ABSTRACT
The article argues that the strong presence of working-class children in the public spaces of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Vienna had various and very different features. Although the unsupervised presence of children outdoors was principally seen, and often misinterpreted, as morally dangerous, the concerned middle- and upper-class elites implicitly made a distinction between those who spent time on the streets, mainly playing, and the ‘real street children’, who wandered the city and lived outdoors. The paper sheds light particularly on the everyday lives and practices of the latter, pointing to their occasional agency within the suffocating limits of extreme poverty and exploitation.
