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1800s: Two children – one poor, one wealthy – escape the privations of nineteenth-century Hull to make their fortune in London
The Long Walk Home
What you need to know before your trail
Young Mikey Quinn, scavenging on the streets of Hull, is thrown into prison for stealing a rabbit from the butcher. His chief accuser, a well-to-do lawyer, has a daughter, Eleanor, whom he badly mistreats. When Mikey is released he finds that his mother has died and his brothers taken into the workhouse – determined to find a better life for his family, he walks all the way to London to seek his fortune.
There he finds that the grim realities of city life are even worse than they were in Hull, and comes under the evil patronage of the sinister Tully, first encountered when he was in prison. But he also meets Eleanor again, and between them they face the dangers of London and gradually make a new life for themselves. Together they have to face journeying back to Hull – the long walk home.
Travel Guide
Hull
Life in Hull in the 1850s was grim indeed. Life for a poor boy who tries to steal a rabbit to feed his starving family is bad but then so too is life for Eleanor who might live in a gilded existence to the outside world but this is a gilded cage with an absent mother and a violent father.
Life on the streets, the cobbled, dirty and mean streets are not where children should be. When Mikey gets taken to prison, he meets the dregs of society and one man in particular who tries to get him into a life of crime. This is a snapshot of how children on the street were made to fend for themselves. Hull is a dirty, dank, place of poverty for these Victorian children and life beside the docks is smelly and isolating with the only promise of escape for many being a transport to the Australian prisons
London
Are the streets of London paved with gold? Fools Gold if this London is anything to go by. This is the London of Oliver Twist and Fagin and any attemps the children make to better themselves is thwarted at every turn. The sense of community that was apparent in Hull is non existent here with ‘Everyman for himself’ being the sound carried in the wind.
Streetview Maps
C) Hull - The prison off Kingston Street
E) London - London Bridge
Booktrail Boarding Pass Information: The Long Walk Home
Author/Guide: Valerie Wood Destination: Hull , London Departure Time: 1850s
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