Street-rats and gutter-snipes: child pickpockets and street culture in New York city, 1850-1900.

For over half a century, the street child was an inescapable fixture of the nineteenth-century industrial city. Lacking formal education, adult supervision, and sometimes even a home, such youths were derided as "rats," "gamins," "Arabs," "urchins" and "gutter-snipes." "Street-rats," concluded one Children's Aid Society (CAS) report, "gnawed away at the foundations of society undisturbed." In a country which identified geographic mobility and physical movement as freedom, the street kid represented the logical nightmare--the replacement of community, familial and even spiritual bonds with the rootless individualism of the nomad. "[T]hose who have once adopted the semi-savage and wandering mode of life in early youth seldom abandon it," wrote Harper's Weekly in 1868. Rather, they "continue to the end of their existence Arabs by second nature." (1)

Even those who rejected such pejorative imagery and moralistic judgements recognized this new urban reality. In 1851, the wealthy attorney and diarist George Templeton Strong complained about "the hordes of ... children who live in the streets and by them." Many labored at casual, unskilled "street-jobs"--blackening boots, sweeping side-walks, hauling bags and other goods, scavenging, or selling newspapers. They lived, slept and ate in streets, alleyways and hallways. "The bad times," admitted detective John Warren referring to the depression of the 1870s, "has driven a small army [of children] into our streets." By 1893, the reformer Helen Campbell concluded that the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed little change in the conditions of Gotham's street children. (2)

The first historical studies of urban children and street life in the U.S. focused on interventionist programs of reformers, "the invention of juvenile delinquency," and the emergence of new systems of penology. (3) Only recently have historians recognized the distinctiveness and complexity of urban youth subcultures. Historians like Christine Stansell have documented antebellum New York's public reaction to street children and their changing uses of public thoroughfares. Between 1846 and 1860 the urban bourgeoisie transformed the "urchin" into an image of fearful pathology, a danger to public health, a threat to domestic, family life. By contrast, David Nasaw has argued that city streets in the first decades of the twentieth century offered a separate world for children with its own distinct milieu. The street proved more formative than either educational or municipal institutions, ultimately compelling youths to place their primary loyalty and identity with their peers. (4)

Most historians of American childhood, however, have largely ignored the "criminal" aspects of this subculture, specifically the fluid movement between the licit and illicit street trades. As a child, for example, George Appo admitted that he and fellow newsboy George Dolan pickpocketed with impunity and without interruption for two years before his first apprehension. Similarly, pickpocket Larry Caulfield bragged that from ages 13 to 15, "I made a great deal of money at picking pockets, without getting into difficulties with the police." Sophie Lyons testified that when her father went to fight in the Civil War, her stepmother taught her how to steal. "All during my early childhood I did little but steal, and was never sent to school." Her frequent arrests mattered little, "as my stepmother knew how to bring influence to bear in my favor." Lyons claimed that she pickpocketed on a daily basis, frequently returning home with sums of money in excess of $100. "I did not know it was wrong to steal; nobody ever taught me that." (5)

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The world of the street child and juvenile pickpocket was organized, in part, around an unwritten, oral culture. Such youths left few, if any, printed documents. Inconsistent arrest records, exaggerated eyewitness accounts, and little participant testimony thus present difficult interpretive problems for historians interested in discerning the complexities of child street life. Furthermore, juvenile pickpocketing was, in certain respects, an invisible crime. Few pedestrians ever witnessed such activities; young pickpockets claimed working for years at a time before any apprehension. The CAS and others concurred, believing that child pickpockets were so "quick and cunning" that they usually avoided detection, much less arrest. In 1875, the Times declared newsboy "pocket-pickers" so adroit "that the real offender is scarcely ever captured, and the accomplice, if arrested is generally acquitted for lack of proof." (6)

Consequently, most historians have paid only cursory attention to child pickpockets and their informal subcultures. Some conclude that by the 1840s pickpockets and shoplifters alike tended to be adults and professional thieves. Juvenile crime focused primarily on merchants or less organized forms of thievery in semipublic areas such as dumps, junkyards, and railroad yards. Even Christine Stansell, in her otherwise exemplary study of this underworld milieu, equivocates. "While robbing people--pickpocketing and 'baggage smashing'--seems to have been limited to professional child thieves (properly trained by adult sponsors), appropriating random objects was another matter." (7)

More importantly, the youthful pickpocket activity of Appo, Caulfield, Lyons and undoubtedly others raises difficult and complicated questions about the impact and importance of this youth subculture. Were children involved in illicit street activity trained by adults? Or was such activity the outgrowth of a youth culture organized on city streets by other youths? How did this form of theft, in both its actual and symbolic effects, reflect new social divisions emerging within the industrial metropolis? In what ways, if any, did child pickpockets represent an alternative or oppositional subculture? (8)

The precise number of New York's street children was always subject to debate, but few doubted it was substantial. By the 1850s, Police Chief George Matsell and the Rev. Samuel Halliday separately estimated that 5,000 to 10,000 boys lived in New York's streets. Another minister, while criticizing exaggerated figures of 50,000, nonetheless admitted the number was large, between 10,000 and 30,000. In 1870, the CAS treated over 24,000 different children, including nearly 6,000 orphans and 15,000 homeless youths. In 1876 alone, city police "recovered" 5,593 "stray" children found wandering the streets (roughly 15 per day), 97 percent of whom were returned to their parents. One report in 1886 claimed 12,000 homeless youths could be found nightly "wandering in the street." (9)

The Connecticut Yankee, Protestant minister and social reformer Charles Loring Brace epitomized the contradictory views on street children. On one hand, Brace admired their autonomy, describing them as "sharp, ready, lighthearted, quick to understand and quick to act, generous and impulsive, and with an air of being well used 'to steer their own canoe' through whatever rapids and whirlpools." Elsewhere, he invoked horrors of high crime. Street children were the "dangerous class," the element most threatening the property, morals and political life of civil society. (10) In effect, Brace articulated the paradoxical stereotypes of the street child: a cute, fastidious urchin with nascent entrepreneurial values and pragmatic wits, and a corrupted, irredeemable devil full of evil motives and selfish desires, the dangerous class writ small.

Observers noted that certain street children--notably newsboys--had a distinct subculture. Newsboys, wrote one, "have their rules." Every day, young males showed up outside the offices of specific newspapers. Passers-by recounted how they heard them "bargain and swap and giggle and sell." One observer claimed that newsboys were informally divided into two classes--"speculators" and "working bees." The former were older, entrepreneurial youths, who took large quantities of papers from editors and then hired younger boys. Working bees were "the children of poor parents, forced into their occupation by privation and suffering." Once they received their newspapers, they scattered throughout lower Manhattan, many going to the ferry wharves and entrances to the principal hotels. Some specific spots--even particular boats in the case of ferries--were "considered the private property of particular boys." Any intrusion by a competitor was fiercely resented. "Let a strange boy make his appearance on any of these consecrated grounds," noted one observer, "and he fares worse than a wounded porpoise in the midst of a school." (11)

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These street children reflected one grim reality of the new industrial metropolis, or as the popular writer George Foster put it, "[t]he Newsboy is a result of the modern civilization." After 1840, apprentices virtually disappeared from artisan workshops. Factories and sweatshops rapidly replaced craft households and artisanal workplaces. At the very moment that the close supervision of adult craftsmen declined, New York experienced an unprecedented flood of European immigrants into the city. Between 1840 and 1855, 68 percent of all United States immigrants passed through Gotham. By 1860, half the city was foreign-born. Increasingly, certain parts of the working class, especially those trapped in the casual labor market, were pushed into street trades and the informal, underground economy. Newspaper editor Horace Greeley estimated that two-thirds of antebellum New Yorkers lived on one dollar per week. New York was, in the words of historian Edward Spann, "a sparkling gem set in a pile of garbage." (12)

One boy's predicament epitomized the impact of this economic transformation. Writing to Mayor William Wickham in 1875, Henry Barton begged: "I am seventeen years of age, have neither farther [sic], mother, sisters, brothers, home, or friends. I have been working at printing, but my work has give out [sic] and I have been all over looking for work but in vain and I ask your honor to please get me work at anything that will pay my board as I am in debt for it now. I pray your honor do not throw this aside without a thought but send an answer to a poor boy's letter." (13) The combination of declining apprenticeships, the increasing proletarianization of industrial occupations, and poorly enforced school attendance provided fertile conditions for street children to engage in theft. The more astute and adventurous became pickpockets. Larry Caulfield, for example, not only believed that most of his pilfering colleagues were young teenage males, but that such youths enjoyed distinct advantages over older males. "[A] boy can get next to a woman in a car or on the street [for the purpose of pocketpicking] more easily than a man can," he reminisced. "He is not so apt to arouse her suspicions." Appearances were important, insisted Caulfield. "[I]f he is a handsome, innocent-looking boy, and clever, he can go far in this line of graft." (14)

