Home Sweet Home The Victorians

HOOTER BLARES

The Victorians saw the world change before their very eyes.

And Victorian artists captured that change in paintings that were the cinema of their day.

They were pictures that revealed their greatest dreams

and their worst nightmares.

One dream in particular fuelled the Victorian imagination -

a dream of escape.

Escape from the monster that was the sprawling, dirty Victorian city,

with its lure of vice,

drink...

SIREN WAILS

..and crime.

Escape to a haven that offered refuge from all that.

The family home.

Once inside, you could close the door to on that noise and

nasty reality out there, and be secure in your own "Home sweet home".

A respectable household showed you had worked hard and provided for your family.

Victorian artists loved cosy domestic scenes.

A sort of comfort food for the soul.

Their paintings showed life in the Victorian home as it should be.

Father pays for it.

Children play in it..

But the one who holds it all together is the wife and mother.

She became known as "The Angel in the House."

But artists also liked to dispense moral medicine

in paintings which warned what could happen when things went wrong.

The fear of poverty and disease.

The evils of drink.

The shame of illicit sex.

All waiting in the shadows to destroy the Victorian dream of "Home Sweet Home".

On the Isle of Wight, well away from the noise and

filth of the city, lay a Royal model for the perfect family household.

Queen Victoria's holiday home, Osborne House, was created as a haven of peace and family life.

For Victoria, it was a retreat from the business of being queen.

Here she escaped from London, from politics, from the Court,

to live out a dream of a very different kind of life.

Here at Osborne, Victoria and Albert could indulge themselves in their favourite fantasy, which was

that they were just like any other British middle-class family.

So the dining room here is full of pictures of the family.

Not so much Royal pictures as family pictures and the one that dominates

the room is this one - Victoria's favourite, by Franz Winterhalter.

It was painted here at Osborne in 1846 and shows Victoria and Albert

with five of their children, just after they'd moved in.

OK, who wears a crown at home?

But this is the Queen and Consort as mother and father.

The princelings are children first, royals second.

Even the older girls gaze dotingly on the latest arrival as though in preparation for motherhood.

Victoria and Albert's was a genuinely loving marriage.

And though we like to think of Victoria as a bit of a prude,

she and Albert enjoyed married life to the full.

This room, their bedroom, is full of clues as to how much they loved each other as well as the place.

The door, for example. One keyhole on the outside and

two keyholes on the inside so the servants wouldn't disturb them when they didn't want to be disturbed.

The bed, a little plaque to commemorate when they first slept together and the last occasion.

And even in the fabric on the seat at the bottom of the bed,

a little profile Victoria

and one of Albert,

looking at each other for all time.

Over a period of 17 years, Victoria was almost constantly pregnant.

Osborne is a shrine to motherhood.

Images of Madonnas jostle with portraits of Victoria as a doting new mother.

And a dutiful wife.

But the royals lived an enchanted life.

Victorian artists knew that for ordinary people, the course of true love didn't always run smooth.

They showed courtship as a risky business,

with temptations of the flesh everywhere.

Forbidden pleasures, only a whisker away.

Betrayal lying just behind the garden fence.

And broken vows spelling disaster.

Pictures like this carried a clear moral message.

The sooner young lovers got married, set up home and had a family, the better.

The newly-fashionable London suburb of Kensington was where one middle class couple chose to settle down.

18 Stafford Terrace was home to the newly-wed Linley and Marion Sambourne.

From the outside at least it looked like the perfect, respectable household.

Linley was a cartoonist for Punch magazine.

Marion was a full-time housewife, and soon a mother, too.

Together, this exemplary, hard-working pair put

their hearts and souls into their cherished family home.

What is amazing about this house is that it is virtually unchanged

since the time when the Sambournes moved in in the 1870s.

Like many Victorians, they loved to show off their possessions.

This single-terraced house has 144 chairs and there are 900 pictures on the walls.

Minimalist it ain't.

As in any middle class home, it was Marion, the matriarch, who ordered the household.

And this, the morning room, is where Marion ran her empire.

This was not a particularly large Victorian household - only two children -

but it still had a staff of four - cook, parlour maid, housemaid and groom.

She would sit at the desk here, writing letters, doing the accounts

and telling the staff what they ought to do during the day.

But as well as an army of servants, you also needed this -

Mrs Beeton's Book Of Household Management - the bible for running a household.

