How the Victorians cleaned house 

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Like so many other things, how you cleaned house in Victorian England depended on how much money you had. Money decided how much time you had, how much stuff you owned that demanded to be cleaned, and whether you cleaned it yourself or had other people do it for you. It decided how sooty your neighborhood was and how far you had to go to get water. But what people cleaned with didn’t vary that much.

It was heavy work, and all or almost all of it was done by women.

 

Baking soda

The Victorian era ran from 1837 to 1901, and baking soda was introduced in 1846. It was–well, the phrase I grew up with was that it was the aspirin of the its dayera, meaning you used it for just about anything, but aspirin isn’t the aspirin of our time anymore, so let’s say baking soda was the reboot of the age. It was the first thing you’d try, and it fixed a surprising number of problems..

Baking soda’s primary purpose was to raise your cakes, your quickbreads, and your scones, and it revolutionized baking   But it also cleaned your oven and your silverware.

True, most of us  wouldn’t have had silverware if we’d lived back then, but never mind that. It was so new and so amazing that it cleaned your imaginary silverware. All you had to do was set your imaginary silver in a mixture of baking soda and water and it would bubble away like some magic potion. You could also use it to clean copper pans or add it to dishwater, possibly because it made dishes easier to clean and possibly and possibly because everyone agreed that it did. What the hell. It was new, it was exciting, and so you’d toss it in..

How many times have you rebooted not because you knew it would work but because everyone knows it’s the place to start?

Irrelevant photo: This is Fast Eddie, Senior Cat of the Houeshold, who did not consent to bringing in a kitten and is not amused.

Vinegar and other acids

You could clean windows with white vinegar and rub them with newspaper. You could get burned food out of pans by soaking it in cider vinegar and boiling water. (I expect any vinegar would’ve worked, but I’m parroting what I read.)

You could also, bizarrely, get a stain out of an enamel pan by putting a stick of rhubarb and water in it and simmering it for ten minutes, then leaving it to cool for an hour or so. 

You could crush eggshells, mix them with lemon, and use them to scour pans. 

 

Tea

You could also clean your windows with weak tea that you’d left sitting around for a few days. (I have no idea why the sitting around mattered. Sorry. You’re on your own there.) You could also sprinkle the rug with tea leaves that you’d squeezed almost dry, then take it outside and beat the hell out of it. The tea leaves, according to one source, helped get rid of the smell of tobacco smoke.

Yes, of course anyone who smoked did it indoors back then. 

You could also sprinkle an ordinary hard floor with tea leaves before you swept it. The theory was that it would “lay the dust.”

 

The yucky stuff 

What would you do when you needed a heavy-duty degreaser for carpets and woolens? Well, you’d use stale urine–and yes, it does actually matter that it’s stale. It has ammonia, which neutralizes dirt and grease, which are slightly acidic. 

I asked Lord Google for more information on that and his top offering read, “Shop stale urine as a degreaser.” 

I didn’t bother. I can make my own and it’s free.

But let’s not stop there. The Victorians had more fun ways to clean  Got bed bugs? Mix four egg whites with an ounce of quicksilver–that’s mercury and it’s extremely fucking poisonous–and brush it onto the mattress. It’s as damaging to humans as it is to bed bugs, but we tend to be larger so it takes longer. The World Health Organization says:

“Neurological and behavioural disorders may be observed after inhalation, ingestion or dermal exposure of different mercury compounds. Symptoms include tremors, insomnia, memory loss, neuromuscular effects, headaches and cognitive and motor dysfunction. Mild, subclinical signs of central nervous system toxicity can be seen in workers exposed to an elemental mercury level in the air of 20 μg/m3 or more for several years. Kidney effects have been reported, ranging from increased protein in the urine to kidney failure.”

You prefer the bed bugs? It’s your choice. The bites do itch.

