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I would love to see the opposite of this video, where bluejay tries to explain modern times to a victorian guy who has been body-swapped out of his life and into alex's old body
You forgot to mention the chimney boys had “chasers”. They would follow the chimney cleaner with needles or at times even lit candles to keep them moving all day. Then they could just claim to be stuck for 10 minutes to catch a break they had to move till they couldn’t any more! Delightful isn’t it!
I can assure you theres plenty already doing that. Only difference is in the future standards and a new generation will be able to fully agree at how weird the way things are globally are weird.
well, look at average life expectancy. A person born in 1900 could expect to live to about 55 on average. Now the average is over 80 (lower in America despite spending HUGE amounts on for-profit healthcare, with its frightening eating habits aligned with its patchy health care access, grotesquely expensive medicine prices, massive gun murder rate and horrible drug abuse problems) That is about 40% increase in 120 years. I saw a projection that a baby girl born in the UK last year has a 30-50% chance of living to be 100. Anyone who wants to live in a time/place where they are old at 30 and venerable at 50 needs their head examined.
@@occamraiserthat rise in lifespan is largely based upon the precipitous decline in child mortality. For those that made it to 18 and weren’t destitute, they had lifespans up to their 80s and commonly into their 60s.
I think it's worth mentioning that 4 pennies would've been a good wage, but that you also needed to be able to buy a few pints of gin or other hard liquor (to avoid the disease) and bread, so that would be most of your wages gone before you got to bed time
@@ahuman32478 You're kidding right? Compared to 150 years ago? Even minimum wage workers live like kings. Hell, even the homeless in America live the same as the middle class from back then. It is nearly impossible to starve to death in a 1st world nation these days, especially with all the government programs to help people who don't make enough money. People REALLY do not understand just how good they have it in this world living at this time in human history. Congrats, you got to avoid all the torture, executions, pillaging, exploitation, famines, feudalism & all manner of horrible things that have graced human history until recently. Think of it like this, this lifestyle we're living right now is something that has only been possible in the past 80 years. 10,000 years of written human history & hundreds of thousands of years of wandering the Earth as cavepeople and you got to live in the first timeframe in human history where there are actually human rights & easy living compared to before.
I can't wait for when you go over the ways people died in the Victorian Era. From falling from stairs that weren't aligned probably/ too steep and narrow. To boiling themselves to death in the bathtub.
@@abloodcorpse3318 The bathtubs at the time had a section where you would put wood under it and light it to heat up the tub... the thing is though hot metal is very painful to touch, so you would literally get to a point where you can't move because the metal is to hot to touch so you end up get boiled alive.
Arsenic in your walls, Lead on your dolls, Corsets on your torsoes, Cyanide in your photos, Strychnine in your tablets, Explosive bits of plastic, Kitchens full of toxins, Morphine for your youngings, Mercury-coated hats, Radiation from your glass, Kerosene in your hair And asbestos in just about everything... That makes some nice rap lyrics ngl
except the uranium glass had so little radiation that you could use it your entire life with no issues. they've been tested over and over with modern equipment, and people still collect them and use them.
The wheeze when he says " 9 to 5" is brilliant , really goes to show how much better blue jay is getting at making these videos compared to his first video.
ahem… *clears throat* *corrects tie* *does vocal warmups* …… 🧐 🍷👕 👖 Ahem you appear to have misspelled a word… Thoust is spelt… “video” And thus… Your comment is now invalid…
@@TitanCole722 my brother in christ if you live in the west you stop working after 8 hours (you are protected under labour laws), children have compulsary education so you will most likely not work until you're 18, and you are able to get a paid retirement plus "mega corporations" aren't even a thing, most countries nowadays have competition laws to make sure of that
@@charlestonianbuilder344 That's retarded though. If the *parents* were dirt poor and sending their kids to work child labor regulations would probably make them *starve*.
But think of all the profit society would loose! 🎩 🙀🧐And besides, shouldn’t workers have the right to choose if the want to live a hardworking life? If we stop billionaires from doing business their way, everyone in my social circle will loose money. The part of the population that has any money will be poor! /s Suddenly you see trickle down economics are still being believed
The truly insane thing about the Victorian era is that if you were born in 1820 and lived to 1920 you would over the course of your life go from Candle Light, Leeches, and horsepower to Electric lighting, modern medical practice and gasoline powered cars. The only century of lore rapid development would probably be the 20th.
my great grandma was born in germany in 1900 and died in 1999. she went from horse wagons to cars and airplanes, survived two world wars, saw them seperate germany and build the wall, destroy it almost 30 years later, witnessed the first cell phones in her last years. absolutely mad.
I don't want to live in Victorian England, but I'd like to walk around and just experience it. As a student of history nothing would beat experiencing it firsthand. Like a temporary time travel back to the Victorian Era and hang around for a little and see how it was like irl. Our modern world has problems, but I'd rather live here than in the past.
They had all the same human problems as we do. I think for us, the perception of extreme poverty would be overwhelming for the first few days at least.
Just walking around experiencing it will get you heavy metal poisoning, emphysema, leprosy, tuberculosis, smallpox, polio, measles, mumps, whooping cough, gonorrhea, syphilis, phossy jaw, gout, scurvy, rickets, bubonic plague, septicemia, cholera, dysentery, typhoid, haemorragic fever, bone madness, and (if female) hysteria.
@@Xalerdane thank God I said I wouldn't stay there and come back to modern day with modern medicine. Also the chances of getting all of those at once I feel is low. Hold on gonorrhea and syphilis are sexually transmitted, scurvy is from a lack of citrus, gout is from an unhealthy lifestyle. Some of these diseases are nothing to worry about if you're just experiencing it.
@@Kr0noZ that part. Same reason sulfur is added to natural gas in the modern day. Almost all natural gases are unnoticeable to people, so they add sulfur so we can notice that distinct “gas smell”
Unfun fact: Child chimney sweeps also had a significantly higher rate of testicular cancer, as they sometimes went into the chimneys naked, due to the heat in the chimney and not having many changes of clothes, and the soot was a carcinogen.
6:56 Fashion history nerd here! Corsets get a bad rap and have a lot of myths about them, but in reality they're only dangerous if worn improperly. If you're wearing the correct size and aren't tying it way too tight, you'll be fine. Of course, upper class women were more likely to do dangerous things with corsets like tightlacing than middle or lower class women were, so that part of corsetry was definitely an upper-class danger the middle class and poor didn't really have.
I've been getting a lot of comments on this so I just wanted to say: My comment on corsets being dangerous wasn't meant to be a blanket statement for all corset use. While certainly not always dangerous, when the practice was taken to the extremes (aka tight lacing), permanent ribcage and organ deformation could occur (which is the picture I showed in the video). There are skeletons in museums showing the results: www.rcseng.ac.uk/library-and-publications/library/blog/effects-of-the-corset/ I've also been getting a lot of comments on the life expectancies of 25 and 22 being misleading because it includes childhood mortality. It's actually not misleading at all. All I did was a balance of probability. If you are older than the life expectancy of one group, then you would statistically be more likely to be dead at that point in time than you would for the other group with a higher life expectancy. It's basic statistics. Infants are still a part of the equation and you have to account for them because if you were to roll the dice to see if you'd be alive at the age of 26 for example, infant mortalities would affect that outcome. Also: Some people are mishearing my line at 6:18, I'm not saying mummies had brains, the line was, "oh my god, look, he's got no brain, that's crazy."
But the picture is a goddamn drawing. And an anatomically incorrect one at that. Not saying that tight-lacing wasn’t a thing, and that it wasn’t bad for your health, but can we please stop using drawings made by victorian doctors? Those are the same doctors who thought that the uterus was suspended within the body on strings that could snap and make your uterus fall out. Edit: I don’t want to be so negative. I really like the video! I‘ve just seen too many bad corset stuff recently, so I was a bit annoyed.
Wrapped or unwrapped mummies or parts thereof were also kept as curiosities or conversation pieces in salons or parlours. Ground up mummy was also consumed as a cure-all or mixed into an artist's paint known as "mummy brown"
My Great-Grandfather hated Victorian England so much he signed up in the British Army as soon as he could and spent the next 24 years in India. Luckily for him WW1 started 2 weeks after he finished his service so he immediately re-enlisted.
Sounds like he knew how to live and how to pick one's poison. My Great Grandfather robbed a bank with a gun with no bullets during the Great Depression, (Naturally) so he could go to jail and earn a living wage for his family.
