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By Root 1634 0

“child stripping” and performed by those hardened from decades on the street, this lowly act of desperation bode ill promise for both Agnes’s and Janet’s future. The two youngsters, however, spent little time worrying about what might lay ahead. What they dreaded most about winter—the fear of freezing to death during the night—was on temporary hiatus. Now that Scotland’s warmest season had arrived, the closely knit pair felt as though huge boulders had rolled from their backs. They would only need to pilfer food for the day and not bother about buying a bed for the night.

Agnes hadn’t seen her mother since she’d been in the mill and didn’t feel welcome on Goosedubbs Street anymore. Some summer evenings, the grey-eyed lass and the spirited redhead hunkered down in a familiar doorway inside the East End wynds. Other nights they crawled into a sheltered hideaway along the River Clyde. Hours before industry’s stir-rings shook Glasgow from restless slumber, the clear sweet song of the lark awakened the girls.

Soon after dawn, their idyllic river retreat lost its luster. Once the winds picked up, an inescapable stench arose from the raw sewage and industrial waste being dumped directly into the River Clyde. Pollution killed the fish, whose corpses then lay along the shore, adding to the fetid odor. It was time to move on.

Careful to avoid the stinging bristles of nettle plants that had taken over the muddy river’s edge, Agnes and Janet watched glossy black-birds dive and swoop along the banks. Atlantic winds warmed by the Gulf Stream brought an unusual lightness to the air, and Agnes found a bounce in her step. She felt like singing again. This was going to be the best summer ever.

The fair on the Glasgow Green was a week away. This working-class holiday was a bonnie break from the press of sixteen-hour days on the docks or in the tannery. For street waifs, it was a celebration of unlimited possibilities. Young thieves like Agnes and Janet were known as “sneaks.” Lacking the skill for picking pockets and the tools for clean house breaks, they sneaked about seeking ready targets for theft.

Although a good friend, Janet was not an ideal partner. Her russet tresses stood out like a flashing beacon in a crowd. On July 2, 1834, two days after Agnes’s release, a constable caught Janet carrying off a bolt of blue-and-white fabric from a shop owned by James Fraser on High Street. A judge sent the sassy redhead straight back to Mr. Green’s mill for sixty days. Only half the pair was arrested because the lookout did not get caught. Out of the officer’s direct sight, Agnes must have blended into the crowd and made her getaway. It was Janet’s turn to take the fall. Theirs was a friendship but also a business partnership that helped them through another day. The fair wouldn’t be the same without her trusted confidante. Bad luck and bloody hell. Now she was a gang of one.

On her own for two months, Agnes knew enough street people to get by. The summer of 1834 lumbered on as she drifted through the alleys, counting the days until Janet’s release. She had big news to share. No sooner had Janet been freed from Mr. Green’s than Agnes grabbed her hand and dragged her to the corner of Saltmarket and Greendyke Streets. Ta-da! Englishman William Mumford had opened a theater in a ramshackle shed next to the Glasgow Green.

Listening for the sound of musicians who signaled the lifting of a canvas flap, the laboring class and the homeless gathered around and watched a new form of entertainment in a neighborhood rife with brothels and unlicensed taverns. Sword in hand, Mr. Mumford played the lead in Rob Roy, a play about the romantic Scottish outlaw born in the seventeenth century. As he poured glass after glass of gin down his throat, he lectured his patrons on the evils of drink.4 Mr. Mumford might have been rather surprised to learn that his primitive theater would become Scotland’s most famous penny geggy, a Scottish term for “show.”

Boxing matches, cockfights, fortune-tellers, jugglers, and players of the “mouth organ” (harmonica) brought a