Imagine it's the middle of the 19th

century and you're a member of the

emerging middle class enjoying a bit of

downtime. You might decide to read the

newspaper, the tick- tock doom scrolling

of its day. But rather than experiencing

relaxation, you're bombarded with death

and destruction. Color outbreak in

London, 20,000 British dead at the siege

of Sevastapole, mutiny in India, and

that's just the 1850s. Now, that's

enough news for one day, you might

think, and you decide to close your

newspaper and enjoy something a bit more

wholesome, like the interior of your

lovely middle class home. Perhaps you'll

admire your fine new wallpaper, or try

on your new hat, or spend some time with

the weird menagerie of taxiderermy

animal specimens you've decided to put

in your drawing room for some reason.

But these things are not the stress

relieving creature comforts you think

they are. They might just be the death

of you. Your beloved safe space is

packed with things that are out to get

you. And I'm not talking about knife

wielding servants, although such murders

certainly did happen. Instead, I'm

talking about mundane objects, the

mixture of practical and luxury items

that make a house a home. Now, home

wasn't always home in the way we think

of it today. We tend to think of our

homes as sanctuaries in which we can

escape the outside world and close the

door on the carnage of stuff that causes

such stress and strain on our daily

lives. But up until the middle of the

19th century, this really wasn't the

case. Unless you're a member of the

upper classes, there would be little

divide between your work life and your

home life. You might sleep and eat at

home, but you conduct business there,

too, like looking over your accounts or

sharpening your plowshare. But this

changed in the Victorian period as an

evolving economy ushered in a growing

middle class. To quote the writer Kate

Somerscale, the English home closed up

and darkened over the 1850s. The cult of

domesticity matched by a cult of

privacy. As long as you weren't poor,

your home became a vital refuge. What's

more, it became an extension of your own

personality. It was a representation of

your own self and your own standing in

life. that these homes were still full

of hidden killers. Things that could

maim you, poison you, and even take your

life.

Let's start with some of the more

obvious dangers, the tangible dangers

that you could actually see. Perhaps the

most obvious danger is the staircase. In

posher Victorian homes, staircases were

both practical and decorative. They

provided a convenient connection between

levels, but they also offered a striking

visual centerpiece to wow your guests

with. In larger homes, the main stairs

would be carefully designed and

therefore fairly safe. They typically be

broad and easy to navigate, minimizing

the risk of falls. But other staircases

would not be placed front and center in

this way. Those were hidden away either

in servants quarters or just in another

part of the house. The same care and

attention was not afforded to these

secondary staircases. These were often

steep and narrow. The steps may be

irregular and the tread of the stair

might be uneven. This meant that moving

up and down this kind of staircase

became a challenging puzzle as people

risked life and limb just to move

between floors. Victorians certainly

knew that stairs were dangerous. As

early as 1820, the architect Peter

Nicholson outlined a range of guidelines

for crafting safe staircases. Nicholson

stated that the gradient of the

staircase should be somewhere between 30

and 35° and there should not be more

than 3.7 m between each landing. The

step of each stair was known as the

going and must be twice as broad as its

height or rise. All this should have

made staircases safe in Victorian

Britain. But when the staircase was

hidden away, these rules were often

ignored. This meant lots of broken limbs

or if you really unlucky, a broken neck.

Other visible dangers were the new

appliances that emerged during the

Victorian period. Things like gas stoves

began to appear in homes from the 1850s

onwards and revolutionized domestic

cooking. Gas lamps had first appeared on

London streets as early as 1807, but by

the Victorian era, they were appearing

inside homes, too. Gas lighting has a

very different connotation nowadays, but

back in the 19th century, it was just a

way to illuminate the home, albeit quite

a dangerous one. The whole point of gas

was that it was combustible and so could

generate the energy needed to heat and

light a home. But combustibility is not

always a good thing. When gas appliances

malfunctioned, they could swiftly cause

a deadly fire or explosion. Just like

with stairs, Victorians knew that the

gas could be highly dangerous. The great

fire of Newcastle and Gates Head in 1854

may have been started by a buildup of

gas and killed 53 people and left

hundreds injured across both towns. But

despite this knowledge, dangerous stoves

continue to claim lives in Victorian

homes. A new story from 1889 tells of a

wife and three little ones cremated at

home after gas cooked stove exploded.