Others charged that certain kinds of street work evolved into pickpocketing. "From these [child vagabonds] come the pickpockets, petty thieves, small burglars, 'cotton-baggers,' copper-stealers, young prostitutes, peddlers, streetsweepers, and boot-blacks that swarm in various parts of the city," claimed the CAS in 1869. Two decades later, Helen Campbell concurred: the newsboys' "views of life have come from association with 'flash-men' of every order, with pugilists, pickpockets, cockfighters, and all the habitues of pot-houses or bucketshops." (15) Indeed, the period from 1866 to 1887 might be described as the "age of larceny." During those two decades, larceny comprised between one-third and one-half of all crimes in New York State. In the words of one pickpocket, the decades following the Civil War were "the halcyon days for us." (16)

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The "newspaper dodge" epitomized how selling newspapers and picking pockets often overlapped. Newsboy pickpockets routinely waved a newspaper in the face of a potential customer while reaching into the victim's pocket. Larry Caulfield described how he boarded streetcars, approached male passengers, and shoved a newspaper in their face, yelling "News, boss?" The diversion gave him enough time to pick their watch and chain. Caulfield bragged: "If you will stand for a newspaper under your chin I can get even your socks. (17)

The rise of child pickpocketing was rooted in the changing social ecology of the city. For most children, the street was a workplace, a social center, a place of amusement. At a time when parks (excepting small squares) were nonexistent and playgrounds almost half a century away, streets served multiple functions in a child's life. By the 1860s, parts of Park Row and the Bowery--not to mention numerous post offices, hotels, elevated railroad stations, and ferries--were filled with youthful panhandlers. In the vicinity of the Western Union Building, child pickpockets ranging from 10 to 16 in age preyed on messengers, customers, and even company executives. The most congested pathways of metropolitan commerce became the workplaces of child pickpockets. Appropriately, lower Broadway was soon identified as "pickpockets' paradise." (18)

Arrest records confirmed popular charges that petty larceny was "a boy's crime." One grand jury reported in 1854 that 80 percent of felony indictments and 50 percent of petty offenses in New York were committed by minors under 21 years of age. Between 1859 and 1876, the number of pickpockets brought to trial by the district attorney nearly quintupled, increasing from 52 to 242. Although indictments are an imperfect measure of the amount of pickpocketing--most were simply never arrested--they provide one of the few windows into this hidden, secretive activity. In a sampling of seven selected years between 1859 and 1876, the New York district attorney indicted at least 166 juveniles (17 years-old or younger) for pickpocketing. The overwhelming majority were between the ages of 14 and 17 (84 percent), native-born (82 percent), and male (95 percent). In fact, over half of all males arrested in the seven sampled years (56 percent) were 15 to 24 years of age. (19) Most of these larcenies occurred in the street (79 percent), and only a small percentage (19 percent) were physically aggressive assaults where the perpetrator violently snatched an object and ran away. (20)

These arrested youths diverged from popular stereotypes in important ways. Unlike Larry Caulfield, a self-described "moll buzzer" who pickpocketed women, child pickpockets did not prey on the most vulnerable pedestrians; only one out of five victims, for example, was female. The most common purloined object--in two-thirds of all cases--was money. The median value of stolen goods was $10.30. While this seems like very little money, regular working men averaged only $5 to $10 per week. Newsboys were lucky to make a dollar. (21)

The term "child pickpocket," in some respects, was an oxymoron, as such arrested youths rarely considered themselves children. Although they ranged in age from 10 to 17, the vast majority of these young pickpockets identified themselves as adult wage earners, not children. A mere six percent of those indicted affirmed they were students, only one of whom exceeded 14 years of age. In fact, a greater number (7 percent) claimed to be "unemployed" rather than in school.

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Their vocational opportunities, however, were neither stable nor lucrative. Most occupied positions of part-time employment or worked in downwardly-mobile crafts. Newsboys and bootblacks accounted for 27 percent of all arrested. Those in service jobs such as clerks, errand boys, messengers and telegraph operators represented another eight percent. A mere four percent labored in factories. The remainder were scattered among a variety of occupations. Particularly striking was the breakdown of the craft system: only two boys (a cooper and a tailor) claimed they were apprentices. (22)

Most of these youths had experienced a swift and sometimes brutal introduction into the market. "Strictly speaking, they have neither childhood nor boyhood," lamented Junius Browne. "They pass from neglected infancy, almost by a bound, to an immature and unnatural manhood, compelled by a sense of self-protection to a rugged and semi-savage independence." Formal education had even less impact because most never darkened the door of a school. Indeed, throughout the nineteenth century, fewer than half of New York's children regularly attended school. Some, like pickpocket George Appo, never spent a single day in a classroom. In 1860, the average daily attendance was only 58,000 (out of 153,000 registered school-age children in public and private schools). In 1870, the figure rose to 103,679 out of 270,000. On average, males left school at age 14. Passage of the Compulsory Education Act of 1875 did little to change the situation; in 1894, Jacob Riis complained, "our compulsory-education law remains a dead letter." (23)

Contrary to popular belief, most child pickpockets were not homeless. Rather, 85 percent of those brought to trial gave specific street names and house numbers when asked where they resided. (24) This is not to say they came from economically or emotionally secure families. While observers continually commented in hyperbolic language on the "broken homes" of such youths, domestic life for many was indeed fraught with difficulty. In one informal survey of 400 street children in 1871, the CAS found that 34 percent were orphans or without known parents, while another 23 percent were victims of abandonment, abuse, or desertion. Some lodging houses even claimed that over half their child patrons were without parents. Traditional or secure family structures for such youths were at best weak, at worst non-existent. (25)

In certain ways, pickpocketing emerged as an underground alternative to the traditional but vanishing forms of apprenticeship in the new urban market economy. Most often, older teenage pickpockets taught the secrets of the trade to young "apprentices." One detective claimed pickpockets literally went through "a course of instruction." Older pickpockets, "incapacitated for work on their own hook," instructed the younger charges, reducing the subject "to a science." Others insisted that in saloons and pool rooms, street youths were "instructed by New York Fagins in the arts of petty pilfering, of pocket-picking, sneak-thieving, circulating counterfeit coin," and other kinds of crime. Police chief George Matsell believed that as early as 1854 that "crime among boys and girls has become organized, as it never was previously." (26) While informal and fluid, such instruction was part of the clandestine activity of child street culture.

These complaints were not simply middle-class paranoia. Fourteen year-old Edward Logenstein, after being arrested for pickpocketing, admitted that he was part of a "thieves' school" run by an older man on Ludlow Street. Every afternoon, boys were sent to different parts of the city accompanied by older teenagers who instructed and watched them work. Whenever they stole a purse, claimed Logenstein, "a bigger boy would come up and take the things." After his first successful theft, Larry Caulfield was approached by an adult counterpart. "He had heard of our achievement and kindly 'staked' us, and gave us a few private lessons in picking pockets," remembered Caulfield. "We were proud enough, to be taken notice of by this great man. We felt we were rising in the world of graft, and began to wear collars and neckties." According to Caulfield, the picture of Fagin in Dickens's Oliver Twist was "true to life." (27)

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A certain fraternity among teenage pickpockets thus emerged. Larceny had its own division of labor, an informal apprenticeship system and a community of colleagues with patterns of support and exclusion of outsiders. Youth crime was typically the work of small, intimate groups of youths who collaborated together, often for long stretches of time as Appo described working with George Dolan. Picking pockets, like other forms of street life, produced a subculture with arcane, intricate and complex forms of communication which described all the salient roles and procedures of the craft. "Those who have been to the business [of thievery] use this argot to such an extent," pronounced one reporter, "that a stranger finds it as impossible to understand them as he would if they were speaking in a foreign tongue." Pickpockets referred to their accomplices, usually numbering two to four, as "mobs." The streets, parks, or trolleys where they worked were "beats." The actual larceny was a "touch" which was performed by a "wire," a "pick," a "bugger" or a "tool" while "stalls" distracted or jostled the victim. Pocketbooks were "leathers" and money was a "roll." The novelist Herman Melville described the underworld vocabulary as "the foulest of all human lingoes, that dialect of sin and death, known as the Cant language, or the Flash." (28)

The special argot bespoke a fraternity with shared affinities extending beyond child larcenists. After having his pocket picked, for example, the adult Julius Rocholl entered one William Street establishment in search of the perpetrator. He found a group of youths crowded around a bench. "I shoved the boys aside and found under the bench this little boy with his coat off" who Rocholl believed had purloined his property. Without warning, the pickpocket's peers raced to his defense. "I had to let go my hold of the boy as there was a crowd of boys all around who immediately rushed between this boy and myself," many of whom "were jeering and laughing at me," claimed the victimized Rocholl. In response, he simply relinquished his captive. (29)

Similarly, George Appo described an uncertain community support to his pickpocketing. As a teenager, he once pilfered a money-filled wallet from a man walking along Wall Street. Upon hearing the cry "Stop thief," a police officer chased Appo in hot pursuit. He managed to escape, but not before the officer shot him in the stomach. Quickly, Appo retreated into the Pearl Street residence of the Maher family, "with whom I was acquainted," he recounted. Rather than report him to authorities, "the good woman, Mrs. Maher, hid me between the mattress of the bed where I remained until her son went out, looked around and returned, saying everything was all right." (30)

