50 Posts From The Victorian Era That Prove It Really Was A Different Time

Print culture was also big and diverse, supported by high literacy rates for the time.

There were hundreds of magazines and newspapers available at increasingly lower prices. The 1880s saw the emergence of New Journalism, which drew in readers with pieces on violence, crime, and scandals in high society.

Novels were also popular. By the mid-century, Britons of all classes could afford and read novels. Some were aimed at highly educated and well-off people, while others were published for the less-educated readers looking for appealing and exciting stories. Victorian novels were often quite long, with complicated plots (often centered on marriages) and many characters.

However, not everyone lived long enough to experience all of these pleasures. Life expectancy at birth for the average Victorian was about 42, and more than 25 percent of children died before their fifth birthday.

Until 1842, when new laws were introduced which prevented children under 10 from working underground, children made up 25 per cent of the workforce in mines, factories, and workshops. Infants as young as four could be found holding open ventilator doors for coal wagons to pass through, usually pushed by other children. They would also crawl beneath moving machines to clean and tidy. It's no surprise that accidents were so common.