“Tiddy Diddy Doll.”
day, at open air shows, and on all public occasions. He amused the crowd to his own profit; and some of his humorous nonsense has been preserved.
“Mary, Mary, where are you now, Mary?”
“I live two steps underground, with a wiscom riscom, and why not. Walk in, ladies and gentlemen. My shop is on the second floor backwards, with a brass knocker at the door. Here’s your nice gingerbread, your spiced gingerbread, which will melt in your mouth like a red-hot brickbat, and rumble in your inside like Punch in his wheelbarrow!” He always finished up by singing the fag end of a song—“Tiddy Diddy Doll, lol, lol, lol;” hence his nickname of Tiddy Doll. Hogarth has introduced this character in his Execution scene of the Idle Apprentice at Tyburn. Tiddy Doll had many feeble imitators; and the woman described in the lines that follow, taken from a child’s book of the period, must have been one of them.
Tiddy Diddy Doll, lol, lol, lol,
Tiddy Diddy Doll, dumplings, oh!
Her tub she carries on her head,
Tho’ of’ener under arm.
In merry song she cries her trade,
Her customers to charm.
A halfpenny a plain can buy,
The plum ones cost a penny,
And all the naughty boys will cry
Because they can’t get any.
“Large silver eels!”
Fifty years ago “Young Lambs to Sell, two for a penny,” which still lingers, was a well known cry. They were children’s toys, the fleece made of white cotton-wool, attractively but perhaps a trifle too unnaturally spangled with Dutch gilt. The head was of composition, the cheeks were painted red, there were two black spots to do duty for eyes, and the horns and legs were of tin, which latter adornment, my younger readers may suggest, foreshadowed the insufficiently appreciated tinned mutton of a later period. The addition of a bit of pink tape tied round the neck by way of a collar made a graceful finish, and might be accepted as a proof that the baby sheep was perfectly tame.