The Victorian home was a place of sanctuary from the outside world,
especially in the cities where dirt and disease hung in the air
and danger stalked the streets.
And thanks to advances in science, a whole host of products and services
were promising to make life at home cheaper, easier and more convenient.
But they were also making life much more dangerous.
For under the guise of family-friendly products,
mass consumption was bringing killers
into the very heart of the Victorian home.
With the aid of modern science, I'll seek out the deadly assassins
that hid on every floor.
Leaning too close to the fire and, "Boof!", they burst into flames!
I'll be revealing what the Victorians couldn't see
inside their homes...
Five grams is sufficient to potentially kill a small child.
..and showing the terrible injuries that were inflicted
in the name of progress.
That could completely remove the skin from the hand and the arm.
Welcome back to the perilous world of the real Victorian home.
Between 1800 and 1900 the urban population in Britain
increased tenfold.
London became the biggest industrial city in the Western world.
City dwellers in houses like this
were creating an unprecedented demand
for mod cons as well as life's necessities.
They were becoming mass consumers at the end of a production line.
Supplying the household with the basic foods
in the newly-expanded cities of up to 3 million people
was a strategic challenge.
But thankfully, by the late 19th century,
the staples of bread and milk had become cheaply available.
To cater for the new demands,
the Victorians pioneered new food-processing techniques.
This left the consumer at the mercy of the unscrupulous merchants
responsible for each part of the food chain.
One thing that the Victorians loved above all was profit
and the way to make profit, of course,
is to use the cheapest ingredients and charge a high price for them,
so adulteration became very popular throughout the Victorian period.
Some merchants would substitute real ingredients with cheap alternatives
that would add weight and increase profit margins.
Food adulteration had always gone on,
but the new manufacturing process meant it was now big business.
The food shops themselves change as well
so you used to have a system whereby for example, with bread,
the miller was the same as the baker, was the same as the retailer.
Now the miller mills the flour, passes it to the baker,
the baker bakes and the retailer sells.
So you've got divorcing all the way along the chain.
That de-personalises the food chain.
People don't have the personal relationship with their customers,
therefore they think they can get away with it.
Anything that is made, manufactured,
or passes through the hands of somebody who can adulterate it,
by the mid-Victorian period, the chances are it will be adulterated.
These additions were astounding -
chalk, iron sulphate and even plaster of Paris.
But for many, buying processed foods
released them from the drudgery of baking,
was time-saving and, above all, was affordable.
Bread was particularly susceptible to tampering
as many things could be disguised in it.
The biggest adulterant at the time was alum
and that's been used since the 18th century.
It's a whitener.
What it does is it enables you to take seconds or middlings
or the lower grades of flour and make them look whiter.
Alum is an aluminium-based compound often found today in detergent,
but when hidden in bread, it not only makes it whiter
but retains water, so the bread feels more substantial.
In theory, the amounts used were quite small
and in theory they were not particularly dangerous to health
but when you've got both the miller adding alum
and then you've got the baker adding alum as well,
then you start to build up the dose to levels
where it really will affect your bowel system.
Food Historian Annie Grey has prepared three loaves for me,
to illustrate the choice I would have had as a Victorian housewife.
Whilst one loaf is pure, two of them have plaster of Paris,
alum and other undesirables added to them.
And which is which?
Well, you're the Victorian housewife, so I would say, you're in the baker's
and you're presented with these loaves, which one would you pick?
Well, they all look very attractive, which is slightly worrying.
It's really quite dense, though, isn't it, it's quite heavy.
Listen to that!
This one's still quite dense, but again looks nice...
And smells really like rubber or something.
Very odd.
That smells fine.
This is lighter.
Smells more like bread that I'm familiar with.
So my guess is that this one is fine?
Yes, it is, although it's interesting the way that perception plays a role.
Part of the reason that you're preferring that one, I suspect,
is because we are predisposed now to like granary breads
and things that look healthy, whereas with your Victorian hat on,
you should be looking for the bread that is whitest
and therefore will impress your dinner guests.
So I would probably be looking not to go for something wholemeal
that looks healthy today,
but for something like this. Yes.
In the Victorian period people really want white bread.
The current obsession with wholemeal, granary,
beautiful artisanal loaves, nothing. You want white bread.
So alum is the whitener that's put in.
Which is which, in terms of these two? Which is the one...
What's got what? This one is the alum-based one,
and this one is the one with plaster of Paris and bean flour.
From a baker's point of view, this one's brilliant because a third
of the dry solids in this are not pure flour,
so you're making a reasonable saving
on even the sort of low grade flour that you're using.
But this housewife's choice had dire consequences for the consumer.
If you were a worker eating two pounds of bread a day
and not much else, when you consider that a third of what you're eating
just won't benefit you at all, you can see why chronic malnutrition
is such an issue, and when your adulterants are things like
plaster of Paris and alum, you can also see why chronic gastritis
is a problem in late Victorian England.
