A House through Time

 Avid TV history buffs like me welcome the reruns of programmes like A house through time.  Thanks to Amazon I have a second hand copy of the book by David Olusoga and Melanie Backe-Hansen based on the series - or in truth supplementing the series.

I have been genuinely shocked by the chapters on the Victorian poor. I remember being told by an Open University lecturer that Dickens never exaggerates in his descriptions of the lowest of the low and the appalling conditions they were forced to live in.  I was aware of the reforms made by the early sanitary reformers and benefactors such as the Quaker manufacturers Cadbury and Rowntree.  But what has totally overwhelmed me has been the blatant disregard of the poor as Victorian London was "developed" - broad new avenues and suites of houses which were deliberately routed through the disgusting "rookeries" of the bottom of Victorian society.  Train lines were brutally cut through districts of the poorest.  The Victorian middle classes villified the poor as shirking, filthy, moral degenerates - some may have been but there are descriptions of the overcrowded, huddled together rooms with absolutely no facilities and the disgusting overflowing rotting effluent laden "shared privies" - so few for whole streets! How the poor could be "moral" seems a tad optimistic!

I know that we have deep wealth divides, I know that rents are immorally high, I know that many children still live in disgusting damp, infested accommodation and that so many live in food poverty.  It's too easy for me to be appalled by conditions which prevailed within the actual lifespan of my own home, and to turn off the TV when documentaries make me uncomfortable.  It's frustrating - not being at that level of poverty myself yet without the wherewithal to make a difference.  Except that unlike the benighted Victorian poor I can vote.