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The 1900 House
1999 · TV series · 1 season
The 1900 House is a historical reality television programme made by Wall to Wall/Channel 4 in 1999. The show is about a modern family that tries to the live in the way of the late Victorians in 1900 for three months in a modified house. It was shown on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom and PBS in America. The series was accompanied by a book titled 1900 House: Featuring Extracts from the Personal Diaries of Joyce and Paul Bowler and Their Family by Mark McCrum and Matthew Sturgis.
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The best accounting I've seen of how much work people did historically were the mini-series that were aired on PBS a few years back: "Frontier House", "Colonial House", "Texas Ranch House", "1900 House", "The 1940s House", "The 1900 Island", "Prairie House", etc. Average modern families took up residence in a building of the times and had to use only the tools of the day to work as they did then. (Though they didn't have to grow their own food.)
Without exception, the work was backbreaking and unrelenting. Some of the moderns chose to quit rather than finish the month-long 'experiment'. Everyone came away with aspects of shell shock in realizing how hard life was back then for the average person, even just 70 years ago. It also became obvious that the lives of slaves or those working with only hand tools were that much harder still.
No, it's just insane to imagine that anyone in the past had easy lives. Nasty, brutish, and short, indubitably.
Fascinating to see how hard our recent ancestors had it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1900_House