Yep.
The lesson every left-of-center person certainly takes from this is that nearly everything has become dramatically better in the last 200 years. And will presumably continue to get better in the future.
this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
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But only if we fight for it as hard as those early trade unionists and socialists did. o7
True, the rewards will naturally flow to the top, and it's important to keep that from happening in excess.
Read this a few times before I remembered "elegant balls" could refer to social events... and not... balls.
Glad I'm not the only one who thought the Victorians shaved and decorated their nuts.
Small children dying sweeping chimneys and literal rivers of shit. Is that what they mean when they say they’re making things great again?
They usually intentionally forget the past's bad parts, hence the "return to a mythical past". My great-grandfather didn't had 8-10 siblings bcause his parents wanted to outbreed the Roma (European People of Color), but because many didn't live until childhood. In fact, he's a single one, who lived to adulthood.
As a revisionist-historian, I prefer disposable chimney roomba.
Not-So-Fun-Fact! The 12-hour workday was a reform which shortened a previously longer (unregulated) working day, which could be 16-18 hours a day, six days a week. Even after this reform, many industrial employers would attempt to screw over their workers by messing with the factory's clocks - one reason why some older unions still maintain their hard-won right to handle the company clocks to this day.
Oh! Now tell me about the Haymarket riots and inventing the weekend.
Oh you mean the reason that the most badass American ever, Lucy Parsons, became a widow
Turns out any time period is pretty great when you're rich.
[X] doubt
There was no pain killers (except alcohol) and anesthesia just started to become available.
You still could die from a rotten teeth.
Air and water pollution was still affecting you.
I would rather say any time period is pretty bad when you are among the poorest, but it did get substantially better for other classes.
They had some pretty decent painkillers available - Opium, morphine, laudanum, cocaine, ether, chloroform. Aspirin too, technically, but that was pretty late in the game if we're staying Victorian.
And that the current time period is pretty great even if you're kinda middle income rich.
IDK, medieval period seems like it kinda sucked even if you were rich. The state of their medicine seems to have been even worse than it could have been, humanity had uncovered a lot of cures that were forgotten, considered heretical (e.g. herbal experts, who were often considered witches) or even became extinct (e.g. that roman-era plant that reportedly worked as a contraceptive). And while rich people definitely had servants who cleaned up their non-~~plumping~~ plumbing toilets, that didn't quite isolate them from the kinds of illnesses that spread when everyone has to live without ~~plumping~~ plumbing.
Victorian England doesn't seem like it was much better, though.
I'm only mentioning this because it doesn't fit the rest and it's twice, but plumping means getting fat, plumbing moves water.
Geez, no idea wtf happened there. I definitely knew that it's not plumping and I don't use any autocorrect ...
Seemed weird to me, too All I can imagine is, if you happen to type "rumschlumpel" a lot, or something irl that's similarly spelled, your fingers might go "lump" out of habit. Otherwise you usually type what you intend, as far as I can see. (Any nonstandard spellings being by choice, I mean)
Even if some ancient herbs possibly cured some diseases, nobody had any knowledge about what caused them to cure them. There were no reliable ancient cures, because we were unable to create any before we had enough scientific knowledge about our bodies to consistently replicate their effects.
There was no magical golden age of herbal cures that later became forgotten. Medical knowledge was slim and based on guesswork throughout the entirety of human history until very very recently.
So that is why it may have been much better to have been rich in ancient societies, until you became sick. Then you were basically as fucked as the poor.
Cures can be forgotten without a preceding golden age. It's always one step forward, two steps back with pre-modern medicine, but that one step forward did indeed happen, repeatedly.
There were no reliable ancient cures, because we were unable to create any before we had enough scientific knowledge about our bodies to consistently replicate their effects.
Many (well, some) herbal remedies etc. did and do actually work, it was just more difficult to match them to the illnesses they were actually useful against and they were less effective than our contemporary pills. e.g. they definitely had painkillers, disinfectants, emetics and laxatives. Calling them "cures" might be a bit much compared to e.g. antibiotics, but these types of things definitely still have medicinal use.
Some ancient herbal medicine did survive into the scientific era. Like the invention of aspirin is based on salicylic acid in willow bark which was used as a pain relieve for thousands of years.
tbf, most herbal cures weren't considered witchcraft. Witchcraft was more of a social state than one related to any of one's actual practices (ie "We want this old widow's property"), and didn't really ramp up until the Renaissance and Early Modern Period, ironically.
De Materia Medica, a Roman-era pharmaceutical text, actually survived this entire period in Greek, Latin, and Arabic, because of its usefulness. Albeit you might struggle to find many areas of early medieval Europe with a copy on hand... or the requisite knowledge to make use of it...
