3-034-600 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

A London School-Board capture, 2.40 a.m., 1871. 'The Elementary Education Act...[compels] the attendance at school of children not otherwise learning or working. The justice and wisdom of such legislation had been established by sound argument and sad practical experience, which proved that the community suffers a huge amount of mischief in every way from the idleness and ignorance, too readily seduced to positive crime, so frightfully prevailing among the poor neglected youth of our towns...Mr. J. Lawrence, the active officer employed by the London School Board...has known when and where to lay hold upon those most in need of attention. He has been accustomed now and then to seek them, with a police constable to aid him...in those nooks and corners of the great city where they are apt to lie down and find the wretched shelter of the outcast...Such a place is to be found beneath the Charing-cross railway station; and there, in the third hour after midnight, was enacted the...subject of our Illustration. The abject figures, the tattered and dirty attire, the cowering attitudes - half terrified, half guilty - the faces prematurely sharpened by want, and probably also by wickedness, of these poor little fellows cannot be overdrawn'. From "Illustrated London News", 1871.