insisted such offences of the ‘have nots’ be rigorously pursued. The profane language, gambling and sexual licentiousness of street boys and girls further challenged English morality and stoked fears of a fracturing of the very foundations of English society, built on obedience to God and law. There were concerns that there would be a replica of the dark moment portrayed by Dickens in Barnaby Rudge — the 1780 Gordon riots in London in which the Army killed nearly 300 people protesting on a range of economic, nationalist, social and religious issues — or even of the French Revolution of 1789–1799.
Boy thieves and scavengers were seen to be ‘cradled in iniquity’,3 corrupted from birth and dangerous, or perishing under parental neglect, abandonment or tutoring. Living in what was seen as Godless depravity, running wild on the streets, they were variously known as ‘street urchins’ or ‘street arabs’ and then ‘undesirables’ before a new catch-all term emerged: ‘delinquent’, derived from the Latin for offender.
Depiction of a scene in London’s criminal underworld, as illustrated in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Oliver introduced to the Respectable Old Gentleman, illustration, George Cruikshank, 1837. Image courtesy The Charles Dickens Page website. https://charlesdickenspage.com/illustrations_web/Oliver_Twist/Oliver_Twist_05.jpg
Young children pickpocketing in the streets of England, as illustrated in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Oliver amazed at the Dodger’s Mode of ‘going to work’, illustration, George Cruikshank, 1837. Image courtesy The Charles Dickens Page website. https://charlesdickenspage.com/illustrations_web/Oliver_Twist/Oliver_Twist_06.jpg
Within a few years, tens of thousands of delinquents were pressed into court rooms and the harshness of correction houses or workhouses. Many a boy would, like Oliver Twist, plead ‘Please Sir, I want some more’, but there was never more food, or sympathy. In the British newspapers some reformers and critics lamented a world where adults created or administered the very environment that forced children into crime, and then exacerbated the problem through legal and judicial zealotry. But the moneyed, pious and powerful reflected an Old Testament view that some, including children, are naturally evil and wicked. Insisting that such depraved, deviant and dangerous street urchins had to be put onto the ‘right path’ and a higher state of Godly grace, and to preserve and promote the overall ‘good’ the state had to control and punish any dangerous forces and ‘win’ the war.
In this climate of impoverishment, fear and loathing, children comprised nearly half the population, but had no laws protecting their childhood. There was nothing to ensure they lived in a proper home or attended school, or were protected from the perils of drinking, gambling or sex. Nothing to stop boys as young as six being used in dangerous work of climbing inside chimneys and scrapping in dirty and dangerous textile mills and factories. They were a generation whose childhood was bereft of family, love, shelter, food, clothing, education and morality, a generation not living as children in heart and mind but not yet adults. Dickens himself had narrowly avoided the same reality: just two days after he turned twelve the author’s father was sent to Marshalsea Prison over a debt to a baker. While his mother and younger siblings joined their father in gaol for three months before the debt was paid off, Charles was despatched to Warren’s Blacking Factory at Hungerford Stairs on the Thames to paste labels onto blacking pots for ten hours a day, six days a week, for a shilling a day. The Dickens family was relatively fortunate. Other fathers were jailed for petty offences — one was taken from his family for stealing nails to build his son a rabbit hutch — or fined when they clearly had not a penny to their name, and the absence of any household income, legitimate or otherwise, forced wives and children to steal or starve on minimal parish aid.
From 1744, a Vagrancy Act had declared street boys ‘rogues’ and ‘vagabonds’ and sentenced them to houses of correction for up to two years, often with a whipping to drive home the message, while others over twelve were effectively dragooned into ‘his Majesty’s Service, either by sea or land’. But as the criminal tide of ‘alien’ boys rose, so did the arsenal of severe laws and punishment. The number of crimes for which a person risked a walk to the gallows rose to more than 220 by the early 1800s, not just for murder, treason, rape and counterfeiting, but also for pickpocketing, shoplifting, poaching and burglary — the common purview of children. There was ‘probably no other country in the world in which so many and so great a variety of human actions are punishable with the loss of life as in England’.4
The 1824 Vagrancy Act made it criminal for boys to even engage in their favourite street pastimes of playing and betting on skittles, coin-tossing, marbles or cards. Hungry boys stealing someone’s vegetables or fruit were deemed criminal three years later under a Malicious Trespass Act — one conservative MP opining that country gentlemen had ‘suffered much by the deprivation of our turnips’ by young thieves, so ‘we have at length determined to put an end to this practice and my good friend the Minister has been so obliging as to make it death’.5
In 1829, Sir Robert Peel introduced a full-time professional police force for greater London and new constables enthusiastically pursued the ‘enemy’, an estimated 50,000 poor and criminal within 5 miles (8 km) of St Paul’s Cathedral.6 New laws allowed police to apprehend, without warrant, anyone they thought to be ‘loose, idle and disorderly…or whom he shall have just cause to suspect of any evil designs’, or found between sunset and 8am sleeping or loitering outdoors and unable to give ‘a satisfactory account of themselves’.7 A new, tougher Poor Law Act in 1834 disgusted Dickens, and his coverage of it for the Morning Chronicle partly inspired Oliver Twist. He was outraged that workhouses denied relief for many seeking shelter and food due to poverty, illness, mental or physical disability, or the plight of babies, children, and the aged. The core concern of authority was only whether they were ‘deserving’ or ‘undeserving’ poor: those deemed to be at the door from ‘idle, disorderly or thriftless habits, have reduced themselves to merited indigence and disgrace’, and would find life inside ‘harsh, monotonous and characterised by the intent of improving the inmate’s moral character’. Such ‘improvement’ could come through halving of an already miserable diet, time in the ‘black hole’, or removal to a ‘pauper farm’ where contractors warehoused the poor even more cheaply.8
Some could see the demon of law-making could have unintended consequences, especially when, as Newgate prison schoolmaster Thomas Wontner observed, ‘any legal statutes are constructed with no other view than to protect the rich from punishment…protecting the rich…against the poor’.9 Reforming reporters like Dickens, George Reynolds, Henry Mayhew and John Binny were appalled that boys as young as five and six were being clad in prison dress and branded felons for the ‘heinous’ offences of throwing stones, knocking on doors and blocking a street passage, the same crimes that, ‘if equally visited, would consign almost every child in the kingdom to a jail’.10
Convicts well understood the truth spoken by Dickens:
There are many pleasant fictions of the law in constant operation, but there is not one so pleasant or practically humorous as that which supposes every man to be of equal value in its impartial eye, and the benefits of all laws to be equally attainable by all men, without the smallest reference to the furniture of their pockets.11
Many convicts had spent time at Newgate prison, as Dickens had as a visitor, where its schoolmaster could see that neither the law, nor the world, was any friend of the juvenile with ‘no parent, or those of such habits and temper as would have rendered orphan-ship a blessing, and that in all probability, most of them…never had a kind or affectionate sentiment imparted to or drawn out of them, by any human being they could look
