Poverty
The Victorian Era in America was also a time of massive immigration. This wave of immigrants, referred to as the Third Wave (1880–1914), consisted of immigrants mostly from Southern and Eastern Europe. German and Scandinavian were very common.
| Decade | Number of German Immigrants | Number of Scandinavian Immigrants |
|---|---|---|
| 1830s | 152,454 | 1,202 |
| 1840s | 434,626 | 13,903 |
| 1850s | 951,667 | 20,931 |
| 1860s | 787,468 | 109,298 |
| 1870s | 718,182 | 211,245 |
| 1880s | 1,452,970 | 568,362 |
| 1890s | 505,152 | 321,281 |
| Total | 7,176,071 | 1,223,047 |
Cities expanded rapidly under the onslaught of immigrants and from 1880-1900 New York City grew from 1.9 million to 3.4 million. These immigrants settled in the North and obtained poorly paid jobs in factories. Housing was crowded, poorly ventilated, and unsanitary. Some blocks in New York City had as many as 10,000 residents, all living in buildings no higher than six stories. Some rooms in tenement houses had no outside windows or air ducts. Cities grew much faster than resources, so indoor plumbing and sewage were inadequate. Tenement buildings often had their own well in the basement, where the sewer drained, that tenants could use for water. However, in the summer, the water table often dropped below the level of the pump for many hours of the day. Child labor was common due to intense poverty.
Read more about this topic: Victorian America
Famous quotes containing the word poverty:
“Give a beggar a dime and he’ll bless you. Give him a dollar and he’ll curse you for witholding the rest of your fortune. Poverty is a bag with a hole at the bottom.”
—Anzia Yezierska (c. 1881–1970)
“It was not important that they survive.
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,
Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“The organization controlling the material equipment of our everyday life is such that what in itself would enable us to construct it richly plunges us instead into a poverty of abundance, making alienation all the more intolerable as each convenience promises liberation and turns out to be only one more burden. We are condemned to slavery to the means of liberation.”
—Raoul Vaneigem (b. 1934)