I'm Dr. Onyeka Nubia and I'm a historian, and I'm walking through Britain to reveal a fascinating period in our history.

The Victorians shaped modern Britain.

I'm searching for the innovation, the technology, and the industry that the Victorians gave us... (Dr. McWilliams) It's the oldest working engine in the world.

It's really a jewel in our collection.

(Dr. Nubia) ...for good and for bad.

(man) If you get your finger caught in the belt, you get the fingers off.

(Dr. Nubia) I'm going to explore this era that is as complicated as it is fascinating.

(atmospheric music) (peppy music) This time I'm in Nottingham... (creaking) I think it's meant to resemble hell.

...on the trail of Victorian law and order.

(Tom) You could be arrested for sleeping in an outhouse, sleeping on the street.

(Dr. Nubia) The 1800s saw this ancient settlement transform into a bustling industrial hub.

But with growth came tension and even violence.

People were, like, lobbing stones at each other in the market square.

The police got involved, they could barely contain it.

(Dr. Nubia) From prisons and policing to politics, the tale of this city reveals the underbelly of life in Victorian Britain.

(Stephen) He could look at you and know exactly how much rope he needs to break your neck.

♪ (contemplative music) (Dr. Nubia) For much of the Victorian age Britain was still ruled by the aristocracy.

♪ Britain's democracy only extended to men with property and wealth.

By 1832, only one out of every seven male adults Could actually vote.

♪ Nottingham, though, was changing fast.

It had a booming lace industry which was attracting people to the city in vast numbers.

Nottingham was an old town, but in the Victorian period it grew, it grew too fast, too quickly, and too soon.

The result was overpopulation and staggering inequality.

♪ With overcrowded slums, rising crime, and angry demands for change, Nottingham can tell us a lot about life in the Victorian age.

♪ In the very heart of Britain, I'll be walking through this city to get to grips with Victorian law and order.

♪ From the city center in the Lace market, I'll head south to explore the industry that caused Nottingham's boom... ♪ ...back to Shire Hall to discover the city's earliest police force.

♪ ...and out to Mapperley to see how desperate demands for democracy led to violence.

But I'll end across the border in Lincolnshire to explore a very Victorian and rather radical prison system.

♪ My walk starts in the center of Nottingham, at the heart of the city's quest for law and order, Nottinghamshire County Jail.

Prisoners have been tried and punished here since the 15th century.

Little has changed in this medieval building, but by the start of the Victorian age it was prosecuting an unprecedented number of people.

So welcome to the Criminal Crown Court for Nottinghamshire.

(Dr. Nubia) I'm meeting Head Interpreter Stephen Dennis.

So if you were arrested in the area, this is where you were brought to stand trial.

-Mm.

-Right up until the 1980s.

Who would be tried here?

-Men, women, and children?

-Absolutely, yeah, across the spectrum.

(Dr. Nubia) Children as young as how young?

We had, for example, an 11 year old here who had been convicted here four times already.

-Convicted of what?

-Stealing.

(Dr. Nubia) And the punishment for stealing?

(Stephen) You could get six months here as a small child.

(grim music) (Dr. Nubia) Those found guilt would be led underground to cells that were already 100 years old by the Victorian times.

(Stephen) But today it's just you, so, uh-- (Dr. Nubia) It's very nice, well, I should have a look inside.

(Stephen) Yeah, you-- you wanna go inside, yeah.

(Dr. Nubia) Each of the eight small holding cells were designed to hold three convicts.

♪ Very moody.

Yeah, it's intended to intimidate you.

♪ (creaking) It feels like a-- another world really beneath the world that we know, a world in which you've been sort of cast.

I think it's meant to resemble hell, the hell that you're going to go to.

In this cell, would they have mixed men, women, and children together?

(Stephen) Well, that was an issue because this was a mixed prison, so you had men, women, and children locked up here, and it was very hard to keep them apart.

So originally there weren't as many female prisoners as male prisoners, 'cause men were more likely -to commit crimes.

-Mhm.

So most of the cells were designed for men, and any women they had were usually left in the care of the actual jailer and his wife.

But when it comes to men, we're talking boys as well, so children would've been in here with adults, no different.

(Dr. Nubia) Across most of Victorian Britain the belief was that hard labor was the key to stopping reoffending.

