Blackguard Children

[4][5][6] In the first decades of the 18th century, London stood out among other European cities for its beauty and maintenance, but it nonetheless had to deal with the utter poverty a huge portion of its inhabitants struggled with.

[7] Many people couldn't even afford a proper accommodation for the night, and would either spend the little they had gained during the day through begging and charity to pay for disreputable lodgings or find shelter in barns, haylofts and stables to avoid sleeping rough.

[10] Living on the streets and the necessity of surviving any way they could brought paupers and vagrants to engage themselves in a wide range of unregulated occupations, from the illegal ones such as prostitution, to temporary employments as chimney or crossing-sweepers, food sellers, shoeblacks or milkmaids.

[11] Many simply sold what they managed to collect on the streets, changed their trade according to different seasons and circumstances, and sometimes took advantage of their professions to obtain charity through their labour, approaching passers-by, begging and pickpocketing.

[15] Though such an eager deposition was probably meant to avoid prosecution, he was eventually brought to trial at the Old Bailey anyway, and acquitted on 15 January 1731,[16] but in the meantime he had managed to expose an organized criminal gang led by Katherine Collins.

[31] These factors helped to increase the already high infant mortality rate: in the third decade of 1700, London seems to have witnessed the christening of roughly 150,000 children, but 110,000 under the age of 5 were buried in that same few years.

[32] There is a whole branch of novels dealing with the reality of orphans and their everyday struggles, but Colonel Jack and Oliver Twist, written in 1722 and between 1837 and 1839 respectively, can be named as the most prominent ones describing the life of theft some children turned to.

Oliver promptly repents entering a life of crime, and is even wrongly brought to trial for it;[34] very similar is the path the orphan Pip follows in Great Expectations, as he is scared by a convict into stealing.

In his preface, Daniel Defoe laments the conditions which bring destitute children to steal by necessity instead of becoming educated and well-principled men, and hopes his readers will find the story instructive.

[40] The very same aim was shared by other charitable foundations, such as the Lambeth Asylum, founded in 1758, which was meant to rescue from the streets, educate and train orphaned girls and penitent prostitutes.