Victorian Sensations

In the first of three films focusing on the technology, art and culture of the of the 1890s, mathematician Dr Hannah Fry explores how the latest innovations, including X-rays, safety bicycles, and proto-aeroplanes, transformed society and promised a cleaner, brighter and more egalitarian future. Whereas Victorian progress in the 19th century had been powered by steam and gas, the end of the 1800s marked the beginning of a new ‘Electric Age’. Hannah discovers how electrical energy dominated the zeitgeist, with medical quacks marketing battery-powered miracle cures, and America’s new electric chair inspiring stage magicians to electrify their illusions. The future had arrived courtesy of underground trains and trams (as well as electric cars), and in the 1890s the first houses built specifically with electricity in mind were constructed. Like our own time, there was concern about where this technology would lead, and who was in control. HG Wells warned of bio-terrorism, while the skies were increasingly seen as a future battleground, fuelling the race to develop powered flight. Hannah outlines the excitement around the coming Electric Age. Electricity was a signifier of modernity and Hannah discovers how electric light not only redefined the way we saw ourselves but changed what we expected from our homes. The new enthusiasm for all things electric was also something exploited by canny entrepreneurs. In the 1890s many believed that electricity was life itself and that nervous energy could be recharged like a battery. In 1896, out of nowhere, the X-ray arrived in Britain. Hannah delves into the story of what Victorians considered to be a superhuman power. This cutting-edge technology was a smash hit with the public who found the ghoulish ability to peer under flesh endlessly entertaining. In the medical profession that X-rays caused a revolution and, as well as changing our views of our bodies, the X-ray revealed new fears in society about personal pr

The 1890s was the decade when science, entertainment, art and morality collide - and the Victorians have to make sense of it all. Actor Paul McGann discovers how the works of HG Wells, Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde were shaped by fears of moral, social and racial degeneration. Paul, seated in Wells’s Time Machine, sees how the author’s prophecies of a future in which humanity has decayed and degenerated highlighted the fears of the British Empire. Paul finds out how these anxieties were informed by new scientific theories based on Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Paul learns how Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton sought to improve the genetic stock of the nation, through a project he coined as ‘eugenics’. Another of the decade’s prominent scientific thinkers – Austrian physician Max Nordau – declared that it was art and culture itself, and its practitioners – the aesthetes and decadents – that were causing Britain’s moral degeneration, singling out Oscar Wilde as the chief corrupting influence. Paul explains how Wilde sought to subvert traditional Victorian values. Tucked away in one of Wilde’s haunts - the famous Cheshire Cheese Pub on Fleet Street - Paul hears from Stephen Calloway about how Aubrey Beardsley – the most decadent artist of the period – scandalised society in much the same way as Wilde through his erotic drawings. Wilde and Beardsley were not alone in being parodied by Punch Magazine. Historian Angelique Richardson shows Paul caricatures of a new figure who had begun to worry the sensibilities of Victorian Britain. Known collectively as The New Woman, this was a group of female writers, who in more than 100 novels, portrayed a radical new idea of femininity which challenged the conventions of marriage and motherhood. However, as Paul discovers through reading a short story called Eugenia by novelist Sarah Grand, some advocated the idea of eugenics through their writing. For eugenicists, if one means of keepi

In the final episode of this series, psychotherapist Philippa Perry time-travels back to the 1890s to explore how the late Victorian passion for science co-exists with a deeply held belief in the paranormal. Using a collection of rare and restored Victorian films from the BFI National Archive, she shows how the latest media innovations made use of contemporary ideas of ghosts and the afterlife – and how this ‘new media’ anticipated today’s networked world. The final years of Queen Victoria’s reign are a moment when the old Victorian order rubs shoulders with the beginnings of our modern world. This is a chaotic, febrile time of discovery and innovation in science and technology, entertainment and art, and the Victorians have to make sense of it all. Philippa finds out how Marconi’s early experiments with wireless telegraphy encouraged speculation amongst the public and scientists that telepathy – communication between minds – would be the next scientific breakthrough. She also replicates eminent physicist Oliver Lodge’s pioneering experiment with radio waves and discovers his fascination for exploring the paranormal with the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). This Victorian group of ghost hunters includes William James, a pioneer of psychology, biologist Alfred Russel Wallace and even Prime Minister William Gladstone. Buried in the archives of the SPR in Cambridge University Library, Philippa finds an incredible Census of Hallucinations that contains 17,000 ghostly encounters sourced from the Victorian public. Maybe it’s not surprising that people of the age saw so many ghosts because, in a sense, spirits do haunt the Victorian home. Every Victorian innovation - from photography to motion pictures, phonographs to fantasy books – had its own supernatural genre. Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the hyper-rational Sherlock Holmes, drew on his real-life experience as a ghostbuster to write his ghostly fiction. Philippa learns the art of s