A few years ago I watched a series where people had to live like the Victorian poor, some on the very bottom rung of the ladder. It showed how doss houses worked, if you couldn’t afford a bed for the night there was a bench all the way along one wall with a rope in front of it. People slept there (or perhaps I should say tried to sleep) sitting up and the rope was to stop them falling forward or off the bench!

A really nice edition of the book put together with care and attention, I read it recently having found my brand new copy in a pile of mostly french language books dumped in the street just before rainfall a couple of years ago.
Appropriately found on the street in hackney as well (and printed in clerkenwell)

If you view all the photos he took in 1902 [ https://hdl.huntington.org/digital/collection/p16003coll7/id/3199/rec/6 ] you will see a more rounded picture. It seems to me that he photographed the life of the East-End ‘poor’ then focused on those who found themselves below even the very bottom of the ladder.

Some of these photos are clearly posed – the policeman with the flashlight, the ‘Drunken women fighting on a rooftop’ are just two examples. On a rooftop I ask you! How come he just happened to be passing by a rooftop with a camera and tripod?

Perhaps the saddest photo of all ‘Tottery old men and women were searching in the garbage thrown in the mud’ shows street hawkers selling their wares on the streets. He’s cropped off another elderly hawker selling what looks like boxes of matches. This same chap appears in a different photo taken in Leicester Square, to contrast the difference between the rich and the poor. There’s another showing a woman shopping in Bethnal Green, then in a different photo the same woman, same pose exactly. These illustrate a degree on collusion between the photographer and his subjects.

There’s no doubt that the misery and abject conditions he reported could be found all too easily in that area at that time (and even today) but it should not be assumed that everyone lived like this.