A photograph from the Victorian era might show a family dressed in their finest clothing, seated in natural poses, appearing peaceful and composed. What the image does not reveal is that one of the subjects is already dead. In 1860s England, the high cost and rarity of cameras meant that many people were photographed only once in their lives—and that single sitting often happened after death. Families dressed their deceased relatives in their best clothes, posed their bodies to look lifelike, and sometimes even painted open eyes onto closed eyelids.
Children were the most frequently photographed this way, as child mortality rates were brutally high. Some of these images are so convincingly realistic that it is impossible to distinguish the living from the dead. This practice was just one element of a broader Victorian relationship with death that modern observers often find disturbing. Families also kept locks of hair from the deceased and transformed them into elaborate pieces of mourning jewelry, including brooches, necklaces, and bracelets braided from human strands.
Specialized craftsmen created intricate floral designs and patterns using only hair. Queen Victoria popularized the custom after her husband Albert died in 1861, wearing jewelry made with his hair for the rest of her life. Some of these pieces still exist in museums and private collections today. Death was so omnipresent in Victorian Britain that some families refused to let go entirely.
In the 1870s, using arsenic and mercury—substances now known to be highly toxic—families preserved the bodies of their loved ones and kept them at home for weeks or even months. Bodies remained in living rooms, bedrooms, and sometimes in the dining room during meals. Children grew up living alongside preserved grandparents or siblings as though it were perfectly normal. The practice only began to fade when doctors realized the preservation substances were making the living sick as well.
Children were also given dolls bearing the faces of deceased relatives. In the 1870s, mourning rituals lasted for years, and children were incorporated into them from an early age. Craftsmen created custom dolls with the features of dead grandparents and siblings, sometimes using postmortem photographs as reference. Parents believed these dolls helped children process loss and keep memories alive.
The Victorian obsession with appearance extended to dangerous beauty routines. Women consumed arsenic in the form of complexion wafers, advertised as a way to achieve porcelain white skin, which had become a standard of elegance. The same poison used to kill rats slowly accumulated in the body, causing stomach pains, hair loss, and death. The symptoms resembled common illnesses, so doctors did not suspect the cause.
The product remained on shelves for decades before anyone questioned its safety. Similarly, women drank straight vinegar daily in pursuit of thinness and pale skin. The acid caused painful stomach ulcers, weakened bones, and rotting teeth. Some women fainted for no apparent reason.
Doctors issued warnings, but social pressure proved stronger. Corsets were laced so tightly that some women pursued an 18-inch waist—smaller than a basketball. Doctors documented cases of permanently deformed ribs and internal organs pushed out of place. Some women fainted several times a day from lack of breath.
Mothers laced corsets on girls as young as three. Autopsies revealed livers cut in half by the constant pressure of whalebone stays. Despite medical warnings, the fashion persisted for decades. Some women took even more extreme measures, deliberately swallowing capsules containing tapeworm eggs.
The worms grew inside the intestine and consumed part of the food the person ate, producing weight loss without dieting. Quack doctors sold these pills as miracle solutions. The parasites could grow meters long, causing serious organ damage. Some women developed cysts in the brain, and others died.
The trend lasted for decades. Hygiene practices during the era were equally troubling by modern standards. In 1850s England, even royalty bathed only once a month. People believed hot water opened the pores and allowed disease to enter the body.
The result was a pervasive stench masked by strong perfumes and heavy colognes. Cholera and typhus killed thousands in London, and doctors blamed bad air in the streets rather than recognizing that poor sanitation and lack of bathing were spreading disease. Medical treatments of the time were often dangerous or outright lethal. Doctors practiced bloodletting, believing that draining blood restored the body’s fluid balance.
They opened veins or applied leeches, sometimes removing liters of blood from patients who were already weak. Many patients died from the treatment rather than their original illness. George Washington had nearly two liters of blood drained before his death. In British asylums in the 1880s, doctors performed crude skull operations, boring into patients’ heads to release pressure that supposedly caused madness.
The procedure was performed without proper anesthesia, with patients strapped down while primitive instruments pierced their bones. Many died from infection. Survivors often ended up in vegetative states or lost their personalities entirely. These experiments later paved the way for ice pick lobotomies, a procedure for which doctors would win Nobel prizes.
Patent medicines were equally dangerous. Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, marketed to calm crying babies, contained morphine as its secret ingredient. During the 1860s, doctors noticed babies who slept too much and never woke up again.
The syrup was sold in Britain and America for decades, and it is estimated that thousands of children died or became addicted before sales were banned. The manufacturers knew the risks but prioritized profit. Bayer released a product in the late 19th century promising to cure coughs and pain. The main ingredient was heroin, named from “heroic” because doctors believed it was a powerful, safe medicine.
