Victorian literature in Britain was from about 1830 until 1901. During this time, the nation saw an increase in population as it went from about two million to six million. With this increase in the population, manufacturing cities and industrialization began to boom. However, the unemployment rate increased especially in the early period as people struggled to survive. According to Greenblatt, when the nation went through an economic crash in 1837, the period was known as the “Time of Troubles”, and people desperately needed a way to feed their families (1022). One method was to use their children and they too were sent to the mills and mines to work. These events impacted authors’ of this era writings. These factories mistreated children and authors like Elizabeth Barrett and Henry Mayhew wrote about their hardships in poetry and the downside to industrialism. Elizabeth Barrett wrote “The Cry of the Children” in 1843 during the early period after the economic crash. It details children working in coal mines. The poem has tones of hopelessness and the children accept their abusing lifestyle. The poem also uses symbolism as it refers to the children as innocent lambs. As the children’s lungs …show more content…
Also written in Britain’s’ most troubling era, the text details the life of a young man. After his father died, he is left with his aunt and works in a cotton factory because his mother cannot care for him. He is physically abused by the factory owner and leaves the harmful environment by running away from home. While he is able to be “his own master”, he is very poor and lives in a shelter. The speaker finds peace living as an honest homeless person. According to Nelson Harland, while this text has a negative tone, it does have a somewhat happy ending for the narrator (207). Mayhew details the anguish and pain that this man goes through and how it is ironic that he finds peace in having little to