HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: The official website for BBC History Magazine
date: 2025-06-10T10:39:24.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Victorian Britain's fearless female felons
items: What did Victorians do with their poo? The battle over the 19th-century excrement explosion
items: Week six quiz: Victorian life
items: Victorian family life | HistoryExtra Academy video lecture
items: Living in sin: unmarried relationships in Victorian Britain
items: Week five quiz: work and labour rights in Victorian Britain
items: Victorian working life | HistoryExtra Academy video lecture
items: How gruelling was the Victorian workhouse?
items: What working-class autobiographies can tell us about the Industrial Revolution
items: A Victorian cult: inside the strange world of the Agapemone

Victorian Britain's fearless female felons
type: item
date: 2025-06-12T08:00:53.000Z
creator: Rosalind Crone
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Life in Victorian Britain
subject: Victorian crime and punishment
description: Drugging, fraud, even murder – women couldn’t really commit such heinous crimes, could they? Rosalind Crone explores five audacious female-led felonies from the 18th and 19th centuries
encoded: 1. The Victorian spiking crisis Female thieves took to drugging men’s drinks with opiates before cleaning out their victims’ pockets On 2 January 1865, Elizabeth Bagwell (alias Elizabeth Manning) was convicted at the Middlesex Sessions of “larceny from the person”, and sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude. It was a harsh punishment, reflecting the fact that she already had three previous convictions – but also that she was no ordinary pickpocket. Bagwell had spiked the drink of James Rintoul, a London cab driver, at her lodgings off Edgware Road, according to press reports of her committal hearing at the Marylebone Police Court. The drugged glass of gin she gave James was, he claimed, “so hot that it burnt my mouth”. He fell unconscious, and later woke to find himself “alone in the room, and in darkness. My gold watch and chain were gone… my ring also [and] 25 shillings from my pocket.” He had fallen victim to a crime commonly called ‘hocussing’, derived from ‘hocus pocus’ – the term used since the 17th century for conjuring, trickery or sleight of hand. By the late 19th century, ‘hocus’ had become shorthand for drugged liquor. Hocussing had become more prevalent by that time, likely because of the ready availability of cheap drugs including opium (in the form of laudanum), morphine and chloroform. Particularly in convivial social settings such as Victorian public houses, it was easy for thieves to slip drugs into drinks undetected. With their victims bewildered or unconscious, hocussers had time to search pockets thoroughly, remove any valuable jewellery and escape the scene of the crime, making pursuit and prosecution difficult. Poisoners in prison Hocussing was deployed by women and men against victims of both sexes. As a weapon of the weak, poison enabled female thieves to overcome stronger male victims. Men who had been lured by the promise of sex with women hocussers may have been reluctant to prosecute, for fear of reputational damage. Certainly, by 1865…

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What did Victorians do with their poo? The battle over the 19th-century excrement explosion
type: item
date: 2025-06-06T14:10:23.000Z
creator: Dr David Musgrove
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Life in Victorian Britain
description: The industrial revolution caused huge growth in the urban population – and with it, a rising tide of human waste. Find out how the leaders of Victorian cities tried to cope with the excrement explosion that came hand-in-hand with the 19th century’s boom in industry
encoded: In the 1890s, Manchester’s civic leaders faced a mounting crisis. The city’s population had exploded, its industries were booming, and with them came an ever-growing tide of human waste. By the later decades of the 19th century, Victorian Britain’s sanitation revolution was well underway, but as historian Richard Jones explains in an April 2025 article from the Environment and History journal, ‘Excremental Flows: Manchester Corporation’s ‘Dung Hill Scheme’ and the Rampton Manor Estate, Nottinghamshire, 1892’ (available to purchase or access via a subscriber login), the transition from solid waste systems to water-borne sewage was anything but smooth. By the late Victorian era, Manchester’s “existing waste removal infrastructure – designed to deal with the much smaller volumes and narrower range of waste materials of the pre-industrial age – had begun to struggle with the prodigious quantities of polluting waste its people and factories now generated,” says Jones. The sanitary reformer Dr Southwood Smith vividly described a scene he was greeted with upon a visit to a Manchester privy in 1860: “The floor… is completely covered, several inches deep, with ashes and night-soil, so that it is impossible to get to the seat itself without being over shoes in abominable filth. The seat itself is, in every part, besmeared, and in some parts covered several inches deep, with the same filth.” By the mid-19th century, Manchester was already producing more than 100,000 tons of ‘night-soil’ (a euphemism for human excrement) annually. This waste was collected from thousands of ash-pits – an open pit into which all domestic waste and excrement was disposed, partially dried and deodorised by adding ashes from hearths and ovens – and privies. Then, it was often transported by rail to distant farming regions in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire. But this system was expensive and increasingly unpopular. In one step to cope with the growing burden, Manchester introduced pail-cl…

