3 September (2001-09-03) – 22 October 2001 (2001-10-22)
What the Victorians Did for Us is a 2001
BBCdocumentary series that examines the impact of the
Victorian era on modern society. It concentrates primarily on the scientific and social advances of the era, which bore the
Industrial Revolution and set the standards for polite society today.
In 1875, the Bulldog Club defined the perfect British
Bulldog, in a booklet that was circulated to breeders everywhere. From
dogs to
engineering, from
sports to
space and
time, the world was becoming obsessed by standards, and the rules that defined them. This was the world of the Victorians.
— Adam Hart-Davis
Victorians standardised the rules for
association football, or soccer, based on a range of games already played, such as the
Eton wall game.
Walter Clopton Wingfield invented the game of
lawn tennis, which allowed young men and women to socialise together, and to get more exercise than by playing the sedate game of
croquet.
Victorians set down rules for formal dining, and invented the
fish knife.
Mrs Beeton documented recipes and how to run a household.
Florence Nightingale recorded extensive details of wounded soldiers in the
Crimean War, and used these statistics to demonstrate to a
Royal Commission the effectiveness of simple
hygiene in reducing unnecessary deaths.