Their methods included the use of a crank which served no purpose other than to be turned 10,000 times a day.

But Stephen is now taking me to the prison yard where one of the most severe forms of punishment awaits.

Okay, this is a bit brighter.

-Where are we now?

-So this is -the jail's exercise yard.

-Right.

(Stephen) It's where you'd come out for your fresh air.

(Dr. Nubia) The cell that I was in, where's that?

(Stephen) Directly above our heads.

See the bars in the windows above us just there?

(Dr. Nubia) Let me see.

(ominous music) So this is the exercise yard, but one cannot help but notice that in the midst of the exercise yard is a scaffold.

(Stephen) When people were actually executed at this site, they were hanged on the front steps where you came in today, 'cause that was a public location.

-Right.

-So there'd be no point in the backyard here 'cause no one's gonna see it.

-And where's the entertainment.

-Ah.

(Stephen) So they did it on the very front steps, so the prisoner who's kept down here would be taken straight up out into the street usually around 9:00 in the morning, and then put to death in front of the crowds.

(Dr. Nubia) The first recorded hangings in Britain took place in the 5th century.

By the time of Victoria's reign, it was the most popular form of public execution.

Almost 10,000 people were hung during the 19th century, but these executions were also public entertainment.

(Dr. Woolf) They loved spectacle, they loved sensationalism, they loved gory details.

So what better way to spend your afternoon than nipping down to see a local hanging.

It was considered entertainment.

It was fun.

And it does tell us something interesting about how they viewed criminals and indeed many of the poor.

They were different, they were other, they were morally separate from the rest of us.

(Dr. Nubia) So how do we know that the gallows or the scaffolds were actually like this?

(Stephen) Well, again, there's no real strict method of how to do it.

So originally there was no trap door, -like you might imagine.

-Yes.

(Stephen) So you might have to climb up onto a ladder with the rope round your neck and they would just move the ladder away and let you drop -and dangle around.

-Right.

Or you'd be on a wagon and they'd move the wagon away, you'll fall off the back of the wagon and dangle.

But by the 19th century, the trap door method was a bit more sophisticated.

And you had hangmen, like William Marwood, very famous hangman, who developed the long drop method to a precise science, and he could look at you and know exactly how much rope he needs to break your neck.

(Dr. Nubia) A cobbler by trade, William Marwood served as a hangman for nine years, during which time he hung over 176 people.

(Stephen) He actually came here and hanged the last man hanged at this site in 1877.

(Dr. Nubia) After that, local executions took place either in Lincoln or in Birmingham.

The very last hanging in this country took place as recently as 1964.

But for early Victorians there was an alternative and very different form of punishment: Transportation to the British colonies.

Once in Australia, 10 hours of hard labor each day would help build the young colony.

(Stephen) Some prisoners were transported, so before they left overseas, they left their names behind, and there's quite a lot here from that time period, such as Valentine Marshall here.

He was only 17 years old when he did that and that was in 1832 when he was transported.

(Dr. Nubia) Oh, that's--that's absolutely-- that's really interesting.

(Stephen) So he would've stood here and carved his name into the brickwork.

Got a bit of an education here 'cause you got -each high crime on the wall.

-Right.

(Stephen) So you've got S. Clark, that was Samuel.

Condemned March 10th, 1826, for housebreaking at Sutton-in-Ashfield.

-So he's a burglar.

-Yeah.

He's put condemned 'cause he's got -the death penalty.

-Right.

-But they didn't hang him.

-I see.

So they were a bit more lenient and his sentence was reduced to transportation to Australia.

So a lot of thieves, burglars especially, would've been sentenced to death, but sent to Australia instead, um, which was a lot luckier for them, even though to them it was still a bit of a death sentence.

They were never gonna see their families again, and Australia was not what we can think of it today.

It was an unknown destination.

(Dr. Nubia) Those who were spared a death sentence often faced a sentence worse than death: Transportation.

(Stephen) It is very much a large holding area because this is where you're gonna get large groups of prisoners chained up together by their feet already to--for the off to go to Australia.

And they were usually kept in one of our pits, which is what we have in the corner down there.

(Dr. Nubia) Oh yes.

(Stephen) So you can imagine being chained up down there to a dozen people, all waiting for a month or so.

