Slumming

[Daniel]

This is about living conditions in London in the 1880's. It says synthetic or altered content, but I haven't seen any yet.

At 3:00 the narrator talks about slumming. I thought this was interesting.

The rich would take guided tours of the slums.

Link to video

I had friends at school who would "go slumming" and take me with them.

Two students were heirs to fortunes. There were only 500 students so it was impossible not to know these things.

One was an heir to the Eckerd fortune (See: Ruth Eckerd Hall).

The Eckerd family owned the 4th largest drugstore chain in the South until they sold it to Merrill Lynch.

There are no more Eckerd drug stores. There used be everywhere and they were paired with Albertson's grocery stores by contract. They were still there when I was in school.

This student and I were friends. He had a crush on me. We were never in a relationship, but had a good time together one semester.

Ruth Eckerd was his grandmother.

The other was an heir to the Holt publishing fortune. This student and my friend were roommates.

Then there were the garden variety kids from private schools who had trust funds.

I would recount my adventures "slumming" and it was interesting, and I did have fun, but I won't because it was just a bit of harmless amusement, and nothing worth recounting.

The first thing that stood out to me in this video was men paying a nominal amount of money to sleep holding onto a rope.

This happened in the US during the great depression as well.

I'm going to finish watching this video, but the bottom line is that poverty in Victorian London was wretched, and the environmental quality included streets full of sewage and horse manure, and air that was a cloud of industrial toxins.