Learning from the Past to Clean the Present
Deep cleaning is often a job we dread as comfortable moderns; even with all our foamy soaps and vacuum cleaners. But here at Weald & Downland Living Museum, not only do we deep clean our buildings, we also (in a manner of speaking) step back in time to do so. To maintain the highest levels of authenticity in our preservation work, we try to exclusively use traditional methods and resources. And recently, these were put to work in our Whittaker’s Cottages, late 19th Century railway worker’s homes.
And the event of a deep clean affords us the opportunity to take a dive into Victorian cleaning habits.
House cleaning in Victorian England was no simple task. In fact, it was a gruelling, time -consuming responsibility, mostly falling on the women of the household. What you used to clean your house depended largely on how much money you had. The wealthy could afford servants, but for the working class, housework was manual labour, often dictated by what cleaning supplies were accessible. While technology and attitudes toward cleanliness have changed drastically since the Victorian era, exploring how homes were cleaned back then offers a fascinating glimpse into the daily lives of people during this period. Especially when you are putting these practices into use in our own Victorian cottage.
The Universal Cleaning Solutions of the Victorian Era
Despite the vast differences in wealth, many of the actual cleaning products used were quite similar across households. The era’s staple cleaning products were natural substances that have stood the test of time – baking soda, vinegar, and even tea. Let’s take a look at how these materials were used.
Baking Soda: The Household Hero
Baking soda, introduced in 1846, was a revolutionary product for the Victorians. Its primary role was to aid in baking, making cakes, breads, and scones rise, but its use extended far beyond the kitchen. Baking soda was seen as a multi-purpose cleaning agent. Used to scrub ovens, polish silverware, and clean copper pans. It became an essential household item, primarily because it was new and exciting, and it just seemed to work. Much like how modern homeowners might turn to a trusty product out of habit, Victorian housewives swore by the wonders of baking soda. And so did we, primarily cleaning Whittaker’s with baking soda mixed with water.
Vinegar and Other Acids: A Cleaning Staple
Vinegar has long been praised for its cleaning power, and in the Victorian era, it was essential for tackling tasks like cleaning windows or removing burnt food from pans. Vinegar is also a natural antiseptic. Even more creative methods, like boiling rhubarb in a pan to remove stains or scouring pots with crushed eggshells and lemon, reflected the resourcefulness of the era. Whether through necessity or tradition, Victorian cleaning solutions were practical and often based on ingredients they already had in the kitchen.
Tea: Not Just for Drinking
It may surprise you, but tea wasn’t just for sipping – it was also a cleaning tool. Old tea leaves were repurposed to clean rugs, dampening them before a thorough beating outdoors. Tea was even used to sweep hard floors, believed to ‘lay the dust.’ While the logic behind using weak, leftover tea might seem questionable today, it was a trusted practice in many Victorian homes.
Water: A Precious Commodity
Indoor plumbing was rare, so water was a valuable and sometimes hard-to-get resource in Victorian homes. Most families had to carry water, often from far away, meaning it was used sparingly. In some industrial towns like Ironbridge, Shropshire, families hauled water up to a third of a mile. This meant cleaning had to be as efficient as possible, and wastefulness was simply not an option.
Cleaning Tools: Feather Dusters, Cloths, and… Bread?
The Victorian home wasn’t just cleaned with chemical agents but also with a range of tools, from the elegant to the downright strange. Feather dusters, made from ostrich feathers, were coveted because their barbs effectively captured dust. However, they were too expensive for most households, who relied on soft cloths instead. In true experimental Victorian style, they also used squashed white bread to clean out hard-to-reach crevices!
Rather More Extreme Victorian Cleaning Methods
Not everything used in Victorian homes would appeal to modern sensibilities. One of the more unusual and somewhat revolting cleaning agents was stale urine, used for its ammonia content. It was key in degreasing carpets and woollens. Today, this might sound shocking, but ammonia remains a core ingredient in many commercial cleaners (just not from urine, thankfully!). However, the Victorians took it a step further by using home-brewed urine, showing just how resourceful (and sometimes desperate) they were in the fight against grime.
When it came to dealing with pests like bed bugs, the Victorians had no idea just how dangerous their methods were. They mixed mercury (quicksilver) with egg whites and brushed it onto mattresses, completely unaware of its toxic effects. Though mercury did indeed kill bed bugs, it was equally harmful to humans, causing a range of severe neurological and behavioural disorders. This shocking detail is a chilling reminder of how much we’ve learned since then about health and safety in cleaning practices.
Laundry: The Most Dreaded Task of All
Laundry was perhaps the most labour-intensive job a Victorian housewife faced. The process was painstaking:
1. Collect and heat water
2. Use soap flakes and a dolly (like a metal barrel) and posser (a wooden tool that looks like a plunger with a T-shaped handle) to agitate and clean the clothes
3. Run them through a mangle to remove excess water.
This was repeated for each load, followed by drying and ironing with heavy flat irons heated on the stove. Understandably, mothers of the time were relentless about keeping their children’s clothes clean – any extra laundry meant hours of backbreaking work.
Spring Cleaning: A Thorough Annual Ritual
In addition to daily chores, Victorian women undertook a massive annual spring cleaning. This was a deep cleanse of the entire house, starting at the top floor and working downward. Furniture was moved, curtains were washed, floors were scrubbed, and everything from wallpaper to lighting fixtures received attention. It was a time-consuming yet necessary task to rid the home of months of soot, dust, and grime.
Cleaning Via Time Travel
As we look to preserve, maintain and bring to life our buildings, we experiment with, try out and learn from traditional practices and tools. This is no different in our Victorian buildings. In our cleaning of Whittaker’s, we used baking soda, water, traditional beeswax and a whole heap of elbow grease to make sure the cottages are sparkling.
So, what can we learn from these Victorian methods? Well, practices such as cleaning wallpaper with white bread and polishing wood floors with a beeswax-turpentine mixture, still work. Indeed, we used an authentic Victorian recipe for our beeswax furniture polish, which contains pure gum Turpentine.
Other methods, like cleaning carpets with damp tea leaves or polishing silver with Worcestershire sauce, are better left in the past. You can rest assured that no urine got anywhere near our carpets, rugs or woollens!
For Victorian women, housework was indeed a never-ending struggle, a daily battle against dirt, grime, and the wear and tear of life in a soot-filled world. Yet through their creativity, resilience, and sheer determination, they managed to keep their homes – and their families – clean and cared for. While we no longer have to scrub floors twice a day or rely on stale urine to degrease our carpets, these historical cleaning practices remind us just how far we’ve come in simplifying our daily chores.
So, come and visit our freshly cleaned Whittaker’s Cottages. Experience history, step into the past, see traditional methods and tools in practice, and learn how we have grown, changed and improved over time.
