How Would You Die In Victorian England?

Death would come to you in the form of Consumption.

You lived a lot longer than the doctor thought you would, almost two years more than expected, but in the end death came with one final bloody cough.

Tuberculosis or "Consumption" as it was called during the Victorian era, is an infectious disease of the lungs that was one of the leading causes of death during the early 19th century, killing 1 in 5 people. The disease can be spread through contaminated milk and food and by infected people coughing on others. With so many people crowded together and living in unsanitary conditions during this period, it's no surprise that infection increased at a rapid rate. Symptoms of Tuberculosis are a chronic cough with blood-tinged sputum, fever, night sweats, and weight loss (the latter giving rise to the name, "consumption").

Consumption was also a popular subject in Victorian literature and art due to it's prevalence, and because of this was strangely considered a "romantic disease". People afflicted with it were said to be more sensitive and it was often considered an artist's disease.

Death would come to you in the form of Poison.

You were poisoned, that much is certain...but you didn't commit suicide and you weren't murdered. So how exactly could you have died from being poisoned? Well...

In Victorian England almost all everyday products had poison in it. Wallpaper, beer, wine, sweets, paint, wrapping paper, painted toys, sheep dip, insecticides, dyes, stuffed animals, hat ornaments, coal, and candles—all contained arsenic. There was even arsenic in medicine (often deliberately prescribed by doctors.)

It doesn't end their however, as the grocery stores were packed with foodstuffs more liable to kill you as to nourish you. Strychnine, cocculus inculus (both are hallucinogens) and copperas was placed into rum and beer; sulphate of copper in pickles, bottled fruit, wine, and preserves; lead chromate in mustard and snuff; sulphate of iron in tea and beer; ferric ferrocynanide, lime sulphate, and turmeric in chinese tea; copper carbonate, lead sulphate, bisulphate of mercury, and Venetian lead in sugar confectionery and chocolate; lead in wine and cider; all were extensively used and were accumulative in effect, resulting, over a long period, in chronic gastritis, and, indeed, often fatal food poisoning. Red lead gave Gloucester cheese its 'healthy' red hue, flour and arrowroot a rich thickness to cream, and tea leaves were 'dried, dyed, and recycled again.'

So how were you poisoned you ask? Take your pick.

Death would come to you in an Unfortunate Accident.

You were earning a living, like everyone else, it wasn't your fault you couldn't afford to find a job in safer conditions. Your arm got caught in the machinery and before anyone had time to react and help you, you were pulled in.

During the Victorian Era there was no job more difficult or more dangerous then that of the factory worker. Men, women and children worked long twelve to fourteen hour days, six days a week (usually only having Sundays off) in life threatening and filthy conditions for 5 shillings a week ($0.45) . Factory owners cared little for the well-being of their employees and wanted only for their products to be finished more quickly and efficiently. As a result, workers were not trained in how to properly operate the machinery and many of the machines and furnaces went without proper safety checks. Because of this many people were severely injured or killed.

Death would come to you in the form of Murder.

You were walking home one night when you suddenly felt as though someone was following you, you turn to look but find that you are alone on the darkened street. Satisfied that no one is behind you, you continue on your way, but soon you hear the sound of footsteps again and you immediately quicken your step, whoever is following you also begins to pick up their pace, panicked you begin to run. After, running for sometime, you duck into an alley and catch your breath. Peaking your head from around the corner you see no sign of whomever was following you. The last thing you remember is a sharp blow to the back of your head and your body hitting the ground.

The Victorians had a very strange obsession with death, this can be seen in many of their works of art, literature and funeral customs. With this heightened interest in death, their came a morbid curiosity with murder. Dozens of books and plays were written and performed about this truly disturbing subject, of course Victorian England saw it's fair share of real murders and killers such as Amelia Dyer, Dr. Neill Cream, William Palmer and of course Jack the Ripper. But despite this there really weren't many murders going on in the early 19th century.
In fact in 1810, only 15 people were convicted of murder (out of a population of 10 million) in all of England and Wales.

When someone WAS murdered in Britain, even in a scenario we might consider relatively unremarkable — such as a confirmed criminal offing one of his confederates — it was a big deal. The curious mobbed the scenes of notorious murders (where the victims’ bodies were frequently left in situ for purposes of identification). People eagerly bought the personal effects of both killers and their victims. Even weirder, Staffordshire potteries cranked out china figurines of not only the principal players in each crime, but also of significant buildings.

Yeah...Victorian's were weird.

Death would come to you in the form of Fashion

You were attractive and fashionable, the envy of everyone you met. And why not? Not keeping up with the latest fashions is social suicide. Unfortunately for you, you discovered that looks CAN kill.

The Victorian's had many very beautiful ideas about fashion and they went to very bizarre and dangerous lengths to achieve the very heights of desirability and if they didn't they would become social outcasts.
Let us start with the ever popular corset, a bit of clothing designed to make a lady's waist appear smaller so that they could achieve an "attractive" hourglass figure. As you may know, lacing a corset too tightly can be hazardous to one's health and unsurprisingly, when tight lacing was fashionable people didn't breathe very well. Breathing the wrong way in one of these things could break a rib and cramming all of the organs inwards could cause internal bleeding.

Another dangerous bit of fashion, which was very popular during the mid 19th-century, was the crinoline. A crinoline was a type of hoop skirt that was made from horse hair, cotton and steel and it was designed to make the wearier have a more attractive bell shape. However, the thing was actually so deadly it's amazing that it was ever worn at all. Because of its design, it was quite susceptible to gusts of wind. There are tales of women on piers that were swept up and carried out to sea, where they promptly drowned due to having a steel cage tied to their waists. Other risks associated with the crinoline were that it could get caught in other people's feet, carriage wheels or furniture. And then there were the fires...3,000 women were killed due to their skirts going up in flames, the horse hair and cotton was highly flammable and the fire would be fanned by the oxygen trapped under the skirt.

