>>96427972

Tuberculosis was the hottest thing. They endlessly fetishized it and romanticized the hell out of it. The symptoms were ideals of beauty.

>>96427972

The Thames was an open sewer. r, filled with untreated human waste and industrial runoff, which led to a severe public health crisis and widespread outbreaks of waterborne diseases like cholera. The disastrous "Great Stink" of 1858.

>>96427972
The prevelance of spiritualist, psychics, mediums, and the like as well as the fascination with weird science stuff.

And ways to prevent people from being buried alive.

Since photography was new and expensive, people would often have portraits taken of their recently deceased loved ones. The bodies were sometimes posed with props or even propped up to look like they were still alive, particularly with children who may never have been photographed before.

Women would sometimes collect their tears in special bottles, and once the tears had evaporated, the mourning period was considered over.

Queen Victoria herself set the standard, wearing black for the remaining 40 years of her life after the death of Prince Albert.


For a "translucent" and pale complexion, women consumed arsenic wafers, a practice that led to sickness and death. Green dyes used in dresses and wallpapers were also made with arsenic, making them literally poisonous.

Women would put raw meat on their faces to prevent wrinkles.

Some doctors recommended wrapping oneself in newspaper to prevent pneumonia.

Ground-up mummies were sold and consumed as medicine, a practice that drew on a fascination with ancient Egypt and a belief in their healing properties.

Wealthy landowners would hire people to live as "hermits" on their property, adding a touch of rustic eccentricity to their gardens.

London's air was so thick with coal smoke that people often wore black to hide the pervasive gray soot that stained lighter-colored clothes.

Young women would gain notoriety by claiming they could survive for years without food or water, often a form of performance or a way to escape unwanted attention.

With a high demand for bodies for medical research and dissection, grave robbers (or "resurrection men") were a real problem, leading to innovations like "mortsafes" (iron cages) to protect graves.

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>>96427972

The Mad hatter is not just a bizarre character in Alice in Wonderland. Hatters were exposed to mercury used in felt production suffered neurological damage, leading to symptoms like tremors and erratic behavior. The idiom "mad as a hatter" was a common phrase by 1837, describing the effects of mercury poisoning

>>96427972
Children who are mature or forced to be mature before even coming of age and may or may not be missing fingers, toes, and limbs due to factory work.

>>96427972

Read/watch anything from Dickens, like Oliver Twist.

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>>96427972
Public executions were seen as a good thing to bring your kids to as a family outing. You could buy all sorts of memorabilia of the executee and have a grand old time.

This site is a goldmine by the way. My favorite is the section on how Continental Europeans react to British doorways. Apparently having a townhouse with a moat, spiked iron gate, and reinforced front door is a little surprising to a visitor from abroad.
https://www.victorianlondon.org/index-2012.htm

>>96427972
Christians got obsessed with the dirkas as an artsy fad.

>>96427972
>And in general how do you do x-punk well so it isn't just aesthetic fetishization?
My advice is that the fantastical should not be ubiquitous. If you do that the setting loses recognizability as what it originally was, which kind of defeats the point of the Xpunk distortion of reality. These people still drink tea and read the morning papers, they don't inject STEAM-JUICE and enjoy the STEAM-POWERED NEWSPAPER.

It would be like downloading a glass of whiskey in a cyberpunk setting, it's ramming down one side of things to the point of drowning out the other. Draw on history as much, preferably more, than any fantastical elements. History is weird enough to carry itself with steam carriages and flying machines as the spice rather than the whole of the matter.

Essentially just don't go full cogfop. Never go full cogfop.

Springheel Jack.

Before the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there were very few government regulations or inspections for food quality, worker safety, or sanitation.

Food adulteration—the practice of adding cheaper, and sometimes dangerous, substances to food to increase profits—was widespread. Common examples included adding chalk to milk, sawdust to bread, and lead to beer.

Unregulated slaughterhouses in densely populated areas often had inadequate waste disposal, leading to the contamination of water supplies and outbreaks of diseases like cholera and typhoid, which were a constant public health crisis.

Rats were rampant in the meat storage areas, leaving their droppings all over the meat. The packers would put out poisoned bread to kill the rats, and then the dead rats, poisoned bread, and meat would all be shoveled into the grinding hoppers together to be made into sausage.

