The Victorian slum

[gingerboy1912]

Anyone watching. It's on bbc2.

I will be on catchup tomorrow! Looks good, similar to that celeb time travelling programme?

It's good but grim.

I'm on a train but my mum says it's great. Will iplayer tomorrow.

Love, love, love this. They should make school kids watch, from year 5 or so.
I'm crying like a baby now.

Ah that boy wanting biscuits before bed. This is going to be a massive wake up for him!

Those ropes that people who couldn't afford a bed had to pay to sleep over

I watched 10 minutes of this and toed it to watch it today with DS. I would have preferred a documentary rathe than a reenactment show, because no matter how cold/tired/hungry/physically sore etc these guys get during the show, there is never any danger that they will actually starve, lose a limb in a work related accident (no such thing as health and safety), get one of the many debilitating diseases that addled folks in Victorian times and have to continue to work long back breaking hours just for a few coins to feed their families. Or the agony of losing child after child etc.

I've no doubt that the participants will have changed from this experience and I'm sure they felt each hunger pain, each sore muscle, but that has got to be tempered with the knowledge that all will be well once the show wraps up, that it's not their life forever.

FWIW, my dad's childhood was pure Angela's Ashes. He was one of 10 and we've heard all the stories from all the aunts and uncles etc.this was in the 40s and 50s. And there were still slums in the east end of Glasgow in the 1960s.(and probably other cities too). So nothing would have induced me to take part in this show where it was even worse. Ill still watch though as I'm sure it will be really interesting and I do like Victorian history.

I watched this last night. I am wondering just how far they are going with these reality documentaries.

The fact they were happy to send a retired 60 something old (who also had never had a physical job previously) to do an incredibly physical job was a bit for me. I kept thinking he could end up having a heart attack.

The shock to his body must have been immense. That and having no food. (Although I hope off camera they gave him something other wise I reckon he could have been in hospital. Now he's knackered his back and looks thoroughly miserable and in pain most of the time. Really is it worth it for TV program.

Then they've got adults not eating for two days again is it worth pushing people to the brink of collapse to proove a point?

I'm not sure.....

It is a very educational program. But worry they've gone to far for authenticity.

Ooh, going to watch this tonight I think!

Oh wow, this is amazing! My gt gt gt grandmother left Stepney for the Oz goldfields in 1852, but her father was a tailor! Her younger sister left the East end in the 1860s I think it was and moved to Northampton... her mother and eldest sister died in the last cholera outbreak in (I think it was?) 1866

It was OK and I usually love Michael Mosely stuff esp. the medical history one he did which was so fascinating.Pain, Pus and Poison, it was called. I didn't think he was as good in this as when he's on his own. I saw a similar programme last year, I think, with celebs including Tyger DH and Anne W. which I thought was more entertaining.

I'm watching it now and not understanding the money at all

The labourer earned £10 for a day. That's 880 quid in today's money so there's something wrong with the maths

The maths was they earn the modern equivalent of the Victorian wage - so he did A days work for £10 which was just under half the rent for the week - but all foiod was bought in - the kipper were £1,50 - just imagine that 15% of your earnings for a piddly fish :(

And yep. The origin of the hangover - cos if you'd been on the booze that sitting up rope leaning perch was the only thing you could afford.

The rent was £13 wasn't it?

So you'd only work one and a half days to pay for lodgings, that's not right.

I enjoyed it. Was glad they did change the money or never be able work out shillings and pence. Trying say rent is cheap but food is very high.
Thought families could have worked together better surely better company have box and matchbox people in one room with kids chatting keeping warm than own rooms?
Can see single parent having to shack up with rent man! Free rent she pays towards food win win!

Did think kids earning same as grandad selling watercress was far fetched. Surely labourer earned much more than child in those days you woulnt had the cute aympthy vote from shoppers.

arkire I think it was because people were giving pound coins for the water cress rather than the 9p they asked for, and reckon the producers let them keep it since they managed to to cripple the grandad. Because also they never said how they paid and how much the watercress was to buy in.

