Elaborate the ill effets of industrialisation in London.

The ill effects of industrilaisation:

(i)Around 20,000 criminals were living in London in the 1870s. A great deal about criminal activities in this period is known, as crime became an object of widespread concern.

(ii)They were the cheats and tricksters, pickpockets and petty thieves crowding the streets of London.

(iii)Large number of children were pushed into low-paid work, often by their parents. According to Andrew Mearns, a clergyman who wrote The Bitter Cry of Outcast London in the 1880s, showed why crime was more profitable than labouring in small underpaid factories: ‘A child seven years old is easily known to make 10 shillings 6 pence a week from thieving … Before he can gain as much as the young thief [a boy] must make 56 gross of matchboxes a week, or 1,296 a day.’

(iv)Although poverty was not unknown in the countryside, it was more concentrated and starkly visible in the city. In 1887, Charles Booth, a Liverpool shipowner, conducted the first social survey of lowskilled London workers in the East End of London.

(v)He had found that as many as 1 million Londoners (about one-fifth of the population of London at the time) were very poor and were expected to live only up to an average age of 29 (compared to the average life expectancy of 55 among the gentry and the middle class). These people were more than likely to die in a ‘workhouse, hospital or lunatic asylum’.