I had the same line of thought... Better join the army or navy in order to not starve or sleep in the streets. The trade off is dying in combat or by tropical diseases and sometimes still scurvy (if you're in the navy) because after all military leadership didn't care about you much - but living a working class life, there's no one who cares about you
"I was born in a small rural village in Finland in the 1960's and was really surprised to realize how "victorian" our life was: we lived in a small house, had an outside privy, there was neither running water nor central heating. We did have electricity but neither a fridge nor a hoover. Things started to change in the 1970's and now our life is of course quite different. " - Popeye the Sailor Man
Life expectancy is not the same thing as age of mortality. There were lots of lower class people over age 25. A LOT of their kids died very young though. It brought the average life expectancy down a bunch.
Don't forget that these coffin beds were often times filled with lice, were scarcely cleaned leaving plenty of (totally not existing) germs all over the place, and lets not forget about the wake up call. Often times there were also shelters that people didn't get even a bench to sleep on. In exchange for sleeping on the floor you were given a roof and sometimes a hot meal with near mandatory church service in the morning that cold hours to complete when you should be looking for a days work. Hell if you were daring to fend off against the rats I hear you can make a killing in the sewers as a Tosher!
Considering mummy's had their brain and internal organs removed and stored in jars, finding a mummy with a brain still inside their skull would be rather unusual.
I thought about that too. While I'm familiar with the process, since the Egyptians *_didn't_* open the skulls of the bodies they did this to, I wonder how they would know they had completed their task? Well, time for dinner. Spaghetti tonight! 🤢
Corsets weren't/aren't even bad for you, most people didn't tight lace, and those who did, normally didn't do it for an extended amount of time. Corsets were generally used for support not to fundamentally change the shape of your body, and if fitted correctly they are not supposed to hurt. Tightlacing would've been considered extreme in a similar way to how those stupidly dangerous diets where you just starve yourself are considered extreme. It was much more common for people to use padding to give the illusion of a different body shape, whereas nowadays people try to physically alter their body.
People who shit on corsets as "tools of patriarchy" are usually the same people who want to have big fake tits that cost $5K. Way to go society! personally i dated two girls that liked corsets and they didn't complain because as you said most people dont squeeze them like crazy. So i got to enjoy bigger tits and they got to enjoy feeling empowered without having to spend lots of money on a cringe surgery that has actual consequences for health.
One Invention I missed was Firedrich Haber Co-Developing of the Haber-Bosch Process to synthesize ammonia, which was then utilized to "feed the world", as it enabled a massive rise in the world population. Being an introvert, he kinda dsliked it and invented Mustard Gas for the Germans to undo that rise in population
I feel the need to point out that it was not corsets persay, but a practice called tightlacing that called organ problem and constricted bloodflow. The majority if corsetry was very useful for support and was only an issue for the extreme cases of tightlacing.
More people need to learn about this kind of stuff. I get so sick and tired of people romanticizing the past and talking about how they wish they lived in it.
there were definately better times/places to live in than others, and if i were forced to travel more than a hundered years in the past, i def would pick either rome or 1000s scandanavia, but like, compred to modern luxury? lololol no shot.
I appreciate this video. The transition was phenomenal! The entire script flowed beautifully and the visual aspects did too. It was a very informative video, thank you!
You know I had known how brutal and gloomy victorian england was but I still was flabbergasted at the coffin beds. Truth really is stranger than fiction. How could a whole society devolve itself into being that cartoonishly depressing, dehumanizing and cruel.
I mean they didn’t devolve into that, it was in fact a step up from what they had before industrialisation. The Victorian era and capitalist industrialisation brought about decreases in such things as infant/child mortality and made the workers richer; there is a reason why people actually made the switch to factory jobs, moving into the cities. (Which saw huge growth in this period from having been pretty irrelevant beforehand to having populations of hundreds of thousands to a million)
@@lordcutlerbeckett58industrialization was the worst thing to happen to humanity, since it killed skilled labor, and thusly put many craftsmen and tradesmen out of work.
@@lordcutlerbeckett58 Reason is that people were losing their farmland, as rich land owners were exploiting it in other ways, resulting in millions of people losing their source of income. With no place to settle, you either moved into new territories, such as America, if you got money to pay for sea voyage, or move to cities to get factory job. Only because workers actually started revolting and rioting, conditions were improved a bit.
@@wolfetteplays8894 and brought hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, yeah it sure sounds like it was terrible. Artisans craftsmen, and Tradesmen still existed and still do to this day. And do factory jobs not also require skilled labour? Particularly in advanced and light manufacturing sectors although still all factory jobs require a great deal of knowledge and skill, especially know that all menial tasks are automated.
Chimney sweepers often died of aggressive forms of testicular cancer from all of the soot. It was actually one of the first recognized forms of cancer, in 1775. Often they called the aggressive cancer “sooty warts” or “sooty balls”.
Which means cancer wasn't known about until it was too late. Makes sense. Hitler's mother died from cancer. The doctor was a jew that tried and failed to save them. Hitler went out of his way to get that one jew out of Germany. Bloody loyal if nothing else.
@@SpagbolphinThey had to break those boys down of course! The only way to do that was destroying anything that made them boys in the first place! .. I hate the Victorian era
I just saw an interview with Maggie Smith, who said Downton Abbey producers allowed her to skip wearing a corset, as long as she sat and walked as if she was wearing one; apparently she "pulled it off".
Funnily enough I am currently reading a book about everyday life during the Victorian era. Seeing some of these things animated like that is pretty awesome!
Also why is no one talking about “the telephone, an invention that allowed people to find out about their car’s extended warranty” that was so smoothly delivered I loved it
I had a bad day. Have always been a fan of your videos, but somehow not watched this one yet. It cheered me right up. A few more of your videos and I will feel distracted and better again, while at the same time learning something.
What the fuck do you think Australia was? Where they sent the serial killers and rapists? Fuck no, steal an apple, and it's nine months on a cramped ship with no hygiene to arrive in an alien land with a radically different climate to work until your sentence was up. And this was before 1800. The rich parts of the world didn't "make" all the poor people exist in other countries to solve poverty, they experienced massive economic growth which created a middle class and brought better living conditions to everyone. Everywhere, including Britain and Europe as this video illustrates, was poor until after the reconstruction following world war 2. The default state for agricultural civilisations is poverty, and most people lived in agricultural civilisations. Rich countries only became "rich", in the sense that the average person had a decent life, well after they realised that colonialism was both bad and unsustainable and began decolonisation. "Poor" countries have usually gotten richer after decolonisation, but so has everywhere else, and the immense disparity between growth rates is why Africa amongst other places is still so poor compared to the west. In 1960 the difference between per capita income in Africa and the west was less than tenfold, but today the difference is more than 30 times. And there are still poor people in rich countries. They're just not as poor, and there are less of them.
'poor people' might be a bit generous; it was more along the lines of "lets limit the vast amount of children working in our factories aged 9-13 to only 9 hours a day. oh yeah and enslaving brown people is even more chill now but we can't let the people who can suddenly all afford to buy a single pageboy hat now see because they might empathize with them"
I always come away from watching period pieces set in Georgian or Victorian England thinking it would be nice to live then. Then I remember that my family would be middle to lower class and at best I would be one of the help and at worst dead by age 10. On the plus side, my family were farmers back in the day so maybe I could survive on rural life in the country.
Honestly? Yeah. Rural life was markedly better than city life for almost all of history. The water wouldn't be half as dangerous because there's only ten people shitting in it instead of ten thousand and you can clearly demarkate drinkable upstream from undrinkable downstream, and working the field is not only less dangerous than a factory, but you'd also get most of the year off between sowing and harvesting. You'd have to grapple with starvation on the off chance a crop failed, but it's not like people in the city wouldn't also starve in that case.
Except that laws were past to keep people from abandoning the country and coming to the city. Life was actually worse in the country than city, hence the migration
Yeah, tenant farming was huge at that time and farmers barely had enough money to do much with. The payment for land was extreme and led to a bunch of families starving (look at the Irish Potato Famine). I would think being middle class in a city was much better than being rural, but I feel like rural life was still being a coal miner or being lower class in the city and sleeping on a rope.
@@nicosmind3 Honestly it depended on your family, the period and your country. Not all medieval tenant farmers were equally bound to their lands. In some cases the contract they had was even to their benefit, as it prevented the local lord from just forcing them out if he could get a better deal with someone else. It would of course be ideal to be a free farmer, but tenant life wasn't neccesarily the worst thing in the world (unless you're Irish or Russian). City life was often popular for those whom couldn't even become tenant farmers. Families that didn't have enough land for all their sons, or who couldn't inherit their tenant farm would have to seek their fortunes elsewhere. In medieval times this often meant the cities. The cities were often like their own little city states, having walls to keep pesky nobles away, and their own local council government. Of course only the actual humans (rich merchants) got to have any part in this, but if you know a craft you might be able to get an apartment in the "nicer" part of town. If not then I hope you like living in a closet, because unskilled labour isn't gonna get you much better than that. Perhaps the best time to be a farmer (or any normal person for that matter) in medieval times was probably just after the plague died down, as the workforce had been thinned out making labour more valuable, while making land and job positions less valuable. This generally meant that many people got much better conditions to negotiate with their lords and bosses.
my history teacher in high school, said that royals from the past would trade their castle for a fairly decent 2 bedroom apartment, with heat and AC, and that miracle of survival the Refrigerator!!! Flushing toilet! YES!
