Customer Reviews

The 1900 House

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

The Bowlers, an everyday British family, were selected from 400 families who applied to star in what would become the most popular series on England's Channel 4 that season. The Bowlers agreed to spend three months living the life of a lower middle-class family of the late 19th century, without modern conveniences, in an authentically reconstructed Victorian house. In the premiere, we see the producers' search for an appropriate house, the hunt for authentic furnishing and housewares, and a construction crew's removal of electricity, central heat, indoor toilet, etc., as they turn a London row home of 1999 into The 1900 House. We also see various families' auditions. In episode 2, the Bowler family is outfitted with their 1900 clothing, and is greeted at their new home by the museum curator in charge of the house's restoration. We witness their first week in The 1900 House. By part 3, Victorian life is starting to wear down the family's composure -- especially the women's -- so the mother places an advert for a housemaid. The maid agrees to abide by the rules: cleaning will be done using late-19th-century technology. In need of a break, much of the family visits a public baths -- except the women, who are not welcome there. Part four presents the end of the Bowlers' stay in the house, and sums up. Utterly fascinating and always entertaining. It's sort of what you'd get if you crossed THE REAL WORLD with UPSTAIRS DOWNSTAIRS. This American video release has an advantage over the video that was sold in the UK, in that the PBS video contains the complete four-hour series.

1900 House may be the closest thing to a time machine any of us will ever experience. This series follows the Bowler family as they agree to live their lives according to the reality of 1900 London. That means period clothes, gas lamps, etc. - all the seemingly romantic trappings of the period. It also means cold baths, dinners that take all day to prepare, clothes that are never quite clean, dreary and damp rooms that are always too cold. It's fascinating to watch how the family comes to grips with 1900s life. The mother's frustrations are especially palpable. I hope Britain's Channel 4 decides to do more series like this one - each one going back another 100 years.

You don't have to be completely obsessed with Victorian history and social life to love this documentary. Watching a modern day family cope with the hardships and joys of a completely alien existence is fascinating to anyone, history buff or not. The refreshing honesty of the Bowler family, and the realness of the project draws you in and you become attached to each "character" even more than you would in a book or movie. Unlike other reality shows, the presence of the family makes the atmosphere loving and supportive, not nasty and backstabbing. Everyone?s in it together, and that?s really nice to watch. But if you are, like myself, interested in history and specifically Victorian history, this movie is a rare gem. You get to see what we have glossed over in our interpretation of the period. I can say that I did over glamorize the lack of technology, and have never even pondered the constraints on diet and hygiene. The documentary truly opens your eyes to living history in a way no book or movie could. It is a little disappointing that all but one family member rejoined modern life for work and school, as I?m sure that somewhat lessened the full force of the experiment. But the experiment is still very forceful and, more importantly, fun to watch. I would recommend this to anyone, and I would especially recommend it to history buffs of any era because it opens your eyes to the difference in living history and the history time remembers.

I thought The 1900 House well done, overall; it revealed both the more elegant aspects of the era (home decor and clothing) and the more awkward aspects (everything painfully basic and time consuming).

However, I was startled to see that an intelligent, well-educated family of the 21st century could not function well with mere books, board games, and conversation for entertainment.

Perhaps this is because two absolutely central aspects of Victorian life were not included in their lives at all (and perhaps could not have been in this context): Church and social life, which often intersected, were vital to Victorians.

Unless you were a very disfunctional Victorian family indeed, this important community connection not only lightened some of the more dreary aspects of life, it was also seen as a moral obligation. (This could be why the "reality" family found so little to converse about. Was life so boring because this was 1900 or because there was no social interaction at all for this family? That would be boring in any period.)

Another point (which the program addressed briefly but perhaps not quite accurately) was domestic service: Many families in this economic catagory quite often seem to have had one live-in and one "daily" or to have sent their laundry out. Various memoirs and autobiographies from this period also indicate that some servants, at least, took pride in their profession and were treated with respect by their sometimes struggling employers (Agatha Christie's excellent autobiography would be a good example). Not all, but some.

This program did show us the down side of "the good ol' days" and kept us from romanticizing the period; but it is perhaps also true that we, as modern individualistic people, are losing the ability to appreciate a more community-oriented and simplified life (but who could not immediately empathize with the joyful return to a modern washing machine?!).

