Bizarre Victorian Jobs You Wouldn't Believe Existed | Boring History for Sleep

Behind the gas lamps, the crinolines, the tea services and the tidy museum cases, the real Victorian city ran on hundreds of trades that have no modern equivalent at all. Ordinary people spent whole working lives doing things nobody thought worth writing down — gathering dog mess off the streets in a bucket because the finest leather in England could not be made without it, wading through the sewers at low tide with a hoe and a lantern strapped to the chest, walking thirty miles a day selling boiled horseflesh on skewers to London's cats, letting leeches drink from their own bare legs in a marsh for a living, sitting alone in the pitch dark of a coal mine at six years old to open a ventilation door, and dipping matches in white phosphorus until the jawbone rotted and glowed in the dark — while the rest of the city went about its business as though none of it were the least bit strange. Because to them, it wasn't. In this video, we drift through a single day and night in London in eighteen fifty-one, the year of the Great Exhibition, and meet the people who kept the greatest city on earth running from underneath. Discover what a pure finder actually collected and why the tanneries paid well for it, what a tosher earned in the sewers and whether any of them really got rich, and what an eight-year-old girl selling watercress at four in the morning told a journalist about her life. We'll also examine the knocker-up who woke a whole street with a pea-shooter, the mudlarks working the falling tide for copper nails, the mountains of ash at King's Cross that were sold to make bricks, the crossing sweeper who sold you a clean path across the road, the cat's meat man and his three hundred thousand customers, the gut girls of Deptford whose wages scandalised the middle class, the climbing boy whose death finally changed the law, the match women who struck in eighteen eighty-eight and what their victory did and did not win, the wallpaper that poisoned quietly for fifty years, the resurrection men and the Act that moved the terror onto the poor, the women who worked the pit brows in trousers and beat Parliament, and the teenage boys in Greenwich whose job title was computer. Slow, calm narration, made to help you fall gently asleep. Resources: The 1888 Matchgirls' Strike – The National Archives Coal mines and the 1842 Royal Commission – UK Parliament Body snatching – UK Parliament Mudlarks: the murky world of London's river scavengers – Royal Museums Greenwich Henry Mayhew brings Victorian London to life – London Museum Flushed away: sewers through history – Science Museum Gut Girls! – Museum of London Archaeology