The lowest of the low

I've been looking at Charles Booth's poverty map of London which was compiled around 1889. He describes the inhabitants of the streets where my people lived as 'vicious and semi-criminal' and that ' Their life is the life of savages, with vicissitudes of extreme hardship and their only luxury is drink'.
Those poor people. Most of my people didn't make it to old age, with many of them popping off in their fifties. Very few of them made it past seventy. No wonder they drank.
The Victorian view of poverty was that it was the Poor's own fault because they were lacking in virtue. The more virtuous, the richer the person. They lived hand to mouth and struggled to feed themselves. They had many children and an appalling number of these didn't reach adulthood. Many died of things like coughs or diarrhoea (my 3xgreat grandmother died of the latter). Those poor people had no recourse to doctors, because the fees were completely beyond their reach. They relied on household ingredients to provide medicine. A few of these were still in use in my house when I was a boy. One example is onions and brown sugar for a cough.
Booth took a more enlightened view than his peers did, and used his data on poverty to campaign for the introduction of an old age pension. What a good man.