(Dr. Nubia) Yes, it looks very dingy, very unpleasant.

(Stephen) But up until the 1860s you'd be off to Australia and you'd have to be kept together in a place like that.

(Dr. Nubia) And how long would they be kept in this holding place?

(Stephen) Well, once you've had your court case, it's just a matter of gathering together everybody who's going to be transported.

So you could be waiting for quite a while.

It could be a few weeks to a couple of months before they got enough prisoners to be shipped off.

(unsettling music) (Dr. Nubia) Ships departed Portsmouth for Botany Bay, Australia, arriving over eight months later.

In one case, 40 of the 736 convicts died on route.

Most of the prisoners were guilty of petty crimes, such as theft.

Up until 1853, convicts would be transported to Australia, Tazmania, not all--not all the time, but if they were deemed fitting for transportation.

But by 1853, the colonies had had enough of English convicts, and so they put a stop to transportation and that turned in, therefore, to hard labor in Victorian prisons.

(ominous music) (Dr. Nubia) But in total, over 158,000 British criminals ended up in Australia before that form of punishment was formally abolished in 1868.

(peppy music) I'm in Nottingham investigating law and order in the Victorian era.

In this city the challenges were widespread in no small part due to a population explosion caused by one key industry.

In the Victorian period, Nottingham was the center of Britain's lacemaking industry, and the people that worked in that industry lived and worked right here.

To this day, the Lace Market area is filled with the grand Victorian facades of sales rooms and warehouses.

This was the time that turned Nottingham from a pleasant town with a tradition of knitting stockings into the world's industrial lace hub.

But the ancient town, hemmed in by the River Trent and the city walls, was ill prepared for the new workers, all of whom needed space to work and space to live.

♪ I'm traveling five miles south of the city center to the village of Ruddington to discover a lovingly restored example of a 19th century framework knitters' yard, and it's where I'm meeting Museum Manager Jim Grevatte.

Are they lacemaking machines?

Or is that--is that the wrong way to think of them?

(Jim) No, no, it's a really good question.

These are stocking machines, they're knitting machines, but the clever knitters managed to adapt them to make knitted lace before the lace machine was invented.

So the reason that Nottingham has a lace trade is that there were already 1,800 of these things churning out lace by the time the lace machine was invented and they had a skilled workforce to move straight into it and a production and a supply chain already set up.

(Dr. Nubia) By the mid-19th century, many hand-operated lace frames had been replaced by steam-driven factory-based machines.

This factory resisted steam and maintained the early Victorian tradition of skilled labor... (peppy music) (clanking) ...as demonstrated by a modern-day apprentice.

What I notice is that there's not a lot of space, but there is space.

(Jim) That's brilliant and that's what the factory inspector said.

(Dr. Nubia) Okay, is it?

(Jim) You've almost-- you've almost summed it up.

The whole building's built around the machines.

All the dimensions are based on them.

But the machines are built around a human.

They're all human powered.

There's no steam here.

Each man, and it was mainly men that were knitters, had their own space.

They talked about it being both a sanctuary and a cell.

And that inspector said, "There's quite enough room for a man to work, but if he did move, he would bump his back -with a man next to him."

-Wow.

So they were really close.

(Dr. Nubia) Some shifts lasted up to 14 hours, so to maintain productivity there was a small concession.

(Jim) One of the parts of the apprenticeship for a framework knitter is to make his own seat.

So the reason all the seats are different is that they were all handmade.

And they actually took those with them.

If they ever moved to a different frame, they'd take the seat with them.

That comfort was absolutely critical.

(Dr. Nubia) So these are leather straps?

(Jim) They're leather straps, often old belts, and some of them have got names carved in, -which is lovely.

-A 19th century person -sat on that seat?

-Yeah.

-Some were earlier than that.

-Let me see.

-Can I try and sit on one?

-You--please do.

We always invite people to come and sit, yeah.

-I must come and sit on it.

-I'd love to give you a go -actually knitting, but, um-- -No, I--as long as I-- (Jim) That's a seven-year apprenticeship.

(Dr. Nubia) As long as I can sit so I can feel what it's like.

My feet can't quite touch the ground.

This person must've been quite tall.

The vast majority of staff employed here were men due to the fact that in order to knit you were required to be an engineer.

