Table of Content
We still don't know the full number of deaths that have resulted from it because it remains a lethal hazard. A magical new element was discovered in the Edwardian era - a source of energy and brightness that delighted and fascinated the Edwardians - radium. It was used, like asbestos, in all manner of products, such as cigarettes, condoms, makeup, suppositories, toothpaste and even chocolate. Above all, there was a craze for glow-in-the-dark watch faces, which were painted by the "radium girls".
Alum is an aluminium-based compound, today used in detergent, but then it was used to make bread desirably whiter and heavier. Not only did such adulteration lead to problems of malnutrition, but alum produced bowel problems and constipation or chronic diarrhoea, which was often fatal for children. Between 1851 and 1901, the average income per head in Britain doubled in real terms.
Hidden Killers—New Hidden Killers of the Victorian Home
There were dangerous miasmas in the air, but they carried mortality, not immorality. Virtue and respectability weren’t just a question of who you were, but what you had. Poor aesthetic judgement promoted immorality, "household goods became household gods" and bad taste could do as much moral damage to society as taking a mistress.
Victorian women’s corsets could exert enormous amounts of pressure on the inner organs, and distort the liver, constrict the lungs, and even displace the uterus. Besides making basic exercise uncomfortable, they predisposed women to more serious conditions like pneumonia and prolapse of the uterus, and many women continued to wear them during pregnancy, with unhappy results. Suzannah Lipscomb nominates five potential 19th-century death traps – from wallpaper to children's toys. Suzannah Lipscomb reveals the killers that lurked in every room of the Victorian home. Suzannah Lipscomb reveals the killers that lurked in every room of the Edwardian home.
Drowning—The Tudor Home
With the help of experts in history and science Dr Lipscomb brings the late Victorian Home, and the killers that lurked there, frighteningly to life. Suzannah Lipscomb takes us back to Tudor times in search of the era's household killers. Domestic refrigerators began to enter the home in the Edwardian era. They were tremendously useful and exciting new goods, with which the consumer could demonstrate fashionable wealth, but their initial designs were fatally flawed. They leaked toxic gases such as ammonia, methyl chloride and sulphur dioxide, which damaged the respiratory system and could easily lead to death. The late Victorian period saw the introduction of gas lighting and central heating into British homes but at first these were extremely hazardous, as the systems lacked stopcocks and release valves.
Yet, as we now well know, radium is a source of radiation poisoning - if ingested, it could lead to anaemia, bone fractures, necrosis of the jaw, and leukaemia. The late Victorians and the Edwardians lived through a domestic revolution. Theirs was a bold and exciting age of innovation, groundbreaking discoveries and dramatic scientific changes, many of which altered life at home in profound ways - including some that were terrible and unforeseen, writes historian Dr Suzannah Lipscomb. Yet, the irony is that at the very heart of the Victorian home – this place of moral safety and comforting shelter – danger lurked. Victorians were assaulted in their own houses and attacked by their very own tastefully chosen objects of status.
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Stories of exploding stoves and people suffocating as they slept were alarmingly common. Discover the stars who skyrocketed on IMDb’s STARmeter chart this year, and explore more of the Best of 2022; including top trailers, posters, and photos. Yet, many of the products they bought or inventive technological solutions they came up with were not only health hazards, but deadly domestic assassins.
As the 19th century drew to an end the burgeoning middle class of Great Britain were wealthy and prosperous and filled their homes with the latest gadgets and time saving devices. At first, people didn't know how to use it - warning signs advised them not to approach the electric socket with a match. In the early 20th Century, electricity companies sought to interest consumers in electric products beyond lighting. The newspapers are full of cases of people electrocuting themselves. When basic staples like bread started to be produced cheaply and in large quantities for the new city dwellers, Victorian manufacturers seized on the opportunity to maximise profit by switching ingredients for cheaper substitutes that would add weight and bulk. Bread was adulterated with plaster of Paris, bean flour, chalk or alum.
Edwardian engineers thought they'd discovered a wonder material- a mineral that was non-flammable, cheap and clean. It was used for just about everything in the early 20th Century home - hairdryers, floor tiles, toys, oven gloves, gutters, insulation, even clothing. However, the wonder material - asbestos - was, as we now know, deadly.
At the same time, the cost of necessities, like food, dropped dramatically, and rents cost, on average, just 10 per cent of a middle-class salary. This class had both disposable income and the leisure time to plough into a new ideal of the well-appointed home as a place of comfort, refuge and wholesome morality. Perhaps the most shocking hidden killer of the Victorian age was the newly developed baby’s feeding bottle. A curved glass bottle to which was attached a piece of rubber tubing and teat provided the perfect incubators for all manner of life-threatening bacteria – and Mrs Beeton advised new mothers that they needn’t wash the teat for the two or three weeks it lasted. So the porous tubing and teat gave the flourishing bacteria direct access into the bodies of the most vulnerable.
Only in 1902 did the Pharmacy Act make it illegal for bottles of dangerous chemicals to be similar in shape to ordinary liquids. While trying to lead an empire, these rulers had no idea that the biggest threat to their lives was under their own roof. After the discovery of electricity, there were many wild inventions. Follow the beautiful Suzannah Lipscomb as she uncovers some of the scariest and most hilarious parts of history that we couldn't fathom today.
The Crystal Palace Great Exhibition of 1851 symbolised and catalysed this new age of increased prosperity, middle-class confidence and a belief in progress through science and technology. In the 1860s and 1870s Britons were accumulating wealth and possessions as never before. Home, presided over by the "ministering angel of domestic bliss" – the lady of the house, was to be, in theory, a reassuring sanctuary for men away from the jealousies, cares and dangers of working life. Suzannah Lipscomb examines the Victorian obsession with the home as a safe haven of domesticity, and explains how, in many cases, Victorian homes were anything but... Tubi is the largest free movie and TV streaming service in the US.
The welcoming hearth of the well-ordered home behind a solid front door signified a place of seclusion and repose; a perfect antidote to the corruptions and hazards of the working world. A desire for social status and a higher standard of living meant these newly-enriched middle classes filled their homes with conspicuous commodities and contemporary technological innovations (newly termed ‘gadgets’), produced as a result of the successes of industrial manufacture. The aspiring British middle classes were themselves a product of the age. Successful industrialisation meant that between 1851 and 1901 the middle class expanded from 2.6 million people (12.5 per cent of the population) to 9.3 million people . Following a long period of increasing prosperity and peace, in the 1850s, often termed the ‘mid-Victorian calm’, the British middle classes suddenly found themselves able to build a comfortable haven of domesticity. Historian Dr Suzannah Lipscomb undertakes another investigation into the deadly consequences of ordinary life in the late Victorian era, which aired on BBC FOUR on 10th December 2013.
The bathroom as we know it is a Victorian invention, but at first, it could be a dangerous place. Besides horrible cases of scalding in the bath, there are even reports that there were incidents of lavatories spontaneously exploding. Changes to toilets - beginning in the late 18th Century and continuing in the Victorian era - sorted the problem of gas leaking. Suzannah Lipscomb takes a tour of the Victorian home and unveils the hidden dangers that posed a deadly threat to Victorian life. A vase shaped like a fish, but in a position no fish could ever assume, was a lie.
