London: The Biography

There is another photograph, of seven little boys who have obviously been arranged in a tableau by the photographer; but it is a tableau of want. All of them are barefoot; one child is wearing a battered hat but his trousers are in rags and falling off at the knee. How they managed to live is something of a mystery still; they look careworn, but they are not starving. There is a famous picture of a boy selling Bryant amp; May matches; he holds up a box with an air of solemn defiance, as if to say-Take it or leave it, I shall survive.

In the early part of the century, Prince Herman Pückler-Muskau saw a child of eight driving his own vehicle, in the middle of a whirlpool of carriages, and commented that “such a thing … can only be seen in England, where children are independent at eight and hanged at twelve.” There is indeed the famous description by a traveller in 1826 of a group of twelve-year-olds, sitting in the condemned cells in Newgate, “all under the sentence of death, smoking and playing very merrily together.” In 1816 there were 1,500 inmates of London gaols who were under the age of seventeen. “Some were barely nine or ten,” according to the Chronicles of Newgate. “Children began to steal when they could scarcely crawl. Cases were known of infants of barely six charged in the courts with crimes.” Children formed regular gangs, “each choosing one of their number as captains, and dividing themselves into reliefs to work certain districts, one by day and by night.” Their favourite tricks were those of picking pockets, or shop-lifting, smash and grab where a young thief would “starr” a window pane, and robbing drunkards. In this last occupation, “The girls attacked him, and the boys stripped him of all he had.”

The street children of the nineteenth century were known as “little Arabs,” a title that indicated in jingoistic terms their propensity for savagery. It is perhaps appropriate to note in this context that the recalcitrant children of more affluent families were known as “little radicals,” as if to identify the source of social unrest in the energy of the young. Three different books were published in the 1870s and 1890s, each with the title The Cry of the Children, confirming the prevalence of that anxious note; it could be interpreted as a cry of battle as much as a cry of woe. Tolstoy visited London in 1860, and remarked that “When I see these dirty tattered children, with their bright eyes and angels’ faces, I am filled with apprehension as if I were seeing drowning people. How to save them? Which to save first? That which is drowning is that which is most valuable, the spiritual element in these children.” Charles Booth came across a group of “cockney arabs,” “small rough-looking children”-“I suggested they would be better at home and in bed at this time of night; to which a girl of about eight (and little at that) replied in saucily precocious style, speaking for herself and a companion, “Garn, we’re ahrt wiv ahr blokes; that’s my bloke.” “Yus,” says the other girl, “and that’s mine.” At this there was a general shout of laughter, and then came a plaintive plea. “Give us a penny, will you, Guv’nor?”’

London children were a paying proposition. “No investment,” wrote the author of The Children of the Poor in 1892, “gives a better return today on the capital put out than work among the children of the poor.” Some young children became “errand boys” or the carriers of beer; others donned a red uniform and were employed to clean up the horse manure in the busy streets. They held horses for those who wished to make a purchase; they carried trunks to and from the railway, or parcels for omnibus passengers; they stood at the doors of theatres and public places ready to call a cab, especially when the night “turned out wet”; and they helped porters whose duties had become too onerous, or cab-men who were befuddled with drink. It is possible to envisage a city of children-the number occupied in street-work was estimated between ten and twenty thousand-watching for work and taking it up with eagerness and alacrity when it was offered. They were the true progeny of London.