Laundry
in Victorian times
Clothes
washing was a major task, which needed space. Well before washing
machines, working class housewives used a public laundry, or a
local washerwoman. A middle-class home like Church Farm would have
had a special washing room.
Water
was brought from an outside pump (there was no mains supply). It
was boiled over the kitchen fire or in a separately heated copper
(a big metal tub).
Clothes
were put in a dolly tub, with soap flakes (no detergents were
available until the late 19th century) and pounded with a washing
dolly. This was very hard work. Ingrained dirt was scrubbed away
on a washboard.
Running
the clothes through a mangle squeezed the water out, and the
clothes were then hung to dry on washing lines overhead or
outside. Ironing was usually done on a table, covered with a
padded cloth. Flat irons, heated in front of the fire, were
common. Two flat irons were needed, to be swapped over as each
cooled. (Paraffin and charcoal irons were also used.) Tablecloths
and sheets were pressed into their creases in a linen press before
being put away.
The first
heated irons were used in
China
eight hundred years ago but they only appeared in
Europe
in the 16th century.
The earliest
type was the box iron which was warmed either by a slug of metal
heated in the fire or by glowing charcoal. Flat or sad
irons were common in the 19th
and early 20th centuries. Heated in front of the fire or on the
top of a stove, their metal handles became so hot they had to be
wrapped in a cloth to enable them to be used without causing
burns. A laundry maid needed at least two sad irons to work - one
heating up by the fire while she used the other.
Victorian
inventions included irons heated by burning paraffin and coal gas,
but both were awkward to use and very smelly. Electric irons were
first made in the 1880s but were very expensive, and dangerous to
use as they were not earthed. They did not become really popular
until the 1930s. The dates of the electric irons on show range
from the 1920s to a contemporary steam iron. The small travelling
iron was made in the 1940s.
Specialist
irons have been known since Elizabethan times. The Italian iron on
show dating from the1880s was heated by an iron rod placed in a
fire. It was used to put creases into lace cuffs, caps and frills.
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