What Was Life Like For The Victorian Working Class? | Historic Britain | Absolute History
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- Опубликовано: 7 май 2024
- How dangerous was the workplace in the Victorian era? Explore the perilous world of Victorian factories, where innovation and industry came at a deadly cost. From the deafening roar of spinning mules to the unforgiving machinery, workers faced constant danger. Discover the grim reality of daily life, where risk lurked around every corner in pursuit of progress and profit. Many stately homes conjure up visions of separate ‘upstairs’ and ‘downstairs’ realms, but at Erddig the 18th-century Yorke family took a different approach. Alan learns how they encouraged a romance between nanny and groomsman, immortalized staff in photos and verse, and treated them with a respect unheard of among other grand houses.
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I always wonder why workers were treated so unnecessarily horrible in Victorian England. It's like factory bosses went out of their way to devise methods to dehumanize and demoralize workers and children. Not saying everyone can live in luxury but even outside of the workhouse everything was deliberately substandard to the point it seems like they were working harder to keep everything in a horrendous state than it would have taken to let things naturally improve. The entire Victorian era was a nightmare for most people. England loves to say they abolished slavery in the early 1800s but Victorian labor structures/workhouses just replaced it immediately after abolition.
In my experience they still do in America.... you don't go to jail for being poor but people still call you lazy even if you work 60+ hours a week and can't make ends meet, but you do end up on the street and possibly dead in the gutter - when the attitude is put up with all the illegal stuff or I promise I'll make it worse for you and you don't deserve to live so the fact that I give you any compensation for anything you do is something you should be thankful for and if you're poor it's not my exploitation but just your fault for not being born into money that I intentionally make sure none of you can ever be born into because I need desperate workers who are barely not dead and so will do whatever I say, I do not see a difference other than whether or not it's blatant or wrapped up in other wrapping paper to pretend to be better than it is... in fairness it is better, but by like 10% or 20% max, not by the amount they pretend it is, and the owner class has found ways where I live to ensure there are really no FT jobs in the market so everyone is piecing together PT to equal overtime (that's the employers ganging up on us to ensure we can never get overtime no matter how much we work but "oh no" it's an "accident" - it's not an accident... they don't care how many they kill or how much we suffer - only that the top 1% get richer - nevermind the fact that the money is tainted in blood and suffering).
This era is a nightmare for most people, still... saying it's not just means you are in the lucky set of priviledged ones that doesn't get it... if your reaction is no I'm not - YES you are... if you feel like you struggle enough to count as not priviledged yet there are those of us (many) for whom your level of struggle is a pipe dream to which we aspire, then that should just show you that intense struggle should not equal being "one of the lucky ones" and yet, it does. Most are less lucky than that. I'm not saying that your struggle isn't real, but even those who struggle intensely could be counted amoung the lucky ones, most people are not just struggling but truly desperate and terrified at every moment of their lives.
@@GoodNewsEveryone2999 I assumed I would get a response like this. To compare the experience of "the poor" in modern day America to even the poor in the rest of the world today is laughable. To compare it to Victorian workhouse poor is insane. I would agree there are people living is terrible situations around the world today but America is wayyy down on that list. The modern socialist will always inflate the "plight of the common worker" but the comparison is a massive leap in logic. Poor Americans have access to luxuries and social safety nets that a lot of the modern world doesn't much less Victorian England. A lot of people who act "terrified" about their financial situations always seem to be people trying to live beyond their means and being unhappy they can't live like a rich materialistic person. The reality of our standard of living even for our poor is glaringly different but yes it actually requires you to work to better yourself...and yes sometimes struggle. So much so that we see the poor all over the globe migrating across our southern border because our system offers genuine social mobility. The victim mentality many Americans have fallen into is apparently not shared by the rest of the world willing to break laws to get here.
This is snowballing into a whole different conversation but the point is comparing "the struggle" of modern Americans to any other time/place just for the sake of bashing America deliberately ignores the reality of things. And pointing that out doesn't make me "priviledged" or "one of the lucky ones" because I came from poverty and worked my way comfortably into the middle class. Would I like to make more money? Sure but even as a poor kid our life was absolutely nothing like how Victorian England treated the poor. Yeah, people still have troubles but this whole victim hierarchy gets absurb when people deliberately inflate comparisons to be on par with actual slavery or what was effectively indentured servitude.
