London's Poor in the 19th Century

Louise Wright

Henry Mayhew, an English journalist, witnessed deplorable conditions in which the poor of London lived. He penned the London Labour and the London Poor in 1861. “His writing captured the conditions of their daily life, and recorded their utterances in a form that many have described as the best oral history of the period. Mayhew approached his work on London Labour and the London Poor by venturing directly into the poorest parts of London. The first three volumes contain biographical sketches of the flower girls, cat and dog meat dealers, pickpockets, prostitutes, and others who struggled to eke out a living in Victorian London.” Mayhew’s sketches revealed a dark side of London; a back drop in the midst of wealth and prestige. He became the voice for those who did not have the ability to speak for themselves – the poor.

Those who suffered the most were children. Unhealthy and overcrowded living conditions were common, and children were vulnerable to infectious diseases such as scarlet fever and tuberculosis. Many children did not have family, or a place to call home, and slept on the street. “Hordes of dirty, ragged children roamed the streets with no regular money or home to go to. The children of the street were often orphans. They stole or picked pockets to buy food, and slept in outhouses. Some children did jobs to earn money. They swept their way through the horse dung to clear paths, while others sold lace, flowers, matches, muffins, etc. on the street.” Because of their small stature, children were often used as chimney sweepers, or forced to crawl through narrow openings and clean out cesspools which compromised their health and safety.

Children without families were taken to orphanages, but the living conditions in the orphanages offered little relief or comfort. “Unfortunately, the treatment of orphans had still not greatly improved while away from a family environment, and they were encountering the same brutal living conditions as they had before. In fact, in The Workhouse Orphan, the pamphlet written in response to the 1860 Committee of Inquiry on Education, the author argued that the institutions set up to care for the poor and orphaned children were failing in their attempts to do so and leading orphans towards a life of crime.”

Under the guise of fiction, the novel Oliver Twist written by Charles Dickens in 1837, mimicked the reality of what life was like for an orphaned child growing up in England during this time period.