5 Reasons The Victorian Era Was Utter Insanity | Answers With Joe

so recently i did a video on spring hill jack which is considered the first urban legend and in that video i spent a little bit of time talking about victorian london because it was sort of that time and place that set all the things up that made something like spring hill jack happen but here's the thing the bit about victorian london uh was actually just a small chunk of what was originally in the script because uh you know i just had to cut it for time so i can get to the spring hill jack stuff but you know that's the nature of writing sometimes you gotta kill your babies but i didn't kill it completely i set it aside for a future video i uh put it in a coma but i did that because i find the victorian era absolutely fascinating i've totally fallen down a victorian era rabbit hole it's just the cultural norms at the time the way people live the the new technological innovations and discoveries that they were all just kind of figuring out it just it just all created a very weird time so today i'm going to dust off some of the stuff from that previous video and talk about a few different ways that the victorian era was utter insanity [Music] what we think of as a victorian age began on june 20th 1837 with the coronation of queen victoria and it ended with her death at the beginning of 1901 so basically most of the 1800s it's mostly associated with the united kingdom because obviously she was the queen there but it also corresponds to a lot of stuff that was going on in the united states at the time because we're culturally similar but also this was a time period when the sun didn't set on the british empire so victorianism spread pretty far and wide and this was a time of incredible change new discoveries and technical innovations not just changed the way we saw the world it changed every facet of our lives from medicine transportation to fashion so the victorians were kind of caught between the old world and the new and this mixing of old school superstitions and scientific advancement led to some idiosyncratic cultural norms that seemed baffling today so while the title of this video says five reasons it's kind of five categories of reasons there's actually a lot so let's just let's just get into it number one their homes were death traps okay so victorian interior design was really big on wallpaper big colorful designs covering every inch of the walls especially in their entertaining rooms like their parlors and dens where people would meet and gather it was supposed to start conversations respected artists would actually create wallpaper patterns and then the rich and elites would like clamor to get them be the first to show them off in their homes and green was an especially popular color because it was kind of brand new green and the past had been particularly difficult to get just right it usually came out kind of dull and it faded really quickly but in 1775 a swedish chemist named carl wilhelm sheel created a new type of green that became known as shields green and it was a big success because it was super rich and vibrant and most importantly it stayed that way and with the advancements of industrialization and the victorian era wallpaper got down to a price where the middle class could afford it so shields green found its way into thousands of homes around britain the problem was one of the chemicals that he used to make this particular shade of green was arsenic arsenic that would flake off and get inhaled or ingested or it might just find its way into the vapor that was created from the glue evaporating off the wall and for a while it kind of seemed like a mystery illness people would complain of pain in their throats closing up difficulty swallowing abdominal pain diarrhea vomiting and then they just died and unfortunately these symptoms are very similar to cholera which was rampant through london at the time so that made it particularly hard to diagnose but they did eventually catch on and then next thing you know there are stories all over london of people buying wallpaper and then dying a few months later and believe it or not this made it less popular so arsenic would eventually get phased out of this green color but arsenic wasn't the only thing that you could find in paint that was also lead lead was used in all kinds of paint at the time especially high gloss wood paint so it would find its way into doors and walls and also kids toys lead poisoning could cause anemia leading to sort of a gray power and a loss of energy it would also cause mental problems and a loss of iq in children and in extreme cases it caused what were called burton's lines which is sort of a bluish greenish line that would occur on the gum line and underneath the tongue there's no way to know how many people suffered from lead poisoning it may have just kind of been part of life at the time maybe that's why people look so sad all the time or maybe they were sad because their homes kept catching on fire the victorians were first introduced gas lines into their homes for heating and cooking and lighting the room with gas lamps but like any new technology there were hiccups hiccups like gas fires homes exploding and sometimes people just asphyxiating in their homes later on electricity found its way into homes and electric light bulbs which many of the old people were not fans of such a glare i couldn't have electricity in the house i wouldn't sleep a wink but similarly electrical fires were common people got electrocuted a lot because yeah new technology but maybe the biggest death trap in victorian homes was also seemingly the most innocuous and that's baby bottles yes baby bottles were introduced during this time which was kind of a big deal because a proper victorian woman did not breastfeed expose my bosom in private what am i an animal that job was handed off to wet nurses these are women whose job it was to kind of keep the milk flowing for the aristocratic ladies of the day they were professional breasts basically but then baby bottles came along and did away with all that because now victorian mothers could feed their children themselves without the indignity of their nipples seeing the light of day but the bottles used stoppers made out of cork and rubber both of which were very porous and provided a place for bacteria to hide in this bacteria