Your da is grinning from ear to ear. Your heart is so full of gladness you think it might burst.
‘Will Grandpa really live here with us now?’ asks Abel.
‘He will,’ you tell Abel. ‘Happily ever after.’
FACT FILE:
SMALLPOX
Smallpox was a highly contagious disease, which killed approximately 400,000 Europeans every year during the early 1800s.
Around sixty per cent of adults and eighty per cent of children who caught smallpox died from it, although if you had it and survived, you could never catch it again. Having someone to look after you and give you food and water while you were ill would improve your chances of survival, but many families left smallpox victims to suffer alone, for fear of becoming infected themselves.
People with smallpox experienced high fevers, strong headaches and joint pain, vomiting, and a horrible rash that covered the whole body. Some people survived smallpox but were left blind because the rash spread to their eyes and permanently damaged them.
There is still no known cure for smallpox, but luckily for us, the disease was wiped out in the 1970s by a team of doctors who travelled all around the world vaccinating people, to prevent anyone from catching it in the first place.
Other awful diseases that existed in Britain in the early 1800s that we don’t often experience today included scarlet fever, typhus, diphtheria and tuberculosis. These diseases were often easily spread because of poverty and unclean living conditions.
Return to scene 1 to make your choice.
FACT FILE:
PICKPOCKETS
London in the early 1800s was a crowded and sometimes desperate place. A lot of people were very poor, and many children, some as young as five, were taught how to pick pockets as a way of getting some money to help them stay alive.
A common way of training pickpockets was to hang a jacket from a hook with a bell attached. You had to try to take a wallet from the coat’s pocket without making the bell ring. If that sounds like a fun game, consider this: child pickpockets were usually badly treated – often beaten – by their masters, and if they were caught by the authorities, they could be sentenced to death by hanging.
Charles Dickens’ book Oliver Twist is a famous story about a boy who becomes a pickpocket on the streets of London.
Pickpocketing does still exist today, but it isn’t a common crime in Australia. Lower-income families in Australia are now given an allowance from the government, which means they don’t have to steal to survive. Also, all children in Australia today must go to school, whereas in London in the 1800s, only very rich children were able to attend school, leaving many poor children on the streets.
It’s interesting to think that eliminating crimes like pickpocketing has been achieved today by supporting people to live more comfortable and healthy lives, not by making the punishments for crimes even worse.
Return to scene 4 to make your choice.
FACT FILE:
CHILD LABOUR
In the 1800s, Europe was going through a stage of industrialisation, which means that, because of new machines that had recently been invented, things that were previously made by hand (like homespun cloth) were now made by machine.
Although children had always done some work around the home and on farms, as more factories and mines opened, children were now wanted more than ever before to do dangerous, repetitive work tending to the machines, cleaning the factories, or going down the mines.
There were no laws to protect children from working, and in the cities of Britain at that time, children usually started work at around eight years old. They made only a tiny amount of money, and they were often killed, either suddenly, by accidents with the machines or down mines, or slowly, by sicknesses brought on by inhaling coaldust or cloth fibres.
Many countries, including Australia, now have laws that protect children from being exploited by work. (You can still do some types of work, so long as it doesn’t interfere with your schooling or your development in any way. Including housework, unfortunately!)
However, in some countries – particularly those badly affected by poverty – children are still forced to work long hours under terrible conditions to support their family, just as many British children in the 1800s did.
Return to scene 5 to make your choice.
FACT FILE:
PRISONS
Britain in the 1700s and 1800s had many problems, which all fed into each other. For a start, there were simply too many people living there. Overcrowding, and the resulting lack of affordable food and accommodation, drove many desperate people to a life of crime. Criminals were sentenced harshly – whipped, hung or locked up even for minor offences – and so soon there were not enough jails, or gaols, to hold all the criminals.
As a result, in the 1700s, Britain started transporting prisoners to colonies of the British Empire, such as Australia or America. This solved two problems, somewhat relieving overcrowding in the prison system, and also providing a workforce to build new settlements in the colonies. The American War of Independence (1775–1783) put an end to convicts being transported to America, and transportation to the Australian colonies began soon after.
Even before the American War of Independence, Britain still had too many prisoners to fit in its jails. In 1766, parliament agreed that prisoners could be kept on prison hulks instead. It was supposed to be a two-year measure, but it lasted for eighty-two years!
Prison hulks – like the one Da is held on – were ships that had once been used by the British navy, but were no longer seaworthy. Prisoners were allowed out to work during the day, and locked into the ships at night. The hulks were vile, overcrowded, violent places. The hulk system for containing prisoners became so useful to the British
