Strange Things The Victorians Did That Would Not Be Allowed Today

The Victorians may have been a pretty straight-laced lot in many ways, but they also had a few habits that will astonish and in some cases appall you. From snacking on sheep’s trotters and limping in the name of fashion, to sending gratuitously insulting Valentine cards and wearing dead people’s teeth, the Victorians actually engaged in some truly bizarre behavior. Read on at your own peril to find out about some of the weirder things your Victorian ancestors were getting up to... and don't say we didn't warn you.

Why were they limping?

You may have had a limp before after hurting yourself, but have you ever limped in pursuit of fashion? Surely not! Except women in Victorian 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 — and she had a bout of rheumatic fever which resulted in a limp.

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 not always the case in Victorian times. 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.