The article speaks of how the whole

family was quote roasted in the flames

when their gas stove turned into a

rudimentary bomb. The story comes from

Pennsylvania in the US, but reflects the

dangers found in British homes, too. Of

course, the gas didn't need to explode

to be deadly. The coal gas used in

heating and lighting could produce

carbon monoxide as well as hydrogen and

methane. Carbon monoxide has no smell

and so a leak is difficult to detect.

But if that carbon monoxide is leaked

into the home, inhabitants might become

tired and dizzy before quickly losing

consciousness and then dying. Later in

the century, electric lighting began to

appear in homes that could afford it,

and this brought hazards of its own. As

this was the state-of-the-art

technology, it could be disturbingly

volatile. And what's more, people really

didn't fully understand the risks. They

might overload the circuits in their own

home, leading to overheating and deadly

fires. Alternatively, they might touch

an exposed wire and receive a fatal

shock. Rubber and even cotton or linen

might be used as insulation. This would

either be ineffective or actively

dangerous, as the insulation itself

could catch fire. There were also no

circuit breakers in the system and so no

protection against power surges. The

third marquee of Salsbury seems to have

been astonishingly confident in his own

experiments with alternating current

electricity. One of his staff remarked,

"The marquee would scarcely believe it

was possible to get an electric shock

until he got one himself." The marquee

did survive his accident, but not

everyone was so lucky. An experiment the

Marky conducted in 1881 delivered a

massive electric shock to one of his

gardeners who died. But all those new

forms of lighting, at least when they

weren't killing people, were making the

home a whole lot brighter. And this

would influence the interior decor and

design of the home as the century

progressed. It was now much easier to

see and appreciate the wallpaper in your

home. And so there was a demand for new

and exciting patterns that took full

advantage of this. Artists and designers

like William Morris became famous for

the intricate patterning and complex

imagery of their work. The arts and

crafts movement rejected the poor

quality of mass production and instead

turned everyday home furnishings into

works of art. To achieve this, they

worked with an increasingly

sophisticated color palette. Dramatic

reds and burgundies, deep browns and

blues, and plenty of shades of green.

But this green caused a bit of a

problem. One of the most sought-after

pigments was Shield's green developed by

Carl William Schill in the 1770s. And if

you've seen my video on the gas chamber

execution, you may already have heard of

this guy. You might remember that he

died of kidney failure aged just 43

after a career spent working with

dangerous chemicals. Shield developed

his green using a compound called acidic

copper arsenite. And you can't make

copper arsenite without arsenic.

Nowadays, of course, just the word

arsenic is enough to set alarm bells

ringing. But that's because we're living

in a post Agatha Christie world, and we

know how effective arsenic is at killing

wealthy people on trains. But back in

the 19th century, arsenic was far less

well understood. While pure arsenic was

a known poison, shields green was an

arsenic compound, and so it was assumed

to be safe. But it was not safe. In the

early 1860s, the dangers of Shill's

green caused something of a panic. It

all began when 19-year-old Matilda

Shurer came down with a disturbing

illness. To quote the historian Allison

Matthews David, the whites of her eyes

turned green, and she told her doctor

that everything she looked at was green.

Matilda died with an expression of great

anxiety. So, Shield's green was

poisonous and it was covering the walls

of every middle to upper class home in

Europe. But was the panic really

justified? Well, poor old Matilda had

not ingested the poison just by standing

too close to some pretty wallpaper.

Instead, she had the rather unfortunate

sounding job title of fluffer. In

Victorian times, this was a more

innocent occupation than it might be

today. Basically, she was employed to

dust artificial leaves with a green

powder containing shields green. So, she

was breathing lungfuls of the stuff

every working hour, every working day

over quite a long period of time. So,

Matilda's tragic death can be explained

by overexposure to Shaw's green and dust

form. But did that really mean that

people with the pigment in their drawing

rooms and parlors were safe? Not

necessarily. As the years went by, the

wallpaper became even more dangerous

because the pigment gradually began to

break down as it was exposed to sunlight

and air. The paper itself began to

flake, releasing tiny particles of

arsenic, which could then be ingested.