(Jim) Being quite a gendered society at the time, you didn't get many girls going into engineering.

-But there were some women?

-There were, yes.

They've got some lovely reports of--of female knitters.

(Dr. Nubia) Working here in Nottingham?

(Jim) Oh, in Nottingham, definitely, yeah.

We've just recently acquired court summons of a woman who was taking her master to court because he wasn't teaching her, he was neglecting her and abusing her time, which was really common.

You know, you're exploiting your workforce.

(Dr. Nubia) Is it like a legal contract?

-Yeah.

-So is it they are legally required to work for this person for seven years, but at the end of that they're meant to acquire a trade and a skill, and then they can set themselves up -as independent?

-Yeah.

We know, for example, in this village, in these workshops that there were the same names popping up for generations.

They come up in the census, returns again and again.

Fathers passing to sons, passing to daughters sometimes, this skill and this knowledge, and them staying and working in the same workshop for generations.

The other big problem was that whole families were trapped in the industry.

You know, if you started your child working at 5 or 6, which was very common, and you needed them economically to be working for you, even if there was a free school in the village, which there was here, they couldn't attend it.

So Sunday school was about as good as they could expect, and they were, well, the Nottinghamshire term was "as poor as a stocking."

You know, that's-- they were the lowest of the low, they were right at the bottom of the social scale.

(Dr. Nubia) Those lace workers that were living in Nottingham in the Narrow Marsh area, what were conditions like?

(Jim) They were pretty terrible.

You only need to look at the plans of that area to see just how many houses were crammed in, how few privies there were, how few toilets, how few pumps there were for water.

They were famously described at the time as the worst slums outside of Calcutta, I think was the-- was the comparison.

(Dr. Nubia) As the demand for lace continued to grow throughout the century, the rights of workers took second place.

One now famous group of knitters banded together to fight back.

(Jim) So the Luddites were a group of framework knitters originally who were campaigning effectively at how they were being exploited by their employers.

What they were really campaigning against was the fact that wider frames had come in which could produce a lot of material very quickly.

And managers were employing colts, which was poorly trained young lads to churn out cheap stuff with little skill and no finishing, and then sell it on as being decent stuff.

Spurious goods, it was called, which I love as a phrase.

And it undervalued the craft of these guys that had served their seven-year apprenticeship and had whole families working and supported by it.

(Dr. Nubia) And when the factories didn't take the Luddites' complaint seriously, violence ensued.

(Jim) And would, you know, quite violently enter these premises and break the machines.

(Dr. Nubia) Break up the machines just like this.

-So they would smash them up?

-A few well-placed hammer blows and it puts a very expensive item out of action.

And you know, the reaction was quite severe.

You know, the death penalty, and of course the famous hangings in Nottingham of--of framework knitters who were caught taking part in all of this.

Yeah, it was a really serious time.

(Dr. Nubia) Community can give rise to popular protest, and popular protest can give rise to revolution, so these-- this very industrial practice can be a precursor to industrial and political change.

To stop revolutions a very clear attempt was made to restore law and order.

(Carl) Law and order was very much like it had been in the late to medieval and early modern periods.

You had watchmen, you had constables, but they weren't really sufficient to control, and that's what the upper class wanted, they wanted to control the working class.

(Dr. Nubia) Prior to 1836, law enforcement in cities such as Nottingham was mostly controlled by watchmen who patrolled the streets.

However, an innovation that began in London found its way to the streets of Nottingham: Policing.

The authorities here in Nottingham were afraid, they were afraid of social unrest, they were concerned about law and order.

What were they going to do?

Their answer was to build a police force, a police force just like London.

(solemn music) I'm back in the city center walking to Shire Hall, once the headquarters for Nottinghamshire's county police to meet Police Historian Tom Andrews.

(Tom) There was very much this underbelly of discontent in Nottingham, and I think the authorities were keen to have this kind of law enforcement post to try and maintain law and order in the city.

-Right.

-But they were a little bit fearful about it, about the public's reception to it.

Nowadays we sort of take it for granted that the police are everywhere.

I know we don't have a national police force, but we--you know, they are in most cities and boroughs and towns.

Is that true of the Victorian period?

(Tom) From the outset of the Victorian period it was the municipal corporations activating in '35 that allowed boroughs to found a police force, and Nottingham were very early adopters of that.

