Victorian England quiz

More questions about Victorian England

These visible examples show the question style. LearnClash turns the full topic into ranked duels and spaced repetition.

1. 1 Easy

   How long did Queen Victoria wear black after Prince Albert died?

   Answer: Forty years

   Why: She kept his rooms untouched and had hot water carried up to his dressing room every day, still steaming, for the rest of her life.

2. 2 Medium

   What were the cheap, sensational serial stories sold for a penny?

   Answer: Penny Dreadfuls

   Why: They cost a twelfth of what a Dickens instalment did, which is exactly why respectable opinion worried so much about who was reading them.

3. 3 Hard

   What institutions were built to house the poor after 1834?

   Answer: Workhouses

   Why: By 1839 some 583 Poor Law unions covered nearly all of England and Wales, and relief for the able bodied meant moving in and labouring for it.

4. 4 Easy

   What caused the 1858 crisis that had Parliament soaking its curtains in chloride of lime?

   Answer: Raw sewage in the Thames

   Why: A hot summer baked the waste of two and a half million people onto the riverbanks, and the smell came straight through the windows.

5. 5 Medium

   Which household item often contained toxic Scheele's Green pigment?

   Answer: Wallpaper

   Why: Carl Wilhelm Scheele created the copper arsenite pigment in 1775, and in 1862 four children in Limehouse died in a room newly hung with it.

6. 6 Hard

   What was the common name for the thick, yellow London fog?

   Answer: Pea souper

   Why: The colour came from coal smoke mixing with river mist, and the worst of them killed roughly four thousand people in five days.