Harrowing pictures of a pregnant ten-year-old prostitute and tots begging for money capture the heart-breaking poverty of Victorian street children
Youngsters suffered precarious lives, blighted by cruelty and squalor
FOUR months pregnant, a child prostitute bares her growing belly.
The plight of 10-year-old Mary Simpson embodies the horrors many Victorian street children were forced to endure.
These were precarious lives, blighted by cruelty and squalor.
And some of that horror is caught on camera in this collection of harrowing photos showing young girls forced to live by their wits to survive.
Smiles are notable by their absence in the snapshots from over a century ago that show the girls in tattered clothes.
A couple of frames feature older men with the helpless youngsters.
A further photo taken by Alice in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll shows Alice Liddell - the inspiration behind Alice - dressed to appear like a child beggar.
Street children in Victorian times were found in abundance living in alleys or side streets.
Many were orphans but a large part of the street children were from neglectful, alcoholic families where abuse was the norm.
The belief that children had rights that the states should protect was almost non-existent at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Faced with the choice of living in these conditions or living on the street some children chose the street.
Many of these children fell prey to prostitution and begging to support themselves.
Child prostitution flourished until the late 1800s and was an accepted fact of city life.
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Minors accounted for over half of individuals involved in prostitution in Paris whilst it wasn’t uncommon for child prostitutes, some as young as eight-years-old, to work the streets of London.
Even eminent Victorians like novelist Ernest Dowson and John Ruskin wooed young girls. In a letter to his physician John Simon on 15 May 1886, Ruskin wrote: “I like my girls from ten to sixteen - allowing of 17 or 18 as long as they’re not in love with anybody but me - I’ve got some darlings of eight, 12 and 14.”
However a scandal in nineteenth century England caused the government to raise the age of consent and tackle child prostitution.
The age of consent was then raised from 13 to 16.
During this period, the term white slavery came to be used throughout Europe and the United States to describe prostituted children.
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