Sweeps, nomads, quacks and crawlers: (shortened - photos from 1870s London)

The Daily Mail (UK) ^ | 31/03/12 | Daily Mail

[GeronL]

Child labor was the big things back then.

Poverty was seen as the normal status of human beings. Anyone who wasn’t poor had worked at it.

[MinuteGal]

The wooden platform sole on his right leg is probably a special shoe made to help him walk.

As a youth in Germany in the late 1800's, my grandpa was kicked by a horse hitched to a parked bakery cart. They didn't know how to set broken bones in those days, at the very least the common folk had no access to knowledgeable doctors. So, whatever happened or didn't happen, grandpa ended up with one leg shorter than the other. For the rest of his life he limped severely and walked with a cane.

Today he would have received a prosthetic shoe.....more scientifically made than the clumsy, more primitive ones of over a hundred years ago.

Leni

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Genetics might also have had a role to play.
My Swedish great grandmother suffered hip failure (one leg became shorter than the other) and she walked with crutches in her 60s (in the 1950s/early 60s.) My great grandfather lost circulation in one leg and so at age 85, one leg was amputated. He lived to be 92.
My mother had hip problems in her 60s and received an artificial hip on one side and a new vein on the other leg at University of Iowa Hospitals. She lived to be 90.

[goat granny]

Your post brought back a memory of my childhood that was completely forgotten....In Detroit we had a man pushing his grinding wheel and walking down the street yelling for anyone that wanted their knives or scissors shapened to bring them out....there were memories of horse drawn ice wagons, sheeny men, horse drawn milk wagons but the knife sharpener guy was forgotten until you brough it up...Circa: 1940’s....Oh yea and the fresh produce truck’s twice a week run....

[AnAmericanMother]

Those poor horses are not only malnourished - they're poorly conformed, over at the knee, sway-backed, ewe-necked, all the rest of it. They would look a little better if you fed them up a bit, but they would still be ugly.

Just about all the horses you see nowadays are the top end of the scale as far as conformation and build. That's because we don't use horses for general transport any more, so there is no need for cheap, ugly horses.

The people in these photos were at the bottom of the heap, so a cheap ugly horse was all they could afford. Those poor equines are the flesh-and-blood equivalent of the old smoking beater of a pickup truck with busted out windows, rusted-out fenders and a rope holding the hood closed.

Read Anna Sewell's Black Beauty. She was a reformer, so the story is a bit exaggerated and crowds every kind of mistreatment you could see on the streets of London into one horse's story -- but it's pretty accurate.

The other end of the heap:

King Edward VII with his racehorse, Persimmon, who won both the Derby and the St. Leger in 1896.

[paudio]

While big influx of South Asian didn’t start until the 60s, European fixation to exotic Asia had been around for long, at least to the 19th century. Arts, knowledge, and medicine from the East were romanticized as ‘purer’ to the Western counterpart (needless to say, many Westerners still hold similar views). So, street medicine sold by Indian would look more authentic and potent.

[WorkingClassFilth]

Looks like a corrective shoe - maybe a club foot, or maybe the dude has some kind of sympathy scam going on...?

[riri]

Yes, perhaps I should embrace the America hating, free enterprise hating British folks who frequent so many message boards and who I have encountered over the years.

[PhilosopherStone1000]

Thank you for the Wyckoff reference. I have since (reading it this morning) powered my way through both “East” and “West”!

Amazingly well written, insightful and full of real humanity without the slobbering, cowardly leftism that infects so much current “sociology”. I literally could not stop reading those books.

Thanks again for the cite!

[Oatka]

Amazingly well written, insightful and full of real humanity without the slobbering, cowardly leftism that infects so much current “sociology”. I literally could not stop reading those books.

I was similarly taken and admired the man so much that my wife and I retraced his travels in 2003. I took pictures of each town as it looks today and compared it to a period post card, along with some snippet from the book.

After a couple of Twilight Zone instances, I decided to set up a website in his honor. To start, click on his photo HERE.

[pricilla]

You can embrace whomever you like.Most Britons don’t hate the USA and to use such language to describe a whole race of whom you obviously know very little,quite frankly shows you to be somewhat of an imbecile.

[PhilosopherStone1000]

LOL! That’s the first link that comes up when you google Wyckoff’s name! Congratulations! I’ll get to it when I have some more time for reading.

[AnAmericanMother]

Wow! Love the Lizanne Truex material - my mom was a professional dancer and at age 86 she still steps on the boards for an occasional cameo.

Really talented dancers getting very little credit from Hollywood (or Broadway for that matter) is SOP. Most are very unsung.

[Revolting cat!]

Photos from the 1870s? How’s that possible? That was before cellphones had cameras in them!

[riri]

Hmm, the numerous socialism loving and defending Brits I have met in my travels, posting on places like the Daily Mail and the Local must be some sort of freak anomalies. I will get an evaluation pronto.

[Oatka]

I’ll get to it when I have some more time for reading.

Go with God, my son. :-)

I got pretty windy in the intros, but set up the two maps that covered his East/West books and you can home in to specific states/towns.

Ran across his books in 1966. When I read the bit where he was cold, hungry and homeless in a wintry Chicago, saw an old school chum and knew he'd find warmth and food, and toughed it out instead, I put the book down and thought "I'd like to know that guy", little realizing that he died more than 50 years before that.

When I set the site up, I went and bought the bound Scribners volumes (1897-1898) that had his articles. I got a kick when they had to explain to the readers that the stories were true and not fiction. I guess some back then couldn't believe some of the stuff he saw and went through.

[AnAmericanMother]

That’s funny. “Weary Willie” was Princeton ‘88. I’m Princeton ‘77. I live right next to the CSX main line.

[pricilla]

If your travels continually bring you into contact with socialists and commies,then you are obviously moving in the wrong circles.There are about 65 Million in the UK and yes there are some America haters among them,but there are probably more socialist loving America haters right here in the US,ie the millions who gave us Obama.Leave the Brits alone,they’re doing the best they can with what they have.

[a fool in paradise]

Photos from the 1870s? How’s that possible? That was before cellphones had cameras in them!