If you're in a workhouse and you're a three-year-old,
you're going to start off with constipation.
You're then going to have irregular bowel movements,
and that will lead to diarrhoea.
And if you are a three-year-old in a workhouse,
and you have got chronic diarrhoea, then that will lead to death.
Another reason for adulteration was a desire to make food
more attractive and appealing.
Colour was a key component.
And so there were things like colourants.
You might have something like lead chromate,
which is a very vivid yellow colour.
In fact, it's the yellow that's used in the paint
of American school buses. It's that really bright yellow.
And that was put in things like mustard
to give it an authentic mustard colour
without having to actually include too much of the real ingredient,
which is expensive.
Tea is adulterated with everything from iron filings, to dust,
to used tea leaves, then black lead to make it look black.
Green tea has Prussian blue in it. I mean, they're pretty lethal.
Sir Arthur Hill Hassall, a London-based physician,
identified adulteration in 2,500 products
and published his results in the Lancet.
This led to the first wave of legislation in 1868.
The food adulteration laws were not very strong
when they were initially put in, and they were not particularly
effective either. People simply continued
because it was very difficult to police,
it was very difficult to prove.
And even after it is known about, even after Ackham and Hassall
start to publicise food adulteration, people just simply don't know what
adulterated food looks like versus non-adulterated food.
So you might know that your bread is probably adulterated,
but either you don't have a choice or you just assume blithely
that it happens to other people.
Bread adulteration might ultimately kill you
because of malnutrition, but there was a greater,
more immediate danger that was part of every child's diet.
For the Victorians, milk was a cheap and important source of calcium.
A healthy food, it was thought.
However, in 1882, 20,000 milk samples were tested
and revealed that one-fifth had been adulterated.
A clue as to what was going on
came from the domestic goddess of her day, Mrs Beeton.
The Victorians sought advice on all manner of things,
and when it came to food, Mrs Beeton was their guru.
According to the 1888 edition of her Book Of Household Management,
"Milk", she said, "could be purified by preparations
"of which the principal constituent is boracic acid,"
and she adds, "It is said that most of the milk that comes to London
"is treated in this way."
She concludes, "Fortunately for the consumer,
"it is a quite harmless addition."
But was it as harmless as Mrs Beeton believed?
Microbiologist Matthew Avison has devised an experiment
that tests Mrs Beeton's advice.
Boracic acid was a component of a product called borax,
an alkali which was used during the Victorian period
to prolong the life of milk.
This milk doesn't taste very nice, so you would throw it away.
The Victorians would say, "That's a waste, so let's do something to it
"that removes the sour taste",
and what they would have done is added alkalis.
When fresh, milk has a neutral pH measurement of around seven,
but over time, as it sours or spoils
and becomes contaminated with bacteria,
it becomes more acidic and its pH measurement drops.
So the Victorians worked out,
probably by trial and error,
that if you add alkali to this, it would neutralise the acid
and I've calculated that that will neutralise the acid in this milk,
so just give it a bit of a shake
and then we'll show, hopefully, that it gives a pH closer to neutral.
So you can see this has gone back to 6.6, which is approximately neutral.
It's neutralised the acid, it's now made this milk palatable again.
This new wonder alkali, sold in the shops as borax,
was so popular it became a staple of the Victorian larder.
But alarmingly, borax wasn't only used to treat milk -
it was also marketed as a wonderfully versatile product,
as I found when I read the journals of the time.
I'm just looking at these ads and there's a sketch from 1893
and there's this absolutely extraordinary one-page ad -
"Californian Household Treasure."
It says, "It's absolutely pure and absolutely safe.
"It possesses qualities that are exceptional
"and unknown to any other substance and it purifies water,
"destroys bacilli..." It promises everything.
In fact, borax promised too much -
as well as "purifying" milk,
it was brilliant at cleaning your bath and your loo.
So what happened when borax ended up in the body?
borax, or sodium borate,
if inhaled or ingested, can cause severe irritation.
So if it's swallowed, it can cause abdominal pain, nausea,
vomiting, diarrhoea.
If you have a large amount of it,
it will start to affect other organs,
like the brain and the kidneys.
And if you have enough, it can prove fatal.
But just how much borax is harmful?
I've added a small amount of borax to neutralise the acid in this milk,
but of course, if you had a pint of milk you'd need more borax,
so I calculated that you need this much borax to neutralise
a pint of milk that has gone sour.
This is five grams and, according to some people,
five grams is sufficient to potentially kill a small child.
So the addition of borax was not as harmless as Mrs Beeton suggested.
Enough of it could kill.
But by reducing the acid in the spoiled milk
and disguising the sour taste,
borax was concealing another deadly threat.
