Hi! Thanks for your questions. My answers this time around are going to be a little sketchier than usual, because a lot of my books are in my office, and my building and my university library are both shut down, so I don't have access to many of my usual sources. So those of you who think that my responses tend to be longwinded can breathe a sigh of relief!

I don't think I have to go into too much detail about child poverty in Victorian England. Suffice it to say that it was endemic, widespread, and absolutely heartbreaking. As the "outdoor relief" of charity gave way to the "indoor relief" of workhouses and Ragged Schools over the course of the 19th century, the measures being taken to try to care for the staggering number of poor children in some cases only made things worse. And much of that has to do with how the poor were seen and treated.

The term "street Arab" has its origin in Thomas Guthrie's influential 1847 "First Plea for Ragged Schools," describing the awful plight of children in Edinburgh by comparing them to, among others, Arabs. Because I really can't put it any better, here I will extensively quote Lindsay Smith's 2008 article about the way "street Arabs" were depicted in photography:

The by no means inconsequential coinage of the term 'street Arab' in Thomas Guthrie's 'First Plea for Ragged Schools', first published in pamphlet form in Edinburgh in 1847, makes the correlation between the child and a bestial other, between city and desert:

"These Arabs of the city are as wild as those of the desert, and must be broken into three habits, - those of discipline, learning, and industry, not to speak of cleanliness. To accomplish this ... hard words and harder blows are thrown away here. With these, alas! they are too familiar at home, and have learned to be as indifferent to them as the smith's dog to the shower of sparks." (30)

The association is clear: the people, including the children, on the street are associated with the figure of the racial Other, someone who is almost sub-human, associated with dirtiness, poverty, and criminality, an object of pity but also revulsion. Guthrie also tells the story of an orphan child in Africa coming out of the desert to a missionary (the implication is that a kindhearted missionary would help the child), making an appeal to the reader that such a story"will prove as successful with kind hearts at home" (31). But Smith demonstrates that this framing carries a condemnation of the "street Arab" as well, the implication being that they are failing to be authentic, that they are a poor likeness of a "real" Arab, out of place in the British world but not the real thing, either, someone with no proper place or status.

For a mocking portrayal of this figure in the public imagination, check out the poem "The Arab," in which Charles Stuart Calverley imagines a conversation with an "Arab" who the reader soon realizes is a street vendor, selling newspapers and offering to polish the speaker's shoes. It's worth noting where the speaker tells this "Arab" that his skin color is not from his ethnicity ("due to nature") but from blacking shoes: his low-class work has made his skin match that of a "real" Arab, at least in the eyes of the speaker (as has, it seems, his rough life, as the child always has "at least one black eye"). Pretty tellingly, despite his pity for the "Arab," the speaker gives him nothing and sends him away, filled with disgust: "Flee, child, flee!"

Crime and Punishment in Victorian England describes the infamous slum of St Giles: "Here, as in Whitechapel, Shoreditch, the Ratcliffe Highway and other places where survival is a struggle, many of the children seen 'fluttering in rags' are taking their first steps in criminal careers that may one day get them imprisoned, transported, or worse. These 'street arabs' are to be seen 'in vast shoals' at the street markets, loitering with clear intent by shops whose wares are displayed in the street and doorway and prowling in districts in which it might be possible to steal fruit and comestibles from costermongers' barrows..." (etc.) "Some children have been sent out to steal--often at the tender age of only six or seven--and some are hungry, while others are egged on by their mischievous friends" (14-15). As is too often the case, the association of poverty with crime was absolutely ingrained in the Victorians, and often grinding poverty only became visible to other classes when it entered into their lives in the form of crime.

To answer your other question, it was not at all uncommon to give money to people, adults and children alike, to run errands. "Casual" work was becoming increasingly common in Victorian cities, and often people would survive by doing such odd jobs. Look no further than the child Scrooge pays to fetch the turkey to Bob Cratchit's house. Scrooge is rather more generous than Holmes, it seems, as he gives the boy "half-a-crown," five times the sixpence Holmes offers. While I don't have on hand the going rates for casual work, I have found sixpence to be a pretty common price asked for small tasks performed for the middle class, such as holding a horse, carrying luggage, or wrapping a purchase in paper.

Edit: I've since heard that faculty and PhD students can still use the side door to the library to access books, so at least I've got that going for me, which is nice.