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What Do You Miss About the 1800s?
Especially when my mom comes to town, I enjoy a rich diet of period films. In a week in July, my mom and I consumed the BBC miniseries Little Dorrit. Our Mutual Friend was next for me, after which I feasted on Oliver Twist. A long tale from ’90s television called The Aristocrats was sumptuous, visually speaking. These on-screen confections and others, including any Jane Austen fare, get me thinking: despite horrible, bizarre realities of the past, life before the 1900s wasn’t all bad.
Yes, for the longest time it was probably better to stay home and suffer rather than consult a doctor. And suffer you did. Electricity, hot showers, well-insulated homes, widespread literacy, and other comforts of the body and mind were all luxuries of the future. Travel was slow and exhausting. Big cities were centers for disease, misery, and terrible odors. Improvement of your station was elusive. Job hours were long, rich folk snobby.
Yet as blessed as I am to have been born in 1974, I can’t help feeling as if I’ve missed out on a few attractive features of life from the early 1800s and before.
1.) Fireplaces and easy chairs. Wouldn’t that be lovely, of an evening, to sit in front of a warm fire (hopefully chimneys have been invented) and chat with friends or family from the depths of a cushioned chair (if you were wealthy enough to afford one, in pre-manufacturing days)? Or even read a book with the aid of firelight and candles?
2.) Passing time with family and friends. Connected to #1, it would have been delightful to spend more of life sitting together after dinner–with no interference from TV or radio–reading aloud, playing music, talking or singing.
3.) Cups of hot tea. These steaming drinks being brought out in pretty serving sets look inviting. They would be comforting aids to friendly conversation. Pair it with items 1 and 2 for an ideal experience.
4.) Dances. The dancing looks wonderful. I wish contra and other dancing were more popular activities today. I keep threatening to take a dance class, but sadly, my husband doesn’t want to go.
5.) Lovely gowns. The gowns would be great fun to wear for a few hours at a time, for special occasions. Probably without the whalebone and other confining accessories. These days, fewer and fewer events call for dressing up. We could produce these elaborate pieces relatively inexpensively in our time.
6.) Beautiful countryside. Most period films give the impression that people in the old days enjoyed swathes of unspoiled green countryside, which is why I eat them up. Courting couples would get acquainted with pastoral scenes as backdrops. Peaceful mornings dawned with lilting bird song. Walking in the country or in one’s garden was a pastime. Even seeing it on screen brightens the mood.
7.) Letters and Journals. I love typing, and I think the Internet will be a tremendous resource to our progeny and to historians–if we back it up properly, not assuming that it will be around forever. However, when I see a movie character sit at a picturesque desk, get out a fresh sheet of paper, and start scratching away with an ink pen, I’m reminded that in the last twenty years, we have lost the practice of exchanging long, meaty letters and of saving our correspondence. This practice sharpened our thinking, our writing, and our connections to faraway people that we loved. Also, the majority of us, if we’re not typing up our daily adventures on a public online forum, are rotten at keeping journals. We don’t even know what to record. True, a lot of these personal journals were transformed into best-selling books of the time, so there was ulterior motivation for taking daily notes. Yet it seems like disciplined journal-keeping was common practice in those days.
8.) Sense of Wonder. Speaking of adventure journals, the world was young leading up to the 1900’s because there was so much to be discovered. English audiences of the late 1700’s were startled to read of experiences with isolated ethnic groups–the world map still had blank spots in it, and there were limited means of reaching faraway places. With pleasure they read of the hazardous explorations of Africa by Mungo Park and David Livingstone. News of India would be captivating. And the scientific and technological discoveries kept building. After hot air balloons, who knew what to expect next? There were always exciting books to read and discussions to be had.
9.) Servants. This one is a bonus, because I just thought of it. Back then, if you were the right station in life, you could get away with having–no, you were expected to have–a few servants around. They would cook the meals, do laundry, take care of the yard, and clean the house. And even though I’m content at the balance of work and play in the 21st century, wouldn’t it be pleasant, occasionally, to have a small staff that took over repetitious tasks and saw to your neglected house projects while you took some air in the garden?
Is there anything you miss about the 1800s?
