The Victorian Home Hidden Killers

It was the Victorians

who cherished the idea of home as a domestic haven.

They coined the phrase, "safe as houses".

And in this age of invention, homes were bursting at the seams

with new gadgets, products and conveniences.

In the bedroom were the latest beauty products

and manufactured clothes,

while in the nursery, the toys were brand new and factory-produced.

And for the first time, the stove warmed the entire house -

the original "home sweet home".

But there was a problem.

Many of the exciting products and appealing innovations they welcomed

into their homes were not just health hazards, they were killers.

And with the aid of science, I'll seek out these domestic assassins.

Oh, their houses were disgusting!

I'll be revealing what the Victorians couldn't see

inside their homes...

These things undoubtedly would have killed many children.

..and showing the terrible injuries that were inflicted,

in the name of progress.

What you need to do is move your bust up.

OK. Just...

And I'll feel the strain of chasing the Victorian ideal.

I feel a bit better now.

Welcome to the perilous world of the real Victorian home.

In the second half of the 19th century,

cities exploded, to house the booming middle classes.

In just over 50 years, their number grew from 2.5m to over 9m.

And these new urban middle classes took immense pride in their homes.

They had money, and they wanted to spend it on making their houses

cosy havens of domesticity and comfort.

Not for these people the grim perils of Victorian factory life

or the gritty reality of the overcrowded streets.

The sort of family who lived here enjoyed a level of comfort

and luxury previously unknown to ordinary people.

The cost of necessities fell dramatically

and new mass-production techniques made goods available and affordable.

This meant a level of conspicuous consumption never witnessed before.

They filled their rooms with things that made the house a home.

They'd been inspired by the Great Exhibition of 1851,

showcasing the latest and the best in gadgets and consumer goods.

What had been happening now

for the best part of 100 years, suddenly crystallised,

in this extraordinary exhibition. It wasn't so much that it was new,

as it was just suddenly "Boom!", in bulk.

As the century went on and consumerism began to increase,

one of the fascinating things is that the phrase

"standard of living" first appeared.

For the first time in history, you measured how good your life was

by how many objects you possessed.

When you think about it, that's actually a very strange idea.

You couldn't just buy anything -

what was and what wasn't tasteful was discussed at length in the many

and various new household guides and magazines.

John Ruskin, the leading art critic and social theorist,

impressed on Victorian consumers

the importance of making the right choices.

"Good taste is essentially a moral quality."

"What we like determines what we are

"and to teach taste is, inevitably, to form character."

Yet, while the Victorians fretted about abstract notions of morality,

they were oblivious to the real dangers that came from things

they had welcomed into their houses.

Every room in the Victorian home was filled with hidden killers.

And one of most dangerous places...

..was the drawing room.

The Victorians were really rejecting the idea of the 18th century -

Classicism, the restraint,

the delicacy, the white walls - that was all over.

They wanted clutter, they wanted colour, they wanted excess.

They really furnished, to show that, for them, colour and clutter

and objects - that was wealth,

that was importance and that was riches.

One thing that particularly indicated

both good taste and status was wallpaper.

The richer the pattern

and the darker, more vivid the colour, the better.

Why?

Because with the introduction of gas lighting, for the first time

in history, there was enough light in the house for ordinary people

to have, and enjoy, intense colour on their walls.

As a result, there was something of a wallpaper craze.

Manuals like Cassell's Household Guide, which told the Victorians

how to do everything, outlined principles of good taste

and told them which patterns of wallpaper to buy.

They were influencing a massive market.

Wallpaper sales had shot up, from around one million pieces a year

in 1834, to 32 million, by 1874.

Cassell's even gives what it calls its "theory on colour".

It describes its rules for the artistic appreciation

in dress, in furniture,

and it recommends green. It calls it, "a colour of repose".

It says, "The eye experiences a healthy and peculiarly grateful

"impression from this colour",

as opposed to something like yellowish-red, which it says,

"..is the preference of impetuous robust men and savage nations".

A particularly brilliant green, known as Scheele's Green,

was all the rage.

Scheele was the Swedish scientist who first mixed the pigment,

to produce an intensely vivid colour that didn't fade.

Its incredible popularity meant that it was used in everything,

from carpets, blancmange, candles, and children's toys,

but most of all it was used, in industrial quantities, in wallpaper.

There was one strange coincidence. As wallpaper sales escalated,

so did reports of unexplained deaths and illnesses in the home.

But there was nothing mysterious about it.

The magic ingredient that was giving the wallpaper its rich, green hue

was arsenic.

These were samples of what would be considered tasteful wallpapers

to have in a Victorian home.

This, on the walls,

would have been loaded with arsenic.

Actually, in the printing of the book,

it's also used - arsenical dyes.

So this book that you're showing me now has arsenic in these pages?

There's quite a lot of arsenic in that.

It's not that I don't believe what you're saying,

-but could you prove it?

-It's very easy to do.

If I use this instrument, which is a portable XRF, it tells us

which contaminants, metallic contaminants, are present in items.

