“The poor man allus goes to the cheap shop.”
“Right enough too,” says you.
“Gammon,” says I, for that cheap’s a word as ain’t to be found in reality; it’s a word as my philosophic friend Josef Sprouts would call “a beautiful illoosion.” It’s a ignis something—I don’t quite know what—as cheats men on to follow it, and then bogs them as tight as my brush is bogged in dry weather in the crusty paste. Don’t you never buy nothing cheap. Now, this is the way. You goes and buys cheap butter at fourteen-pence when you might have had it as honest dripping, afore the tater flour and yaller colour was put in, for ninepence. You buys penny candles one at a time, and so gives eight pence a pound when you might have had ’em for seven-pence. You buys: cheap tea at two shillings, when one spoonful of three-shilling goes twice as fur. Working men’s stout bluchers, all brown paper and bosh. Cheap clothes, as falls all to pieces, and shrinks anyhow, till the bottoms of the trousers seem to have made up their minds to be tight knickerbockers. Cheap calico, as is all facing till it’s washed, when it turns out canvas or fine net. Coffee, as is—well, perhaps what I heard about burnt liver ain’t true, after all; but you may depend upon one thing, and that is, that the man as buys the best of everything in a plain way lives the cheapest. Look at flour. Well, say the best is a penny a quartern more—and the wife seems so satisfied because she thinks she is saving. Why, it’s a mistake altogether, and if you feed yourself with so much husk amongst your corn, mustn’t you have more corn to supply the nutriment? Don’t tell me! I haven’t made paste so many years without being a good judge of flour.
Cheap things is nasty. At least that’s wrong, for cheap things is good, and the real cheap things is the best of everything; and what you’ve got to do is this—have a little, but have it good. I’ve watched the dodges long enough to know; I’ve stuck up the cheap advertising bills, and then looked into it, and blowed the missus up for being so took in: cheap soap as is kept wet and runs all to a mosh in the water; cheap rice full of grit; cheap bacon as shrinks in the pot; cheap currants with plenty of stones; cheap meat—there, if there is a cruel thing perpetrated on the poor people of London streets, it’s that sending up diseased beasts, sheep, and pigs, to be sold cheap; and if I were the Lord Mayor of London, or either of the other magistrates (which ain’t likely to be the case this year, because the election’s over, and there ain’t a bench at liberty) I’d just tar the gentlemen as sells the stuff with their own brush, I’d—I would, and no mistake—I’d feed ’em with their own meat—now then!
I’ve stuck so much poetry about cheap clothes for the tailors, and strong tea for the groshers, that I’m sick of it; but I know one piece right off by heart, and at the end of a verse it says:—
“Oh, God, that bread should be so dear,
And flesh and blood so cheap!”
You know! “Song of the shirt.” Cheap shirts for cheap people, who make fortunes out of the poor.
“Oh,” you’ll say, “that was only a made-up thing.”
What! here, save up your pence and go down Bethnal Green, or amongst the tottering old houses in Spitalfields, places where I can find heaps of spots for sticking bills, and you can hunt ’em out for yourself; women sewing their shrouds, hard at work at ’em, doing a little bit every day till they get ’em done, and then the parish sends a cheap coffin, supplied by the lowest bidder, the undertaker as does these things by contract on the cheap fetches the rough black case; and then “rattle his bones over the stones,” and off to the cemetery; and you and I will buy the cheap shirt, and find as the calico’s thin, and the buttons come off, and the stitches fall out almost from our bargain.
“Just come here, will you?” says a p’leeceman to me one day as I was a-sticking an “Alarming Sacrifice” against the wall, and a thinking to myself it was like the way we used to gammon the old hens at home, shamming to throw down barley, so that they’d come running and clucking like fun to find nought; while here was these rogues a-using me to scatter their barley about to bring all the old London hens a-clucking over their bargains in calicoes and dresses, bought at unheard-of prices, “in bankruptcy.” “Just come in here a minute,” says the policeman, and I leaves off at “Alarming Sac—;” and I daresay there was an alarming sack made out of the noodles, for that bill never got finished, but stopped there till another sticker went and stuck the “Christy’s” over it. I follows my chap in, carrying my bills and crutches and paste, on account of the boys, and follows him right upstairs—up stairs as wern’t safe—to a miserable attic, where there was a poor thing lying on a bed—at least on a few rags, and she dressed in rags herself. There was the rain pelting against the broken windows and making a puddle on the floor; the wind whistling down the chimney, where there was no grate, only a few bits or iron hoop resting on some bricks, but no fire; whilst the rest of the furniture, after the ricketty bedstead, was a little table, and a chair with the bottom sticking down like part of a fish basket.