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| CATEGORY: | DVD |
| THEATRICAL RELEASE DATE: | 12 June, 2000 |
| MEDIA: | DVD |
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Customer Reviews of The 1900 House
Entertaining and Informative This program entertains and instructs. The principal lesson is that the wealth that ordinary people today enjoy in capitalist societies is gargantuan by historical standards. This fact is true even when those standards are set by history as recent as a century ago. A related lesson - one that points to the very reason that "The 1900 House" is an entertaining program - is that this gargantuan wealth is so widespread that we today take it for granted.
Wealth is to modern Americans and western Europeans what water is to fish: it's noticed only on those very rare occasions when it's absent - or when we see demonstrated vividly, as in "The 1900 House," what life was like without much of the wealth that is widely available today.
The middle-class British family featured in this documentary had no idea just how difficult, tedious, dangerous, and dull life was for middle-class families only 100 years ago. We see the family struggle with these hardships. What we don't see - what we today cannot see - is how middle-class families truly of 100 years ago perceived their lives. We look back on daily life of a century ago and marvel that our ancestors possessed the fortitude to deal with such hardships. But I suspect that those same ancestors in 1900 looked at their daily world as one of marvels and conveniences unimaginable to their own parents and grandparents.
The audiences most appropriate for this documentary are those people today who self-righteously, but ignorantly, decry material wealth. One open-minded viewing of "The 1900 House" will persuade anyone that, while not producing heaven on earth, the continuing expansion of material wealth makes everyone's life safer and longer, easier, and much richer in experiences.
"The 1900 House" is a splendid program!
A Real Time Machine
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.
Not so much history as it is "Anti-Nostalgia;" 3 1/2 stars
If I am counting correctly, we have been treated to four houses now. "Frontier House" and "Manor House," while entertaining in their own right, do not contain many elements to which the modern-day viewer could relate. "1900 House" and "1940's House" by contrast, portray hapless modern-day families attempting to cope with situations & technologies that are quite familiar to us, even though the technology is much more primitive.
The Victorian era, for some strange reason, is an era that romantics on both sides of the Atlantic seem to long for. We have all seen those dreadful "Victorian Christmas" and "Victorian Wedding" books. It is an era that just oozes nostalgia.
"1900 House" should kill any feelings of nostalgia once and for all. Even though the technology looks familiar, it is clearly a struggle for this family to cope for any length of time. The family was equipped with what was close to cutting-edge technology, but found every-day life to be tough sledding. All this without showing the amazingly constricting moral constraints of the Victorian & Edwardian eras, which probably would have put the Bowler over the edge once and for all.
As other reviewers have correctly observed, there is a conspicuous lack of context in this show, as the very crucial aspects of social life & religious life are simply absent. The Bowlers might as well have been living on a desert island, because there is precious little indication of life outside the house itself.
What we are left with is not so much a lesson in history as an anti-nostalgic smack upside the head, as we are reminded regularly that we, as modern-day people, could not cope with life in 1900, no matter how familiar that life may appear.
Just as nostalgia distorts history by emphasizing only the good stuff, this show similarly distorts history by presenting 1900's life as a non-stop struggle, but without putting it in its proper context. This is not to say that the program was not extremely entertaining, but it was not as instructive as it might have been.