I know it's a bit Mary-sue-ish.. but please bare with me!
Oh and i only own Liz's parents and Liz...unfortunately :(
Two pasts:
So we've been talking about two people, who don't know each other and have a few similarities between them. We said that they were poor and didn't have nice homes they were going to for a good night's sleep. But there is another similarity we haven't touched base with yet. This similarity is quite simple, they had problems. Yes, this is a broad topic, and we will explain a bit further.
The boy in this story has a very common problem, and you may have been able to tell from the things you have read before. But if you haven't figured it out, he had a drinking problem. And he probably had it because of his heritage. He was Irish, and he had a father. No, being Irish or having fathers doesn't make you an alcoholic. But having a father who was a drinker and a criminal could definitely do it. Let's explain a little about the boy's, or Jack's (as we now know him by) past.
A young man of twenty three by the name of Henry Sullivan came fresh off the boat from Ireland in 1874. He landed in the great city of New York and within two days made it from Ellis Island to the actual city. His family had died from lives of poverty under cruel landlord rule. He was left orphaned at an early age and finally saved enough money to come to America. He came with a true, kind heart. He fell deeply in love with a young woman who couldn't marry him, for her parents didn't want her marrying "Irish Scum." So the young man simply didn't marry his real love, instead he married another young and poor woman. To be blunt he did not love her. But they married and as years went by his heart grew bitter. He started to hate his wife, his life, his bad job, his tenement apartment. He stopped working and the two grew poorer and poorer as time went by. Soon they had a baby boy, and the mother loved him with all her heart. The father did not. So the father started a new tradition, since he was filled with so much hate and anger he decided drinking could take him out of his miserable life. So he did, every night he took the little money the small family had and went to the local tavern. The mother worked very hard to keep them surviving. When the father would come home, he would sometimes even beat his wife and once their son was older beat him as well. So the boy grew up in a broken home. He loved his mother and hated his father. Soon his father was caught stealing and had assaulted a police officer in the process, and was sent to jail. The mother had died soon after. The boy at age six was taken to the Newsboys Lodging House to work the rest of his young life as a Newsie.
And Jack did just that, but he had known everything that his father had done to his mother, and himself. He never forgave his father, but somehow, even though he truly didn't want to, slightly followed in his father's footsteps. He started drinking when things got tough. But he never got as bad as his father had.
Jack had done pretty good things while being a Newsie. Since he had lived there forever, he had taken the role of being leader of the Newsies living in Manhattan. And he was a fantastic leader, and role model, minus his little problem. But he strictly kept that problem to his close friends, who were his age, and he usually never got out of hand…usually. He did get out of hand with the drunkenness once in a while, and when he did it wasn't pretty, at all. But that's enough about Jack, let's talk about this Liz.
Formerly known as Elizabeth Williams, was of English parents, who had sailed over a few years before Jack's father had. Unlike our Jack's parents, hers had married for love, and did love each other. This caused a problem though. Sometimes when love is too strong people make stupid mistakes, economically speaking. Her parents lived very poor lives, but got by somehow. They sometimes lived on the streets, in tenements, wherever they could get a place to stay essentially. But even though they loved each other, love cannot be the base of income. The two had a baby girl and right away loved her. They kept themselves alive, but barely. They lived in a tenement, and the father had finally gotten a job, but as the years went on tragedy struck. The mother got deathly ill. Her mother died and her father was left a broken man. But not the broken you are probably thinking of. Well at first he was but like Jack's father, his sadness soon turned into anger. He blamed his daughter for his wife's death and hated her for it. The girl was seven at the time. He forced his young daughter to tend to household chores, a wife would normally do. She had to sweep and scrub the floors. She had to cook the meals and wash the dishes. But her work wasn't normal work. For instance he didn't bring home much money and the two didn't have much to eat. So the little girl had to make something to eat from practically nothing. And the worst part of it was, she would work so hard every day, cleaning and such and when her father came home from work, or drinking (it depended on the day) he would yell and scream at her for not doing good work. He would even hit her from time to time. She lived in that house until she was twelve.
But then something even worse happened to her. Her father decided she needed to get a job, but he picked the profession for her. One day he brought her to a bar and practically sold her to the owner. The owner was going to sell her to older men and turn the twelve year old into a prostitute. And so she became one, and continued the job until seventeen, where we are now in our story. And since we discussed how Jack was in his job, it's only fair we say Liz's status.
Most men said she was great, a young fresh squeeze to fool around with at night. And she was good at it. Like most people she took to her job very well and did it the best she could. Well if she went home and the bar keeper told her father she hadn't performed well the night before, let's just say things wouldn't turn out well. So the father and daughter lived off of the commission he got from her night's work at the bar.
Thankfully though her father soon died. He had been drinking way too much one night and could not find his way home. He slept outside on a freezing cold night and froze to death. So Liz was now free from her father, but she didn't quit her job. Being a prostitute was the only thing Liz knew how to do, so she stayed working for the bar keeper.
But you're probably wondering what kind of a problem is that? At first glance, being a prostitute doesn't sound like a real problem, besides it being morally wrong. But it is; Liz was slowly killing herself. She was only looked at as a body, not a person. What she was living wasn't a life, it was a terrible routine every night that she was forced into doing and had to continue for lack of something else to do.
And besides Liz was better than that, she had greater potential. But talking about her "greater potential" is getting ahead of ourselves.
So I guess if you wanted to, you could say that in general they had the same problem. Both Jack and Liz had pretty bad upbringings, and were currently in bad positions.