The real problem is, it doesn't get rid of the bacteria,
the underlying cause of the acid,
and those bacteria could still kill people.
Bacteria like brucella, which causes undulating fever,
it's a nasty fever that can go on for weeks at a time,
that's not particularly lethal, but what would be lethal would be TB.
The bovine TB bacterium is present in cow's milk
and this is what was able to flourish undetected in the milk
with devastating effects.
Bovine TB, it's not the same TB that would cause the coughing symptoms
that we associate with TB, but what's called non-pulmonary TB,
which spreads out into the extremities,
includes damage to internal organs,
damage to the bones, and particularly problematic in children.
What other effects could drinking milk contaminated
with the bovine TB bacterium have?
Bovine TB could also cause damage to the bones in the spine.
For example, it could cause an abscess
in the bones of the spinal column
which would soften the bone,
which would then collapse to form a wedge shape.
And if several of these vertebrae collapsed at once,
it could cause massive deformity of the spine.
This woman was actually particularly lucky because her TB damaged
only the bones of the spine and not the spinal cord itself.
If the abscess had tracked and burst backwards into the spinal column,
it would have compressed the spinal cord and caused paralysis at best
or death at worst.
Effectively, purifying this according to the standards of Mrs Beeton
is like removing the bio-hazard tape
and now, it's basically pot luck
as to whether we have something that is contaminated and could kill us
or something that is not contaminated and is safe to drink.
Adding borax to milk allowed bovine TB bacteria to grow undetected,
exposing a generation to a lethal infectious disease.
It's estimated that virtually all children were exposed to
Bovine TB at some time during their upbringing, and it's known
that many of those children succumbed to that infection.
So you're saying that hundreds of thousands of people,
mostly perhaps children, died as a result of that?
There are many studies, one of which was a series of post mortems
done in London in the 1890s,
and they did postmortems on 1,300 children who had died.
30% of those children had died as a result of TB - non-pulmonary TB...
Almost certainly that came from milk.
If we extrapolate that up, it's considered likely
that half a million children died of TB from milk
during the Victorian era.
Despite these horrendous deaths, the purification of milk with alkali
was not banned by legislation in the Victorian period.
And the problem of adulterated food continued,
until gradually, consumer pressure led manufacturers
to advertise their wares as "pure" and "unadulterated".
The next hidden killer lies not in the room,
but between the levels of the Victorian house.
The dangers weren't just the result
of products introduced into the home,
they were built into the very fabric of the new Victorian houses.
One of the most common death traps was right under their feet.
Stairs have always been dangerous.
Even with today's building regulations,
at least 300,000 accidents occur every year in the UK.
But in Victorian times it was even worse.
There's numerous accounts of people falling down staircases
and breaking their necks or breaking their legs
and dying later of septicaemia.
Why were there so many deaths and injuries from stairs?
The finger points to the urban population boom.
The number of Victorians per square mile
increased from 390 in 1871
to 558 by 1901.
Houses were thrown up and packed into smaller plots
with little concern about regulation or standardisation.
The problem was is the way that the house styles changed.
Houses become very much more narrow.
So what you've got is very high ceilings, 10-11 feet,
with a very narrow frontage.
It's a straightforward geometrical problem
because if you've got 11 foot and only a very short space
to get into it, the staircase has to be steep.
In middle-class homes, the stairs that were most likely to be
cheaply constructed, to be the steepest and the narrowest,
were those that led to the servant quarters.
Upstairs/downstairs came from the difference in staircases
from the decorated staircase which was the main one
in the house which was there as a show of wealth.
It was a...
It was a statement to say, "Look, this is how much money I've got."
As you came through the front door, there's these wonderful double
bullnose stairs, highly decorated with spindles and volutes
and balustrades and goosenecks.
You had people spending thousands and thousands
and thousands of pounds on these staircases.
And then the downstairs staircase was for the servants.
It was built out of the cheapest soft wood that you could possibly buy.
You'd be lucky if there was handrails and spindles.
Rises of nine, ten, 12 inches.
Safety really wasn't high on the agenda.
Tragic really, because by 1847, visionary builder
Peter Nicholson had calculated how to build a safer staircase,
transforming the art of stair-building into a science.
He came up with a mathematical formula for working out
the rise and go of a staircase.
He worked out that if you went up a certain height,
you could travel a certain distance with great ease
and he developed a formula around that.
Nicholson's formula considered how
someone could take a normal stride
yet still allow them to rise six to eight inches with every step.
Until you get those factors right then the stairs is always
going to be a dangerous place.
There is a science to stair building
but in the rush to throw up houses, it was a science that was
often overlooked in the late Victorian period.
I've come to Manchester Metropolitan University
to see what modern science can tell us
about the dangers of the Victorian stairs.
I've been wired up to a motion-capture device which will
track every step I take to find out how my body adapts to the stairs.
