https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/04/bread-winner-by-emma-griffin-review-victims-of-the-victorian-economy

Britain had never been richer, so how did working families become trapped in a nightmare of dirt and want? An intimate history, from darning to dinners in the gutter

As a lad in 1880s Bermondsey Sid Causer appeased his hunger by filching fruit from market barrows. Louie Stride, brought up dirt poor in genteel Bath, thought nothing of looking for dinner in the gutter. Joseph Sharpe from Derbyshire was obliged to go “barefooted and barelegged” and get by on “tea sops and flour porridge”. Causer, Stride and Sharpe are just a few of the pale, pinched children who stare out at us from the photographs of late Victorian Britain. The girls are bundled up in shawls while the boys have the oyster eyes of the permanently exhausted. Together they make up a visual shorthand for “the Victorian urban poor”. 

But why were they so poor? Britain had never been richer. By the end of the 19th century all those lovely inventions, from tarmac to sewing machines and toilets to telegraphs, had transformed the fabric of ordinary life. Real wages had roughly doubled. Given that Britain was a byword for progress and prosperity, what was to be made of the revelation by social investigators such as Charles Booth and Henry Rowntree that an increasing number of working families were trapped in a gothic nightmare of dirt and want?