With this you would become the perfect domestic goddess and

a rather formidable one at that, by the sound of it.

The functions of the mistress of a house

resemble those of an army general or the manager of a great business concern.

Mrs Beeton's was just one voice advising a young wife how to run the perfect household.

There were plenty more.

The pictures that hung in every home carried clear messages, too.

The man was the head of the family, the moral guardian of the home.

The woman was a provider of love and comfort.

A figure of purity and goodness.

Marion Sambourne seems to have embraced her role.

In the words of a popular poem of the day, she set out to be the perfect "angel in the house".

Her husband, on the other hand, was definitely lower than the angels.

For Linley had a little secret. It all started off innocently enough.

He was a good enough draftsman, but felt he had a problem drawing people.

Photography seemed to be the answer.

Linley started off using himself as a model.

Then he persuaded his wife, children and even servants to pose for him.

But soon, Linley would require another sort of model altogether.

His private bathroom doubled as a darkroom.

Using the rather predictable excuse that an artist needed to be

intimate with the naked body in order to be able to depict the human form, he began to hire in models.

He used them to take photographs like this.

Quite why Miss Cornwallis needed to be naked in order for him to draw a cartoon of a Vicar's daughter

riding a bicycle is a question it would have been rather interesting to hear him try to answer.

As his passion for nude photography grew, so Linley grew bolder.

Always carefully choosing times when Marion was safely out of the house,

Linley started to smuggle models into the family home.

And in Marion's morning room of all places.

One particular session involved Marion's delicate tea table as a prop.

Another time, look what he did with her favourite comfy armchair.

Poor Marion Sambourne - she really hadn't much idea what was going on. Fortunately nor did the neighbours.

Keeping up appearances was what it was all about.

This was a very good time to be a portrait painter.

Rich families commissioned pictures to tell the world they were upright, content and respectable.

Which is why they all look rather smug.

Most people, of course, couldn't afford an oil painting of their family.

But the local photographer could provide something that looked just like one.

This photographic studio in the Sussex town of Lewes has been run by the same family since the 1850s.

This is the room where all the images are kept.

-It is like a treasure trove.

-Yes!

-How much have you got down here?

-My father worked out there were about five tonnes.

About 200,000 plates. It's all the images back to the beginning of the business in 1850-odd.

Can we have a look at one or two?

Absolutely.

Let's take a box out.

-There we go. There are two shots of three children.

-Wow!

They look fairly sombre. It was probably all taken very seriously at the time.

It also tells you something about the pride that the parents had in their family.

And of course it follows on from previous art.

The great masters - they're not grinning out of the canvases at you.

They've got dignity and gravitas. And so did early portraiture.

It's only more recently that you're expected to have a cheesy grin.

-A group of some sort.

-That's in the studio, is it?

-Yes it is. That's a painted backdrop.

-There were lots of different backdrops.

-That's right. It was a matter of fashion.

-People had different backgrounds according to the fashion.

-Let's look at some others.

And you could also, presumably, pass yourself off as something that you weren't, quite?

People only knew you from the image. So if you dressed up and had a fancy backdrop, you were more important.

Yes, why not?

Was it an enormous performance, having one of these done?

-It probably was in the old days. Do you want to have a go?

-I'll give it a go, yeah, why not?

Right. This is the studio where we still do all the photography, where great-grandad started off.

What I thought was, this was a fairly standard Victorian set-up,

the gentleman sitting at the desk in the chair, with the painted backdrop.

-So we can build a set.

-This is the desk, is it?

This is the desk, yep.

If you'd like to pull the chair in...

Am I going to regret this?

Almost certainly!

We've only got one survivor of reasonable antiquity.

-And it's in a bit of a state.

-Welcome to my modest home.

-Absolutely. Made to order.

-This is a Victorian neck clamp.

-Neck clamp?

-Just to allow you to sit still for the requisite time.

We put the neck clamp in the back of your neck. There we go.

Splendid.

Excellent.

You can see why they have that rigor mortis look about them..

-It looks perfectly natural!

-Doesn't feel the slightest bit natural!

Bit of meths, flash powder...

And one, two, three...

Jolly good!

SMOKE ALARM BEEPS

JEREMY LAUGHS

I think there's a rook nest here.

Oh for goodness sake, it'll burn itself out!

JEREMY LAUGHS

And here is the end product - the very picture of Victorian respectability.

