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@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.