would then get into the unpasteurized milk the babies would drink it and a lot of them got sick thousands died today of course we know all about sanitizing baby bottles but the reason that we know to do that is because they didn't and we saw what happened the infant mortality rate in general was insanely high like if you've ever wondered why they had so many kids back then they would all have dozens of kids it's because 60 percent of kids in the working class died before the age of five every child born back then was basically a flip of the coin they might make it or they might not so parents didn't really get attached to their kids that much and one way they did that which i find utterly fascinating is that they kind of didn't assign genders to the kids like they basically treated every kid like it was a girl with dresses and long hair this was partly out of practicality so they could use the same clothes over and over again they wouldn't grow out of the dresses quite as fast as they would grow out of pants but also it was a way to sort of detach from the kids like why invest in this kid's individuality if there's a 50 chance they're not gonna make it for example this picture right here this kid that's franklin delano roosevelt in 1884 when he was two years old boys were dressed like this until about the age of seven when they were put in pants for the first time pants were called breeches at the time so this was known as breaching and they would even hold breaching parties to mark the occasion it was like somewhere between a bar mitzvah and a gender reveal party and in a way it was kind of a celebration that this child made it you know that this particular coin flip landed on heads and they didn't die like so many of the others and maybe because there was so much death around number two they were obsessed with death it's been said that the victorians were professional mourners and a lot of that came from queen victoria herself her husband prince albert died in 1861 at only 42 years old and this devastated her she never fully recovered she went into mourning and stayed in mourning for the next 40 years and many people in britain joined her especially the aristocracy it was kind of considered unseemly to stop mourning before the queen did so they just kept mourning along with her they all wore black and then that style of wearing black kind of filtered down to the rest of the population although i did hear that one of the reasons people wore black was because the soot in the smog of london was so thick that it would get on people's clothes so they wore black because it didn't show up as badly on black but anyway yeah with so much death on their mind maybe it's not too much of a surprise that when photography became a thing one of the first things that they pointed their cameras at was dead people it was a type of something called a memento mori or a reminder of death and this is something that goes way back but the victorians were super into it because of course they were but post-modern photographs became really popular because they were really expensive at the time and so people didn't usually get their photographs taken and then when somebody died it was like well here's your last chance and for parents who lost kids that was often the only photo they ever got of them considering there was a 60 mortality rate that's a lot of pictures of dead kids now one thing about photography at the time was that the exposure time on these cameras was really long up to a minute and a half and so it was almost impossible to not move a little bit during that time so most of the pictures were blurry it was also pretty much impossible to get a baby to sit still for that long so most of the clear pictures of babies were dead babies in fact early photographers had stands that they would put their subject's heads on so they wouldn't move during the shot but in many of these postmortem picks where the family members posed with the dead loved one you can tell which one is the dead one because they're the ones that are not blurry whatsoever it's super creepy oh and one example of a memento mori was the long canoe thing that i mentioned in a previous video which by the way i know i'm mispronouncing it just go with me lon canoe was a young girl whose body was found on the side of the river sand in paris and they made a death mask of her and this death mask became like a really popular item in victorian homes they bought them up like crazy it was everywhere yeah i'll put the link to the previous video down below because it's a super fascinating story and michael jackson shows up in it at one point uh but it's just sort of another one of those weird macabre trends that were really popular in the victorian era they also had a lot of superstitions around death like a lot like any minor random thing could mean that your time was up they saw doom in everything just some of them include if a firefly gets into your house someone will die soon if you smell roses when none are around somebody's gonna die if you see an owl in the daytime somebody will die if a sparrow lands on a piano someone in the home will die if a picture falls off the wall someone you know will die opening an umbrella in the house means someone will be murdered there if a bird pecks on your window or crashes into one that means someone has died and if there's a death in your house you're supposed to stop the clock at the time of the death or you'll die yourself pray and cover all the mirrors in the house to prevent the dead person's spirit from hiding there and of course the next reflection seen in the mirror will be the next person to die the body needs to be removed from the house feet first to prevent the spirit from looking back and beckoning another family member to follow and after the funeral procession is left the house is bad luck to lock the door if you see a funeral procession in the street you're supposed to turn your back because facing it is bad luck but if you can't turn around you can hold on to a button that'll fix it and if a dog howls at night while someone in the house is sick that's a bad omen it can be reversed though by reaching under the bed and turning over a shoe obviously number three it was the best of times it was the worst of times that of course was the famous line to charles dickens a tale of two cities which was actually set during the french