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Peeing in Victorian Times


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There are a few sites with threads discussing this topic, but I didn't see a thread here.  Most of you may want to talk about Victorian ladies, but I think about the males.  The lower classes weren't too fussy about where and when they'd pee, both genders using the street gutter when necessary, but the upper class folks had to be more genteel about it.  Women might retire to a private place or pretend fainting or whatever, since they were the "weaker sex", but a gentleman couldn't show that "weakness".  When out in the country, a lady's voluminous dress might let her relieve herself on the ground without notice, but a man's pants without a fly would make it more complicated for him.  A gentleman couldn't be so crude as to indicate he needed to pee!  Because water was most likely contaminated, they drank lots of tea, wine and other diuretic beverages.  Imagine courting a lady, sipping cup after cup of tea, and bursting for a piss!  What was a guy to do?

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Guest tholepin

Peeing or any "private" activity really was hidden. Holding was necessary as time went on.when I 

When I need a fact or a sample of the language, I use Victorian Voices.net. All aspects of daily life are there - except frank and erotic discussions of bathroom usage. But from reading anonymous books such as The Autobiography of a Flea and others in that vein, we as sexual beings haven't changed, in fact, we've gotten better!

I don't know how to hyperlink here, but googling Victorian Voices is a good start.

Being new here, I feel self-conscious at noting just how good the stories are! I am learning a lot. Thank you all.

Tholepin

 

  

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Guest tholepin

By chance I found what I was looking for; www.horntip.com Here you will find The Romance of Lust, one thousand pages of erotica describing everything you could imagine. Truly something for everyone. Enjoy.

 

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The problems would extend to servants, who would not be allowed to use the same facilities in the house as the family.  While I would expect that there would be a toilet or privy in the basement for use by staff, servants might be working long hours upstairs without a break, and their bedrooms would be in the attic.  I imagine that holding was necessary.

 

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Edit: Sorry for the quotation marks, I'm on mobile.

Here's a bit of what volume 1 of The Romance of Lust contains."

There were three of us — Mary, Eliza, and myself. I was approaching fifteen, Mary was about a year younger, and Eliza between twelve and thirteen years of age...""

We had discovered that mutual handlings gave a certain amount of pleasing sensation; and, latterly, my eldest sister had discovered that the hooding and unhooding of my doodle, as she called it, instantly caused it to swell up and stiffen as hard as a piece of wood. My feeling of her little pinky slit gave rise in her to nice sensations, but on the slightest attempt to insert even my finger, the pain was too great. We had made so little progress in the attouchements that not the slightest inkling of what could be done in that way dawned upon us. I had begun to develop a slight growth of moss-like curls round the root of my cock; and then, to our surprise, Mary began to show a similar tendency. As yet, Eliza was as bald as her hand, but both were prettily formed, with wonderfully full and fat mounts of Venus. We were perfectly innocent of guile and quite habituated to let each other look at all our naked bodies without the slightest hesitation; and when playing in the garden, if one wanted to relieve the pressure on the bladder, we all squatted down together, and crossed waters, each trying who could piddle fastest. Notwithstanding these symptoms of passion when excited, in a state of calm I might have passed for a boy of ten or eleven."

 

 

Edited by JLH99 (see edit history)
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On 29 August 2016 at 2:15 PM, JLH99 said:

Here's a bit of what volume 1 of The Romance of Lust contains.

 

 

So glad to see someone quoting this amazing piece of literature. I remember stumbling across a copy of this online when I was living with my parents still. I would spend nights reading this while hardly understanding it, but somehow besotted by the charm of the words. You bring back warm memories!

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The Victorians were uptight about sex but I think they were much less uptight about urinating in public. I can't remember where but I've read several histories written by historians (non-fiction) that talk about gentlemen whipping it out in London next to a carriage wheel, perfectly respectable for upper class, and London would be the most "genteel" of the cities.

