Paid to Collect Dog Poo: What People Really Did All Day in Victorian London

In Victorian London, you could earn a living collecting dog poo. Children as young as five went out to work, and some men spent all day wading through the sewers hunting for lost coins. Follow one day in Victorian London, from 4am to midnight, in the words of the people who lived it, as recorded by the journalist Henry Mayhew: the knocker-upper who woke the city, the eight-year-old watercress girl, the costermongers and servants, the crossing sweepers, the pure-finders, the mudlarks and the toshers, the trapper children in the mines, the climbing boys, the matchgirls who went on strike and won, the Great Stink of 1858 and the sewers that ended cholera. Did the Victorians build the modern city, or should we never forget the price? And which job would you survive? Tell me in the comments. Chapters 0:00 Paid to collect dog poo 0:11 The biggest city in the world 0:56 4am: the knocker-upper 1:26 The watercress girl 1:53 6am: the markets 2:14 The servants 2:37 The crossing sweepers 2:56 The pure-finders 3:29 The mudlarks 4:00 The toshers 4:55 Midday: children at work 5:33 The climbing boys 5:58 The matchgirls' strike 6:42 The Great Stink 7:29 Evening 8:06 Things were changing 8:27 Progress, or the price? 8:48 Which job would you pick? Sound effects: CC0 recordings from the Kenney, CC0-Public-Domain-Sounds and rse/soundfx collections, the ESC-50 dataset (CC0-sourced clips only), and AltSFX by ALEX11BR (CC-BY 3.0). Maps: Natural Earth (public domain). Anything drawn by hand is labelled on screen. #VictorianLondon #VictorianHistory #History #StickmanTimeMachine