Street Child. Berlie Doherty
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First published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton
First published by HarperCollins Children’s Books 1995
This edition published by HarperCollins Children’s Books 2016
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,
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Berlie Doherty’s website address is
Text copyright © Berlie Doherty 1993
Why You’ll Love This Book copyright © Julia Golding 2009
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2016
Cover illustration © Giodarno Poloni 2016
Berlie Doherty asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780007311255
Ebook Edition © 2016 ISBN: 9780007397631
Version: 2016-06-14
For Hilda Cotterill
With thanks to the children of Lynne Healy’s class at Dobcroft Junior School in Sheffield, who helped me with their advice and enthusiasm, and to Priscilla Hodgson, Deborah Walters, Mike Higginbottom, the Barnardo Library, Dickens House, The Ellesmere Port Boat Museum and Sheffield Libraries, who all helped me with their knowledge.
CONTENTS
Copyright
Why You’ll Love This Book by Julia Golding
Tell me Your Story, Jim
Chapter One – The Shilling Pie
Chapter Two – The Stick Man
Chapter Three – Rosie and Judd
Chapter Four – The Workhouse
Chapter Five – Behind Bars
Chapter Six – Tip
Chapter Seven – The Wild Thing
Chapter Eight – The Carpet-Beaters
Chapter Nine – The Jaw of the Iron Dog
Chapter Ten – Lame Betsy
Chapter Eleven – The Spitting Crow
Chapter Twelve – Shrimps
Chapter Thirteen – The Lily
Chapter Fourteen – The Waterman’s Arms
Chapter Fifteen – Josh
Chapter Sixteen – Boy in Pain
Chapter Seventeen – The Monster Weeps
Chapter Eighteen – You Can Do It, Bruvver
Chapter Nineteen – Away
Chapter Twenty – The Green Caravan
Chapter Twenty-One – Circus Boy
Chapter Twenty-Two – On the Run Again
Chapter Twenty-Three– Shrimps Again
Chapter Twenty-Four – Looking for a Doctor
Chapter Twenty-Five – The Ragged School
Chapter Twenty-Six – Goodbye, Bruvver
Chapter Twenty-Seven – Barnie
The End of the Story
More Than a Story
About the Author
By the same author
About the Publisher
Why You’ll Love This Book By Julia Golding
It could’ve been you – that might be the slogan on the movie poster if this story of an ordinary boy up against impossible odds was put on to the big screen. Street Child does something quite extraordinary. It dissolves the gap between just reading about the poverty in Victorian London and makes you live it. This is no dry history lesson, but an adventure into the dark underbelly of those times. Within these pages, you will find monsters and heroes, comedy and tragedy, all set against the backdrop of the scary docklands of London. As I read Berlie Doherty’s brilliant and moving book, I was constantly challenged. How would I have fared if I had been left an orphan with no money or friends to help me? Where would I have gone for love and help? What would you have done?
This is the crushing fate that the main character, Jim Jarvis, faces when his mother dies. He journeys through the horrors of the workhouse, finds brief happiness in a fragile existence helping a street seller and comes to a state close to slavery working on a coal boat where he is treated worse than his master’s dog. The book is full of vivid characters, some of whom could be plucked from a horror novel: Grimy Nick and his dog Snipe, Shrimps, the boy named for the toes showing through the end of his boots, the glittering but treacherous Juglini circus troupe. Acts of kindness – a hug from a woman in the workhouse, Rosie’s care for Jim, Josh on the Newcastle collier ship, the boys tending to a dying friend – these are rare moments that shine out from the darkness like diamonds in a shovel of coal.
But what really works is that you can’t help but fall in behind Jim, rooting for him to find a way out of the traps continually sprung