The one benefit of being an old timey royal was all the servants. Labor is much, much more expensive now. Not sure if they would be able to adjust to doing everything by themselves. The biggest selling point for the modern age would probably be the medicine - it's amazing how many rich and powerful people in the past died because of diseases that are now preventable or treatable.
Yeah, many nobles who could afford started building palaces or new manor houses in or around the cities because their old castles were a shitty place to live in compared to the luxury of the cities. Lower nobility often owned smaller city houses or apartments
I have to admit. Being born in 1977 is pretty cool. Started out watching televisions to smart phones. Much better Entertainment and you learn something. Thanks for your hard work.
I've heard the Thames miasma theory did hold water, the river being so poluted, it was possible to contract an airborne disease just by breathing it in. Not sure how true this is. London wasn't the only city that stank. The river Avon runs through my city and to this day the richest part of the city was built upon cliffs overlooking the city because it was the only way you'd live close enough to work in city industry while avoiding the smell of the river.
The miasma theory was not new in Victorian times. It had been around for centuries. In earlier centuries, for example, they thought plague was spread by bad smells.
@Miles Doyle Your a bot, aren't you? If not, please take a chill pill. You look like a crazy corner soap box preacher. that scares more people away from the faith that brings in...or at least put your comment in a better format. Its a giant wall of text, no one is reading that.
It’s insane that with all of this going on Gladstone condemned the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1850 for the poor living conditions of the population, which accompanied by political suppression, led to the Kingdom being diplomatically isolated by the major powers later in the decade.
Not really, Sicilians were dirt poor and heavily exploited by landowners and the mafia. One of the reasons they did well in the US was that they could live well on practically nothing. Coalminers in Britain were well paid and among the most affluent of the working class in Britain, transitory labourers were probably the worst off but were still better off than peasants in Mediterranean countries, notably they weren't tied to the land and were better able therefore to haggle over wages. During this period in England landless agricultural workers and the landed aristocracy tended to be allied against the yeoman class who employed most of the workers, worker action tended to be organised and lead by members of the local aristocracy and the great estates were know to provide relief during times of want, usually though the creation of superfluous jobs and though church networks.
I'm not going to beat the obvious dead horse(totally am) that the nobility usually only did this after they had lost their power to the merchant class, who while absolutely terrible, still at least dealt and sold to the working class things that would've landed the peasants in jail, like selling them their own land to now farm for themselves instead of the nobility. Basically, it was the classic abusive romance triangle of two obviously shitty guys deciding among themselves which one of them gets to walk away from the bar fight with the girl that is going to move into a DV shelter in another three years after having a kid. (Damn, I'm dark, but now even I'm sad)
Fun fact: day labor halls in America have benches that some homeless just use to have a place to sit while they "wait for work" (some really are, some have no intention of going anywhere that day heh), they still have monitors to make sure nobody falls asleep on the benches. To get work one should generally be there 5 to 6am to maybe get a job for the day. The place stays open until 5 or 6pm one can stay as they please while "waiting for work" so long as they don't fall asleep. Place of business after all. - 2022
Fantastic video! The Victorian era is my favorite time period in history for a bunch of reasons but one of them is definitely how wacky and absurd it was. You covered way more than I thought you would which was great to see. I’m surprised you didn’t mention the dreaded WORK HOUSE or that the upper class thought that poverty was a direct symptom of being morally bankrupt but quite frankly those are small things compared to all the other things you mentioned. I really hope you do another 1800’s episode because there’s just so much absurd shit. Great video
You forgot to mention the extremely high chance of getting testicular cancer from chimney sweeping. The boys nuts would go black and in some cases fall of, and they would bleed out. Also their food consisted mainly of water soup with a dash of water, you know to keep slim to fit in the chimneys.
The average Victorian male shrunk to 5 foot 3 inches. Many highly trained historians have been disciplined enough to pretend they have no idea why this happened.
Ha yeah, and upper class women of the time wouldnt even talk to a short man rich or not. "Nice tall man" regardless of how nice he actually was. And disgusting short bald man. Regardless of how he actually was besides appearance. Guess when you get bored of taking baths all day or ordering in orphan children to help with the harvest then sending them back. Youve gotta have something to keep yourself occupied.
@@jayclark9662 I love the fact that men put weight on when they went to war around this r8me. They finally were properly fed, sometimes for the first time in their lives.
All I know about my family in the Victorian era was one faked his death and immigrated to england from Ireland without his family. And another one worked in a poor house all her life and was buried in a paupers grave
Yes the Victorian countryside would be a different story altogether. But still the English urban proletariat didn't revolt like Marx and Engles expected them to. Instead Socialist brainiacs had to make a revolution in Russia which had hardly any proletariat at all. Ended up killing a load of peasants who just would not understand Marxist theory no matter how often you told it to them. Stupid potatoes, up against the wall!
Sure, if you actually managed to work in the agricultural economy. The extreme exploitation of the urban working class largely happened because mechanization of farming had led to rural unemployment, causing a constant stream of people migrating to the cities for work. Resulting in said overcrowding and low wages.
@@anderskorsback4104 Basically being a farmer would be better. If you get to be one in the first place in the time when farmers were a shrinking demographic.
Blue jay, I just want to say thank you for deciding that uploading youtube videos is something you enjoy and do. You're humour is top tier. It feels like I'm talking to one of friends back in my hometown. Currently going through it as of right now and wanted to say thank you. keep doing you.
Scrotal cancer was also a big after effect of being a chimney sweep because some sweepers went naked into chimneys just to keep their jobs. It is considered one of the first identified cancers caused by working within a particular occupation, a link to particular carcinogens.
You know, in alot of ways, I've thought that a modern middle class person lives a better life than even the wealthy of even 100 years ago. Sure, if you were wealthy you lived in a huge house and had servants. But if you don't have servants, you don't need as big of a house (no servants quarters) and you don't have to manage employees. So, instead we have houses that are plenty big enough for our needs, machines instead of servants, and outsource alot of our needs to businesses (think about how much food you buy from the store has been processed in some way, even if that processing is just being portioned out and placed in a convenient package). The wealthy of 100 years ago would have paid significant money for even a cheap seat on a budget airline. Remember, they may have traveled in luxury, but a trip to Europe took weeks. A cross country trip by rail took the better part of a week. And the choices for food and entertainment the average person in a developed country has access to would have simply been incomprehensible to even the wealthy. And that's leaving out the enormous advances in medicine and information. So, the point is, we may have our issues now (and we certainly do), but all of us are better off now than humans have ever been, even than many of the wealthy and powerful.
@@blackcountryme Quite true. But "quickly" is rather relative. Even in the late Victorian period, a transcontinental railroad trip was the better part of a week (in the US, still is, actually). That was a huge improvement over earlier times when it could have been a month or more, but still time consuming compared to modern air travel. Across a smaller place, like Britain, it would have been, of course, much shorter, but perhaps not quite as dramatic.
7:52 in the italian part of switzerland many families sent their children to big cities in italy to sweep chimneys and you basically worked 12 hours every day until you get too big so you get sent back to the family with lung cancer and alot of other very very bad physical disorder because well you were for 10 years always in a really small chimney ( my grandma lost about 3 brothers just because of chimneys)
Fun fact, not all mummies received the same level of embalming due to their status and wealth, and the process of embalming changed over the years as well. Some mummies definitely did have their brains and other wealthier people who were embalmed did have all their brains and organs removed. It went both ways…there’s a pretty awesome “like you mom” joke there with that last phrase too which I will refrain from using, but will acknowledge.
“Miss Trent opened the Bow Street Society’s office door but didn’t enter; she knew she’d locked it. Slowly she looked over the darkened room until she could make out two silhouettes; one behind the desk, the other to its left. She stared at the latter as she moved forward and closed the door. “There is a lamp, you know,” she remarked casually. Lifting the glass shade from the kerosene lamp on her desk, she turned on the gas slightly and ignited it with a match. As she carefully increased the lamp’s gas, the faces of Mr Locke and Mr Snyder emerged from the darkness.” ― T.G. Campbell,
Even in the upper class life was significantly shittier than it is today. Disease was rampant, medicine was slightly better than random guessing, and things that harm you in many ways were parts of every day life because no one knew any better.
