‘Victorian Slum House’ Is A Bonkers Look At Britain’s History Of Poverty

I have a new favorite show and it’s called Victorian Slum House.

Yeah, go ahead, and laugh. I know you want to. I get it. At first glance, Victorian Slum House looks like a perfect satire of a PBS show. It’s a reality series that follows modern folks as they struggle to make ends meet in a reconstructed “Victorian Slum House” in London’s East End. Families share beds like in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Tween girls sell watercress to modern Londoners in Covent Garden. The grocers use the outhouse to smoke fish. There are bowler hats and British accents. There’s grime and history lessons. On tonight’s episode someone even curses, “Oh no! My bobbin’s gone!”

However, Victorian Slum House is way more than a quaint reality show. It’s one of the most delirious bits of progressive political propaganda I’ve ever seen. By placing these people in the dire straights of London’s East End from 1860-1910 — each episode pits the cast against the changes and challenges of a new decade — it forces them to confront the use of public housing, workers’ rights, free education, and Britain’s National Health Service. Each new resident quickly goes from hopeful to beaten and every confessional feels to arrive at the same conclusion: “Thank god for Britain’s welfare state.”

Of course, this, like the show’s drama, is all by design.

Episode one covers the 1860s and introduces a motley crew of residents, mostly families, that will inhabit the historically accurate slum house. Accommodations are eked out according to how much money a group could have expected to earn per week. So the Howarths, a four-person family whose patriarch is a present day bespoke menswear designer, inhabits the nicest room and is tasked with stitching and selling clothes. Single mom Shazeda and her ten-year-old twins are stuck in the cheapest garret. One of the first great awkward moments is when the show’s narrator explains that in the 1860s, Shazeda would probably have had to turn to prostitution for her survival; here she makes fancy boxes. Spoiler alert: you can’t support yourself and two children on fancy boxes alone.

Victorian Slum House‘s drama hinges on how on the nose the situations are. These people are literally struggling to survive  and there’s no attempt from the production team to be politically correct. In fact, the show relies on historical stereotypes to help flesh out the struggles of the Victorian age. You see through interpersonal relationships how damaging prejudices evolved. Race matters. Age matters. Disabilities matter. No man or woman or child is created equal, unless you consider that everyone is taking on an equal amount of desperation.

In episode one, the grandfather of one family of “unskilled laborers” spends a whole day breaking down iron bells for pittance. It’s the hardest day of work in his life and he hurts his back. Does the show go easy on him? Nah. In fact, in the next episode, they introduce a plucky pair of young Irish siblings to stir shit up. On most reality shows, “stir shit up,” means to cause drama by spreading rumors. Here, the younger, more abled bodied Irish kids steal jobs from the older and infirm cast members. That’s way harsh, but way true to historical fact. Elsewhere, Andy, a professional golfer with a prosthetic leg willingly gives up his fancy modern prosthesis and takes on a peg leg to fully embrace the slum house experience. He’s leaning on a crutch for the rest of the series and finds it hard to work enough to earn money for food. And although they never bring her race up, you have to wonder if the producers purposely made single mom Shazeda’s plight worse to reflect how much more dire things could have been for a woman of color in the time period. Have I mentioned how fast things go south for Shazeda? Spoiler alert: really darn fast!

Because each episode covers a new decade, the show mixes things up to make the cast members feel the pinch of societal changes. Sure, the Haworths get a sewing machine in the 1870s, but they also have to put their kids to more serious work to keep up with the bulk orders. In tonight’s episode, the Haworths set up a literal sweat shop with new migrant workers who have come to the house. True to form, the show has cast actual Polish immigrants and their descendants to reflect the racial shift of the age. The twist is this new set up brings out an imperious side in Mandy, the mother. Her daughter declares, “My mum! I’ve never seen her like that before. She’s embracing the sweat shop thing,” before adding that she herself has qualms about the lack of workers’ rights. Later in the episode, Mandy softens her stance, but only after a historian reveals that her own great-grandfather, a Jewish tailor fleeing the pogroms of Russia, labored away in a sweat shop. It’s this extra step of empathy that finally changes her mind.

That’s kind of the trick of Victorian Slum House. By dropping modern Europeans, who have lived in a culture where the rights of the lowest classes are usually protected by law, into a visceral experience where those rights are stripped away from them, they come to appreciate how and why our modern values came into existence. There are actually moments when some cast members have to ask themselves if they can morally deny children food or a bed just because their mother is broke. THEY ARGUE ABOUT THIS! The slum house is an eco-system and one person’s inability to make rent or pay off their tic at the shop reverberates through the community. It’s an eco-system, but it’s a closed one. There is no escape from this lifestyle without intervention. As the pressures mount, and the population of the house rises, you see the participants come to unionize for their own sake (with the obvious prodding of producers).

Victorian Slum House is an engaging bit of reality TV that mines its drama from being a literal time warp into the seedier side of British history. Because it pulls no punches, it also pushes the viewer to confront where our politics and prejudices really come from. It also does a huge deal to argue that no one in a civilized society deserves to live in abject squalor. Whether you agree with the show or not is up to you. I’m just saying it’s a ripping good watch.

May I remind you that someone actually says, “Oh no! My bobbin’s gone!” on tonight’s episode? That’s entertainment.

Stream Victorian Slum House on PBS