In 1828 a Select Committee was set up to consider juvenile crime. One of the people who came forward to give his opinion was Reverend Robert Black, Honorary Secretary of the National Schools of the City of London. On 19 March he told the Committee of his experience with troublesome schoolboys:

“It has fallen to my lot to watch the career of many [school-leavers]; but out of some thousands, it is difficult to keep your eye upon more than a hundred of them. . . They have generally risen in society and become very respectable, either mechanics or servants. Or I have known many of them go as writers to attornies, and make a very good living by it. . .

“Boys of bad character and bad habits are not likely to remain with us; we have had some experience in that way; in some few instances we have been enabled to retain some boys, and reclaim them, but those who have formed bad habits will not remain with us. They will play truant so much that we are obliged to expel them for the sake of keeping up the discipline of the school; and the parents, when they are summoned, appear very careless about it… It happens more frequently than we could wish.

“There is one class of boys that we have not been enabled to bring to our schools yet, and that is the very lowest, who are without shoes, and are generally so raggedly clothed that the excuse is with many that they have no shoes to come to school in. I have been too frequently in contact with them; I see them about; they are a very dissolute description of boys, and very unruly in every respect; they are boys that take a delight in annoying our schools; and in the neighbourhood of Shoe Lane [Holborn] in particular, I have been obliged to have two of them more than once before a magistrate, for having broken our windows, merely out of sport. It is that description of boys that I apprehend are chiefly brought before magistrates. I am afraid it is a very numerous class.

“We are as tender of corporal punishment as possible, but sometimes we correct him by keeping the boy longer in school or by disgracing him in the eyes of his school fellows. . . which is generally very effectual to bring him to his senses. . .We endeavour to excite in their parents’ minds a desire to co-operate with us, and the first thing we say to them is, ‘We trust you will take as great an interest in them as we do, and that you will see that good effect is produced.’ The parents are summoned to attend the committee on the admission of their children; and one point that is enforced upon them is, that they shall see that what is learned at school is attended to at home.”

The lovely little illustrations are unpublished pencil sketches by George Scharf the elder (1788-1860), for my money the best of the early nineteenth-century artists of London street life.

Thomas Chapman, gentleman, gave his opinion to the same Select Committee that the behaviour of young males had deteriorated as a result of the end of “living-in” apprenticeships: with these, an adolescent boy lived under the same family roof and according to the house rules of the “master” from whom he was learning a trade. “About forty years ago, a very fatal and unhappy practice has taken place in London and Westminster, and which has been followed up in the country, of taking what is called out-of-door apprentices; it is one of the most demoralizing, destructive things that ever was introduced into the land.

“I have known, from that unhappy practice, five out of a dozen have been either transported or hanged; the fact is this, that at seven o’clock business ceases. . .there are a dozen of them together; you may easily imagine the bad consequences of these young lads being left upon the town. If there are one or two mischievous ones, they contaminate all the rest.

“This evil is not confined to London or Westminster but unfortunately this spirit has got into the country… If there are any bad characters in the kingdom, it is among these out-of-door apprentices.”

Sir Richard Birnie, chief magistrate at Bow Street, came along to give his view on gangs and child vagrancy: “There were last night, and it will be the same tonight, perhaps from ten to fifteen or eighteen boys sleeping under the green stalls in Covent Garden, who dare not go home without money, sent out by their parents, to beg ostensibly, but to steal if they can get it; and I have reason to believe . . . that it is the same in Fleet Market and other markets, little urchins that I have taken out at night, with no home to go to, or if they have they dare not go home with under sixpence, and then those boys become a prey to older boys, and so organised gangs are established. To get away those boys before they are completely contaminated would be a great national object; I would venture to say that thievery could be dug up by the roots.”