"When proud pied April, dress'd in all his trim, Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,"
yet for the rest of the year the coarse grass is carted to their stalls, or they devour what the breweries and distilleries cannot extract from the grain-harvest. Long before "the unfolding star wakes up the shepherd" are the London cows milked; and the great wholesale venders of the commodity bear it in carts to every part of the town, and distribute it to hundreds of itinerants, who are waiting like the water-carriers at the old conduits. But the wholesale venders have ceased to depend upon the suburban cows. The railways bring milk in enormous cans to every station. The suburb has extended, practically, to a circle of fifty miles instead of five. It is evident that a perishable commodity which every one requires at a given hour must be rapidly distributed. The distribution has lost its romance. Misson, in his 'Travels,' published at the beginning of the last century, tell us of the May-games of "the pretty young country girls that serve the town with milk." Alas! the May-games and pretty young country girls have both departed, and a milkwoman has become a very unpoetical personage. There are few indeed of milkwomen who remain. So it is with most of the occupations that associate London with the country. The cry of "Water-cresses" used to be heard from some barefoot nymph of the brook, who at sunrise had dipped her feet into the bubbling runnel, to carry the green luxury to the citizens' breakfast-tables. Water-cresses are now grown like cabbages in gardens.
Of the street trades that are past and forgotten, the small-coal man was one of the most remarkable. He tells a tale of a city with few fires; for who could now imagine a man earning a living by bawling "Small coals" from door to door, without any supply but that in the sack which he carries on his shoulders? His cry was, however, a rival with "Wood to cleave." In a metropolis full of haberdashers, large and small, what chance would an aged man now have with his flattering solicitation of "Pretty pins, pretty women?" He who carries a barrel on his back, with a measure and funnel at his side, bawling "Fine writing-ink," is wanted neither by clerks nor authors. There is a grocer's shop at every turn; and who therefore needs him who salutes us with "Lily-white vinegar?" The history of "cries" is a history of social changes. The working trades, as well as the venders of things that can be bought in every street, are now banished from our thoroughfares. "Old chairs to mend" still salutes us in some retired suburb; and we still see the knife-grinder's wheel; but who vociferates "Any work for John Cooper?" or "A brass pot or an iron pot to mend?" The trades are gone to those who pay scot and lot.
Pots to mend.
There are some occupations of the streets, however, which remain essentially the same, though the form be somewhat varied. The sellers of food are of course amongst these. "Hot peascods," and hot sheep's-feet, are not popular delicacies, as in the time of Lydgate. "Hot wardens," and "Hot codlings," are not the "cries" which invite us to taste of stewed pears and baked apples. But we have still apples hissing over a charcoal fire; and potatoes steaming in a shining apparatus, with savoury salt-butter to put between the "fruit" when it is cut; and chestnuts roasted; and greasy sausages, redolent of onions and marjoram; and crisp brown flounders; and the mutton-pie-man, with his "toss for a penny." Rice-milk, furmety, barley-broth, and saloop are no longer in request. The greatest improvement of London in our own day has been the establishment of coffee-shops, where the artisan may take his breakfast with comfort, and even with luxury; where a good breakfast may be had for three-pence; where no intoxicating liquors are sold; and where the newspapers and the best periodical works may be regularly found.
