The Little Slaves of the Harp: Italian Child Street Musicians in Nineteenth-Century Paris (review)

During the nineteenth century, Italian child street musicians and others performed in cities across Europe and the Americas Indentured labourers by virtue of a contract signed between their parent(s) and an adult employer (padrone), these boys and girls were taken to Paris, London, New York, and elsewhere to work as violinists, harpists, organists, pipers, and exhibitors of white mice, monkeys, and dancing dogs and bears. (Others apprenticed as figurine vendors, mosaic-cutters, chimney sweeps, and glassworkers.) Marked by their peasant costumes, rural manners, poor skills, and in some cases swarthy looks, the children caught the attention of urban authorities and journalists.

Once a respectable adult occupation, Italy’s migrant music trade developed by mid-century a notorious reputation as a child slave trade run by cruel padroni who abused their recruits Government, philanthropic, and media reports recounted lurid tales of poor youngsters snatched from rural homes to become virtual beggars on foreign streets, of child “dens” in city slums where unwashed children crowded into small and windowless rooms, fed on bread and macaroni, and slept on filthy floors. The romantic yet pathetic figure of the Italian child performer surfaced in the writings of Dickens, Dylan Thomas, Dostoyevsky, and others Caricatures of Italian entertainers—a barrel-organist and dancing dog, “white mice boys,” and girls playing violin—graced the pages of the penny press.

This fascinating topic is the subject of John Zucchi’s book. First published in hard cover in 1992, The Little Slaves of the Harp is now available in paperback. It contains valuable research and critical insights, but problems of organization, lacklustre writing, and repetition detract from its value.

Zucchi situates his case studies of Paris, London, and New York within the larger context of nineteenth-century Italian emigration. He shows that the child trade grew out of an earlier and more honourable adult migrant occupation that, in turn, had its origins in the impoverished districts that produced northern and southern Italy’s earliest “modern” migrants—cash-starved artisans and peasant and tenant farmers on seasonal sojourns. Zucchi locates the origins of the street musicians in certain clusters of hometowns or regional districts of Italy, and documents the timing of their differing migration waves from these Italian locales to cities across the globe Having discovered these patterns, however, Zucchi draws few conclusions, except to say that these musicians were among the precursors of the mass migration of later decades. He also repeats his findings—in the form of long lists of Italian place names—in every subsequent chapter.

A major contribution is the analysis of host society responses. While middle-class authorities in each city shared much in common, Zucchi highlights key differences. For Paris, the child entertainers were treated largely as a law and order problem. London authorities sought to regulate street noise in middle-class residential suburbs, while reformers tried to stamp out what they saw as a begging problem New York child reformers hoped to channel the children into useful occupations. Meantime, in the newly united Italy, relevant political debates revealed more a concern with liberalism and nationalism than with the children themselves. In documenting these patterns, Zucchi recounts many fascinating anecdotes Unfortunately, the decision to devote a chapter to each city does make for some repetition, and the problem is exacerbated by the author’s listing of virtually every city by-law, ordinance, court decision, parliamentary debate, proposed bill, and public official that he came across.

A central question is how best to evaluate the child music trade. Zucchi’s answer falls on the agency side of the “victims vs agents” paradigm. What outsiders depicted as a virtual slave trade, he argues, was in fact a form of apprenticeship “like any other” except that the child did not become skilled in a trade The padrone was an ethnic intermediary and labour agent with the resources necessary to conduct the trade. The parents were struggling farmers who...