10 Victorian Jobs That Were Secretly a Death Sentence

Ten ordinary Victorian jobs, counted down from ten to one, each one taking a working man or woman into the work, the reason they took it, and plainly what it did to them. It starts in a cotton card room, where the dust that gave workers brown lung hung in the air for ten hours a day even after the Ten Hours Act of 1847. It goes underground with the railway navvies of the Woodhead tunnel, where thirty-two men died, and down into the London sewers with the toshers, who hunted for coins. Further on come the pottery dippers with their bare hands in lead glaze, the hatters, the white-lead workers, the sweeps, the flower makers, the fork grinders and the match girls with their phossy jaw. Each job answered a real need, and each one put its cost in lungs, blood, skin or bone. The film asks how that cost stayed hidden, and why the finished goods always arrived clean, folded and far from the person who paid for them.