Spoiled, moldy, and rejected meat was regularly mixed with fresh meat. Workers would use chemicals like borax and glycerine to "doctor" the meat, making it appear fresh so it could be sold for consumption.

The floors of the packing plants were often covered in a mixture of blood, water, and waste. Workers would spit on the floor, and diseased animals were processed alongside healthy ones.

Meat was stored in rooms without proper refrigeration, leading to rapid spoilage.

Workers were exposed to harsh acids used for things like cleaning hides and preparing sheep pelts. This exposure caused their hands to be eaten away and their joints to become crippled.

The work was back-breaking and often performed in extreme temperatures. "Beef-luggers" carried 200-pound quarters of meat, a job that could wear out even the strongest man in a few years.

Workers suffered from a litany of ailments. Knife-wielding trimmers and boners often had their thumbs and fingers sliced off. Many were susceptible to diseases like tuberculosis and rheumatism due to the damp, cold, and unsanitary conditions.

>>96428384

While Victorian slaughterhouses were filthy and unsanitary by modern standards, the sheake industrial scale and mechanized horror of Chicago's Union Stock Yards (the largest in the world) was something new. Smaller, less centralized English facilities would have had filth and vermin, but the infamous "use everything but the squeal" philosophy reached its apogee in Chicago.

>>96427972

Christianity, races and progress. And the Maxim Gun if those somehow failed.

But more seriously, shit like the Golden Bough and a shitton of surpassed historical beliefs? Hard science was an interesting subject as well, as they fetishized it and genuinely like it (at least in a popularized fashion) and somehow took even Darwin as an example for many things he didn't mean to... but despised the fact that it disproved biblical literalism.

Something that I find interesting and alien to us (even the richest of us) is how incredibly common and, uh, "inescapable" were servants, possibly moreso than most period of history. Even working classes, at least in households with a steady occupation, would have a maid in house almost 24/7. Great houses had armies of servants, if you've ever watched Downton Abbey the funny thing is that something like that would've been a skeleton crew for an earl's house. I think this might be an interesting angle to go into in RPGS: what if you're not the nobles/middle upper class with a dark secret but the servants of a family with one?
(note that being a servant was generally a hard job, but not necessarily at all a bad job, economically speaking. Actually you could've made a pretty penny for working classes)

>>96428028

Also Thames's shit was, well, hot shit.

https://mikedashhistory.com/2012/07/05/the-worst-job-there-has-ever-been/

>>96428108

Speaking of Liddel, bathing machines were an actual thing. Maybe it's me, but I always found those kinda the hardest thing to believe were really used.

>>96427972
The whole "scientific racism" thing.

>>96428001
Women used to take small amounts of various poisons (I remember strychnine was popular) to make themselves paler and thinner.

>>96428476
>And the Maxim Gun if those somehow failed.

Whatever happens,
We have got,
The Maxim gun,
And they have not.

-Hilaire Belloc

>>96428507
>scientific racism

Don't forget judging if people are naturally criminals by the shape of their skulls

>>96428525
Also from photographs of their face IIRC.

I'm pretty sure they tried to profile people based on their fingerprints, as well, after those were discovered.

>>96428138
>using a fan as a fan means introduce me to your retarded friends
Kek

>>96427972

If you can't name, say, 5 novels/movies/games/whatever that definy whateverpunk to you, don't do it. It would mean you're exactly going for the stupid aesthetic fetishization.
And I'm not even sure what IS there to fantasy-fetish about (vs simply using the historical setting, maybe a little supercharged regarding dresses, smoke, moors and whatnot).

>>96428507

Also their racism was pretty autistical at times.They thought there were like three races in Europe at the time - and good look telling a a mediterrenean from an alpine, we're not talking vedda vs tamil (which, racist or not, is more or less sensible as much as typical faces go). Not even the nazis were SO much nerds about it.

It might be Elizabethian or some other era, but there was a fashion for women of just walking around wet all the time. Just straight drench your clothes is water.

Horse shit in the 1890s.

>>96427972
Mummy parties.

Rich people would Egyptian mummies and hold big parties to unwrap them. They would be unwrapped with great spectacle, and sometimes an expert (or "expert") would be hired to "examine" the mummy and talk about it.

>>96427972
The Victorian Era had a bunch of occult secret societies/organizations like the The Rosicrucians, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, some sections of the Freemasons and the Theosophical Society.

