Living History?

Now here's an idea! Live as you would have in about 1890; no modern appliances though it appears they have town power and a landline, no modern clothing (corsets and petticoats for the lady), no mention of what happens when you need medical or dental treatment...

And document it all on your website!!!

http://www.thisvictorianlife.com/

1890? Ha!

We basically lived "that way" for the first six years of my life, and my paternal grandmother lived "that way" for all but the last dozen years of her long life. Water was heated in a special compartment on the side of a cast-iron range, and heat in winter was by way of chunks of coal burning in a tall, centrally placed stove, which came complete with icing-glass windows. The only modern improvement we had was electric lights.

Hard ice? Never heard of it. All ice was "mined" from rivers and lakes in winter, and stored all summer in ice "houses". Harvested blocks of ice were kept separate by sprinkling them with saw dust, which also served as insulation. When you bought a block of ice from the ice-man it arrived still sprinkled with saw-dust. Ice was harvested and sold by the railroads ... as trains relied on ice for cooling, too.

If a family didn't have an ice-box, they often stored perishables in pails, lowered by rope into a cistern. If my memory serves, we finally acquired an electric refrigerator when I was about 12.

If you didn't want to go to the outhouse in the middle of a winter storm, you pulled the Chamber Pot from under your bed.

Iron clothes? You heated two chunks of "iron" on top of your wood stove, clamped them into a wooden holder, and as it became too cool for the purpose, you exchanged one for the other.

Wrapped in heavy towels and slipped under the covers, those hot "irons" kept your feet warm in winter, too.

Oh sure, there are still plenty of people alive who grew up without town power or water and did the laundry in a copper. Comes to that, when I was a toddler we had an icebox and we lived in a decent sized country town. But like your family we eventually bought a refrigerator. The Chrismans actually sold theirs, finding it an anachronism.

Would you go back to living "that way" in order to make a living?

Well, when we moved to a farm in 1961 the house had electricity, the previous owners had carved a bathroom and small hall out of an over sized dining room and my parents put in a forced air oil burning furnace. The electricity was unreliable at best so we always had backups. The well had a hand pump, there was an outhouse, a three seater, and the fireplace in the living room could keep that room toasty and the adjoining rooms bearable. The hot air from the furnace was not piped to the upstairs where we kids slept. I often found a ring of ice on the water glass I took to bed with me. I had an honest to god feather bed to sleep under.

Would I go back to that? I could but without the electricity I would miss you guys and gals.

Where did I hear that if you loose the internet you are back in 1984 but if you loose electricity you are in 1875? I found the electricity out when I got home last Friday. Sitting around silence with the light of a kerosene lamp is encouragement to go to bed early.

A few people, without electricity, have the knowledge and resources to live in the 19th Century; but most Americans would be thrown back into the 10th Century at best. No functional fireplaces, so no indoor heat; no indoor water; no way to wash clothing (or repair it).

I like to read about the past, not live in it. The Good Old Days: They Were Terrible!

#5 You are absolutely right about that. When we bought this house I had two requirements I would not compromise on, a working wood burning fireplace and mature trees. I may have threatened a survivalist mentality from my father. He was born and raised in the inner city but we moved to a medium sized farm when I was six. He has several excuses that he gives when asked why we did that but I think that the Cold War had a lot to do with it. My wife rolls her eyes at times about it and she has put her foot down over buying 100# bag of rice but when our power was out for a week thanks to a freak weather in 2007, hurricane winds made it into Ohio, we were able to have hot coffee every morning in spite of having an electric stove.

Seed to Seed is my recommendation for the best book to have after civilization falls. ;-)

As one person I know commented: If they have their vaccinations, they aren't living as Victorians.

>7 southernbooklady: I'll see that, and raise you: They almost certainly don't have the one vaccination that would have been reasonably common among their Victorian counterparts . . . smallpox.

Come to think of it, there's a larger issue at work here:

Your average small-scale frontier farmer of the 1840s was largely -- though not completely -- "off the grid." Given the right tools and skills, and a lot of dedication, you can simulate the rhythms of that lifestyle.