You can see straight off, it says it has large amounts

-of copper in it and it's got large amounts of arsenic in it.

-Oh, yes.

The actual salts used in this pigment are copper arsenate.

In this book? Is it safe for you to touch?

Probably not! I'll wash my hands afterwards.

Modern science can prove

the Victorian wallpaper contained arsenic,

but this danger wasn't fully understood at the time.

To confuse matters further,

the symptoms of arsenic poisoning were very similar to cholera,

which had been rampant in Britain in living memory.

The immediate effects

would be of pain, swelling of the oesophagus,

very dry throat and difficulty in swallowing.

And then what's described is "agonising abdominal pains",

as the whole digestive tract is affected by the arsenic.

Vomiting, diarrhoea,

sounds terribly unpleasant, and then people would die

which was said to be a relief, cos it was such an agonising way to die.

Newspaper headlines continued to report mysterious illnesses

and deaths, and links were made with arsenic.

In the second half of the 19th century,

the newspapers are full of cases like this one.

"Six month old child dies as a result of chewing

"on a piece of emerald green wallpaper."

But even if you hadn't eaten the wallpaper, you weren't safe.

In fact, the wallpaper was endangering the health

of the nation in another hidden, and much more insidious, way.

Thanks to a chemical reaction, poisonous fumes are thought

to have infiltrated the very air they were breathing.

There's a lot of debate about the production

of arsenic gases from the wallpaper.

The actual surface of the wallpaper,

particularly flock wallpapers, could come off

and your house would be covered in arsenical dust.

Also, in Victorian houses which were not centrally heated,

they were relatively damp.

You put damp together with wallpaper paste and cellulose,

which is in the wallpaper itself, and you've got fungal growth.

And as many fungi can actually volatilise those arsenical salts

into a volatile form of arsenic. And they're highly toxic.

They were billowing out arsenic in the home,

in which, obviously, the windows were hardly ever open,

because of the smog.

They sat there, in this lovely fug of arsenic,

thinking they were in this perfect, virtuous, healthy home.

It doesn't actually matter how the arsenic is absorbed

into the body - whether you breathe it in,

whether it comes in through the skin or the other membranes

or whether you actually eat it - it actually has a very similar effect,

because its effects are via the bloodstream,

so the arsenic gets into the bloodstream and travels around the body.

But one of the problems with the slower arsenic poisoning,

of a small amount over a longer time, is that it could cause very vague symptoms.

Obviously, if you're being poisoned by something in a particular room

of the house, and when you left that room you got a bit better.

It could come and go, so it was much harder to differentiate it

from other illnesses around at the time.

Some doctors began to question the use of arsenic in wallpaper,

as more and more mystery deaths were reported in the home.

The Lancet, too, took up the cause.

"There appears good reason for believing that a very large

"amount of sickness and mortality among all classes

"is attributable to this cause

"and that it may probably account for many of the mysterious diseases

"of the present day, which so continually baffle

"all medical skill."

In 1856, a couple in Birmingham reported to their doctor,

Dr Hinds, that they were suffering from inflamed eyes, headaches

and sore throats.

Even their pet parrot was drooping.

They decided to go on holiday to the seaside

and their symptoms disappeared.

They suspected something in their house.

And they had recently applied

bright green wallpaper to two rooms at home.

Dr Hinds wondered if, that alone,

could be responsible for their ailments.

People went to the seaside and took the waters and took the spa.

What, effectively, they were doing was moving out of a toxic environment

into a healthy, diluted environment

where you had fresh air, water that came from a known source, not relying

on what was in a concentrated area within their property.

They moved away from a toxic environment.

What's really astounding is how much arsenic there was

in a Victorian drawing room,

when you add up all the materials that contained arsenic pigment.

Certainly we know that there was a huge amount of arsenic in, say,

a Victorian living room which had a 100m square surface area -

could contain up to 2.5 kilograms of arsenic. That's a lot of arsenic.

-That's a huge amount of arsenic.

-It's a huge amount of arsenic

Dr Hinds, along with some other medical practitioners,

became an outspoken critic of the use of arsenic pigment.

In Germany, arsenical wallpapers had been banned, but not in the UK.

The wallpaper manufacturers didn't want people to think

there was anything wrong with their products,

and The Lancet and the British Medical Journal

fought a long campaign, to bring this to the public fore.

So there was quite a lot of dispute.

Some doctors and newspapers called on the British government

to ban the poisonous paper,

but others were quick to belittle the claims of the killer wallpaper.

Some manufacturers even offered to eat it, to prove how safe it was.

One of Britain's most celebrated wallpaper designers

was William Morris, a leading light of the Arts and Crafts movement.

He was also one of the fiercest critics

of the heartless industrialists of this period.

But what is not well known about this champion of handicraft

is that he was a director of the biggest arsenic-producing mine

in the world, Devon Great Consols.

William Morris was making most of his money from arsenic.

That's quite a surprise, isn't it?