There were also other ways for arsenic

to migrate from the wallpaper to the

lungs. Fungus and mold often grew on the

walls of Victorian homes, releasing

arsenic laced spores onto the home's

interior. Once breathed in, this could

cause some serious illness. The World

Health Organization describes the

symptoms of arsenic poisoning as

vomiting, abdominal pain, and diarrhea.

These are followed by numbness and

tingling of the extremities, muscle

cramping, and death in extreme cases.

So, this is pretty nasty stuff. And yet,

Shields Green was used in everything

from book printing to food production.

That's right. It was used as green dye

in food coloring, especially in desserts

like bl. The green pigment was also used

for painting children's toys until the

dangers were finally understood and the

diet was phased out. After its toxicity

became common knowledge, the pigment was

still used in other applications though,

right up until the 1930s. The main

application was an insecttoide, which

probably tells you everything you need

to know. But Shill's green wasn't the

only toxic thing about children's toys

in the Victorian era. And often these

toys were painted and colored with

leadbased paint. As this paint began to

flake off after repeated use, it could

easily be ingested by the child. The

tendency of children to put toys in

their mouths also helped to increase the

concentration of lead in their bodies.

The environmental chemist Andy Mayhug

believes that this toxicity was found in

basically every children's toy during

the 19th century. Anything that was

colored or pigmented would have had high

levels of a toxic metal in it. Even if

it was white, it wasn't safe. There were

large levels of lead, even in white

painted toys. Across Victorian Britain

and elsewhere in the world, children

became sick from lead poisoning. Mild

cases could cause children to feel

irritable and to lose their memory.

Constipation and pain in the stomach

were common, too. In higher doses, lead

could cause severe problems with the

nervous system, resulting in seizures

and even death. As children's bodies and

brains are less developed than those of

adults, they were also way more

susceptible to these complaints.

Poisoning would typically show in the

first lines of blue or gray coloring

across the base of the gums. These were

first identified by Dr. Henry Burton in

1840 and were referred to as Burton's

lines. A young victim named Charlotte

Rafity displayed these lines and

suffered severe convulsions until she

eventually died. Maryanne Toller also

lost her life to lead poisoning and she

was described as quote a girl of 17 who

never had a fit in her life. Three times

she became ill and had to leave work in

the factory before she was 19. She

showed symptoms of lead poisoning, had

fits, fro at the mouth and died. In

fact, lead paint was found right across

the Victorian home, not just in

children's toys. The paint was still

being used in British homes long after

it was banned elsewhere. Still appearing

right up until the 1970s. Now, I know

sometimes when I'm speaking out loud, I

can get the dates wrong, but let me

confirm that's the 1970s,

not the 1870s.

60 years ago, there were lead paint in

our houses. That's nuts. Anyway, as Dr.

Susanna Lipkcom says, "In the 1920s,

white lead was banned in indoor paint

products in Sweden, Czechoslovakia,

Austria, Poland, Spain, Finland, and

Norway, but not Britain. Amazingly, it

wasn't until the 1970s, more than 100

years after the problem had been

identified, that the British government

controlled the lead content of household

paint. This is particularly odd, as it

wasn't exactly unknown that lead was a

toxic metal. Victorians were well aware

of what it could lead to. So why did

they keep using it, especially in

children's toys? Well, the main reason

was simply that no one joined the dots

on all those deaths. Victorians weren't

going to let their children play with a

chunk of pure lead. But would they let

them play with a toy covered in lead

based paint instead? Sure, go for it.

Even if they weren't playing with lead

encrusted toys, children could find

plenty of other ways to get themselves

into trouble around the house. often

almost as soon as they were born. The

Victorian era was famous for its

oversensitivity to moral outrage and

scandal. While some aspects of Victorian

pearl clutching are exaggerated, others

are certainly true. Queen Victoria was

wellknown for her disgust towards

children, including her own children.

And when it came to breastfeeding,

Victoria simply wasn't having it. In

fact, it wasn't just the Queen who found

herself disgusted by the idea of doing

something that mammals have been doing

for millions of years. Plenty of other

respectable Victorian women felt just

the same. The writer Jane Ellen Pantton

offered her own parenting advice to

Victorian women. Quote, "I myself know

of no greater misery than nursing a

child. Let no mother condemn herself to

be a common or ordinary cow unless she

has a real desire to nurse." So rather

than do it themselves or employ a wet

nurse, which would of course be just as

beastly, many women opted to bottlefeed

their babies. Now, there's nothing

inherently wrong with this, except that

the Victorian baby bottles tended to be

really nasty, bacteriarriddidden

contraptions that could do some serious

harm. The idea of steam cleaning had

been around since the late 17th century.

