The Gentle Boy from the Dangerous Classes

Pederasty, Domesticity, and Capitalism in Horatio Alger

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4836367
AutoresMichael Moon (0000-0001-5490-242X, autor de correspondencia)
Año1987
Volumen19
Páginas87-110
Fecha de publicación1987-07-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaRepresentations (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0734-6018 • E-ISSN: 1533-855X
EditorialUniversity of California Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1525/rep.1987.19.1.99p0173p
OpenAlexW4253518326
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas22
Referencias citadas1

THRONGS OF RAGGED CHILDREN bent on earning or cadging small sums of money filled streets of mid-nineteenth-century New York, if we are to credit testimony of a large number of chroniclers of city life of period. These genteel observers-journalists, novelists, social reformers, early criminologists-professed to be alternately appalled and enchanted by spectacle of street children noisily and energetically playing, begging, and hawking a multitude of services and goods-shoeshines, matches, newspapers, fruit. In considering accounts of this scene made by those who first concerned themselves with it, one soon becomes aware that a significant number of writers respond to it with strong ambivalence. For many of them, there is an undeniable charm or beauty, strongly tinged with pathos, in spectacle of pauper children: high style with which they collectively wage their struggle for subsistence exerts a powerful appeal. For some of same observers, though, charm of street urchins is a siren song: beneath their affecting exteriors many of them are prematurely criminal, expert manipulators of responses of naive and sentimental adults. George Matsell, New York's first chief of police, initiated vogue for writing sketches of city's street children with his sensationalistic and strongly unfavorable report of 1849 on the constantly increasing number of vagrants, idle and vicious children of both sexes, who infest our public thoroughfares.' The extensive testimony of minister and reformer Charles Loring Brace, who devoted a long career to saving street children, is more ambiguous, and consequently more representative of genteel response in general. While professing to detest criminal tendencies that he believes street life encourages in poor childrenindeed, philanthropic plans for them that he and his colleagues in Children's Aid Society (founded in 1853) framed and enacted involved systematically removing them from city-Brace nevertheless often confesses to feeling a powerful attraction toward children themselves, especially boys. Brace seems to have possessed a remarkable capacity for activat~ing] male sympathies

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