London Labour and the London Poor, Vol. 1

by Henry Mayhew

OF THE STREET-SELLERS OF STATIONERY, LITERATURE, AND THE FINE ARTS.

We now come to a class of street-folk wholly distinct from any before treated of. As yet we have been dealing principally with the uneducated portion of the street-people—men whom, for the most part, are allowed to remain in nearly the same primitive and brutish state as the savage—creatures with nothing but their appetites, instincts, and passions to move them, and made up of the same crude combination of virtue and vice—the same generosity combined with the same predatory tendencies as the Bedouins of the desert—the same love of revenge and disregard of pain, and often the same gratitude and susceptibility to kindness as the Red Indian—and, furthermore, the same insensibility to female honour and abuse of female weakness, and the same utter ignorance of the Divine nature of the Godhead as marks either Bosjesman, Carib, or Thug.

The costers and many other of the street-sellers before described, however, are bad—not so much from their own perversity as from our selfishness. That they partake of the natural evil of human nature is not their fault but ours,—who would be like them if we had not been taught by others better than ourselves to controul the bad and cherish the good principles of our hearts.

The street-sellers of stationery, literature, and the fine arts, however, differ from all before treated of in the general, though far from universal, education of the sect. They constitute principally the class of street-orators, known in these days as “patterers,” and formerly termed “mountebanks,”—people who, in the words of Strutt, strive to “help off their wares by pompous speeches, in which little regard is paid either to truth or propriety.” To patter, is a slang term, meaning to speak. To indulge in this kind of oral puffery, of course, requires a certain exercise of the intellect, and it is the consciousness of their mental superiority which makes the patterers look down upon the costermongers as an inferior body, with whom they object either to be classed or to associate. The scorn of some of the “patterers” for the mere costers is as profound as the contempt of the pickpocket for the pure beggar. Those who have not witnessed this pride of class among even the most degraded, can form no adequate idea of the arrogance with which the skilled man, no matter how base the art, looks upon the unskilled. “We are the haristocracy of the streets,” was said to me by one of the street-folks, who told penny fortunes with a bottle. “People don’t pay us for what we gives ’em, but only to hear us talk. We live like yourself, sir, by the hexercise of our hintellects—we by talking, and you by writing.”

But notwithstanding the self-esteem of the patterers, I am inclined to think that they are less impressionable and less susceptible of kindness than the costers whom they despise. Dr. Conolly has told us that, even among the insane, the educated classes are the most difficult to move and govern through their affections. They are invariably suspicious, attributing unworthy motives to every benefit conferred, and consequently incapable of being touched by any sympathy on the part of those who may be affected by their distress. So far as my experience goes it is the same with the street-patterers. Any attempt to befriend them is almost sure to be met with distrust. Nor does their mode of life serve in any way to lessen their misgivings. Conscious how much their own livelihood depends upon assumption and trickery, they naturally consider that others have some “dodge,” as they call it, or some latent object in view when any good is sought to be done them. The impulsive costermonger, however, approximating more closely to the primitive man, moved solely by his feelings, is as easily humanized by any kindness as he is brutified by any injury.

The patterers, again, though certainly more intellectual, are scarcely less immoral than the costers. Their superior cleverness gives them the power of justifying and speciously glossing their evil practices, but serves in no way to restrain them; thus affording the social philosopher another melancholy instance of the evil of developing the intellect without the conscience—of teaching people to know what is morally beautiful and ugly, without teaching them at the same time to feel and delight in the one and abhor the other—or, in other words, of quickening the cunning and checking the emotions of the individual.

Among the patterers marriage is as little frequent as among the costermongers; with the exception of the older class, who “were perhaps married before they took to the streets.” Hardly one of the patterers, however, has been bred to a street life; and this constitutes another line of demarcation between them and the costermongers.