If we lament over the general decay of the itinerant traders—their uncertain gains, their privations from constant exposure, their want of home comforts, their temptation to drive their children into the streets to make more sales—we lament over what is an inevitable consequence of the general progress of society. Can we correct these evils by saying that the profits of the itinerant traders ought to be raised? Their low condition is a necessary consequence of their carrying on a system of industry which is at variance with the general system of civilization. They may have their uses in districts with a scattered population, because they bring articles of consumption to the door of the consumer. But in densely populated districts they must inevitably be superseded by the shopkeepers. They carry on their industry by a series of individual efforts, which are interfered with by numerous chances and accidents. We are told that the class is extending yearly. But it cannot extend profitably. In many cases it assumes only another form of mendicity. It is a precarious occupation. It can count upon no regular returns. Its gains, such as they are, are like all other uncertain gains—the impulse to occasional profligacy in connection with habitual misery. The costermongers, according to Mr. Mayhew, are drunkards and gamblers,—living without religion or the family ties. Their children are wholly uneducated. These are brought up to assist very early in obtaining their precarious living; and they cleave to a wandering in place of a settled life. Dissociated, thus, from all regular industry, they become the outcasts of the people; and go on swelling the number of those who, in France, are called "the dangerous classes." All classes are dangerous in whom there is none of that self-respect which goes along with domestic comfort—with sobriety, with cleanliness, with a taste for some pursuit that has a tincture of the intellectual. How is such a class to be dealt with? The adult are almost past hope; the young, taken early enough, may be trained into something better. But the very last thing that society has to do is to encourage, by any forced and unnatural process, the accession of numbers to the body, always deriving new competitors from the unfortunate and the idle who have fallen out of regular occupation. Those who learn the necessity of being provident cease to be costermongers. With some, indeed, the profitable sale of an article in the streets may be the first step in an accumulation which will lead to the more profitable sale of an article at a stall, and thence, onward, to the possession of a shop. There have been such instances; and we knew of a remarkable one in a boy who went to a tea-dealer, and said if he could be trusted with one pound of tea he could make a living. He was trusted. In time he wanted no credit, and was a regular and valuable customer to his first patron. He passed out of the itinerant life into the settled; and ultimately became a flourishing shopkeeper.
In striking contrast to the various forms of unskilled labour and irregular trading which we have noticed, may be mentioned an industry which in London has a very perfect organization. In Clerkenwell and the neighbouring parish of Saint Luke's, there are sixteen hundred watchmakers. These are not the artisans whom we see as we pass along the streets of the metropolis, and of the provincial towns, sitting in front of the shop-window diligently repairing or putting together the works of a watch, by the light of day or of a brilliant lamp, each with a magnifying glass pressed under his eyebrow. Nor are they the workers in metal who manufacture the movements,—that is, the wheels—of a watch, for these chiefly dwell in Lancashire. The London watchmakers, thus closely packed in a district which is small compared with the whole area of the metropolis, are those who put the movements together, and supply all the delicate parts of the mechanism, such as the spring and the escapement. They provide also the case and the dial-plate. The degree of the skilled labour employed in these several branches necessarily varies, according to the quality of the instrument to be produced, from the ordinary metal watch to the most luxurious repeater. With some exceptions, the artisans do not work in large factories. They are subdivided according to their respective qualities, amongst small establishments, where a master has several men receiving wages for performing one particular branch of work; or the artisan himself, in his own home, may be an escapement-maker, a spring-maker, a fusee-maker, a maker of hands, an enameller, an engine-turner, a jewelled pivot-hole maker. All this beautiful subdivision of employments has been found necessary for the perfection and the cheapness of watches. The capitalist, who is essentially the watch manufacturer, organizes all these departments of industry. English watches, by this economical system of production, keep their place against the competition of foreign watches; of which we imported, in 1853, fifty-four thousand. The skilled workmen, in all the various subdivisions of the manufacture, are well paid, and take their due rank amongst the great and increasing body of intelligent mechanics.
Within these few years American clocks have been extensively sold in this country. People would once have thought that the business of clockmaking in England would be at an end, if it had been predicted that in 1853 we should import, as we did, a hundred and forty thousand clocks. The goodness and cheapness of American clocks have carried a clock into many a house, that without them would have been deficient of this instrument for keeping all industry in accordance with the extraordinary punctuality which has been forced upon us as an indispensable quality. We owe the general exercise of this virtue to the post and the railroads. No one needs now to be told, as our grandfathers were somewhat roughly told by the sun-dial in the Temple, "Be gone about thy business." The American clocks are produced by factory labour. In Connecticut two hundred and fifty men are employed in one establishment, in making six hundred clocks a-day, the price varying from one dollar to ten, and the average price being three dollars. Each clock passes through sixty different hands; but in every stage the most scientific applications of machinery chiefly produce the excellence and the cheapness.