1)Going to university” meant either going to Cambridge or Oxford. There, one did not attend classes; they simply had a tutor come a few hours a week, and attended a few lectures. One was not even necessarily expected to graduate with a degree; it was mainly a place where the wealthy youth could go and meet other wealthy youth to get connections for when they were older.
2)One regular crime committed in the era was the abduction of children for their clothes. Well-dressed youth would be captured, stripped, and left running home in their underwear. This was one of the reasons chaperones were often employed.
3)If a single man called another single woman by her first name, it implied engagement. If you have seen the Emma Thompson version of Sense and Sensibility, there is a part where befuddled Hugh Grant befuddle calls Ms. Dash-wood “Elanor,” and says he’d like to ask her a question. By calling her her first name, Elanor knows exactly what the question will be-alas, he doesn’t get to finish.
4 Shark Week could just as easily be called “Seal Death Week.”
5 Whist is like Spades, except not as exciting.
6 The “delicate” lady’s place in fashion probably lead in many ways to the Victorian woman’s high death rate. As a healthy appetite, labor, exercise, and spending a lot of time outdoors was considered manly, women didn’t eat a lot, hardly ever got good exercise, and spent a lot of time indoors, where the air was stagnant and germs ran amok. The working men got the best food and meat, and the women in the family looked after the sick, who coughed in their faces all day.
7 Tuberculosis (the chronic pulmonary type was called “consumption”) was the main killer of the 19th century. It accounted for half of the deaths of women from age 15 to 35; more than the dangers of childbirth.
8) Until the 1890's, when microscopes proved diseases existed, most learned people believed that bad odors caused sickness.
9) Rugby was invented because the prep schools (like the one called Rugby) had added their own rules to the game of football (soccer), such as picking up the ball and punching each other. The next time that stereotypical Southern good-old-boy football fans talk about the British being dandies, remind them that the British version of football has less penalties and only sweaters for padding.
10) Port, to the Victorians, was the masculine drink, and sherry the feminine drink.
11) The term “Esquire” was used not by lawyers, but by men aspiring to be gentlemen and the landed gentry. The “esquire” supposedly comes from the word “squire,” the apprentice to a Knight.