I’ve always wondered what life was really like before modern conveniences. You see those period dramas where everyone looks elegant in elaborate dresses, sipping tea in spotless drawing rooms. It all seems so refined. Then I found an actual Victorian housekeeping guide from the 1870s tucked away in a dusty corner of a used bookshop, complete with detailed daily schedules and instructions that looked utterly insane. So naturally, I decided to follow it for one full day.
Here’s what I learned: our ancestors were basically superhuman. Or possibly just exhausted all the time.
The Ungodly Hour When The Day Actually Started
The guide insisted I wake at five in the morning. Not five thirty. Five. Victorian maids typically rose at 5 a.m. and didn’t get to bed until midnight, which means they were working up to nineteen hours daily. I dragged myself out of bed in the dark, feeling like I’d made a terrible mistake. The first task was to light the fires throughout the house, which in Victorian times meant hauling coal, clearing ash from the previous day, and getting the flames going before anyone else woke.
Without central heating, this wasn’t optional. Every room needed its fire lit and tended. Housemaids cleaned bedrooms, made beds, emptied slops and refilled the coal buckets. I cheated slightly and used my thermostat instead, though honestly, I think I got off too easy. The physical labor of carrying heavy coal buckets up and down stairs must have been brutal.
Blackleading The Grates Was Medieval Torture
Next up was something called blackleading the fireplace grates. I had to look this up because it sounded made up. Turns out, it’s a real thing involving rubbing black lead paste onto cast iron to keep it from rusting and looking presentable. Commercial iron paste or grate polish restores blackness and is usually applied, left for a few hours and then polished with a cloth.
I attempted this with a modern equivalent paste on my (admittedly decorative) fireplace. My hands turned black almost immediately. The paste got under my fingernails, on my clothes, and somehow on my face. It took nearly an hour of scrubbing and buffing to make one small grate look decent. Victorian households had multiple fireplaces. Every. Single. One. needed this treatment regularly. My back ached from crouching, and I’d only done one grate in one room.
Breakfast Preparations That Took Forever
By six thirty, I was supposed to have the fires going and start preparing breakfast from scratch. No grabbing cereal from a box or popping bread in a toaster. The guide recommended fresh bread, cooked meats, eggs prepared multiple ways, and porridge. Everything had to be made on a coal or wood stove that required constant temperature monitoring.
I compromised by using my regular stove, though I forced myself to make everything without modern shortcuts. Kneading dough for bread alone took twenty minutes of arm work. While that was rising, I had to tend to the eggs, slice and fry meats, and keep everything at the right temperature. Breakfast, decluttering, and dishes took much longer than expected, and I was already an hour behind schedule by the time I’d finished. The Victorians hadn’t even invented dishwashers yet.
The Never-Ending Battle With Dust And Dirt
After breakfast came the real nightmare: cleaning. The work done by servants was excruciating, including scrubbing the floor, brushing the carpet, beating rugs, filling lamps every day. I started with sweeping, which sounds simple until you realize Victorian homes didn’t have vacuum cleaners. Just brooms, dustpans, and endless amounts of dust from the coal fires I’d lit earlier that morning.
Carpets had to be brushed by hand or taken outside and beaten with a carpet beater. I tried this with a small rug and nearly threw my shoulder out after ten minutes. The dust cloud that erupted was genuinely frightening. Imagine doing this for every rug in a multi-room house. My guide also mentioned that oil lamps needed filling and cleaning daily, their glass chimneys polished until spotless. I found myself genuinely grateful for electricity.
Chamber Pots And Other Delightful Morning Tasks
Let’s talk about something truly unpleasant: emptying chamber pots. Before indoor plumbing became standard, every bedroom had a chamber pot that needed emptying every single morning. Housemaids emptied slops and refilled the coal buckets as part of their daily routine. I’ll spare you the details of my approximation of this task, except to say that indoor plumbing is possibly humanity’s greatest invention.
