Strange Things The Victorians Did That Would Not Be Allowed Today

They may have been a straight-laced lot, the Victorians, but they had some habits that will astonish and in some cases appall you. From snacking on sheep’s trotters, through limping in the name of fashion, to sending gratuitously insulting Valentine cards, the Victorians engaged in some truly bizarre behavior. Read on to find out about some of the weirder things your Victorian ancestors were doing...

Why were they limping?

Possibly the majority of us have had a temporary limp resulting from a minor accident; of course, some always limp because of a long-term condition. But limping in pursuit of fashion? That’s just crazy! Except Victorian women in Britain did just that. The bizarre fad even had a name, the “Alexandra limp.” And it was all about mimicking royalty.

In 1863 Princess Alexandra of Denmark married Queen Victoria’s son and heir Albert Edward, later King Edward VII. The unfortunate princess suffered a bout of rheumatic fever resulting in a limping walk. Some of the fashion-conscious citizenry began to copy her gait. Women even wore mismatching shoes to achieve the desired effect. Pretty soon, shoemakers started to make ill-matched footwear specially designed to cause limping. Extraordinary.

Vinegar Valentine cards

When you send a Valentine card, it’s to declare your love for someone, right? It turns out that this was most definitely not always the case when the Victorians mailed a message to mark St. Valentine’s Day. In fact, there was a whole genre of insulting cards. Some of these cards, known as Vinegar Valentines, were downright offensive.

In a 2017 article about these Vinegar Valentines the Smithsonian magazine gave a few choice examples. One card shows a woman dousing a man with a bucket of water. The caption goes, “It says as plain as it can say, Old fellow you’d best stop away.” Hardly Shakespeare, but the message is clear enough. Astonishingly, according to author Ruth Webb Lee, by the middle of the 1800s nearly half of all Valentine cards were of the vinegar variety.