Because we associate William Morris as being this leader

of the Arts and Crafts movement, as someone going back to basics,

back to natural things, but he's got this mine that, potentially,

is certainly selling arsenic. Whether he's using it in wallpapers or not is something else.

The Times has said there was enough arsenic produced there

to kill the entire planet and every creature on it.

Some of the people who came out with the processes had vested interests

in other locations. They would own arsenic mines.

They would own areas where it was in their interests to include

arsenic into paints, dyes, whatever.

Did William Morris ever accept that he was doing this?

Or did he continue to deny it?

Well, there's an interesting letter.

There was a customer complaining that the wallpaper was poisoning him

and his family and, basically, Morris said it was witch fever.

So that was the sole utterance we have.

That it was witch fever?

In other words, he thought he was being accused of something

that just wasn't true?

He was just saying it was these doctors who were saying

arsenical wallpapers were killing people and damaging people's health, and he was

just saying, "It's mumbo jumbo", basically, was what he was saying.

Contrary to Morris's claims, the evidence building up

became impossible to deny.

But it would take intervention from the very top before things started to change.

One of the key tipping points of that recognition was when Queen Victoria,

herself, had had wallpaper of Scheele Green and she had a diplomat

who actually came to stay with her, who fell ill overnight and she was...

the records show she was quite put out, to be perfectly honest,

that she'd been stood up early in the morning and he hadn't turned up.

But actually, the poor chap had actually keeled over overnight,

he was actually effectively poisoned by the arsenic in the wallpaper.

She was a little sceptical about it, but then,

when it actually came out in the papers and there were a lot

of publications around that time, that she'd done that,

it was then that step change, in that, "Maybe we need to think in how we regulate this".

Unbelievably, the use of arsenic in wallpaper was never officially banned,

but as consumers understood its danger, they stopped buying

these wallpapers and forced commercial practice to change.

Morris Wallpapers and other astute manufacturers started to

advertise their product as arsenic-free.

Certainly by 1872, even the style guides had switched to safer printing.

But we'll never know how many died a slow death

through the prevalence of arsenic in Victorian products.

I cannot see that, having this amount of arsenic dust flying around

a Victorian home wouldn't have led to chronic health problems.

It's a class-one carcinogenic,

it's a human carcinogen - so years of exposure to this would have led to cancers, basically.

The Victorian ideal, or perhaps fantasy,

of domesticity was that the lady of the house should be,

as Charles Dickens describes it in the Mystery of Edwin Drood,

"the ministering angel of domestic bliss".

Victorian women were encouraged to make their home a reassuring

sanctuary for their husbands, away from the jealousies,

cares and dangers of working life.

The idea of the "angel of the house" was obviously a literary creation,

but it tapped in completely to what the Victorians essentially wanted.

It was a movement away from the fact that, in the 18th century,

usually father and mother had pitched in together in the business.

With the professionalisation,

the growth of factories, the home was away from the place of work,

so the home became this ideal place of perfection and taste,

this enclosed bubble of purity.

As the home became an ideal, it needed to be protected

and nurtured and, therefore, buying things for the home,

creating things for the home, came to be seen as the woman's occupation.

The men went out there, conquering the Empire,

the women stayed at home and kept things pure.

Women were expected not only to create the perfect home.

The "lady of the house" had to measure up, as well.

Our next danger, in this house, is in the bedroom.

The pursuit of this feminine ideal wasn't entirely safe.

Lurking in many beautifying products were harmful toxins.

Part of being the ideal Victorian woman was looking just right.

Whatever your physique, one of these came in handy.

In fact, this was essential.

Corsets kept everything under control and they meant self-reserve -

vital to the Victorian woman -

because the opposite was just excess and freedom and flesh flying everywhere.

And once you do that, well, the world might fall down.

Feels quite tight already!

You're actually just squeezing all the air out of my lungs!

Sarah Nicol looks after one of the biggest corset collections in the country.

Tell me about the different layers we can see here. What's going on?

First, we've got the chemise underneath, so you'd never have worn your corset next to your skin.

The corset predates the bra. Its function was to support

the chest and help take the weight of up to 14lbs of clothing.

Over the top of this, you would have had a petticoat, as well.

That's five garments, before you've even got to your outerwear.

It is, yes.

The Symington factory manufactured corsets

that were affordable for everybody.

They did all of their own artwork and printing,

-for all their box tops for their corsets.

-That's just beautiful.

It may look beautiful, but women were, unwittingly, paying a terrible price.

In the 1860s and '70s, corsetry became increasingly extreme.

By the mid-19th century, the ideal female form,

the corseted female form, was everywhere - in newspapers, magazines, journals aimed at women

and the celebrity actresses had it, the dancers had it, but particularly,

these fashion plates had it - this impossible figure.

They were drawn, simply because no woman would look like that.

What kind of corsets, and how restrictive they were, depended on your age,

your class, your occupation and how fashionable you were.

It was recommended that a corset was to be worn at all times,

and there was no escape, not even in the Colonies.

Symington's made this to market directly at ladies that were

going to tropical regions, so they were either going with their man or to get their man.

