The Tone of the Times

I noticed a lot of similarities between Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "The Cry of the Children" and other publications of the Victorian era, particularly in their tone and the overall mood they create. For instance, Charles Dickens's "A Walk in the Workhouse," an essay written during the Victorian era, was very similar to Browning's poem in more ways than one. Both have what we would today consider an over the top depressing mood. The children in both poems want to die, which just seems like they're laying it on thick. In "The Cry of the Children," the fourth stanza shows a small child saying "It is good when it happens...That we die before our time," and in "A Walk in the Workhouse" you've got a nearly identical scene where the narrator comments about how a "morsel of burnt child, lying in another room...thought it best, perhaps, all things considered, that he should die." In this day and age, it's hard to even imagine children choosing death over life. The concept seems to repulse us. But I wonder if that's a consequence of the times or if it's just because we live in an affluent country? A hundred years from now, I wonder what people will think about what we consider "modern" and "postmodern" literature? Will they think it's just as over the top as the Victorian era literature we're reading now?