Published in History
Clearly they bled scarlet and cream like the rest of us Cornhusker (formerly Bugeater) fans and I imagine they were good breeding stock for future offensive linemen and detasseling crews. (Possibly a hardier bunch than the rest of us bohunks…but I wouldn’t bet on it.) The forces of nature mandated that they settle in the land of the large, aggressive mosquito.
My parents lived for a year in Baghdad, Iraq in the early 1950’s (before I was born, my father was a visiting professor at a university there). The house they rented came with a servant included in the rent. At first my very American mother found this a bit awkward. She quickly realized that there was no way she was going to navigate the local markets and other daily services my parents needed without the local knowledge of the servant. At that time and place, being such a household servant was a middle-class job. The servant did not live in the house, and had his own house and family.
Mrs. Tabby and I love to watch costume movies and shows set in the early to mid 1800’s (Jane Austen et al.). We’d want to be there only if we were the truly rich, but many of the niceties you cite we can imitate today.
Letters and Journals.The main feature of the past that I miss today is that the exchange of letters prompted deliberation and thoughtfulness. Also, people had the attention span to make and read or hear extended thoughtful discourses on the subjects of the day.
Lovely Gowns.I do wish people would dress better than they do today. Many of the complaints about nicer clothing being uncomfortable are more a function of people not buying the correct size of clothing (40 year old men refuse to accept that their necks, chests, and waists are larger than they were when they were 16 years old).
Cups of hot tea.Yes! Hot tea is not an instant thing. There is a process that requires time, which helps to calm passions and invite introspection and perspective.
Fireplaces and easy chairs.Fireplaces only if either a) I have a servant to load, start, stoke, and clean out the fireplace, or b) a remote controlled gas fireplace. We loved the two gas fireplaces we had in our recently sold house in cold New York state. We are in the process of moving to Texas, and the area in which we are building a new house does not have gas, so there will be no fireplace.
Servants. A version of a “gratitude survey” I do once in a while is to consider how many mechanical and electronic “servants” I have.
Without today’s technology, it would take several servants to keep me as comfortable as I am.
When our children were young and we were reading the Laura Ingalls Wilder books and vacationing at historic places like Colonial Williamsburg, we lived in a house with a wood-burning fireplace. We would sometimes have “19thCentury” nights in which after dinner we would turn off all the electric lights, light the fireplace, and do our evening family activities by candlelight. (I was then younger and had the energy to build the fire and clean out the fireplace.)
I love that the women’s favorite activity while having a party or hosting is walking around the perimeter of the living room while gossiping about people who are in the room.
I know! No thanks. I don’t want to be that desperate for something to do.
Total bunny trail here. Isn’t that how a lot of life goes? I remember being at the zoo when my oldest was around 4 or so. We were looking at the tigers. My daughter, standing as close to the glass as she could, suddenly said, “Here kitty, kitty. Come here.” I’m assuming she wanted to play with him. Yikes!
Mama Skinner’s dad put her, her mom and her sisters on a train from San Diego to Nebraska in February ‘42, right after he joined the Navy. He was born in a sod house, but that was well after 1899.
Mama said that she and Auntie Em arrived in Nebraska with pockets full of nickels. There was a young woman on the train who would give her or her sister a nickel to sit next to her. And there was a young sailor on the train who would give them a nickel to sit somewhere else.
Really?
More or less
Pluses:
-No TV or internet
-No cell phones
-You had to leave the house and be among people to buy things
…………
Minuses:
-No TV or internet
-No cell phones
-You had to leave the house and be among people to buy things
But seriously, people had good manners and nobody talked about their addictions or alcoholism etc. Everything was swept under the rug where it belongs.
On the other hand, I’d have been dead of appendicitis at 21, so there’s that.
No.
