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It's good to be in London circa 1900 if you are wealthy. If you are poor you have to deal with all the effluent of all that progress. Terrible air quality, tenuous access to clean water, cramped, unsanitary living conditions, brutal work, endemic malnutrition. Persistent assaults on every facet of your health is your lot in life as an urban prole at the turn of the 20th century. (Though even 1900 is substantially better in these respects than say, 1860; or at least for London it is).
Is there any way to find out when London had the lowest overall crime rate?
My WAG would be either the late thirties, when the worst of the poverty had been ameliorated, or the early fifties when the standard of living started to seriously rise after the end of rationing.
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True, but was there anywhere better to be poor in than London in 1900? I doubt Paris or New York was much better.
Like others I'd say the frontier. Smaller cities were also less oppressive in terms of the environmental pollution. London in particular had infamously bad air quality. The crux of the problem is though you're assuming you have options: the reason so many people ended up in these awful situations is because they were chasing what limited employment and opportunities were available to them. It's not like the rural exodus was just because people decided they didn't like farming.
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The American frontier, in all honesty.
Pretty much anywhere there was an abundance of land that was tied into the global trade network. If you could get enough land to be a commercial farmer for relatively cheap any time before mechanization in the 1920s, you'd be set, no matter how you started off.
In that case you wouldn't be considered poor by 1900s standards. The "dream" for a lot of people back then was to own land and be a farmer. The reality for most working poor was being a factory worker, a household servant, or a tenant farmer on someone else's farm. And that's assuming they could get a job at all and weren't just unemployed, like many were, leading to a lot of surplus men looking to sign up for the army.
Right, but if you started poor somewhere it was realistic to save up and get that land, that's the best circumstance to be poor in: you're not going to be stuck impoverished. That's someplace it's significantly better to be poor in than in London at the same time.
Nobody saved enough money in a blue-collar job to buy enough land to support a profitable farm - which by 1900 was quite a lot of land - smallholder poverty was a pretty universal phenonenon. Where there was an open frontier, the land was given away free. I know this is fictional evidence, but the whole plot of Of Mice and Men depends on the fact that Lenny and George's dream of saving up to buy land suddenly goes from being unrealistic to being realistic when they befriend a guy with a personal injury settlement (who could not use the cash to buy land himself, because his injury would prevent him from farming it).
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I suppose I would agree with that!
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