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.”
If they lived, the poor children were lodged in the parish workhouses. These were essentially primitive factories where, from seven in the morning until six in the evening, the little inmates were set to work spinning wool or flax and knitting stockings; an hour a day was spent upon the rudiments of learning, and another hour for “dinner and play.” These workhouses were generally filthy and overcrowded places. That in the parish of St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, for example, was “obliged to put thirty nine children into three beds.” It combined the aspects of both factory and prison, thus confirming its identity as a peculiarly urban institution; many of the children infected one another with “disorders” and contagious diseases, and were then despatched to hospitals. The quartet of London confinement—workhouse, factory, prison and hospital—is complete.
Children were confined precisely because, in their natural and liberated state, they were considered to be wild. They were still “half-naked or in tattered rags, cursing and swearing at one another … rolling in the dirt and kennels, or pilfering on the wharfs and keys.” These were the “ill natured cattal” with which “our prisons are daily filled and under the weight of which Tyburn does so often groan.” Very few social observers chose to discuss whether the conditions of London itself brutalised or dehumanised these small children; the reality was too overwhelming, and too palpable, to elicit any cogent analysis beyond the imagery of bestiality and savagery. Once the vagrant children had been trained to labour in the parish workhouse, for example, they are “as much distinguished from what they were before as is a tamed from a wild beast.” But that imagery can be applied elsewhere in the commercial jungle of London. “The master may be a tiger in cruelty, he may beat, abuse, strip naked, starve or do what he will to the poor innocent lad, few people take much notice, and the officers who put him out the least of anybody.” The reference here is to the “parish child” being sold off as an apprentice; although that condition has been immortalised in Oliver Twist in 1837, the cruelties and hardships associated with this trade in children have a particular eighteenth-century emphasis.
Consider the plight of chimney-sweeps, apprentices known as “climbing boys.” They were usually attached to their masters at the age of seven or eight, although it was also common for drunken or impoverished parents to sell children as young as four years old for twenty or thirty shillings. Small size was important, because the flues of London houses were characteristically narrow and twisted so that they became easily choked with soot or otherwise constricted. The young climbing boy was prodded or pushed into these tiny spaces; fearful or recalcitrant children were pricked with pins or scorched with fire, to make them climb more readily. Some died of suffocation, while many suffered a more lingering death from cancer of the scrotum known as “sooty warts.” Others grew deformed. A social reformer described a typical climbing boy at the close of his short career. “He is now twelve years of age, a cripple on crutches, hardly three feet seven inches in stature … His hair felt like a hog’s bristle, and his head like a warm cinder … He repeats the Lord’s prayer.” These children, blackened by the soot and refuse of the city, were rarely, if ever, washed. They were coated in London’s colours, an express symbol of the most abject condition to which it could reduce its young. A familiar sight, they wandered about, shouting out in their piping voices “to sweep for the soot, oh!” It was known as “calling the streets.”
In the harsh condition of London, however, they were rarely the objects of compassion. Instead, they were condemned as thieves, part-
time beggars and “the greatest nursery for Tyburn of any trade in England.” Yet in one of those astonishing displays of theatrical ritual, of which the city was always capable, once a year they were allowed to celebrate. On the first of May, they were painted white with meal and hair-powder and as “lilly-whites,” to use the contemporaneous expression, they flocked through the streets where they called “weep weep.” They also banged their brushes and climbing tools as they paraded through the city. In this reversal we recognise both the hardness and gaiety of London: they had very little to celebrate in their unhappy lives, yet they were allowed to play, and become children again, for one day of the year.
But there are other connotations here, which reach deep into the mystery of childhood in the city. The climbing boys were characteristically dressed in foil, gold leaf and ribbons just as were the children in the pageants of the medieval city; in that sense they came to represent once more holiness and innocence, in however vulgarised a fashion. Yet, banging the instruments of their trade along the thoroughfare, they also become lords of misrule for the day; thus their wildness is being emphasised, itself a threat to the city unless it were formalised and disciplined within ritual patterns. All these elements converge—playfulness, innocence, savagery—to create the child in the city.
