Henry Mayhew’s interviews with London street children reveals a terrible consequence of Industrialization. The factory owners and other members of the upper class have capitalized on the massive influx of people into urban centers by paying them abysmal wages for horrid jobs. Many people cannot find work or make enough money to support a family. Many, especially children, have nothing else other than drastic measures such as stealing or begging. The Watercress Girl in “London Labour and the London Poor” has etched out a pathetic living by selling lettuce on the city streets. This little girl should be a youth; she should embody the carefree life for which so many are nostalgic, but, sadly, the class she was born into forced her to forgo any chance of youth. She fails to even see her self as a child anymore, she believes that “[they] wouldn’t let such as [her] go there” in referring to the parks of London that she had never seen (1109). She also clearly admits that she “ain’t no child,” but she does not see herself as yet a women grown (1111). The poor youth of London found themselves stuck in a state of limbo, or perhaps purgatory, between youth and adulthood. They know that they are children, but they spend all their time trying to merely survive rather than growing and learning as they ought to. The age of industrialization does not simply redefine youth, it crushes and distorts it into something that cannot be recognized.