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PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   28131 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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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.

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.

If you could get enough land to be a commercial farmer for relatively cheap

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.

I suppose I would agree with that!

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