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Week six quiz: Victorian life
type: item
date: 2024-12-11T20:32:15.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Life in Victorian Britain
description: Test your knowledge on what daily life was like in Victorian Britain with our quiz...
encoded: Watch our video lecture with Ruth Goodman on what family life was like in Victorian Britain – and test your knowledge below with our 20 question quiz! View Riddle on the source website

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Victorian family life | HistoryExtra Academy video lecture
type: item
date: 2024-12-11T13:04:30.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: HistoryExtra Academy
subject: Life in Victorian Britain
description: In the 19th century, men took more control at home than at any other time in history. In the final episode of our course on Victorian life, Ruth Goodman discusses the ‘male breadwinner pattern’, the employment of boys and its impact on family life, as well as how Victorians controlled the size of their families
encoded: View Green Video on the source website Ruth Goodman is a historian of the social and domestic life of Britain. She has advised the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Globe Theatre and presented a number of BBC television series, including Victorian Farm

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Living in sin: unmarried relationships in Victorian Britain
type: item
date: 2024-12-11T09:05:00.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Life in Victorian Britain
description: Is the idea that Victorian working-class couples often skipped marriage accurate? Rebecca Probert examines the evidence...
encoded: There is a surprisingly widespread assumption, shared by popular and academic historians alike, that cohabitation (living together in a relationship without being married) was common among the Victorian poor. The journalist Matthew Sweet suggests in his book Inventing the Victorians that working-class men and women took an “equivocal and pragmatic approach” to marriage, with many choosing to cohabit out of economic convenience. Others refer darkly to ‘unknown’ numbers of people living in ‘irregular unions’ – the implication being that those numbers, though unknown, must nevertheless have been large. Moving from the belief that the poor did not marry to the observation that the working classes made up the largest section of the population, it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that marriage was a minority practice in Victorian England. Of course, individual examples of cohabiting couples can be found in all classes of Victorian society. George Eliot is a regularly cited example, and her fellow authors Mary Elizabeth Bradden and Wilkie Collins, along with the political activist Eleanor Marx, often feature alongside her on lists of Victorian cohabitants. And yes, alternatives to marriage were seriously discussed by radical thinkers such as the socialist Robert Owen in the 1830s and the early feminists of the late 19th century. But one should never confuse big names with big numbers. Newly available historical data, using recently digitised sources, clearly establishes that all but a tiny fraction of Victorian couples sharing a home had gone through a ceremony of marriage. Read more | A brief history of proposing marriage Earlier generations of researchers who have looked at the extent of cohabitation were hampered by the need to wade through thousands of pages of registers when searching for evidence that a marriage had taken place. Understandably, they often failed to trace weddings that had been held more than a few miles from a couple’s home parish, and from …

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Week five quiz: work and labour rights in Victorian Britain
type: item
date: 2024-12-05T16:47:26.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: HistoryExtra Academy
subject: Life in Victorian Britain
description: Test your knowledge on work and labour rights in Victorian Britain with our quiz...
encoded: Watch our video lecture with Ruth Goodman about labour and workers' rights in Victorian Britain – and test your knowledge below with our quiz! View Riddle on the source website

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Victorian working life | HistoryExtra Academy video lecture
type: item
date: 2024-12-05T10:41:44.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: HistoryExtra Academy
subject: Life in Victorian Britain
description: In week five of our course on life in Victorian Britain, Ruth Goodman explores how the 19th century saw work change for most of the population, with shift working made possible by gas light, a new adherence to fixed hours of work and a fierce concentration upon a smaller number of tasks whilst at work. She also looks at the slow movement towards protection for workers, including children
encoded: View Green Video on the source website

