Bizarre Facts About The Victorian Era

The Victorian period was all about contradictions. Victorians cheered for the railroad boom but fretted about railway madness. They surrounded themselves with death by adorning their outfits with bird corpses but tried to escape their own mortality with "safety coffins."

Men auctioned off their wives at the market one day and then insisted that women preserve their modesty at the beach by hiding in "bathing machines" on the next day. Makeup was denounced as tacky but arsenic skincare products were advertised as "perfectly harmless."

The Victorian era facts in the gallery above paint a very different picture of the time period than the one usually seen in history books.