'1900' makes you grateful for 2000

Published: Friday, June 09, 2000


We're not merely talking no phone, few lights, no motor car precious little luxury. Living in 1900 Victorian England meant brushing your teeth with a pig-bristle brush dipped in salt or bicarbonate of soda and, for the women, making their own sanitary rags. (This was 30 years before the tampon.)

It meant lots of boiled meat for dinner, cooking on a stove that rarely generated sufficient heat and constant, difficult housecleaning.

Some 400 families applied to live in the house in southeast London. They expressed a variety of reasons, from a desire to ''ease down the tempo of modern life'' to wanting to show the children just how cushy life in the year 2000 truly is.

The family chosen for this experiment, the Bowlers, won on the strength of mother/wife Joyce, who is particularly keen to achieve ''a true, accurate experience.'' Her family husband Paul, 17-year-old Kathryn, 11-year-old twins Hilary and Ruth and 9-year-old Joe agree to go along.

Over the next four Mondays on PBS, you can see how they fared. But as you might imagine, the answer for the most part is: not well. (After all, no one ever sang, ''Tonight we're gonna party like it's 1899.'')

Giving up fast food, modern appliances and even basic products such as shampoo proves to be unnerving. Three days into their three months, the family members particularly Joyce are haggard, dirty and on edge. They stare into the cameras with frightened Blair Witch-style looks on their faces and pray for pizza.

And why not? To live like it's 1900, dishes had to be washed in soda crystals and boiling water, drying out the dishwasher's skin almost overnight. Bed sheets and clothes needed to be boiled. Because of that, 2,000 English children died from burns and scalds in 1900, we're told. In 1999, the number was 11.

Photographs were processed in a cyanide solution, paint had high lead content, wallpaper was laced with high levels of arsenic. Dental fillings were made with hot molten lead.

No wonder opium- and cocaine-based medicines were available over the counter.

Not everything was hardship. The family hires household help, goes swimming and buys a bicycle all within the parameters of what was available in 1900. The children come up with clever ways to entertain themselves.

But mental stimulation is hard to find.

''I know exactly how it feels to be stuck in a Victorian, boring mind-numbingly boring existence,'' Joyce says at one point.

Through the four weeks of shows, the story of the Victorian era is told in such a stylized way, and the Bowlers turn out to be such perfect guinea pigs, that viewers will find themselves educated, entertained and grateful for every modern convenience.

At the end of each episode, viewers are invited to learn more by visiting pbs.org on the World Wide Web. Forget visiting. You'll be too busy hugging your TV, phone and computer.

