I.2. The Dark Side of the XIX century

In the nineteenth century, the population of Great Britain increased a lot. She saw her population tripling at the end of the century. We think that it is because of immigration, in particular the large number of Irish immigrants, who faced unemployment and famine in their country, as well as in the fact that people lived much longer and that the children who generally died early , survived. Families were bigger.

The population of cities very strongly increased. This because of the effects of the revolution. Some came to look for the work, others to look for a better lifestyle.

Because of the population explosion, and immigration (foreign and domestic) people (that they were qualified or not) were looking for work. This entailed a rush on any available jobs.

So that the family survived, the children had to help their parents to earn money. Some work in coal mines, the others sold things (flowers, matches)

Housing had become rare and expensive. People needed housing close to work.

Because of the overpopulation, houses were transformed into buildings. Only the owners did not care about the state of housing. Certain writers spoke about these conditions in their books, as Kellow Chesney in The

Victorian underworld which describes the condition of people in their housing:

“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,”

We could pass of the wealth in the poverty in a few minutes .Indeed the beautiful houses of the rich were not very far from shanty towns and rookeries

Poor people who did not have anything to drink were forced to take the water which flowed into the street, which looked like some liquid mud.

Henry Mayhew writes in an article: “As we gazed in horror at it, we saw drains and sewers emptying their filthy contents into it; we saw a whole tier of doorless privies in the open road, common to men and women built over it; we heard bucket after bucket of filth splash into it” This one also writes an bookcalled London Labour London Poor where he writes in introduction: “…the condition of a class of people whose misery, ignorance, and vice, amidst all the immense wealth and great knowledge of “the first city in the world”, is, to say the very least, a national disgrace to us”

In 1850 numerous persons would die because of the famine and of the poverty.

Because of poverty and of the lack of food, many children were chased away from their home, but others ran away. They had to learn to manage alone. Many people were homeless.
But that they are alone or with them families,they all suffered from the lack of food and water as well as from a bad hygiene.

Pamela Corde wrote in her book The Victorian town child: “In 1848 Lord Ashley referred to more than thirty thousand 'naked, filthy, roaming lawless and deserted children, in and around the metropolis'”.

To survive many poor children stole. They were considered as a threat for society.

Some people thought that by schooling them the problem would be settled .But others did not hold this view, as Henry Mayhew who says that : “since crime was not caused by illiteracy, it could not be cured by education the only certain effects are the emergence of has more skilful and sophisticated race of criminals”.