Sidney Attfield was born in 1840 in the rural parish of Albury, Surrey, the son of agricultural labourer John Attfield and his wife Ann, and grew up in a large, struggling family that eventually sent some of its children into the Guildford Union workhouse.

As a teenager Sidney drifted between the workhouse, casual labour and the streets, and at sixteen he broke into a house and stole bread, sugar, a saucepan and a wedding ring, telling the constable he had done it “from hunger,” beginning a long pattern of petty thefts, short prison terms and repeated returns to the workhouse. In 1860 he enlisted in the British Army and served in Ireland, Malta and India, but was discharged after six years as medically unfit with only a small pension, and by the 1870s he was once again in and out of prisons and London workhouses.

By 1881 he was recorded as a single, homeless “vagrant” in the Guildford Union’s casual ward, and after that he disappears from the records entirely, his life illustrating how Victorian poverty and poor law institutions could absorb a man from childhood and still leave no clear trace of his end.