Personally I will take not getting lots of interesting diseases and having internet in exchange for not being able to play hunt the poor or human mortal kombat chess. On further review you may have some points though that second one sounds fun
Imagine if in the victorian universe, there is a version of youtube where a victorian worker switches bodies with a person in the 21st century. And its just 12 minutes of him going like, "WHAT, THEY HAVE LUXURIES!???!?!?!?"
This guy somewhat gives off the feel of Sam’O Nella whom I miss dearly since he stopped making content. This channel somewhat fills that sad missing hole. Keep up the good work.
With the life expectancy to be 25 now I understand the part from Jane Austen "Persuasion" where main character Anna is 27th years old and wonders of its not to late to get married. Well, she was one foot in the grave, potentially...
The corset thing is actually a myth that was spread by the company that invented bras to sell more bras. Corsets are actually pretty comfortable and definitely safe to wear, tight wrapping was a fairly rare practice.
10:57 Correction. The telephone was invented by Antonio Meucci. Graham Bell bought the patent rights for it and marketed it but when they expired he didn't return the patent rights, Meucci took it to court but then he died and the whole issue went on hold. It remained unresolved until 2002 when the US government published a paper that confirms the telephone was invented by Meucci
Bloodborne was inspired by the literary works of authors H. P. Lovecraft and Bram Stoker and the architectural design of real-world locations in countries such as Romania, the Czech Republic and Scotland.
Howdy there you dazzling little devils, if it tickles your fancy consider joining my Patreon! www.patreon.com/bluejayyt
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Cheers!
CHWENee FIVE AND CHWENee TWO
I would love to see the opposite of this video, where bluejay tries to explain modern times to a victorian guy who has been body-swapped out of his life and into alex's old body
great idea actually
yes!
great idea
There should be more content on the topic, showing people of the past our present
The Victorian would be more scared, per sqaure goosebump (PSG) than the modern person
You forgot to mention the chimney boys had “chasers”. They would follow the chimney cleaner with needles or at times even lit candles to keep them moving all day. Then they could just claim to be stuck for 10 minutes to catch a break they had to move till they couldn’t any more! Delightful isn’t it!
E
Still not the scariest chaser you can find in Britain.
@@RIFLQ E~ndeed
You really could make an entire video on all the messed up stuff that happened with Victorian Era child labor!
@@BlueJayYT not like you will, right?
It’s kinda weird how someone might be making a video hundreds of years from now about how bad it would be to live in our time.
I can assure you theres plenty already doing that. Only difference is in the future standards and a new generation will be able to fully agree at how weird the way things are globally are weird.
well, look at average life expectancy. A person born in 1900 could expect to live to about 55 on average. Now the average is over 80 (lower in America despite spending HUGE amounts on for-profit healthcare, with its frightening eating habits aligned with its patchy health care access, grotesquely expensive medicine prices, massive gun murder rate and horrible drug abuse problems)
That is about 40% increase in 120 years. I saw a projection that a baby girl born in the UK last year has a 30-50% chance of living to be 100. Anyone who wants to live in a time/place where they are old at 30 and venerable at 50 needs their head examined.
@@occamraiserthat rise in lifespan is largely based upon the precipitous decline in child mortality. For those that made it to 18 and weren’t destitute, they had lifespans up to their 80s and commonly into their 60s.
“How to not get cancer if you lived in the 21st century” would be the title. And it would be Shockingly hard
@@SpacedudeGFX Yeah lol pretty much everything will raise your chance of getting cancer.
I think it's worth mentioning that 4 pennies would've been a good wage, but that you also needed to be able to buy a few pints of gin or other hard liquor (to avoid the disease) and bread, so that would be most of your wages gone before you got to bed time
Pfft, a full meal AND a sleeping place all in one day? You think you're some kind of bourji boy?
How do you even fuck and raise kids at that sort of income rate?
So basically slavery
@@ahuman32478 You're kidding right? Compared to 150 years ago? Even minimum wage workers live like kings. Hell, even the homeless in America live the same as the middle class from back then. It is nearly impossible to starve to death in a 1st world nation these days, especially with all the government programs to help people who don't make enough money.
People REALLY do not understand just how good they have it in this world living at this time in human history. Congrats, you got to avoid all the torture, executions, pillaging, exploitation, famines, feudalism & all manner of horrible things that have graced human history until recently. Think of it like this, this lifestyle we're living right now is something that has only been possible in the past 80 years. 10,000 years of written human history & hundreds of thousands of years of wandering the Earth as cavepeople and you got to live in the first timeframe in human history where there are actually human rights & easy living compared to before.
4 pennies didn’t mean SHIT even with inflation
I can't wait for when you go over the ways people died in the Victorian Era. From falling from stairs that weren't aligned probably/ too steep and narrow. To boiling themselves to death in the bathtub.
How do you start boiling and just not notice?
@@abloodcorpse3318
They boiled it the same way people boiled their food:
A kettle full of water over an open fire.
Sam N. I'm not sure if that was a bit later, but the first refrigerators also had a pretty good tendency to release poisonous gases.
@Miles Doyle So true bestie!!!
@@abloodcorpse3318 The bathtubs at the time had a section where you would put wood under it and light it to heat up the tub... the thing is though hot metal is very painful to touch, so you would literally get to a point where you can't move because the metal is to hot to touch so you end up get boiled alive.
Arsenic in your walls,
Lead on your dolls,
Corsets on your torsoes,
Cyanide in your photos,
Strychnine in your tablets,
Explosive bits of plastic,
Kitchens full of toxins,
Morphine for your youngings,
Mercury-coated hats,
Radiation from your glass,
Kerosene in your hair
And asbestos in just about everything...
That makes some nice rap lyrics ngl
except the uranium glass had so little radiation that you could use it your entire life with no issues. they've been tested over and over with modern equipment, and people still collect them and use them.
@@ghomerhust That depends on the set of glassware. While most are generally safe, others can be quite dangerous.
@@ghomerhust I'm still sure tho that in conjunction with just about everything else, these glasses weren't really helping the problem
IF I HEAR SOMEONE MENTION CORSETS AGAIN I SWEAR-
I thought it was We didn't start the fire at first.
Minecraft proves what all victorians understood: Children yearn for the mines
yesss
lmao
woah woah woah
Those who oppose child labor have never seen children working 40 hours a week to get a special item in a pvp minecraft server.
We need to find a way to make remote operating mining equipment “fun” for them, and then think of the massive expansion that would happen.🤣
The wheeze when he says " 9 to 5" is brilliant , really goes to show how much better blue jay is getting at making these videos compared to his first video.
Thank you so much, that's so kind of you to say!! I've been trying to improve my voice acting in my videos so I'm glad it's showing! :)
He forgot about prostitution (child and otherwise) that was a way for people to make some real money.
@@bigmoniesponge too bad education is education
@@bigmoniesponge Imagine BJ turning YT into a career. You must be joking.
ahem…
*clears throat*
*corrects tie*
*does vocal warmups*
……
🧐
🍷👕
👖
Ahem you appear to have misspelled a word…
Thoust is spelt… “video”
And thus… Your comment is now invalid…
Victorian lowerclass citizens:
"So. When do I stop working?"
Upper class citizens: "That's the neat part. You don't"
Modern working class citizens: “So. When do I stop working?”
Mega corporations: “That’s the neat part. You don’t.”
@@TitanCole722 my brother in christ if you live in the west you stop working after 8 hours (you are protected under labour laws), children have compulsary education so you will most likely not work until you're 18, and you are able to get a paid retirement
plus "mega corporations" aren't even a thing, most countries nowadays have competition laws to make sure of that
Ah yes the victorian era, the main illustration on why labour regulations and social/human rights are VERY important
and a reason to why to oppose child labor being pushed by some far right idiots in some state i forgot the name of
That's, like, just your opinion, bro.
@@charlestonianbuilder344 That's retarded though. If the *parents* were dirt poor and sending their kids to work child labor regulations would probably make them *starve*.
Worker should be treated fairly in workplace?? I disagree!
/s
But think of all the profit society would loose! 🎩 🙀🧐And besides, shouldn’t workers have the right to choose if the want to live a hardworking life? If we stop billionaires from doing business their way, everyone in my social circle will loose money. The part of the population that has any money will be poor! /s
Suddenly you see trickle down economics are still being believed
Social History the way it should be taught 10 out of 10 stars!
I can only agree!
Including the ads?
@@Bantallas Meh.. Teachers gotta get paid?
@@colinritchie1757 fair point
@@Bantallas yes, he should get a fair pay for it!
The truly insane thing about the Victorian era is that if you were born in 1820 and lived to 1920 you would over the course of your life go from Candle Light, Leeches, and horsepower to Electric lighting, modern medical practice and gasoline powered cars. The only century of lore rapid development would probably be the 20th.
