A small hardback book with a glossy picture of a child in front of a four-storeyed Victorian building on the cover, and three end pages listing the Heinemann's New Windmill Series, with the author's two contributions ranked with the famous and eminent, all perhaps directed towards readers still at school, to judge by a prefatory paragraph that acknowleges the Dobcroft Junior School in Sheffield, as well as the Barnardo Library, Dickens House, and The Ellesmore Port Boat Museum.

There are 152 pages, made into 27 short chapters, prefaced by a statement, apparently from Jim Jarvis, who has been persuaded to tell his story to a man called Barnie. It is the eloquent story of how a boy becomes homeless in East London, endures the direst circumstances and meets a sequence of Dickensian rogues before he is offered shelter by Barnie, whose real name he cannot remember. Chapter 27 is headed 'Barnie', who by then has Jim's confidence sufficiently to be shown where other homeless children sleep overnight in the back streets.

'The End of the Story' is an epilogue bringing together sadness, compassion, and gratitude, and in case readers do not recognise the historical occasion when Thomas John Barnardo first realised that he had found a homeless child seeking shelter in the Ragged School which he had established in Stepney in the late 1860's, Berlie Doherty adds an 'Author's Note' asserting the veracity of the main people and events in the story.

Her own writing contains many elements of the language in the early accounts of these events by Barnardo himself, to be found in the pamphlets that he produced in support of appeals for funds, and subsequently embellished and interleaved with similar fictional stories to make the magazines that he edited, produced, or sponsored over the ensuing twenty years in support of his work. She is one among a number who have seen the influence of Dickens in Barnardo's prose, and has nicely elaborated upon this in her own story for young people.

Return to Barnardo Bibliography (click)