They initially only kind of had a 50-50 approach to policing, where they maintained the pre-existing night watchmen to still work the night shifts, and actually only had three police officers working in the day and 12 in the evening time.

(Dr. Nubia) With the new presence of police, the city's workers had much to be wary of as specific laws now targeted the lowest in society.

If people obviously couldn't afford to pay rent and didn't have employment and things, they were put into work houses.

You had things like debtors' jails as well, where if people owed money to others and they couldn't pay it off, they would also be put in prison.

So Vagrancy Act, if people didn't have a substantial home that they lived in and were living on the streets, they could be put in prison for that.

You could be arrested for being poor.

(Tom) You could be arrested for sleeping in an outhouse, sleeping on the street, sleeping under a car or a wagon.

Or you could be arrested for not being a resident of the parish and sleeping on the street.

If somebody was arrested, for example, for not having a job and, uh, not having a dwelling, how long would they be in prison for?

Oh, they could typically be in prison for about one or two weeks, but that would come with hard labor, so they'd be expect to break rocks, build roads, and they could also be subjected to floggings if they were persistent offenders.

(solemn music) (Dr. Nubia) But as the police became more established, their relationship with the poor classes of Nottingham changed.

(Tom) As time progressed and the police got to know their communities in the beats where they worked, then there was this almost grudging acceptance by those communities that actually the police officers had a job to do.

As long as they didn't overstep their bounds and perhaps didn't just punish every minor offence, if they just moved the beggars on, for example, rather than throw them in prison, then there probably was this grudging acceptance that actually the police are there.

If we need them, they will help us as much as they will help the others.

(Dr. Nubia) Facing ever-growing crime levels, police officers were given more authority.

And of course the most iconic aspect of the police force, which many police don't have nowadays, is the truncheon.

-Is it a weapon?

-The truncheon itself actually goes back a long way before the Victorian period, and in the Victorian period it would've had two purposes.

Because there wasn't mass literacy at the time, so the truncheons were actually elaborately decorated, um, and would have a crown and the monograph of VR, Victoria Regina on it, which would be a symbol of the constable's authority, that he was working on behalf of the Crown.

And so he could show this truncheon up, because he wouldn't-- people wouldn't have been able to read a warrant card like police officers have now.

So the crown on the truncheon was a symbol of authority, but it also doubled up as a weapon if he needed it.

(Dr. Nubia) I'm glad I asked that question because I never thought about that before, and, um-- that the, uh, truncheon was actually a symbol of power like a scepter.

(peppy music) I'm on a walk through Victorian Nottingham, Britain's lace producing capital, whose 19th century story reveals how the Victorians approached law and order.

But beyond the city jail and the dawn of policing, there as a bigger issue yet, that of democracy itself.

So industrial Britain was built on the backs of the poor, and yet the poor had no say in how their governments were constituted.

They were barred from partaking in parliamentary elections, so they really had very little power whatsoever.

And that's why amidst this poverty, amidst this exploitation, amidst this big industrialization where more and more people are moving into urban centers, you had desires for change, for reform, and this could lead to revolt, rebellion.

(Dr. Nubia) Nottingham was such a place.

I'm walking a couple of miles north of the city center to high ground outside the suburb of Mapperley.

It was here in 1842 that working people made a stand for their rights.

This is Mapperley Park in Nottingham, and here working people decided that they wanted the right to vote.

This was the era of revolutions and demands for social justice.

Here in Nottingham thousands of working people gathered armed with a document entitled "The People's Charter."

These people became known as Chartists.

To discover what they wanted I'm meeting 19th century History Dr. Matthew Roberts.

(Dr. Roberts) So this was the site in the summer of 1842 of a large demonstration for democratic rights for ordinary working people at the time.

(Dr. Nubia) So you say democratic rights.

What are we talking about?

(Dr. Roberts) The most of important of those was votes for all men above the age of 21.

-Why was that?

-So politics was the preserve of the elite at the time, and those with voting rights were essentially propertied individuals.

(Dr. Nubia) Ah, so in order to be able to vote you had to have money, did you?

-Yeah.

-And you had to have land?

-Correct.

-So 50 percent of the adult population was denied the right... -Yeah.

-...simply for being women for a start, and then another 80 percent altogether -because they were poor.

-Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it's not very fair, is it?

(Dr. Roberts) No, and the Chartists are not to be fair to them, they're not just campaigning for votes for men.

There's a significant opinion within the movement that we should be campaigning for votes for all people above the age of 21.

(Dr. Nubia) The Chartists' movement was popular with local people from villages around Nottingham who worked in low-paid jobs in the textile industry.

(Dr. Roberts) These men and their families have fallen on very hard times by the 1840s.

Some of them are earning as little as five, six, seven shillings a week.

They see in politics the source of their poverty.

Legislation has been made that benefits rich people at our expense.

But they also see politics as a vehicle for improving their lives.

(Dr. Nubia) So how popular were these movements?

(Dr. Roberts) So hugely popular.

At the height of the movement 3.3 million people signed the petition demanding this People's Charter in the spring of 1842.

(Dr. Nubia) But this was far from the first time the government had been placed under such pressure.

Just a year earlier a similar petition had been turned down by Parliament.

And Parliament again rejects this petition and it's a rising of a dissatisfaction from that that you see a turn in the movement towards more militant activities.

(Dr. Nubia) In the summer of 1842, a series of strikes broke out across the manufacturing regions of Britain due to the worsening economic conditions.

This presented an opportunity for the Chartists.

These don't start out as Chartist strikes, but they--the Chartists quickly realize that they might be very useful, and the new demand becomes, "We will not return to work until Parliament grants The People's Charter."

(Dr. Nubia) After three days of protest, 5,000 of Nottingham's working population gathered here to stand up for the right to vote.

It would become a landmark moment in Nottingham's history.

Is there any sense of fear from the government that what is happening in Nottingham will spread to other towns, stroke cities, across Northern or Midland Britain?

The fear is this movement for democracy in Britain is gonna be Britain's equivalent of the French Revolution.

(Dr. Nubia) And of course in the 19th century there were lots of revolutions that took place in Western Europe, and we often forget that.

(Dr. Roberts) Yeah, so just at those moments I think where elites are starting to think, "Okay, we're past revolution," another one happens and it stokes those fears.

(Dr. Nubia) The Nottingham authorities, however, did not easily give in to the protesters' modest demands.

In fact, they took strong action against them.

They organized a police and regiments of dragoons who intimidated and forced the demonstrators towards the city center.

In this melee, chaos ensued as galloping dragoons faced volleys of stones from protesters.

Then the police took action.

It was from here in 1842 that working people were arrested and taken to Nottingham, and many of them were imprisoned simply for their right to vote.

Out of the thousands that had gathered, around 50 were found guilty, some of which were imprisoned and given hard labor.

But imprisoning the protesters did little to stop the discontent among working people.

They wanted the right to say who sat in Parliament and who governed them.

In places like Nottingham this could lead to real crime problems and law and order problems as well.

And so what you started to see was out of this poverty in industrial cities across the UK, but particularly in Nottingham, crime and organized crime taking hold.

(Dr. Nubia) Violent and organized crime even infiltrated local politics.

I'm coming to one of Nottingham's oldest pubs to find out more and meet author Adam Nightingale.

-Great, can I come in?

-You may.

-Okay, can I talk a seat?

-'Course you can.

(Dr. Nubia) Great, great.

So we're in a pub in the middle of Nottingham.

-Mm.

-Fantastic.

So in the Victorian period, what was politics like?

(Adam) It was violent, I think is the best way of putting it, because what you have is this massive transitionary period from essentially aristocrats electing aristocrats and no one really below a certain income stream having the right to vote.

With each successive election, people come closer to sort of getting the vote or more kind of electoral freedoms given to the working classes, and then there's people trying to appease that, and then there's always a riot.

You know, so it was typified by violence, and Nottingham was the city that was most associated with rioting in the whole of the British Isles.

(Dr. Nubia) Right.

One senior figure in Nottingham politics famously turned the city's reputation for violence to his advantage.

Nottingham-born MP Robert Clifton, who will forever be associated with a notorious local gang, the Nottingham Lambs.

-Who were the Lambs?

-The Nottingham Lambs was the name of, like, the-- well, probably to this day the most notorious Nottingham street gang, and they were sort of prevalent throughout the 1840s, '50s, and '60s, and they were this enormous, incredibly well-organized street gang.

