Building canals in India. Curt Carnemark for the World Bank/Flickr. (CC 2.0 by-nc-nd)
Although all too often glossed over, Victorian Britain’s harsh working conditions are no secret.
“Children of nine or ten years…dragged from their squalid beds at two, three, or four o’clock in the morning and compelled to work for a subsistence until ten, eleven or twelve at night, their limbs wearing away, their frames dwindling, their faces whitening”, wrote one journalist in the Daily Telegraph in 1860.