>>96428384
>>96428443
I feel like I could use this in my game and then have my players accuse me of adding too much grimderp to the setting. Reality truly is stranger than fiction sometimes.

>>96428229
>Apparently having a townhouse with a moat, spiked iron gate, and reinforced front door is a little surprising to a visitor from abroad.
Well, it's either that or allowing citizens to have guns.

>>96429481
Then they would partake in the mummy's flesh.

As a joke, the Albion is not a cannibal, he only cleared the battlefields of the napoleonic wars and ground the corpses into meal to raise better crops.

>>96434271
Gun laws in Great Britain were pretty liberal until somebody took a shot at Winston Churchill. He didn't enjoy that and made it everybody's problem.

Used to be the case that Bobbies would just ask around and borrow a gentleman's pocket revolver whenever they needed more oompf.

I have to think peoples descriptions of London in this thread are somewhat exaggerated. Life was tough but it wasnt literally Hell.

>>96434341
A defining fiction book about slum life, A Child of the Jago.
Is based on somewhat inaccurate accounts of the Old Nicol slum.

While a garbage place of poverty and crime, it didn’t completely go down the tubes until the slum cleared it. And all the empty houses became a magnet for vagrants looking to lay low from the law or attempt fraud by claiming the compensation.
Coupled with interviews with the older inhabitants asking about the worse things they can remember happening. And an earlier slanted book.

>>96428525
>>96428534
Wait until these anons find out about Big 5 personality trait inference with AI.

>>96434341

It all depended on your social class. But when people say that average person has a better life and more amenities than a king or an emperor they are not exaggerating. Although kings had more personal servants and command of resources than a modern commoner, modern access to clean water, indoor plumbing, air conditioning, efficient transportation, communication, and a consistent supply of food provides a quality of life previously unimaginable, even for the wealthiest rulers. Something like the mighty Roman Empire would have had a GDP equivalent to modern Sudan, Jordan or Uganda.

>>96435529

As for GDP per capita, by best estimates it would be around 1000 US dollars. That would make it one of the poorest countries in the world today, roughly in line with countries like Ethiopia and Rwanda, Somalia or Afghanistan.

>>96427972
There was a fashion of Women wearing very long hat pins in their hats as a form of self-defence weapon, but it got so bad due to innocent people being stabbed on buses that they had to be banned by the government by 1910

>>96435636

That's probably a legend tough.

>>96427972
You should read a short story called 72 letters by Ted Chiang. Its about British Victorian scientists in a world where most of the crazy stuff people believed in the past is true-like fully formed people being in sperm, and those fully formed peopled in the sperm having fully formed people in their sperm within the sperm, and therefore there are actually a limited number of future generations based on how deep that goes. It also has like golems but treated as a science, unicorns etc. They do really interesting stuff with it where its really about how crazy rich people were back then with what they try to do with all this information.

>>96427972
If the game goes on long enough that you're looking to take it out of England a natural dlc sort of addition would be doing something with Ireland's sincere belief in fairies, looking up things like Bridget Cleary for inspiration. I'm assuming its like steampunk with fantasy elements if you're so interested in this side of things.

>>96435529

I always tought that was bullshit, except for specific situations (technological medical assistance being probably the outlier).

If you were rich you had clean water, your shit was put out by servants*, if it was unbearably you could most of the time get to your house in the country were it would be better, transportation is not an issue (I mean, sure, less tourism and certainly less comfortable rides and sailing), food is THE thing richer people had access to.
I can concede communication and -not so much small a thing- boredness, I suppose, even for a noble or patrician. Possibly personal security for most of the higher classes was pretty bad as well for 2024 standards (Mexico narco zone bad), but that's not directly technologically-dependent.

You ARE totally right in that poorer people worked very hard with little security net (especially in cities), mind you.

*=hell, I'd even say that is hardly on top of the things you might be missing in your home (vs the streets, having people soiling public roads is not gonna look good nor being good for general health). Probably what would really be missed in your home would be hot water to clean yourself, but servants for rich people would make it more or less berable vs getting to the well. That being said consistent bathing is something I would miss - I would rather be middle class in imperial Rome than during the Renassaince, I guess.

