This is Adelaide Springett, born in 1893 into the harsh poverty of Victorian London.
Her parents were street hawkers, scraping together a living by selling goods door to door. Life was cruel from the start. Adelaide’s twin sisters, Ellen and Margaret, died at birth. Another sister, Susannah, was gone by the age of four.
By 1901, when this photograph was taken, Adelaide was just eight years old. She and her mother were living in a Salvation Army shelter in London’s East End. The man behind the camera was Horace Warner, who spent years documenting the “Spitalfields Nippers”—the forgotten children of the slums, whose lives might otherwise have vanished without record.
Before Warner took the picture, Adelaide quietly removed her boots. Not because she didn’t own any, but because they were so worn and broken that she was ashamed to be seen in them. That small gesture says more than words ever could about the world she lived in.
What became of Adelaide after this moment is unknown. The last trace of her is this photograph, a child frozen in time, standing at the edge of the 20th century with nothing certain ahead.
And yet—through this single image—she endures.
A child who had lost nearly everything, but still chose dignity. A reminder that even in the hardest lives, there is a quiet courage that refuses to be forgotten.