It's called the ventilated corset. For obvious reasons, it has the centre section removed.

-There were women wearing this in all parts of the British Empire?

-Yes.

-Whatever the weather?

Yes, and you were regarded as a loose woman

if you didn't wear your corset.

It demonstrated their character and it demonstrated that they were

fine and upright citizens and, you know, fit for the British Empire.

These robust cages of whalebone

and steel were turned into potential killers by one surprisingly small

technological advance - the metal eyelet.

What difference does that make?

It allows people, if they want to, to tight-lace their corset, without fabric pulling away.

The metal eyelet made it easier to get the look,

because it was possible to lace tightly,

without the material tearing, as it previously would have done.

There was a fashion for wearing very, very, very, tight bodices,

I mean, it's fascinating. You see in photographs, the fabric pulls

in a way that we would think means it doesn't fit.

The tight lacing is something that a minority of people did.

And that is to get your waist as small as you possibly can.

They used to do this by lacing their corset tighter and tighter.

Some women would keep their corsets on day and night,

to train their bodies.

What are the effects of a corset on the body, in the long term?

Well, if I could just show you here, the position of the normal organs.

So the liver, for example,

our largest internal organ, sits underneath the ribs, on the right.

And so it's a large wedge-shaped organ that sits here under the ribs.

And so, in a corset, which brings the ribs in very tightly,

to give the typical small-waisted outline,

the liver gets squashed upwards and it presses against the ribs.

There are specimens of livers taken from women who have died,

who have worn tight corsets, actually have ridges on them

where the ribs have made indentations in the surface of the liver, because it's been so tight.

And another organ that may be affected by a tight corset is the stomach.

That sits here, underneath the rib cage,

so if the rib cage is pulled in by the corset,

the stomach is pushed downwards, into the abdominal cavity.

That would then have an effect on the rest of the abdominal organs, which would be pushed down.

This is a pregnancy corset, from 1885.

Some women even wore corsets when pregnant.

A particular choice came for women about the corset when they fell pregnant.

Because many husbands complained they didn't want their baby's head shaped and moulded.

But there were women who continued to wear corsets through pregnancy,

which you know, there's no way at all that is possibly good for the baby.

One of the problems with corsets after pregnancy, particularly

if women had a lot of babies, was that of prolapse of the uterus,

the pelvic floor muscles having been weakened during childbirth,

and then a very tight corset, that increases the pressure

in the abdomen, forcing all the organs down.

So that would have been a very unwanted side-effect

of wearing tight corsets.

Now, it's my turn.

I've got it a little tighter. I don't know if you can feel that I've got it any tighter?

Yeah, I can feel it, yep, yep.

SHE LAUGHS

'I confess, I felt delighted to have a smaller waist.'

Oh, result! I can see why they did it now.

-24 inches, look!

-24 and three quarters.

The Victorian household guides even advised on suitable exercises

for a lady.

I'm just exhausted after doing just that!

I'm not really that unfit, honestly.

Or am I?

We're going to use sports science equipment, with Matt Furber,

to measure the effect of the corset on my body.

Yep, I'm happy. Are you happy?

-Yep!

-Happy as you can be?!

'First, I have to give him a baseline of fitness without the corset.

'I exercise for six minutes.'

And...stop.

'Now, Matt monitors my vital signs, with the corset on.

'First, how it affects me at rest.'

And...three, two, one...go.

'And I repeat the same exercise, with Matt measuring my heart rate

'and air flow.'

-You know how hard work it is.

-Feels like a 16, now.

-Heart rate?

-177.

175. Lovely. Two minutes to go.

'Halfway through and Matt's already seeing the changes.'

And...stop.

OK, if you just want to go and take a seat.

-Feel OK? Don't feel light-headed?

-A bit light-headed.

-Worse than last time?

-Yes!

'I feel close to fainting and it takes two minutes for my head to clear.

'And I'm not even tight-laced.'

Breathing OK?

Yeah, it is.

OK, last ten seconds.

Excellent! Well done, you're free.

'So what happened?'

Is that all right? Let's get this off you, as well.

'What can science reveal about the effects of a corset?'

-So, in terms of the rate in which you're breathing...

-Hah!

Look at that.

So even at rest, you can see. The red line is when you are wearing

the corset and the blue line is when you are not wearing your corset.

So you'll see even at rest, when you're sitting down

you're breathing in a corset round about 23-24 breaths per minute,

whereas when you didn't have a corset on, you're down about

14 breaths per minute, so it shows that, even at rest, the corset is really restricting.

And when it actually comes when you're doing the exercise,

we can see with your figures - with the corset on, your tidal volume,

the amount the amount of air you're getting every breath, is a lot lower,

so you're breathing approximately 200-300mls less every single

breath with the corset on.

Gosh. So that's why, at the end, I felt like I was really fighting to get in air.

Absolutely. Really with these figures you can really see the impact,

the restriction the corset's having.

You're basically hyperventilating in a corset.