I would assume there was still a part of feudalism in those times. Just not from nobles but from factory owners. They were the nobles of their times. Just like today we have a new noble class called CEO's of big companies.And their workers were treated like indentured servants. Plus when you are basically forced into the city to make ends meet you take what you can get (even send your own children into dangerous jobs). Remember the early urbanisation took place because many small rural families could not sustain their small farms due to the rising costs and only cities held the opportunities to earn enough money
@@GoodNewsEveryone2999that was a horrible read. I recommend sentence structure to get your point across better. I gave up a third of the way through that massive run on sentence.
During WWII in London my father was 12 or 13 working in a machine shop running 7 metal saws cutting out the brass bases of the bomb shells. He had to work to help take care of his mother it took 3 years for his father to meet up with them again.
Thank you for sharing this.
The children yearn for dangerous industrial machinery.
So sad. These kids were dispensable to the factory. They didn’t care. At least they had a name of poor boy that was killed cleaning.
9?? I heard as young as 4,5, or 6 year olds would be working in mills.
2 years old was a very popular age for worker kids
did you not bother to read your history books? or look shit up? what could possibly have been more interesting then the fucking shithole world how it actually is? the price of affluenza
The Roman Empire era had the best gardens
Ces gens ont tellement travaillé fort, c’est incroyable
Today we call this slave labor "internships". Young graduates, already burdened by back-breaking debt, work endless hours essentially for food at Google, Apple, Microsoft and all the Big Tech code factories, while living in their cheap cars. And they compete with each other as to who will be offered the ...priviledge of getting eventually hired - and not being able to afford a house anywhete near Silicone Valley.
poor babies. maybe they should have more integrity
Oh my. Such sob stories. Life is hard and being entitled makes it harder when you are confronted with reality.
Not even close lmao
watched this on 1.5x speed and didnt notice a difference
its funny cuz its lowkey true 😭
Not having Tony as the presenter sucks.
Thank you.
British workhouses make American poor farms look almost modern and progressive
who is this "Ally Silica" that shows up fifteen minutes in? ❤ good heavens ❤
The letter she had about the father with 2 daughters. Sad as they did not even get to live there.
the absolute state of you
As you can see they was doing that to they own people keep that in mind not other races👨🏽💻👀🤦🏼♀️
The dark, satanic mills.
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It seems like people had wonderful handwriting and took care in writing to make it beautiful,, certainly not like today’s handwriting I’ll say,, which, for the most part becomes illegible
But how did this affect black people?
Well the mills were hungry for cotton, which came from American slave plantations
Nobody cares.
Asking this in the RUclips comments is an awful idea. Best to look into it yourself.
To give an answer that’s not completely ignorant and proof of being pathetically lazy, it did but it also didn’t.
There’s a record of black folk becoming very rich, powerful, and famous in the UK as far back as the Middle Ages. John Blanke was so talented and influential that the king punished the treasury for underpaying him.
But not everyone was that lucky. Black children were routinely kidnapped and sent to “schools” ran by different Christian Churches. Ireland has a famous one that ran for so long there are survivors alive today. They were forced to work, subjected to horrific abuse, and routinely murdered with their bodies buried with no gravestone.
England outlawed slavery just before the Victorian era, however, you can see the rich and the royals were all to happy to enslave folks of any race. All races in England were sent to these prisons if they “deserved it”.
This does not touch the treatment of black folk in the colonies. John Oliver has an incredible episode on the Royalty that shows how black folk were forced into segregated workhouses and slavery. Their official slave owners were actually compensated by the crown for their “loss of property” when revolts and abolition took places. The slave masters paid and the slaves sent to be slaves in a legal fashion.
Once the Victorian era ended, there were virtually no Jim Crow type laws. There was awful racism, obviously. But less legal restrictions.
Black folk were treated how they always have been by white folk: horrifically. In England it could be on the same level as white folk and sometimes worse. It depends on the time, place, and group directly in power.
The more you know.