During the reign of Daoguang to Guangxu, when the Westernization movement and various changes were underway on the land of China, the industrial revolution had reached its peak in distant England.
At this time, the British economy and culture can be described as in its heyday, and after the title of empire was transferred to the United Kingdom, the British Empire opened up an era that cannot be replicated, and this is the famous Victorian era.
Many people wish they could be born in Victorian England, where the luxurious and wealthy aristocratic life is desirable, but the fact is that like Dickens's interweaving of heaven and hell, crazy Victorians have many strange lifestyles in human history, and it is estimated that many people are difficult to accept until now, let alone stay there for a while.
Diary of Demonic Beauty Stripped of teeth
Everyone has a love for beauty, but in the Victorian period, people were particularly hardcore in their pursuit of beauty.
First of all, from the morning brushing teeth, people at that time paid great attention to oral hygiene, so the invention of charcoal and honey brushing home remedies, and a spread of ten to hundred, began to be widely popular in the United Kingdom, charcoal's super dirt adsorption effect so that everyone has a mouthful of "sterile" teeth, but the corrosiveness of honey has brought trouble to everyone.
So you can see the streets and alleys, from teenagers to old people basically have a mouthful of corroded "good teeth", some women who love beauty in order to be beautiful will directly and ruthlessly extract all their teeth before getting married and make a full set of dentures.
In addition, the yearning for natural beauty is also a fashion in the Victorian era, and the beauties of the popular frontier not only want their waists to be thinner than A4 paper, preferably like wasps, which also indirectly leads to many people being infertile. The excessively narrow corset causes girls to suffer from internal organ damage, rib deformity, pelvic congestion, endometrial prolapse and other gynecological diseases.
Not only that, the exaggerated puff sleeves are the representative works of that era, and people are particularly fond of insects and birds in decoration, live insect jewelry is the most popular, many people directly stick dead butterflies on the robe as decorations, and feather hats and feather skirts are sought-after, and some avant-garde women directly inlay the whole bird's corpse as decoration on hats and dresses.
These bewildering pops also came at a natural cost, with almost 67 species of birds extinct at the time, and many local insects disappearing.
Of course, the pursuit of beauty in clothing is not a classic of the Victorian era, the most classic is that they like fair skin and reddened cheeks, which coincides with modern aesthetics, but the Victorian era is still slightly better.
At that time, because I saw that tuberculosis patients were pale and their cheeks were red, many people began to get such a disease, and some beauty lovers were even willing to die in such a beautiful way. The faint-hearted will choose to use leeches to make their faces appear pale, thus revealing a noble "dead man's white" complexion.
And these are actually small things, and testing drugs is the king. At that time, there was a complete process in the guide to the beauty of ugly girls, first using opium as a mask, then washing the face with ammonia, and then taking a small sip of arsenic tablets, this poison used to kill rats is a frequent visitor to many women's dressers, and finally smearing the face and arms with lead, so the charming fair-skinned beauty is completed.
Eye makeup is a bit simpler, applying makeup directly, but it is rich in antimony, cinnabar and cinnabar toxic minerals, which can make eye makeup more glamorous, but also give long-term users the illusion of mental confusion. These are not groundless, but are the daily contents of the "Ugly Girl Newspaper" with detailed records.
Just looking at these names can make people shudder, let alone practice, but these are the basic processes of daily beauty and makeup for Victorian ladies, so everyone looks like a miserable white and horrific beauty, from the beginning of Elizabeth I to the Victorian era.
In addition, because the makeup is coated with pure lead, the facial expression should not be too much, otherwise it is easy to have cracks, so it looks unsightly and needs to be applied again, which leads to the fact that the beauty at that time basically can't smile, after all, the teeth are not very beautiful.
Struggling on the brink of death every day
It is not an exaggeration to say that the people of the Victorian era struggled with the brink of death every day, from birth they entered the race against death, a very popular infant "obedient syrup" at that time, when babies and children were crying, in fact, it contained opium tincture, after eating it did put children in a state of fluttering coma, but if they were not careful, they would also die.
