The Victorians

Jeremy Paxman investigates the most dramatic event of Victorian Britain. The explosion of great cities. As paintings from the time reveal, the Victorians at first feared these new monsters in their midst but then grew to love and transform them. Jeremy explores the canals and sewers, suburbs and back streets, workhouses and magnificent buildings of the great Victorian city.

Jeremy Paxman continues his exploration of the Victorian world by entering the homes of the period. Considered a haven of order, respectability and morality, not everything was always as it should be. Sexual double standards and the perils of drink, disease and poverty threatened to destroy the cherished dream of Home Sweet Home, as the art of the era reveals.

Inspired by the paintings of the day, Jeremy Paxman tells the story of Victorian power. Railways, factories, and military might made Britain the richest country in the world, ruling an empire greater than Rome's. He finds British generals in togas, meets the horse that led the Charge of the Light Brigade and visits a fort to tell the story of the time when Britain seemed to be having it all.

Jeremy Paxman discovers how in the dying years of Victoria's reign, artists led a revolt against Victorian values of money and morality. They created a world filled with medieval knights and damsels, dreams and fairies, sex and death. He meets a pair of spiritualist mediums, visits a collection of Victorian nudes and is allowed into Broadmoor hospital in search of the mad artist Richard Dadd.