The Little Slaves of the Harp: Italian Child Street Musicians in Nineteenth-Century Paris, London, and New York

Desmond Maley is a librarian at the J.W. Tate Library, Laurentian
University.

This study is not intended as a contribution to the history of street
musicians, but is instead a social and ethnic analysis of the Italian
child musicians who began to appear on the streets of metropolises such
as New York, London, and Paris in the mid-19th century. Historian Zucchi
reminds us that the population movement from Europe to the Americas
during the period 1840–1940 was one of the greatest in human history.
Sixteen million of the 50 million migrants were Italians, and of these a
tiny but conspicuous group were child musicians.

The children performed as harpists, violinists, and organ grinders, and
also exhibited animals such as marmots, monkeys, and white mice. They
came from the impoverished rural areas of Italy and worked in indentured
service to older adult males known as padroni. The total number of
musicians worldwide was never more than 7000, but the spectacle of
children on street corners engaged in a thinly veiled form of begging
provoked a string of legislative initiatives to ban them in four
countries, including Italy. That the child musicians disappeared by the
late 1800s was also due to changing economic conditions.

The depth of Zucchi’s research shows in references to police records,
newspaper accounts, and legislative debates, as well as governmental and
consular reports. Zucchi’s writing style is solid and competent, but
the narrative suffers from the silence of the children themselves, most
of whom were illiterate. We can see them only through the prism of the
adults who wrote about them. New York journalists, for example, wrote
sensational accounts of “the little slaves of the harp,” while
French police viewed les petits italiens as a threat to law and order.

Zucchi notes that none of the legislation passed improved the
children’s welfare—nor, indeed, was that the intent. While some
children went home, many more joined their confreres as bootblacks,
newspaper vendors, models, flour carriers, chimney sweeps, and
glassworkers. Long hours and poor living and working conditions remained
the norm. In the end, the chief merit of Zucchi’s study lies in what
it tells us about 19th-century social values.