That's kind of what's happening, because you're breathing an awful lot faster, over ten breaths

per minute, that's an extra 25% faster, wearing a corset.

I've proved it's damaging, but it could be a killer?

That chronic under-profusion, not getting enough air down into

the bottom of the lungs could cause problems.

It predisposes to infections like pneumonia.

And that was something that a very tight corset,

worn for many hours a day, could cause problems with.

If a woman had an underlying problem, it could exacerbate it.

So, for example, if a young girl had rickets, from vitamin D deficiency,

she'd have soft bones that were still developing

and they could be distorted very much by wearing a tight corset.

There are stories of the ribs breaking

and piercing the lung underneath, which could be fatal.

As the century wore on, the corset became the focus of a huge debate.

Women's possibilities for activity became much larger

over the 19th century. By the end of the 19th century,

there was nothing unvirtuous in going around on your bicycle,

in walking freely and so this really wasn't very practical for them

to be wearing corsets, I mean, it just simply didn't work.

And increasingly women began to say, "These are pointless, they're just getting in the way.

"You know, I'm spending hours in the morning getting myself

"into the corset, when I could be doing something far more useful."

It really also coincided with the growth of votes for women -

the idea that women were equal citizens, so if they were

equal citizens demanding the vote, they shouldn't be treated as some kind of excessive ornament

that are there to be looked at and there to be admired.

And they're ruining their health just so they look right for men.

The campaign for change was

spearheaded by the Rational Dress Society, established in 1881.

Constance Wilde, wife of Oscar, edited the Rational Dress Gazette.

"The Rational Dress Society protests against the introduction

"of any fashion in dress that either deforms the figure,

"impedes the movement of the body or in any way tends to injure health."

By the 1890s, some manufacturers had started to respond

to demands for looser clothing.

Yet one thing will probably never disappear -

the temptation to conform to an ideal of beauty, whatever the cost.

Why did women carry on wearing corsets?

Well, for exactly the same reason as I was delighted

to have a 24-inch waist.

It was psychologically rewarding, even, if physically,

it could take its toll.

The idea of that S-shaped figure, we are completely enthralled to it,

even now, so I don't think we can look back on the Victorians

and say, "Oh, my goodness, weren't they silly, fainting when they sang,

"falling all over the place because they wore corsets."

I don't think we can say we're, necessarily, that far away.

I'm on the trail of the next household danger.

I'm heading to the kitchen.

Corsets weren't just worn by middle-class women, they were also

worn by their servants, as they carried out household tasks.

It almost beggars belief,

but at least those servants benefited from the proliferation

of new gadgets, designed to make their lives easier and safer.

Well, sort of.

This was a brave new world, where the ingenious Victorian inventor

felt he had the answers to any domestic problem.

But many of these inventions were difficult to use and proved to be

dangerous - and people were untrained in how to use them.

By the mid 1870's,

the Victorians were bringing services into the home -

piping in water and trying out new gas appliances and gadgets.

And of all the new inventions available, what could be more desirable in these dark, damp houses

than something that offered heat and light?

Gas was to open a whole new chapter of Victorian household catastrophes.

What we had in the past was, everybody would be congregated around

a single lamp, and it would be either oil or a candle or something else,

and then, all of a sudden, people didn't want to live

on top of each other all the time.

We wanted to find better ways of doing it.

It was towards the end of the Victorian era

that they started bringing in gas lighting, lighting that

was actually capable of lighting a whole room.

It was a massive step forward.

It was the greatest innovation.

You could have a room that was completely lit.

They had coal gas, they had something that was called wood gas

and they had another material,

called water gas. Now, these were highly poisonous.

There was no control, no stopcock, it was just gas.

The worst killer was because you couldn't actually smell it.

So you'd have no idea, until it was too late, basically.

You would just keel over and that would be the end of you.

In the second half of the 19th century,

the papers - everything from the Worcester Evening News to the Western Gazette -

are full of stories of people dying horribly.

These aren't headline cases, they are just little snippets that give the facts and figures.

So, for example,

in the Manchester Evening News, in 1886, there's a story

of five boys suffocating in a loft, or this one, from the Sheffield

Independent, 1872 - a lady was found confined in a bedroom,

with her infant and its nurse, and it says she "must have unconsciously

"deranged the joint of the gas stove thus permitting an escape of gas."

All three were found, apparently, lifeless.

But why were such cases so widespread?

It may seem obvious to us now,

but at the time the dangers of gas were not known to the man

in the street and the gas company's adverts didn't help matters.

Some of the major gas companies were coming out with misnomers,

that gas was actually good for people,

that you could actually have a room full of gas

and walk in there with a naked light and it would be perfectly safe.

Gas companies were popping up all over the place.

You couldn't walk a block in London without seeing a gas company.

The rivalry was just huge. But with rivalry comes cost-cutting.

What you also had at the time was unscrupulous activities

going on between gas suppliers, where they would actually sabotage

their opponents or their competitors by actually dropping the pressure.

To save money, companies would reduce their own gas supply

to customers at night.

