A thin shawl was drawn over her shoulders; her dress was ragged and worn, her face deathly pale…In her pocket was found the remnant of the crust, and a copy of verses printed on red paper.
Lines Written by a New York Homeless Woman
Jack’s Story: The True Story of a Poor Boy in 19th-Century New York
“My father would smash everythin’ he could reach and knocked my mother round awful so I ran away.”
The Mysteries of New York (1848) | Stephen Basdeo
In the Victorian era, New York was a large industrial city with ‘dark Satanic mills’ in which the poor and the rich lived “cheek by jowl”; paupers lived a hand-to-mouth existence and for many, a life of crime as part of an organised criminal gang.
New York’s 19th-Century Underclass: The Work of Jacob A. Riis (1849-1914) | Stephen Basdeo
Stephen Basdeo takes a look at the life of one of New York’s pioneering social reformers, Jacob A. Riis.