There aren’t a lot of history enthusiasts out there that are as dedicated to history as Gabriel Sarah Chrisman. The two have spent the last decade living like a Victorian couple from the 1890s.
Sarah and Gabriel come from wildly different backgrounds. Sarah has always loved history and dreamed of becoming a writer one day. Gabriel, on the other hand, loved technology and signed up for the computer science program at his university. But it was during his time at university that he came to realize he did not appreciate the effect of 21st-century technology on his life. He felt like a cog in a machine and thought that instead of bringing people together, computers were starting to alienate everybody around him.
So after university he and Sarah, now his wife, decided to try something new. Between Sarah’s love of the past and Gabriel’s fear of the future, the only way forward for the couple was going back to the past—the 1890s, to be exacted.
They started researching life in Victorian times, and bought a Victorian house in a small town in the Pacific Northwest, took out any piece of modern technology, and simply started living life as a Victorian couple. Sarah wears corsets and writes historical novels, and Gabriel rides 19th-century bicycles wearing a top hat. Life as a Victorian isn’t always easy— modern technology can be so convenient—but, Sarah and Gabriel wouldn’t trade their quiet Victorian existence for anything in the world.