Depending on where you lived you probably also went through the same transition if you were born in the 20th century
my great grandma was born in germany in 1900 and died in 1999. she went from horse wagons to cars and airplanes, survived two world wars, saw them seperate germany and build the wall, destroy it almost 30 years later, witnessed the first cell phones in her last years. absolutely mad.
If you declare with your mouth, 'Jesus Is Lord' and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. -Romans 10:9
@@avangardismm wtf does that have to do with anything
My grandfather says his mother's generation went from horse and buggy, to landing on the moon. That's kinda crazy!
I don't want to live in Victorian England, but I'd like to walk around and just experience it. As a student of history nothing would beat experiencing it firsthand. Like a temporary time travel back to the Victorian Era and hang around for a little and see how it was like irl. Our modern world has problems, but I'd rather live here than in the past.
They had all the same human problems as we do. I think for us, the perception of extreme poverty would be overwhelming for the first few days at least.
Just walking around experiencing it will get you heavy metal poisoning, emphysema, leprosy, tuberculosis, smallpox, polio, measles, mumps, whooping cough, gonorrhea, syphilis, phossy jaw, gout, scurvy, rickets, bubonic plague, septicemia, cholera, dysentery, typhoid, haemorragic fever, bone madness, and (if female) hysteria.
@@Xalerdane thank God I said I wouldn't stay there and come back to modern day with modern medicine. Also the chances of getting all of those at once I feel is low. Hold on gonorrhea and syphilis are sexually transmitted, scurvy is from a lack of citrus, gout is from an unhealthy lifestyle. Some of these diseases are nothing to worry about if you're just experiencing it.
This is literally my sentiment towards visiting the USA
Theres still the risk of gettin beatin up for the wrong clothes or shit
stinky air not being the one to blame is history's greatest plot twist
Right up there with mercery turning out *not* to be the key to immortality!
Omg I love you dude.
Although tbf, there were a few instances where stinky air was, in fact, to blame.
There's a reason most toxic fumes in nature smell bad to us...
@@Kr0noZ that part. Same reason sulfur is added to natural gas in the modern day. Almost all natural gases are unnoticeable to people, so they add sulfur so we can notice that distinct “gas smell”
@@BlueJayYT make your logo a white J in a blue box
Unfun fact: Child chimney sweeps also had a significantly higher rate of testicular cancer, as they sometimes went into the chimneys naked, due to the heat in the chimney and not having many changes of clothes, and the soot was a carcinogen.
no way queen victoria gave people ball cancer, 1/100 star era
6:56 Fashion history nerd here! Corsets get a bad rap and have a lot of myths about them, but in reality they're only dangerous if worn improperly. If you're wearing the correct size and aren't tying it way too tight, you'll be fine.
Of course, upper class women were more likely to do dangerous things with corsets like tightlacing than middle or lower class women were, so that part of corsetry was definitely an upper-class danger the middle class and poor didn't really have.
Yes, very true! Like most things on that list, they're dangerous when used improperly, that was what I was highlighting
Thank you!
stopppp i cry when i see corset scenes that are just so painfully ‘modern’ like noooo… 😢😢😢😅😅
stopppp i cry when i see corset scenes that are just so painfully ‘modern’ like noooo… 😢😢😢😅😅
All hatters were mad because they worked with felt, which contained mercury, which made you go cray cray after you inhaled enough of it.
I've been getting a lot of comments on this so I just wanted to say: My comment on corsets being dangerous wasn't meant to be a blanket statement for all corset use. While certainly not always dangerous, when the practice was taken to the extremes (aka tight lacing), permanent ribcage and organ deformation could occur (which is the picture I showed in the video). There are skeletons in museums showing the results: www.rcseng.ac.uk/library-and-publications/library/blog/effects-of-the-corset/
I've also been getting a lot of comments on the life expectancies of 25 and 22 being misleading because it includes childhood mortality. It's actually not misleading at all. All I did was a balance of probability. If you are older than the life expectancy of one group, then you would statistically be more likely to be dead at that point in time than you would for the other group with a higher life expectancy. It's basic statistics. Infants are still a part of the equation and you have to account for them because if you were to roll the dice to see if you'd be alive at the age of 26 for example, infant mortalities would affect that outcome.
Also: Some people are mishearing my line at 6:18, I'm not saying mummies had brains, the line was, "oh my god, look, he's got no brain, that's crazy."
@Miles Doyle stop spamming
@Miles Doyle keep spamming
@Miles Doyle Get your sky daddy bs out of here and let me enjoy child labor in the Victorian era
But the picture is a goddamn drawing. And an anatomically incorrect one at that.
Not saying that tight-lacing wasn’t a thing, and that it wasn’t bad for your health, but can we please stop using drawings made by victorian doctors? Those are the same doctors who thought that the uterus was suspended within the body on strings that could snap and make your uterus fall out.
Edit: I don’t want to be so negative. I really like the video! I‘ve just seen too many bad corset stuff recently, so I was a bit annoyed.
To be fair... The autogen captions misheard you too. Which I guess isn't saying much? Idk. I heard got a brain.
Wrapped or unwrapped mummies or parts thereof were also kept as curiosities or conversation pieces in salons or parlours. Ground up mummy was also consumed as a cure-all or mixed into an artist's paint known as "mummy brown"
Mmmm yes
Forbidden human jerky
My Great-Grandfather hated Victorian England so much he signed up in the British Army as soon as he could and spent the next 24 years in India.
Luckily for him WW1 started 2 weeks after he finished his service so he immediately re-enlisted.
Sounds like he knew how to live and how to pick one's poison. My Great Grandfather robbed a bank with a gun with no bullets during the Great Depression, (Naturally) so he could go to jail and earn a living wage for his family.
How'd your great-grandfather do in WW1? I'd think he'd regretted his choice to re-enlist after that rip
@@senseishu937 He was wounded in 1916 and spent the rest of the war working as a cook. He died in 1926 as a result of alcohol abuse.
@@Siddingsby damn he got lucky. Sounds like a cool guy. Thanks for sharing the story
I had the same line of thought... Better join the army or navy in order to not starve or sleep in the streets. The trade off is dying in combat or by tropical diseases and sometimes still scurvy (if you're in the navy) because after all military leadership didn't care about you much - but living a working class life, there's no one who cares about you
"I was born in a small rural village in Finland in the 1960's and was really surprised to realize how "victorian" our life was: we lived in a small house, had an outside privy, there was neither running water nor central heating. We did have electricity but neither a fridge nor a hoover. Things started to change in the 1970's and now our life is of course quite different.
" - Popeye the Sailor Man
popeye is finnish???
@Miles Doyle why do you waste your time posting this stuff? do you not have friends?
@@danielstandford4930 You can report for spam
@Miles Doyle - Popeye
@@Cruxador does that even do anything anymore?
Life expectancy is not the same thing as age of mortality. There were lots of lower class people over age 25. A LOT of their kids died very young though. It brought the average life expectancy down a bunch.
The average of life expectancy not what you see
this is true. the biggest factor in the change of life expectancy from the age of modern medicine was due to the decrease of infant mortality.
A 4 penny coffin is hilariously evil, 100% gonna use it in dnd
@Miles Doyle Buddy, look, spreading the word is good, but time and place, stop spamming comments.
Don't forget that these coffin beds were often times filled with lice, were scarcely cleaned leaving plenty of (totally not existing) germs all over the place, and lets not forget about the wake up call. Often times there were also shelters that people didn't get even a bench to sleep on. In exchange for sleeping on the floor you were given a roof and sometimes a hot meal with near mandatory church service in the morning that cold hours to complete when you should be looking for a days work. Hell if you were daring to fend off against the rats I hear you can make a killing in the sewers as a Tosher!
@@TheLaughingReaper525 I don't find this funny at all, at one point it was real people like you and me having to do all this crap ☹️
That's the kind of thing that would look unrealistic in a novel, while being totally real XD
@@cryamistellimek9184 I don't even see the post you're responding to, and yet I know what it is and I 100% agree.
That video was more fun than a Victorian era person would have their entire life.
The sleeping arrangements for the poor seemed so ridiculous that I had to look them up and YES... all accurate and so very sad.
Considering mummy's had their brain and internal organs removed and stored in jars, finding a mummy with a brain still inside their skull would be rather unusual.
I thought about that too. While I'm familiar with the process, since the Egyptians *_didn't_* open the skulls of the bodies they did this to, I wonder how they would know they had completed their task?
Well, time for dinner. Spaghetti tonight! 🤢
@@choosecarefully408 scraped it out through the nose
I wonder if they actually ate the mummy's remains or if they just used the skull as a bowl for some meatloaf or something stupid like that
Probably because it’s a fake.
