You may be heavily overestimating lifestyles in 1900. Here's a very interesting book written in the early 1900s looking at families with a father in solid empl

You may be heavily overestimating lifestyles in 1900. Here's a very interesting book written in the early 1900s looking at families with a father in solid employment, ~~renting for~~ (edit - living on) about 1 pound a week in London. They're poor, but not the poorest - not in the workhouses. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/58691/pg58691-images.html#CHAPTER_IV https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/58691/pg58691-images.ht... Regardless of precise lines, I recommend reading this as an actual look (mixture of descriptive prose and figures & stats) at life for people of the time.