Almost as respectable in fact as this gentleman.

This is the artist William Powell Frith.

Frith painted one of the most popular paintings of the day, casting himself

as the perfect father and his own family as a true picture of Victorian virtue and happiness.

This is his little daughter, Alice.

It's her sixth birthday.

This is Isabelle Frith, young mother to a fine brood.

A happier scene of family life you could hardly imagine.

When it went on show at the Royal Academy in 1856, the public loved it.

Pictures like this proclaimed life was wonderful in the Victorian home.

The critics applauded its "moral and improving tone."

Copies of Frith's painting hung in homes up and down the land,

reminding everyone of what to aspire to.

The trouble is, at the heart of this picture was a lie.

This nice, respectable middle-class enclave in Bayswater was where Frith

lived with his nice, respectable middle-class wife Isabelle and their 12 children, his official family.

And here, in the rather more shabby district of Paddington, is where he

set up home with his mistress and his family of illegitimate children.

For many years, he managed to run both households, without his wife suspecting a thing.

But then, one day, so the story goes, his wife saw him posting a letter in west London.

Nothing unusual in that, of course, except that on that day, he was supposed to be away.

When she received the letter later that day, it told her what a lovely time he was having in Brighton.

Keeping a mistress was not unusual.

They were hidden away in rented rooms all over the place.

Everyone knew what was happening, but no-one talked about it.

Then one artist dared to show what was really going on.

In William Holman Hunt's scandalous picture, The Awakening Conscience,

a married man canoodles with his mistress in their love nest.

The look in her eye shows a glimmer of guilt.

She's resolved to end their affair.

But the man is flushed with desire.

Look at that face.

No pangs of conscience for him.

All this suits him just fine.

But the public were appalled.

And so, too, were critics.

"Mr Hunt's picture", fumed one, "is drawn from a very dark and repulsive side of domestic life."

This was a subject far too close to home.

But adulterous liaisons were common.

So, too, was prostitution.

In London in 1857, it's estimated there was one prostitute for every 25 men,

and many of their clients were married.

Sexually transmitted diseases were rife.

Thousands of unsuspecting Victorian wives and mothers were infected.

Even Mrs Beeton, who had defined the perfect Victorian home, fell victim

to syphilis, probably infected by her husband on their honeymoon.

In many Victorian cities, anatomical museums provided the public with

graphic and sensational warnings of the dangers of illicit sex.

These places have long vanished.

But hidden in the backroom of a modern waxwork museum, one Victorian collection survives,

too unpleasant to be on public display nowadays.

Wow, what is this?!

This is what remains of the Liverpool Museum of Anatomy,

a rare survival of a public Victorian anatomy museum.

These are wax anatomical models of common Victorian diseases

that people could have walked in, paid sixpence and seen at any time of the day.

They are revolting.

"Lets go for a nice afternoon out and look at the symptoms of syphilis, dear." It's horrible.

-This was of great concern to people at the time.

-Syphilis was?

-Yes, small pox was small because

syphilis was the great pox and the fear of syphilis in Victorian Britain was very prevalent.

No-one would want to visit a prostitute whose skin looked like that.

There's obviously a moral warning here, isn't there?

Yes, when people came into the museum, they'd be given

a catalogue, such as this one, the descriptive catalogue, urging man "know thyself".

"Face of man showing the evil effects of secondary symptoms of syphilis."

That's this face here, isn't it?

Yes, that's probably referring to this actual specimen.

"Model of a head of a child.

"In this model, the visitor sees the awful effects of men leading a depraved life."

-And that's this child here, is it?

-Yes, you can see the inflammation of its eyes and nose...

Many men must have been concerned if they'd had a wayward youth.

The worst possible thing for them to do was for them to infect their loved ones with this

dreadful disease, which was not only something that would affect them and be passed on to their children...

So this is all a dire warning, isn't it?

-It's, "Don't."

-Yes, for example this one here, "The face of an old bachelor, a confirmed onanist."

-An onanist is a masturbator.

-That's right, that's what they meant by onanist.

"He became idiotic and he rapidly sank into a second childhood.

"What a fearful account he will have to give of himself at the Judgment Day."

To put it crudely, simple masturbation is going to addle the brain.

That was the worst thing for you because the sexual organs,

like the other organs of the body, were regarded as being there, placed there to perform a function.