revolution but the term dickensian became sort of synonymous with poverty in the victorian era because of books like oliver twist as i talked about my spring hill jack video victorians were just obsessed with class structures to the point that like if you were in a lower class and you tried to even talk to somebody in the upper class you could be arrested or fined for that social mobility wasn't really a thing whatever class you were born into you pretty much died in if you were poor you pretty much died poor unless you were lucky enough to have somebody in the upper class kind of take you in and mentor you but this was super rare the reality for most poor people was living in squalid slums working long hours in dangerous factories for pennies a day yet the life expectancy for tradesmen at the beginning of the victorian era was 25 years old for labor it was 22. luckily there were no child labor laws so you could start employing somebody as young as four which they were popular in mines and chimney sweeps because they could fit into places where adults couldn't and yeah if one of your parents died or were sent off to a debtor's prison the kids had to go to work so they could you know provide food for the rest of their siblings and if a kid lost both of his parents he had the option of going to one of the famously nightmarish orphanages or joining a gang of pickpockets that roamed the streets of london which there were many and for the adults that had no place to live you could go to work at one of the victorian workhouses where you could work for up to 12 hours a day and basically indentured servitude in the beginning they were almost a good idea you know they provided shelter and employment for people that didn't have any other place to go but as industrialization sort of took over they began running these for profit and it basically became a form of slavery now there were some efforts made to alleviate the suffering of the homeless and destitute especially considering the brutal london winters so like say if you want to get out of the elements you could go to what's called a penny sit-up where you paid a penny and basically got to sit on a bench for the rest of the night though you weren't supposed to sleep there they actually had monitors that would walk through and kind of tap your skull if you fell asleep because that did not come with the price of admission for that you could pony up another penny and sleep on a two-penny hangover this was literally a rope that you hung over and you could sleep there if you wanted to if you could manage to sleep like that but by morning time the staff would literally come around and just cut the rope and send everybody crashing to the floor don't gotta go home but you can't stay here but if you were lucky enough to have a few more pennies you could go to a four penny coffin these were homeless shelters with rows of wooden boxes that you could sleep in hence the name yeah this sounds terrible but it's a big step up from hanging over a rope and plus a lot of these places would provide blankets and sometimes even tea and bread you know like you're a human being or something but if you were lucky and you survived to an old age you could get a job as a garden hermit yeah you know those ceramic gnomes that people like to put around their yards that used to be an actual job this actually started in the century before the victorian era but yeah like rich people with palatial gardens would basically build a little hermit house they called it a hermitage and they would pay an old man to live there and dress him as a gnome or a druid keep in mind these weren't like the groundskeepers they didn't actually do anything usually they just lived there according to an advertisement reference in 1797 quote the hermit is never to leave the place or hold conversation with anyone for seven years during which he is neither to wash himself or clean himself in any way whatever but is to let his hair and nails both on hands and feet grow as long as nature will permit them again this predated victorian times but it was definitely carried on by victorian aristocrats i do declare you're just nobody unless you have a crazy old homeless man living in your backyard number four they drink their own sewage yeah one of the biggest technological innovations during the victorian era was indoor plumbing specifically toilets this obviously revolutionized how many people live but for a while there it kind of made everybody sicker because london's sewer system at the time was still pretty medieval and it was dominated by trenches and waterways that had been built centuries before the most recent update was from the 17th century where they basically just covered up the fleet in walbrook rivers and then just used those as sewers keep in mind this was 200 years prior but with the population boom that was going on in london and now there's all this toilet water flooding into everything it was just bursting at the seams and it overflowed into the thames the thames of course is the river that london was built around father tim's as it was called it was the way people got in and out of town it was how they imported and exported things and it was their drinking water so yeah there was sewage in their drinking water and this led to cholera outbreak after cholera outbreak in 1832 1848 and 1853 that killed tens of thousands of people and all the while the river was getting more and more polluted and disgusting even legendary scientist michael faraday lobbied to do something about it but the problem is they didn't associate the cholera outbreaks with the sewage in the river because at the time they believed in the miasma theory of disease spreading they believed that the spread of disease was caused by an invisible miasma in the air basically they thought that the smell of the water was more dangerous than the water itself so instead of actually treating the problem in the water they just tried to cover up the smell but there was one doctor who thought there was a better answer and his name was jon snow fine you know nothing jon snow except this jon snow actually knew something why do i do this during the cholera outbreak of 1848 he noticed that the death rates were higher in the areas where the water was provided by two companies and he published a paper that suggested that it was the water supply spreading the disease which