The Great Escape:
Secret Hideouts and Teen Hangouts
Transcript coming soon!
In this episode of The Children’s Table, we explore children’s hideouts. Why are we so obsessed with them? We think about how adults have romanticized the idea of kids’ hideouts in sources ranging from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the nineteenth century to J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in the twentieth to rental advertisements in the twenty-first. We then look to historical sources to think through how and why children have sought out hiding spaces — including an interview with some very thoughtful young people about the role of privacy in their lives.
image gallery
reading list
Bachelard, Gaston. 1958. The Poetics of Space. Penguin, 2014.
Barrie, J. M. Peter and Wendy, illustrated by F. D. Bedford, Scriber and Sons, 1911. Project Gutenberg.
Dobbins, Bill. “Jacob Riis: Lighting up the Slums with Flash Photography.” Frame by Frame, 8 March 2018.
Gilfoyle, Timothy J. “Street-rats and Gutter-Snipes: Child Pickpockets and Street Culture in New York City, 1850-1900.” Journal of Social History, vol. 37, no. 4, Summer 2004, pp. 853–862.
Jack Kerowax. “Huck Finn’s Hideout,” Bandcamp.
Margolin, Susan C. “Why Kids Love Building Forts — and Why Experts Say They Might Need Them More Than Ever.” The Washington Post, 18 May 2020.
Nasaw, David. Children of the City: at Work and at Play. Anchor, 2012.
Riis, Jacob August. “Flashes from the Slums: Pictures Taken in Dark Places by the Lighting Process: Some of the Results of a Journey Through the City with an Instantaneous Camera – The Poor, the Idle and the Vicious.” The Sun, 12 February 1888, p. 10. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress.
Sobel, David. Children’s Special Places: Exploring the Role of Forts, Dens, and Bush Houses in Middle Childhood. Wayne State UP, 2022.
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Charles Webster and Company, 1885.
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