Um, no. Please get your history right.
I was thinking more on a world scale but just an analysis of UK and the US 1890's and our modern era Brings these results
Poverty:
According to the US Census those below the poverty line in America had a rate of 11-15%; This is despite "food banks, mission shelters and nursing homes and other things"
UK in the 1890's had a rate of 12-15% (Rowntree, B.S., Poverty: A Study of Town Life, 1901)
So they were about the same as in percentages per capita, though it should be noted that although social welfare was not nationalized civic and religious organizations acted in their stead.
Disease:
According to the scholarship of W. T. RUSSELL, F.S.S.
(From the National Institute of Medical Research, Hampstead, N.W. 3,
and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, W.C. 1.)
26,325 people in a population of over 30 million died of cancer. Double that and you got the approximate population of the UK today 62,698,362-
That would make the cancer rate with no scientific advances at 52,650 with today's population.
The cancer rate (deaths only) though despite are medical advances is three times higher with the same approximate population. Death from Cancer 2008 = 156,723.
Tuberculous kills over 1.8 million a year around the world but most of the deaths do not occur in the UK or America (10 deaths per 100,000). AIDS though accumulates to 114,766 current cases in the UK alone with over 19,000 deaths. Heart disease 89,174 deaths (mostly due to modern diet and obesity).
STD's in UK: 123,018 new diagnoses of chlamydia, 28,957 diagnosed with genital herpes, 92,525 diagnoses of genital warts, 7,298 people in 2008 were diagnosed with HIV in the UK. I could not find proper STD statistics for 1890's, but reading the literature suggests four things: the Victorian era's repulsion of prostitution did curb the spread of STD's, the relative absence of homosexuality (sodomy) and relative lack of intravenous drug use as well pre marriage and married monogamy limited the spread of STD's. All things are opposite in our modern society.
Family breakdown:
1890's
Researchers Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall have argued that, "during the Victorian era, the prosperous British middle class increasingly valued the family unit. Consequently, Victorians regarded a loving, secure home as a buffer against the intrusions of the outside world". Most households had two parents with many times the grand parents living with them as well
20th/21st centuries
“Marriage has declined as the central institution under which households are organized and children are raised,” Smith said. “People marry later and divorce and cohabitate more. A growing proportion of children has been born outside of marriage.” - Tod Smith author of “The Emerging 21st-Century American Family.”
Domestic violence:
Three months of a typical year in the SF bat area
Dec.25 Santa Clara Husband Emotionless As He Shot Family
Dec.11 Santa Rosa Man Found Guilty Of Stabbing Girlfriend
Dec.8 Martinez Death Sentence For Man Who Killed Sister
Dec.7 Menlo Park Son Of Bonds Arrested After Arguing
Dec.1 East Oakland Suspect Caught After Fatal Stabbing
Nov.20 San Rafael Porn Mogul's Son To Be Tried In Death
Nov.17 Berkeley Man Charged With Murder Of Mom, Child
Nov.6 Martinez Death Sentence For Killer
Nov.1 Raiders Ex-wife, girlfriend claim Cable abuser
Oct.24 Palo Alto Man Charged In Girlfriend's Arson Death
Oct.20 Palo Alto Lounge owner arrested in girlfriend death 36-year-old Bulos 'Paul' Zumot, the owner of a smoking lounge, is behind bars after being arrested in the death of his girlfriend
Oct.8 East Oakland 2 people dead in shooting
East Oakland Woman died after shooting
Sep.30 Berkeley 2 injured followed family dispute
Sep.14 East Oakland Mother kills daughter, self at nursing home
"One in three women in the United States will be battered, beaten or abused in her lifetime."
1890's
History shows a rise in domestic violence in the 19th century but it was very limited compared to today.
Frances Power Cobbe, champion of the rights of working-class women, wrote in 1878: “Wife-beating exists in the upper and middle classes rather more, I fear, than is generally recognized; but it rarely extends to anything beyond an occasional blow or two not of a dangerous kind”
This was because there was a protection built into society as researcher Jenna Dodenhoff writes:
"In a society as highly dependent on social approval as that of the Victorian middle and upper classes, all but the most vicious of husbands would be keenly aware of the pretension that wives were husbands‟ mates and to be treated with dignity".
As for shelters and support systems (for the lower class).
Jenna Dodenhoff writes:
"While physical violence was generally accepted and expected among the working class, it had the unexpectedly positive side effect of providing the victim with a built-in support network her social superiors lacked. It was improper for neighbors to intervene in an altercation between husband and wife, which was regarded as a natural part of marriage, but female neighbors tended to a battered wife‟s wounds, offering her a safe haven if she saw fit to flee her husband‟s temper"
While failing to live up to the Victorian ideal of marriage led a great deal of husbands to covet a superior attitude towards their wives, the fact that it was so social unacceptable made advocacy so prolific and the act so foreign to a modern reader of accounts.
Crime: Well, lets just say gun violence because it is hard to get statistics for crime before the 20th century. It is reported that in all of the UK 3 homicides were committed with guns in 1890-1892 (http://www.allsafedefense.com/news/International/EnglishFailures.htm) Now compare that with San Francisco at any time.
From the BBC history of crime:
The economic downswings of the second half of the nineteenth century were generally not as serious, widespread, or life threatening as those of preceding centuries. Violent behaviour was increasingly frowned upon, dealt with increasingly severely by the courts, and seems, in consequence, to have been brought under a greater degree of control. The new police forces, uniformly established across the whole country in the mid-1850s and subject to annual inspections on behalf of Parliament, appear to have had some success in suppressing those forms of public behaviour that respectable Victorians considered rough and offensive. Violent crime in the form of murder and street robbery never figured significantly in the statistics or in the courts.
Hatred: Do we even have to go here? The fact we have a term "Ethnic Cleansing" and "Genocide" where those concepts were so foreign to the Victorian mind. "The Killing Fields" had just happened in Cambodia right before the action of the film takes place.
War: More people died in the 20th century from warfare than every other century combined in the history of record keeping.
So this is a brief challenge to your incorrect assumptions.
While Jack the Ripper was confined to a small corner of the East end his story was blown out of proportion because of its peculiarity (Interestingly the Night Stalker would start to prowl around the same year as the film 1979). The 1890's despite its problems with the industrial revolution (primarily in the cities) it was an overwhelmingly kinder and gentler place to live. The general love amongst "neighborers" was greater as well as moral fortitude in all areas. It was generally a safer and a subjectively better place to live.
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