Purely for procreation, it wasn't pleasure or anything else.

Yes, exactly, but there were devices that could come to your aid.

This is a spermatorreah ring.

Oh, my God.

It's designed to fit around the base of the penis to prevent inadvertent nocturnal emissions.

So, OK, the penis goes through the middle,

you get an erection...

Oh, my God, and you come up against all these spikes.

That would wake up you really. That would put an end to proceedings.

Yes, exactly. It was sold as the early awakener,

not really the awakening one would want.

The message was clear.

Illicit sex was a huge threat to the Victorian home.

COWS MOO

You just couldn't take too many precautions to keep loose behaviour at bay.

Even in the way you built your house.

This is Lanhydrock in Cornwall.

It was the home of Thomas Charles Agar-Robartes.

He was a stern-minded Anglican, who lived here with his wife Mary and their children.

When he redesigned their home in the 19th century,

he turned it into a bastion of morality and rectitude.

When they rebuilt the house, they did it according to the guidelines

laid out by the architect Robert Kerr in his book of 1864 The Gentleman's House.

Now, this is a highly prescriptive guide to how to run and build

a successful and, indeed, morally-upstanding household.

He says, for example, "Every servant, every operation,

"every utensil, every fixture, should have a right place and no right place but one.

"The family constitute one community, the staff another.

"This is the way to to plan a gentleman's house of the better sort."

What this is then, is a guide to morality set in stone.

As well as rules about the separation of the classes, with

the servants in the practical areas and the family in the polite areas, Robert Kerr also laid down

very strict rules about the segregation of the sexes, right across the household.

No ladies allowed in here.

The billiard room was for men only.

Instead, women retired to Lady Robarte's boudoir to drink tea.

Now, above stairs, the family were expected to act impeccably, but below stairs, nobody wanted to

take any chances so the male and female living quarters were quite separate

and to avoid any temptation, they were accessed separately.

So while the women used this wooden staircase to reach their bedrooms in the attic, the men used this sturdy,

stone staircase and if all went well, never the twain should meet.

They needn't have worried so much.

Victorian servants were probably too busy working to have a lot of time for hanky panky.

Most Victorian paintings of them show a rather cheery view of life below stairs.

This finely dressed skivvy looks the picture of contentment,

happy to serve her master and look fetching at the same time.

You can understand.

What rich employer would want a picture of some sour-faced drudge on his walls?

Everyone had their place in the Victorian home.

Yet there would be some whose place would never be comfortable.

The person who occupied this room belonged neither above stairs

nor below stairs - the nanny or the governess lived in some in-between world.

She lived with the children and because she was responsible

for the children's education, she was better paid than the servants.

When a new nanny moved into a house, she was often advised, if she had one, to put down

a silver-backed hairbrush, so the servants could see they weren't one of them.

But equally, they weren't part of the family.

They were in some sort of social no-man's-land. It was a very uncomfortable place to be.

This painting by Richard Redgrave spells it out.

The Governess, the young woman in mourning dress,

holds a black-edged letter telling her of a death in the family.

The music sheet on the piano from the popular song "Home Sweet Home"

ratchets up her unhappiness by recalling the family she has been forced to leave in search of work.

She sheds a single tear.

Next to her, lie the remnants of her lonely supper- a dry husk of bread.

Although evening's drawing in, her work is not over -

the table is piled with exercise books to be corrected.

Behind her, her pupils play happily, oblivious to her sorrow.

For the artist, this was an especially painful painting.

His much-loved younger sister, Jane, was working as a governess when she died.

She was 19.

Richard Redgrave put her death down to her unhappy working life and

he never forgot the plight of genteel young women who'd fallen on hard times.

It'd have to be said, though, that for the children of

the rich who were charges of these governesses, life was about to become better than it had ever been.

For middle and upper-class children like the family who lived here, the 19th century was a golden age.

Never had privileged children been so indulged and doted upon.

Victorian artists created a picture of childhood as a time of innocence and purity -

a time to be cherished.

If only it could last forever.

In reality, children had never been more vulnerable.

This was the great age of epidemic.

Tuberculosis, scarlet fever and typhoid

killed thousands of children every year.

No amount of money or prayer could keep death from the door.

CHURCH BELL TOLLS

No-one was safe from epidemic.

The Rev AC Tait and his wife Catherine had seven children.

