If you want to catch a glimpse of both past and future, watch Victorian Slum House on Channel 9 on Tuesday’s at 7:00 p.m.. It is also available for viewing on iPlayer and for download. The program follows a group of twenty-first century people who move into a Victorian-era tenement slum, accurately recreated in London’s East End. Families and individuals must cope with tenement living conditions and the economic realities of the Victorian era. Life in the United States in the 1860s was comparable.
You will recognize many of the tenants of the Republican vision for America in the Victorian era. This is the American they hope to recreate.
Workers are “empowered” to become “entrepreneurs.” That is to say that everyone above the age of seven must work in order to pay the rent and, hopefully, buy some food. Family “entrepreneurs” work up to 16 hours a day folding and pasting cardboard into matchboxes. The average worker could produce 1,000 matchboxes a day, working non-stop with no breaks for non-existent food. This was piece work and 1,000 matchboxes would get enough for approximately a day’s worth of food. This is rather like Right To Work combined with a dismantled OSHA.
Workers had no protection from injury or sickness. In the first episode, one of the twenty-first century male breadwinners is too lame from a day of work at a foundry to return to work. There is no safety net. The children are turned out to sell watercress on the streets in an effort to earn the rent. Workers had to find work every day and families lived day to day.
If anyone falls sick, there is no insurance and no doctor will visit. There is no ER. There is no maternity care. This is Trump Care in practice.
One family is headed by a single-parent. In the first week, the mother miscalculates how many “fancy boxes” (worth more to the buyer) she can successfully make and her family is head over heels in debt within a week, with no prospects for making up the difference. A shocking number of Victorian era women turned to prostitution, either full time or occasionally, for survival for themselves and their families
Another twenty-first century man has a disability. He has lost a leg. His modern prosthetic is replaced with one from the Victorian era. Out of compassion from the program producers, he is given an artificial leg that is better than what he could actually afford.
The program highlights how our ancestors struggled to live and to change the conditions they lived under. It makes it all the harder to understand why working people today seem so eager to return to an era before labor organizations, health, safety, workplace and environmental protections, and decent wages. Next week the program moves from the 1860s to the 1870s.
You can find more information on Victorian Slum House at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07zd454.
Submitted by Michael Pfeifer, WCD Member