2-3-4 Challenge Book Discussions #1 discussion
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What Darkness Brings
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Jonetta
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Aug 19, 2016 06:22AM
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That always breaks me heart because I have children who are around the same ages as the kids that Hero interviews. I can't imagine my kids surviving on the streets that way. I always want Sebastian and Hero to take them all home but, of course, that's not practical. Society just seems to treat them like as though they're disposable. And whatever orphanages might have been around back them probably were little better than the streets. I took a sociology class once and one of the topics discussed was about how children were once viewed as just small adults because no one really knew about the human developmental process in terms of cognition.
I know free education was not introduced into England until the 1890's. Not sure if it was compulsory even then, but I think the idea that children were actually children must have come in around then too. And to think that is less than half a century before my mother was born!!!!!!!!!
Heartbreaking, and an indication of how far we've come, but also how far we need to move forward on behalf of the world's children on the streets.
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The Maiden Lane series by Elizabeth Hoyt features a family maintaining a home for orphaned children in the St. Giles area so I know there were people who did care. It just really bothers me every time they show up in these stories.
This isn't limited to the UK, either. Lots of our child labor laws in the US were originally crafted because of abuses during this era through the turn of the 19th century and beyond.
Maybe it's a modern thing to treasure our young.
It is really difficult to read about the horrors that children were subjected to throughout history. I keep having to remind myself that we live in a different (and at least in this respect better time) even though there are still places in the world were children are neglected, abused, worked to death and even used as weapons.
Jonetta wrote: "Maybe it's a modern thing to treasure our young.."I doubt that modern parents are more caring than those throughout history. People are the same, it is the circumstances that have changed.
Children, especially orphans, have always been a vulnerable part of society. Today there systems in place (especially in Western countries) to care for them, but in the past, society either lacked the awareness or the resources to do anything about it. It was people like Hero and her articles who brought the plight of the children to light, and that is when things began changing and laws were enacted to protect children.
Another thing that is different is life-expectancy and birth control. The old adage that the rich get richer and the poor have children didn't come out of nowhere.
My heart broke reading about the kids. I can only imagine how that single father felt with three kids to worry about. He was doing the best he could, but sometimes it seems the harder you try the worst it gets.I don't know how people could just walk by and not do anything. I know it was a different culture back then, but it breaks my heart to know that some of those kids never had a fighting chance. Just really sad that human beings could be so cruel.
It is very sad. It is like people of this time are conditioned to see these children as less than human. It has me interested to see when people started to change their attitudes. Although I remember an old landlord I had was an orphan. He lived in an orphanage here in the US. I'm trying to remember because he was old when I rented from him, but I'm thinking it would be around 1940. He told some terrible tales of his life more than 100 years after the Regency period.We aren't always good to our children.
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