Victorian Life

With the primary research still in my mind I decided to look more into how it really felt back in the Victorian era. I wanted to really understand the mood of how it would have been like to be alive in the 1800s. The closest I could find to truly feel the ambience was through photographs of the time.

While researching I stumbled upon an unusual and highly insightful website: Spitalfields Life

The images on the site were full of historical significance, and useful to attempt to experience Victorian life.

London was viably different in the Victorian era, with crooked buildings and grimy walls. Some buildings built to last centuries, others only a few years. It was also a time of great change, with many of these older buildings being pulled down and replaced with straight roads and terraced housing.

The scenes are often ghostly in appearance, with shimmering mists and sinister shadows giving an uneasy sense of danger.

The people photographed are almost like ghosts themselves, blending into the landscape as though they are transparent. I looked at this image at least three times before I noticed the person standing in the background. Meanwhile the architecture is so haphazard, yet somehow imposing and ominous, something I would love to capture in my project.

Scenes are never as they seem in the first glance, yet again people hide almost as if they are afraid to be seen.

Apparently this is a photograph, though it could have just as easily been a piece of artwork. It is named "A fine day in London", I have my doubts about the weather in this image. There is almost a smoggy misty atmosphere in this image, making it quite mysterious and ethereal.

The eerie, haunting quality of many of these images gives a terrifying impression of what it would have been like to live back then.What would it back been like at night, with limited lighting and a much greater sense of danger.