ABSTRACT
The Causes which fill our streets with children who either manifest the keen and sometimes roguish propensity of a precocious trader, the daring and adroitness of the thief, or the loutish indifference of the mere dull vagabond, content if he can only eat and sleep, I consider to be these: 1 . The conduct of parents, masters, and mistresses. 2 . The companionship and associations formed in tender years. 3 . The employment of children by costermongers and others who live by street traffic,
and the training of costermongers’ children to a street life. 4 . Orphanhood, friendlessness, and utter destitution. 5 . Vagrant dispositions and tastes on the part of children, which cause them to be
runaways. […]
Concerning cause 1. […] The brute tyranny of parents, manifested in the wreaking of any annoyances or disappointments they may have endured, in the passionate beating and cursing of their children, for trifling or for no causes, is among the worst symptoms of a depraved nature. This conduct may be the most common among the poor, for among them are fewer conventional restraints; but it exists among and debases other classes. Some parents only exercise this tyranny in their fits of drunkenness, and make that their plea in mitigation; but their dispositions are then only the more undisguisedly developed, and they would be equally unjust or tyrannical when sober, but for some selfish fear which checks them. A boy perhaps endures this course of tyranny some time, and then finding it increase he feels its further endurance intolerable, and runs away. If he have no friends with whom he can hope to find a shelter, the streets only are open to him. He soon meets with comrades, some of whom perhaps had been circumstanced like himself, and, if not strongly disposed to idleness
Source: ‘London Labour and the London Poor’, London, Griffin, Bohn, 1861, vol.1, extracts from pp.468-79.
