Victorian Poverty Crime and Squalor

Born into a life of poverty crime and squalor where hunger and cold winds bite and disease is rife and it was a daily battle to stay alive and find some food to stay alive. Uneducated illiterate caught in the poverty trap drinking polluted water from the same polluted cholera riddled tap. An impoverished woman sells her body for a cheap bottle of Gin and a lodging for the night while a pickpocket and mutcher ever watchful look for a pocket to alight. The deafening clunk and clatter of horses and carts on the cobbled ground and shouts from the street market traders echo all around. Children play and run through the narrow crowded streets dressed in rags no shoes upon their feet The putrid stench from the gutter and thick choking bellowing smoke from factories make one heath and make it hard to breath. Dilapidated hovels and buildings covered in black soot horse manure and raw sewage under foot. Beggars with large mournful eyes reach out pleadingly to the passing gentry to fill their empty bowls with plenty. A peeler pins a notice of a forthcoming hanging at the local Gaol for the few who can read upon a rusty nail. A Mother desperate to feed her hungry children steals a loaf of bread from a market stall but is soon captured in the sprawl. The judge sentences her to 10 years penal servitude far over sea in Botany bay but she dyes aboard the ship of fever upon the way. Her 9 children are sent to the workhouse for the poor to gain some education and work hard behind it's hellish door never to see their Mother or escape poverty ever more. Peter Dome.copyright.2012.