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Listen to the Child

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Listen to the Child

By: Elizabeth Howard
Narrated by: Laura Pierson
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London's East End heaves with child prostitutes, hawkers, beggars, and thieves. A solution is offered that sounds perfect - Canadian farmers need workers, their wives want housemaids. Shipping children to this land of plenty offers them a future. Widow Mary Trupper is wary, but the promise of a good life for her children is strong.

©2016 Yvonne Barlow (P)2019 Hookline Books Fiction Historical Historical Fiction Romance Victorian
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This story describes well the poverty in Victorian London, particularly the East End, and families struggling to survive and avoid the workhouse. Constance is a well meaning young lady (if a bit naive) who along with her Mother Helen volunteers at the Home of Industry. There is a scheme to send poor children to Canada as solution to the overcrowded streets and workhouses in London and Canada is depicted as the promise land with Christian families who will take in children and treat them as their own ensuring they have schooling and religious education while training them in domestic or farming skills. Constance is very excited about this programme and takes 100 children on a perilous journey to Canada and I was very keen to know the outcome for the children in her care. There were no real safeguards in place to protect the children once they were placed with a family and sadly many of them were ill treated and beaten. They were just used as cheap labour.

This is a heartbreaking story which is very close to the truth.

I found the narrator rather irritating - this is a story initially set in London and would perhaps have been better with an English accent with the correct intonations.

I was given a free copy of this audio book for an unbiased review.

Heartbreaking story

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