Thus, The 1900 House seems to have been quite as revealing about the pro's and con's of The 2000 House as it was about the very late Victorian era (when many modern conveniences were only ten or fifteen years away; had this been even The 1913 House, life perhaps would have been more bearable).

I love the concept of being able to "time travel" - to live (as close to possible) as people did in a certain time period. While I realize that too much of history has been rewritten and whitewashed, I am still fascinated by Victoriana.

Bottom line: The Bowler family was *the* wrong choice for this project. I was very interested in the first half of the first videotape where we were shown how the project came together and how health and safety inspectors almost shut down the project for safety concerns. But my interest faded once the family got inside of the house.

From Day One, it was non-stop whining on the part of Mrs. Bowler. Even though she's a vegetarian, that lifestyle severely hampered the ability of the viewing audience to see Victorian cuisine in the present day (the local butcher laughed at how she was going to life such a lifestyle in accordance with Victoriana).

Another thing regarding Mrs. Bowler's being a vegan: WHY, after the project ended and the family was driven to a highway service station on their way home, did she go to a Burger King and order Whoppers? A bit hypocritical, eh?

And perhaps I shouldn't say the entire family were a bunch of whiners. The twins - Hilary and Ruth Bowler - were the only level-headed ones in the house. I do believe the son, Joseph, was too young to have taken part in this project.

The fact that the family did not go out to theatres or engage in anything outside of the house until the very end of the project was another pitfall of the show. There were plenty of ways people amused themselves back in 1900 - besides the local music hall (which, as it was pointed out, was not a place where Victorian parents took their children). I'm sure such places were still around (or the equivalent of such) in 1999 England.

I was especially disappointed with the way the project influenced the Bowlers. Instead of expressing gratefulness at being able to get to know each other better (unless that was edited out), all the family did was express gratefulness that there are numerous cleaning solutions on the market and that they had their choice of cosmetics and clothes. How incredibly shallow!

The only good to have come out of this was, as Paul and Joyce themselves pointed out, that no one got hurt or sick for the duration of the project.

I give credit to the organizers of the project for a great and innovative idea. It's too bad the wrong family was selected to execute the project. - Donna Di Giacomo

What a wonderful way to time travel. I thought that it was very interesting and informative. When you see Victorian times portrayed in the movies, it is quite misleading. It's portrayed as a quiet and gentler time, where women had a lot of time to learn to play the piano, visit friends or do needlepoint. Maybe this was true of the wealthy, but for most women, the Victorian era was much more difficult. There was much illness and disease and death especially amongst the children and many Victorian women were obsessed with death because it permeated their daily lives. Housekeeping was time consuming and would start from sunrise to sunset. I truly enjoyed how the family really slipped into their roles as a Victorian family. It was interesting to see the growing resentment in Joyce because she had to bear the brunt of living in the 1900 House. I felt that many women of the era probably felt the same way, which is why women began to enter the workforce at that time. Paul seemed to easily slip into his role as Master of the House as he orders the maid around the house. This was a great history lesson to remind us that women and household appliances have come a long way since 1900. This show made me appreciate many of the modern conveniences that I usually take for granted. I will never look at the year 1900 the same again!

In this marvelous PBS production, you follow a project of producing a true "living museum." Taking a London townhouse that existed in 1900, a host of experts are called in to return it to its original appearance, complete with gas lighting, coal burning stove, turn-of-the-century paintings, clothing, toys, soaps, etc. Then, a 1999 family (the Bowlers) is challenged to live in this house, wearing 1900 clothing using only 1900 technology, for three months. This show is presented on two VHS tapes, each containing two one-hour episodes.

I really enjoyed this show. Learning about the house and what went into it in the first episode was interesting, but much more so was watching the family's reaction to the jobs they needed to perform around the house and the limited tools they had to perform the tasks. Emotions range from the joy of parties to the frustration of the mother, when the inability to perform some everyday tasks reduces her to tears. They hire a maid (who, in 1900, would have earned four pence a day for fifteen hours of work!), and then have to deal with the situation of having a domestic.