>>96434297
>Then they would partake in the mummy's flesh.
Eating mummies was more of a Medieval thing. By the 19th Century men knew better than to think that eating mummies could cure their diseases; they had bleeding for that.

>>96434341
Victorian London was legit one of the grimmest places in human history if you were poor.

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>>96434341
Jack the Ripper's first victim was killed because she didn't have the fourpence she needed to pay for her lodgings for that night, and tried to make the money with some quick prostitution, which unfortunately got her into Jack's clutches.

Not to mention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_farming

It was really, really bad. Victorian London basically produced Marxism, because it was so bad and showed no signs of getting better for so long that it seemed inevitable that there would be a violent revolution from all these miserable, immiserated people getting shoved into tight quarters with one another.

>>96436218
nta, but while you are right that it wasn't as common anymore, mummies were still regularly used to produce a popular shade of brown pain, their body parts traded as curiosities and mummy unwrapping parties did exist.

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>>96427972
The UK used a crazy complicated currency system!
2 farthings = 1 halfpenny
2 halfpennies = 1 penny
12 pennies = 1 shilling
2 shillings = 1 florin
2 shillings 6 pence = 1 half crown
2 half crowns = 1 crown
20 shillings = 1 pound
21 shillings = 1 guinea

>>96436543
Thats worse than the currency system in Harry Potter.

>>96436543
>20 shillings = 1 pound
>21 shillings = 1 guinea

There is simply no way this distinction was helpful.

>>96434341
it had periods of ups and downs. By the end of the century, Jack as an exception, it was largely better. But in those early days? Holy shit was it bad. I mean, sleeping on the factory floor, waking up and working 16+ hours while the doors are locked, drinking pure brown sludge that comes from the well, and all with the threat of hanging at best or australia at worst if you slip up even once.

But each and every one of those problems (except Australia) was solved over the course of the century one way or another.

>>96434341
The whole world was literally hell until surprisingly recently. For most people globally the world is still literally hell.

>>96436484
Farthings, florists, and crowns were names of specific coins. The actual system was

12 pennies to a shilling.
20 shillings to a pound.

Not that complicated. Talking about farthings etc is you saying

>American money is so complicated
>5 pennies to the nickel
>2 nickels to the dime
>2 dimes and a nickel to the quarter
>2 quarters to the half-dollar
>2 half-dollars to the dollar

>>96436584
It's a cute story actually.

Guineas were made of gold, while the pound was valued in silver. Guineas were originally chosen to be 1 guinea = 20 shillings = 1 pound, but the fluctuating value of gold compared to silver meant that in practice they varied from 15-30 shillings. Eventually the value was fixed, at a time when the guinea happened to be 21 shillings.

Meanwhile it had become common for most educated professionals (lawyers, doctors, architects, etc) to levy fees in guineas, to the point that even today its common to see lawyers charging £105 and hour and the like.

>>96436811
>even today its common to see lawyers charging £105 and hour and the like.

"Common" is overstating it. It happens but is definitely not the norm.

>>96436584
Guineas were for buying horses and other high value items. Originally a 1 Pound coin made from gold. The first gold coin minted, the steady rise in gold vs silver caused it to be worth up to 36 shillings. It was fixed to 21.
They were removed from circulation in 1816 and replaced with the Sovereign, which has its own weird history.

Guineas remained an informal form of currency because you paid 21 shillings and the seller got 20 (1 Pound) and the commission was 1.

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>>96427972
OP, here's some serious advice that you really need to hear.
History is the most lied about and slopified subject there is.

So Never,
NEVER get history facts from 4chan.
(Or reddit, or any major forum, for that matter.)

If you need serious historical information, find books that were written at least 30 years ago on the subject.
Preferably 50+ years ago.

>>96436853
>Hurr durr, if you need serious historical information, make sure to exclude all sources written after 1950
Just don't read pop history, whether it was written in 1925 or in 2025.

OP, this is the guy I'm warning you about
>>96436866

>>96436871
Yes, you were warning him NOT to read any modern books, so that he can learn exclusively outdated historical theories, I know. Maybe if he goes back far enough, he can conclude that Great Zimbabwe was built by Egyptians.

>>96436853
>picrel

This particular tendency is a little annoying. Also "[Historical person who was a little antisocial] was clearly autistic!"