For street children and their sympathizers, the distinctions separating legal and illegal activities proved to be overlapping and fluid. Unbeknownst to adults, youths regularly met, socialized, played, and even reproduced their subculture over time. By the 1860s, street kids were regular habitues of Bowery theaters, museums, and similar entertainments. The Bowery Theater, in particular, was described as "a common ground for the gamins." Arthur Pember remarked in 1874 that Saturday evenings at the Bowery Theater were "a night on which all the elite of the bootblacks and newsboy world make a point of going to the play." As more upscale establishments moved uptown, the Bowery became a popular outpost for street kids. In its "old-fashioned pit," noted one, "the juveniles of the Bowery region are packed like sheep." The writer George Foster described how newsboys, while occupying the middle benches in the pit of the Chatham and Olympic theaters, inscribed their names with knives, thereby "securing them against invasion, and occupying them by as good a right, and with more regularity nightly, than the rich frequenters of Grace Church and St. Patrick's, their pews." (31)

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The Bowery, in particular, served as a surrogate home for street children. Into the 1880s, reformers complained that young boys "infest[ed] the Bowery at all hours of the day and night." The pull of the Bowery was allegedly so great that juveniles often remained away from their real homes for days and even weeks. Their daily regimen included selling papers, begging, stealing from stores, and "going through" drunken men to pilfer money, much of which was then spent at the theater. "Thus they live till arrested or picked up," concluded one Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children report. Investigator George McDermott, after visiting Volk's Theater in 1882, was "most astonished" by the many unchaperoned children. Out of an audience consisting mostly of minors, he counted at least 200 children between 7 and 10 years of age, 500 under 14. "For the purpose of corrupting the minds of children," concluded McDermott, "this place affords better advantage than any other resort I know." (32)

Streetboys even had their own theater. In 1871, newsboys, bootblacks and other street children founded the Grand Duke's Opera House. Located in a Baxter Street cellar, the establishment's managers, stage hands, musicians, actors and audience were composed entirely of young boys, many of whom were bootblacks and newsboys. For years, the Grand Duke's Opera House was the only theater which successfully defied municipal efforts to collect the license fee. (33)

The world of the child pickpocket was heavily, but not entirely, masculine. Newsgirls were to be found, but young females generally enjoyed fewer opportunities within the rough-and-tumble street culture milieu. "Girls can only sell papers, flowers or themselves," acknowledged criminal attorneys William Howe and Abraham Hummell, "but boys can black boots, sell papers, run errands, carry bundles, sweep out saloons, steal what is left around loose everywhere, and gradually perfect themselves for a more advanced stage and higher grade of crimes." Like their male counterparts, young girls were found in City Hall Park, the Battery, Union Square and Madison Square, playing, sitting on the benches, and accosting passing pedestrians. Sophie Lyons worked mostly as a pickpocket, but she also used sharp, little knives "to slit open the bags so that I could get my fingers in." One pickpocket remembered a teenage female friend so talented at pickpocketing "that older guns of both sexes were eager to take her under their tuition and finish her education." (34)

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In most cases, child pickpockets and street children were bound together because of their shared poverty and social marginalization. Their experiences on city streets, for example, broke down common forms of collective identity. "As a rule," concluded Helen Campbell in 1893, street boys "are known by nicknames and nothing else, and in speaking of one another they generally do so by these names." Rather than identifying each other according to categories based on race, ethnicity or religion, Campbell noted that, "these names indicate some personal peculiarity or characteristic." Commentators and criminals alike rarely discussed the ethnic or immigrant origins of New York's street children, much less any notion of self-described national identity. More often, contemporaries described such youths by their street occupation or activity: newsboys, copper pickers, wood-stealers, ragpickers, swill-gatherers, bootblacks. The one social condition that they all shared was poverty. Perhaps the native-born origins of the majority of Gotham's child pickpockets muted any shared ethnic, racial or religious bond, for undoubtedly large percentage of these children had immigrant parents. Street life, however, seemed to level those forms of identity. (35)

Pickpocket memoirs reflected this. Although few, if any, child pickpockets directly addressed questions of ethnic or national identity, adult pickpockets reminisced on their childhood. George Appo, for example, remembered pickpocketing as a teenager with another youth with the Irish surname of Dolan. But neither then nor later did Appo ever identify himself as Irish, Chinese or even Roman Catholic, although he was all of these by birth. Like the polyglot world of Five Points where he grew up, Appo never labeled himself by a single, ethnic category. Significantly, as an adult he conspired with Chinese criminal entrepreneurs like Tom Lee, Irish-Americans Barney Maguire and Jimmy McNally, and German-Americans Ike Vail and Bill Vosburgh. Appo's individual experience confirmed observations by some like the CAS that ethnic identity was incidental among their charges; instead street children were part of "an unconscious society for vagrancy and idleness." (36)

Street children in their attitudes toward work, family, life and property presented a competing value system to pious, middle-class ways. What horrified adults--the absence of parental authority, the rejection of formal schooling and legitimate employment, the disregard for law and order--was functional for children. Critics failed to acknowledge how child thieves imitated the middle-class values of consumption and accumulation. (37) As a youth, George Appo admitted that he admired his pickpocketing peers because they "always were well dressed and had plenty of money." Similarly, one burglar and safe robber who grew up in New York admitted that he became a river thief because he believed he made ten times the income of a machine shop apprentice. "I wanted a lot o' dough, an' the only way 't I know how to get it was to steal it." On another occasion, Charles Loring Brace asked a group of street urchins: "My boys, what is the great end of man? When is he happiest? How would you feel happiest?" Their blunt retort: "When we'd plenty of hard cash, sir!" (38)

The secret pilferings of child pickpockets also challenged the vague boundaries of urban consumption. Pickpocket crimes were, in part, the result of an expanding market economy with fashionable and expensive consumer goods. The symbolic and concrete evidence of these new patterns of consumption were the diamond-studded stickpins, gold pocketwatches, and hard cash pedestrians conspicuously paraded while traversing the streets. "Everybody seems to have the idea that unless they are more or less furnished with ornaments they are not properly presentable," commented one fashion journal. Worn for purposes of display and spectacle, these advertisements of personal prosperity invited their secret removal. (39)

Such conspicuous displays of wealth and prosperity alongside homelessness and poverty not only generated resentment by many a child turned pickpocket. Some articulated an alternative morality. Asked if he knew the difference between right and wrong during one later court interrogation, George Appo replied, "I know that I ain't doing wrong in picking pockets." When queried further if he thought he enjoyed a right to steal, he acknowledged, "To a certain extent, yes, I do." (40)

On the other hand, even if youthful pickpocketing like Appo's was an ongoing, daily strategy, the overwhelming majority of thefts presented no overt or even symbolic protest to authority or to property arrangements. What was an act of personal maintenance or economic sustenance for impoverished youths was playful rebellion for others. Pickpocketing was integrated into the daily street life of many children, at times irrespective of class. Even well-off youths at times engaged in petty theft. Such boys treated the pilferings not as a crime, but rather a contest, a form of mischief, a product of peer pressure. For example, 16 year-old Joseph DeBoe admitted that he stole Elizabeth O'Rourke's pocketbook at the behest of two acquaintances who wanted to rent a boat and go sailing. At his trial, victim and district attorney alike concurred that the DeBoe was "of good character." The charges were dropped. (41)

In general, the social institutions created and developed by street children functioned as networks of resistance, propagating sentiments of exasperation, disaffection and indignation. With their own ideas about public space, respect for personal property, and standards of family domesticity, street kids represented an alternative subculture. Their institutions allowed for indulgence in adult, male activity, socialization with like-minded friends, while catering to those with a penchant for risk-taking and danger. Coffeehouses, saloons, theaters, museums, even prisons, were an extension of this street milieu. Here youths shared common experiences with their friends, defended themselves against adult outsiders like the police, truant officers, school authorities, even parents and their surrogates. This alternative community of child pickpockets embodied a new struggle, played out on the streets of America's exploding urban centers, between adults with money, consumer goods and power and unsupervised children with little of each.

As this internal, underground, informal child economy grew more pronounced, the dominant society became less tolerant. New Yorkers initially resorted to private forms of social control. Rather than utilizing direct, coercive forms of state power, voluntary groups tried to intervene and change the behavior of street children. Organizations like the CAS resisted methods of repression or coercion associated with municipal police and state prosecutors. They employed persuasion, rhetoric, symbolism, and tangible rewards to solve child criminality. In 1872, Elbridge Gerry founded the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCC), which enjoyed certain forms of policing power and acted as a conduit between municipal courts, private institutions, and poor children. Judges routinely followed the SPCC's recommendations, which exercised unparalleled influence on child care in New York. (42) Unable to police families and children, local government resorted to private agencies to fight juvenile delinquency.

