A period of extreme poverty of the lower working classes <br />As they worked to the death the rich sat politely on their arses <br />London’s poor tried to scrape a living doing jobs the devil created <br />As the rich sat at their windows laughing at the pitiful souls they hated <br /> <br />The poor would have sooner died than enter the poor houses control <br />As it was not fit to harbor a single living human soul <br />Small boys were used to clean narrow sooted chimneys <br />While in the coal mines children worked on their hands and knees <br /> <br />Although this golden age pioneered many useful inventions <br />Children privileged to go to school were whipped instead of detentions <br />And as the poor worked for a life at every waking hour <br />The rich covered their stench with perfume and wild flowers <br /> <br />The poor had nothing and hardly anything to eat <br />While the rich enjoyed tea and honey and sherbet lemon sweets <br />In Victorian London the poor just lived and died <br />The rich never really noticed the rich never really cried <br /> <br />A period of extreme poverty of the lower working classes <br />As they worked to the death the rich sat politely on their asses<br /><br />nicola burkett<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/21-victorian-poverty/