went against the current thinking of the day and this paper changed nothing nobody listened to him when cholera broke out again in 1854 snow noticed a cluster of deaths on broad street in soho where people use a communal water pump so he removed the handle of the pump so nobody could use it just to run a test i'm sure the people living on broad street didn't really appreciate having to go somewhere else to find their water but the death stopped and when they investigated the water source they found out that it was right next to a cesspool that had a crack and at the brick and the cesspool was getting into that water supply again he published his results again he was ignored i mean the scientific community was starting to come around on germ theory as opposed to miasma theory but miasma theory is what the general public had been going off of for a long time and this nerd wasn't gonna change that it's like imagine if some scientist today claimed that the germ theory of medicine was wrong and that disease was actually caused by like fluctuations in the quantum field or something we'd all be like what so the river's getting worse and worse color outbreaks left and right and the population was growing and still nothing was being done about this and then 1858 happened june of 1858 was an especially hot month and that combined with some droughts upriver caused the thames to evaporate as the water level went down the concentration of sewage went up and the embankments of the thames became caked with tons and tons of human waste actually not just human waste but also animal waste industrial waste dead animals dead fish all washing up on the side and just putrefying in the sun the smell from literally hundreds of years of human waste just is probably as bad as you can possibly imagine i mean it spread all over london but especially down in the city center right off the thames it was almost impossible to breathe it became known as the great stink of 1858 and at long last something was finally done about this problem and you know why because this building right here that's the houses of parliament and you see that water right next to it that's the thames the lawmakers in parliament literally had to attend meetings holding handkerchiefs to their faces and again they were mostly trying to cover up the smells so they put what was called chloride of lime on their draperies that was kind of an old folk remedy to get the miasma out of the air when that didn't work they just dumped it right into the river which only made it more toxic finally realizing that there was no way around it they passed a bill through in 18 days which was a record at the time they allocated 3 million pounds to this project which would be around 4 billion pounds today and they assigned it to a civil engineer named joseph bazeljet this was one of the biggest public works projects in human history they built 1100 miles of oversized sewers to accommodate for the growing population and it works so well it's still in use in london today and after the new sewer system was complete london never had another caller outbreak again so jon snow was proven right and the miasma theory faded into history and number five they believed there was life on the moon briefly most of the stories in this video relate to britain more than the united states but this one is definitely a u.s thing on august 21st of 1835 an article appeared in the new york sun which was a very brand new newspaper at the time it was only a couple of years old but it referenced something that was published in the edinburgh journal of science which was a very respected scientific journal at the time the article was about a new discovery by sir john herschel now if that name sounds familiar you might recognize william herschel who was john herschel's father william herschel discovered uranus and the herschel space telescope was named after him so yeah his father was a legend of science but john harshall had some accomplishments of his own for one thing he was an early photography pioneer he actually created several of the different processes that were done in the early days of photography in fact he coined the term photography he was also a respected astronomer he discovered several galaxies was the president of the royal astronomical society three different times and in 1883 he took a research trip to south africa to catalog the southern sky and it was there that he saw the eruption of edicarinae which now looks like this 190 years later anyway it was one of the discoveries on that trip that this article in the new york sun was about and that discovery was life on the moon not just life but a whole civilization of different types of creatures including giant birds unicorns tailless beavers that stood as tall as humans one horned buffalo furry-tailed giraffes and a race of fur-covered winged humans building temples across the moon's surface he even named this species vespertillo homo yeah that means batman and apparently he was able to see all this stuff where other people couldn't because he was using a telescope an immense telescope of an entirely new principle as it was saying in the sun so this was actually a series of six articles that appeared over the next couple of months and the public went crazy for it it was super popular not only in the us it went wild all around the world sales of the new york sun went through the roof and they quickly became one of the most popular newspapers in the country you know this was the early days of mass communication thanks to the telegram things could spread all around the world faster than ever before this was kind of the first thing to ever go viral this was a time of new scientific discoveries every other week there was some new groundbreaking technology electricity galvanism steam engines and now one of the most respected astronomers of all time is saying that there is a civilization of batman on the moon yeah astute scientific observers of this channel probably have already figured this out but it wasn't true it was it was all made up after the sixth article was posted the sun admitted that the whole thing was a hoax just an entertainment to sell newspapers and uh it definitely did that and believe it or not people weren't even mad about it they all just kind of accepted it as the joke that it was and laughed along with it in fact the sun printed uh some