Andshesgone they were getting paid in modern money. So a day's work was the equivalent of only £10 in today's money.

I really enjoyed this, really interesting. I just can't understand, though, how people kept going back then. 12 hours of backbreaking work to go and hang over a rope and then do it all again. Where was the hope? What was the point?

Read Round About a Pound a Week. It's a study done just pre WWI in London slums. Life there had not changed much from Victorian times. The proportion of income expended on food and housing is huge compared to nowadays. And the sheer number of hours everything took, whether it was walking to your place of employment, the length of the working day, or how long housework took.

Apparently Victorian workers were short from lack of food, but extremely strong. Stronger even than most modern athletes.

Round about a pound a week is a brilliant book isn't it Life. Very interesting too how they had to weigh up better accommodation (and therefore fewer illnesses) and more food. And how the money was divided between being spent on the man, children and woman.

I just can't understand, though, how people kept going back then. 12 hours of backbreaking work to go and hang over a rope and then do it all again. Where was the hope? What was the point?

I think maybe because everyone else was doing the same, and with lack of education they probably didn't think that there was any other option.

I just can't imagine the sheer hardship of watching family members die young, children being orphaned or not actually wanted, watching people fall ill all around you, no human rights as such, alcoholism was rife, domestic violence was rife, no where to wash or keep clean. No hope of being educated enough to learn to read and write, employers exploiting workers. And not having a safe warm place to sleep at night

A book called 'the people of the Abyss' by Jack London is an interesting but grim read. It's an American author who spent a year living in the east end of Victorian London at the turn of the century.

I watched this (I worked near where it's filmed last year and the difference between then and now is mindblowing).

I live in a fairly big (originally there were 8 rooms - I think - from kitchen and scullery in the cellar to bedrooms on the 2nd floor) victorian house built around the time that the show was set (not in london, east england). I know that the people living here at the time would have been very rich, because of certain fancy features, I did not realise the magnitude of difference between them and the average person back then. One pane of glass in a window would have fed a family for ages. Then there's the cast iron balustrade and ceiling rose, huge sash windows & marble fireplaces while people were sleeping on ropes.

Life was pretty grim for poor people in Victorian times, pared down to the basic essentials. Priority number one was a roof over your head, followed by food in your belly. For some people, those two things were all they could ever hope to achieve - and to have achieved them at all against all the odds was something to be proud of.

It was not so very long ago! My paternal grandparents were born in the East End, at the turn of the 20th century, into families of 10 and 12 siblings, living in 2 rooms in a tiny terraced house shared with another family who lived upstairs. There was no bathroom, no hot water, no kitchen (just a very basic scullery), no toilet (just an earth closet privy at the end of the garden).

As recently as the 1950s, my grandparents were still living in the same circumstances, although most of the children had left home by then. My grandmother used to take the family's laundry in an old pram to the local public baths, where she would hand wash everything and put it through a mangle, then have a bath herself (a weekly treat!) before lugging it all back home to hang out to dry. Such a life of drudgery, yet it was the accepted norm at the time.

As recently as the 1970s, I knew people who lived in houses that had no bathroom. Then, in the early 1980s, there was a government grant scheme, providing grants to anyone whose home had no bathroom and/or no hot water, to enable them to pay for installation of a bathroom, usually downstairs and often in a small lean-to extension on the back of the house.

Until the mid 1980s, my own home had no central heating and no heating at all upstairs. In winter, there was ice on the inside of the bedroom windows and I sometimes had to break the ice in the nappy bucket in the bathroom before I could remove the previous day's nappies for washing! We all had chilblains on our feet and used to go to bed wearing pyjamas, socks and a dressing gown! I used to sew and I made fleecy all-in-one sleep outfits for the DCs to wear in bed, over their pyjamas, to keep them warm at night.

In my lifetime, standards of living in the UK have skyrocketed!

I thought the £10 for watercress was unrealistic too. The single parent family would have been better off selling that rather than the fancy boxes.