Foundling Remi is uprooted from his foster home when his adoptive father sells him to Signor Vitalis, a wandering street performer. To survive, Remi travels across nineteenth-century France with a troupe consisting of a fiddle player, three trained dogs, and a monkey. He learns to sing and perform while enduring hunger and winter storms. Following Vitalis’s death, Remi searches for his biological family, eventually discovering his English heritage and his connection to the Barberin family who first cared for him.
Readers interested in the history of child labor and social conditions in Victorian-era Europe find a detailed portrait of poverty and the legal systems of the time. The narrative provides a lesson in personal resilience and the importance of chosen bonds when biological ones are severed. People read it to understand the transition from childhood to independence under extreme economic pressure. It offers a practical look at how loyalty and work ethic serve as tools for survival when navigating a landscape of shifting fortunes and industrial change.
- Published
- 1878
- Language
- EN