In the 1860s, Louis Pastor and Joseph

Listister made big steps towards

understanding the dangers of bacteria

and counteracting these dangers. But

even late in the 19th century,

sterilization was mainly reserved for

medical instruments. Babies bottles

tended to just be washed in the regular

way. This meant that bacteria and

microbes could easily collect in the

bottle's nooks and crannies, potentially

putting babies at risk. While things

like lead paint in children's toys and

arsenic in the wallpaper sounding like

the real killers here, the bacteria was

actually a huge problem. Infant

mortality declined significantly during

the 19th century, but infant death

figures were still astronomical compared

to what we would expect today. For every

1,000 babies born in 1800, more than 329

would be dead before 1805. That's very

close to one in three not reaching their

fifth birthday. By the end of the

century, this figure would have been

slashed, but was still above 229 infant

deaths for every 1,000 live births. As a

comparison, the figure in 2020 was four.

While poisonous chemicals certainly

contributed to this high death rate, the

biggest killer was infection. More than

half of the under fives who died in the

19th century lost their lives to a

bacterial infection and often this

infection came from the baby's bottle.

Another source of fatal illness in the

Victorian home came from a rather more

macab place. The Victorian era was a

golden age for biology and naturalism.

In the early part of the century,

naturalists like William Buckland and

Gideon Mantle began discovering and

describing the great creatures that

walked our earth millions of years ago.

By 1842, Sir Richard Owen had coined the

term dinosaur for the first time.

Charles Darwin had been working as a

naturalist and biologist since the early

1830s, and in 1859, he published his

book on the origin of species. Suddenly,

cuttingedge scientific discoveries were

available to anyone with a reasonable

education and decent reading level. This

meant that Victorian Britain was

suddenly full of amateur naturalists and

people with a casual interest in

biology. These people were not likely to

go out there and discover a new species,

but they could do the next best thing

and fill their homes with the eerie

forms of animals that had been killed,

preserved, and stuffed. Taxiderermy

really took off in the 19th century. But

this was actually a pretty hazardous

enterprise and not just for the animal

getting stuffed. Taxidermists used

things like arsenic soap prevent

decomposition and relied on mercury

chloride, also known as calaml, to treat

the skins. These chemicals put the

taxiderermists themselves at immense

risk. But even after the process was

completed, the danger remained. Arsenic

and calam could become volatile,

entering the air and poisoning anyone

who came into contact with it. Even

today, many of these items remain highly

dangerous. In 2015, Daniel Burke of the

Fine Art Restoration Company wrote an

article about the tax dummy body of a

sheep that was brought into the studio.

The sheep had been sitting proud of

place in the owner's home for years with

no protective covering. The team tested

the sheep in the laboratory and found

the levels of arsenic was still

incredibly high. Even in the 21st

century, taxi animals could still be

taken revenge on humanity from far

beyond the grave. And that's before we

get to things that you might actually

wear around the house, like corsets,

which have been around for centuries.

But the Victorian obsession with the

perfect body shape brought them back

into fashion in a big way in the 19th

century. These garments were never

comfortable and they weren't designed to

be. But some women took their pursuit of

fashion to serious extremes. Corsets

were applied so tightly that they

actually distorted the bones of the

wearer and pressed on internal organs

like the liver and stomach. Indentations

were even found on the livers of

deceased women where the corset had

pressed the ribs of the wearer down into

the tissue. During pregnancy, corsets

were even more dangerous and put the

wearer's unborn children at risk. The

risk continued after pregnancy, too.

Once the pelvic floor muscles had been

weakened by childbirth, the pressure of

the corset could do some pretty horrible

things to the body. Horrifying

conditions like a prolapsed uterus were

not unheard of. And while women

certainly had the raw end of the deal

when it came to clothing, men's clothing

could be deadly, too. Fashionable men's

hats were produced by the process of

carroting, which involved treating

animal pelts with mercuric nitrate.

