The Victorian age bright side was the industrial revolution with its great inventions and scientific progress, but this magnificent age had also a dark side to it a social dark side. George R. Sims in his chapter How the Poor Live, exposes one aspect of this dark side:  deep poverty, a situation that forced the young members of families, the children, aged between six and ten to “work hard at dangerous trades for their living “. Girls work long hours for pennies in a ‘Bronzing factory’ using dangerous chemicals which caused fatal illnesses without taking any precaution and without getting any protection either from their bosses or families. Another example is of young boys sometimes age six or seven working in sawmills, again no precautions were taken resulting in fingers loss or worse even loss of hands to the machines. Lead poisoning was another fatal condition that those young children died of working in the lead industry and Lemonade bottling factories where bursting bottles maimed children who were doing the job.

The poorer the family the younger the kids who went to work. James Greenwood, in his book The Seven Curses of London from 1869, describes the stages that little boys went through from the age of seven to become a prestigious “errand boy” when they are ten. They worked from early morning till the late hour of the evening winter and summer alike to earn something. ‘Uncle Jonathan’ In his Walks In and Around London, from 1895, described them as the “children of the poor who have to earn their own living”. Not earning any money resulted usually in cruel beating or other cruelties at home. The jobs ‘Uncle Jonathan’ described are not these dangerous jobs that make the reader shiver but more of mundane little independent initiatives that render the kids transparent, unnoticeable. Those kids were to be found in markets, like Covent Garden in Uncle Jonathan’s story, where at about five or six o’clock in morning those kids showed up to buy their merchandise for the day, boys and girls alike: flower girls, Orange-girls, the little match-sellers, telegraph boys etc. Other kids worked as scavengers, collecting horse discharge from the dangerous bustling roads, risking their life for pennies.