But in each of the books that featured this narrative, the plot suddenly changes after setting this doleful scene, when a Protestant minister named Charles Loring Brace steps in. It might seem odd that children in the late 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s would want to read scores of books that hashed out such depressing melodrama. Whether their work is honest or not, these children’s futures hold no hope for anything but basic survival-that’s all their poor parents can achieve, which is why so many of them succumb to the bottle. Girls without homes dance on the street or sweep crossings or become sex workers boys join street gangs and are routinely thrown in the Tombs, the infamous jail in the Five Points neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. Otherwise, they might live in a shanty among chickens and towers of scrap metal, sewing piecework or shining shoes to help their families scrape by. If their family is part of the “deserving poor,” they keep their floor scrubbed and a Bible on the table.
If the fictional children have homes, they live in tenements that smell of garbage and garlic, sleeping six to a mattress. Novels fill the New York City streets of the mid-nineteenth century with hawkers selling corn from pushcarts, beggars wrapped like mummies in strips of tattered cloth, barefoot children with grimy faces picking rags from the gutters to sell. In the upcoming months, Lapham’s Quarterly will explore the history and allure of pop culture's period pieces, artifacts that captivated audiences with their conceptions of the past-and the political and cultural contexts that made these historical fictions so compelling. History does not reach us only in classrooms and via textbooks movies, novels, songs, and even video games have shaped how we understand what came before the present for generations.