lithographs of illustrations of what these creatures might look like and people bought them up in droves yeah even john herschel appreciated the joke at first yeah apparently 10 years later after being asked for the 5 millionth time about the moon people he didn't think it was so funny anymore so in 1840 a reporter named richard adams locke came out as the author of these articles and he claimed to have done it well to sell newspapers obviously but also to sort of satirize some of the more outlandish scientific claims of the day one example from 1824 was a professor at munich university who claimed to have found evidence of a civilization on the moon in his paper titled discovery of many distinct traces of lunar inhabitants especially of one of their colossal buildings another person he was apparently satirizing was reverend thomas dick who had computed that the solar system contained 21.9 trillion inhabitants including 4.2 billion on the moon this whole event became known as the great moon hoax of 1835 and it's considered by many to be the greatest hoax of all time so yeah during a time of technological revolution specifically communication technology a media company published fake articles in order to make money this sounds familiar and i think maybe this is why i'm so fascinated with this time period because there are a lot of parallels between now and then i mean again we think of today as a time of massive change but look at how life was before and after the victorian period like i mentioned toilets earlier before the victorian age people did their business in bedpans and bathed in washtubs in their bedrooms the victorians created the entire concept of a bathroom there was an entire industry around ice because that was the only way to keep food from spoiling by the end electric refrigeration was common travel was basically something only rich people could do and the fastest you could get anywhere was by horse by 1900s trains spanned continents and there were cars on the road interior lighting was only done by candlelight and oil lamps kitchens were basically rooms built around a wood-fired oven or stove that you had to keep feeding with fuel so much of life before gas stoves was arranged around storing and preparing food afterward it was just a thing you scheduled into your day and think about music for all of human history before the invention of sound recording the only way to experience music was to be physically in front of somebody playing it so fancy houses had parlor rooms arranged around pianos and it was important for somebody in the house to be able to play music for family entertainment when guests came over but then once victrolas came out parlors were centered around them they were like the first entertainment center so much of how we live today and how we understand the world got its start in the victorian era everything changed on a very fundamental level so all this crazy that happened during the victorian era it was basically the birth pangs of the industrial world and now today we're experiencing a new technological revolution that's changing everything about how we live and work i mean like look at what i'm doing youtuber that is a job is only like barely over a decade old we are in a period of transition just like the victorian age and let's be honest with ourselves it's getting kind of weird kids eating tide pods for fake internet points people eating sheep dewormer for a disease that we have a vaccine for i'm pretty sure people in the future are going to look back at this time period with a giant wtf as well you know just like the victorian era was the birth pangs of the industrialized world maybe we're currently experiencing the birth pangs of the information world but hey at least we're not drinking our own poop all right so let's get serious for a second you know we got all these modern conveniences in our kitchens and what what are you doing you getting fast food eating frozen dinners come on stop doing that to yourself you should check out hellofresh hellofresh delivers fully stocked meal kits right to your home and let me tell you why this is better than going to the store first of all it saves time second of all a lot of the ingredients are bought direct from farmers so it's 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hellofresh is offering 14 free meals if you go to hellofresh.com and enter joescott14 at the promo code at checkout by the way just to give you an idea of how much food that is i rarely can eat all of it in one sitting i usually get two meals out of each one of these so for me anyway it's more like 28 meals this is this is a lot of food and they're even covering shipping so you got nothing to lose so yeah if you've never done it it's a whole lot of food you'll like it just give it a try hellofresh.com and our joesgot14 the link is down below big thanks to hellofresh for supporting this video and a huge shout out to the answer files on patreon and the youtube members that are helping to keep this channel afloat i got some new members i want to shout out real quick we got daniel jones glenn bell melissa big mac missing shoe films uh jeffrey olson jorge antonio san martin pina francisco abreu liam fisher rob dragon adam and peasy space i think i got that right thank you guys so much if you would like to get early access to videos and access to uh exclusive live streams and whatnot just click the little join button right down below this video on your computer and you're good to go please do like and share this video if you liked it if this is your first time here google thinks you might like this one too so go check it out see if you like it or you can look at any of these others that have my face on down here and if you do enjoy them i invite you to subscribe i come back with videos every monday all right guys i hope you enjoyed that i find this totally fascinating so uh you might see something about this again there's actually more that didn't wind up in this video like i said i fell down a giant victorian era rabbit hole but anyway thank you guys for watching now go out there have an eye opening rest of the week stay safe and i'll see you next monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

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Id: 3IDN9gTAtjg

Length: 27min 40sec (1660 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 13 2021