@@Klishar122 what? did you just say that mummys aren't real, or that the 1800s mummy unwrappings were fake?
Corsets weren't/aren't even bad for you, most people didn't tight lace, and those who did, normally didn't do it for an extended amount of time. Corsets were generally used for support not to fundamentally change the shape of your body, and if fitted correctly they are not supposed to hurt. Tightlacing would've been considered extreme in a similar way to how those stupidly dangerous diets where you just starve yourself are considered extreme. It was much more common for people to use padding to give the illusion of a different body shape, whereas nowadays people try to physically alter their body.
Exactly.
so true bestie
These were the same people who treated opiates, arsenic and radioactive suppositories as miracle medicine. Don't underestimate their stupidity.
People who shit on corsets as "tools of patriarchy" are usually the same people who want to have big fake tits that cost $5K. Way to go society! personally i dated two girls that liked corsets and they didn't complain because as you said most people dont squeeze them like crazy. So i got to enjoy bigger tits and they got to enjoy feeling empowered without having to spend lots of money on a cringe surgery that has actual consequences for health.
trying to physically re sharp your own body is more efficant and real
One Invention I missed was Firedrich Haber Co-Developing of the Haber-Bosch Process to synthesize ammonia, which was then utilized to "feed the world", as it enabled a massive rise in the world population. Being an introvert, he kinda dsliked it and invented Mustard Gas for the Germans to undo that rise in population
That wasn’t during the Victorian Era
I feel the need to point out that it was not corsets persay, but a practice called tightlacing that called organ problem and constricted bloodflow. The majority if corsetry was very useful for support and was only an issue for the extreme cases of tightlacing.
Corsets properly laced are really comfortable, moreso than a bra for lots of women.
THANK YOU
I came here to say the exact same thing
Anyone here from the Catherine De'medici's Time Travel Society? 😏
@@amandas2986 omfg yes. Don't forget that corsets were boned with tusks and uteruses are suspended in your body with little strings ;)
More people need to learn about this kind of stuff. I get so sick and tired of people romanticizing the past and talking about how they wish they lived in it.
there were definately better times/places to live in than others, and if i were forced to travel more than a hundered years in the past, i def would pick either rome or 1000s scandanavia, but like, compred to modern luxury? lololol no shot.
nah fr
What I wish is that I could be immortal, be transported to the beginning of human history and just be a spectator in it.
@@visnau1126 that genuinely sounds really fun tho. Or maybe we could engage in those times with no consequences (to us 😈)
@@visnau1126 That’s actually my secret dream.
I appreciate this video. The transition was phenomenal! The entire script flowed beautifully and the visual aspects did too. It was a very informative video, thank you!
You know I had known how brutal and gloomy victorian england was but I still was flabbergasted at the coffin beds. Truth really is stranger than fiction. How could a whole society devolve itself into being that cartoonishly depressing, dehumanizing and cruel.
I mean they didn’t devolve into that, it was in fact a step up from what they had before industrialisation. The Victorian era and capitalist industrialisation brought about decreases in such things as infant/child mortality and made the workers richer; there is a reason why people actually made the switch to factory jobs, moving into the cities. (Which saw huge growth in this period from having been pretty irrelevant beforehand to having populations of hundreds of thousands to a million)
@@lordcutlerbeckett58industrialization was the worst thing to happen to humanity, since it killed skilled labor, and thusly put many craftsmen and tradesmen out of work.
@@lordcutlerbeckett58 Reason is that people were losing their farmland, as rich land owners were exploiting it in other ways, resulting in millions of people losing their source of income. With no place to settle, you either moved into new territories, such as America, if you got money to pay for sea voyage, or move to cities to get factory job.
Only because workers actually started revolting and rioting, conditions were improved a bit.
@@ceu160193 factory jobs in the cities were much better paying than being trapped in a state of near slavery same is true for the working conditions
@@wolfetteplays8894 and brought hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, yeah it sure sounds like it was terrible. Artisans craftsmen, and Tradesmen still existed and still do to this day. And do factory jobs not also require skilled labour? Particularly in advanced and light manufacturing sectors although still all factory jobs require a great deal of knowledge and skill, especially know that all menial tasks are automated.
Chimney sweepers often died of aggressive forms of testicular cancer from all of the soot. It was actually one of the first recognized forms of cancer, in 1775. Often they called the aggressive cancer “sooty warts” or “sooty balls”.
How the hell
Which means cancer wasn't known about until it was too late. Makes sense. Hitler's mother died from cancer. The doctor was a jew that tried and failed to save them.
Hitler went out of his way to get that one jew out of Germany. Bloody loyal if nothing else.
E
@@SpagbolphinThey had to break those boys down of course! The only way to do that was destroying anything that made them boys in the first place!
.. I hate the Victorian era
Why testicular cancer? Wouldn't lung cancer come first?
I just saw an interview with Maggie Smith, who said Downton Abbey producers allowed her to skip wearing a corset, as long as she sat and walked as if she was wearing one; apparently she "pulled it off".
Funnily enough I am currently reading a book about everyday life during the Victorian era. Seeing some of these things animated like that is pretty awesome!
What is it? Bill Bryson?
@@JB-xw1zq No, does he have one? I love his books and read almost all of them!
It's from Ruth Goodman, "How to be a Victorian ", a Christmas present I received.
@@TheRealLanMisa I just read that a month ago!
@@harrymanocha4533 Cool, that's a neat coincidence!
It’s always a good day when bluejay posts
yes 😎
Agreed
Hell yea it is
Yes
yes eys yesy yesyeyys ye yseyyes yeysy yessy eysye s
8:33 the children yearn for the mines
Minecraft
Also why is no one talking about “the telephone, an invention that allowed people to find out about their car’s extended warranty” that was so smoothly delivered I loved it
E
One of my favorite videos of yours! Fantastic job on this one!
Thank you space llama, stay safe up there
@@BlueJayYT my dog is in space
@@BlueJayYT Thank you. Will do.
How can a guy who gets his historical facts from Reddit make a good video
@@spacellama7851 my doggy went with manny from scarface to the moon and still not come back😭😭
I had a bad day. Have always been a fan of your videos, but somehow not watched this one yet. It cheered me right up. A few more of your videos and I will feel distracted and better again, while at the same time learning something.
We all have those days sometimes, I’m glad I could help, I hope your day gets better!
@@BlueJayYT Thank you so much!, you are really a good person!
The Victorian Era gave rise to the brilliant idea of "how about we make all the poor people be in other countries? heck, how about other continents?"
haha, made me realize the very good reasons my British ancestors immigrated from 1600-1800s. Europe sucked😂
What the fuck do you think Australia was? Where they sent the serial killers and rapists? Fuck no, steal an apple, and it's nine months on a cramped ship with no hygiene to arrive in an alien land with a radically different climate to work until your sentence was up. And this was before 1800.
The rich parts of the world didn't "make" all the poor people exist in other countries to solve poverty, they experienced massive economic growth which created a middle class and brought better living conditions to everyone. Everywhere, including Britain and Europe as this video illustrates, was poor until after the reconstruction following world war 2. The default state for agricultural civilisations is poverty, and most people lived in agricultural civilisations. Rich countries only became "rich", in the sense that the average person had a decent life, well after they realised that colonialism was both bad and unsustainable and began decolonisation. "Poor" countries have usually gotten richer after decolonisation, but so has everywhere else, and the immense disparity between growth rates is why Africa amongst other places is still so poor compared to the west. In 1960 the difference between per capita income in Africa and the west was less than tenfold, but today the difference is more than 30 times. And there are still poor people in rich countries. They're just not as poor, and there are less of them.
@@pcarebear1 everywhere sucked
'poor people' might be a bit generous; it was more along the lines of "lets limit the vast amount of children working in our factories aged 9-13 to only 9 hours a day. oh yeah and enslaving brown people is even more chill now but we can't let the people who can suddenly all afford to buy a single pageboy hat now see because they might empathize with them"
So colonisation and slave trading in a nutshell.
I always come away from watching period pieces set in Georgian or Victorian England thinking it would be nice to live then. Then I remember that my family would be middle to lower class and at best I would be one of the help and at worst dead by age 10. On the plus side, my family were farmers back in the day so maybe I could survive on rural life in the country.
Honestly? Yeah. Rural life was markedly better than city life for almost all of history. The water wouldn't be half as dangerous because there's only ten people shitting in it instead of ten thousand and you can clearly demarkate drinkable upstream from undrinkable downstream, and working the field is not only less dangerous than a factory, but you'd also get most of the year off between sowing and harvesting. You'd have to grapple with starvation on the off chance a crop failed, but it's not like people in the city wouldn't also starve in that case.
