As revealed in the episode, the undercover reporter uses the name Jefferson Brick, a character from Charles Dickens' "Martin Chuzzlewit" as his pseudonym at the House of Industry. The pseudonym Murdoch uses, Henry Weldon, is a character from Dorothy L. Sayers' "Have His Carcass."
The banana split was very much a novel treat in 1904, the year the episode takes place. That year, optometrist David Strickland had just invented it and sold it at the drugstore over which he kept his office in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. This new kind of sundae, which cost 10 cents, double the price of a regular sundae, quickly spread throughout the USA and before too long, Canada.
In Ontario, the earliest forms of institutionalization were workhouses, many of which were built before Confederation (1867), under Britain's Poor Laws. Destitute people could find shelter in workhouses (also called poorhouses) in exchange for work, although these were far from benign institutions. It was generally assumed in the 19th and early 20th centuries that poverty was a moral failing. In reality, in major Canadian cities in the early 1900s, including Toronto, one in seven households could not survive on the pooled wage earnings of every man, woman, and child in a family.
A "house of industry", after which the episode was named, was a "charitable" institution of the 18th-19th centuries built in various cities in the British Empire under the Poor Law. Originally, these institutions were workhouses which would forcibly lodge the poor and put them to work. Later, they would offer temporary and permanent lodging, food, fuel, and other assistance. The Toronto House of Industry was started by Dr. William W. Baldwin and other reformers in an former courthouse on Richmond Street in January 1837. Baldwin wanted this House to be more like the latter benevolent, voluntary kind of poorhouse, though it also placed orphaned children as servants into wealthy homes. By 1947, the Toronto House of Industry was occupied predominantly by poor senior citizens, so it was converted into an old folks' home called the Laughlen Lodge. After modern senior housing was completed in 1983, the north section of the old House of Industry was preserved as the Rotary-Laughlen Centre.
This episode takes place in 1904.