But in general, I think that modern history is good. Old histories also had their own particular biases, and at least modern historians are more self-aware about that sort of thing. There's also a greater tendency in the modern day to go to original sources instead of using shitty 500 year old translations, and to place more weight on physical evidence than second-hand accounts.

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>>96436853
Like picrel? (Published 1938)

>>96427972
Doctors binding books in human skin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_bound_in_human_skin

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>>96436882
>Yes, you were warning him NOT to read any modern books, so that he can learn exclusively outdated historical theories
Correct.

>>96437056
Yes, you are a retarded ape, I know. No need to post a stupid basedjack meme to confirm it.

>>96437059
You're literally spamming F5 to reply to my posts in 60 seconds or less lmao

>>96437064
And you're a newfag, too, impressive.

>>96437066
just realized you're probably a bot

>>96437073
Not a surprise that the guy who recommends exclusively reading outdated books that have since been contradicted and superseded by modern research, is also too stupid to tell a human being from a bot.

It's called 4chan X, faggot. You don't have to report back.

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There was a brief period where it looked like steam powered road vehicles would be a thing, but Parliament made a law against it due to lobbying.

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>>96437099
This one set fire to a barn when it was left unattended IIRC

>>96437080
mad

>>96437173
Yes, it is annoying when people tell others to ignore all facts to instead ingest stupid X memes.

The level of poverty was shocking. Read anything by Dickens to get an idea of how many people actually lived.

Police departments didn't exist until very recently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Metropolitan_Police#The_new_police

These were actually professions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tosher
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mudlark

>>96437195
Fuck, I wanted to post those.

I'll double-down by mentioning that Toshers had a mythology that included Rat Queens (Attractive naked women in the sewers with rat tails)

>>96437195
>>96437247
These are just warhammer fantasy roleplay professions, complete with skaven

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>>96427972
Phantasmagoria were basically their version of horror movies. Take your girl to go see some spooky skeletons projected onto the wall and maybe she'll swoon for you.

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>>96437404
the GW team were drawing on their ancestral memories.
>>96437524
You could also go to morgues to see dead bodies. The Paris morgue was the Euro disneyland of its day.

Bedlam also existed. Sometimes I think about the fact that I would probably have paid money to go there were I alive at the time, and also that there's a non-zero chance I would do so nowadays.

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>>96437195
>The level of poverty was shocking.

>>96437599
Okay but what do you think Victorian London was like.

>>96437599
Now imagine that you can't try to go around the homeless because the streets are too narrow, that visibility is measured in feet because of the burning sulphur-fog, and that there are no patrolling policemen, anywhere, because they haven't been established yet.

>>96437404
WFRP has a lot of odd Victorianism in it, especially the Altdorf book.
Ankh-Morpork is another example of a fantasy city heavily inspired by Victorian London

>>96437662
Far fewer overdoses, suicides, and other deaths of despair.
So objectively better.

>>96437670
London police predate the victorian era, as well as coal-powered factories

I genuinely loath you "people" for wasting my time with your garbage.

>>96438032
Nobody cared about recording suicides and there was no fentanyl or even injectable heroin, at least not such that random people on the streets would know how to do it.. People drank themselves to death constantly.

India officially has a lower or similar suicide rate today to many western countries.Why don't you just go live the average persons life there if thats the only relevant metric.

It might be hard to apply for a game, but I think it is really interesting how the concept of work time in traditional labor clashed with the work time of manufactoring. It was a massive culture shock for rural workers moving to cities when they were expected to work fixed work hours every day and just repeat same manufacturing process on daily basis, instead of just working as much as there was work to be done.

>>96438125
>Nobody cared about recording suicides
Utterly false

>and there was no fentanyl or even injectable heroin,
They would have been injecting morphine.

>People drank themselves to death constantly.
Way less than they do currently.

>India officially has a lower or similar suicide rate today to many western countries.Why don't you just go live the average persons life there if thats the only relevant metric.
Because I'm not Indian/brown, unlike yourself.

>>96437599
Yeah, there were no homeless people in Victorian London because they were all forcibly thrown into workhouses, retard.

>>96438902
He's about to say that's good because he'll just assume Victorian workhouses were a completely different, much nicer thing than they were, and not something people who were literally starving to death during the Irish famine were still terrified of and avoiding.

