Article: 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 ...

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