The gas lamp would actually just flicker away

and then blow out in the middle of the night and then the gas

would just seep into your home and you wouldn't be waking up in the morning.

It was the heart of the industrial period.

They wanted everything new manufactured to be seen

to be at the cutting edge of what was going on and that was then how

they drove innovation, through making something, engineering something.

If it wasn't engineered, it wasn't good.

The speed of change was breathtaking.

But there was neither the time, nor the will,

to test these products that would be sold to millions of consumers.

One of the most brilliant contraptions, in this age

of scientific progress, was a system that could provide

warmth throughout the whole house - a massive improvement

on open coal fires and draughty chimneys.

Gas central heating was a huge thing.

In the 1800's, they came up with the idea of a sealed system,

where you could heat water exactly the same as a steam train,

basically, in a huge cylinder.

It was very volatile and the pressure inside these boilers

was just absolutely phenomenal.

They were running them all the way round houses -

you could have 10, 12, 15, 16 radiators on each system,

but of course, you could be sitting down having your lunch

and the steam valve doesn't open.

You could be tucking into your turtle soup and the next thing, there's a huge explosion

and you'll be leaving the building without opening the door.

EXPLOSION

The pressure was just huge.

It was only ever going to end up in one story, really.

It was going to be an accident and people will die.

The main problem was that they didn't understand

the dangers of what they were doing.

Gas and cast iron had not been used in this way in the home before.

When they were actually doing the casting, it was at the very

forefront of that technology, of understanding that weaknesses

and flaws in that casting could actually cause problems

further down the line.

The inventive Victorian engineer, having tackled heat and light,

now turned his attention to cooking stoves.

What could be so dangerous about a stove like this?

With an open system, when you add the coal and the massive flue

and the smoke pouring up the chimney. Ventilation was superb,

because the air would run through the kitchen, straight up

the chimney, take all the smoke away.

But when they, sort of, encompassed it into a sealed container,

they had problems with pressure,

and they had problems with getting rid of the smoke,

because the actual ventilation and the draught,

there wasn't one to go through the system to take the smoke away

so inevitably, the kitchens became really smoky.

Of course, this could lead to anything, up to suffocation.

If you avoided suffocating in the smoky kitchen,

you still had a potential problem.

They made sealed units and poured hot water into them

and used them like the modern-day kettle,

and, of course, this was a boiling pot and had no release valves

or anything like that and these stoves were just exploding.

It was like a small timebomb. It was a totally sealed unit.

They didn't understand the pressures and what happened

when you introduced oxygen and they had these huge,

huge catastrophic explosions in kitchens.

Towards the end of the Victorian era, a new power source

gradually came into play.

It was starting to turn away from gas, because it was so volatile,

and go towards electricity, basically.

But electricity was a killer, as well. It wasn't 100% safe,

when they were first coming up with these ideas of light bulbs,

because if you mix electricity with gas -

bringing electric lights in, you've still got your gas cooker

and these gas cookers were left on, The joints still corroded,

broke down and let gas escape and, of course, you would come down

in the morning, turn your wonderful new electric light on

and the first thing that explodes is your gas cooker.

So the two of them, they weren't to go together. It was a recipe for disaster again.

It wasn't until 1923 that any safety regulations were brought in,

but the benefits of a warm, cosy home meant that most were willing

to risk the consequences.

Invention was running 100 miles an hour

and we just weren't quick enough to keep up with it

or the fitters were not skilled enough to keep up with it, but the

amount of deaths that happened through negligence, not just

through not understanding about the material they were using, was huge.

I'm leaving the dangers of the kitchen and I'm going to

the one place in the house where you'd think health and safety

would be particularly cherished, the nursery,

to seek out the next hidden killer.

The new consumer culture even extended as far as providing

entertainment for children.

Surely, that wouldn't be a problem, would it?

Alarmingly, despite all the progress,

154,000 infants under the age of one

died annually between 1880-1890.

And so, a surviving child was an important one

and their interests were indulged.

Childhood was expanded more than ever before.

Girls were at home for a very long time -

virtuous young ladies - Lord Shaftesbury saying children shouldn't work excessively in factories.

The idea of childhood became sacrosanct.

In the Victorian world, this meant a new consumer market to target.

Manufacturers absolutely poured goods for the child

into the shops and people snapped them up.

This was a time when Christmas was essentially invented as a child's festival.

It was a time when children received presents and children were spoiled.

But it was this indulgence that was now endangering children...

..and toys were the problem.

Anything that was coloured or pigmented would have had high

levels of a toxic metal in it.

And even if it was white, it wasn't safe, as there were large

levels of lead in white-painted objects.

Lead is a very poisonous substance and there is no amount of lead

that is safe for your body. Even the tiniest amount can be detrimental.

And obviously, children, being much smaller and also

because they're developing and lead damages the nervous system, are much

more susceptible to lead poisoning. Unfortunately, it was typically children

who were poisoned by lead, partly because it was used for

things like lead soldiers and for painting children's toys, but also

because of the children's habits of licking and putting things in their mouth.