Although at the same time there totally were tonnes of homeless people in Victorian London as well. An absurdly higher percentage of people than a modern western city.

>>96439105
Then get off 4chan and go marry an Amish gal, retard. Your pathetic LARPing is as tedious as it is unwanted.

>>96439072
Most Victorian literature people are likely to read is not going to work against the notion that it was as bad as everyone's saying it is. At best most of the time you find out that the top bare sliver of the population had it not so bad in some ways, actually still surprisingly bad in others.

>>96439115
>Then get off 4chan and go marry an Amish gal, retard
I'm not buying into Mennonite heresy regardless of how cute the heretic f*males are. But I see that you've run out of arguments and resorted to ad hominem, which is happening in 100% cased of plebbit arguing with /pol/.

>>96439132
No, I'm simply demonstrating that even you don't believe this stupid shit, because you are posting on 4chan instead of going to church.

Every year in Victorian London, 1% of the population died of tuberculosis. Not, "1% of the people who died, died of tuberculosis." 1% of the ENTIRE population of Victorian London.

Their society was objectively much worse than ours, and the people of that era labored and struggled and worked to enable our vast prosperity. It disrespects their suffering and heroic struggle to make the world a better place for their descendants to say "psyche, actually, everything you worked for was bad because TFR dipped below 2 in 2010, and I've decided that's the only number that matters."

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Regarding Machen: The 'Great God Pan' cycle is a pretty amazing supernatural horror set in pre-WW1 London. 'The White People' can be emulated for a great hook, of PCs finding a diary of a deceased occultist. If the GM so desires, the weird may even be toned down to be a charade put up by foreign mafia types, which the naive appreciators of the weird take as bait before being dragged into very mundane kind of degeneracy a-la The Horror In The Red Hook (Objectively, all the weird stuff might be chalked up to Malone's hallucinations there. What other saw was a gang of Muslim kidnappers who did an allahu akbar as a final fuck you to the cops).

>our vast prosperity
post nose, mosche.

>>96439178
>>our vast prosperity
>post nose, mosche.
>posted from my iPhone
God, I hate you "people" so much.

>>96439192
>posted from my iPhone
You're hallucinating, plebbitor. Or, perhaps, projecting.

At any rate, suckstart a shotgun - it will drastically improve the average IQ in whatever shithole you're residing in.

>>96438680
>Utterly false

Why. You have a positive case to make here that if Oliver Twist killed himself its getting logged properly by the system.

>They would have been injecting morphine.

There's a reason drug addicts today don't just inject themselves with morphine. There are reason heroin and now fentanyl are street drugs and intravenous, classic morphine isn't. They didn't have modern heroin or fent in the Victorian era. If they did it would have been carnage.

>Way less than they do currently.

On what grounds are you claiming people drink themselves to death more now than in the Victorian Era. Contemporary sources that pay any attention to that sort of thing note that it was rampant. Every negative political cartoon about any ethnicity or low social class included them being rampant, raging alcoholics.

>>96439197
There have always been pathetic dipshits like you, crying as they enjoy unimaginable material prosperity, and they were always completely disconnected from reality. The sad reality is that we have like 100x as many of you, and you constantly pollute the internet with your stupid garbage.

Get the fuck off the internet if you hate material prosperity so much, bitch.

96439208
>plebbitor still seething
Go make a threda on plebbit about it, faggot.
>There are reason heroin and now fentanyl are street drugs and intravenous, classic morphine isn't.
Opium ain't cheap, nigga. De Quincey managed to become an addict in early XIX century, but he was somewhat wealthy. Actually, his book would be a good recommendation for OP as well, the first part where he's a homeless boy with a prostitute girlfiend on the streets of London hits harder than later where he's pissing off his wealth on laudanum.

>>96439224
>>plebbitor still seething
>Go make a threda on plebbit about it, faggot.
Go back to /pol/, I was here first, you fucking retarded election tourist.

>>96439224
>>96439231
NTA, but why are you so stupid you can't even link posts correctly?

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Clowns from pic rel infesting this thread like maggots would a piece of meat left exposed.

>>96427972

Victorian London was notoriously bad, especially for the poor, due to the rapid population growth that overwhelmed the city's infrastructure. While the wealthy enjoyed a life of luxury and convenience, the majority of the population faced extreme poverty, squalid living conditions, and rampant disease. The stark contrast between the social classes defined the city's harsh reality.

