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Notes -
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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