This is a great show, being very educational and yet entertaining. There are many vignettes, where a great deal of information about life in 1900 is presented. This is a great show, and I recommend it 100%.

The turn of the century, life moving at a simpler pace without the fears and stresses of our modern world, elegantly dressed ladies, dapper gentlemen, horse drawn carriages and luxerious steamships. Who hasn't wished they could find a way back to those times to escape the pressures of our own? Well, an English family called the Bowlers did just that as part of an experiment conducted by a television station to see just how far domestic life has changed in the past 100 years. A period house was retored to 1900 condition and the Bowlers lived there for three months as Victorians. Their experience proves an eye opener for them and us as we discover the "Good Old Days" were anything but. Mrs. Bowler discovers that doing laundry is an all day job, suffers a meltdown three days into the experiment when the coal fired stove malfuntions for the umpteenth time, she and 16 old daughter Kathryn get first hand experience with female sanitation of the Victorian era, and Kathryn discovers that being a teenaged girl in the year 1900 was quite a dull existance. Father Paul revels in the Victorian role of father as Lord and Master of the house. Elizabeth the girl Mrs Bowler hires breifly as a "Maid of all work" gives us insight of what life for a domestic servant of the era was really like. (Upstairs Downstairs this aint!) To really get an idea of what it was really like to live back in the early years of the 20th century, watch this video and hear it firsthand from people like you and me who actually did it, the Bowlers.

Okay, riddle me this? Why would you volunteer to be a part of a reality tv show where women wear corsets, didn't have the right to vote and treated their servants poorly, and then whine about it when you get on TV? Better yet, why would you want to watch it? After enjoying 1940's house I rented 1900 house only to find it not quite up to par. The problem with the series was not the setting...It was the Bowlers themselves. The Bowlers, particularly the wife and the eldest daughter were a bunch of whining wimps. Instead of throwing themselves into their roles, they continue to whine, complain and grouse about the things they 'do not have' and how 'unfair' everything is. Of course its unfair, this is the 1900's!

I was disappointed in Mrs. Bowler. Her vegetarianism and distaste for meat, cooking, and the hiring of a maid, meant we missed out on seeing some interesting Victorian era cuisine and we also missed seeing her develop some proficiency in creating meals from that era. There is only so much I could listen to her anti-meat ranting and see the insipid meatless dishes she cooked up. (To be fair, one time she made sausages, but only after whining about 'how disgusting' the meat provided by the butcher was). What's the point of watching a show about the Victorian era if all we get are dishes anyone can make in the modern era? (Spaghetti, vegetable soup etc.)

Ms. bowler's anti-corset rantings also took up at least twenty-minutes of screen time. Yes we know corsets are awful, unhealthy etc. The teen daughter's whining and complaining also got on my nerves. Oh my god! I have to share a room with my two sisters! The sky is falling! Get over yourself and take advantage of the opportunity to learn something new- such as piano, writing, sewing, quilting etc.

The husband character was absent a lot, and the best character, I felt was the maid.

3 stars. Would be greatly improved by a cast who was actually INTO what they were doing. Also, the ending, and listening to how many of the participants disliked their experience annoyed me. Yes, I realize not everyone would like the experience, but I felt the participants could've been more positive.

When a London television station ran a contest to choose a family to live as Victorians for 3 months, over 400 families responded. After viewing 50 videotaped final applicants, a psychologist chose a very special family, the Bowlers, as the most stable. Even the Museum director who furnished the old townhome said he never could do what they were going to do. They had to cope with so much work that we "feel their pain" as this special family cooks, cleans and entertains themselves (3 teenagers, too) The mother has a "melt-down" as she experiences a failure at rhubarb compote. The females struggle with laundry that we cannot begin to comprehend. My favorite parts are the Mom's surprise birthday present (vintage chickens), the spring cleaning episode and Mrs. Bowler's honest and confidential appraisal to the camera on the sixth day that "this experience has gotten to my core". I adored watching every minute of this and was constantly surprised at their experiences and the fascinating bits of information on how those Victorians lived. What a special and unforgettable program. If you like Antiques, England, History and adventurous people you'll love this. (Did you know Victorians feared germs and although they felt iron beds were more sanitary they thought that germs lived in the joints of the beds and thus had to disinfect those areas?}