The Children of the Poor was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1892, two years after How the Other Half Lives, and it narrows the focus from the tenements in general to their most vulnerable inhabitants: the children. Riis argues that the children of the slums are the strategic key to reform — that while the adults may be too damaged by poverty to be helped, the children can be rescued through education, recreation, and the removal of the conditions that destroy their potential.
The book examines child poverty from every angle: the crowded schools (Riis documents classrooms with sixty or seventy students per teacher), the industrial work (children as young as five laboring in sweatshops), the street life (newsboys, bootblacks, peddlers), the institutional life (orphanages, reformatories, juvenile courts), and the simple daily struggle to survive in buildings with no heat, no light, and no sanitation.
Riis’s proposed solutions are a mixture of the practical and the idealistic: kindergartens, playgrounds, trade schools, child labor laws, improved housing, and above all, the conviction that every child — regardless of nationality, religion, or parents’ circumstances — has the right to a chance. The book contributed directly to the expansion of public education, the kindergarten movement, and the first child labor legislation in New York State.
Collecting The Children of the Poor
First edition (Scribner’s, New York, 1892): Cloth binding, illustrated.
Market values:
- First edition, good condition: $60–$200
- Later editions: $10–$25