On top of that, fresh water had to be carried up to every bedroom for washing. No turning on a tap and having hot water appear. Housemaids took up more hot water and lit lamps throughout the day. Water is heavy. Carrying multiple pitchers up flights of stairs made my arms shake. I genuinely don’t know how anyone managed this daily without developing shoulders like a linebacker.
Laundry Day Was Actually Laundry Week
I technically cheated here because proper Victorian laundry wasn’t a one-day affair. Doing laundry in the late 19th century was a complicated, hot, sweaty, backbreakingly heavy, week-long processes that included boiling clothing and linens over a hot stove. The process started with sorting, soaking, treating stains, and mending clothes.
Then everything had to be boiled. Actually boiled. All white clothes and linen should be boiled for fifteen to twenty minutes in soft water with enough soap to create a slight lather, while sick room linens should be boiled for half an hour. After boiling came rinsing, wringing by hand or with a heavy mangle machine, and hanging everything to dry. If that wasn’t enough, most items then needed starching and ironing with irons heated on the stove. I attempted one load of laundry following these rules and called it quits after three hours. My washing machine suddenly seemed like a beloved family member.
Preparing Dinner Without Modern Appliances
By early afternoon, I was supposed to start preparing dinner, which in Victorian times was the main meal of the day. The recipes in my guide assumed I’d be roasting meat over an open fire, boiling vegetables for extended periods, and creating multiple courses. Temperature control on a coal stove is basically guesswork and constant adjustment.
I tried making a simple roasted chicken with root vegetables using only my oven’s most basic settings and no timers. It required checking every fifteen minutes, rotating the pan, and adjusting the temperature by feel. The Victorians had none of the precision we take for granted. The Cook was responsible for the kitchen and the preparation of family meals and had an extremely important job because it was essential to impress guests when the family was entertaining. The pressure must have been immense. My chicken came out acceptable, though I nearly burned the vegetables twice.
Mending, Sewing, And The Endless Upkeep Of Clothing
Victorians didn’t just toss damaged clothing. They repaired everything meticulously. My guide allocated time for mending stockings, sewing on buttons, and repairing tears. Lady’s maids had to delicately treat stains, repair wear and tear, and often this job involved removing trims and ribbons before washing, treating those separately, and then reattaching them.
I sat down with a basket of clothes that needed buttons or small repairs and spent ninety minutes doing work that felt impossibly tedious. Every stitch by hand. No quick machine sewing. The detail work required for fancier garments must have taken hours. I gained serious respect for anyone who maintained an elaborate Victorian wardrobe. The sheer time investment in just keeping clothes wearable was staggering.
Afternoon Cleaning That Never Actually Ended
Just when I thought I might catch a break, the guide reminded me that afternoon cleaning was essential. Housemaids re-lit bedroom fires and cleaned glass and china in the drawing room while the family went about their day. Polishing silver, dusting every surface again (because coal fires created constant dust), and beating cushions were all on the list.
The physical repetition was mind numbing. Dust the mantelpiece. Polish the picture frames. Wipe down every wooden surface. Sweep again. I started to understand why roughly six out of every ten female servants in mid-Victorian times worked alone as general maids expected to perform all duties and chores. The isolation combined with endless physical labor must have been crushing. I found myself staring blankly at a half-dusted bookshelf, wondering how people didn’t just give up entirely.
The Physical And Mental Toll Was Real
By the end of my Victorian housekeeping experiment, every muscle in my body hurt. My hands were raw despite using gloves for some tasks. I had a newfound appreciation for modern conveniences that I’d always taken for granted. Washing machines, vacuum cleaners, central heating, indoor plumbing, electric lights – all of these eliminate hours of daily physical labor.
Research has shown that Victorian housework was genuinely strenuous. Women doing housework required between two hundred and sixty and three hundred and fifty calories per hour, giving caloric expenditure ranges of roughly twenty-four hundred to thirty-five hundred calories daily. That’s the equivalent of running a half marathon every single day just from household chores. The physical demands were enormous, yet this was expected labor that received little recognition or appreciation. I barely made it through one day with compromises and modern tools.