Even private ameliorative institutions like the Newsboy's Lodging Houses administered by the CAS were of questionable influence. Undoubtedly, numerous street children passed through their doors: between 1854 and 1885, over 150,000 different boys entered the multiple CAS lodging houses. By 1872, nearly 12,000 individual youths (roughly 400 per night) annually sought refuge in at least five such establishments. (43) Yet, some argued that the autonomy lodging house juveniles enjoyed did little to discourage most forms of street life culture. The average stay lasted only one week, hardly enough time to counteract criminal and other delinquent behaviors. Not surprisingly, a newspaper reporter observed, "the lodging houses and other places where boys assemble are training schools for vice." One former lodging house resident admitted his fellow lodgers included youths who became "respectable citizens" and others, "the swellest of crooks." (44)

Municipal institutions of law enforcement--specifically jail and the police--proved equally inadequate to control pickpockets. Larry Caulfield described how older youths taught him how to "bang a super" (pickpocketing a watch by breaking it off the chain) as a 15-year-old Tombs inmate. Other pickpockets repeated similar experiences while incarcerated. Jails like the Tombs were little more, concluded another, than "seminaries of crime." (45)

Outside, Gotham's police were undermanned. For most years between 1855 and 1900, New York had one police officer for every 400 residents; some years the figure exceeded 500 residents. By contrast, in 1975, the city employed one officer for every 177 residents. As historian Eric Monkkonen has argued, nineteenth-century U.S. municipalities suffered from an inadequate number of police, poor funding, the state-control of punishment systems, and the inability of local courts to mete out justice. Such conditions did little to discourage teenage boys from pickpocketing or engaging in other forms of street crime. (46)

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By 1875, police justices admitted that pickpocketing was a growing problem in New York; some even expressed fears that it was overwhelming the city's law enforcement apparatus. Public officials consequently resorted to new measures to stem the problem. In the same year, the state legislature passed the "Children's Law" decreeing the removal of all healthy children ages 3 to 16 from the state's poorhouses in order to remove them from "pauper influences." In 1876, another state statute prohibited theatrical, concert, and musical performances by children under 16 without the written consent of the mayor. (47)

Following legislators' lead, the criminal justice system responded with even more coercive solutions. Between 1869 and 1876, for example, district attorney prosecutions of pickpockets more than tripled, increasing annually from 91 to 302, while juries proved increasingly willing to convict child pickpockets. By 1876, 79 percent of all such cases resulted in conviction. And judges meted out even harsher sentences. Before 1873, only a handful of teenagers were ever sent to prison, and never more than six in a single year. But in both 1874 and 1876, judges sentenced 25 such youthful offenders to Sing Sing. (48)

Most striking was the draconian severity of some punishments. For stealing one dollar, for example, the fourteen-year-old, Irish immigrant Henry Ducketts was sent to the House of Refuge for a year. When teenagers John Golden and Alfred Johnson, in separate cases, were convicted of pickpocketing 50 cents, they each received three year sentences. Similarly, 19-year-old Lawrence Dixon was sent to Sing Sing for five years for stealing 80 cents; John Kelly was given four years for absconding with five cents. (49)

This was part of a larger trend. In the final quarter of the nineteenth century, law enforcement authorities "got tough" on juvenile offenders. After 1875, municipal courts annually convicted over 1,500 (sometimes more than 2,000) children age 14 years or younger. In 1876 alone, New York's police justices convicted more than 9,500 teenagers; over 2,600 of them were under 14, a figure which exceeded the number of convicted African-American adults. (50) By the time a male pickpocket reached age 15 he was just as likely to end up in the penitentiary as the House of Refuge, the Juvenile Asylum, or the Catholic Protectory. For 16 and 17 year-old males, the odds were worse: 85 percent ended up in Sing Sing. (51) To judges, teenage pickpockets were adults.

Street children worked and lived outside the paradigm of middle-class domesticity, enjoying few, if any, traditional familial influences. Their collective identity was shaped primarily by a peer group of immediate friends and associates, not the "civilizing" social structures of a bourgeois Victorian household. Absent such influences, street children almost by necessity developed a confrontational and oppositional subculture relative to adult authority. Yet, while alienated in certain respects from the dominant culture, street children simultaneously adopted certain entrepreneurial behaviors as a survival strategy. And why not? They labored as independent contractors at a pace, place and time they chose. Free to set their own schedule, they enjoyed more autonomy than in the school, factory, or home. Such individualistic, entrepreneurial values mirrored elements of the dominant society, thereby discouraging a broader collective, communal outlook in most cases. Absent was any long-lasting system of reciprocal obligation fundamental to group cohesion and solidarity. (52) Based on personal experience, the identity of child pickpockets never embodied a larger conception of mutuality and shared suffering. Political revolution or economic redistribution were not their end; individual gain and personal accumulation were. Theirs was a different avenue of upward mobility. The goal was not to turn the world upside down, but rather inside out.

Street kid ideology--broadly defined as those values originating in their ordinary experiences and validated in their social life--was personal and immediate, delineated by their daily struggles to survive in an urban market economy, and grounded in the experience of city streets. (53) These were children who literally slept with rats, who lacked the knee of a supportive adult on which to sit, or a shoulder on which to cry. Absent was any family to love them. Struggling to negotiate a terrain between personal autonomy and adult authority, between self-sufficiency and economic dependence, the personal ideologies of child pickpockets were framed in the context of everyday street life. Child pickpockets thus cultivated their own conception of freedom and independence. But in trying to carve out a place for themselves, they found a world where few adults cared to understand, and many wished they would go away. By avoiding the factory, the school, the church, child pickpockets spoke with their feet, and frequently their hands.

ENDNOTES

I wish to thank Daniel Czitrom, Elliott Gorn, James Grossman, Eric Monkkonen, Peter Stearns, the anonymous readers of the JSH, and the Newberry Library Fellows Seminar for their thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this essay.

1. Harper's Weekly, 19 Sept. 1868 (hereafter HW); Children's Aid Society (hereafter CAS), Sixteenth Annual Report (New York, 1869), 6. "Annual Report" is abbreviated as "AR" hereafter. On the common use of terms like "gutter-snipes," "street rats," and "Arabs," see Helen Campbell, Thomas W. Knox and Thomas Byrnes, Darkness and Daylight: or, Lights and Shadows of New York Life (Hartford, Conn., 1891), 112-18; Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Twenty Years' Work Among Them (New York, 1872), 41, 79 (Arabs).

2. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, eds. The Diary of George Templeton Strong (New York, 1952), II:57; John H. Warren, Jr., Thirty Years' Battle with Crime (Poughkeepsie, N.Y., 1875), 227; Campbell, Darkness and Daylight, 117-18. On the persistence of the newsboys' subculture into the twentieth century, see Leonard Benedict, Waifs of the Slums and Their Way Out (New York, 1907), 99-115. For similar observations, see New York City Department of Public Charities and Correction, Ninth AR for 1868 (New York, 1869), 28; B.K. Pierce, A Half Century with Juvenile Delinquents; or, the New York House of Refuge and Its Times (New York, 1869), 218; William F. Howe and Abraham H. Hummel, In Danger; or, Life in New York. A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations (New York, 1888), 19-20, 25; Arthur Pember, Mysteries and Miseries of New York (New York, 1874), 195; Samuel B. Halliday, The Little Street Sweeper; or, Life Among the Poor (New York, 1861), 142-43; New York State, Metropolitan Police, AR (New York, 1865), 9-10; Junius Henri Browne, The Great Metropolis: A Mirror of New York (Hartford, Conn, 1869), 424, 427; HW, 3 Sept. 1881; Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, 13 Nov. 1880. For related fictional images, see Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick and Mark, the Match Boy, Rychard Fink, ed. (New York, 1962); Elizabeth Oakes Smith, The Newsboy (New York, 1854); Marie Louise Hankins, Reality; or, A History of Human Life (New York, 1858), 66. For songs about newsboys, see Mr. Chapman, "Newsboy" (1844); D. W. Boardman, "The News Boy" (1868); W.C. Parker, "Jimmy the Newsboy" (1893); Alfred T. Smith, "The Orphan Newsboy" (1910), all in Box 524, DeVincent Sheet Music Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

3. The literature on "child saving" and reform is vast. The most useful in this study have been: Thomas Bender, Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth Century America (Lexington, Ky., 1975), 1-70, 129-193; Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), 94-107; Edward K. Spann, The New Metropolis: New York, 1840-1857 (New York, 1981), 256-77; Robert S. Pickett, House of Refuge: Origins of Juvenile Reform in New York State, 1815-1857 (Syracuse, 1969); Anthony Platt, The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (Chicago, 1969); Joseph M. Hawes, Children in Urban Society: Juvenile Delinquency in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1971); LeRoy Ashby, Saving the Waifs: Reformers and Dependent Children (Philadelphia, 1984); Marilyn Irvin Holt, The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America (Lincoln, Neb., 1992); Catherine J. Ross, "Society's Children: The Care of Indigent Youngsters in New York City, 1875-1903" (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale Univ., 1977); Bruce Bellingham, "The 'Unspeakable Blessing': Street Children, Reform Rhetoric, and Misery in Early Industrial Capitalism," Politics and Society, 12 (1983), 303-30; idem, "Waifs and Strays: Child Abandonment, Foster Care, and Families in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York" in Peter Mandler, ed. The Uses of Charity: The Poor on Relief in the Nineteenth Century Metropolis (Philadelphia, 1990), 123-60; idem, "'Little Wanderers': A Socio-Historical Study of the Nineteenth Century Origins of Child Fostering and Adoption Reform, Based on Early Records of the New York Children's Aid Society" (Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1984); Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York, 1986), 117-50; Peter C. Holloran, Boston's Wayward Children: Social Services for Homeless Children, 1830-1930 (Boston, 1989). On the creation of "youth crime panics" in the nineteenth century which exaggerated levels of juvenile crime, see Robert Wegs, "Youth Delinquency and 'Crime': the Perception and the Reality," Journal of Social History, 32 (1999), 603-21.

