12 - Danger and degeneracy: the threat of the urban idiot

Summary

The crowd of parents, awaiting their appearance before a school board ‘B’ committee, mills outside the room on the second floor of the school building. The year is 1883, and they have been summoned to the meeting to explain before a group of school board officers why their children have been missing school, which had been made compulsory with the 1870 Education Act. When Mrs Jones, ‘a decent-looking woman’, takes her turn to explain why her daughter has been missing classes, she is accompanied by her nursing baby and ‘a small boy, with staring eyes that seem fixed upon nothing in particular – a strange, uncanny, big-headed child, who attracts attention directly’. As reported by George R. Sims, a popular journalist and playwright attending the meeting as part of his research for a series of articles under the general rubric ‘How the Poor Live’ for The Pictorial World, a London tabloid, Mrs Jones then claimed:

it's that boy as is the trouble. Ye see, sir, he can't be lef' not a minnit without somebody as can get after him quick. He's allers settin' hisself afire. He gets the matches wherever we 'ides 'em, and he lights anything he sees – the bed, the baby, hisself. Bless you, gen'lemen, it's orful; he can't be off settin' somethin' alight not five minnits together. He ain't right in 'is 'ed, sir.