Peter Earle, in A City Full of People, has noted that early eighteenth-century London “offered many enticements” for young people. In particular the city offered “the lure of bad company, gambling, drink, idleness, petty theft and ‘lewd women.’” So London children were, from the beginning, at a disadvantage. In the spirit-shops lurked “children, who drink with so much enjoyment that they find it difficult to walk on going away.” In the engravings of Hogarth, too, children are often characterised as malevolent or mischievous tokens of the city; their faces are puckered up in misery or derision, and they tend to mock or imitate the conduct and appearance of their elders. In the fourth plate of A Rake’s Progress a young boy can be seen sitting in the gutter; he is smoking a small pipe, and reading with attention a newspaper entitled The Farthing Post. The sign of White’s gambling house can be seen in the distance, down St. James’s Street, and in the foreground five other children are engaged with dice and cards. One boy is a bootblack who has literally lost his shirt; another is a seller of spirits, while a third is a newspaper vendor known as a “Mercury.” Of nineteenth-century street-boys, too, it was noticed that “gambling was a passion with them, indulged in without let or hindrance.” In the early decades of the twentieth century, also, quite young children were still being arrested for street-gambling in games such as “Buttons.” So for at least two centuries London children have been associated with, or identified by, gambling. And why should they not be gamblers, faced with the general uncertainty of life in the city? Another boy, away from the foreground in the Hogarth engraving, is stealing a handkerchief from the rake himself. Here in miniature is the image of the eighteenth-century London child, busily engaged in all the adult life and activity of the streets. Their features are also stamped with greed and acquisitiveness, like tutelary spirits of place. In the series of engravings, “Morning,” “Noon,” “Evening” and “Night,” children play a significant role. Some of them wear exactly the same clothes as their elders, so that they have all the appearance of dwarf-like or deformed citizens; others are ragged street urchins, fighting for food in the gutter or huddled together for warmth beneath wooden street stalls.
The ragged children of the streets have a vivid emblematic quality, therefore, but in the photographs of nineteenth-century London they become more recognisable and more sorrowful. These are no longer characters or caricatures, but somehow familiar human faces, soft or plaintive, sorrowful or bewildered. It has been suggested that the philanthropic instinct had changed by the end of the eighteenth century, towards a more benign dispensation, but the actual conditions of London had not altered. “The amount of crime, starvation and nakedness or misery of every sort in the metropolis,” Dickens told a journalist in the mid-nineteenth century, “surpasses all understanding.” It surpassed understanding because that starvation and misery affected the very youngest and most vulnerable. In 1839 almost half the funerals in London were of children under the age of ten, and it was a pretty conceit of early photographers to pose small children among the tombstones of the city graveyards; it represents the brutality of Victorian naïveté.
In another genre of photograph three little girls sit in the street, their feet in the gutter and their bodies upon the flat stone pavement; one girl looks round with surprise at the camera, but the most striking impression is of their dark and faded clothes. It is as if they were mimicking the dark and cracked stone all around them, so that they might become almost invisible. It is often forgotten how drab and dirty the Victorian capital was; the thoroughfares were always filled with litter, and there was a general air of grime and grease. As Dickens wrote: “How many, who, amidst this compound of sickening smells, these heaps of filth, these tumbling houses, with all their vile contents, animate and inanimate, slimily overflowing into the black road, would believe that they breathe this air?”
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 & 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.
Others became street-sellers, and were recognisable figures with nicknames such as the Cocksparrow or the Early Bird. They were envied by “unemployed little ones, who look upon having the charge of a basket of fruit, to be carried in any direction, as a species of independence.” This is an interesting vision which these children possessed; to have even the smallest means of earning a living allowed you to become master or mistress of the streets, to wander as you will. Small boys and girls, known as “anybody’s children,” were hired by costermongers or small tradesmen to sell stock upon commission. Each child would undertake to bring back an amount for the wares he or she had been given, and could keep as “bunse” anything earned beyond that figure. At first light the children would assemble in the various street-markets. A boy would run up to the barrows of costermongers with the plea, “D’you want me, Jack?” or “Want a boy, Bill?” They waited all day to “see if they’re wanted” and, if they were fortunate, became the favourites of certain costermongers. A boy was often employed at “crying” the goods which he and his master were pushing in a barrow. This might appear to be a charming custom, except that “we find the natural tone completely annihilated at a very early age, and a harsh, hoarse, guttural, disagreeable mode of speaking acquired.” Here the physical effects of living in the city are clearly delineated; London wearied even the voices of the young, and turned high notes into harsh ones.
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