Victorian Poverty Hardship And Sqauler Poem by Peter Dome

Born into a life of poverty hardship and squalor
where hunger bites and disease is rife
in the dirty cobbled streets
where its a daily battle to stay alive
and find a morsel of food
to survive.

Uneducated illiterate
caught in the poverty trap
drinking polluted water
from the same typhoid cholera riddled tap.

An impoverished woman
sells her body
for a bottle of gin and lodgings for the night
while pickpockets and muchers
ever watchful look for a victim
for their pockets to alight.

Children run through
narrow crowded streets
dressed in rags
no shoes on their dirty feet
The putrid smell from the gutter
thick smoke from the choking bellowing chimminey's
make it hard to breath
rats as big as cats scurry
and spread disease.

Dilapidated buildings covered in black soot
manure and raw sewage under foot.

Beggars flea infested
with large mournful eyes
reach out to the passing gentry
to fill their empty bowls with plenty.

A peeler posts a notice
to an old rusty nail
about a forth coming hanging
at the local Gaol
for those few who can read.

The streetwise barrow traders
shout and hustle
above the throng and bustle
The deafening sound horse and carts
upon the cobbles
echo around the dark pitful hovels.

An emancipated mother
desperate to feed her children
steels a loaf of bread from a stall
a shout goes out
and she's soon captured in the sprawl.

The judge sentences her
to penal servitude
10 years of hard labour
far away across the sea
to botany bay
but, she dies upon the ship of fever
on the way
Her children
sent to the harsh unforgiving
workhouse for education and labour
behind it's hellish door.

A life frawt with danger
where the mortality rate was high
and people struggled to live
before they die
destined for a paupers grave.