And then in the spring of 1856, scarlet fever struck the parish.

They could only watch as, one after another, their children succumbed.

The first to die was Charlotte on March 6th,

Susan Elizabeth died on March 11th, Frances Alice on March 20th, Catherine Anna on March 25th.

Mary Susan on the April 8th.

That is five daughters dead in five weeks.

Infant death became a compelling subject for painters.

On the walls of countless Victorian homes hung

pictures of parents grieving for their dead or dying children.

In Frank Holl's painting, Hush!,

a woman begs her daughter not to wake the sick baby in the cradle.

In its companion piece, Hushed, the mother is inconsolable with grief.

The cradle is still.

The headboard now resembles nothing so much as a gravestone.

In the poorest homes, almost one child in five died before their fifth birthday.

The terrible living conditions of the poor led desperate mothers to pay to have their babies adopted,

sometimes with horrifying consequences.

On 30th March 1896, a bargeman here on the river at Reading looked in the water and saw a package.

He fished it out, he opened it,

and found it contained the body of a baby girl. She'd been strangled.

There was a white tape tied tight around her neck and knotted below her left ear.

The discovery led to one of the most gruesome murder cases in British history.

All the police had to go on was some writing on the paper the body was wrapped in.

The address they deciphered lead them here, to 45 Kensington Road. It was the home of Amelia Dyer.

She was what the Victorians called "a baby farmer".

For a price, baby farmers adopted children from desperate parents with the promise of a better life.

But in the case of Amelia Dyer, it was a promise never kept.

Over the space of 30 years, she took in more than 50 babies.

And she killed them all.

The records of her case are held here in the Thames Valley Police Museum.

How would a baby farmer like Amelia Dyer have got access to children?

Well, what she did was she put these adverts into the paper...

"Highly respectable married couple wish to adopt child. "Premium required, very small."

And this is Amelia Dyer herself, isn't it?

That's Amelia Dyer shortly after she was arrested.

I would imagine that was taken at Reading Police Station.

These are dead children, are they?

These are dead babies which were recovered from the river near Caversham.

-She strangled them all?

-Yeah.

Terrible, isn't it?

What she was doing was disposing of them, sometimes in

brown paper packages, and sometimes in carpet bags.

And here we've got the carpet bag

together with the bricks, which had been used to weight the bag down.

There would have been a dead child inside this?

-Yes.

-It's awful for the mothers, isn't it?

You have a child, presumably out of wedlock,

you make the heart-wrenching decision to give it up,

-you pay for privilege and then you discover you've given up your own child to be murdered.

-Absolutely.

More often, both illegitimate baby and unmarried mother ended up in the river.

It was a fate they richly deserved in the eyes of many.

But then a painting appeared that confronted that prejudice head-on.

Found Drowned, by GF Watts,

is an almost religious vision of the fallen woman.

In despair, she has thrown herself in the river.

She lies washed up on the shores of the Thames stretched out like a martyr to Victorian morality.

She drowned clutching a locket - does it hold a picture of her child?

Her body is bathed in a warm light - set against a cold uncaring world.

A single star shines down on her.

This picture couldn't fail to strike a chord in Victorian Britain.

Its title was taken from a regular column in the Times newspaper which

listed the number of women who'd thrown themselves into the Thames.

In just two days in August 1847, the bodies of five women were recovered.

In the artist's eyes, the fallen woman has become

a fallen angel, no longer a moral degenerate but someone to be pitied,

a victim of an unjust system which sees a man go unpunished while she is cast out from society.

Other artists took inspiration from Watts, insisting the public

take notice of women in desperate straits.

Banished from the home...

..pining for the children they'd had to give up.

Forced to live on the streets.

Sympathy for unfortunate working-class women was one thing.

But if a respectable woman was involved in sexual scandal,

it spelled disaster not only for her, but for all polite society.

One artist dared tackle this taboo head-on.

In "Past and Present",

Augustus Leopold Egg shows a wife prostrated before her husband, begging for forgiveness.

His face is stiff with despair and disbelief.

In his hand he holds a letter he's intercepted from his wife's lover.

An apple on the floor at her side suggests Eve's fall from paradise.

Their daughter looks on anxiously.

The family home like a house of cards is about to collapse.

Two more paintings accompany the main picture.

In this one, the daughters have grown up to be penniless spinsters,

unable to marry because of their mother's disgrace.

