Of the Costermongers in Bad Weather and during the Cholera.
“Three wet days,” I was told by a clergyman, who is now engaged in selling stenographic cards in the streets, “will bring the greater part of 30,000 street-people to the brink of starvation.” This statement, terrible as it is, is not exaggerated. The average number of wet days every year in London is, according to the records of the Royal Society, 161—that is to say, rain falls in the metropolis more than three days in each week, and very nearly every other day throughout the year. How precarious a means of living then must street-selling be!
When a costermonger cannot pursue his out-door labour, he leaves it to the women and children to “work the public-houses,” while he spends his time in the beer-shop. Here he gambles away his stock-money oft enough, “if the cards or the luck runs again him;” or else he has to dip into his stock-money to support himself and his family. He must then borrow fresh capital at any rate of interest to begin again, and he begins on a small scale. If it be in the cheap and busy seasons, he may buy a pad of soles for 2s. 6d., and clear 5s. on them, and that “sets him a-going again, and then he gets his silk handkerchief out of pawn, and goes as usual to market.”
The sufferings of the costermongers during the prevalence of the cholera in 1849, were intense. Their customers generally relinquished the consumption of potatoes, greens, fruit, and fish; indeed, of almost every article on the consumption of which the costermongers depend for his daily bread. Many were driven to apply to the parish; “many had relief and many hadn’t,” I was told. Two young men, within the knowledge of one of my informants, became professional thieves, after enduring much destitution. It does not appear that the costermongers manifested any personal dread of the visitation of the cholera, or thought that their lives were imperilled: “We weren’t a bit afraid,” said one of them, “and, perhaps, that was the reason so few costers died of the cholera. I knew them all in Lambeth, I think, and I knew only one die of it, and he drank hard. Poor Waxy! he was a good fellow enough, and was well known in the Cut. But it was a terrible time for us, sir. It seems to me now like a shocking dream. Fish I could’nt sell a bit of; the people had a perfect dread of it—all but the poor Irish, and there was no making a crust out of them. They had no dread of fish, however; indeed, they reckon it a religious sort of living, living on fish,—but they will have it dirt cheap. We were in terrible distress all that time.”