While simplifying the process and helping you stay in check, that should help reduce the sheer number of gowns that work for you. I bathe with a bowl and pitcher almost any morning, and for a nice long soak I use our castiron clawfoot bathtub. I wash my hair using Castile bar soap from a company established in My hairbrush is a 130 year old design, and my othbrush has natural boar bristles. When we look for to grind something, we have a Victorian food chopper as well as mortars and pestles, When I seek for whipped cream or an omelet, Know what guys, I use an antique rotary eggbeater. While using a sourdough culture I keep constantly bubbling in the back corner of our kitchen in a bowl that belonged to my grandmother, I bake all our bread from scratch. We replaced them with sturdy historic equivalents instead of more disposable modern trash, when cheap modern things in our lives inevitably broke.
Nearly any birthday and anniversary became an excuse to hunt down physical artifacts from our favorite time period, that we could hereafter study and use together.
My husband and I study history, specifically the late Victorian era of the 1880s and ’90s.
Now we have a ‘periodappropriate’ icebox that we stock with block ice. We sold that whenever we could. Almost any evening, and sometimes twice a day during summer, To be honest I empty the melt water from the drip tray beneath its base. There was an electric fridge in the kitchen, when we moved in. Our methods are quite different from those of academics. Everything in our boring life is connected to our period of study, from the technologies we use to the ways we interact with the world. Five years ago we bought a house built in 1888 in Port Townsend, Washington State a wn that prides itself on being a Victorian seaport. Just think for a moment. You have a story to share, right? Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com. We use oil lamps, when it’s just the two of us.
On the basis of the first patents of Tesla and Edison, when Gabriel and I have company we use early electric lightbulbs.
Mostly there’re no modern lightbulbs in our house.
We were amazed by how much brighter the light is from antique oil lamps than from modern reproductions, when we started using period illumination every day. Actually the greatest gift we give ourselves is mutual support in moving forward with our dreams. This is the case. Did you know that the life we now enjoy came bit by bit, through gifts we gave one another. Essentially, it’s not as though someone suddenly dropped us into a ‘ready furnished’ Victorian existence one day that sort of thing only happens in fairy tales and Hollywood. We had to work hard for our dreams. That’s where it starts getting really interesting. The process didn’t happen all at once. Now this modal can be closed by pressing the Escape key or activating the close button. It’s a modal window. I became so accustomed to the presence and movements of my skirts, they started to send me little signals about my proximity to the objects around myself, and about the winds that rustled their fabric even the faint wind caused by the passage of a person or animal close by.
Gabriel said watching me grow accustomed to Victorian clothes was like seeing me blossom into my true self.
They became a peripheral sense, a natural part of myself, I never had to analyze these signals, and after a while I stopped even thinking about them much.
Things as subtle as the way my anklelength skirts started to act like a cat’s whiskers when I wore them almost any single day, Features of posture, movement. Wearing ’19thcentury’ clothes on a daily basis gave us insights into intimate life of the past, things so private and yet so commonplace they have been never written down. Consequently, when we need to use it, I have to open and light it, To use our antique space heater in the winter, Know what guys, I have to fill its reservoir with kerosene and keep its wick and flame spreader clean. Did you hear about something like that before? It’s certainly a more mindful one than flicking a switch, It’s not a burdensome process. However, we’re way more careful about how we use them, when we use resources through technology that has to be tended. Everything escalated organically from there, and now our whole life revolves around this ongoing research project.
We take it more seriously than many people take their paying jobs, nobody pays us for it.
Our bed itself is an antique from our period of study, and since it didn’t have a mattress when we bought it, Know what, I sewed one by hand and stuffed it with feathers.
In the winter we tuck hot water bottles into bed with us, and even the cotton covers that I sewed for those bottles are made out of periodappropriate fabric. Our heat comes from 19thcentury gas heaters and from an antique kerosene space heater. Now regarding the aforementioned fact… Any day I write in my diary with an antique fountain pen that I fill with liquid ink using an eyedropper. Actually I buy my ink from a company founded in My sealing wax for personal letters comes from identical company, and my letter opener was made sometime in the late Victorian era from a taxidermied deer foot, My inkwell and the blotter I use to dry the ink on every page before I turn it are antiques from the 1890s. Any morning I wind the mechanical clock in our parlor.
Artifacts in our home represent what historians call primary source materials, items directly from the period of study.
Look, there’s an universe of difference between a book or magazine article about the Victorian era and one actually written in the period.
One person misinterprets something, the next exaggerates it, a third twists it to serve an agenda, and so on. Going back to the original sources is a single way to learn the truth. Let me tell you something. Books and magazines the Victorians themselves wrote and read constitute the vast bulk of our reading materials and since reading is our favorite pastime, they fill a large percentage of our days. While anything can be a primary source, nonetheless the term usually refers to texts. Modern commentaries on the past can get appallingly like the game telephone. On p of this, on our vacation just last week, we rode our high wheel cycles more than 75 miles along a historic railroad route between abandoned silver mines.
I kept thinking of an article we had read in a 1883 cycling magazine about wheelmen riding bikes just like Gabriel’s when they ok a trip out to a mine.
Gabriel has three ‘high wheel’ bicycles, and he has ridden them hundreds of miles.
I’ve never even had a driver’s license Neither I have ever had a cellphone, nor my husband. On special outings when Gabriel and I go cycling together, Know what guys, I ride a copy of a high wheel tricycle from the 1880s. This is the case. It ok mutual support to challenge society’s dogmas of how we should live, how we should learn. On p of that, he had been homeschooled as a child, and he never espoused the strict segregation that now seems to exist between life and learning. We both wanted to learn more about a time that fascinated any of us, as adults. Even before I met Gabriel, we both saw value in older ways of looking at the world. We came into it gradually and together. Not everyone necessarily wants to live very similar lifestyle we have chosen.
Learning to use all these technologies gives us confidence to exist across the world on our own terms.
Watching the amount of kerosene diminish in the reservoir heightens our awareness of how much we’re using, and makes us ask ourselves what we truly need.
Anyone can benefit from choices that increase their awareness of their surroundings and the way things they use each day affect them. We are called freaks, bizarre, and an endless slew of far worse insults. Gabriel’s workout clothes were copied from the racing outfit of a Victorian cyclist, and when he goes swimming, his ‘hand knit’ wool swim trunks raise more than a few eyebrows but so it is just the least of the abuse we’ve taken. Dealing with all these things and not being ground down by them, not letting other people’s hostile ignorance rob us of the joy we find in this lifespan that is the hard part. We live in a world that can be terribly hostile to difference on planet earth, by comparison.