The Weird Household Gadgets Victorian Housewives Wasted Money On | History for Sleep

Victorian London in the 1880s was a city of nearly four million people under a winter pall of coal smoke, where new terraced suburbs such as Camberwell and Walworth housed clerks and their families, crossing sweepers cleared horse dung from the streets, door-to-door salesmen and hawkers worked every residential road, and gaslight, paraffin lamps and arsenic-green wallpaper filled the middle-class home. Most of that world has disappeared: the kitchen range, the scullery copper and the maid-of-all-work sleeping beside the fire are now found only in museums.Here the video looks closely at the Victorian middle-class household and the patent gadgets sold to run it, from rotary knife cleaners and mangles to carpet sweepers, washing machines and apple parers. It covers the daily labour of domestic servants, many of them young girls earning a few pounds a year, who black-leaded the range, whitened the front step with hearthstone and scoured knives with brick dust. It explores the household budget of a clerk's family, the cost of coal and soap, and the hire purchase or "easy payment" system that let families buy goods by weekly instalments at a far higher total price. It also touches on household manuals, respectability, and the 1882 Married Women's Property Act that changed a wife's legal position over money and debt.In 1884 London hosted the International Health Exhibition in South Kensington, which displayed sanitary inventions, model kitchens, cooking ranges and domestic appliances and drew more than four million visitors. It captured the late Victorian faith that a well-equipped home could be healthier, cleaner and more modern.Discover what running a home in 1880s London truly demanded, beyond the polished parlour and the advertisements that promised a house that ran itself.