Professor Costas Manganaris...
OK, I'm just going to clip you into the harness.
..and Professor Neil Reeves are experts in biomedical research
and are going to demonstrate two staircases.
We'd like you to go to the top of the staircase,
stand facing this way and just walk down
at your own comfortable speed as you would normally.
This first staircase has been set to dimensions similar to
a main Victorian staircase, following Nicholson's principles.
The going, or width, of each step has been set to 11 inches
and the height, the rise, to 12 and a half inches.
Well, apart from all the get-up, it felt pretty easy
coming down those stairs.
I'd be happy running up and down those, no problems at all.
Now they set the stairs
as they might have been in the servants' quarters.
This definitely breaks Nicholson's formula.
With the going narrower and a steeper rise.
Can you walk down as you would normally?
Predictably, this is not comfortable at all.
In fact I'm really having to slow down,
change the way I take each step and hold the handrail.
Imagine if I had to carry a tray or the linen,
and couldn't see where my foot fell because of a long skirt.
If we measure your foot, this is about 26 centimetres,
which is much larger than the 17.5 centimetres room you had.
I had to turn it sideways.
You had to turn your foot sideways.
Well, otherwise...
Otherwise, what will happen is an important part of the foot
will come out of the edge
and then you would have an increased likelihood of encountering a slip.
Yes, yes, and I have fallen down the stairs before
so I was very conscious of not wanting to do it. Absolutely.
From the data input, the scientists reveal
that on the servants' staircase, we are six times more likely to fall
than on the grand one.
It may seem obvious that a steeper staircase would be more dangerous,
but there was another hidden danger -
many Victorian homes were built with non-uniform steps.
This video of a New York subway stairs illustrates what happens when
one stair out of 16 is a fraction of an inch higher than the others.
Professor Jake Pauls,
a specialist in stair safety, studied the stairs
and worked out that this tiny change has a dramatic impact on the misstep
and fall incidents that is not equated to any other stair defect.
In other words, you're more likely to fall
if the stair is not uniform than for any other reason.
What is it about that video? What does it tell us?
Well, I think what it tells us
is that people get used to a very regular stair pattern
very quickly, so after a few steps. And if, all of a sudden,
there's a step that's very different, it poses a difficulty to people.
This is why it's more likely for someone to have an accident
or slip on that irregular step.
If you had given me two that were the bigger ones
and then a smaller one, I almost certainly would have fallen down.
Exactly. Thank you for not doing that!
By disregarding Nicholson's formula, the Victorians' new staircases,
installed in many of these narrower houses, had unwittingly
combined high rises, narrow goings
and uneven steps to create a grave hazard for the servants.
With the extra weight of carrying trays and food,
there's no way they could get up and down those stairs in one piece.
Total death traps.
Absolute death traps.
Stairs remain one of the most common sources of accident
and death in the home.
To understand our next set of dangers,
we need to appreciate one of the major preoccupations
of our Victorian forbears.
It was at this time that cleanliness was becoming powerfully linked
to ideas of morality and respectability
and this was reflected in the literature of the period.
Charles Kingsley's novel The Water Babies epitomises it
because it suggests you can take a dirty boy off the street
and transform him into a model gentleman,
through the cleansing power of water.
It sums it up in the last lines.
They say,
"Meanwhile do you learn your lessons and thank God that you have plenty
"of cold water to wash in - and wash in it too, like a true Englishman?"
The Victorians were totally and utterly obsessed with being clean.
For them, the idea of cleanliness was truly next to godliness.
They were setting themselves against the 18th century,
which was a time of dirt, a time when the upper classes,
that perfume was used to disguise dirt.
The Victorians believed that a clean heart, a clean body,
meant a clean soul.
It was this desire for cleanliness that would lead the Victorians
to embrace a whole new range
of potentially deadly innovations and products.
One of the rooms that the Victorians can claim
to have invented is the bathroom.
And what surer sign of progress than a private room
in which to carry out one's ablutions?
The bathroom really appears primarily
because running water comes into the home for the first time.
So if you can actually bring water into the home,
it becomes more practical to have a room dedicated to its use.
Until the mid-Victorian period, hot tubs for bathing had stood
next to the fire in the front room or kitchen,
where water had to be warmed and poured into them.
This means that servants no longer have to be sort of traipsing
up and down the back stairs carrying large amounts of water.
I think this is when the bathroom, as we know it,
as a sort of separate, private, lockable space,
away from the rest of the house, really starts to take shape.
What the Victorians hated most of all was the idea of bodily fluids,
the kind of smells they made, the kind of traces they left.
They wanted to expunge them entirely from the body,
so that no-one can smell the traces of these fluids
that link you to the working classes.
And what happened in this private, lockable space could be
incredibly dangerous.
I've come to Blaise Castle in Bristol
to meet curator Catherine Littlejohns.
