his own undoing, and they asked themselves, remembering that the " greater the sinner, the greater the saint," whether it was not time that they did something to give a helping hand to the neglected of the gutter, to the child criminal and the boy thief, who, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, England had passed over for the unconverted of the heathen, for the remote Chinese and the elusive Esquimaux. From the moment that Dickens published Oliver Twist, the reaction against this brutality and neglect set in. The handful of devoted workers, who, under Lord Shaftesbury and Leone Levi had been pleading for the street arabs — and pleading largely in vain — suddenly found themselves caught up and borne forward by a great flood of sympathy and support that the pictures of Fagin's school for boy-thieves had evoked among all classes. To realize even faintly, the immense service that Dickens rendered our race, in thus liberating their frozen sympathies and revivifying their lost confidence in childhood, we have but to turn to the fearful records of juvenile crime and the more fearful records of juvenile punishment, in which his time abounds. " I know of one infant," said Dickens himself, " six years old, who has been twice as many times in the hands of the police as years have passed over him." This alas! was no unusual case. A little fellow eight years of age was tried in August, 1845, at Clerkenwell for stealing boxes. He was sentenced to a month and a whipping. In January, 1846, he was again tried for robbing a till. After that he was twice summarily convicted and then again tried at the Central Criminal Court later in the same year — to be sentenced to seven years' transportation when only nine years of age! This sentence was commuted. " But," says Mr. Montague, in his Sixty Years of Waifdom, " in 1852, when he was only thirteen years of age, and but four feet, two inches high, he was a hardened jailbird, with whom the law was powerless to deal."
Worse even than this is the fact that in England children were regularly and systematically trained in the arts of theft. According to Mr. Montague, " a little fellow whose father and mother were dead, who was alone and uncared for, told his teacher one Sunday that he and twenty more boys were kept by a man and a woman in Wentworth Street, Whitechapel, and taught to pick pockets. The training took six months. Daily the woman dressed herself, put a bell in her pocket, also a purse containing 6d.; any of the pupils who could take the purse from her pocket without causing the bell to tinkle got the 6d., as a reward for his dexterity. When proficient, the boys were sent out to plunder for the pair."
The confession of another thief's tutor was as follows: —
" He had been twenty years living a criminal life, and had been twenty times in prison. He resided in a low lodging-house where he carried on his craft of training young lads to steal. The best hands among them were sent into the streets, and they brought home the plunder on which the criminal school lived. He was too well known to the police to dare to go out himself. ' But,' said he, ' I never can keep the young 'uns long, for as soon as I have made them clever at their profession, if they are not taken by the police, they leave me and start for themselves; so I am obliged to look out for new hands.' Being asked how many lads he supposed he had trained to be thieves during the twenty years, he replied that he had kept no account, and could not exactly tell, but of this he was sure, that it was not less than five hundred.'"
It is estimated that 1500 children, infants for the most part, passed through the cruel and soul-destroying horrors of imprisonment during one year, children whom there were none to befriend on their release, who almost certainly went to swell the permanent prison population. Dr. Guthrie, in his Pleas for Ragged Schools, paints a fearful picture of the juvenile delinquents who thus found their way to prison.
" No man cared for their souls, or commiserated their condition. Banishing what it did not hang, the country shipped off thousands to rot and fester in our colonies, till these, rising as one man, declared that they would have no more of our refuse and waste; that, if we would grow criminals, we should keep them. Many seemed born for the gallows, and coolly calculated on being hanged, as sailors do on being drowned, or soldiers, in time of war, on being shot. I happened once to find them at their rehearsals. They had a ragged urchin suspended by a rope thrown over the door-lintel of an old house. The noose was dexterously placed under his arm-pits; but the way he hung his head and mimicked the dying spasms, drew up his legs, and kicked, was perfect. So thought his companions. The young savages danced round him in wildest glee, and greeted each kick with roars of laughter. They were familiar with hanging; not much wonder, since Newgate, for instance, used to show ten or a dozen old ruffians with boys, strung up like vermin, and slowly turning round in the morning air, with their white caps — waiting to be cut down. Horrible sight! "
" Let me say," said Dickens, in one of his articles in the Daily News, " that I know the prisons of London well; that I have visited the largest of them more times than I could count; and that the children in them are enough to break the heart and hope of any man. I have never taken a foreigner or a stranger of any kind to one of these establishments, but I have seen him so moved at the sight of the child offenders, and so affected by the contemplation of their utter renouncement and desolation outside the prison walls, that he has been as little able to disguise his emotion, as if some great grief had suddenly burst upon him. Mr. Chesterton, and Lieutenant Tracey (than whom more intelligent and humane Governors of Prisons it would be hard, if not impossible, to find) know perfectly well that these children pass and repass through the prisons all their lives; that they are never taught; that the first distinctions between right and wrong are, from their cradles, perfectly confounded and perverted in their minds; that they come of untaught parents, and will give birth to another untaught generation; that in exact proportion to their natural abilities, is the extent and scope of their depravity; and that there is no escape or chance for them in any ordinary revolution of human affairs. Happily, there are schools in these prisons now. If any readers doubt how ignorant the children are, let them visit these schools and see them at their tasks, and hear how much they knew when they were sent there. If they would know the produce of this seed, let them see a class of men and boys together, at their books (as I have seen them in the House of Correction for this County of Middlesex), and mark how painfully the full-grown felons toil at the very shape and form of letters; their ignorance being so confirmed and solid.
" The contrast of this labour in the men, with the less blunted quickness of the boys; the latent shame and , sense of degradation struggling through their dull attempts at infant lessons; and the universal eagerness to learn, impress me, in this passing retrospect, more painfully than I can tell."
I This, then, was the position in which the children of the poor stood in relation to the law, when Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, following fast on the unprecedented success of Pickwick, stirred the nation to its depths and aroused a fervour and compassion for the young such as no one had suspected was to be found in all England. The first practical effect of the pictures of child-life which they contained, was to place upon the Statute Book an epoch-making piece of legislation, the first of a number of Acts that have revolutionized the position of the child in regard to the State, which was called the Reformatory School Act of 1854. Its effect was instantaneous. It broke up the schools of crime that had flourished under men like Fagin and for the first time, in the history of England, it allowed a magistrate to send a boy guilty of some childish offence, not to prison permanently, but to an industrial school where he got valuable training, healthy discipline and. kindly supervision. To-day, when our Chairmen of Quarter Sessions wax enthusiastic over the diminution of juvenile crime, when the records show the success that has attended the passing of the First Offenders' Act, when on all sides the feeling is growing that the child must be kept free from contamination, no matter what its class, or how poor its parents, let it be remembered that the first man to rescue children from the jail was the great novelist of whom we write, and who for this reason has earned surely the gratitude of every humanitarian to-day.
Dickens's own personal efforts in the great revival centred mainly round the Ragged School Union, to whose funds he induced the Baroness Burdett Coutts to subscribe.
He described the work of the schools in an article of irresistible force entitled " A Sleep to Startle us," which appeared in Household Words during 1852:
" I found my