The sins of the mother have been visited on the next generation.

In the final painting, the destitute mother

lies huddled alone under an arch, cradling the illegitimate child that is the product of her affair.

There's no mistaking whose side the artist is on.

Why, he asks, are women punished so savagely?

But the critics were horrified.

Paintings of the Victorian family were supposed to invoke feelings of

comfort, harmony and security - not to expose terrible dark truths.

Too late. The truth was out.

Home sweet home could be hell on earth.

Artists began to abandon their cosy myth-making, and started to show the

Victorian home as a very different place for a man and a woman.

For a man it might be his castle,

for a woman it was all too often a prison.

Painters showed the Victorian wife bound by law...

..by convention...

..by religious teaching.

Even by the clothes she wore.

-Hello, you must be Rosemary.

-I am.

-Hello.

I've come to see you about your collection of Victorian clothes.

Wonderful.

This is what I call the fragrant woman and the whole thing is delicate and feminine.

This is the perfect Victorian woman.

She's very thin.

Underneath she has some excruciating corsets.

And this... do you mind if I touch it?

No, you can touch it.

How does it work? Is it lots and lots of layers?

There's lots of layers.

The skirt is to give that idea of a sort of ebullience and then there are several petticoats.

And the idea, presumably, is to get a shape that goes out, in and out again. Is that it?

Yes. The most alluring -

and probably still is, let's face it - shape for a female is to have

the bosom, a small waist and generous hips.

This was the prized look of the Victorian time.

Was there a moral purpose to it, too?

It gave a sense of propriety, you know.

Everything was right as rain if the woman was upright and corseted.

-Of course you couldn't, almost literally, you couldn't be a loose woman, could you?

-No, indeed.

You were a tight-laced woman.

Yes. And, if you've got

a corset pulling your insides in and your ribcage in,

it must do something to your insides, mustn't it?

It certainly did. There were articles in the Lancet and medical

journals of the time which warned of the dangers of misplacing...

you know, the ribs were crushed, particularly for women of child-bearing age.

The organs were displaced, or indeed would malfunction after that.

They suffered from dreadful dyspepsia, they could hardly eat.

So when a woman was wearing corsets,

could she get into them by herself?

Give me a couple of seconds and I'll show you.

You're not going to take all your clothes off, are you?

See you in a bit.

Jeremy, please, could you just help me out here?

The laces need tightening and then tying.

Perhaps you could give your manly strength to this.

Is it like doing a shoelace up?

Tighter, Mr Paxman, tighter!

Stop hamming it up!

You're a vicar's wife, for heaven's sake!

-Enough, enough!

-There we are.

-Good.

-That's it, we're there.

I thought you had to put your knee into the small of the back of a person.

Well I'm not asking you to do that.

No, because you're so slim it just fits perfectly.

Yes, and then I'd have slipped into my gown of choice.

Is it incredibly uncomfortable?

Well, because I'm not used to wearing something like this it does feel a little odd.

It's so engineered, so structured, it could be done by Mr Isambard Kingdom Brunel himself.

But women wouldn't be trussed up forever.

Something had to give.

Victorian women started to fight back.

It began with The Dress Reform Movement of the 1880s, a national campaign

against the kind of clothing that scarcely allowed women to breathe.

They fought, too, against divorce laws that saw them lose their house, children and money.

They fought conventions that kept them locked in the house.

And they fought the prejudice that education was only for men.

Universities began to open their doors to women.

They studied maths and science,

they took up sport,

and they found there was a life beyond the family home.

The fact that a few middle class women could now get a university education didn't mean the end of the

old order for Victorian women.

But it did mean that the door, which had hitherto

been firmly locking them in the house, was at least ajar.

It would never be closed again.

The Victorian dream of Home Sweet Home, a dream fed for so

long by so many Victorian painters, was now well and truly over.

But it had never been much more than a dream.

Even the young Queen Victoria had written in her private diary,

"All marriage is such a lottery,

"the poor woman is bodily and morally a husband's slave.

"That always sticks in my throat."

Now such thoughts were out in the open.

Children weren't always the apple of their parents' eye.

Nor the husband, the faithful provider.

Nor the wife, the contented homemaker.

We'd never look at the home

in the same way again.

Next time: how the Victorians came to believe they were born to rule the world...

..and thought their reign would last forever.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

E-mail [email protected]