One of the things we remember the Victorian era by is the vast poverty levels it possesses. Although the problem has improved immensely in the last 100 years, but it is something still exists today. Maybe not so much in the Western world, but it's a major problem in the third world. In a way, poverty is 'disappearing' in our modern society, but I want to look back at the conditions that was present at the time in relation to the Victorian times.Child labour:
Children were expected to help towards the family budget. They often worked long hours in dangerous jobs and in difficult situations for a very little wage.
For example, there were the climbing boys employed by the chimney sweeps; the little children who could scramble under machinery to retrieve cotton bobbins; boys and girls working down the coal mines, crawling through tunnels too narrow and low to take an adult. Some children worked as errand boys, crossing sweepers, shoe blacks, and they sold matches, flowers and other cheap goods.
Slum housing:
All these problems were magnified in London where the population grew at a record rate. Large houses were turned into flats and tenements and the landlords who owned them, were not concerned about the upkeep or the condition of these dwellings. In his book The Victorian underworld, Kellow Chesney gives a graphic description of the conditions in which many were living:‘Hideous slums, some of them acres wide, some no more than crannies of obscure misery, make up a substantial part of the, metropolis … In big, once handsome houses, thirty or more people of all ages may inhabit a single room,’
Overcrowding:
Many people could not afford the rents that were being charged and so they rented out space in their room to one or two lodgers who paid between twopence and fourpence a day. Great wealth and extreme poverty lived side by side because the tenements, slums, rookeries were only a stones throw from the large elegant houses of the rich.
Destitution:
Many cases of death caused by starvation and destitution were reported. One example of such a report will suffice. In 1850 an inquest was held on a 38 year old man whose body was reported as being little more than a skeleton, his wife was described as being ‘the very personification of want’ and her child as a ‘skeleton infant’.
Homeless children:
Obviously these conditions affected children as well as adults. There were children living with their families in these desperate situations but there were also numerous, homeless, destitute children living on the streets of London. Many children were turned out of home and left to fend for themselves at an early age and many more ran away because of ill treatment.
Children and crime:
Many destitute children lived by stealing, and to the respectable Victorians they must have seemed a very real threat to society. Something had to be done about them to preserve law and order. Many people thought that education was the answer and Ragged schools were started to meet the need. However there were dissenting voices against this. Henry Mayhew argued that: ‘since crime was not caused by illiteracy, it could not be cured by education … the only certain effects being the emergence of a more skilful and sophisticated race of criminals’.
Society's attituide towards the poor:
It does appear that many people and various agencies were becoming aware of the problem, but the sheer scale of it must have seemed overwhelming.
One of the difficulties in dealing with it were contemporary attitudes:
‘the poor were improvident, they wasted any money they had on drink and gambling’;
And in a hymn published in 1848 by Cecil Frances Alexander sums the whole situation up:
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them, high and lowly,
And order’d their estate.
More info here.
Thoughts: Poverty has the power to make a certain class of people to disappear. As the poor makes the majority in Victorian London, could this be the reason of its fall?
