Not all circuses were alike, of course. Eléonore Rimbault, in her recent (very theoretical) article on the childhood memories of Indian circus children, enumerates quite a few interviewees whose destitute economic status engendered an early departure for the circus. Almost every description of circuses -- not those of the fancy kind, though -- mentions children. During the nineteenth century, some of the more famous ones developed the hiring of children into a more paternalistic apprenticeship-like relationship, probably for more than one reason (see, for example, this article with evidence from Australia).

The figure of the itinerant child was very common in nineteenth-century literature. Hector Malot's Sans Famille/Nobody's Boy (1878) was inspired by another type of itinerant child workers, the street musicians. As John E. Zucchi showed in his book, they became a problem of interest to legislators and reformers throughout Western Europe and the United States. Like among Rimbault's Indian interviewees, most of these musicians were raised in impoverished families that could hardly feed them. Their often rural origin was hard to trace as they migrated to the large city and sometimes across the ocean, whether by luck or misfortune.

Whether youth ran away to join the circus is a different issue. There is some evidence of that happening, for example in late-nineteenth-century Virginia, but it was by no means the standard way to acquire child laborers for your circus. Child custody, after all, is a serious matter. It was much more common to be sold into a circus, if not for money than at least for the promise of feeding the child.

Still, some did: Betty Broadbent, the "Tattooed Venus" of the United States, was born in Florida, moved with her parents to Philadelphia, and left the increasingly sexualized industry of horrifying your audience with your tattoos to join the circus. However, by then, she was around 18 (See Margot Mifflin, Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo [1997]). Indeed, runaways were likely around the age of finishing school when they joined the circus.

Running away to join the circus was more of a fantasy than a reality. It was also a great literary trope. Most children who found themselves as circus workers, however, joined the circus due to family strategy and poverty. The prevalent focus on child workers in factories and industry made their plight somewhat unnoticed (the street musicians, who worked in capital cities, were somewhat more noticeable) until later in the nineteenth century.