Images in the LMA graphics collection allow us to visit a time when school (and school holidays) were not the norm for London’s children. Instead young children were called upon to help their family’s incomes by working, often informally, as components of the London economy.

London child workers were spared the agricultural labour and factory work that faced those in manufacturing towns and the countryside - and they escaped the appalling plight of the child mine workers, but such work as climbing London’s chimneys brought dangers enough- and a great many were exposed to drudgery and hazard.
Street sweeping, scavenging and mudlarking are among the more unpleasant examples of work undertaken by children, all described in Henry Mayhew’s 1851 Survey of London Life and Labour. The activities in fields we would now term as service, catering or retail consumed the daylight hours of many others.

In the selection of images in this gallery we see Lavender sellers, Match sellers, Baked potato sellers, District messenger boys, Bell boys, Link boys, Newspaper boys, Cress sellers and Delivery boys. For girls the choice was often limited to domestic service. The luckier of the boys however might secure an apprenticeship in one of the many crafts and building trades which, all being well, would set them up for their future working lives.

As a worst scenario many young girls, starting out innocently as street sellers, would be inveigled into the dangerous world of prostitution, the world that we hear about from the male perspective in the diary of Pepys, the journals of Boswell and the novels of Dickens.

Today the working hours and conditions of London children are subject to strict controls. But as we see on our television screens in many parts of the world, such as in the streets of Afghanistan, the ability of a child to find work on a given day is the difference between eating and not eating.