Diet was dreadful back then. People were shorter and often developed rickets quite early in life. Even the well off who could afford to eat well by the standards of the era often ate and drank themselves into an early grave. The food for the upper class was full of grease, butter and rich cream sauces. I remember seeing a doctor on TV looking at the menu from a dinner in the 1890’s and he was horrified when he checked out the recipes for the various courses. He said you could get a level of cholesterol from a single meal that we would normally accumulate in a month.
My grandparents were adults in the 1890s——three of them made it into their 80s.