In June 1873, an eleven-year-old boy stood before the magistrates at Richmond Petty Sessions in Surrey.

He'd stolen gooseberries from a garden - the whole lot valued at a shilling. They gave him one month's hard labour and five years in a reformatory. He already had three previous convictions. He was eleven.

Behind him was a household that the courts knew even better than they knew him. A father who'd threatened to kill his mother. A brother already lost to the prison system. Parents who appeared in the petty sessions so often that a magistrate once described where they lived as "an extraordinary neighbourhood."

His name was John Greening, and by every measure the Victorian system had, he was going the same way as the rest of them. What happened next is a story I didn't expect to find. This is his life, told through the records that survived him.