 

Water

I can’t give you a solid date for the point when indoor plumbing was introduced–it’s not that simple–but it’s safe to say that almost no one had it. So unless you were wildly rich, you wouldn’t use any more water than you had to. In Ironbridge, Shropshire, some people had to walk a third of a mile for water–and then haul it back, preferably without spilling it. 

 

Feather dusters and cheaper alternatives

As the Victorian era rolled on, people further down the economic scale were able to afford some soft furnishings, some books, some knicknacks–little non-useful things that could be set on a shelf and admired. And they all of them collected dust. 

So you dusted. Feather dusters were best–they were made from ostrich feathers, which had barbs that caught the dust–but they were also too expensive for ordinary households. So you might use a soft cloth. 

You could also squidge white bread into any crevices that you couldn’t reach with a cloth or a fingernail.

 

Floors

I’m shifting categories here, from things people used to clean to the things they cleaned with them. Somewhere out there lurks a way to avoid that, but I can’t be bothered to hunt it. It’s a sly old beast, and I’m simply an old one. So pretend you don’t notice.

In working class homes, the floor would be a hard surface–tile, wood, stone–and you’d sprinkle it with tea leaves, sweep it, then get down on your hands and knees and scrub the beast, using soapy water or water and soda–but this isn’t baking soda, it’s something both stronger and harder on the hands. 

Let’s take Ironbridge as an example, because its museums have a good website. It was at the heart of the industrial revolution, a town full of factories, furnaces, and dirt, soot, and smoke (they went together). People heated with coal, which kicked out some more soot. So everyday cleaning was a battle. And the streets–at least in working class neighborhoods–weren’t paved, so when you came in your shoes would be muddy. 

This is Britain, remember.

One Ironbridge resident said, “I’ve seen my mother scrub ours twice a day, year in, year out sort of thing.  Because she used to do it in the morning.  Well then we used to come home from school, we used to be pittering and pattering, in and out, because there was no tarmac roads, you carried a lot of rubbish on your shoes.  And I’ve seen my mother set to and scrub the floor before my father come home from work.  And that was twice a day, and that was regular.” 

 

Laundry

This was one of the heaviest jobs and not technically housecleaning but if you were a housewife (and having gone through what housekeeping was about I begin to think women did marry the house) it was part of the deal.

First you’d collect your water (wherever it was–up to a third of a mile away, remember) and heat it on the stove, then add some soap flakes and toss in your first load of laundry, which you’d agitate by hand, using something called a dolly or a posser. (These days, you can buy a dolly tub online for £170 and use it as a lawn ornament. It’s good to know that irony isn’t dead.) 

You’d do that for, oh, say, half an hour. Then you’d run everything between the rollers of a mangle to force the soapy water out and put the laundry into fresh water to rinse.

Then you’d run it through the mangle again and rinse it again. And again. Then you’d add some blue dye to make everything look brighter. 

Then you’d run it through the mangle one last time and hang it out to dry, hoping to hell it wasn’t raining. If it was (this is Britain, remember), you’d have to hang it indoors.

Then you’d go back and do it all over again with the next load. And the one after that. And the one after that.

When everything was dry, you had to iron it, using a flat iron that you heated on the kitchen stove. 

If you wonder why mothers yelled at their kids about getting their clothes dirty, that’s why.

 

Spring Cleaning

But everyday cleaning wasn’t enough. You had to do spring cleaning as well.

You’d start, I expect, by getting the chimneys cleaned, because that knocked dirt from the chimney into the house. You wouldn’t want to do that after you’d cleaned, and you would want to skip  this step. You could burn the house down. 

After that, you’d get to work.

According to the Ironbridge Gorge Museums website, you’d start this at the top of the house and work down, moving all the furniture out of a room, taking the curtains down to wash, repainting the walls or cleaning the wallpaper, cleaning the floors and woodwork, cleaning and polishing the furniture.

This applies, of course, to people whose houses had multiple stories and multiple rooms, and all the stuff that went into them. Adapt it according to your circumstances.

