Page:First Annual Report of the Woodbury Hill Reformatory.djvu/12

 them of their history. A boy will try to catch your idea and always shape his statement accordingly. I remember an eminent man visiting us and asking a very bad boy of his parentage, &c. The boy thought bad example and depraved life was the cue from the form and tone of the question, and drew a picture of domestic degradation very appalling but entirely imaginary. They understate their age on trial always. They know well enough that leniency may ensue—or the treadmill be escaped. The boy mentioned above as between eighteen and nineteen doubtless gave himself as fifteen. The following letter is as good an evidence bearing on this point, as also on the dislike of criminal parents to Reformatories, as I can adduce.

The son of this woman having run away had arrived at her house, and was in lodgings procured by her, and visited by her daily, at the time she wrote as follows:—

"Birmingham, Jen 13th. Rev. Sir,

I take the Libberty of adrising theus few Lines to you to now if you ave found the Boys and if you have to pleas not to punnish George as it afects is head if hee is put about the Least thing in the World the doctor told me that is head was so Bad that it was not fit for to Be put about and if you ave pleas to let me now and i shold take it as a very Great faver of you, and Remane your Humbel Sirvent SARIAH TURNER."

Vanity is another marked feature. This shows itself in various ways—in dress and the like—but in nothing outward so much as their hair. Haircutting, though except in runaways it is never cut for disfigurement, is always a time for tears. This dislike of short hair does not arise from its relation to the Gaol, or it were commendable, but from its supposed ugliness and its relation to the workhouse—but chiefly the first. Two big boys detected in a design to run away—roared with grief at the cropping of their hair, though nothing else moved them, and one was of very large experience of life.

Vanity co-operates with or stimulates untruthfulness in such results as these. In exaggerated accounts of their parents income &c. A low origin is very much disliked. The workhouse is despised not because the idle resort to it, but because it is unaristocratic. A thief will take advantage of the workhouse to elude pursuit or for opportunity of pilfering, but he never would like it thought he was obliged to have recourse to it—or for long time. In a tendency to exaggerate past criminality. In these cases all character for honesty is gone—the title of "reg'lar thief"—being claimed. Sometimes the appearance of glorying in iniquity may be put on with a view to repelling a tense of shame and of repelling commiseration, but after repeated convictions there is scarcely much sense of shame left, and the exaggeration proceeds from the vain wish of creating an interest and of proving a claim to heroism.