4. David Nasaw, Children of the City: At Work and at Play (Garden City, 1985), 26-27, 91-100; Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1790-1860 (New York, 1986), 193-216. Also see John E. Zucchi, The Little Slaves of the Harp: Italian Child Street Musicians in Nineteenth-Century Paris, London, and New York (Montreal, 1992); Vincent Digirolamo, "Newsboy Funerals: Tales of Sorrow and Solidarity in Urban America," Journal of Social History, 36 (2002), 5-30.

5. The Autobiography of George Appo (typewritten manuscript), p. 3, Box 32, Society for the Prevention of Crime Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York, N.Y. (hereafter Appo); Hutchins Hapgood, ed., The Autobiography of a Thief (New York, 1903), 34; Sophie Lyons, Why Crime Does Not Pay (New York, 1913), 11-14. Appo claimed he made as much as $600 per day pickpocketing. See Appo, 29.

6. CAS, Sixteenth AR, 6 (quick and cunning); Times, 6 April 1875; Hapgood, Autobiography, 32-35; Appo, 2-3. Some believed that police officials undercounted the number of such crimes in order to stem fears and criticism.

7. Stansell, City of Women, 204; Eric H. Monkkonen, The Dangerous Class: Crime and Poverty in Columbus, Ohio, 1860-1885 (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), 60-61; David R. Johnson, Policing the Urban Underworld: The Impact of Crime on the Development of the American Police, 1800-1887 (Philadelphia, 1979), 44, 54; idem, "Crime Patterns in Philadelphia, 1840-70" in Allen F. Davis and Mark H. Haller, eds., The Peoples of Philadelphia: A History of Ethnic Groups and Lower-Class Life, 1790-1940 (Philadelphia, 1973), 89-110, esp. note 8. For an insightful account of female shoplifting, see Elaine S. Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (New York, 1989). Only in 1881 did the state begin prohibiting children from "begging, gathering or picking or sorting rags, from collecting cigar stumps, or bones or refuse from markets." See HW, 30 July 1881. "Baggage smashing" was also applied to baggage handlers at railroad and transport stations. See CAS, Sixteenth AR, 6. I am indebted to the anonymous reviewer for pointing out this nuance.

8. On certain forms of criminal behavior as a form of political resistance, see Robin D.G. Kelley, "'We Are Not What We Seem': Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South," Journal of American History, 80 (1993), 75-112, especially 82; idem, "The Black Poor and the Politics of Opposition in a New South City, 1929-1970" in Katz, "Underclass" Debate, 293-333; Alex Lichtenstein, "'That Disposition To Theft, With Which They Have Been Branded': Moral Economy, Slave Management, and the Law," Journal of Social History, 21 (1988), 413-40; James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990); idem, "Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance," Journal of Peasant Studies, 13 (1986), 5-35; idem, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985); Terry Williams, The Cocaine Kids: The Inside Story of a Teenage Drug Ring (Reading, Mass., 1989), 97-105. On the differences between alternative and oppositional subcultures and their relationship to a dominant culture, see Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (London, 1980), 40-42.

9. Halliday, Little Street Sweeper, 142-43; CAS, First AR (New York, 1854), 3-4; idem, Sixteenth AR, 6, 51; idem, Seventeenth AR (New York, 1869), 47-48; Brace, Dangerous Classes, 31 (20,000-30,000), 132-33; Warren, Thirty Years', 218 (6,000); Campbell, Darkness and Daylight, 112, 153, 213 (15,000 homeless children); David Dudley Field, "The Child and the State" Forum, April 1886, reprinted in Titus Munson Coan, ed. Speeches, Arguments, and Miscellaneous Papers of David Dudley Field (New York, 1884), III:343 (12,000); Tribune, 17 Jan. 1877 (5,593 stray children); Nasaw, Children of the City, 67-68. On bootblacking and newspaper-selling being the most popular callings, see Browne, Great Metropolis, 426. The exact figures in 1870 were 5,886 orphans and 14,822 homeless children. See CAS, Nineteenth AR (New York, 1871), 6. By the 1870s, the Newsboy's Lodging House provided assistance to 8,000 different boys annually. See Brace, Dangerous Classes, 344. Between 1860 and 1880, New York City officially had between 230,000 and 305,000 children, ages five to nineteen, more than a quarter of the city's total population. See New York Secretary of State, Census for 1855 (Albany, N.Y., 1857), 8, 38-39; idem, Census for 1865 (Albany, N.Y., 1867), 39-45; United States Department of the Interior, Census Bureau, Population of the United States in 1860; Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census (Washington, D.C., 1864), 322-23; idem, The Statistics of the Population of the United States ... From the Original Returns of the Ninth Census (Washington, D.C., 1872), I:633; United States Department of the Interior, Census Office, Statistics of the Population of the United States at the Tenth Census (Washington, D.C. 1883), I:422, 660; idem, Statistics of the Population of the United States at the Tenth Census: Report on the Social Statistics of Cities (Washington, D.C., 1886).

10. Brace, Dangerous Classes, ii, 26-27, 344; CAS, Nineteenth AR, 5. For a deeper analysis of Brace's motives and ideology, see Bellingham, "Unspeakable Blessing," 303-30.

11. The Flash, 14 Aug. 1842, vol. 1, no. 9, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.; HW, 19 Sept. 1868 (early age). On newsboys working as bootblacks, see HW, 3 Sept. 1881. On the hard work associated with newsboys and the newspaper business, see James Parton, The Life of Horace Greeley (Boston, 1872), 357-60.

12. George Foster, New York in Slices; By an Experienced Carver (New York, 1849), 103; Spann, New Metropolis, 23-44, 71 (Greeley), 137 (garbage). On the bootblack as a "modern innovation," see HW, 19 Sept. 1868. On the decline of artisanal trade and rise of factory-based production, see Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1789-1850 (New York, 1982), especially 107-44, 299-361; Stansell, City of Women, 203-09; Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 1785-1850 (New York, 1989).

13. Harry Barton, 525 Pearl Street, to Mayor William Wickham, 12 Feb. 1875, Folder 208, Box 1259, Mayors' Papers, New York City Municipal Archives and Records Center (hereafter MP). For another example of street trades encouraging children to resort to criminal activity, see Eddie Guerin, I Was a Bandit (New York, 1929), 5. On the crisis in U.S. economy from 1870 to 1900, see David M. Gordon, Richard Edwards, and Michael Reich, Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States (New York, 1982); Alexander Keyssar, Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts (New York, 1986), 1-4, 340-44.

14. CAS, First AR, 3 (80 percent); idem, Eighteenth AR (New York, 1870), 51 ("boy's crime"); idem, Nineteenth AR, 8 ("boy's crime"); idem, Sixteenth AR, 6; Times, 6 April 1875; Hapgood, Autobiography, 32-35; Appo, 2-3. For a later examination reaching similar conclusions, see Josiah Flynt, The World of Graft (New York, 1901), 26.

15. Hapgood, Autobiography, 35; Tribune, 12 Aug. 1876; CAS, Seventeenth AR, 48; Campbell, Darkness, 117. Police and other law enforcement officials rarely broke down pickpocket arrests from other forms of petty larceny. The overall rate of child commitments and incarceration was:

Year  < 15    15-20

1857          2,592
1859          2,636
1860          2,207
1861          2,408
1864  1,965
1865  1,934
1868          2,927
1869  1,872
1870  1,625   2,876
1871  1,017   2,936
1875  1,536   4,327
1876  2,076*  2,076
1877  1,930   5,890
1880  1,651*
1885  2,009*  5,670
1890  2,031*
1893  2,079*

< 15  imprisoned males under 15 years
15-20 imprisoned males 15 to 20 years
*imprisoned males under 14 years

See CAS, Eighteenth AR, 51, 52; idem, Nineteenth AR, 8; idem, Forty-second AR (New York, 1894), 14-15; Board of the Police Justices of the City of New York, Third AR for 1876 (New York, 1877), 21; idem, Fourth AR for 1877 (New York, 1878), 14-15; idem, Twelfth AR for 1885 (New York, 1886), 19.

