Victorian England looks like a pretty nice place in Victoria, the hit PBS series about the life of the queen who lent her name to much of Britain’s 19th century.
Victorian England looks a whole lot different in Victorian Slum House, a slightly weird but informative new series that launches on PBS Tuesday at 8 p.m. ET (check local listings).
Victorian Slum House might be best called a hybrid between a PBS documentary and the PBS version of reality television.
Several middle-to-upper-class British families from 2016-2017 are placed in replicas of 1860s Victorian slum housing.
For some weeks they then have to live a Victorian slum life, meaning they have to find subsistence work that would have been available to the lowest economic classes 150 years ago.
That work must earn them enough money to cover their rent and food, which was a constant struggle with no guarantees of success.
It’s much closer to Survivor than to Big Brother, with the jauntiness of neither.
The presentation is also a hybrid. We see the families trying to figure out how to earn money, or fit five people into two rooms. In between these scenes a narrator talks about statistics on Victorian housing and reminds us of all the modern-day amenities that were barely a distant dream in the 1860s.
Even for families who could nominally afford a couple of rooms, that didn’t mean much more than a roof. Water was drawn from a communal pump in a courtyard, which is also where bathrooms were located.
It was a sign of relative prosperity to afford a place that had a stove. Not that a stove was nearly as important as it is for most people today, because most slum-dwellers couldn’t afford food that required cooking.
A meal with heated kippers was a celebratory luxury.
The modern families we follow in this series are the Potters and the Birds, all of whom volunteered because they were curious how their own ancestors survived in urban Victorian London.
They quickly learn that the answer is “tenuously,” and there are some reality-show moments of melodrama along the way.
Members of the families who are not working at outside jobs plunge into tasks like assembling matchboxes, the Victorian version of those “Earn big money stuffing envelopes at home!” advertisements.
It turns out they are much trickier to assemble properly than the average bloke might imagine, and the money to be earned from them isn’t big.
But everything helps, which is why pre-teen girls were sent out to Covent market to sell bunches of watercress.
Again, the profit margin was slim, but every penny and shilling counted toward the essential goal of having enough money for Black Monday, the day when the rent collector came around.
If the money was short, the rent collector had other families waiting for your rooms and you could be downsized to the Victorian equivalent of a shelter.
Once you were in that situation, it was a pay-as-you-go world. Food was available, but if you wanted to eat it out of a bowl, you probably had to rent the bowl and the utensil as well.
In any case, Victorian Slum House is not the England of all those PBS costume dramas, or the England of Victoria.
This is the England of Dickens, and a valuable reminder that most of our ancestors did not live in the beautiful parts of the world.
Life was a battle, day to day. And if you needed something extra, like medical attention, there was no such thing as a social safety net.
Victorian Slum House runs for five episodes, each moving a decade forward until we reach the 20th century and the end of the Victorian era.
The series does not spend much time explicitly tying Victorian poverty to modern-day poverty.
But the fact we have largely abandoned the term “slum” doesn’t mean we have eliminated the conditions that spawned it – or that millions of people don’t still fight that day-to-day battle for survival.
That’s the double-edged sword of Victorian Slum House.