ABSTRACT
British debates around difference and disorder have been dominated by two distinct bodies of writing, the first rooted in the mid-nineteenth century and the second in the late-twentieth. Urban investigators of the mid-to-late nineteenth century, writing during years when imperial power abroad contrasted sharply with urban poverty at home and when fears for national and racial decline helped to stimulate social reform, detailed the habits of the white underclass in ways which projected them as a race apart. In this genre, made most famous by the illustrated articles of London journalist Henry Mayhew and the annotated maps of London reformer Charles Booth but encompassing a wide range of other writers, the white poor of the large cities were variously featured as feckless, degenerate and potentially dangerous. Their children’s future and fate raised particular concerns that did much to shape British responses to juvenile delinquency and child neglect. Texts such as Mary Carpenter’s Reformatory Schools for the Children o f the Perishing and Dangerous Classes, Dorothy Stanley’s London Street Arabs, Arthur Morrison’s A Child o f the Jago, William Booth’s ‘Children of the Lost’ in his In Darkest England - a tiny selection of similar titles - displayed a common concern to tame the wild child, but also a common fascination for its customs and territories.1
