Jim Jarvis is a runaway. When his mother dies, Jim is all alone in the workhouse and desperate to escape. But London in the 1860s is a dangerous and lonely place for a small boy and life is a constant battle for survival. Just when Jim finds some friends, he is snatched away and made to work for the remorselessly cruel Grimy Nick. Will Jim ever be free?

Review: Based on the true story of the orphan whose plight inspired Dr. Barnardo, Street Child  is an exciting, evocative and often deeply-moving historical novel. As Julia Golding observes in her introductory note, Doherty 'dissolves the gap between just reading about the poverty in Victorian London and makes you live it.”

 Short chapters and an episodic structure lend pace to the story as we follow Jim on his journey through suffering and adversity to final freedom and a place to call home, encountering along the way injustice and cruelty intermixed with the simple kindness of strangers.

After an initial chapter in Jim’s own voice, a third-person narration takes over to allow us to ‘see’ Jim in his struggles. The boy’s pain, fear, warmth and determination to survive fill the story with emotional intensity and constantly remind the reader of the real children who shared his story. The tone of the novel is sober, but not bleak; Doherty’s compassion shines continually through, as does Jim’s uncrushable sense of hope: “the little secret promise that had nestled inside him [and] began to flutter into life like a wild thing”

Street Child is peopled by a cast of vivid, memorable, sometimes grotesque characters. Often they are brought into the mind’s eye through a striking simile, such as the workhouse matron with teeth “as black and twisted as the railings in the yard”, or crippled Joseph whose body “was curved down like a walking stick”. Particularly repulsive is the vicious coalman Grimy Nick, “coalie-black wiv eyes like fires”, whose savagery and cruelty are matched only by his mangy dog, Snipe.

This new ‘Essential Modern Classics’ edition includes a supplementary ‘More than a Story’ section, containing factual information about workhouses, a brief biographical sketch of Dr. Barnardo and Q&A with the author. These, along with the historical detail, drama and empathy of the novel itself, make the book ideal to accompany and inspire study of the Victorians in Upper KS2.

2010-01-30

Available form Scholastic, Read and Respond: Street Child