I feel like any time I read a wikipedia page about some historical figure born around then they always are described as "sickly" in their childhood. Like fuck, weren't there any health kids back then running around with those hoops and the stick or singing creepy songs in fields and... idk whatever the fuck else kids did back then, commune with black goats who send them on wicked errands to corrupt their soul to the dark prince?
there was a real issue of companies taking poor children from the workhouse as unpaid apprentices and then not feeding them and working them to death then burying them in mass graves. In the UK at the time. Basically the industrial revolution in England was incredibly evil and the worst time to be a kid
Dickens does a great job of portraying this - most of fucked up shit that he describes was just commonplace observation in Victorian London. Also, his article on the sheer amount of horse shit that was sitting on the streets all the time is mind-boggling: a big reason the aristocracy retreated to the country every summer is because the horse shit would turn to dust and you'd be breathing horse shit dust everywhere you went.