Childhood Struggles in Victorian London

Victorian London was an absolute nightmare if you were a kid. While wealthy children

played with creepy wax dolls in big nurseries, poor kids were literally fighting for survival.

You wouldn't be in school; you’d be a mudlark scavenging through sewage in the river for scrap

metal, or stuck inside a chimney cleaning soot. Even if you had

money, you weren't safe. The water was so gross that diseases like cholera and

scarlet fever took out everyone indiscriminately. Charles Dickens wasn't making that stuff up; surviving

childhood back then was basically an extreme sport.