Victorian Era Poor Homes

Victorian Houses or Homes depended on the financial status of the family. Poor Victorian children lived a much different life than the wealthy children did. Throughout the Victorian era, puritan middle and upper-class men and women would routinely dismiss the people living in London's slums and lazy and feckless.

This could not have been further from the truth. While there certainly were many work-shy people living in poverty, there were also plenty of people working hard, just trying to get by. An example of one such is Strand House in East Sussex.

In the early Victorian era (see Poor Law), poverty was seen as a dishonourable state. As depicted by Charles Dickens, a workhouse could resemble a reformatory, often housing whole families, or a penal labour regime giving manual work to the indigent and subjecting them to physical. Her years at the poorhouse-a facility designed to house poor people in a time before social services- were "a crime against childhood," she later remembered.

Find out about life and work in a wealthy family's Victorian town house. During the Victorian era many Scots moved from the countryside to towns and cities. In Victorian society, rich and poor could find themselves living very close together, sometimes just streets apart.

During the 19th century more people moved into the towns and cities to find work in factories. Victorian Housing Originally, up until the late eighteenth century, the wealthy and poor lived side by side. Wealthier people lived in large houses on the main streets and the poorer people lived behind these houses in the "service streets".

Charles Dickens' House, Doughty Street, where he lived 1837-1839 (Author's photo 2023). The specter of the Victorian Poorhouse haunts both history and literature. The surviving image, although not entirely accurate, is a grim reminder that not everyone flourished during an era whose very touchstones were progress and prosperity.

No single historically-accurate image of the poorhouse remains, however, as each poorhouse has its own history. Each facility differed dramatically from. Poverty and Families in the Victorian Era This article by Barbara Daniels gives an overview of the causes and the effects of poverty on poor families and children in Victorian Britain.

At the time of writing Barbara is a Ph.D. student with the Department of Religious Studies, at The Open University. How tough was life in a working class Victorian house, and what kind of people would you meet there? Find out in this eyewitness account by a Victorian journalist who visits the houses and.