Victorian Laundry: A Dirty Secret🤯
October 7, 2025
The Stinking Truth Behind the Gorgeous Gowns 🤢
It's fascinating to look at media depicting 19th-century British aristocrats with their grand estates and lavish attire, but it often makes you wonder: how did they possibly wash all those clothes and bed linens? Considering the many layers in their dresses, even cleaning one garment would have been a complex and arduous task.
Aristocrats of that era had different outfits for various times and occasions—a nightgown, dressing gown, morning dress, tea gown, day dress, walking dress, dinner dress, evening dress, and riding outfit. One book even states that Victorian ladies changed their clothes up to 12 times a day! All those outfits, of course, ended up in the laundry.
While researching this, I came across a description of laundry practices in "At Home: A Short History of Private Life" by Bill Bryson, a book on the history of domestic labor. It noted that because natural dyes were used back then, improper washing could easily strip the color from clothes. However, necessity is the mother of invention! Our ancestors, through trial and error, discovered various cleaning methods.
For example, when washing red garments, they used something called vitriol. This was obtained from salt-like deposits found at the bottom of dried-up mine waters. They learned that mixing vitriol with oil and washing red clothes with it would make the red color more vibrant and prevent the dye from bleeding. Similarly, a mixture of alum and vinegar made green clothes brighter and prevented green dye loss. For purple garments, baking soda served a similar purpose.
So, why did most people dread laundry duty? Old aristocratic garments often had multiple layers of white linen lining, all of which had to be detached from the clothes before washing.
Next, the white linen was put into a mixture of human urine and chicken droppings, which was excellent for bleaching. However, the odor was intensely unpleasant. To deodorize them, the linen was repeatedly washed in water infused with herbs and lavender until the smell was completely gone. Finally, the linen linings had to be reattached and sewn back onto the colored fabric dresses. What a task!
If one person did their laundry at Megawash instead of using an average home washer, they would save about 2,236 gallons of water each year. 2,236 gallons is enough water to keep 12 people hydrated for a whole year!
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