Life in 1859

In 2007, I realised that the sesquicentenary of the publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species was coming. As an active historian of things scientific, I decided to write my own account, and casting around for themes, I read Richard Dawkins' comment to the effect that "the world changed after Darwin published", the suggestion being that the book caused change, when my view was that Darwin's book was but a symptom of a fast-changing world.

1859 was the year that Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln turned 50 (they were born on the same day in 1809) and by the end of the year, their names were becoming known, all over the civilised world. It was the year of the first oil well, the invention of the slide rule and spectroscopy (rapidly giving us enough extra chemical elements to make the Periodic Table mean something). It was also the year in which Mendel started investigating the genetics of peas, the Suez canal was started, key evidence for the germ theory of disease was being assembled, and tobacco-smoking was first identified as a cause of cancer—and that's just for starters!

Railways, telegraphs under the sea, steamships and internal combustion were all tying the world together in amazing ways.

The end result was a work entitled Mr Darwin's Incredible Shrinking World, which saw the light of day in 2008 as a print book which you may or may not be able to pick up somewhere: here's a quick outline.

The work is certainly available from Amazon as a Kindle e-book, and also from Booktopia, or you can listen to me talking about it here.

Anyhow, my next few entries are drawn from chapter 7 of that book, and they serve to describe life in that era. If you want to see the others, use the tag 1859, which appears at the end of each entry. I will begin with fashions.

Fashions, after all, are only induced epidemics.

George Bernard Shaw, Doctor’s Dilemma, preface.

British men in the 19th century were generally clean-shaven until soldiers returned from the Crimea with beards, though “literary men” had beards sooner. The young Charles Darwin had no beard, old Charles Darwin was bearded. In early 1861, Abraham Lincoln explained just before his inauguration why he would be the first US President to have a beard in office: an 11-year-old girl, Grace Bedell, wrote and suggested he should grow one because his face was thin, but if fashion did not sway Lincoln, it must surely have influenced Grace Bedell.

Men used lead-based dyes on grey beards or hair and many bright colours contained a variety of heavy metals. Women who dyed their hair were at risk, but they had more to fear from arsenical dyes in their gowns, while everybody was threatened by green wallpaper, dyed with arsenic compounds — but it was fashion. Fashion was just as lethal to the whales which supplied whalebone for corsets and crinolines, and it had been as bad for the beavers which had provided the fur needed to make gentlemen’s hats until the 1850s.

Then the varnished silk hat took over, but Scientific American did not like them, saying the hard-shell hats were a menace. Some of these had gauze tops for ventilation, but most did not. While felt hats are somewhat porous and so somewhat ventilated, silk plush hats were saturated with lac-varnish and completely airless. They needed perforations at or near the band, argued the reporter. Later in the year, William Warburton obtained a patent for a machine that used heated points to perforate the sides of a hat, a system that Scientific American recommended for any headwear coated with varnish.

Ladies’ underwear was causing some worry. With the development of the crinoline, where hoops of whalebone, wire or other stiffening converted the dress into a giant bell, exposure of the limbs was more likely. Legend has it that ladies, fearful of being blown on their sides by wind or swooning, suddenly wanted more modest underwear, but the evidence is, at best, scanty — unlike the new underwear, it seems.

And in Britain, the poor were still being banged up in workhouses. I may or may not get back to discuss the fate of Thomas Drewery's orphans in Victoria, not long after that, but I have already described the fate of Australian poet, Jennings Carmichael, who died in an English poorhouse.