibly fascinating, aren't they!

(from another YouTube channel) is one of my favourites - so vivid, the cat and the children so real.

The playlist here has colourised films of Moscow and Paris on the late 19th century.... plus one of a fair in Northern England in 1902, which to be honest makes me glad of modern festivals 😁

Not sure why that link of the children and cats didn't work... try again:

I'd be interested to just wander round somewhere busy, like a market or a busy cafe perhaps, and just listen in on what people were talking about. We sort of know what people looked like in those days, but what did they sound like and what did they talk about to each other?

I would love to know that as well!
There would have been a lot of conversation most likely as there was no technology or tv to distract them.

‘Victorian’ covers quite a long sweep of history. I recently watched this video sketching how women’s fashion changed through the nineteenth century and it made me think how e.g. the 1860s and the 1870s were probably as distinct to them as the 1980s and 1990s were to us.

Practically I expect life didn’t change that much in rural communities though.

Walking round streets and eavesdropping sounds great. If I could go back and see one historical event it would be the Matchgirls strike I think.

Gaaaahhhh! Me again. check out videos #24 and #25 on this link.
A-ma-ZINg dahling as Craig would say.

Read 'The Five' by Hallie Rubenhold and I bet you'd change your mind about that. Late 19c Whitechapel was where people went when they had no further to fall in society.

I didnt know there was a history club section? is this new?

I would like to go back and visit people like Newton or other inventors and wow them with things like electricity, trains, cars or bicycles.

Indeed, it was grim. Can’t for the life of remember the book I read, it might have been by the history writer Sarah Wise, but in describing the utter deprivation of the East End slums and doss houses, she mentioned that the room in which Mary Jane Kelly was murdered in Millers Court was still splattered with her blood when the next tenant moved in. I can’t think of anything more horrible.

I had ancestors who lived on Dorset St and surrounds.

Also another good book is Child of the Jago but also People of the Abyss

My great great grandfather was a photographer and my great great great grandmother was a photographer - both at different times and places in the Victorian era. We have photos taken by both still. As well as other family photos. I think the earliest we can date are from the 1860s (though we have evidence that my great great great grandmother was in business in the 1850s which makes her one of the earliest professional photographers and certainly one of the earliest women photographers).

I find them utterly fascinating. The photos only show so much and even though video shows more I can still see them being a source of more, not less fascination.

I’ve read that book!

I'm surprised nobody has said this yet but...

I would love to spend a day with the women who started the first organised suffrage groups, maybe in the 1880s when hopes were high that enough MPs could be persuaded to change the law and let women vote. I'd like to shadow someone like Millicent Garrett Fawcett for a day.

I'd like to spend the evening in my great-grandparents' humble home in Lambeth, absorbing what they were like, what they talked about and how they lived.

Oh I would love this!

I'd think nobody has mentioned it because the suffragette movement is more associated with forming in the Edwardian era than the Victorian era, even if the roots of it during earlier years.

A lot of them were ghastly snobs too who felt suffrage/involvement in the movement was not for the lower classes or people of dubious character.

@Alcemeg I spent ages the other night watching through some of these videos you posted the link for and what surprised me the most was how incredibly well dressed everybody appeared to be. Especially the one of the fair up north. Unless all the people caught on the film were from the middle to upper classes as I was always under the impression the victorian era was full of unclean ragged looking people.

As for white Chapel in London which people have mentioned I'm from Manchester and we had a similarly bad district known as Angel meadow during the victorian era I'd love to go back to see if it really was a bad as it was reported to have been. During the victorian era a Germany reporter called freidrick engels wrote a book about how bad he found Angel meadow to be the book was called the condition of the working classes in England.

@theblackradiator Yes, don't they look dapper! I suppose filming was expensive and so they tended to record grand occasions.

, though (yet another channel!) is of factory workers in Northern England in 1900/1901 and is rather different. At 04:23 a guy flicks a V at the camera 😂

The "oldest recorded video" I can find is , "Roundhay Garden Scene," shot in Leeds in 1888 and again featuring very beautifully dressed people!