I want to get some idea of the inventions available
to the Victorians who sought to meet
these new high standards of cleanliness.
Oh, wow.
We're just going to look at some of the baths in the collection.
I'm going to show you one of my favourite things.
It's actually a gas-powered bath.
So if we have a look at the underneath here,
you can see where the gas went in the front here.
And then just around by you,
there's a little door, which is where you would light the gas.
OK, so here you would put in your lighted match or whatever.
Yes. Gosh, so that's actually ridiculously dangerous, isn't it?
Doesn't it mean that you can boil yourself in your bath?
You very probably could do.
The instructions, the guidance always says.. They're very careful
to point out you don't want to actually start turning the gas on
until you've got some water in the bath
so you don't boil it dry.
They don't really make a mention of making sure you don't
get into the bath while the gas is on.
The desire to be clean meant that the bath's popularity
outpaced any concern about the dangers, which were significant.
The papers regularly reported cases of scalding
so serious they resulted in death.
It wasn't until the invention of the thermostat,
safer gas and its installation that these risks would be addressed.
This new room, with its cutting edge innovations,
would bring even more killers into the home.
I think they were trying to understand the dangers
of electricity and water and gas, and all of these new services
coming into fairly small, confined areas,
without really understanding the dangers of how they actually
interact with each other.
What could be better or more desirable
than having a loo that flushed?
But its introduction was not without problem.
The first danger lay in the plumbing.
Early plumbing in Victorian houses, the sewer systems
didn't efficiently drain away the waste.
Gases such as methane and hydrogen sulphide
emanating from human waste
would not be able to escape and would build up in the sewer.
Both of these gases are not only flammable,
but they're also explosive.
What always used to happen was
the sewerage outlet would get blocked
and somebody would have to go and figure out how to clear it,
to get it to actually run away free.
At the time, there wasn't electric batteries,
torches and stuff like that, so the only way you could actually go
and investigate it was unfortunately with a...a naked flame.
Not only could gas collect in the sewer,
methane could actually leak back into the house itself.
It was a quite common occurrence for outlets of toilets
to spontaneously combust.
And that was really where the drive towards improvements in draining
actually came from -
they needed to stop methane getting back into the houses.
And it was one of Britain's most famous inventors that helped
put a stop to this potential killer
with one small but crucial component.
Thomas Crapper, even though he gets a lot of good press
about inventing the toilet, he actually invented the siphon valve,
which is actually a water trap and a valve flap which actually
stops methane coming back into the property, so it couldn't ignite.
It didn't stop the problems down in the main sewers
but it stopped it actually affecting the people who lived in the house.
Not only were Victorian bodies subject to a new regime
of washing and scrubbing, but what they put on them was too.
Wealthy Victorians - both men and women -
could change their clothes up to five times a day.
By the late Victorian period, laundry had become a huge operation
because clothing was not simple.
There was an extensive amount of clothing, even for a child,
and certainly for a woman.
She wore a lot of underclothing, a lot of linen
and these had to be changed regularly.
The Victorian mistress had a constant battle against
her greatest enemy, which was dirt.
The Victorian house could not escape the pollution of the time.
In London, for instance,
the manure of the 100,000 working horses,
the pervasive smog and the smoky gas lamps in the home,
all took their toll.
Victorian wash day was quite a mammoth task -
you washed the clothes on the Monday, you dry them
on the Tuesday and you would be ironing them on Wednesday.
So a large part of your week would be taken up by the wash.
Doing the laundry was an expensive business
and a major part of the household budget.
For those who could afford it,
a laundress could be hired in by the day.
It was a military-style operation.
Every Victorian middle-class woman came to her marriage
with great trunks full of white clothing, linen,
and her big job throughout her marriage was keeping those
just as brilliantly white.
And what she used in this endeavour was soaps, disinfectants,
and, most of all, she used the mangle.
So I've just fed this in from the back here.
And you have to get it so that it's between the rollers.
'Wringing out heavy fabrics sodden in boiling water
'became easier with the arrival of the mangle.'
It's not too heavy because of the gear system
and of course this is dry...
So if you were doing it with wet clothes...
But of course this brought its own perils.
But why is it so dangerous? It seems really quite solid.
I think it's probably like a lot of Victorian contraptions
where, yes, it is very solid, but you've got exposed gear wheels
and things. And obviously you have to feed the clothing in.
And what you have to remember is that the lady of the house
would have been doing this with young children around,
her daughters would have been watching her because they needed
to learn how to work these things and often,
probably, in quite a confined space. Ooh, the dangers of little fingers.
Possibly.
The injuries incurred by washday mangle accidents were horrific
and sometimes fatal.
Oh, a mangle could do an awful lot of damage,
particularly to a child.
It was typically children who would put their hand,
out of curiosity, into the mangle.