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How gruelling was the Victorian workhouse?
type: item
date: 2024-12-05T09:00:12.000Z
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Life in Victorian Britain
description: Peter Higginbotham argues that the Victorian institutions weren’t necessarily the grim hell-holes portrayed by Charles Dickens
encoded: “Tory spending cuts send us back to the misery of the Victorian workhouse,” cried a Mirror headline in 2010. Workhouses were “bleak, grimly austere and oppressive”, wrote the author of a study of one local institution in 2012. Ever since Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist began publication in 1837, the establishment he described, and numerous on-screen representations of it, have become the filter through which the institution is invariably viewed. Portrayals of the workhouse habitually take it as read that it was unremittingly horrific, harsh and dehumanising. But was it really that bad? The Victorian workhouse first came about as a result of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act. This act transferred the administration of poor relief from individual parishes to a coordinated national system based on new groupings of parishes, known as Poor Law Unions. Each union, run by a locally elected Board of Guardians, provided a workhouse to serve the whole union area. For the able-bodied destitute and their dependants, the workhouse was intended to be the only help on offer. The operation of the New Poor Law was overseen by a central authority – originally the Poor Law Commission (PLC), later the Poor Law Board (PLB) and then the Local Government Board (LGB). It’s often assumed that Oliver Twist was set in one of the new union workhouses, or “bastilles”, as critics such as MP and journalist William Cobbett labelled them. However, it is clear that it was actually located in one of the pre-1834 parish-run establishments, where there was no uniformity in matters such as work or diet. Everyone knows, of course, exactly what workhouse inmates had to eat: gruel. In Oliver’s workhouse, there were “three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll on Sundays”. But, in the entire workhouse era, before or after 1834, there was never an establishment with such a diet on offer. A typical parish workhouse menu was that at Westminster St Margaret, where breakfast was brea…

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What working-class autobiographies can tell us about the Industrial Revolution
type: item
date: 2024-12-05T00:00:00.000Z
subject: Industrial revolution
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Life in Victorian Britain
description: Emma Griffin explains how 19th-century working-class autobiographies could revise our understanding of the industrial revolution
encoded: The British industrial revolution stands out as a pivotal moment in human history. But when we think about the men, women and children who, with their strong backs and nimble fingers, did the most to power it, we tend to feel that there is less to celebrate. All of the great Victorian commentators – Engels, Dickens, Blake – painted those industrial times in a very dark hue: they lamented the introduction of new working patterns that compelled men to work at the relentless pace of the machines; children forced into factories and down mines at ever-younger ages; families squeezed into dark, disease-ridden cities; and no future but the workhouse for those who slipped through the net. Listen on the podcast | The Industrial Revolution: everything you wanted to know Their dismal litany echoed through the 20th century as a succession of pioneering social historians – Barbara and John Hammond, Eric Hobsbawm and EP Thompson, to name a few – turned their attention to the devastating impact of the industrial revolution on the working poor. Workers’ words Yet, despite the frequency with which various versions of these bleak perspectives have been retold, their central claim – that this period was worse than anything that has gone before – has not received the scrutiny it deserves. In particular, it is remarkable that so little effort has been made to listen to what working people themselves had to say about their life and times. Of course, it is usually countered that such an effort would be futile because such people did not leave behind much in the way of written sources. But though it is certainly true that they wrote far less than their social superiors, it is not the case that they wrote nothing at all. Their legacy is a little-known but remarkable collection of autobiographies written by working people. If we listen to these, we hear a story very different from the one that we are used to. Historians have long been aware of the existence of such memoirs, but most have bee…

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A Victorian cult: inside the strange world of the Agapemone
type: item
date: 2024-11-27T07:00:28.000Z
creator: Ellie Cawthorne
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Life in Victorian Britain
description: Stuart Flinders takes listeners inside the Agapemone – a Victorian Christian cult presided over by rogue Anglican priests
encoded: In the 1840s, a strange, secretive community known as the Agapemonites set up camp in Spaxton, Somerset. Presided over by a rogue Anglican priest who believed he had a hotline to god, this religious cult attracted wealthy members in search of a deeper connection to the Lord. But once they had handed over their worldy possessions in order to join, the Agapemonites found it was rather harder to leave. Speaking to Ellie Cawthorne, Stuart Flinders explores their story, from triple marriages and spiritual wives, to financial exploitation and suicide. Stuart Flinders is the author of A Very British Cult: Rogue Priests and the Abode of Love (Icon Books, 2024). Buy it now from Amazon Hear Stephen Talty tell the story of the 1993 Waco siege, a standoff between a religious cult and the FBI

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