Crime City: Manchester's Victorian Underworld by Joseph O'Neill

wide with want, few could resist the pleading hands of a hungry child. Many were controlled by con men operating this ‘shallow-lay’ – taking advantage of people’s kindness.
    It is estimated that in 1850 there were 100,000 such street urchins roaming the streets of London. Several thousands roamed the streets of Manchester and the authorities were seriously worried about the scale of the problem. As late as 1889 a Manchester survey found 700 street children roaming around the city. A combination of the deserted, the orphaned and the runaway, the vast majority were illegitimate offspring whose parents drove them out to beg and steal. Some had absconded from refuges for homeless children, such as Barnes’ House in Salford. Once on the streets they relied on the common lodging house, whose keeper was often a receiver of the goods these children stole. Children made up a large proportion of the occupants of lodging houses. Like all criminals, they were constantly on the move. They loved the anonymity of the big cities. Some were the children of lodgers. Resident beggars and thief masters kept others they were training up for criminal gain. But many were alone. Their attitude to making a living was just what we would expect of a child. They were concerned with making enough for today, for their immediate needs, with little thought for tomorrow.
    Though childish in some ways, they were worldly in others. Promiscuity was common among criminal children. A parliamentary inquiry of 1852 found many lived with prostitutes and had venereal disease by the age of twelve. Nevertheless, as far as the law was concerned, children were treated differently from adults. Despite the harshness of the early-nineteenth century penal code, the courts condemned to death very few juveniles. Children were, in theory, presumed incapable of criminal intent up to the age of seven and between the ages of seven and fourteen were presumed innocent unless the prosecution could prove their ability to distinguish between good and evil. Children over the age of fourteen were fully responsible for all their actions.
    Yet from the 1850s the courts abandoned the punishment of young criminals in favour of trying to divert them from a life of crime. The Juvenile Offenders Act of 1853 and subsequent Acts in 1854 and 1857 empowered courts to send offenders under the age of sixteen to reformatories, as opposed to prison. This took them out of the criminal environment for two years. It cut their criminal contacts, led to a significant reduction in the number of children imprisoned and a sharp decline in juvenile crime. With the reduction in juvenile crime the number of children sleeping rough and wandering the country also fell. In 1886 one journalist wrote, ‘It is almost impossible in these days to realise the extent to which juvenile crime prevailed forty years ago.’ The ‘steady, regular training’ of the reformatory made the young person attractive to prospective employers. Even the most cynical members of the public, who rejected the possibility of reforming the young criminal, had to accept that the hard work of the reformatory ruined forever the delicacy of touch essential to a pickpocket.
    In 1874 the training ships came into existence. Those sentenced to them got three years’ disciplined training, which equipped them for life at sea.
    Whereas reformatories provided an alternative to prison for juvenile criminals, industrial schools dealt with those who had committed less serious or even no offences. They were simply living in conditions that put them in imminent danger of becoming criminals. It is an indication of the number of children living without any positive parental influence that the courts sent 5,000 neglected Manchester and Salford children to industrial schools in the period 1870 to 1891. From 1856 it was standard procedure to commit virtually all second offenders to reformatory school, regardless of their offence. By the end of the decade