What was life like for adults in Dickens's London?

Answer 1

Except for the very wealthy, life was very hard for Victorians. And even the wealthy had to slog through muddy, disgusting roads, step over animal droppings on the sidewalks, utilize rather primitive sanitary devices, and suffer from uncertain heating and nonexistent cooling. But if you were not wealthy, you worked wherever you could. After contending with the trials above just to get to work (or to church or entertainments), you might sit on a high stool all day and make 'fair copies' of legal documents or enter figures in a column. You probably walked to and from work, unless you could occasionally afford to take the omnibus. Women couldn't work at all, except in a very few areas, like factories (if you were lower class), and then only after the advent of the Industrial Age. Nursing would continue to be a undesirable profession in most people's minds, carried on only by prostitutes and addicts, until Florence Nightingale made it respectable late in the century. The Industrial Revolution (a fascinating period of the Victorian Age) brought to an end many cottage industries and hand-made goods that could now be produced on machines much more cheaply, and put many farmers and land laborers out of work and into outright poverty and the work house.