16. Hapgood, Autobiography, 35 (halcyon days). Nearly half (48 percent) of all crime in 1866-1867 was some type of larceny, and never dropped below 36 percent until after 1887. In 1927, robbery (25 percent) surpassed larceny (24 percent) for the first time. See NYSS, Proceedings Before the Special Committee of the New York State Senate (Albany, 1876), 1192a (statistics before 1876); and table no. 1 in New York State Crime Commission, Report to the Commission of the Sub-Commission on Penal Institutions--1928 (Albany, 1928), 33. On the pervasiveness of pickpocketing and the prominent position of pickpockets among "professional" criminals at this time, see Allan Pinkerton, Thirty Years a Detective (Chicago, 1884), 36; Josiah Flynt, Notes of an Itinerant Policeman (Boston, 1900), 67-68; idem, World of Graft, 24-30. Arrest records on pickpocketing were inconsistently kept and remain a poor measure of the amount of the crime. Police reports, however, claimed the crime decreased nearly 50 percent from 1861 to 1870, before nearly tripling by 1875. The breakdown of total pickpocket arrests during these years was:

1861  466
1862  300
1865  275
1867  345
1868  348
1869  303
1870  274
1871  313
1874  581* (477 male, 104 female)
1875  728* (565 male, 163 female)

*--arraigned

See CAS, Nineteenth AR, 8; Board of Police Justices of the City of New York, AR for 1875 (New York, 1876), 9.

17. The term "newspaper dodge" is found in People v. Joseph Brady, 20 Oct. 1874, New York City District Attorney Papers, Court of General Sessions, New York City Municipal Archives and Records Center (hereafter DAP). Helen Campbell also believed bootblacks were often "practised [sic] pickpockets." See Darkness, 152. For similar views on the transformation of newsboys into pickpockets, see Times, 29 July 1877; National Police Gazette, 27 May 1882. On Lower Broadway and Fulton, Nassau, and Wall streets as havens for pickpockets, see Hapgood, Autobiography, 51. On the distinctive newsboy subculture and the many newsboys on Nassau Street and its adjoining streets, see Foster, New York in Slices, 98, 104-06. For examples of newsboy pickpockets, see People v. Edward Kilbain, 19 March 1874; People v. Daniel Lee, 18 March 1874; People v. Christopher Barry, 18 March 1874; People v. Henry Duckett, 21 April 1874; People v. Joseph Brady, 20 Oct. 1874; People v. Mortimer Sullivan, John Shea, and Patrick Murphy, 4 Jan. 1876; People v. Dennis Sullivan, 26 Jan. 1876; People v. John Parker, 14 March 1876; People v. John Maloney, 26 June 1876; People v. Daniel Cronin, 12 Sept. 1876; People v. James Ryan, Dec. 1876, all in DAP.

18. CAS, Seventeenth AR, 48 (City Hall Park); Howe and Hummell, In Danger, 20; unmarked clipping, 2 Feb. 1884 ("paradise"), New York City District Attorney Scrapbooks, New York City Municipal Archives and Records Center (hereafter DAS).

19. I examined grand and petty larceny cases which involved removing personal property from a person, the charge under which most pickpockets were prosecuted by the New York district attorney in the Court of General Sessions. The database totaled 1,176 individuals in the years 1859, 1864, 1869, 1871, 1872, 1874 and 1876. See DAP. I eliminated any case which was not described as a pickpocket. The indictments numbered 1,010 adults (male and female) and 166 children (age 17 or less). Incomplete descriptions of specific events forced me to define pickpocketing broadly. In cases when a pickpocketing attempt went array, the foiled perpetrator sometimes grabbed or "snatched" the object of desire and ran. The victim was then blocked or tripped when they tried to pursue the larcenist. Descriptions of such cases were frequently incomplete, making it impossible to distinguish if the incident was a botched pickpocketing attempt, a "knockdown pickpocketing" attempt, or a simple purse snatching. Consequently, I included cases involving 146 individuals charged with such larcenies. I also included larcenies which occurred in "panel houses" and brothels. In such establishments, when male clients removed their clothes, accomplices hidden behind a wall panel or door picked the client's pockets as their clothing lay on a chair or table. Of 1,176 individuals, 940 were male (80 percent) and 236 female (20 percent). The breakdown by age was:

Ages          Total  Percent of Total   Percent of Adults

10-14          57             5                 --
15-17         109             9                 --
18-19         179            15                 18
20-24         372            32                 37
25-29         203            17                 20
30-34         110             9                 11
35-39          57             5                  6
40-44          22             2                  2
45-49          11             1                  1
50 and above    5              .4                 .5
Unknown        51             4                  5

20. The gender distribution of child pickpockets was: 158 males (95%) and 8 females (5%), four of the latter robbing their victims in brothels or panel houses. The breakdown by birthplace was:

New York City     63 (38%)
New York state    46 (28%)
New England        6
Middle Atlantic    9
South              4
West               1
other U.S.A.       7
(total U.S.A.)   136 (82%)
Canada             3
Ireland           14
England            5
Germany            3
Other European     2
Unknown            3

Places of theft included: streets--122 (73%); parks--3; omnibuses/streetcars--7; brothels/panel houses/boarding houses--5; stores/saloons--6; unknown--23 (14%).

21. Hapgood, Autobiography, 34 (moll-buzzer). Items stolen included: pocketbook and/or money--115 (69%); watch and/or chain--46 (28%); handkerchief--3; jewelry--2. Newsboys received 100 papers for sixty cents from newspaper offices and then sold them for a penny each, earning a profit of 40 cents. See CAS, Sixteenth AR, 51.

22. The occupational breakdown was: newsboys 32 (19%); unemployed 14 (8%); bootblacks 13 (8%); errand boy/messenger/hallboy/clerk 11; printer/bookbinder 11; student 10; laborer/teamster 8; unknown 8; factory worker 7; peddler 5; tinsmith/iron moulder 4; servant 3; telegraph operator 3; tailor/shirtmaker 3 (includes one apprentice); machinist 2; plumber 2; bartender 2; brushmaker 2; cigarmaker 2; shoemaker 2; cooper 2 (includes one apprentice); boilermaker 2; 1 each of: baker, birdcage maker, brass worker, coffinmaker, corkcutter, dyer, butcher, fanmaker, goldpen maker, iceman, lamplighter, "married," paper hanger, plasterer, soda water maker, umbrella maker, waiter, "works for uncle."

23. Browne, Great Metropolis, 425; George Appo's statement on 6 Oct. 1896, pp. 18, 22 (never went to school), People v. George Appo, 24 July 1896, New York District Attorney Records, Cases #9126, Box B-2, Location 12817, Supreme Court Cases, New York City Municipal Archives and Records Center; New York State Legislature, AR of the Board of Commissioners of the Metropolitan Police (Albany, 1864), 9; National Police Gazette, 18 Feb. 1880; Jacob Riis, The Battle with the Slum (New York, 1902), 231 (dead law); idem, "The Making of Thieves in New York," 49 (1894), 114 (dead letter). Elsewhere, Riis's figures actually showed school attendance improved at the end of the century. See Riis, The Children of the Poor (New York, 1892), 118-28. The Compulsory Education Act did not go into effect until 1 Jan. 1875, and even thereafter mandatory attendance was rarely enforced. See Second AR of the Board of Police Justices of the City of New York for 1875 (New York, 1876), 20. On the failure of the 1853 law, see idem, AR of the Board of Commissioners of the Metropolitan Police (Albany, 1865), 8-10. On males leaving by age 14, see Carl F. Kaestle, The Evolution of an Urban School System: New York City, 1750-1850 (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), 96. On school attendance, see Diane Ravitch, The Great School Wars: New York City, 1805-1973 (New York, 1974), 405-06. For specific figures on truancy, see New York State Legislature, AR of the Board of Commissioners of the Metropolitan Police (New York, 1864), 78-79; ibid., (New York, 1865), 8-10; ibid., (New York, 1867), 49-50; ibid., (New York, 1868), 66-67; ibid., (New York, 1869), 57-58; ibid., (New York, 1870), 62-63; New York City, First AR of the Police Department (New York, 1871), 49.

24. See sampled years in DAP.

25. In 1868, the 11th Ward Lodging-House treated 553 different boys, 359 of whom were orphans (65 percent), 130 "half-orphans" (24 percent); only 64 (12 percent) came from households with both parents living. See CAS, 16th AR, 32-33, 65. In the 1871 survey, only three indicted children even claimed to be homeless. The specific residential information given by the indicted children was: specific house number and street name--141 (85%); street name only--12 (7%); city name only--7; homeless--3; no answer--3. The 400 street children broke down as follows:

Orphans, unknown parents, or parent killed  134  34%
Abandoned, abused, deserted, or nonsupport   91  23%
Intemperate parents                          65  16%
Mothers live out                             45  11%
Parents in hospital, prison, or asylum       29   7%
Mothers too poor                             26   7%
Business failure                              5   1%
Newly arrived immigrants                      3    .5%
Parents in Europe                             2    .5%

See CAS, Nineteenth AR, 9. For critiques of working-class family life and links with alcoholism, see New York State Legislature, AR of the Board of Commissioners of the Metropolitan Police (Albany, 1864), 79; Howe and Hummell, In Danger, 19-20; Browne, Great Metropolis, 424. Other historians have argued that such figures are unrepresentative, that CAS clients were mostly mature youth, lived in domestic groups (usually parents), and mostly returned home after brief periods of foster care. See Bellingham, "Waifs and Strays," 123-60, esp. 131-33; "'Little Wanderers,'" 63. The data in these studies, however, is derived from Record Book #1 of CAS, which only covers the period from April, 1853 to September, 1854.