Except that laws were past to keep people from abandoning the country and coming to the city. Life was actually worse in the country than city, hence the migration
Yeah, tenant farming was huge at that time and farmers barely had enough money to do much with. The payment for land was extreme and led to a bunch of families starving (look at the Irish Potato Famine). I would think being middle class in a city was much better than being rural, but I feel like rural life was still being a coal miner or being lower class in the city and sleeping on a rope.
@@nicosmind3 Honestly it depended on your family, the period and your country. Not all medieval tenant farmers were equally bound to their lands. In some cases the contract they had was even to their benefit, as it prevented the local lord from just forcing them out if he could get a better deal with someone else. It would of course be ideal to be a free farmer, but tenant life wasn't neccesarily the worst thing in the world (unless you're Irish or Russian).
City life was often popular for those whom couldn't even become tenant farmers. Families that didn't have enough land for all their sons, or who couldn't inherit their tenant farm would have to seek their fortunes elsewhere. In medieval times this often meant the cities. The cities were often like their own little city states, having walls to keep pesky nobles away, and their own local council government. Of course only the actual humans (rich merchants) got to have any part in this, but if you know a craft you might be able to get an apartment in the "nicer" part of town. If not then I hope you like living in a closet, because unskilled labour isn't gonna get you much better than that.
Perhaps the best time to be a farmer (or any normal person for that matter) in medieval times was probably just after the plague died down, as the workforce had been thinned out making labour more valuable, while making land and job positions less valuable. This generally meant that many people got much better conditions to negotiate with their lords and bosses.
@@theposhdinosaur7276 except we are talking about the 1800s.
I’d like more of these “how to survive” videos, like what it’s be like in the 1900s
my history teacher in high school, said that royals from the past would trade their castle for a fairly decent 2 bedroom apartment, with heat and AC, and that miracle of survival the Refrigerator!!! Flushing toilet! YES!
The one benefit of being an old timey royal was all the servants. Labor is much, much more expensive now. Not sure if they would be able to adjust to doing everything by themselves. The biggest selling point for the modern age would probably be the medicine - it's amazing how many rich and powerful people in the past died because of diseases that are now preventable or treatable.
Yeah, many nobles who could afford started building palaces or new manor houses in or around the cities because their old castles were a shitty place to live in compared to the luxury of the cities. Lower nobility often owned smaller city houses or apartments
Or hope you're Ludwig II and do both, but he lived in a very specific era
That wouldn't double up as a fortress in a time of war.
I have to admit. Being born in 1977 is pretty cool. Started out watching televisions to smart phones. Much better Entertainment and you learn something. Thanks for your hard work.
E
Danke!
Thank you!
I've heard the Thames miasma theory did hold water, the river being so poluted, it was possible to contract an airborne disease just by breathing it in. Not sure how true this is. London wasn't the only city that stank. The river Avon runs through my city and to this day the richest part of the city was built upon cliffs overlooking the city because it was the only way you'd live close enough to work in city industry while avoiding the smell of the river.
but you could get sick drinking from rivers that don't smell too
The miasma theory was not new in Victorian times. It had been around for centuries. In earlier centuries, for example, they thought plague was spread by bad smells.
As a Victorian watching this from my typewriter, I can confirm this is accurate
As a broke ass baker from the victorian era , I can agree with this. I'm watching this from my oven
As a 26 year old working class person from the victorian era, I can't confirm this as I am dead
As a victorian pure-finder, I agree as well. Watching this from my dog-poop bucket.
as a victorian chimney sweep, i wish i could agree with this but i'm still stuck.
As someone who tried to sleep on the bench but paid only one penny, I just got my bones broken by royal guards💔
As Tom Lehrer said: "Don't drink the water and don't breathe the air."
@Miles Doyle Your a bot, aren't you? If not, please take a chill pill. You look like a crazy corner soap box preacher. that scares more people away from the faith that brings in...or at least put your comment in a better format. Its a giant wall of text, no one is reading that.
Good to meet you, fellow man of culture.
It’s insane that with all of this going on Gladstone condemned the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1850 for the poor living conditions of the population, which accompanied by political suppression, led to the Kingdom being diplomatically isolated by the major powers later in the decade.
Hypocrisy is the worlds oldest politicial views
Not really, Sicilians were dirt poor and heavily exploited by landowners and the mafia. One of the reasons they did well in the US was that they could live well on practically nothing.
Coalminers in Britain were well paid and among the most affluent of the working class in Britain, transitory labourers were probably the worst off but were still better off than peasants in Mediterranean countries, notably they weren't tied to the land and were better able therefore to haggle over wages. During this period in England landless agricultural workers and the landed aristocracy tended to be allied against the yeoman class who employed most of the workers, worker action tended to be organised and lead by members of the local aristocracy and the great estates were know to provide relief during times of want, usually though the creation of superfluous jobs and though church networks.
I'm not going to beat the obvious dead horse(totally am) that the nobility usually only did this after they had lost their power to the merchant class, who while absolutely terrible, still at least dealt and sold to the working class things that would've landed the peasants in jail, like selling them their own land to now farm for themselves instead of the nobility. Basically, it was the classic abusive romance triangle of two obviously shitty guys deciding among themselves which one of them gets to walk away from the bar fight with the girl that is going to move into a DV shelter in another three years after having a kid. (Damn, I'm dark, but now even I'm sad)
@@vorynrosethorn903Wow . This is pretty much been rewritten
0:06 if i want to be an adult during downton abby then i would have to be born during the late victorian era
Fun fact: day labor halls in America have benches that some homeless just use to have a place to sit while they "wait for work" (some really are, some have no intention of going anywhere that day heh), they still have monitors to make sure nobody falls asleep on the benches. To get work one should generally be there 5 to 6am to maybe get a job for the day. The place stays open until 5 or 6pm one can stay as they please while "waiting for work" so long as they don't fall asleep. Place of business after all. - 2022
6:54 BLUEJAY GOT BARS 🔥🔥🔥
Keep an eye out for my 3rd channel: Lil Jay
That last minute rapid fire was solid gold! Can't wait for the next episode...
Fantastic video! The Victorian era is my favorite time period in history for a bunch of reasons but one of them is definitely how wacky and absurd it was. You covered way more than I thought you would which was great to see. I’m surprised you didn’t mention the dreaded WORK HOUSE or that the upper class thought that poverty was a direct symptom of being morally bankrupt but quite frankly those are small things compared to all the other things you mentioned. I really hope you do another 1800’s episode because there’s just so much absurd shit. Great video
Now tell us the story of the guy who moved from Victorian Era to current time
Yes. And what Miles Doyle said, I think, I didn't read it.
You forgot to mention the extremely high chance of getting testicular cancer from chimney sweeping. The boys nuts would go black and in some cases fall of, and they would bleed out. Also their food consisted mainly of water soup with a dash of water, you know to keep slim to fit in the chimneys.
missed opportunity to say “a splash of water”
The average Victorian male shrunk to 5 foot 3 inches. Many highly trained historians have been disciplined enough to pretend they have no idea why this happened.
smol
Cant deny that they were cute sized
Ha yeah, and upper class women of the time wouldnt even talk to a short man rich or not. "Nice tall man" regardless of how nice he actually was. And disgusting short bald man. Regardless of how he actually was besides appearance. Guess when you get bored of taking baths all day or ordering in orphan children to help with the harvest then sending them back. Youve gotta have something to keep yourself occupied.
@Alias Fakename I doubt they’d be 6’3” back then, at least not the average rich dude. Prob closer to 5’7”
@@jayclark9662 I love the fact that men put weight on when they went to war around this r8me. They finally were properly fed, sometimes for the first time in their lives.
All I know about my family in the Victorian era was one faked his death and immigrated to england from Ireland without his family. And another one worked in a poor house all her life and was buried in a paupers grave
A mummy unwrapper usually wouldn't say, "Oh look, he had a brain", because the brain was usually taken out as part of the mummification process.
Ironically enough in this time living as a humble farmer in the middle of the Midlands was probably safe than in London at the time.
Yes the Victorian countryside would be a different story altogether. But still the English urban proletariat didn't revolt like Marx and Engles expected them to. Instead Socialist brainiacs had to make a revolution in Russia which had hardly any proletariat at all. Ended up killing a load of peasants who just would not understand Marxist theory no matter how often you told it to them. Stupid potatoes, up against the wall!
Midlands UK? If so I live there, West Midlands x
Sure, if you actually managed to work in the agricultural economy. The extreme exploitation of the urban working class largely happened because mechanization of farming had led to rural unemployment, causing a constant stream of people migrating to the cities for work. Resulting in said overcrowding and low wages.