No one knows why they were called the Lambs.

But then when Sir Robert Clifton comes along in the 1860s, they seem very loyal to him, and he effectively becomes their sort of paymaster, and they--and they work for him.

(Dr. Nubia) How did the Lambs affect politics?

(Adam) The most famous example of them affecting politics is in the 1865 general election.

So Robert Clifton was up against two liberal candidates called Charles Paget and Samuel Morley.

And, um--and how the campaigning worked was that you had the market square as a platform to speak, and then you'd give it over to your opposition, like, a few weeks later.

And he got up, he did--he did his thing, he ridiculed his enemies.

He was a very good speaker.

He mocked them for their stance on temperance 'cause he was a heavy drinker.

And then when it was time for-- for Morley and Paget to speak, he essentially sent Lambs to meet their supporters, and they met them at the train station with stones and literally stoned them.

And then there was this running battle where Paget and Morley supporters fought their way into the market square.

And then there was this incredible brawl where people were, like, lobbing stones at each other in the market square.

And then the Lambs drove the two liberal candidates' supporters from the market square, set the speaker's platform on fire, and then just ran amuck, smashing up the liberals' offices.

(Dr. Nubia) The police and the army eventually restored order and Clifton went on to win the parliamentary seat.

(dramatic music) But the fallout of this corrupt election saw the chief of police being forced to resign and Clifton and his two opponents subject to a 27-day inquiry.

The election was ultimately declared void.

♪ This 1865 election, do you think it was significant?

(Adam) I think it was the high-- definitely the high watermark of corruption, because, you know, you have two subsequent reform bills passed since then that--that really kind of free more and more working class men up to vote.

But surely corruption was part of 19th century politics.

(Adam) Certainly Sir Robert Clifton created a massive stink in Parliament, and the three politicians involved were stripped of their sort of Member of Parliament status.

So I think--I think that was as bad as it got.

So I think there was probably a clamping down on political corruption.

(Dr. Nubia) So the events in Nottingham did help to change British politics?

(Adam) Well, I can't-- I can't say that categorically, but I think they did probably tip the bar.

I think the scandal probably did help to, you know, cause people to be a little more diligent about how elections were run.

(Dr. Nubia) These sorts of characters are fascinating.

Do they reveal something about Victorian politics or something about 19th century politics?

(Adam) I think what they reveal is something that's common to 19th century, and-- and, uh, modern day politics in that personalities drive politics, and I think people forgive you a lot if they like you.

I think sort of Clifton-- you know, Clifton-- Clifton's a case in point, that effectively he was an aristocrat gangster, but you know, people loved him, obviously they loved him.

(pensive music) (Dr. Nubia) I've been walking the streets of Nottingham exploring a booming Victorian city, but one riddled with inequality, crime, and corruption.

These issues with democracy and law and order were mirrored all across the country.

♪ So I've come to Lincolnshire where there's a surprising relic from this chapter in Victorian history.

♪ Lincoln Castle's Prison was designed according to an intriguing Victorian approach to incarceration.

♪ It wasn't simply meant to punish, it was meant to reform.

I'm meeting Professor Barry Godfrey.

♪ (Barry) Everything is silent, there's no singing.

there's no talking, there's no shouting.

Everything is silence-- about meditation in here.

(Dr. Nubia) Ah, this is a model prison?

This is a model prison, it's getting away from punishment of the body to disciplining the mind.

(Dr. Nubia) The idea that-- that crime is a sin.

-Yeah.

-Oh, right.

-But which could be corrected.

-Could be corrected.

(Barry) They talked about grinding men good, so grinding them into good, useful members of society.

(Dr. Nubia) Prisoners were sent here for crimes ranging from theft of a waistcoat to highway robbery and murder.

Upon entering the facility, criminals were shown to their cell on one of the prison's three floors.

(Barry) So this is where you would've been spending a lot of your time.

-Can I go in?

-You can go in.

So you can see what the basic amenities were in there, and the idea is that they would think about their future, what had led them to this place, and how they could reform themselves.

So how long would a prisoner be in this sort of cell for?

(Barry) You're allowed out of your cell for one hour a day and that is for exercise, but generally 23 hours a day in here.

(Dr. Nubia) So this is almost like solitary confinement then?