Victorian England is one of the few slivers of history wherein things actually got worse for people overall because of technology - not so much out of the largely-fictitious idea that industrial labor was more arduous or less profitable than subsistence farming, but because industrialization led to the sudden and rapid concentration of populations in urban centers which were not really even designed for their own current population, and a low understanding of organizational and public health principles. It wasn't until the mid-1800s that London even started filtering its fucking water. I wouldn't drink straight from the Thames today, much less in a period when upstream sewage and pollutants were poured-in willy-nilly without treatment.
This is why tradwives piss me off. Poor people (including women and children) fought and died for better work conditions, pay, and shorter work days. Feminists are apart of those women (and men) who fought for your right to choose whether or not you want to work or be a stay at home mom. So stop spitting on their graves and pretending that feminism is why women have to work to support their household today.
Most of the popular shows about nobility and classy balls are Edwardian or Regency because Victorian nobility were squares, but same shit.
Yeah, except only Americans and the British believe the top part.
How the British see the British:
European anglophiles are definitely a thing and it's typically not drunk topless football fans and sunburnt fat people on Mallorca they love. Most of them probably still have a more realistic impression than USians, though.
Until the Internet
The top thing was also mostly reality, just one that only a small percentage of the population took part in. Well, the streets might have been somewhat less classy in reality even in rich neighborhoods.
The bottom half doesn't really reflect the reality for most either. Maybe it's accurate for a majority of Londoners or other big industrial city, but in the 1800s only about half of the population lived in cities or towns (rapidly urbanizing during that century), and of those even fewer were in big cities working factories. Many more were farmers, or smiths, or bakers, or cobblers. And of course recognizing the unpaid labor of women at home is important too.
All day farmwork, child labor, coal smog, open sewers or cesspits
Farm work wasn't all day for most of the year until it became industrialised. Plants and animals take a lot of time to grow, and can mostly be left alone while they do it. If one farmer is only producing enough food for fifty people, they end up with a lot of downtime, albeit with a few days a year that require all nighters. Only when machines and fertiliser become able to let one farmer support thousands of people does there start to be something to do all day every day, and that needs the Haber process, which was a 20th century development.
Farm work wasn’t all day for most of the year until it became industrialised. Plants and animals take a lot of time to grow, and can mostly be left alone while they do it.
Bruh.
Animals can't be left alone while they 'grow'. They need constant tending, even when you aren't harvesting animal products from them. Especially in the winter, when they can't reliably forage for themselves (meaning either butchery or high-intensity care wrt food and water is required).
Plants cannot be left alone while they grow. The process of weeding, spreading manure, and tending crops in intensive farming includes labor during the entire growing season; the process of constant sowing and plowing in extensive farming also includes labor during the entire growing season, but spread over a wider area.
If one farmer is only producing enough food for fifty people, they end up with a lot of downtime, albeit with a few days a year that require all nighters.
That's not even close a serious opinion on pre-modern agriculture.
One farmer producing enough food for fifty people is a number you wouldn't seen until the 20th century. In the medieval period, subsistence farmers would typically produce enough food for themselves (you could say 'and their families', but anyone who knows a farming family knows that farming is family work - and it remains one of the few areas where even modern law yields to 'traditional' child labor standards), and the only surplus being fractional. Hence a major reason why urbanization rates were so low - in the 17th century, which itself saw major agricultural advances, urbanization was still only 5%-10%. ~90% of the population was rural - and a majority of that rural population were farmers or other agricultural workers. Even with the agricultural revolution of the 18th-19th centuries, vastly improved yields allowed each farmer to provide for only around five people (on average; individual numbers varied wildly).
Furthermore, there's a reason the term 'working from sunup to sundown' refers to a long workday in common parlance - traditionally, working past natural light is not very practical. "All nighters" are not something that happens often, and certainly not for farmers of all professions, both because of the fickleness of early lights, and because of the high expense of fuel.
Only when machines and fertiliser become able to let one farmer support thousands of people does there start to be something to do all day every day, and that needs the Haber process, which was a 20th century development.
Most of those machines are labor-saving devices. Fertilizer simply allows for 'sustainable' monocrops, reduction of field rotations, and an increase in financially viable arable land - ie land that is profitable to work for profit instead of subsistence.
18th and 19th century plantation work by slaves was not an idyllic part-time task because there simply wasn't enough for them to do agriculturally.
There’s a reason people went to the shitty cities. Urban life wasn’t easy or better either, landlords extracting rent and labor from the lower classes keeping them poor was a thing there too.
It’s tough to build a middle class.
What would I need at a minimum to qualify for having elegant balls?
We'll send a volunteer to perform an inspection
Better bedazzle those beauties!
A silk ribbon maybe?
Shaving
Both of those existed, only one is represented in popular literature/movies.
Not much netflix appeal in 28 seasons of unchanging factory line work and dieing from consumption.
Within first few chapters of "Lord of The Mysteries" was a factory worker that died from lead poisoning.
The factory owner was praised for being a philanthropist until that part. He would even let people take unpaid time off for health reasons.
But not working for weeks would definetely bankrupt every worker at the time so people kept working.
When they animated the book it was left out sadly. Maybe they will mention it later?
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious