ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how visual arts inform us about the power of what has become an iconic image of street children in the United States – the independent cheerful shoeshine or bootblack boy. While his presence was ubiquitous in the city and in popular imagination along with stories and novels, such as Horatio Alger’s best-seller, Ragged Dick or Street Life in New York with the Boot Blacks, his true nature remained invisible. When studied from the 1870s to the 1940s, a time span of almost a century, this iconic image seems to be frozen in time. By examining paintings, illustrations and photographs, as well as novels, we see how an idealized image of the shoeshine boy persisted despite the reformists’ arguments against the harsh reality of child labour and their effort to deconstruct the rags to riches myth. Through the consistent retelling of the bootblacks’ legend, the image of the shoeshine boy remained unaltered, shackling him to his iconic status of an eternal ghost-like, never aging child, a disruptive spectre.
