cover image The Little Slaves of the Harp: Italian Child Street Musicians in Nineteenth-Century Paris, London, and New York

The Little Slaves of the Harp: Italian Child Street Musicians in Nineteenth-Century Paris, London, and New York

John E. Zucchi. McGill-Queen's University Press, $95 (240pp) ISBN 978-0-7735-0890-3

Uprooted from Italian villages, thousands of children indentured to adult masters or padroni in the 19th century earned coins as organ-grinders, harpists, fiddlers, pipers or animal exhibitors on the streets of Paris, London and New York City. Although some were beaten, tortured or neglected, most of these young minstrels, claims McGill historian Zucchi, fared no worse than immigrant children in other trades. Technically neither beggars nor vagrants, they were nevertheless perceived as a threat to the urban order by practicing a veiled form of mendicancy. While charitable agencies pushed for an end to this ``virtual slave trade,'' the liberal American press sensationalized the issue with stories of seedy dens of swarthy waifs. By the late 1880s the child street musicians had largely disappeared, many pushed into ``useful'' occupations where conditions were equally exploitive. This extremely interesting, unusual study, enlivened by photographs, throws a floodlight on ethnic prejudice, cultural constructs of childhood, Tammany Hall politics and 19th-century immigration and working conditions. (Apr.)