Effects Of Poverty In Dickens The Prisoner's Van And Charles Dickens

Poverty the Product of Child Labour and Juvenile Crime as seen in Charles Dickens’ “The Prisoner’s Van” and Henry Mayhew’s “Boy Crossing-Sweepers and Tumblers”

The Industrial Revolution in Britain during the 18th Century required a higher demand for labourers which ultimately forced children part of the poor and working class to work in order to provide for themselves, or for their families in order to escape poverty. Further, “the economic and social difficulties associated with industrialization made the 1830s and 1840s a “Time of Troubles,” characterized by unemployment, desperate poverty, and rioting” (“The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Victorian Age: Review: Summary”). Charles Dickens’ journalistic sketch, “The Prisoner’s Van,” focuses primarily on two sisters forced into prostitution by their mother, and also touches on a number of boys caught for pickpocketing. Henry Mayhew’s journalistic sketch “Boy Crossing-Sweepers and Tumblers” focuses on the interview of a teenaged boy who works as a cross-sweep and tumbler in order to support himself,

The majority of individuals of the Victorian era were dealing with the effects of industrialization, unemployment, and namely the poverty. This lack of jobs required individuals and families to force their children to find any type of work, be it working in coal mines, selling their bodies, or even stealing. One way children would try to make money was through pickpocketing. This is seen towards the end of Dickens’ Journalistic sketch where he tells of the “other prisoners—boys of ten, […] going joyfully to prison as a place of food and shelter” (Dickens 3). The poverty “70 per cent of the population” (Black xliv) is experiencing, is so extreme that these young boys are thankful for being arrested and sent to prison because they are guaranteed food and a place to