Uh, well, it's called the separate system, so they do nine months in a separate system, and that's generally when they would be reformed.

(Dr. Nubia) The Prison Act of 1839 encouraged the development of the separate system as a way to reform prisoners.

The belief was that spending substantial time alone allowed prisoners to reflect on their crimes.

What kind of facilities do they have?

They would've had a bucket and they would've slopped out.

-And this lamp?

-That's-- you need light to see-- gaslight to see the Bible.

(Dr. Nubia) And this rule-- these rules and regulations, they were in every cell?

(Barry) They were in every cell, so you'd know them, and you would be in trouble if you didn't know them, but you'd also be in trouble if you destroyed or defaced them as well, which happened a lot.

(Dr. Nubia) Prisoners were separated from each other at all times, almost as if they were in solitary confinement.

Even when they were permitted to leave for exercise, they had to keep a distance of four-and-a-half meters apart.

(contemplative music) These prisoners really are to create the idea of a model for the future.

-Yeah.

-And they're standing against -what type of prisons?

-Well, the other types of prisons are the-- they're too informal, they're too chaotic.

People bring in their own food, family bringing in food.

It's unregulated.

It's not orderly, so here we have the shift to a timetable, a cell with a set number of things in, and everybody does the same amount of exercise, everyone gets the same amount of food.

It's all orderly.

(Dr. Nubia) In the other prison in Nottingham, there's this sort of haphazardness, and even though the squalor is more, there's a kind of space there.

-Humanity?

-Yeah, I don't know -if it's humanity.

-Yeah.

'Cause it's still squalid, it's still really, uh-- It's not human, but there's a kind of space -in the squalidness.

-Yeah.

-Here there's no space.

-This is about the Lord.

The Lord is dwelling here with you, so the Lord is gonna help you to reform if you know, if you read the Bible, if you listen to the chaplain.

So there's that transformation moment here, but it's quite inhuman.

(Dr. Nubia) To help achieve this religious and moral transformation, the prison had a secret weapon found at the very top of the building.

-So this is the chapel.

-Ah, good.

(grim music) Looks just like a courtroom.

(Barry) It does look like a courtroom.

It's like everybody's in their own individual dock.

(Dr. Nubia) Yes.

(footfalls thudding) So this is probably one of the oddest buildings I've ever been into.

Yeah, I see human heads and these high sort of wooden-- I don't know what you would call them.

(Barry) These are the separate units that everybody would be placed into so they couldn't see anybody else, so everybody's in their-- on their own.

(Dr. Nubia) Even in religious communion, people are still separated in the separate system.

What an odd, odd, peculiar way of thinking about human conditioning.

(Barry) All the better, right?

For you to get the word of God unmediated, direct to you.

(Dr. Nubia) I don't see how people could think that putting people into stalls to give them religious service could possibly lead them anywhere closer to finding themselves becoming moral people or anything.

I don't understand that.

(Barry) It's a heavy psychological layering that's going on here, and this is going to be something which is going to, together with all the discipline and the silence and the separateness of the prison, this is a thing which is really trying to grab your soul and make you change your ways.

(Dr. Nubia) If this is what prison reform looks like, I don't see how this is making people's lives better.

If you've locked up prisoners 23 hours a day, and then that moment of freedom, you snatch it away by putting them in the stall on the Sunday, you're snatching away the last moment of light that they have and putting them in a dark box.

I think that that would take somebody over the edge.

(Barry) Yeah, well, I mean, it did take lots of people over the edge.

There's mental illness, there's suicide attempts.

It's that you-- it's palpably clear that this is damaging people in all sorts of ways.

(contemplative music) (Dr. Nubia) With high suicide rates, spiraling costs, and little evidence that criminals were actually reformed, it was clear that the separate system didn't work.

In 1878, this prison closed down for good.

Most of these prisoners' bodies were encased in quicklime so that their bodies dissolved so that they could bury the dead one on top of the other.

♪ These are the footstones that remind us that what we've been talking about are people, human beings.

The Victorians, for all of their industrialization, had problems, social problems.

♪ Industrialization created problems, it created a poor, an underclass.

Many of that poor underclass ended up here, literally here, buried here.

So we must always remember that with progress there is always a social cost.

♪ (dramatic music) ♪ (bright music)