However, women were not the only ones subjected to deadly clothing. The Detachable High-Collar was the height of men's fashion not only in the Victorian era, but well into the Edwardian era as well. It was a shirt collar separate from the shirt that was fastened to it by studs. The collar was usually made of a different fabric from the shirt, in which case it was almost always white, and, being unattached to the shirt, it was specially starched to a hard cardboard-like consistency. The detachable collar was also a quiet, subtle assassin. By cutting off circulation, it could creep up on a man in his drunken sleep and choke him to death when the man's head fell forward. It could also cause asphyxia and an abscess on the brain just by being tight, or in cases of indigestion that lead to the neck swelling it would simply strangle its prey. One very unlucky man at the end of the 1800's was almost guillotined on his collar when he tripped coming out of a street car.

Death is a high price to pay in order to look good, no?

Death would come to you in the form of a Billiard Ball.

No one loved to have a good time more then you. You often enjoyed going out on the town with your friends, spending the time drinking and gambling. One night, you made a bet with some dalcop over who was the better billiard player. The last thing you expected was a ball to explode in your face.

In 1862, an oft-forgotten British inventor Alexander Parkes, invented the mouldable material that we today call plastic. He christened it "parkesine" but it quickly became known by its American name of celluloid. Such early plastics were highly desirable because they allowed everything from brooches and hair combs to billiard balls, previously only available in expensive ivory, to be made cheaply. Unfortunately, parkesine is also highly flammable - as it degrades, it can self-ignite and is explosive on impact. Not ideal for a billiard ball.

Death would come to you in the form of Cholera.

The doctors were baffled, they had never seen the sort of symptoms you had, but it was clear that it was killing you. They tried everything they could think of, but it was no use...

Cholera or "The Yellow Bile" was one of the largest killers in Victorian England, second only to tuberculosis. Between 1832 and 1866, four cholera epidemics struck Great Britain, as part of pandemic outbreaks that affected the entire globe. The 1848-49 cholera outbreak killed 50,000 people in London alone.
In the 1830s, the disease was still unfamiliar in most of the world beyond parts of the Indian subcontinent. Terrified patients had never seen such symptoms before, and doctors were helpless to do anything but try remedies that they thought had worked for other diseases. These remedies, from the relatively merciful giving of opiates to more aggressive approaches such as bleeding or burning the skin, were largely worthless, as were most theories of how the disease was transmitted (including, but not limited to, bad weather, foul smells, electro-magnetism and divine vengeance). We now believe cholera to be a waterborne disease, which is transmitted between humans via the fecal-oral route. It usually enters the body through contaminated water or food and then multiplies in the intestines. Untreated, it can kill within a few days through rapid dehydration, caused by copious, uncontrollable diarrhea and vomiting.

As people in the early 1800s did not understand what caused the disease nor, indeed, know about germs (which were not understood until much later in the late-nineteenth century), caregivers did not even know to wash their hands after tending the sick. In an era without running water in most homes, and with many people living in small spaces, it was easy for contamination to spread. And in industrial early nineteenth-century cities with rapidly growing populations and no sewer systems, most people disposed of their waste in cesspits or in the streets. From there, it eventually ended up in rivers that provided drinking water, spreading it far beyond its origin.

A very unfortunate way to go.

Death would come to you in the form of being Buried Alive.

"After succumbing to a fever of some sort in, Irish woman Marjorie McCall was hastily buried to prevent the spread of whatever had done her in. Marjorie was buried with a valuable ring, which her husband had been unable to remove due to swelling. This made her an even better target for body snatchers, who could cash in on both the corpse and the ring. The evening after Marjorie was buried, before the soil had even settled, the grave-robbers showed up and started digging. Unable to pry the ring off the finger, they decided to cut the finger off. As soon as blood was drawn, Marjorie awoke from her coma, sat straight up and screamed.
Upon seeing the supposed screaming dead woman, the robbers fled from the graveyard. Marjorie climbed out of the hole and made her way back to her home. Her husband John, a doctor, was at home with the children when he heard a knock at the door. He told the children, 'If your mother were still alive, I’d swear that was her knock.'
When he opened the door to find his wife standing there, dressed in her burial clothes, blood dripping from her finger but very much alive, he dropped dead to the floor."

During the 19th century, no cause of death frightened people more then that of the premature burial. The fears of being buried alive were heightened by reports of doctors and accounts in literature and the newspapers(some which falsely claimed that more than one tenth of humanity was buried alive.)

As well as dealing with the subject in "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Cask of Amontillado", Edgar Allan Poe wrote "The Premature Burial", which was published in 1844. It contained accounts of supposedly genuine cases of premature burial as well as detailing the narrator's own (perceived) interment while still alive.

The hysteria was so prevalent that many upper-class English people left legacies to their family physicians to protect themselves against this gruesome fate. Francis Douce, an antiquarian, gave 200 guineas to his surgeon to see that his heart was taken out after his death. Lady Dryden of Northamptonshire, left an eminent physician £50 to slit her throat before burial.

The general fear of premature burial led to the invention of many safety devices which could be incorporated into coffins. Most consisted of some type of device for communication to the outside world such as a cord attached to a bell that the interred person could ring should he revive after the burial. In the second half of the 19th century, the obsession with security coffins continued and their design became more advanced. Alarm bells were replaced with firecrackers, sirens and even rockets which could be set off from inside the coffin.

I suppose that's one way to get someone's attention.