The Industrial Revolution caused London's population to skyrocket, from around 1 million in 1801 to over 5.5 million by 1891. The city couldn't keep up with this massive influx of people seeking work. The result was severe overcrowding and the rise of sprawling slums, often called "rookeries." Multiple families would cram into a single, poorly ventilated room. These homes were often damp, cold, and infested with vermin.
Basic amenities were almost non-existent for the working class. They had no running water or indoor toilets. Instead, residents shared filthy outdoor pumps and cesspools, which were often contaminated with human waste. This lack of sanitation created a breeding ground for diseases.

The unsanitary conditions directly led to a series of devastating public health crises. Diseases like cholera, smallpox, tuberculosis, and typhoid were rampant and often fatal. The average lifespan for a working-class Londoner was shockingly low, and infant mortality rates were incredibly high. For example, a major cholera outbreak in 1854 killed over 10,000 people.

The city's main water source, the River Thames, was also its sewer. The "Great Stink" of 1858, when the river's stench became unbearable due to all the raw sewage, finally prompted the construction of a modern sewer system. However, for most of the Victorian era, the city's air was also polluted by coal smoke from homes and factories, contributing to respiratory illnesses.

>>96439072
>Modernity-loving faggots lost on their way to plebbit. You are not welcome. You will never be welcome.
...he says, living a life enabled and facilitated by said modernity.

If you're so enamored with the 19th century, you can always get off your phone and computer, refuse to use other degenerate conveniences, and spare us all your online presence.

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>Faggots still seething
LMAO. Stay mad, plebbit.
>>96439433
(czech'd)
London had been a shithole for centuries. It is getting worse. But OP never specified 'London', or even 'England', although 'victorian era' kind of implies it. Countryside had different horrors to contend from, such as children being employed as coal miners or generations breaking because ung 'uns moved to London to find work (there was none where they're from and that is still true today).

>>96427972
People used ointments made out of crack, everyone owned a Chinaman, women wore bloomers made out of wood, ghosts had to be part of a guild and Maddox was still funny.

>>96428066
Newspaper is unironically a great insulator, which is why bums use it and my grandma put it between the sheets during the Great Depression.

>>96428230
There was a revival of all things Arthurian and Celtic.

>i am under no obligation to answer your bizarre racial ramblings
>you dumbfuck Mexican. Lying Mexican. Racist fucking Mexican.
actually kekt

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>>96439525
*to contend with
Brainfart, was too busy being racist in too many different threads.

>>96439322
So... your parents Here's the funny thing: they behave like that not despite of you finding it so cringey that you want to die, but because you do.

Reminder the only reason people let the Thames and all other water sources get so shitty (literally) was because everyone ascribed to the Miasma Theory of disease. Tl;dr they thought diseases were caused by air-or-water-borne poisons found in shit and muck. Because they thought it was poison, i.e. inanimate, they assumed disease couldnt propogate itself and was produced by living things like plants and animals. It the invention of the magnifying glass and a FUCKLOAD of "I'm not insane there are tiny animals so small you can't see them" to get people to change their perspective on how disease spreads or functions.

>>96439197
Don't get suckered into defending the objectively worsening situation of our modern world. Things have become worse, iphone or no.

We're here talking about Victorian stuff.

>>96427972
There's a lot to draw on in terms of manners. Courtship and friendship had more rules that others would also judge you on. Kinda like 1984, this was a lot truer of the upper classes than the proles.

I've always had the theory that empires or complex societies need complex rules to essentially automate a lot of interaction so more thought can be put into complex systems. Removing some of the 'decision fatigue'.

>>96439525
Stop trying to make 'plebbit' happen. You're just a retard everyone hates, everywhere, whether you post on Reddit or 4chan.

t. person who never uses Reddit.

>>96439550
Notice that he never denied being a Mexican.

>>96428229
Excellent website anon. I'm always fascinated by the eccentricity of the old world. In some ways the time was brutal but in others very interesting. Unlike today when everything is the same.

>>96428384
This is one of the reasons why leaving in the countryside was a blessing compared to leaving in the "big cities". Sadly the industrialists started to force people and peasants to move to the cities.

>>96435529
Telling poor people they live better than kings must be one of the most entitled daddy's rich kid lines ever. Go out of your gated community for once.