Working with mercury caused severe

neurological conditions in professional

hat makers, giving rise to the

expression mad as a hatter. Residual

mercury could remain in the hat after it

was complete. And if you were exposed to

too much mercury, you could experience

tremors and problems with coordination.

Headaches, insomnia, and cognitive

issues were also common as the mercury

damaged your central nervous system.

Vintage hats can still pose dangers to

this day. Writing for Psychology Today

in 2012, Professor Paul De Blanc offered

this warning. Persons who collect

antique hats, for example, can be

exposed to residual mercury in the felt,

a threat that curities of museum-based

costume collectors have to take

seriously. But we're not out of the

woods yet. Even if you weren't killed by

your furniture, your stove, your

clothes, or your stuffed animals, there

was still plenty more hazards to avoid.

You might even ingest this material on

purpose, although you almost certainly

wouldn't have realized what you were

putting into your body. We've already

seen how sweet makers would sometimes

put shields green in their treats,

making them look nice and appetizing,

but also making them deadly. But even if

you avoided suspiciously green-l

lookinging desserts, something else

could still get you. Take bread for

example. This ubiquitous doughy food

stuff is a staple of the British kitchen

and dining room, but Victorian bread

could be quite deadly. White bread is

traditionally associated with luxury and

wealth, so it would fetch a higher

price. But if the baker bleaches their

flour with the aluminium compound alum,

then it would look like white bread, but

will be quite a lot cheaper to produce.

In higher concentrations, alum can cause

chemical burns to the mouth and throat.

Most Victorians wouldn't have been

consuming enough alum to experience

this, but it's still a dangerous

additive. Another staple of the dinner

table is milk. But in a world before

reliable refrigeration, milk has a habit

of going off. No problem though. We can

just add borassic acid to the milk. The

borassic acid actually purifies the

milk, turning spoiled milk into

something fresh and ready to drink. Only

it doesn't do that. Of course, it

doesn't do that. It simply masks the

smell of milk on the turn. So, not only

are you drinking nasty gonoff milk,

you're also ingesting a poison. Lucky

you. People often experienced pain in

their stomach and sometimes diarrhea,

surprise, surprise, from drinking this

baric acid cocktail. For younger

children, the acid could severely affect

their nervous systems and even cause

death. This is probably one of the

things that added to that sky-high

infant mortality rate across the

century. Now, after everything we've

said, it's important to note that back

in Victorian times, it was quite popular

to view history as a progression, a

process of evolution from the bad old

days to the civilized present. This view

is commonly known as wig history, and it

held a lot of sway in the 19th century.

And all of this kind of makes sense.

Britain had gone from a feudal society

through a grim process of civil war to

something approaching a constitutional

monarchy in just a few short centuries.

Technology made life much easier than it

had been before. The age of

enlightenment had introduced new ideas

of science and philosophy that put an

end to the superstitions of bygone ages.

It's easy to imagine in this world that

there's a kind of telos of history where

everything is moving towards refinement

and enlightenment and the right kind of

future. So if you were living through

this era, it would be easy to see

history as something with a telos, which

moved from [music] kind of disorder and

chaos and primitivism into something

refined and orderly and good. But

there's a reason why weak history is

unpopular these days, and that's because

in many ways, it's just not true. The

fact that you had funky wallpaper and

gas lights with which to see it might

have made you feel superior to your

Jordan for pairs. But if that wallpaper

and lighting is going to kill you, is it

really any better than just a dark room

and a fireplace? The fact that your

child had loads of toys to play with

instead of, say, a stick might have

added to this sense of superiority. But

if your science isn't developed enough

to understand the danger of pumping an

infant full of arsenic and lead, are you

really so much more civilized? So, the

Victorian home was certainly more

technologically advanced than a Georgian

home, but it wasn't necessarily any

safer. Old dangers had gone and new ones

had taken their place, and a similar

process of replacement would take place

as the Victorian age shifted into the

20th century. Home refrigerators meant

no more poisonous baracic acid in your

milk, but also meant bringing toxic

gases like ammonia, methyl chloride, and

sulfur dioxide into your house. New fire

extinguishers might make your home feel

a little safer. But if that fire

extinguisher is made with radium, then

it carries dangers of its own. So even

as you left the Victorian era behind,

your beloved home still had many ways to

kill you. You're probably safer just

reading your newspaper, just as long as

you stayed away from the stove and the

wallpaper.