26. CAS, First AR, 3-4 (Matsell); New York State, Metropolitan Police, AR (New York, 1865), 9-10 (armies); HW, 30 July 1881 (Fagins); New York Star, 8 Oct. 1883, in DAS (course of instruction); Hapgood, Autobiography, 33.

27. New York Sun, quoted in Minneapolis Evening Journal, 18 March 1881 (thieves school); People v. James Scott and James O'Neill, 18 April 1876; J.H. Madan to Judge Bedford, 26 Dec. 1872, in People v. John Hanley, 23 Oct. 1872, all in DAP; Hapgood, Autobiography, 33 ("staked"), 149-50 ("true"). Stories of street boys being trained by "professional criminals" or "Fagins" were commonplace in the second half of the nineteenth century. See HW, 27 Feb. 1869; Tribune, 12 Aug. 1876, 7 April 1895; National Police Gazette, 27 May 1882 (pickpocket school) Howe and Hummell, In Danger, 28; Brace, Dangerous Classes, 340; unmarked clippings, 22 June 1895, vol. 142, DAS. On Abe Solomon's "pickpocket school" on Suffolk Street, see Tribune and other clippings, 15 May 1894, vol. 127; unmarked clipping, 10 Sept. 1894, vol. 132, both in DAS. Also see reports on Lawrence "Young Irish" Lutterer in New York Recorder, Times, and other clippings, 1, 22 Aug. 1896, vol. 157; on Harry Gablinsky (or Jablinsky), 7, 9 Oct. 1896, vol. 159, all in DAS. On Sophie Lyons being taught to steal by her stepmothers, see Lyons, Why Crime Does Not Pay, 11-14.

28. Hapgood, Autobiography, 34; Allan Pinkerton, Thirty Years a Detective (Chicago, 1884), 37; Sun, 4 March 1861 (stage buzzers); Herman Melville, Pierre, or The Ambiguities (New York, 1984), 281; Johnson, Policing, 54; James D. McCabe, Jr. [Edward Winslow Martin], The Secrets of the Great City (Philadelphia, 1868), 358 ("foreign tongue"), 359 ("bugger"), 369 ("beats"); Jonathan Slick, Snares of New York; or, Tricks and Traps of the Great Metropolis (New York, 1879), 37-38; A.E. Costello, Our Police Protectors: History of the New York Police (New York, 1885), 417; Tribune, 2 July 1883, 25 Dec. 1887. On pickpockets usually working in couples, see Times, 6 April 1875. On the argot of newsboys, street children and pickpockets, see Campbell, et al., Darkness, 123-25, 706-09; Tribune, 11 April 1897. The best source for nineteenth-century underworld vocabulary is George W. Matsell, Vocabulum; or, The Rogue's Lexicon (New York, 1859). For other lists of underworld slang, see McCabe, Secrets, 358-59; idem, New York by Sunlight and Gaslight (New York, 1881), 509-10; Pember, Mysteries, 26-27; "Our Hot-Beds of Crime," World, 19 March 1888, in vol. 46, DAS. One linguist defines "argot" as a "specialized language used by organized, professional groups operating outside the law; these groups normally constitute criminal subcultures, and the language is usually secret or semisecret." See David W. Maurer, Whiz Mob: A Correlation of the Technical Argot of Pickpockets with Their Behavior Pattern (University, Ala., 1955), 4. Recent ethnographic examinations of urban youth culture that place considerable importance on street talk include Williams, Cocaine Kids, esp. 87; Irving Lewis Allen, The City in Slang: New York Life and Popular Speech (New York, 1993).

29. People v. Edward Kilbain, 18 March 1874, DAP.

30. Appo, 93-94.

31. McCabe, Secrets, 262, 265, 442 ("sheep"); Brown, Great Metropolis, 430 ("gamins"); Pember, Mysteries, 184 ("elite"); Foster, New York in Slices, 105-06 (pews). Also see Hapgood, Autobiography, 18; Smith, The Newsboy, 25-33, 99; Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York (New York, 1927), 25-26. Howe and Hummell, In Danger, 25, claimed youths could be found in both Bowery and Broadway leisure establishments. For other reports of children in concert saloons and theaters, see Application Hearing for New York Museum, 210 Bowery, 30 Nov. 1883, Box 85-EF-12, MP. On the popularity of the theater among street children, see Campbell, et al., Darkness, 116. On saloons promoting delinquent juvenile subcultures, see HW, 19 Sept. 1868, 30 July 1881. For more on the subculture of newsboys, see Digirolamo, "Newsboy Funerals," 5-30.

32. Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, AR (New York, 1884), 23; George McDermott to Mayor William R. Grace, 2 May 1882, Box 84-GWR-14, MP. Volk's was located at 199 Bowery.

33. The Grand Duke's Opera House or Theatre (or "newsboy's theatre" as it was sometimes called) was originally located in a cellar at 17 or 19 Baxter Street. See Frank Leslies Illustrated Newspaper, 17 Jan. 1874 (17 Baxter), 30 June 1877; Herald, 20 Feb. 1874 (19 Baxter). It later moved to 21 Baxter Street. See Howe and Hummell, In Danger, 26; James L. Ford, Forty-Odd Years in the Literary Shop (New York, 1921), 104, 197; Digirolamo, "Newsboy Funerals," 9. Critiques of children in the theater appear in: Alger, Mark, the Match Boy, 254-56; idem, Julius the Street Boy (New York, 1904); Brace, Dangerous Classes, 345; Smith, The Newsboy, 102-03. Lodging houses, hoping to divorce theater attendance from child street life, deliberately served dinner at the hours of theatrical performances. See Monkkonen, "Nineteenth-Century Institutions: Dealing with the Urban 'Underclass'," in Michael B. Katz, ed., The "Underclass" Debate: Views From History (Princeton, N.J., 1993), 358-59.

34. Hapgood, Autobiography, 55; Howe and Hummell, In Danger, 20-22; Lyons, Crime, 12-14. For reports on other child female pickpockets, see Mercury, Morning Journal, and other clippings, 3, 5 May 1895, Vol. 140, DAS. Others reported that female pickpockets traveled with male companions, usually preyed on other women, and were rarely caught. See New York Star, 8 Oct. 1883, in DAS. Some sources indicate male youngsters were expected to "take advantage" of their female counterparts. See Hapgood, Autobiography, 40-41.

35. Campbell, Darkness, 124 (quote), 151-54. In the sample of prosecuted child pick-pockets in DAP, 82 percent were native-born. Among the 2,095 youths served by three Newsboys' Lodging Houses in 1868, 85 percent were native-born. See CAS, Sixteenth AR, 6 (unconscious), 27-33, 65-66. Similarly, of the 6,950 teenagers sent to the Workhouse on Blackwell's Island or the Tomb's Prison in 1878, 6,369 (or 92 percent) were born in the United States. See World, 13 Jan. 1879.

36. Appo; CAS, Sixteenth AR, 6 (unconscious), 27-33, 65-66. Other examinations of criminal life which never discuss ethnicity or immigration as factor in criminal or "underworld" identity include Flynt, Graft; Hapgood, Autobiography.

37. For typical examples of outrage at the behaviors of street children, see New York State Legislature, AR of the Board of Commissioners of the Metropolitan Police (New York, 1865), 9-10; idem, AR of the Board of Commissioners of the Metropolitan Police (Albany, 1864), 9; National Police Gazette, 18 Feb. 1880; Browne, Great Metropolis, 425, 432-33; Brace, Dangerous Classes, 342; CAS, Sixteenth AR (New York, 1869), 6. For sympathetic or tolerant views of child pickpockets, see Benjamin P. Eldridge and William B. Watts, Our Rival, the Rascal (Boston, 1897), 22; Howe and Hummell, In Danger, 28.

38. Brace, Dangerous Classes, 81; Howe and Hummell, In Danger, 27; Appo, 3; Flynt, Graft, 91-93 (dough); Pember, Mysteries, 191 (grin and bear it); Rocco Corresca, "The Biography of a Bootblack" in David M. Katzman and William M. Tuttle, Jr. Plain Folk: The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans (Urbana, Ill., 1982), 3-13 (entrepreneurial).

39. Elite Dressmaker and Milliner, 3 (Dec. 1878), 6 (ornaments); Charles Stelzle, A Son of the Bowery: The Life Story of an East Side American (New York, 1926), 17.

40. George Appo statement to the Commissioners of Public Charities and Corrections, 6 Oct. 1896, pp. 17-18, in People v. George Appo, 24 July 1896, New York City District Attorney Records, New York Supreme Court, New York City Municipal Archives and Records Center, New York, N.Y.

