Until the “respectable” press become a more healthful public instructor, we have no right to blame the death-hunter, who is but an imitator—a follower—and that for a meal. So strong has this morbid feeling about criminals become, that an earl’s daughter, who had “an order” to see Bedlam, would not leave the place until she had obtained Oxford’s autograph for her album! The rich vulgar are but the poor vulgar—without an excuse for their vulgarity.
“Next to murders, fires are tidy browns,” I was told by a patterer experienced both in “murders” and “fires.” The burning of the old Houses of Parliament was very popular among street-sellers, and for the reason which ensures popularity to a commercial people; it was a source of profit, and was certainly made the most of. It was the work of incendiaries,—of ministers, to get rid of perplexing papers,—of government officers with troublesome accounts to balance,—of a sporting lord, for a heavy wager,—of a conspiracy of builders,—and of “a unsuspected party.” The older “hands” with whom I conversed on the subject, all agreed in stating that they “did well” on the fire. One man said, “No, sir, it wasn’t only the working people that bought of me, but merchants and their clerks. I s’pose they took the papers home with ’em for their wives and families, which is a cheap way of doing, as a newspaper costs 3d. at least. But stop, sir,—stop; there wasn’t no threepennies then,—nothing under 6d., if they wasn’t more; I can’t just say, but it was better for us when newspapers was high. I never heard no sorrow expressed,—not in the least. Some said it was a good job, and they wished the ministers was in it.” The burning of the Royal Exchange was not quite so beneficial to the street-sellers, but “was uncommon tidy.” The fire at the Tower, however, was almost as great a source of profit as that of the Houses of Parliament, and the following statement shows the profit reaped.
My informant had been a gentleman’s servant, his last place being with a gentleman in Russell-square, who went to the East Indies, and his servant was out of a situation so long that he “parted with everything.” When he was at the height of his distress, he went to see the fire at the Tower, as he “had nothing better to do.” He remained out some hours, and before he reached his lodging, men passed him, crying the full and true particulars of the fire. “I bought one,” said the man, “and changed my last shilling. It was a sudden impulse, for I saw people buy keenly. I never read it, but only looked at the printer’s name. I went to him at the Dials, and bought some, and so I went into the paper trade. I made 6s. or 7s. some days, while the Tower lasted; and 3s. and 4s. other days, when the first polish was off. I sold them mostly at 1d. a piece at first. It was good money then. The Tower was good, or middling good, for from 14 to 20 days. There was at least 100 men working nothing but the Tower. There’s no great chance of any more great buildings being burnt; worse luck. People don’t care much about private fires. A man in this street don’t heed so much who’s burnt to death in the next. But the foundation-stone of the new Royal Exchange—fire led to that—was pretty fair, and portraits of Halbert went off, so that it was for two or three days as good as the Tower. Fires is our best friends next to murders, if they’re good fires. The hopening of the Coal Exchange was rather tidy. I’ve been in the streets ever since, and don’t see how I could possibly get out of them. At first I felt a great degradation at being driven to the life. I shunned grooms and coachmen, as I might be known to them. I didn’t care for others. That sort of feeling wears out though. I’m a widower now, and my family feels, as I did at first, that what I’m doing is ‘low.’ They won’t assist—though they may give me 1s. now and then—but they won’t assist me to leave the streets. They’ll rather blame me for going into them, though there was only that, or robbing, or starving. The fire at Ben. Caunt’s, where the poor children was burnt to hashes, was the best of the private house fires that I’ve worked, I think. I made 4s. on it one day. He was the champion once, and was away at a fight at the time, and it was a shocking thing, and so people bought.”
After the burning of York Minster by Jonathan Martin, I was told by an old hand, the (street) destruction of the best known public buildings in the country was tried; such as Canterbury Cathedral, Dover Castle, the Brighton Pavilion, Edinburgh Castle, or Holyrood House—all known to “travelling” patterers—but the success was not sufficiently encouraging. It was no use, I was told, firing such places as Hampton Court or Windsor Castle, for unless people saw the reflection of a great fire, they wouldn’t buy.
Of the Sellers of Second Editions.
These “second editions” are, and almost universally, second or later editions of the newspapers, morning and evening, but three-fourths of the sale may be of the evening papers, and more especially of the Globe and Standard.
I believe that there is not now in existence—unless it be in a workhouse and unknown to his fellows, or engaged in some other avocation and lost sight of by them—any one who sold “second editions” (the Courier evening paper being then in the greatest demand) at the time of the Duke of York’s Walcheren expedition, at the period of the battle of the Nile, during the continuance of the Peninsular war, or even at the battle of Waterloo. There were a few old men—some of whom had been soldiers or sailors, and others who have simulated it—surviving within these 5 or 6 years, and some later, who “worked Waterloo,” but they were swept off, I was told, by the cholera.
I was assured by a gentlemen who had a perfect remembrance of the “second editions” (as they were generally called) sold in the streets, and who had often bought them upwards of forty years ago, that a sketch in the “Monthly Review,” in a notice of Scott’s “Lord of the Isles” (published in 1815), gave the best notion he had met with of what the second edition sale really was. At the commencement of the sixth canto of his poem, Sir Walter, somewhat too grandiloquently, in the judgment of his reviewer, asks—