London Labor and London Poor: Deserved Penury

Blayne Sanders

London Labor and London Poor: Deserved Penury

                  Post-industrialized Britain was rampant with poverty, filth, and disease. Specialization and factory work attracted thousands of British citizens to the cities searching for jobs. The majority of the population was extremely poor. Horrific conditions circulated disease, such as inadequate housing which left families in small tight cramped housing. Furthermore, working conditions in the factories were inhumane. Children, women, and men worked exceptionally long hours, around fourteen to sixteen hours a day, for minimal pay. With the migration into the cities, factories owners placed wages astoundingly low as there was a constant supply of new workers willing to work.

                  Victorian authors of the time created literature which exposed the petrifying conditions the new poverty-ridden working class. Charles Dickens’ A Walk in the Workhouse sympathetically details the the conditions of the poor who seek sanctuary in the workhouse. Images of burned dying children, starving old men, and women who would realistically have better conditions imprisoned highlight the terrifying reality of post-industrialized Britain. “Generally, the faces were depressed and subdued, and wanted colour. Aged people were there in every variety. Mumbling, blear-eyed, spectacled, stupid, deaf, lame; vacantly winking in the gleams of sun” (751). Despite authors attempts to gain sympathy for the poverty ridden, there was a clear distinction between the poor, those who innately deserved to be poor such as the Hindu beggars Henry Mayhew chronicles and those who were undeserving of the penury.

                  Mayhew describes beggars on the London street, however due to their race, he explicitly details how they are deservedly poor. Accusing the Hindu of lying about their religious beliefs to gain support from elderly Christian women, as well as lying about the caste in which they came in order to seek refuge from the winter cold, infuriates Mayhew. “As untruth is habitual to them, there is not the slightest dependence to be placed on what they say” (1019). Continually, he describes the conditions in which these individuals starve for food and freeze for warmth. “Sometimes in the winter they… stand on the kerb-stone of the pavement, in their thin, ragged clothes, and shiver as with cold and hunger, or crouch against a wall and whine like a whipped animal” (1019). In addition, Mayhew explains that the beggars often sing and dance or sell matches in order to earn money. Nevertheless, the Hindu were deservedly poor for being lying, manipulating, and deceitful in Mayhew’s opinion.

                  These categorical divided between the poverty ridden, although horrifying, does not mask the penury Britain suffered during the Victorian era. The majority of the country was poor, food was scarce, working conditions were grueling and long, pay was minimal, housing was destitute and small, and diseases such as cholera and tuberculosis swept through towns.