Poverty In Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre

The High Price of Poverty
In an ideal world, intelligence, determination, and hard work would determine a person’s success and prosperity. However, this was not the case in Victorian England. Money influenced the social hierarchy so that people were valued solely on the contents of their coin purses rather than the content of their character. The significant impact of wealth and social class relating to the living conditions, job opportunities, and treatment of the English population in the Victorian Era is demonstrated in the novel Jane Eyre.
To begin with, an individual's wealth and social class influenced how they were perceived and treated by society in Victorian England. One example of this is that the aristocrats and influential politicians
Poverty was commonly demonstrated by a lack of food and ragged, torn clothing. This is especially true in Jane Eyre when Jane talks about her conceived notions about poverty: “they think of the world only as connected with ragged clothes, scanty food, fireless grates, rude manners, and debasing vices: poverty for me was synonymous with degradation” (Bronte 26). Even as a child, Jane knew that poverty meant harsh living conditions. It was common knowledge that poverty signified a poor diet and limited clothing. The impoverished also had to live in unreasonably crowded communities, which lead to diseases and eventually shorter life spans. Diseases were very common for poor people and this lead to prodigious death rates: “However, so inured were the men of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the toll of disease, to the shortness of the span of urban human life, that they were unlikely to be moved by only a slight rise in the death rate” (Flynn par. 2). The poor lived in dirty housing ridden with diseases, which caused extreme suffering, and in many cases, death. Destitution in the Victorian Era impacted the quality of life so immensely that being poor could mean the difference between life and