Anything they would chew or lick or would potentially

flake off on them and they get handled, put it on their hands

and then put their hands in their mouths - little flakes of lead.

Unlike a lot of poisons which have an unpleasant taste, lead is

not unpleasant and so, just by licking, it wouldn't put a child off.

So why on earth were the Victorians putting lead in paint?

It's been known to be poisonous since Roman times.

Quite simply it was, and remains, the best preserver of wood.

They had no idea that its poison could be

transferred from a toy into a child's body.

Some of the first abnormalities that might be found would be

developmental ones, so the child may not develop as normal

and may have behavioural problems.

Things that might have been put down to temper tantrums or, nowadays,

something like an attention deficit disorder, may actually

have been due to lead poisoning.

Almost impossible to identify

if you can't test the levels of lead, because it's just the way

in which that particular child is developing and who knows

what their potential would have been had they not been exposed to lead.

Lead wasn't just brought into the house on objects.

It was in the very fabric of the home, on painted surfaces.

If you have a look at this door frame,

I suspect there probably is lead in this.

Lead was ubiquitous in the Victorian house, for providing

white gloss paints that you might find on every wooden painted item

would have been used with lead.

We can have a look at this piece of woodwork

and see what's present. In this, as well, I can see immediately

there's a quite a lot of lead, there's 3,000ppm of lead in it.

Because it's been stripped, it's probably just, again,

traces of old lead paint, before the old paintwork was taken off.

In the late 19th century, lead poisoning was rife,

but it was difficult to detect.

Lead poisoning could cause anaemia.

It's often described that people had a grey pallor,

a sort of very unhealthy look,

but one way which was identified by a physician, Dr Henry Burton,

in 1840, was something called "Burton's lines", which was

a bluey-grey line at the base of the gums,

just at the top of the teeth,

that gave a very characteristic mark that was a sign of lead poisoning.

Although by the time you identified that line, it was probably too late

to undo some of the effects that the lead is likely to have had by then.

Despite the gruesome evidence,

the government did nothing.

It was not until the 1920s that white lead was banned

in indoor paint products in Sweden, Czechoslovakia,

Austria, Poland, Spain, Finland and Norway - but not Britain.

Amazingly, it wasn't until the 1970s, more than 100 years

after the problem was identified, that the British government finally

passed legislation to control the lead content of household paint.

Even today, lead paint in old houses still poses a risk.

But there was an even bigger threat.

I'm on the hunt for our last, and possibly our greatest,

hidden killer and, again, one invisible to the Victorian eye.

Infant mortality rates in Victorian Britain were terrifyingly high.

As many as 15% of all babies died in their first year of life and

often the cause was an unexpected one, mummy's little helper.

Baby science, the idea that babies could be studied

and developed in the most healthy way, was the new order of the day.

In the 18th century, the idea was that God took the children he wanted,

there was very high infant mortality and it was up to God

so you just let it go.

In the 19th century, it was much more about science

and women could be seen as responsible

and they were judged by how many of their children stayed alive.

Just like the Queen, you had nine children, kept them all alive,

who lived long and happy lives.

The relationship between traditional ideas and the new scientific

approach became increasingly fraught around how to feed babies.

To comprehend how this domestic danger had such an impact

requires understanding the Victorian attitudes to baby rearing.

Breastfeeding had long been rather unpopular in the higher aristocracy -

the Queen didn't breastfeed.

It was something that aristocratic women simply did not do.

They gave the job to wet nurses - big, fat, jolly wet nurse -

rather than the Victorian woman, who was supposed to be more delicate,

much more refined and much more restrained.

This attitude filtered into the new swelling middle classes.

One figure loomed large over the household guides to bringing

up baby, Mrs Beeton, and it was her they turned to for advice.

Mrs Beeton gives two chapters in her book,

which was enormously influential,

to baby and childcare and it tells all the tips about breastfeeding,

like drink lots of beer, although it does say stay off the gin,

but after that, it then moves onto, erm,

what to do if, for whatever reason, you cannot breastfeed your child.

Any new idea needs explaining in detail.

Feeding babies by bottle was a new idea.

'The problem with this advice, it takes up much more space in the book

'so it seems as though it is actually recommending'

bottle feeding, or as it was known in the 19th century,

"rearing by hand".

But many saw this as Mrs Beeton promoting bottle feeding.

Her perceived support and the marketing of babies' bottles,

put huge pressure on women to abandon breastfeeding.

And there were these bottles that have these fantastic empire names -

the Empire Bottle, they're really suggesting

that for a woman to choose the bottle - I mean, brilliant

marketing ploy - to choose the bottle made her a much better citizen

of Empire. She was essentially doing the right thing for her children.

But was she?

Could this be a hidden killer?

Dr Matthew Avison is a microbiologist.

He's going to use his scientific expertise, to cast an eye

on this Victorian innovation.

So Matthew, I have bought you this.

This is a Victorian baby's bottle - what's wrong with this?

