Cleaning the Floor
Most of the dust that was removed from ornaments and surfaces would end up on the floor, which in a lot of working class homes would be tiled, wooden boards or paved stones. Damp tea leaves would be sprinkled on the floor to settle the dust before it was swept. Once the floors had been swept they would be scrubbed by hand using a scrubbing brush and a concoction of water and soda, which was very harsh on the hands, or some much more gentle soapy water. Floors could be scrubbed as much as twice a day. As one local remembered:
“I’ve seen my mother scrub ours twice a day, year in, year out sort of thing. Because she used to do it in the morning. Well then we used to come home from school, we used to be pittering and pattering, in and out, because there was no tarmac roads, you carried a lot of rubbish on your shoes. And I’ve seen my mother set to and scrub the floor before my father come home from work. And that was twice a day, and that was regular.”
If they were lucky, a working class household might be able to afford a small carpet or rug. This would also be sprinkled with damp tea leaves or bicarbonate of soda catch any dust or dirt lodged in the fibres and to remove any unpleasant smells like tobacco smoke. It would then be taken outside to be beaten with a carpet beater.
Polishing
Most Victorian furniture was made from wood and needed a deep polish every now and again to keep it in a good condition. Polishing wooden furniture was commonly referred to a ‘warming the wood’ in household manuals of the time. Most woods were polished with a furniture polish that could either be bought or made from a mixture of beeswax, vinegar and linseed oil. It would be applied with a rag or cloth and buffed out with a clean cloth. It was advised that the clean cloth was ironed, not for the sake of neatness but because a cloth that was ironed smooth left a better finish on the wood.
Metal objects in the house would also need a good clean and polish to bring them to a gleaming shine. Brass doorknobs and letter boxes, metal ornaments and decorative furnishings, and any metal dinnerware would be given a good polish using whatever was appropriate. Brass could be cleaned and buffed up using a piece of leather, whilst copper cooking pans could be cleaned using silversand mixed with malt vinegar or lemon. This mixture would be gently rubbed into the pan to remove any burnt on food and to bring up a nice shine once the pans were clean. Even utilitarian objects like kitchen ranges and stoves would be polished every week using black lead.
Laundry
During a spring clean, curtains and drapes, bedding and linens and any other fabrics and soft furnishings that could be washed would be. Laundry was often cited as the most dreaded and hated of all the domestic tasks left to women in the Victorian era. There were no washing machines, tumble dryers or electric irons to make the process easy and simple. Everything had to be done by hand and the whole process was time consuming and exhausting. One local remembered
“…my mother starting to wash when Dad went to work in the morning at half-past six, and I’ve seen her washing up to half-past seven, eight o’clock at night.”
First, water had to be collected from the nearest water source which was then heated in the copper (a large copper pan over a small fire). Once the water was warm, flakes of carbolic soap would be lathered into it and the hot soapy water would be put into a dolly tub with the dirty fabrics. Just like a modern washing machine, the laundry was cleaned by being churned forcefully in water. However, in the Victorian era this was done by hand using a dolly or a posser. A woman would normally have to dolly or posser vigorously for half an hour to get the dirt out before wringing the washing out using a mangle. The fabric would be forced between the rollers to remove any remaining dirt, soap, and excess water, and then put into a dolly tub with clean water for a rinse. Following a rinse the laundry was mangled again, then rinsed and mangled, and rinsed for a final third time. This time a little bit of blue dye would be added to the water as brightener, as it would make the whites appear whiter. Once the laundry had received its blue-dye rinse it would be put through the mangle one final time before being hung out to dry. This whole process would have to be repeated for however many loads of laundry the household had, and then everything would be ironed using flat irons heated on the kitchen range.
