These covered stalls thus surrounding Smithfield, belonged to dealers in gingerbread, toys, hardware, garters, pocket books, trinkets, and articles of all prices, from a halfpenny to a half sovereign. The gingerbread stalls varied in size, and were conspicuously fine from the Dutch gold on their different shaped ware. The usual frontage of the stalls was 8, 10, 12 feet, but some as large as 25 feet. They were 6 feet 6 inches or 7 feet high in front and from 4 feet 6 to 5 feet at back: and all formed of canvass tightly stretched on light poles. The fronts were to the pavements. The houses of business in the streets had their shutters up, and doors closed.
The Shows of all kinds had their fronts towards the area of Smithfield, and their backs close against the backs of the stalls. The centre of the area was thus entirely open, and from the carriage way through it all the shows might be seen at one view. Against the pens at the side there were not any shows. No carriages or horsemen were permitted to enter the fair on account of the crowded masses of people present....
It has to be noted that there was an unusually large assemblage of shows at the fair, including several menageries.
1826. The “Mirror of the Months” contained the following graphic anticipation of the fair to be held this year:—
Another year arrives, and spite of Corporation “resolutions,” and references to “the Committee,” and “Reports” and “recommendations” to abolish the fair, it is held again. Now arrives that saturnalia of nondescript noise and nonconformity “Bartlemy Fair;” when that prince of peace-officers the Lord Mayor changes his sword of state into a six-penny trumpet, and becomes the lord of misrule and the patron of pick-pockets; and lady Holland’s name leads an unlettered mob instead of a lettered one; when Richardson maintains, during three whole days and a half, a managerial supremacy that must be not a little enviable even in the eyes of Mr. Elliston himself; and Mr. Gyngell holds, during the same period, a scarcely less distinguished station as the Apollo of maid servants; when the incomparable (not to say eternal) young Master Saunder’s rides on horseback to the admiration of all beholders, in the person of his eldest son; and when all the giants in the land, and the dwarfs too, make a general muster, and each proves to be according to the most correct measurement at least a foot taller, or shorter, than any other in the fair, and in fact the only one worth seeing,—“all the rest being impostors!” In short, when every booth in the fair combined in itself the attractions of all the rest, and so perplexes with its irresistible merit the rapt imagination of the half-holiday school boys who have got but sixpence to spend upon the whole, that they eye the outsides of each in a state of pleasing despair, till their leave of absence is expired twice over, and then return home filled with visions of giants and gingerbread nuts, and dream all night long of what they have not seen.
The fair was small, and one of its principal features was the bookstalls, which occupied the whole of the west side of Giltspur Street.
1827. The fair was again large, and for the first time I am enabled to present a return of the cash returns of the various places of amusement there assembled. The result will be startling to those who have hitherto failed to realize the importance with which the fair was regarded: Wombwell’s menagerie, £1,700; Richardson’s theatre, £1,200; Atkins’s menagerie, £1,000; Morgan’s menagerie, £150; exhibition of “pig-faced lady,” £150; ditto, fat boy and girl, £140; ditto, head of William Corder, quaker, who was hanged at Chelmsford for murder of Maria Martin—the crime being revealed through a dream of the victim’s mother, £100; Ballard’s menagerie, £90; Ball’s theatre, £80; diorama of the battle of Navarino, £60; the Chinese jugglers, £50; Pike’s theatre, £40; a fire-eater, £30; Frazer’s theatre, £26; Keyes and Line’s theatre, £20; exhibition of a Scotch giant, £20. The comparative attractiveness of the different sights affords room for reflection. Of course these entertainments only represent a portion of the cash transactions of the fair.
Lord Kensington at length intimated that considering the corrupt state of the fair, and the nuisance caused by it in the neighbourhood of Smithfield, he would now throw no obstacle in the way of its abolition. His share of the tolls was from £30 to £40 a year; the estimated value of these was from £500 to £600. The Corporation accordingly bought up these tolls, and henceforward the sole rights and interest in the fair became vested in the City.
The End.—1839. The London City Mission, having pointed out to the Corporation the moral pollution spread by the retention of the fair, the matter was again referred to the City Lands Committee, who referred the question to Mr. Charles Pearson the then able City Solicitor; and he speedily discovered a rational mode of dealing with it: he advised an absolute refusal to let standings for show-booths in a fair that was created in the first instance for the purposes of trade!
The Markets Committee had in the meanwhile been working in the direction of largely increasing the tolls for stalls, &c. The effect being that in 1836 they had increased to £162, 1838 to £284; this year £305. The smaller the number of booths the more each seemed able to pay, showing that the popular patronage of the fair was still considerable.