Hidden Killers Of The Victorian Home Page #6

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Drinking bleach or carbolic acid,

for example,

would lead to an agonising death.

The first thing that would happen

would be a burning sensation

in the oesophagus, because

it is directly corrosive

to anything

that it comes in contact with.

And so that would go down into the

stomach and cause abdominal pain.

In the early stages,

if the person survives

and they don't go into renal

failure, they may develop

strictures because of scaring of

the oesophagus, meaning that they're

unable to swallow any food, and

of course, that could prove fatal.

This lack of distinction in bottles

and packaging of toxic

cleaning materials

and dangerous substances didn't just

confuse the Victorian at home.

There were cases where

even professionals made mix-ups

with disastrous consequences.

On one occasion in Bradford,

a chemist mistakenly mixed

arsenic into his lozenge recipe -

killing 12 people

and rendering

a further 78 seriously ill.

And so it was this problem

with the packaging that really

forced legislation to make packages

much more distinct -

different shaped and sized and

coloured bottles and boxes, so that

you couldn't reach for the flour

and pick up the arsenic, for example.

But it wasn't always an accident -

lethal poisons

of all descriptions were

easily and readily available

over the counter.

With this lay a new temptation,

because poisoning could go

undetected.

The Victorian age was

the age of the poisoner -

the rise of arsenic was

to many people a great opportunity.

Previously, if you wanted

to murder somebody, you had to

use your brute strength, you'd have

to stab them or strangle them.

When arsenic became widely available,

there was a lot of comment

in the newspaper saying,

well, women can just slip it

into their husband's tea.

So why wouldn't they?

They were absolutely afraid that

all the women in Britain

would turn poisoner

because why would you

not murder your husband

and go off to be a merry widow?

Why not?

People bought poisons

for things like rat poisoning

and fly papers, so you could easily

just go and buy them

for completely legitimate reasons.

The other reason was

this is a time when life insurance

became available. So you could

take out a life insurance policy

on one of your family members.

And then, if they die,

you could claim the money.

And there's evidence of quite a lot

of unscrupulous people

who took out large policies

before people mysteriously died.

There were many poisons around,

things like arsenic, but probably

the worst and the one that caused

the most awful death was strychnine.

Strychnine could be used

both as a medicine

and in the garden as a pesticide.

A white odourless powder,

it was like so many other items

in the cupboard.

It has very immediate

and unpleasant effects.

First of all, the muscles of the head

and the neck would start to contract

and then spasms would spread

to all the muscles of the body.

The person would start to convulse

and at its worst,

the muscles of the body would be

so contracted that the person

would be resting on just their heels

and their head with their back bowed

in the middle and unable to move.

Death would follow rapidly,

either because of paralysis

of their respiratory muscles,

which meant they couldn't breathe,

or exhaustion following

all these awful convulsions.

Demand had never been higher

and manufacturers had never sold

so many poisonous products.

It would take a long time

for that to change.

It wasn't until just after

the Victorian Age, in 1902,

that the Pharmacy Act required

that bottles of disinfectant

be distinguishable by touch

from bottles in which

ordinary liquids were contained.

In order to find the next hazard,

we must first understand

the temptations on offer

to the middle-class Victorian.

Could this be a hidden killer?

Manufacturers began to woo

a burgeoning mass market.

This was the first age

of mass advertising.

Back in the 1850s and 1860s,

it had been thought ungentlemanly

to advertise.

Now, for the first time, advertising

became powerfully visual -

photography and art were used

to sell goods, advertising agencies

were founded, and celebrities

started to endorse products.

There's an expansion

in print culture.

There are more newspapers,

there are more magazines.

But there are also new technologies

and ways of producing images

and putting them in them.

For example, photographs appear

in magazines from the 1890s onwards.

And this really means advertising

takes on a new visual form

at this point.

And I think it becomes

more persuasive and more powerful.

The power of advertising put

new pressure on Victorians

and would lead to increased risks.

These advertisements

are particularly aimed

at the upper-class

and the middle-class woman.

And what they're trying to say is,

if you don't buy our products,

if you don't use our products,

you will be a failure

as a housewife, as a woman.

So they really

played on insecurities.

And what they did was

they got everyone to buy all kinds

of dangerous substances under

the guise of perfecting your home.

And the perfect Victorian home

wouldn't be complete without

a dangerous new material,

which they inadvertently

welcomed into their homes

in an amazing array of objects.

The man who invented it

was so famous at the time,

a letter bearing just name and city

would get to him.

Mr A Parkes, inventor of Parkesine,

Birmingham. And it got there!

Birmingham, dubbed

"the city of 1,000 inventions",

had become a magnet for scientists

and it was here that Parkes

developed his revolutionary idea.

He took cotton wool,

ordinary cotton wool,

which he combined with acids

and various things,

and he discovered how to convert the

material into a mouldable material

which we today would call plastic.

So we reckon he is the father

of plastics.

We've sort of forgotten about this

great British inventor, haven't we?

I know, he was a great inventor too.

He had something like

90 patents to his name

but he wasn't

a very good businessman,

his company folded

about two years later.

But his idea was so good,

it was picked up in the States

by a guy called Hyatt. And Hyatt

gave it the name celluloid.

And from then on,

we have known it as celluloid.

We've forgotten Parkes, but we all

know celluloid as an early material.

It was the Americans who developed

it into a business success -

and started something

of a revolution.

It wasn't until 1885 that the world's

first really successful

plastic product hit the streets.

And it was something quite unusual -

it was a celluloid collar and cuff.

And there is a sociological reason

for it, of course.

The clerks sitting at those

high desks, writing on their ledgers

all day long, and they wouldn't

be allowed to have scrap paper

for calculations so they made

calculations on their cuffs.

Now they couldn't afford

a clean linen collar and cuff

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