@@anderskorsback4104 Basically being a farmer would be better. If you get to be one in the first place in the time when farmers were a shrinking demographic.
Love the channel! You can see the hard work that goes into each video, thanks.
Thank you! I'm glad that it shows
Well if it inspired Bloodborne, I guess it was worthwhile. Great video!
That's what I'm sayin'! Thank you so much, Ben :)
The Victorian era is horrible but so fascinating, I like the dresses but I don’t wanna die by falling down the already dangerous stairs
Blue jay, I just want to say thank you for deciding that uploading youtube videos is something you enjoy and do. You're humour is top tier. It feels like I'm talking to one of friends back in my hometown. Currently going through it as of right now and wanted to say thank you. keep doing you.
Scrotal cancer was also a big after effect of being a chimney sweep because some sweepers went naked into chimneys just to keep their jobs. It is considered one of the first identified cancers caused by working within a particular occupation, a link to particular carcinogens.
As a Croydon resident, life in current day london is still terrifying to people accustomed to life in the 21st century.
You know, in alot of ways, I've thought that a modern middle class person lives a better life than even the wealthy of even 100 years ago. Sure, if you were wealthy you lived in a huge house and had servants. But if you don't have servants, you don't need as big of a house (no servants quarters) and you don't have to manage employees. So, instead we have houses that are plenty big enough for our needs, machines instead of servants, and outsource alot of our needs to businesses (think about how much food you buy from the store has been processed in some way, even if that processing is just being portioned out and placed in a convenient package). The wealthy of 100 years ago would have paid significant money for even a cheap seat on a budget airline. Remember, they may have traveled in luxury, but a trip to Europe took weeks. A cross country trip by rail took the better part of a week. And the choices for food and entertainment the average person in a developed country has access to would have simply been incomprehensible to even the wealthy. And that's leaving out the enormous advances in medicine and information.
So, the point is, we may have our issues now (and we certainly do), but all of us are better off now than humans have ever been, even than many of the wealthy and powerful.
The Victorian era, the later part, had excellent travel on railways, you could travel cheaply and quickly from point a to point b. Mostly
@@blackcountryme Quite true. But "quickly" is rather relative. Even in the late Victorian period, a transcontinental railroad trip was the better part of a week (in the US, still is, actually). That was a huge improvement over earlier times when it could have been a month or more, but still time consuming compared to modern air travel. Across a smaller place, like Britain, it would have been, of course, much shorter, but perhaps not quite as dramatic.
The sad part is, a lot of big cities in the US are slowly but surely regressing into sequels to Victorian London.
how so?
Not just the us, seen plenty of cities around the world advertise their rentable sleeping pods
@@DennisHeikki so you want me to give examples of US places (their new state) that are worse that london 130 years ago?
@@SirDrakeFrancis Banguii Central africa Republik
What we live in now is nothing like Victorian times. Just the notion of that is insane. You or me couldn’t survive 1 day back then
As someone who just bought a 3060, I did indeed have to sell my country
Damn, the prices dropped to country-levels?! Thank you for letting me use your face in the video ;)
@@BlueJayYT please feel free to plaster me everywhere in any and all future videos thank you
Actually, the prices dropped quite a bit for me. I got a 3070ti for less than 1000usd.
You should do the “wild” west next. You always hear jackasses talking about how they’d been a cowboy back in the day.
I think the job they are intending to be is a bounty hunter or something along that line
That might've actually been a better place to live than London.
Because for the most part, living in America during the 18,19th century was much better then in London for definite
1:05 10/10 rating for the impressive segway to the sponsorship
8:15 Ahh yes, the great coal mines of London.
7:52 in the italian part of switzerland many families sent their children to big cities in italy to sweep chimneys and you basically worked 12 hours every day until you get too big so you get sent back to the family with lung cancer and alot of other very very bad physical disorder because well you were for 10 years always in a really small chimney ( my grandma lost about 3 brothers just because of chimneys)
9:24
You made me spit out my tea!
Fun fact, mummies didn't actually have brains in their skulls, they were removed through the nose during the embalming process 💀
Haha 6:18 is you listen carefully he's saying "look he has got no brain" not that "he has got brain that's crazy"
@@dimgus3653 nope
Fun fact, not all mummies received the same level of embalming due to their status and wealth, and the process of embalming changed over the years as well. Some mummies definitely did have their brains and other wealthier people who were embalmed did have all their brains and organs removed. It went both ways…there’s a pretty awesome “like you mom” joke there with that last phrase too which I will refrain from using, but will acknowledge.
The Beatles started making music closer to the Victorian era than today
“Miss Trent opened the Bow Street Society’s office door but didn’t enter; she knew she’d locked it. Slowly she looked over the darkened room until she could make out two silhouettes; one behind the desk, the other to its left. She stared at the latter as she moved forward and closed the door.
“There is a lamp, you know,” she remarked casually. Lifting the glass shade from the kerosene lamp on her desk, she turned on the gas slightly and ignited it with a match. As she carefully increased the lamp’s gas, the faces of Mr Locke and Mr Snyder emerged from the darkness.”
― T.G. Campbell,
3:23 nice to see nothing has changed...
John Snow's potential was shattered. Clever 😭❤️ 3:02
As a bald fact boy has said many times. “The past was the worst”
Yeah but only if you were a minority or a woman or not part of the upper 1000th of a percent that had money
Even in the upper class life was significantly shittier than it is today. Disease was rampant, medicine was slightly better than random guessing, and things that harm you in many ways were parts of every day life because no one knew any better.
@@nibblitman fair but you could also do a bunch of cool stuff that pesky things like human rights and health and safety laws have snuffed out today
Personally I will take not getting lots of interesting diseases and having internet in exchange for not being able to play hunt the poor or human mortal kombat chess. On further review you may have some points though that second one sounds fun
@@nibblitman well to each their own, personally I feel that gta would be far more fun if you could play it itl in the small African city you bought
Guy: gaaah my body!
Me: let me guess, cholera right?
Bluejay: it’s radiation poisoning
Me: well f*ck me, that escalated quickly
Don’t tell Jada Smoth
@@LTV746 why not?
First video i've seen from you, lloved every bit i paused multiple times to read the little details and laughed even more. Thank you
Sameeee , I’m a history freak and I’m loving the satire 😂💯
One of the best UA-cam channels
The only thing that could make it better is Blue jay working 24/7 and pumping out one video a day lol
11:44 A more accurate statement would be:
The Victorian Era: Disgusting and deadly. *Which **_inspired_* Bloodborne.
I don’t believe that’d be more accurate
@@BlueJayYT How dare you disagree with an internet stranger.
Imagine if in the victorian universe, there is a version of youtube where a victorian worker switches bodies with a person in the 21st century. And its just 12 minutes of him going like, "WHAT, THEY HAVE LUXURIES!???!?!?!?"
“Babe wake up, Bluejay posted”
This guy somewhat gives off the feel of Sam’O Nella whom I miss dearly since he stopped making content. This channel somewhat fills that sad missing hole. Keep up the good work.
With the life expectancy to be 25 now I understand the part from Jane Austen "Persuasion" where main character Anna is 27th years old and wonders of its not to late to get married. Well, she was one foot in the grave, potentially...
The corset thing is actually a myth that was spread by the company that invented bras to sell more bras. Corsets are actually pretty comfortable and definitely safe to wear, tight wrapping was a fairly rare practice.
Sounds like propaganda from the corset industry....
@@asafoster7954 Cosplayers that wear corsets not designed to crush your organs beg to differ
@@GoldenEntropy no they don't lol
@@GoldenEntropy the corset in the victorian era was dangerous as they never wore it propally and often damaged their ribcages
@@asafoster7954 yes they do..
History with Bluejay. Always a joy. Despite the depressing as hell subject.
Wow those times were Hell for anyone who weren't rich
10:57 Correction. The telephone was invented by Antonio Meucci. Graham Bell bought the patent rights for it and marketed it but when they expired he didn't return the patent rights, Meucci took it to court but then he died and the whole issue went on hold. It remained unresolved until 2002 when the US government published a paper that confirms the telephone was invented by Meucci
Thank you for filling the void of comedic stick figure history! Very refreshing
Jake Farm is another good one
You are just becomming better and better
Thank you so much!!
first time I see your videos. I enjoyed it all along. thanks man!
You're filling the hole in my heart left by Sam O'Nella so well. I thank you
Bloodborne was inspired by the literary works of authors H. P. Lovecraft and Bram Stoker and the architectural design of real-world locations in countries such as Romania, the Czech Republic and Scotland.
11:09 I’m literally shiny hunting froakie as I’m watching this 🤣🤣
5:07 Excuse you?!
Lmao
Well?? Is it true or not paul?
This has really made me appreciate the time we live in a lot more :) thanks man!