I’m too much of a romantic when it comes to the 19th century to be objective about it. I love a good western movie or any BBC Victorian period piece. But I know from my great grand mother and grand father (born 1885 and 1907 respectively) that life was hard and short for most. When my great-great grand father’s people move from Tennessee into North Arkansas and South Missouri in the 1830’s, they were successful business owners, framers and ranchers. The family before 1860 produced children that became doctors and lawyers; however, by the end of the Civil War all that was left were widows and young children, and no one had the money or time for school (side note: I am the first in my family to graduate from university since before 1860 – over 150 year, that’s how long it took this family to recover from the Civil War – but I’m not angry, I’ve learned to let go). My great grand mother talked about how her dad was “given” (a polite way of saying indentured servant) to an uncle in 1870 (he would have been 10 years old) because his mother had re-married. Apparently, except for the very young children (10 years old was not consider young), it was not unknown for widows with children who remarried to send older children back to the dead husband’s family as the new husband would only take care of his off-springs. It always seemed to me that in a time when physical labor was the only way to get anything done, you would want as many hands as you could get, but I digress.
Anyway, my great, great grand father married something between 1879 and 1881 and had 13 children, my great grand mother being the oldest, before her mother died. Then her father died sometime before 1900 in a horse riding accident/incident. According to my great grand mother, and I still can hear her saying it from her toothless mouth whose jaws were filled with W.E. Garrett & Son Scotch snuff, “The old son-of-a-bitch (old? He was not 40 years old yet.) got drunk and thrown off his horse – took him two weeks to die.” I gathered they were not close. All my great grand mother’s 12 siblings were dead by the time she married at the tinder age of 14 (1899). Her husband and five of her children died in the influenza pandemic of 1918, her and four children survived, but she never left the house and passed away in 1963.
So, it’s fun to fantasize about the past, but I don’t think we would want to live there.
By the way, my great grand mother looked and sounded like Granny Hawkins in “The Outlaw Josey Wales”, minus the hat. I never saw her with a hat on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sNTS8FGoiE
Oh, my great grand mother died of jaw cancer. Go figure, right?
I don’t pine for the 1800s.
I love My gorgeous teeth too much.
My teeth aren’t gorgeous. Too much coffee. But I still have them all, even my wisdom teeth, though every dentist I ever went to wanted them.
OH I forgot about that! I’d never still have had all my teeth at this age back then, or even maybe not in the 1940s for that matter.
Wow, what a story–the whole thing!
I’ve been thinking about submitting a story about my family to Ricochet for some time now, but I lack the writing skills and confidence. I should try to put something down I guess, since I’m the last of the family line capable of doing it, but it would be a sorrowful tell.
Two words: Dentistry. Antibiotics.
And that’s not taking into account the diet, which for the common folk was pretty much limited to what could be grown/raised/stored/preserved locally and was pretty monotonous in the winter.
We’re pretty forgiving around here about that. Tell the story.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says we have to force the whole planet off of fossil fuels ASAP.
I wonder what she’d think about cooking and warming her toes on a buffalo- or cow-chip fire in the soddie? More stuff Momma Skinner’s Dad did that I don’t miss (even if it was in the early 20th century.
I know hygiene and medicine were horrific. But was it all bad? How about real silver dollars and gold $10 eagles? Or genuine Hawken rifles?
Gold and silver coins in circulation didn’t prevent some very hard economic times. The deflations in 1870s through the 1890s made it very hard on small business that needed to borrow operating capital.
The deflations in the 1870s through 1890s were precisely due to the gold standard. The economy grew much faster than the supply of gold did. This had the perverse effect of lowering the value of what you produced. If you double the amount of wheat you grow, but keep the money supply fixed, that means every bushel of wheat is worth half as much as it was before you started producing more wheat. It did not matter what the demand for wheat was. With a fixed money supply, there was still twice as much wheat chasing the same number of dollars.
Production was going through the roof because of industrialization (including in agriculture – think McCormick Reaper). The amount of goods on the market increased about ten-fold, but everything was worth much less because the money supply increased by a much smaller amount. The discovery of gold in Australia and Alaska increased the gold supply enough to get the world out of that trap.
Yes, but at least it allows supply & demand on the goods side to play out unimpeded by monetary considerations. Looking at that period of deflation you end up saying Yes, prices should have been going down. Technological change meant supply was increasing dramatically. Supply went up and prices declined until demand could soak up the increased supply levels. That’s how it’s supposed to work.
Given technology and globalized labor markets, we will go back to a pre-Fed deflationary economy the hard way. It’s inevitable. Better living through comprehensively improving purchasing power, not asset inflation and government.