Product Review

The most dangerous place in America in the 19th Century was not in the Wild West; it was in an urban slum called Hell’s Kitchen, on an island called Manhattan, in a city called New York. Over the years it was visited by a diverse hodge-podge of notables, including Davey Crockett and Charles Dickens, all who left aghast at the horrible living conditions, the poverty and the decadence of the people they found there.

At their zenith, these vulgar, diseased and murderous streets housed 30,000 homeless children of all ages--the street urchins--who played, scavenged for food, fought the elements and each other, and tried to avoid the perpetual violence that routinely threatened their survival. Death was their constant competitor, and death often won. They were the discarded refuse of the great 19th century immigrant migrations to America, and they were an undesirable nuisance to the good citizens of New York.

This is the story of two such children, Anna Murphy and Ben McDonald, abandoned to the streets and thrown together in a desperate attempt to achieve the impossible: to escape from Hell’s Kitchen in search of new beginnings in far and distant lands.