Before the photographer took her picture, the eight-year-old girl quietly removed her shoes—they were so worn and torn that she was ashamed to see herself in them.
This is Adelaide Springgate, photographed in 1901 in East London.
She was eight years old, living in a Salvation Army shelter with her mother, and had already lost more than most people ever would in a lifetime.
Adelaide was born in 1893 into abject poverty in Victorian London.
Her parents were itinerant salesmen—people who sold goods door to door, barely surviving on what they could collect each day.
Life had been hard from the start. Adelaide's twin sisters, Elaine and Margaret, died at birth or shortly afterward.
Another sister, Susanna, lived to the age of four before she too passed away. By 1901, Adelaide and her mother, Mary Ann, were living in a Salvation Army shelter in Spitalfields—one of London’s most notorious slums. Her father was away, and they had virtually nothing. The man behind the camera was Horace Warner, an amateur photographer who worked in Spitalfields Market. From 1900 to 1910, Warner spent his spare time documenting what he called the “children of Spitalfields”—slum children whose lives might otherwise have been lost. These were children living in abject poverty: barefoot, malnourished, raging, crammed into disease-ridden dwellings. Many were immigrant children—Jewish refugees, Irish families fleeing famine—trying to survive in one of the world’s richest cities, with almost nothing to their name. Warner photographed hundreds of these children. But unlike many Victorian photographers who treated the poor as mere curiosities or moralizing tools, Warner treated his subjects with dignity.
He learned their names. He documented their humanity, not just their poverty. When he prepared to photograph Adelaide, she did something heartbreaking:
She quietly took off her shoes. Not because she didn't own any. She did own shoes. But they were so worn, so tattered, so clearly worn out, that she was ashamed to be seen in them.
She preferred to appear barefoot—which might suggest she couldn't afford shoes at all—than to be photographed in shoes that revealed her abject poverty.
This small gesture tells you everything about Adelaide. Despite having lost three siblings. Despite living in a shelter. Despite owning almost nothing—she still had pride.
She still cared about how she was perceived. She still had dignity.
Think about that. An eight-year-old girl living in a Salvation Army shelter, who buried three siblings, didn't know where their next meal would come from—and took off her worn-out shoes because she didn't want to be seen as shameful.
Warner captured that moment. In the photograph, Adelaide stands looking directly at the camera, barefoot, in simple clothes, with a wary, unwavering gaze.
She doesn't smile. But she doesn't look defeated either. She looks like a child who survived so much but never gave up.
After that photograph, Adelaide Springgate essentially disappeared from history.
There are no clear records of what happened to her.
Did she survive to adulthood?
The odds weren't good—the infant mortality rate in the East End slums was staggering. Did she marry?
If so, her name would have changed, making her almost impossible to trace.
Did she emigrate, as so many desperate Londoners did?
Did she find a better life, or did poverty claim her as it did so many others? We don't know. For most of the working class—especially women and children—in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, there are simply no records. They were born, they struggled, they died, and history moved on unnoticed. Adelaide Springgate might have vanished entirely, were it not for this photograph. Were it not for Horace Warner taking the time to learn her name and document her existence. The collection was largely forgotten after his death in 1937. The photographs remained in archives for decades, unexamined. But in recent years, historians have rediscovered them and recognized their extraordinary value.
They are not simply photographs of impoverished children; they are social documentary evidence of a life the Victorian establishment wanted to ignore. They are proof that these children existed, that they had names, that they possessed dignity, and that they mattered. And Adelaide’s photograph—with its poignant detail of broken shoes—has become one of the most powerful images in the collection. Because this gesture—hiding the broken shoes rather than displaying them—
embodies a universal aspect of poverty. It is not just about lacking money; it is about the constant negotiation of dignity. It is about the agonizing effort to maintain self-respect when the world treats you as expendable.
Adelaide Springgate was eight years old. She had lost three siblings. She lived in a workhouse. She had almost nothing. Yet, she chose dignity.
We don’t know what happened to her. We cannot give Her story has a happy ending because we don't know the ending at all. But we can do this: We can remember her. We can say her name. We can honor the fact that she existed, that she mattered, and that she chose to be seen on her own terms even when she had no control over anything else in her life. Adelaide Springgate. Born in 1893. Photographed in 1901. We remember her now. A child who took off her broken shoes because she still had pride. A reminder that dignity isn't something poverty can take away—it's something people choose, again and again, no matter how hard life gets. She endures. Not because of what happened to her, but because of who she was in that moment: a child with nothing who still refused to be ashamed. This isn't just history. This is courage.
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