You’d take your carpets outside and whack the hell out of them. Lighting fixtures? These would’ve been gas, oil, or candles and all involved open flames, which brought the gift of dirt as well as light. The fumes from oil lighting tarnished metal. Candles smoked. So clean all your lighting fixtures.

Be sure to polish all the wooden furniture. If you iron your polishing cloth, it will leave a better shine than an unironed one.

Have I missed anything? Take that out and clean it too.

Move everything back in and start on the next room.

 

What works and what doesn’t?

English Heritage–an organization that maintains historic buildings for the public to troop through and gawk at and charms money out of their pockets in the process–has been trying out Victorian cleaning methods. Here’s what they can tell us.

Cleaning tricks that work

  • Using white bread to clean wallpaper. Remember to clean up the crumbs.
  • Using milk to clean flagstone floors. Skim milk’s best,and you’ll need to get down on the floor and attack it with a scrub brush. They recommend trying it on a small corner first to make sure, because stone isn’t all alike.
  • Polishing waxed wood floors with a mix of beeswax and turpentine.
  • Dusting furniture and figurines (of course you have figurines) with a pony hair brush. (Of course you have a pony hair brush. And of course you know why this is different from a horse hair brush.)
  • Using chamois leather to polish your mirrors.

Clearing tricks to avoid

  • Sprinkling the carpet with damp tea leaves before sweeping. They don’t say why this isn’t recommended, but I’d guess it has something to do with the combination of carpets and brooms.
  • Cleaning oil paintings with a wet slice of potato, sponging it with lukewarm water, and drying it with an old silk handkerchief. 
  • Cleaning wallpaper by covering it with oatmeal, then sweeping it off with a feather duster or a soft broom.
  • Shining silver with salt and Worcestershire sauce.
  • Washing wooden floors with beer.
  • Cleaning copper pans with lemon and salt.

If they tried stale urine on anything, they haven’t mentioned it. 

 

A final word on Victorian cleaning

It seems only right to leave you with an abbreviated part of the lyrics to a traditional song, “The Housewife’s Lament.” Apologies for the formatting. I haven’t figured out how to set it as a poem.

One day I was walking, I heard a complaining

And saw an old woman the picture of gloom

She gazed at the mud on her doorstep (’twas raining)

And this was her song as she wielded her broom

Chorus

Oh, life is a toil and love is a trouble

Beauty will fade and riches will flee

Pleasures they dwindle and prices they double

And nothing is as I would wish it to be

In March it is mud, it is slush in December

The midsummer breezes are loaded with dust

In fall the leaves litter, in muddy September

The wall paper rots and the candlesticks rust

Chorus

With grease and with grime from corner to center

Forever at war and forever alert

No rest for a day lest the enemy enter

I spend my whole life in struggle with dirt.

You can listen to it here. 

91 thoughts on “How the Victorians cleaned house ”

  1. Donkey stones for cleaning the front step, well into the 20th century – although I think that’s a northern thing. Trying to keep the house clean in an industrial area was a nightmare, especially as a lot of women worked in mills as well as having to do the housework, but a dirty floor was a sign of being “rough” rather than “respectable”, so you had to clean. Women of my mum’s generation (born just after the war) still tell stories of older female relatives (usually mothers-in-law!) surreptitiously running fingers along the furniture to check for dust.

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    • Some of that, although not as clearly as you’ve put it, was in the back of my mind as I wrote this, but it was already much too long and I was stretched too thin to find an authoritative source for it. I didn’t just want to toss in, “I read somewhere a long time ago that…” So many thanks for adding it.

      But what’s a donkey stone?

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  3. We lived in a Victorian terrace when I was a kid, and had a mangle though it was leftover from when Mum was a kid. She’d managed to roll a finger through it and it didn’t set right, the knuckle was always in raised position. Didn’t stop her playing the piano really well. If you’re parboiling potatoes prior to roasting, put 1/2 teaspoon of baking powder in the water, they come out of the oven crispier on the outside and softer on the inside. Yummy.

