The 40-Day Death Sentence: Could You Survive 1665 London?

Someone is cutting a rope above your head. You don't wake up gently in 1890s East London -- you wake up because the lodging-house keeper has just sliced through the rope holding you upright all night, in a coffin-shaped wooden box that cost you fourpence to sleep in. This is survival in Victorian London's East End: the four-penny coffin, the matchbox factories that rotted women's jawbones, the dust yards where children sorted human waste by hand, and the mudlarks who waded barefoot through freezing, sewage-contaminated Thames mud for a few pence a day. Above all of it loomed the one institution feared more than death itself -- the workhouse, deliberately designed to be worse than any job outside it. This is what it actually took to make it to tomorrow in one of the richest cities the world had ever produced. CHAPTERS: 00:00 -- The four-penny coffin 02:30 -- Act 1: The Street 10:00 -- Act 2: The Work 23:00 -- Act 3: The Workhouse Threshold 34:00 -- Act 4: The Body Under Pressure 42:00 -- The Close: Would you have survived? #VictorianLondon #LondonHistory #EastEnd #HistoryWithFrank #1890s #victorianera