41. People v. Joseph DeBoe, 15 Feb. 1876, DAP. John Hollahan and Henry Flavin, 14 and 12 years-old, respectively, stole a watch at the behest of another teenager who got them intoxicated on gin. See People v. Henry Flavin and John Hollahan, 12 Jan. 1874, DAP. For cases where the "respectability" of parents was reason for forgiveness and the dropping of charges, see People v. Conklin Pearsall, 10 Sept. 1872; People v. Thomas Walsh, 9 July 1872; People v. John Hanley, 23 Oct. 1872, all in DAP.

42. Ross, "Society's Children," 23-28; Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, 117-50; Timothy J. Gilfoyle, "The Moral Origins of Political Surveillance: The Preventive Society in New York City, 1867-1918," American Quarterly, 38 (1986), 637-52. By 1869, the CAS promoted children's courts, compulsory education, and licensing child street-sellers. See CAS, Seventeenth AR, 9, 49; Brace, Dangerous Classes, 347. Despite these efforts, over 25 percent of the more than 900 cases in the SPCC first ten annual reports involved families and children occupied in some form of street life. See Ross, "Society's Children," 30.

43. From 1854 to 1896, the CAS also sent over 93,000 youths to western states. See CAS, Sixteenth AR, 19-22, 63-64, 68 (emigration statistics); idem, Twentieth AR (New York, 1872), 5; idem; Thirty-third AR (New York, 1885), 5 (300,000 boys and girls) idem, Forty-fifth AR (New York, 1897), 13 (93,000); Brace, Dangerous Classes, 97-113.

44. Hapgood, Autobiography, 89 (swellest crooks); National Police Gazette, 27 May 1882 (training schools); CAS, Sixteenth AR, 20-21; Hawes, Children, 96-98. Despite their names, only a small percentage of the youths in these establishments were newsboys. See CAS, Sixteenth AR, 20, 27-33, 65-67.

45. HW, 29 March 1873 (seminaries of crime); Hapgood, Autobiography, 45-46; Brace, Dangerous Classes, 399; John Josiah Munro, New York Tombs: Inside and Out! (Brooklyn, 1909), 12-13, 120-25 ("Schools of Crime"), 241. Other examples that jail and prison contributed to the growth of this subculture can be found in Myer Stern to Mayor William Havemeyer and Board of Public Charities and Correction, 12 Aug. 1873, Folder 7, Box 1220, MP; World, 13, 27 Jan. 1879; Warren, Thirty Years', 226; Inspectors of the State Penitentiary for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, 56th AR for the Year 1885 (Philadelphia, 1886), 100. For other reports of teenage male incarceration, see Times, 9 Jan. 1882; Herald, 13 Jan. 1882, both in DAS; World, 13, 27 Jan. 1879. From 1857 to 1871, the number of 15 to 20 year-old males in city jails rose from 2,592 to 2,936. Throughout the 1860s, more than 1,800 males under 15 years passed through Gotham's local carceral institutions. See CAS, Eighteenth AR, 51-52; idem, Nineteenth AR, 8.

46. On municipal police officers and the low level of expenditures, see the following table:

Year  No. of Police     Budget (mil.)  Population  Ratio  $ Per Capita

1855   1,116                             @665,000  596
1860   1,473                $1.395        813,669  552      $1.71
1865   2,474                             @878,000  355
1870   2,325                $2.901        942,292  405      $3.08
                            (1869)
1875   2,544                           @1,053,482  414
1878                        $3.316
1880   2,159                $3,227      1,164,673  539      $2.77
1885   2,898                           @1,303,000  450
1890   3,410                $4.588      1,441,216  423      $3.18
1895   3,825                           @1,645,654  430
1900   7,426               $11.993      3,437,202  463      $3.49
1926                                          446
1950  19,789              $101.965      7,891,957  399     $12.92
1975  42,165 (highest)                 @7,483,000  177
1990  26,911             $1,627.488     7,322,564  272    $222.26

Sources: Edward T. O'Donnell, "Number of Police Officers in New York
City;" and O'Donnell and James Bradley, "The Growth of the Budget of New
York City, 1830-1990," both in Kenneth T. Jackson, ed., The Encyclopedia
of New York City (New Haven, Conn, 1995), 166, 911; Herald, 9 March
1855. On the low level of criminal prosecution in nineteenth-century New
York, see NYSS, Proceedings Before the Special Committee of the New York
State Senate, Appointed to Investigate in Respect to the Departments of
the Government of New York City (Albany, 1876), table of convictions;
Eric H. Monkkonen, Murder in New York City (Berkeley, Ca., 2001), 167;
idem, "Racial Factors in New York City Homicides, 1800-1874," in Darnell
F. Hawkins, ed., Ethnicity, Race, and/Crime: Perspectives Across Time
and Space (Albany, N.Y., 1995), 113; idem, "The American State from the
Bottom Up: Of Homicides and Courts," Law and Society Review, 24 (1990),
521-31.

47. World, 13 Jan. 1879 (Children's Law, pauper); "An Act to Prevent and Punish Wrongs to Children," Laws of 1876, chap. 122, copies in Folder 271, Box 1265; and Folder 181, Box 1256, MP. Between 1874 and 1875, the number of arraigned pickpockets rose from 581 to 728. See Board of Police Justices of the City of New York, Second AR (New York, 1876), 9. From 1860 to 1895, the number of orphanages in New York City grew 300 percent. See Ross, "Society's Children," 23; Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, 123.

48. See sampled years in DAP. Those sentenced to prison were distributed among the following years:

1859  1  1871   5
1864  1  1872   6
1869  3  1874  25
         1876  25

For recent theories of criminal law, see Michale Moore, Placing Blame: A General Theory of Criminal Law (Oxford, Eng., 1997).

49. People v. Henry Ducketts (14 years old), 24 June 1879; People v. John Kelly (19 years old), 16 March 1871; People v. John Golden (17 years old), 14 Jan. 1874; People v. Alfred Johnson (19 years old), 3 June 1874; People v. Lawrence Dixon (19 years old), 6 Feb. 1874, all in DAP. For an earlier charge against Ducketts when he was nine years of age, see People v. Henry Ducketts, 21 April 1874, DAP.

50. Conviction figures were:

         under 14      15-19 yrs
         M      F      M      F      African-Americans

1874                                   590
1875     1,536    336  4,327  1,418  1,121
1876     2,076    565  5,069  1,525  1,536
1877     1,930    796  5,890  1,891  1,222
1888     1,836  1,224  5,312  1,116
1890     2,031  1,159  4,382    832

See Board of the Police Justices of the City of New York, Third AR for the Year 1876 (New York, 1877), 21-22.; idem, Fourth AR for the Year 1877 (New York, 1878), 14-15; idem, Fifteenth AR for the Year 1888 (New York, 1889), 23; idem, Seventeenth AR for the Year 1890 (New York, 1891), 24. The police courts did not publish annual reports before 1875.

51. Whereas no one thirteen years of younger was ever sent to prison, at least three fourteen year-olds were, including one Irish-born newsboy who was sentenced to Sing Sing for three and one-half years. See People v. Joseph Dodge, 20 Dec. 1859, DAP (Irish newsboy). The numerical breakdown in New York by age and sentence was:

        House of Refuge/  Catholic  School
Age     Juvenile Asylum   Protect.  Ship    Prison

10 yrs   1
11 yrs   1                 2
12 yrs   5                 3
13 yrs   3                 5
14 yrs  12                 8        1        3
15 yrs   8                 0                 8
16 yrs   6                 2                18
17 yrs   0                 2                37
Total   36                22        1       66
(125)

Source: Years 1859, 1864, 1869, 1871, 1872, 1874, 1876 in DAP. On
increasing municipal magistrates' concern regarding child criminality,
see National Police Gazette, 18 Feb. 1880. Before passage of the
Children's Act of 1876 in New York, the almshouse and workhouse was
filled with children. After 1876, children between age three and sixteen
were placed in orphanages and other asylums. See Resolution of
Commissioners of Department of Public Charities and Correction, 10 Nov.
1875, Box 83-CE-3, MP; Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, 104-06. The
above pattern of punishment departs from other Western cities like
London which experienced greater and harsher prosecution with the
adoption of a police force. New York adopted police reform in 1845. On
the London experience, see J.J. Tobias, Urban Crime in Victorian England
(New York, 1967), 58. On the New York police, see Wilbur R. Miller, Cops
and Bobbies: Police Authority in New York and London, 1830-1870
(Chicago, 1973); James F. Richardson, The New York Police: Colonial
Times to 1901 (New York, 1970).

52. On the importance of the family in developing class consciousness, see Scott, "Everyday Weapons." On the importance of shared obligation to group cohesion, see William F. Whyte, Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum (Chicago, 1943), 255-65; Williams, Cocaine Kids.

53. On the importance of social conditions shaping ideology, see Barbara Jeanne Fields, "Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America," New Left Review, 181 (1990), 111-112; and Winthrop Jordan, Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy (Baton Rouge, La., 1993), 181-211, esp. 200.

By Timothy J. Gilfoyle

Loyola University Chicago

Department of History

Loyola University Chicago

6525 N. Sheridan Road

Chicage, IL 60626