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  5. My mother was still using the old “copper” for laundry (though with indoor hot water on tap by then) and a mangle into the early 1950s. Oh the joy when a laundrette opened up down the road, and then when she got her first twin-tub machine.

    Not being a family to throw things away, we also had one of two of the old-style flat-irons, which my mother used (suitably wrapped up) as bed-warmers. But in the end we all grew tired of the thumping as they got kicked out of the bed.

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    • I tried and failed to find out how much they weighed. I’m sure the information’s out there somewhere, but I must’ve been asking the wrong questions. They were pretty damn heavy, weren’t they?

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  10. My philosophy matches Sheila Morris’s. Erma Bombeck also pointed out that as you dusted the dust out the window the wind swept it away and swept in more from the other direction.

    Mercury was also well-known as an early treatment for syphilis. Bedbugs too eh ?

    Hope your dog is better. That adds a whole new dimension to cleaning. And hope Fast Eddie and Little Red Cat are adjusting to one another.

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    • Between the dog and the cats, it’s still–

      Let’s put it this way: At least we don’t have bedbugs. Or mercury. Or syphilis, come to think of it.

      Things are getting a bit better, but it’s taking its own damn time. Thanks for the good wishes.

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    • I was lucky enough to take a class from a historian of women’s history, Sara Evans, and one of the things that stuck with me was that as labor saving devices were introduced, standards of housekeeping rose, guaranteeing that at least some of that free time didn’t become free. She was focused on US history, but I expect it was true in Britain as well.

      Regardless, though, the Victorian woman’s workload was incredible–and heavy.

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      • I seem to remember reading that, at least as regards vacuum cleaners, advances in technology made more work in the home – the first vacuum cleaners were something brought to homes by a specialist and you left the job to them. Buy your own handy cleaner and you have to do it yourself. Likewise, more recently, carpet washers.

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  16. I’m still using baking soda; it works wonders!
    Now after all this … Worcestershire sauce? That is an enigma in itself :) Has anyone outside of the UK ever lived to buy a 2nd bottle?

    Hopefully housewife wasn’t preggos come Spring cleaning! — I’ll give the beer to my husband next Spring and make him clean the floors!

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  17. I just bought a jigsaw puzzle second hand, and when I opened the box, definitely cigarette smoke-y. I threw in a tea bag, waited overnight and voila! Smell was gone. I thought you had to line a bowl with tin foil to make the baking soda take the tarnish off silver? I’ll try it without!

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  19. I have just survived 2 months without a washing machine so I am taking great interest in all these tips. Thankfully the 21st century in the form of plumbing is here now – I actually sat and watched the washing go round, I was so pleased to have it doing the hard work of washing and spinning our clothes. Doing it by hand was very hard work, believe you me!

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  20. I was born with middle child syndrome. Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, chores were my staple.

    Rail lovers lament the demise of steem. I am a fan of heritage rail myself. But a blotch of soot on hand washed white Egyptian cotton hanging still wet on a laundry line is a sight for sore eyes.

    You write well, yet I ended up real tired. Perhaps time for coffee.

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  21. Pingback: How the Victorians cleaned house  – Nelsapy

  22. I still clean my windows with vinegar!! Works a treat (I also use it for mirrors and sometimes for sinks).
    I love some of these old ideas – they are often cheap as chips too.
    For instance (no idea if it’s Victorian or not) but the best garden fertilizer is nettles and water, leave it for a few days until really smelly and then just watch your garden grow. It’s also brilliant to eliminate pesky lice etc from plants.
    Entertaining post!!

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  24. This is one of the best articles I’ve read in a while. Still sitting here in my boots, appreciating my vacuum cleaner. Thanks for stopping by and I’m going to save it just in case I hear someone complain about household chores again and I will direct them your way.

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    • Ever since I wrote this, I have moments of looking at the water I’m using so casually for any one of a hundred things and think, A third of a mile I’d have to haul this. Even if I only had to haul it in from the street, I know I’d be using a lot less of it.

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