London: The Biography

Some of the most poignant memorials of children date from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Carvings of charity children, for example, are still to be seen in Holborn and Westminster. There were statuettes of schoolchildren by St. Mary, Rotherhithe, where a “Free School for eight sons of poor seamen” was established in 1613. Two children of Coade stone were placed outside St. Botolph, Bishopsgate, with badges numbered “25” and “31.” Those belonging to St. Bride’s School were three feet six inches in height, which is a token of the average size of the London child. There are children in Hatton Garden and Caxton Street and Vintner’s Place; some of them wear the costume dating back almost three hundred years, with blue coat and yellow stockings (apparently worn to ward off rats), and are a perpetual reminder of an otherwise forgotten aspect of London childhood. They can be associated with all the other stone or wooden representations of children within the city. The “fat boy” in Giltspur Street, the pannies boy in the Bread Market near St. Paul’s, the boys playing a game of marbles above a doorway on Laurence Pountney Hill, the child brandishing a telephone in Temple Place, all are images of the child living within the city but now, as it were, taken out of time. In that sense they embody the eternal nature of childhood itself.

Yet the city of time could still degrade them. A late sixteenth-century writer noted that “manye lytle prettie children, boyes and gyrles, doe wander up and downe in the stretes, loyter in Powles, and lye under hedges and stalles in the nights.” In the spring of 1661 Pepys records that “In several places I asked women whether they would sell me their children; that they denied me all, but said they would give me one to keep for them if I would.” Samuel Curwen, another seventeenth-century diarist, was walking down Holborn when he noticed a crowd of people around a coach filled with children. They were aged between six and seven, “young sinners who were accustomed to go about in the evenings stealing, filching and purloining whatever they could lay their little dirty claws on, and were going to be consigned into the hands of justice.” Most of such children had been abandoned by their masters, or by their parents, to fall upon the mercy of the streets. Benjamin and Grace Collier, as reported in the County Records of the late seventeenth century, “privately made away with their goods and run away, leaving their children destitute.” Sara Rainbow served in an alehouse in Long Alley, Little Moorfields, for nine years “with very much hardship and of late a month’s causeless imprisonment in Bridewell, and other great cruelties, which she could not endure.” In 1676 she ran away, together with her two brothers; one boy sold himself for five shillings to a clipper bound for Barbados, while the other was never seen again.

There are pictures of such children selling, or begging, or stealing, upon the streets, “almost naked and in the last degree miserable, eaten up with Vermin, and in such nasty Rags, that one could not distinguish by their Clothes what Sex they were of.” Contemporary illustrations verify this unhappy condition. One image of a street child shows him wearing the ragged clothing of an adult with a tattered greatcoat and pitifully torn breeches; his hat and shoes are much too large, and by his side he carries a tin bowl to be used both for drinking and for cooking. He seems to be of no age and of every age, the acquisition of cast-off adult clothing serving to emphasise this ambiguous status. These wandering children are as old, and as young, as the city itself.

The records of parish children in the eighteenth century are filled with images which provoke sorrowful contemplation. Foundling children were often named after the part of London where they were taken up; the registers of Covent Garden parish are replete with names such as Peter Piazza, Mary Piazza and Paul Piazza. The phrase for those dropped or abandoned was “children laid in the streets,” which itself is sufficiently evocative. The parish officers were given ten pounds for each child brought into their care, on which occasion there was a feast known as “saddling the spit”; it was assumed “that the child’s life would not be long, and therefore the money might be spent on jollification.” Once more it is the pagan nature of these urban rituals which requires emphasis. A general opinion prevailed “that a parish child’s life is worth no more than eight or nine months purchase,” and it seems likely that their deaths were hastened by unnatural means. A parliamentary report of 1716 revealed that “a great many poor infants and exposed bastard children are inhumanly suffered to die by the barbarity of nurses.” In one Westminster parish, only one child survived out of five hundred “laid in the streets.”