Could You Survive a Week in Victorian London?

Could you survive a week in Victorian London as one of the poor, with not a single penny? All research and sources are listed below. We send our narrator back about 170 years to find out where he could sleep, what he could eat and how he could earn. A penny got you a seat on a bench for the night, and a bed cost about fourpence. A hot meal from a street seller was about a halfpenny. Work meant mudlarking, sweeping crossings or collecting dog poo for the tanneries. But the cold and the fog were not the biggest danger. The water was. We also look at the 'two-penny hangover' rope bed you may have seen online: the word story is almost certainly wrong, and the rope itself is still a maybe. The narrator's week is made up. The places, prices and people come from real records. 📚 RESEARCH & SOURCES: ▸ Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (1851): street food prices, mudlarks' earnings, pure finders, and the watercress girl's own words ▸ Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers (1836–37): the 'tuppenny rope' joke, with sacking hung from ropes ▸ Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1852–53): the famous opening fog ▸ George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933): a secondhand account of men sleeping sitting up against a rope ▸ John Snow, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera (2nd ed., 1855): the 1854 Broad Street map ▸ W. Walker Hanlon, 'London Fog: A Century of Pollution and Mortality, 1866–1965', NBER Working Paper 24488 (2018), https://www.nber.org/papers/w24488: fog caused at least 1 in 200 London deaths PEOPLE & SITES MENTIONED: ▸ Henry Mayhew, journalist ▸ John Snow, physician ▸ Joseph Bazalgette, the engineer who designed London's sewers ▸ The Salvation Army shelters: the penny sit-up and coffin beds ▸ Broad Street, Soho ▸ Farringdon Market ▸ Bermondsey tanneries ▸ The River Thames and the Great Stink of 1858 Chapters 0:00 One penny, one seat 1:04 Pockets full of nothing 2:07 A bed for fourpence 3:15 Cheaper than a bed 4:11 The rope trick? 5:20 Breakfast on the street 6:17 Earning your pennies 7:38 The yellow fog 8:43 The river problem 10:12 So, could you? #VictorianLondon #VictorianEra #VictorianHistory #Victorians #LondonHistory #SocialHistory #HenryMayhew #GreatStink #JohnSnow #Cholera #History #Animation #Education