London's Teeming Streets, 1830-1914 by James Winter

Author:James Winter [Winter, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781136104282
Google: Kg6CGBOIQcEC
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-06-17T15:56:10+00:00

This blessing turned out to be a prophecy, at least in the sense that the child felt a religious inclination seemingly from the cradle on. The family moved to Ireland in 1838 when the father was put in charge of the Irish Constabulary. John attended Trinity College and there determined to become a missionary. Devout though the Church of Scotland parents were, they objected to this zealous extravagance and persuaded the young man to go to Cambridge instead; there he exercised his taste for muscular Christianity by rowing and leading a Bible class at the Jesus Lane Sunday School. Not a complex person, he nevertheless had an impressive variety of interests. While still an undergraduate, he began writing the first of many pieces for Punch and articles for The Mechanics' Magazine on such subjects as the electrification of railways and the theory of prismatic colours. Journalism and books on adventure continued to occupy much of his time even after he took his degree, read for the Bar, and set himself up as a patent lawyer with chambers in the Inner Temple. Particularly popular with public school boys throughout the rest of the century were accounts he wrote of his adventures in a canoe and tiny sloop (both with names the same as his nom-de-plume, Rob Roy) on the rivers and waterways of Europe, Canada, and the Near East. During 1868–9, for example, he paddled and sailed his canoe from Alexandria down the Suez Canal to the Red Sea, ending in the Holy Land. Proceeds from accounts of this expedition, called Rob Roy on the Jordan, went to help fund one of the dozen or so causes he was deeply involved in, the Prevention and Reformatory School Society. This contribution he supplemented by performing over a number of years in public engagements where he would appear in Arab dress and act out some of the more perilous episodes in his tale.6

Boyish himself, he did much of his writing with male adolescents in mind, and, being spared the necessity of laboring hard at his legal profession, he was able to devote most of his working hours to rescuing youthful criminals, vagrants, and street waifs. This he began to do as soon as he moved to London from Cambridge in 1854. The Revd Baptist Noel introduced him to urban mission work. Soon after, while still reading for the law, he volunteered to teach in The Field Lane Ragged School in Clerkenwell, where the omnipresent Lord Shaftesbury, then Lord Ashley, was the honorary chairman. Recognizing the value of this new recruit, Shaftesbury almost immediately put him on the managing committee of the Ragged School Union, an organization aimed at co-ordinating the policies and management of the many voluntary schools created throughout the poorer areas of London to tame and Christianize the large number of homeless or neglected children (Shaftesbury's estimate was 30,000 or more) who spent their days in the streets and some of them, their nights sleeping in doorways or under carts and railway arches.

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