Don't remember what they said about the ladies, and their dresses and corsets were a lot more confining. Men usually had button flies -- so pretty easy access and clothing designed to make it easy to take a leak.

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Ive done a fair bit of reading exerts from medical journals from the Victorian era mostly to look at the opinions of the period on bladder capacity. Rightly or wrongly, it's clear that the overwhelming opinion of the medical profession was that the female bladder is larger than the male. This was thought not to be an inherent gender difference but arising because of the frequent situations in which women were forced to retain their urine for long periods. Ive even seen one reference that states a larger gender difference in the upper classes owing to the customs of society encouraging women to retire from polite occasions as seldom as possible. Interesting stuff in my opinion. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

As I remember it* the first (Victorian) public toilets were erected as a response to an outcry for decency at about the time efficient sewers were first introduced. But they were few and far between so street peeing was not instantly discontinued. Old habits -especially bad ones - die hard and the older relatives i knew as a boy were young in Edwardian times and not very inhibited about toilet matters.  They took the view that if you had to go,you had to go and there was a prevalent belief that you could do yourself a lot of harm by "holding it" too long.

What we tend to forget is that until things like washing machines and dryers became commonplace, there was a very real need not to wet or poop in clothes or beds because the labour involved in extra laundry was considerable.  The arrival first of plastic "baby" pants and then disposable diapers took the pressure off and kids were given an easier time without the expectation  to be "clean and dry" at the earliest opportunity.

Even middle class families did washing once a week and underwear was changed on Saturday night so you had the clean ones for Sunday. Men's shirts had to last for days - that's why they had detachable collars so they were kept looking presentable despite the  grime from cities and coal fires.

Kids and sick people had basic mattress protection in the form of a rubber sheet- dark red and after a while crinkly with age.  When we criticise parents for the harsh way they punished bed-wetting or wet pants, we need to remember the strain extra washing - even once or twice a week -put on the household.

Worse off  were incontinent people -or those that feared they might become so.  They were "not fit to be seen out" and either kept virtually bed bound at home or put in institutions.  

Things didn't really change until the late 1950's so there are still many folk around who were raised in the dying days of the old order, and it was so very different.  When I was between 5 and 13 years old I was encouraged to do anything rather than wet my pants - including just weeing over a drain at the side of the road.  

* From past reading not because I was there!

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  • 1 year later...

From what I know about history, it was quite a difficult process for woman to pee due to their clothing, especially in public. Add to that the issues females have even today, because of where they pee from , and it is easy to understand that they must have developed strong bladders.  Nevertheless, I tend to believe more than a few of them ended up wetting themselves, under all those clothes. Personal hygiene was not what it is today, so the smell was less likely to be noticed. 

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OTOH, Victorian times in the USA had routes from Missouri to the west coast on which travelers might pass several weeks without seeing a restroom. 

Also, the earlier period would be interesting.  Have attended SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) reenactments east of Bellevue, WA, USA when the serious attendees spend 48 hours each weekend in primitive conditions -- however, not so primitive as they reenact.  Have no idea of the history or what SCA members do in more realistic reenactments.

Go back far enough and we find people were invented long before restrooms.  So almost any period brings us to unfamiliar bladder issues and habits.

Hope some historically-savvy people will say tell us more.

 

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In truth in Victorian Britain, it was the coming of the Railways that brought toilets......at the start, men would retire to one end of the platform and women to the other......the women wore huge long legged panties that were open underneath, between the legs so they just opened their legs under their skirts and peed down.    The railways wanted to discourage this so they built quaint toilet blocks one at each end of the station building......mimicking how the people had gone in the past.......Many of these were lost in the 1960's when the smaller lines were closed.    Some of the most elegant were works of art and kept spotlessly clean, often by a person who had a small room in the place and was low paid but had free accommodation.   Of course the towns wanted to keep up with the Railways and public toilets moved on out into the towns in ever increasing numbers.....sadly to save money and often to stop such things as 'cottaging' many of these 1950's and 60's toilet blocks are being closed.

 

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