Obviously the hand, the arm, and it typically was the upper limb
that was caught, would be compressed
and everything in it would be squashed.
And a significant proportion would have fractures of the bones
as well as damage to the soft tissue.
There was sheering force,
where you're pulling the skin in opposite directions
and that could completely remove the skin from the hand and the arm,
and tear it all away to reveal the muscles and tendons underneath.
The dangers of the mangle might seem obvious to us now,
but our next hidden killer was impossible to see,
both then and now.
Things couldn't just look clean, the new science of germs
and microbes was changing ideas of cleanliness -
from tackling the visible to the invisible.
Dangerous germs, they feared, could lurk hidden from sight
and needed to be eradicated.
Until the late Victorian period,
many believed that diseases were caused and carried by bad air.
But with improvements in technology
and the emergence of high-powered microscopes,
bacteria began to be identified as the cause of disease.
But this science was brand new
and not easily understood by the general public.
There are various theories around the origins of disease
at this point, they're quite confused about it.
They've started to be aware of germ theory,
but this isn't fully understood yet.
What they did understand was that there were microbes all around -
invisible to the eye but everywhere.
And this made the Victorians disproportionately fearful
and easily spooked.
Some mothers didn't want to kiss their children
because they thought it would spread germs.
This is very real and comes up again and again in diaries,
the fact that people were afraid of each other because of germs,
which is a horrific thing when you think about it.
As this climate of fear escalated, so people became
increasingly alarmed about all manner of little things.
One of the most important things, apart from germs, were flies.
The great fly scare of the 1890s.
The great fly scare was caused by the public awareness
of the speed with which flies could spread germs.
Flies were everywhere, living off the horse manure,
and trampled into the home.
Once scientists identified flies as carriers of disease,
the public reacted.
They realised that one of the main communicators of germs were
probably flies, with their little sticky feet walking over everything.
And once you started to look at flies like that,
they became objects of horror.
The terrors of insects and moths
and caterpillars that need to be sternly exterminated
because they just show the natural world coming into your perfect home.
Also skirts. Not strictly speaking anything to do with flies,
except if you noticed as you walked around with a long skirt on
that you'd be brushing up against the faeces,
horse manure and everything else.
And that was likely to bring fly eggs in, or anything,
so skirt lengths went up to ankles.
Once skirts went up, the shutters came down on flies in the home -
with a variety of products invented to stop them.
You'd have fly screens.
You have little lace doilies over your milk jugs.
You have little lace doilies everywhere really.
You cover your curtains with lace to stop flies coming in,
not really so that you cannot see out.
All of these things were partly to do with the fly scare.
But the fight against germs would require more than beaded doilies.
The Victorians needed to believe that these germs were being
eradicated by newly invented products that would kill
all known germs...dead.
Many claims were made in the name of science
before all these items could be vigorously tested,
making the late Victorian home a very scary place to be.
And the Victorians worshipped science,
they worshipped invention, so they would do anything
to make things cleaner, even if that meant using dangerous chemicals.
But as the incredible cleaning powers of these new items
became more potent, so the dangers in the home increased.
The problem was that many cleaning products are toxic
and they have to be, that's how they have their cleaning effects.
But they were stored and sold in very similar packages.
So you would go to the shop
and get a box that contained something like baking soda,
which we would use to bake bread or cakes and is perfectly harmless.
But it may look very similar to the box of caustic soda, which of course
is very corrosive and would do a huge amount of damage to the body.
Dangerous chemicals such as caustic soda and carbolic acid were now
in the cupboard next to the flour, and sugar - and were easily muddled.
The opportunity for mistakes and mix-up between products was huge.
Drinking bleach or carbolic acid, for example,
would lead to an agonising death.
The first thing that would happen would be a burning sensation
in the oesophagus, because it is directly corrosive
to anything that it comes in contact with.
And so that would go down into the stomach and cause abdominal pain.
In the early stages, if the person survives
and they don't go into renal failure, they may develop
strictures because of scaring of the oesophagus, meaning that they're
unable to swallow any food, and of course, that could prove fatal.
This lack of distinction in bottles
and packaging of toxic cleaning materials
and dangerous substances didn't just confuse the Victorian at home.
There were cases where even professionals made mix-ups
with disastrous consequences.
On one occasion in Bradford, a chemist mistakenly mixed
arsenic into his lozenge recipe - killing 12 people
and rendering a further 78 seriously ill.
And so it was this problem with the packaging that really
forced legislation to make packages much more distinct -
different shaped and sized and coloured bottles and boxes, so that
you couldn't reach for the flour and pick up the arsenic, for example.
But it wasn't always an accident -
lethal poisons of all descriptions were
easily and readily available over the counter.
With this lay a new temptation,
because poisoning could go undetected.
The Victorian age was the age of the poisoner -
the rise of arsenic was to many people a great opportunity.