When they grow up a little, the milk that children drink is added with flour, and the bread is added with alum, which is absolutely not allowed for many mothers now. If your child has dental problems, many dentists will give them some tooth powder, which is a highly toxic powder mixed with calomel and can solve some dental problems, but the side effects are also very good.
Although the social productivity and social conditions have been greatly improved, but the population mortality rate in the early 19th century was still very high, the mortality rate of children reached 50%, and living is a kind of motivation for many people at the bottom to climb up.
At that time, the memorial ceremony was very strict, especially for women, if it was a widow, it was necessary to show a state of grief, and for two years it was not allowed to have contact with society, and during the remembrance of her husband, she was required to wear black clothes, and her words and deeds had to show her sadness for the deceased family.
In addition, the mirror in the home cannot be used, and it needs to be covered, so it is impossible to dress up, and not only that, but it is also necessary to take out part of the hair of the deceased and put it in the clothes and jewelry of the filial piety keeper and wear it every day.
Not only that, but people at that time attached great importance to funerals, and even families who had no money had to save one penny a week for each child, two pence for the mother and three pence for the father, as future funeral expenses. When Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre invented the daguerretype, it became popular to take pictures of deceased family members to remember. Because of the high cost of construction, many people only have a photo with their family after death.
For some babies who die young, parents will send their children's hair and clothes to make one-to-one toys at home in mourning, while the child's body will be left in the cemetery. The popularity of these cultures has also had a direct impact on the content of children's play, with many children's play games simulating mourning ceremonies, and many women beginning to wear all black costumes.
Not only has the cemetery become a picnic spot that everyone often chooses, but the cemetery itself is also in short supply, overcrowded, and the 18-square-meter cemetery can accommodate 70,000 corpses at its most exaggerated.
Greedy gravediggers would not only steal the property in the grave, but also cut down the coffin and sell it to local farmers, and at that time, in order to avoid the burial of the person not really died, people also designed a kind of "safety coffin" to choose from, the coffin communicates with the outside world with a bell, if it is accidentally buried, or fake death, then the alarm can be sounded by pulling the rope. However, there are also oolongs where the decomposition and swelling of corpses have led to false alarms.
A modern version of the English breakfast is taking shape
It's said that there is no food in the UK, but let's not forget that the Victorian era still has a delicious heritage of the British homeland - the English Breakfast (Full English Breakfast), which the locals also call Full Engllish.
The British breakfast is the favorite of many of the current British party, and the British breakfast is proud of the British, so the British began to set December 2 as the International British Breakfast Day in 1975, and in 2012, the English Breakfast Society was established, which is enough to see the pride of the British breakfast on their breakfast.
A complete and traditional English breakfast should include bacon, sausages, eggs (can be omelette, scrambled eggs, poached eggs), baked beans, toast, pan-fried mushrooms, hash browns, roasted tomatoes, and depending on the region and taste, with the addition of haggis, spinach, bitter chrysanthemum, muffins, bagels, etc.
Its history can be traced back to the 13th century, and in order to show off their wealth and capital, the nobles liked to use the ingredients produced in their own land to prepare a hearty breakfast for relatives and friends, and over time it became an important way of socializing among the nobles at that time. But then, as the power of the aristocracy began to decline, this form began to fade into oblivion until the arrival of the Victorian era.
Because everyone basically had two meals a day at that time, they would spend more time and energy on breakfast, and the once popular culture of the declining aristocracy began to move towards the Chinese food class and the new wealthy, who followed the example of the former aristocracy and used a hearty breakfast as a daily socialization. Some company welcome ceremonies will also be held in the form of breakfast, and even some couples' weddings will be completed in the form of breakfast.
In addition to consolidating the position of the English breakfast, the invention and popularization of natural gas stoves in the Victorian era also revolutionized kitchen cooking, the kitchen position is no longer obscure, and the social status of women has begun to improve a lot.
Write at the end
As Dickens wrote in "A Tale of Two Cities", this is the best era, but also the worst era, the Victorian period has obsession, madness, and yearning and anticipation, it is understandable that this era has laid the foundation for the development of modern British society, and even the direction of many modern societies around the world, if you have the opportunity, will you choose to return to that era?