The costers, we have seen, are mostly hereditary wanderers—having been as it were born to frequent the public thoroughfares; some few of the itinerant dealers in fish, fruit, and vegetables, have it is true been driven by want of employment to adopt street-selling as a means of living, but these are, so to speak, the aliens rather than the natives of the streets. The patterers, on the other hand, have for the most part neither been born and bred nor driven to a street life—but have rather taken to it from a natural love of what they call “roving.” This propensity to lapse from a civilized into a nomad state—to pass from a settler into a wanderer—is a peculiar characteristic of the pattering tribe. The tendency however is by no means extraordinary; for ethnology teaches us, that whereas many abandon the habits of civilized life to adopt those of a nomadic state of existence, but few of the wandering tribes give up vagabondising and betake themselves to settled occupations. The innate “love of a roving life,” which many of the street-people themselves speak of as the cause of their originally taking to the streets, appears to be accompanied by several peculiar characteristics; among the most marked of these are an indomitable “self-will” or hatred of the least restraint or controul—an innate aversion to every species of law or government, whether political, moral, or domestic—a stubborn, contradictory nature—an incapability of continuous labour, or remaining long in the same place occupied with the same object, or attending to the same subject—an unusual predilection for amusements, and especially for what partakes of the ludicrous—together with a great relish of all that is ingenious, and so finding extreme delight in tricks and frauds of every kind. There are two patterers now in the streets (brothers)—well-educated and respectably connected—who candidly confess they prefer that kind of life to any other, and would not leave it if they could.

Nor are the patterers less remarkable than the costermongers for their utter absence of all religious feeling. There is, however, this distinction between the two classes—that whereas the creedlessness of the one is but the consequence of brutish ignorance, that of the other is the result of natural perversity and educated scepticism—as the street-patterers include many men of respectable connections, and even classical attainments. Among them, may be found the son of a military officer, a clergyman, a man brought up to the profession of medicine, two Grecians of the Blue-coat School, clerks, shopmen, and a class who have been educated to no especial calling—some of the latter being the natural sons of gentlemen and noblemen—and who, when deprived of the support of their parents or friends, have taken to the streets for bread. Many of the younger and smarter men, I am assured, reside with women of the town, though they may not be dependent for their livelihood on the wages got by the infamy of these women. Not a few of the patterers, too, in their dress and appearance, present but little difference to that of the “gent.” Some wear a moustache, while others indulge in a Henri-Quatre beard. The patterers are, moreover, as a body, not distinguished by that good and friendly feeling one to another which is remarkable among costermongers. If an absence of heartiness and good fellowship be characteristic of an aristocracy—as some political philosophers contend—then the patterers may indeed be said to be the aristocrats of the streets.

The patterers or oratorical street-sellers include among their class many itinerant traders, other than the wandering “paper-workers”—as those vending the several varieties of street-literature are generally denominated. The Cheap Jacks, or oratorical hucksters of hardware at fairs and other places, are among the most celebrated and humorous of this class. The commercial arts and jests of some of these people, display considerable cleverness. Many of their jokes, it is true, are traditional—and as purely a matter of parrotry as the witticisms of the “funny gentlemen” on the stage, but their ready adaptation of accidental circumstances to the purposes of their business, betrays a modicum of wit far beyond that which falls to the share of ordinary “low comedians.” The street-vendors of cough drops—infallible cures for the toothache and other ailments—also belong to the pattering class. These are, as was before stated, the remains of the obsolete mountebanks of England and the saltinbanque of France—a class of al fresco orators who derived their names from the bench—the street pulpit, rostrum, or platform—that they ascended, in order the better to deliver their harangues. The street jugglers, actors, and showmen, as well as the street-sellers of grease-removing compositions, corn-salve, razor-paste, plating-balls, waterproof blacking, rat poisons, sovereigns sold for wagers, and a multiplicity of similar street-trickeries—such as oratorical begging—are other ingenious and wordy members of the same chattering, jabbering, or “pattering” fraternity. These will all be spoken of under the head of the different things they respectively sell or do. For the present we have only to deal with that portion of the “pattering” body who are engaged in the street sale of literature—or the “paper-workers” as they call themselves. The latter include the “running patterers,” or “death-hunters;” being men (no women) engaged in vending last dying speeches and confessions—in hawking “se-cond edi-tions” of newspapers—or else in “working,” that is to say, in getting rid of what are technically termed “cocks;” which, in polite language, means accounts of fabulous duels between ladies of fashion—of apocryphal elopements, or fictitious love-letters of sporting noblemen and certain young milliners not a hundred miles from the spot—“cooked” assassinations and sudden deaths of eminent individuals—pretended jealous affrays between Her Majesty and the Prince Consort (but these papers are now never worked)—or awful tragedies, including mendacious murders, impossible robberies, and delusive suicides.