Previously, if you wanted to murder somebody, you had to
use your brute strength, you'd have to stab them or strangle them.
When arsenic became widely available,
there was a lot of comment in the newspaper saying,
well, women can just slip it into their husband's tea.
So why wouldn't they?
They were absolutely afraid that
all the women in Britain would turn poisoner
because why would you not murder your husband
and go off to be a merry widow? Why not?
People bought poisons for things like rat poisoning
and fly papers, so you could easily just go and buy them
for completely legitimate reasons.
The other reason was this is a time when life insurance
became available. So you could take out a life insurance policy
on one of your family members. And then, if they die,
you could claim the money.
And there's evidence of quite a lot of unscrupulous people
who took out large policies before people mysteriously died.
There were many poisons around, things like arsenic, but probably
the worst and the one that caused the most awful death was strychnine.
Strychnine could be used both as a medicine
and in the garden as a pesticide.
A white odourless powder,
it was like so many other items in the cupboard.
It has very immediate and unpleasant effects.
First of all, the muscles of the head and the neck would start to contract
and then spasms would spread to all the muscles of the body.
The person would start to convulse
and at its worst, the muscles of the body would be
so contracted that the person would be resting on just their heels
and their head with their back bowed in the middle and unable to move.
Death would follow rapidly, either because of paralysis
of their respiratory muscles, which meant they couldn't breathe,
or exhaustion following all these awful convulsions.
Demand had never been higher
and manufacturers had never sold so many poisonous products.
It would take a long time for that to change.
It wasn't until just after the Victorian Age, in 1902,
that the Pharmacy Act required that bottles of disinfectant
be distinguishable by touch
from bottles in which ordinary liquids were contained.
In order to find the next hazard, we must first understand
the temptations on offer to the middle-class Victorian.
Could this be a hidden killer?
Manufacturers began to woo a burgeoning mass market.
This was the first age of mass advertising.
Back in the 1850s and 1860s,
it had been thought ungentlemanly to advertise.
Now, for the first time, advertising became powerfully visual -
photography and art were used to sell goods, advertising agencies
were founded, and celebrities started to endorse products.
There's an expansion in print culture.
There are more newspapers, there are more magazines.
But there are also new technologies and ways of producing images
and putting them in them.
For example, photographs appear in magazines from the 1890s onwards.
And this really means advertising takes on a new visual form
at this point.
And I think it becomes more persuasive and more powerful.
The power of advertising put new pressure on Victorians
and would lead to increased risks.
These advertisements are particularly aimed
at the upper-class and the middle-class woman.
And what they're trying to say is,
if you don't buy our products, if you don't use our products,
you will be a failure as a housewife, as a woman.
So they really played on insecurities.
And what they did was they got everyone to buy all kinds
of dangerous substances under the guise of perfecting your home.
And the perfect Victorian home wouldn't be complete without
a dangerous new material, which they inadvertently
welcomed into their homes in an amazing array of objects.
The man who invented it was so famous at the time,
a letter bearing just name and city would get to him.
Mr A Parkes, inventor of Parkesine, Birmingham. And it got there!
Birmingham, dubbed "the city of 1,000 inventions",
had become a magnet for scientists
and it was here that Parkes developed his revolutionary idea.
He took cotton wool, ordinary cotton wool,
which he combined with acids and various things,
and he discovered how to convert the material into a mouldable material
which we today would call plastic.
So we reckon he is the father of plastics.
We've sort of forgotten about this great British inventor, haven't we?
I know, he was a great inventor too.
He had something like 90 patents to his name
but he wasn't a very good businessman,
his company folded about two years later.
But his idea was so good, it was picked up in the States
by a guy called Hyatt. And Hyatt gave it the name celluloid.
And from then on, we have known it as celluloid.
We've forgotten Parkes, but we all know celluloid as an early material.
It was the Americans who developed it into a business success -
and started something of a revolution.
It wasn't until 1885 that the world's first really successful
plastic product hit the streets.
And it was something quite unusual - it was a celluloid collar and cuff.
And there is a sociological reason for it, of course.
The clerks sitting at those high desks, writing on their ledgers
all day long, and they wouldn't be allowed to have scrap paper
for calculations so they made calculations on their cuffs.
Now they couldn't afford a clean linen collar and cuff
every day, like their bosses.
And they couldn't afford to launder them, so by the end of the week
they must have been chaotic with numbers all over them.
Then along comes celluloid. You can do all the numbers you want
on your cuff during the day, take it home at night,
put it under the tap, rinse it, shake it dry
and put it on again in the morning looking pristine, just like the boss.
And it was an amazing sociological success all over the world, 1885.
For as these affordable celluloid products found their way
into items all over the house - a terrible discovery was made.
It's a wonderful material but it's not a perfect material
because it's inflammable, it burns.