>>96436791
Except that dollars are made of paper and not actual physical items like coins. And most money circulating today is just worthless pieces of papers. But in Victorian times you would use these coins to buy everything. Meaning that if your character goes around not knowing what his doing he's going to get scammed really fast. Other countries like revolutionary France for example, tried to "rationalize" the monetary system for this same reason. So yes it was kinda complicated but also fun.

>>96434341
You have to understand that the hellish landscape of these cities was caused, not natural. People were literally forced to go out of their pastoral, rural lives to live in the cities like dogs and livestock so the industrialists could produce cheap consumption material for the same masses that were brought there.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Clearances

Everything became a rat race to the cheapest buck. However is was not all doom and gloom. Many people criticised the abuse, revolts were made, resistance, strikes. It also was one of the most proficient centuries in terms of art and literature. Fantasy genre as we know it started in the Victorian period. So it was not all bleak either.

>>96441131
>I'm doing good things and bragging about them on anonymous imageboard.

This thread is plebbit. You are plebbit.

>>96427972
Age of consent was 7

>>96436725
>The whole world was literally hell until surprisingly recently
If you had a blue sky and werent enslaved or suffering from chronic pain the World wasnt that bad. Air conditioning didnt make the World a good place.

>>96443242
>If you had a blue sky and werent enslaved or suffering from chronic pain
Not one of those things was a given in Victorian Britain, except slavery which is up for debate depending on your views of debtor's prisons and workhouses and the like.

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>>96443242
>If you had a blue sky and werent enslaved
You forgot that light pollution created by modernity stole something from us - stars in the night sky, which bewitched (a cheap pun, I know) generations upon generations of our ancestors, from faggy poets and dreamers to skeptic scientists.

Some things, however, have not changed since Ancient Greece, and probably from way before, being a part of human condition.

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>>96443260
I use Nietzsche’s definition of slavery.

>>96443260
Im not talking about Victorian London.
>>96443271
This bothers me

>>96443291
If I saw Nietzche Id kill him

>>96427972
Bathing. People bathed maybe once a month, and you were considered weird and frivolous if you bathed more often than weekly, especially among the upper classes. The Victorians were usually astounded at more meticulous cleaning habits overseas whenever they went there, especially during Britain's colonial ventures (Where like >95% of all their deaths occurred due to lack of hygiene)

You really needed to derrail a thread into this off topic shit?

>>96443415
I'm thankful we managed a few good posts and avoided the classic "competing definitions of steampunk" derail. When it comes to talking about cool steampunk and 19th century stuff on this site I take what I can fucking get.

>>96443936
>Unironically complaining about racism
Go back to your hovel beetlehead

>Multiple people talking about something related to the topic of the thread?
>I MUST COMPLAIN! EVERYBODY NEEDS TO FOLLOW THE HECKIN' RULES
Insufferable friendless faggots ITT

>>96427972
There was this one criminal I forget the name of, but he was famed for escaping out of prison several times and having a girlfriend with really fat tits (which actively hindered some of the escape attempts trying to squeeze through the bars) and I thought it was funny

>>96439208
>There have always been pathetic dipshits like you, crying as they enjoy unimaginable material prosperity
I thought we never had any prosperity until 1945? Can you sissy faggots make up your minds at least, or is that expecting too much of you?

>>96439152
>Their society was objectively much worse than ours
...The "society" of an urban slum was worse than living in a gated community today? You don't say retard!

>>96444015
Jack Sheppard

>>96444070
Youre a massive faggot
I say we double the janitorial budget to address these concerns

>>96444182
Sat there waiting for the whole fifteen minutes huh?

>>96444203
Kek, thanks for confirming that you did retard.

>>96427972
They believed in the twinkie test.

>>96444324
>I'm looking at it right now
Well? We're waiting.

>>96444363
>Let's suppose, being an intelligent person
Kek'd

>>96443545
Well I would like the game to go back on rails.

>>96448144
On the topic of rails, I remember reading in a horrible history book (not the most reliable of sources but I can't be fucked to check) that rail companies needed permission to build through graveyards but could freely demolish lower-class housing without recourse.

Also, the necropolis line was a railroad dedicated to transporting bodies to a new graveyard in London, there was even a dedicated rail station at the graveyard.