I think the obvious thing, just looking at it,

because of this bend on the side of it,

it's very difficult to actually clean away any residue

that might be forming in here.

Also, the stopper being made of rubber and the tubing,

they're all porous materials, so they would accumulate

a residue of milk and any bacteria that might be in that

would permeate into the porous material

and you'd end up, very quickly, with bacteria growing in that.

There's the bottle and then there is either a rubber or animal skin

nipple, which, says Mrs Beeton's book, you tie on,

and then you don't have to take off,

for the two or three weeks it lasts.

So apart from outside, it never gets washed.

Sounds disgusting,

but what are the dangers of using porous materials with milk?

Matthew's designed an experiment.

He contaminates a piece of porous cork and a piece of non-porous

plastic with a bacteria that would have been common in Victorian times.

He gives them each a quick wash and drops them

into a liquid that mimics the contents of the Victorian bottle.

The shaking of the incubator introduces oxygen

into the samples, which makes them grow faster

and it also heats them up to body temperature, 37 degrees.

Just gives us a quicker result.

Whilst we wait for the result -

what was going into the Victorian baby bottle?

Breast pumps existed, so mother's milk

and a nutritious formula, according to the food manufacturers.

The things that were recommended, I mean,

what Mrs Beeton's doctor calls farinaceous foods, which are

formula that's sold in shops, but it's basically flour.

You know, the children didn't thrive for very obvious reasons, to us.

So did they have an idea about bacteria in the 1890s

when this feeding bottle was invented?

It's around about that time they probably...er...

Scientists are going to have made discoveries about the link between the bacterial

colonisation of substances and disease, so there are many examples

of that. For example, the cholera epidemics in London were stamped out

by separation of sewage and water. That had happened by that time.

But it's just whether that information had permeated down to the domestic level.

So what has our experiment proved?

-OK.

-So these are the results of the samples that I inoculated last night.

You can clearly see that the one with the cork is much, much denser.

You get a much denser growth than on the plastic.

This just shows that there were many more bacteria on the cork

than on the plastic, and the bacteria have come from the pores

within the cork. It illustrates the idea

that when you have a porous material, it soaks up bacteria.

Even in a few hours, you're going to get enough bacteria to cause an infection.

So what does this mean for our babies' bottle?

I think they didn't really understand that porous materials

would retain the bacteria, even if they were washed over the surface,

like this cork had been.

And so, therefore, if new media's put on - new milk, new food,

it's going to take up the bacteria again and cause this effect.

Victorian Britain was alive with killer diseases that sound

tropical now, but were common then.

Things like dysentery and typhoid, these are all very, very serious

intestinal diseases, passed on through dirty water,

which was then drunk. The cycle completes itself

and you end up with serious diarrhoea infections and for a small baby,

dehydration very, very quickly would lead to death within 48 hours.

-Gosh, that quickly?

-Absolutely.

The lack of knowledge of transmission of germs in water

meant that bottle-fed children were more at risk.

In addition to that, there are lots of bacteria that live in the mouth

and in the upper respiratory tract, in the back of the throat.

These bacteria are fine, if they're there,

but if they were to get inhaled into the lungs, they could cause

pneumonia and, of course, when you're sucking on something like

this, there's a potential for any bacteria like that to effectively

be inhaled in small droplets. If they get into the lungs, they can cause

a lower respiratory tract infection - what we call pneumonia.

And of course, infant pneumonia was the biggest cause of death in babies.

And those bacteria from the upper respiratory tract

getting down there, causing that pneumonia, could potentially

be lethal, again, very quickly, and with no cure.

So that's not just one bacteria, not just one danger.

There's loads of them, dozens of them.

We're all covered in billions, trillions of bacteria.

What we're providing here is a place for those bacteria to get a niche,

to grow, multiply into excessive quantities

and then an access route straight into a very vulnerable individual.

And that's why these things,

undoubtedly, would have killed many children.

So the dirtiest, most bacteria-ridden,

deadliest object of all went straight into the mouths of babes.

Doctors came to understand the dangers of bacteria and its growth.

A step forward was made in 1894, with Allen & Hanbury's

double-ended feeder bottle.

The design had a teat at one end and a valve at the other.

This enabled the flow of milk to be constant,

but more importantly, it was easy to clean and, therefore, safer.

Despite this, the old dangerous bottles

sold well into the 20th century.

It may be true that our hidden killers -

the poisonous wallpaper, killer corsets,

dangerous paint, exploding stoves

and infested babies' bottles - damaged the Victorians'

prized ideal of the safe and secure home.

Yet this was an extraordinary age, so full of innovations,

even if there was a price to pay. History, as ever,

is a case of two steps forward and one step back.

And although progress was not without sacrifice -

we still have their legacy. We still live in their houses.

We may think that we're over-regulated today,

that health and safety has gone too far,

but when we think about what things were like

just over 100 years ago,

we should be grateful that the Victorians

not only pioneered new products, but also protections against them.

It makes me wonder what we're oblivious to today.

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