Chemically it's very similar to gun cotton
and gun cotton we know is an explosive material.
So cellulose nitrate, Parkesine, celluloid, it burns very fiercely.
Ignoring its flammability,
celluloid was such a useful material that canny manufacturers saw
numerous opportunities to produce those must-have items.
When the invention of plastics allowed brooches, hair combs
and mirrors to be as ornate and attractive-looking
as the much more expensive ivory, they were eagerly swept up.
The middle-classes wanted to look wealthy and modern
and these products allowed them to look just that.
This Victorian evening bag, for example.
This looks like a piece of hand-carved ivory, but it's not,
it's a piece of pressed celluloid.
It wasn't a real ivory comb, it was made of celluloid
and it wasn't a real wooden bath, it was painted like wood
and that's because the Victorians were
so delighted by innovation and by science,
and they loved the idea of tricking themselves,
and also they loved the idea of a cheap bargain.
Maybe not such a great bargain.
I want to find out just how flammable celluloid really is.
This is a ping pong ball from China.
It's one of the few products in the world that you can still buy
that's made of celluloid.
Assisting me is Martin Shipp from the Building Research Establishment.
Martin, the flame please...
Wow! A surprisingly fierce flame -
definitely not something to try at home.
Martin estimates that celluloid
is five times more flammable than plywood.
Celluloid's chemical composition meant it could not only
go up in flames easily, but it was also unreliable in other ways.
Over time, it degrades.
Light and chemicals can cause it to gradually break down,
And in that breakdown process, it releases camphor
and it releases alcohols and other things that are flammable.
And those flammable gases in the atmosphere can then be ignited
by a spark or a flame,
without anybody igniting the celluloid itself.
That's what made celluloid so dangerous.
And there were other problems too.
Celluloid items could also spontaneously combust,
as this cartoon of the time illustrates.
And billiard balls - traditionally made of ivory -
were now made from the cheaper celluloid -
until it was discovered that they would explode on impact.
This is an example of one of the very first billiard balls
made from cellulose nitrate.
And the inventor of this billiard ball
had a letter from a Colorado saloon keeper, that he didn't mind
when the balls crashed together and you got a mini-explosion,
because it's an explosive material, but what he did object to
was that every man in the room turned round and pulled out a gun!
But even worse was to come.
Celluloid was so versatile, it replaced materials like ivory
and bone, in clothing - items like corsets and lace, brooches,
bracelets, and all sorts of accessories were either made of,
or featured celluloid -
without concern for the accumulative effect.
This is a hair comb used in the 1890s.
And the fashion and the style was to have a hair comb
pushed in the back - not just one but several.
But when you consider this is a highly flammable material...
There were reports of people passing too closely to gas lamps
or leaning too close to the fire, and...BOOM...they burst into flames.
There were terrible tales of misadventure,
like the woman who failed to notice a cigar roll
under her celluloid-enhanced dress until it was too late.
She immediately ran outside to try and get away from the smoke.
Unfortunately, that change in conditions
from fairly restricted within a small area in a home,
to outside where there was a lot of oxygen and some wind,
the skirt started to burn with flames.
And she was immediately engulfed in flames.
In her pursuit of cut-price fashion, the Victorian woman had been
transformed into a walking fire hazard.
Although in 1922 there was an act enforcing better safety in premises
where raw celluloid film was stored, there was never any legislation
to stop the use of celluloid in fashionable items and in clothing.
It was only over the course of the 20th century,
as more improved, less flammable plastics were invented,
that the use of celluloid declined.
But while its introduction had been a dangerous one -
it developed into a far safer product that is still with us.
One that a British inventor had been responsible for.
I think you can look around today and virtually everything
you look at, touch, control, everything you do, involves plastics.
It controls our lives today, which you may think is a good thing
or a bad thing, but it does, we can't avoid that.
He set the wheels in motion for all that.
He laid the foundations for a massive industry
that controls and affects everybody's lives throughout the world.
From the food they ate, to the clothes they wore, and the gadgets
and products championed by the new exciting advertising campaigns,
Victorian homes were brimming with killers.
They lay dormant until scientific progress,
consumer concern or a brave new pioneer
raised their voice above the clamour
and forced a change for the better.
But the Victorian ideal of "safe as houses" was never really fulfilled.
Many of the domestic fatalities of late Victorian Britain can be
explained by middle-class desires to make their lives easier,
cheaper and more convenient,
and to conform to ideals of morality and respectability.
But we mustn't forget that they were pioneers,
and progress always comes at a cost.
As the century reached its close, Britain was leading the world
and was on the verge of a golden age in which scientific advances
would really start to make a difference.
But would the Edwardian home be any safer?
Next time, I'll be discovering how a new century, a new monarch
and extraordinary new inventions
would have an impact on the Edwardian Home.
She covered her face in poison.
Absolutely lethal.