The German company claimed it did not cause addiction, unlike morphine. Mothers gave the syrup to their children without a second thought, and advertisements showed healthy, happy children. Within a few years, hospitals reported serious problems linked to long-term use. Bayer only stopped making it in 1913.
Mariani wine, created in the 1870s by a Corsican chemist, mixed Bordeaux wine with coca leaves and promised to wipe out fatigue. Victorian British elites, inventors, and even Russian royalty loved it. The Vatican awarded the creator a gold medal. Doctors prescribed it, and the maker claimed to have collected more than 13,000 thank-you letters from famous people.
Only decades later did science understand why people could not quit the “miracle drink”—the secret ingredient created chemical dependence. Even more alarming was the Victorian fascination with radium. In the 1890s, the Tho-Radia brand sold creams containing radioactive elements, promising young, glowing skin. The makers claimed radiation stimulated cells and eliminated wrinkles.
Marie Curie had just discovered radium, and the substance became an instant craze, appearing in toothpaste, chocolate, and drinking water. Women applied the cream daily without realizing they were absorbing poison through their skin. Years later, cancer cases appeared. Many women died without connecting the disease to the elegant jar on their vanity.
Some Victorian remedies defy explanation entirely. In the 1860s, Britons imported Egyptian mummies, ground them into powder, and mixed them into drinks. The belief was that the powder contained life energy from the ancient pharaohs. The trade became so popular that merchants in Egypt started faking mummies, artificially aging recent bodies to sell as relics.
Doctors prescribed the powder as a legitimate remedy. It took decades before people realized they were consuming human remains with no real benefit. Doctors in the 1830s also practiced anthropodermic bibliophagy—binding books with human skin. When executed criminals ended up at anatomy schools, some professionals used their skin for book covers, preferring the parts with tattoos.
One well-known case involved a thief named George Cudmore, whose skin became the cover of a book about his own trial. Some of these bindings still exist in libraries and museums. The practice was not considered scandalous at the time; it was regarded as science. Victorian entertainment could also be disturbing.
Walter Potter spent decades creating scenes of stuffed animals posed doing human activities: kittens sitting at tea, rabbits lined up in a classroom with tiny books, squirrels smoking cigars in gentlemen’s clubs. He began the hobby at 19 and never stopped. Families visited his museum as weekend entertainment. One cat wedding display contained almost 20 animals dressed in custom outfits.
The museum operated for over 100 years until it closed in 2003. Human zoos were a darker form of mass entertainment. Real people from Africa, Asia, and the Americas were brought to Europe and displayed in enclosures at world’s fairs. The public paid admission to watch them eat, sleep, and go about daily routines.
Millions of Europeans visited these exhibitions, which were sponsored by governments, blessed by the church, and celebrated by the press. Scientists at the time measured skulls trying to prove racial superiority. The exhibitions lasted for decades and took place in London, Paris, Berlin, and the United States. Children were taken to see them on school field trips.
P. T. Barnum built an empire in the 1860s by exploiting people with physical differences, displaying little people, giants, and conjoined twins in traveling shows. Charles Stratton, known as General Tom Thumb, stood about three feet tall and performed for Queen Victoria.
Barnum made millions while these performers lived in rough conditions behind the scenes. Doctors charged money to examine them in public, and when they died, their bodies were sold to museums and collectors. Child labor added another grim chapter. In 19th century England, children as young as four were sent into narrow chimneys to clean them.
They climbed barefoot through dark tunnels filled with hot soot, using their elbows and knees. Many got stuck and suffocated. Those who survived faced a delayed horror: in the 1840s, doctors noticed a high number of these workers developing scrotal cancer. It was one of the first times in history that scientists linked a disease directly to a profession.
Coal soot, embedded in skin for years, caused deadly tumors. Queen Victoria herself navigated this world with a mix of public solemnity and private belief. After Albert’s death in 1861, her mourning lasted 40 years until her own death. She participated in seances to try to contact her dead husband, consulting a Scottish medium named John Brown who became her confidant.
Spiritualism swept Victorian England, and people from all social classes sought contact with the other side. Given that even the monarch embraced the supernatural, it is less surprising that Franz Mesmer convinced half the world he could cure any disease using “animal magnetism. ” In darkened rooms, the mesmerist made sweeping hand motions, and women fainted while men shook. People claimed cures for blindness and paralysis.
Britain’s elite paid fortunes for treatment. Sessions devolved into mass hysteria, with people entering trances and convulsing on the floor. Decades later, science recognized that Mesmer had stumbled onto the power of suggestion, which became the basis for modern hypnosis. Many of these practices have faded from memory or been deliberately forgotten.
The records that survive—in diaries, medical journals, and museum collections—document a society that was, in many ways, dramatically different from the polite and refined portraits often painted of it.
