If you could travel in time would you go forward or back? Where and what year would you go?

Just to visit - Victorian England
I'd like it too. But on the other hand there were Jack the Ripper, the workhouse, the many suicides of young unmarried pregnant ('fallen') women. The last was so common in those days that it inspired the painter George Frederic Watts to his painting "Found Drowned".

found-drowned-1850-gfwatts.jpg


But if you look at the painting, Watts does not condemn these woman but has much sympathy for her. Her upper body and face are in the light which you could interpret as God, her arms and body resemble a cross and the star shining in the sky above her shows that she already is in heaven.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Found_Drowned
 

The Victorian Age was a mass of contradictions. Advances in hygiene and sanitation were shrouded in cities which were filled with the offal of horses and draft animals. In many cities and small towns, hogs freely roamed the streets, helping control the buildup of garbage.

Sewers drained directly to rivers and streams, where raw sewage joined industrial waste from meatpackers, manufacturers, chemists, steel mills, and all of the thriving activity of society.

The air was filled with smoke from coal, used to warm houses and drive the engines of industry.

In crowded cities the Victorian Age brought about the teeming slums where people packed into areas much too small, and too fetid, to provide a healthful environment. Social reformers called the alarm, and the beginnings of an effort to improve the quality of life for all were initiated. Those who sounded the alarm were at constant risk of poisoning too, from food borne pathogens and those in the air and water.
https://historycollection.com/10-ways-victorians-unwittingly-poisoned-every-single-day/2/
 
I would go back to around April 1975 and NOT ask my first [ex] wife to marry me.
I guess I'd do the same. Go back and not make a fateful mistake.

...so here is where it gets complicated: if I hadn't married my first wife, she wouldn't have had the opportunity to cheat on me- which is why I divorced her. However, I then wouldn't have gone on the re-bound and got together with my future ex #2, whom I had my children with.
Well, being from the future with knowledge of how events would unfold, I'd have to figure a different path to having my kids...:unsure:
 
...so here is where it gets complicated: if I hadn't married my first wife, she wouldn't have had the opportunity to cheat on me- which is why I divorced her. However, I then wouldn't have gone on the re-bound and got together with my future ex #2, whom I had my children with.
Well, being from the future with knowledge of how events would unfold, I'd have to figure a different path to having my kids...:unsure:
Perhaps it is better that we can't go back. It could do more harm than good.
 
I have lived in the best of times, from after WWII till now. Before that, we did not have all the conveniences we take for granted now; in earlier times we did not have all of the modern medical knowledge without it I would have died several times over (e.g., I had 3 successful cancer surgeries,) etc., etc. And my children/grandchildrens times in the furure? I only see disasters ahead of us. No, I thank God every day for having let me live in the best of times.
 
The Victorian Age was a mass of contradictions. Advances in hygiene and sanitation were shrouded in cities which were filled with the offal of horses and draft animals. In many cities and small towns, hogs freely roamed the streets, helping control the buildup of garbage.

Sewers drained directly to rivers and streams, where raw sewage joined industrial waste from meatpackers, manufacturers, chemists, steel mills, and all of the thriving activity of society.

The air was filled with smoke from coal, used to warm houses and drive the engines of industry.

In crowded cities the Victorian Age brought about the teeming slums where people packed into areas much too small, and too fetid, to provide a healthful environment. Social reformers called the alarm, and the beginnings of an effort to improve the quality of life for all were initiated. Those who sounded the alarm were at constant risk of poisoning too, from food borne pathogens and those in the air and water.
https://historycollection.com/10-ways-victorians-unwittingly-poisoned-every-single-day/2/
Reading my own history books of the Victorian Age, It is hard to imagine anyone was allowed any indication of social classes at that time.
The authors of that time period confirm exactly how horrid the conditions were for so many years.
 


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