Your average upper-middle-class urban American married couple of the 1890s (the roles the folks in >1 dajashby: have chosen to cosplay) was enmeshed in a wide range of social and technological networks that shaped virtually every aspect of their day-to-day lives. Those networks don't exist anymore, and can't be recreated by an individual historical re-enactor . . . no matter how skilled or dedicated they are.

>9 ABVR:

a wide range of social and technological networks that shaped virtually every aspect of their day-to-day lives. Those networks don't exist anymore

Excellent point. Reminds me of the college lecture that did the most to convince me that political science is not a real discipline. (I've moderated my views slightly.) The acclaimed scholar who taught our course on nuclear weapons was explaining how, in the event of a nuclear exchange between the USA and USSR, society would revert to a "medieval" condition.

I may not have been much of a historian at the time, but I was astonished by this assumption that modern society is like an onion that has added layers over time: more people, more advanced technology, better standards of living. Blast away the outer layers et voilà! — there they are, blinking in the sickly light that follows a nuclear fireball: a world of peasants, feudal lords, feudal law, insecure kings, and a Latin-speaking church bureaucracy. After a predictable term of confusion and disorder, nine-tenths of us would step into our appointed roles as wheat farmers, driving our trusty oxen, living on bread baked in communal ovens and water from the very well where poor Wat Crookshanks was maimed in the digging of it. We'd pay our tithes to support the local cathedral building project, which none of us would live to see completed. And at Shrovetide we'd all get stinking drunk, make noise, break things, and wear silly hats.

And in five or six centuries, with several onion layers restored, we'd be back in the Nuclear Age to have another go at advanced political science.

#9
I agree, they are cosplayers in a very artificial set-up of their own devising. They seem to me to have cherry picked their situation; upper middle class, urban and equipped with all the mod cons of the time (which I judge to be about 1890 from the clothing style), including electricity. They show you the fun parts, like the antique bicycles, but not the drudgery, like wash day.

I am intrigued by how much discussion there has been about doing without electricity. After all, people managed very well without it for almost the whole of human history. The point I was originally making was that, while I do not question the Chrisens having access to electricity, it is hard to take them seriously when the whole enterprise is documented and promoted (among other things she's written a book about the joys of wearing corsets) via the Internet!

In my mis-spent youth I knew people whose idea of a fun weekend was dressing up as Vikings and waving broadswords at each other, occasionally even making contact. However, any consequent minor injuries were treated with Betadine and Band Aids, and more serious injuries were transported - by motor vehicle - to hospital.

Oh, the modern conveniences of the 1890s? Like having someone come to vacuum your carpets with a wagon mounted steam powered vacuum pump and long hoses. The Vacuum Cleaner: A History

And you could safely have surgery thanks to Doctor Lister's antiseptic Listerine. Sorry, I have too many books that reference thins one to pick one. If anyone is interested check the tag "history of medicine" in my catalog.

Any others?

It's the dentistry that gets to me. What they had in 1890 was a vast improvement on 100 years earlier, but just remembering what I had to endure 50 years ago (having been born with poor quality pre-fluouride teeth) almost brings on PTSD. Nobody with any kind of illness or disability could possibly fancy life in the nineteenth century - nor the twentieth, if we're being totally honest.

Today's mod cons are tomorrow's primitive prototypes. Remember cassette loaded computers?

>13 dajashby::
What about dropping your punched cards, if we are going way back...?

Punch cards? Going "Way back" is typing on a big, heavy, clunky manual Smith-Corona, Remington, or Underwood typewriter, because electric typewriters hadn't yet been invented.

https://www.google.com/search?q=manual+typewriters&biw=1280&bih=586&...

#14
Ooh, yes, I remember that! The university computer was housed in its own air-conditioned room and undergraduate students queued up with their cards tightly clutched, to be run late at night because staff and graduate students used it during the day. I vaguely remember a story of some saboteur breaking in and jumbling cards, after which security was tightened.

People punched the cards with bobby pins - not me of course, I was doing law, lawyers didn't have any use for computers...

The creator of the internet protocols can't get a response from customer service at his internet provider and is going without internet for a week so far.