Palace and Hovel; Or, Phases of London Life

by Daniel Joseph Kirwan

ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY'S GARDENS.

This street, or road, is called the "New Cut," and is situated in Lambeth on the Surrey side of the Thames. It is reached from the City by Waterloo Bridge and the Waterloo road, and from the West End by Lambeth and Vauxhall bridges. Thousands are born, baptized, many beget children and die within the municipality of the Great Metropolis, and yet have never seen the New Cut—nay, have never even heard of it, or if they did, the word would have as much meaning to them as the plains of El Ghizeh, or the source of the Nile to a Bow Cockney. Yet there are thousands who are born here in this New Cut who live and die in it and make a living for themselves, after a fashion, who, if not content with, are certainly unaware of any method of changing or bettering their lot in this life.

Narrow, dark, and mean streets run contiguous to the New Cut, and branch from it in a winding, snaky way. A decently-dressed man is not safe in this street, and the only sound of civilization to cheer him, once lost in the mazes of these festering lanes and alleys, teeming with low pot-houses, tap-rooms, and wild-looking children, bold, bad-looking desperadoes of men, and reckless, obscene women, is the low, rumbling sound coming like the approaching thunder to his ears every few minutes as the loaded passenger trains dash to and fro on the Northwestern and Southeastern Railways.

The New Cut runs into the Lower Marsh and is flanked by Wootton, White Horse, Collingwood, Eaton, Marlboro streets, and the Broad Wall. To the west are Thomas, Isabella, and Granby streets, and from all this misery and destitution of a quarter where the inhabitants are packed like rabbits in a well-stocked warren, the road leads through the Upper Marsh down to the rare pleasaunce or garden of the palace of the Archbishop of Canterbury, one of the most sumptous ecclesiastical retreats in England. The Archbishop's gardens, although located in the heart of a populous city, cover as much ground, it is calculated, as gives sleeping and eating room to 11,000 human beings in the New Cut district.

It is true that the river rolls sluggishly five or six hundred yards below the New Cut, and those who are tired of dog's meat, rotten vegetables, and the offal of the street markets for their common food, and of sleeping eight in a room on straw which is not even clean, can at any time deliver their bodies from further pain and starvation, and their minds from a daily never-ending struggle as to how the dog's meat and decayed offal may be procured, by a quick plunge in the river, near by.

This quarter is the principal resort of the "costermongers" of London. The word "costermonger" has an equivalent which is better known as "peddler." All those who vend or hawk vegetables, fruit, carrion meat, game, fowl, ginger beer, nuts, or, in fact, any of the numerous articles or commodities of refuse merchandise found on the barrows and wagons of the London peddlers, are called by the London term "costermongers." The word is an old one used by Shakespeare, and therefore has, if none other, the merit of antiquity of the most genuine kind.

There are in London proper, embracing its suburbs, of both sexes—including men, women, and children—according to information which I had procured from the police and physicians, who have means of knowing, about 23,000 costermongers. These people are from daybreak until midnight in the open air, I might say, for their marketing is done as early as four or five o'clock in the morning; and then, after an hour or so spent in marketing, comes the cheap, scanty breakfast, consisting of a pound of bread, a "saveloy," which is a sort of a sausage, at a penny a piece, about four inches long and two inches in circumference, quite succulent to the costermonger's palate, or perhaps a piece of beef or bacon of the kind that is vended from barrows in the London streets at two pence a pound, the refuse of the butchers' shops and pieces unfit for a ready sale.

Among these refuse pieces are small portions of ham, shoulders, and pork, fragments of bacon, "snag" pieces, and mutton, and a very suspicious veal, which is often sold by these same hawkers in the suburbs to old maids for cats' meat. Sometimes the "coster" will take a pint of sloppy coffee, which he gets for three half-pence, with his brief breakfast; at other times he prefers a quartern of gin "neat," at two-pence; and again he will be satisfied with a mug of beer at two-pence. As early as 7 o'clock in the morning the hideous noises, which can only come from the throat of a costermonger, are heard in the London streets, awakening those who wish to sleep late, and, to make matters worse, no person, unless the costermonger himself, can by any application ever understand the exact words of their cries. They are only to be recognized by sound, and, therefore, it is always necessary to appear at a window or doorway in order to discover the precise article which the coster wishes you to buy.

SALE OF WATER CRESSES.