Crossing sweeper

It was the focus of fairly intense study and commentary, and attitudes toward the presence of crossing sweepers on city streets varied greatly among urban residents, ranging from appreciation for their work to feelings that they were a public nuisance.

Crossing sweepers also found their way into 19th-century fiction and artwork, including a novel by Charles Dickens and a popular painting by William Powell Frith.

[9] In mid-19th-century New York City, crossing-sweeping was common among young girls, who had even fewer options for earning an income than did lower-class boys (with occasional prostitution being a notable exception).

"[7] Rowe did not see a problem with "alms-giving" to elderly or disabled crossing sweepers, but overall wanted to see their ranks "thinned considerably – viz., by the elimination of the adults who are able, and the young who might be trained to do something better..."[7] A writer in an 1858 issue of Building News expressed a similarly negative sentiment when referring to "those juvenile highwayman who, broom in hand, take possessions of our crossings and level black mail upon the public in general, and timid females in particular.

"[13] In 1882 a self-described "Lady Pedestrian" wrote the editors of The New York Times lamenting recent prohibitions on street sweepers: A few years ago there were many children and men who turned out immediately after a snow-fall, and were daily to be met during the thaw, brushing the crossings as clean as they could.

"[15] The occupation of crossing sweeper received perhaps its most famous literary treatment in Charles Dickens' novel Bleak House with the character of Jo, a homeless boy who "fights it out at his crossing among the mud and wheels, the horses, whips, and umbrellas, and gets but a scanty sum..."[16] Jo has been characterized as "one of the most significant figures" in the novel and as a way for Dickens to address juvenile vagrancy, which was seen as a serious social problem at the time.

[18]One scholar characterized Jo as being "depicted as almost completely bereft of agency, a child swept along by circumstances, made merely to 'move on,'" a member of "a nation that fails to recognize him as one of its citizens.

"[19] Jo was a popular character among readers of the novel which no doubt in part led to the production of a stage adaptation entitled Bleak House; or Poor 'Jo.

[20] While not disagreeing with that assessment, Edwin M. Eigner and Joseph I. Fradin have argued that an earlier, literary precedent comes from Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1846 novel Lucretia, which also featured a young male crossing sweeper, this one named Beck.

Eigner and Fradin suggest that both Jo and Beck are intensely symbolic figures for the two novelists, "the representative orphan of an entire society.