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@ashira She is!! that’s so cool I love it:D
Your mom likes me:)
@michelle @rochellaine @selah-chelyah @ashira
Sorry, I didn’t get back to you guys yesterday. It was Sunday and I had the Wifi turned off.
But I’m here now!
Okay, so you want to know about conditions for the poor in England, Italy and Russia in the 1800s to 1900s? Like Rochellaine said, it’s an extremely broad question.
If you want to know about conditions for the poor in England, I’d suggest reading any work by Dickens, but particularly Oliver Twist and Little Dorrit. Or, if you didn’t feel like reading them, having a look at some study help pages for those books online. Little Dorrit details the life of a man who has been imprisoned for debt. Back in the day (the 1830s), debtors were imprisoned, but given no opportunity to work in order to pay back their debts, so they were usually left to rot in debtors prisons for the rest of their life.
Australia (my home country :P) was founded by England’s obsession with putting the poor in gaol. There were so many poor people in London’s gaols that they all had to be shipped off to the new penal colony in New South Wales. And when they got there, they were worked to death, murdered, died of heat stroke or dysentery, typhoid or tuberculosis. Yeah, things weren’t great.
And most of these people were sentenced just for stealing food to feed their families (a small tangent here, for all the Les Mis fans. You know when Valjean says “I stole a loaf of bread!”? My ancestor was literally sent to Australia for stealing some bread and a shirt).
And as Rochellaine also said, a lot of your treatment had to do with your race. Irish were treated despicably. Australia also has a very large Irish population because they came out in swarms during the Potato Famine. People of colour have also been historically treated very badly, but I can’t speak specifically about England on that issue. I do know that Australia also has a large Chinese population because they would come out here during the gold rushes and were treated abdominally. they were often massacred, sometimes became bushrangers, and were generally treated as worth less than the dirt they stood on. So basically, an English poor person was treated a thousand times better than a Chinese or Irish poor person (it makes me so angry whenever I think about it, but I will try and contain my rant for the sake of clarity and coherence).
Plenty of info can be found online, just try googling “Victorian treatment of the poor” and you come up with some good results. There’s lots of books about that sort of thing available in books as well.
And Russia…well, Russia. do some research on serfdom, realise how horrible it sounds, and then read that it wasn’t abolished in Russia until 1861. The Russian tsars ranged from cruel to ignorant, but either way they weren’t that concerned about the state of the poor and the peasants. There were several revolutions, which finally climaxed in two in 1917 that Rochellaine mentioned. The February revolution threw down the monarchy, but the October revolution instated the communist regime. The Bolsheviks had promised a better life for the peasants, but unfortunately they couldn’t really come through with that.
And Italy…I know they had a fascist government around the 1920s or 1930s, but other than that I don’t really know anything about how things were going there. Italy isn’t really a place of much interest for me so I’ve never really researched it.
Anyway, if you have more questions please don’t hesitate to ask. I like talking about history quite a lot, as you can probably see.
Ceud mile failte
Great summary! 🙂
Here is an article I found on Italy in the 19th century that seems helpful…it has some pictures in it, as well:
And here is what seems to be an excellent article on the working/poorer class in Italy in the same time period:
https://www.theclassroom.com/working-class-early-1900s-16090.html
Let me know if these are helpful…I worked on some Italian history back a little ways for my WIP “OOTA” recently, and don’t mind doing a bit more if you have more specific things you need to know. Let me know! 😀
Assistant Guildmaster of the Phantom Awesome Meraki
~ Created to create ~@seekjustice You know when Valjean says “I stole a loaf of bread!”? My ancestor was literally sent to Australia for stealing some bread and a shirt). Woah, that is CRAZY! Like, kind of cool but really awful too.
Thanks for the post, it was super interesting!!!
"No matter how much it hurts, how dark it gets, or how hard you fall, you are never out of the fight."
@Rochellaine, @eden-anderson, I wrote an American Civil War novel some years ago, in which a somewhat important plot point was the heroine’s needing to get married, despite not being very excited about it or in love with anyone. I collected quite a few sources on love and marriage during the war. If anyone wants them, I can dump links in the thread. . .
@selah-chelyah Thank you so much for the article!! Italy doesn’t really look that old back then:)
Your mom likes me:)
@seekjustice Thank you for your help!! It means a lot:)
Your mom likes me:)
@Michelle I can recommend the OYAN blog’s resources on historical fiction (https://clearwaterpress.com/oneyearnovel/?s=historical+fiction), and I recently did a blog post of my own compiling links to things I’ve found helpful (https://ofdreamsandswords.wordpress.com/2019/01/26/historical-fiction-resources-online/), including but not limited to how to go about questions like “how was X-group-of-people treated in Y-time-or-place?”.
@northerner Thanks so much! I will check this out for sure.
Your mom likes me:)
@seekjustice 😀 Yeah, I mean, you steal food and clothes when you are really desparate and trying to live. It doesn’t sound like he was a thief because he enjoyed it or something.
"No matter how much it hurts, how dark it gets, or how hard you fall, you are never out of the fight."
@seekjustice @rochellaine @selah-chelyah @ashira @northerner Thank you so much everyone for helping me!! you guys are great. I really needed the question answered. The reason I asked the question is because it’s for my story. I don’t like giving too much away but The story is about a Victorian version of Moses… in a way LOL
Your mom likes me:)
Absolutely! Eager to see what you come up with here… 😀
Assistant Guildmaster of the Phantom Awesome Meraki
~ Created to create ~@michelle Oh, I love this topic!! Ooh, victorian version of moses kind of? Sounds very interesting!
"No matter how much it hurts, how dark it gets, or how hard you fall, you are never out of the fight."
Hey guys,
Its been a while since this thread was active, but I absolutely love the chances we get on here to chat about his-fic so I was thinking we could revitalize it.
Other than the things we already discuss on here, I was thinking we could put together a twice weekly (or just weekly) discussion question. Say, on a certain day each week, I could put out a question which could either be a serious discussion question such as “How do you think his-fic contributes to not forgetting history?” Or something more fun like “if you were putting together a historical Avengers team, who would you approach?” Just something so that we can squeal about history together and motivate ourselves to work on our stories.
And in between we can chat, ask for help, critique and that sort of thing.
What do you guys think? (Hopefully I tag everyone)
@valtmy @rochellaine @ashira @selah-chelyah @michelle @northerner @pursuewisdom @scarletimmortalizedEveryone else.
Ceud mile failte
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