And fought like a brick for Lord John.’”
Adopting the calculation of my first informant, and giving a profit of 150 per cent., we find 150l. yearly expended in the streets, in second editions, or probably it might be more correct to say 200l. in a year of great events, and 50l. in a year when such events are few.
Of the Standing Patterers.
The standing patterer I have already described in his resemblance to the mountebank of old, and how, like his predecessor, he required a “pitch” and an audience. I need but iterate that these standing patterers are men who remain in one place, until they think they have exhausted the custom likely to accrue there, or until they are removed by the police; and who endeavour to attract attention to their papers, or more commonly pamphlets, either by means of a board with coloured pictures upon it, illustrative of the contents of what they sell, or else by gathering a crowd round about them, in giving a lively or horrible description of the papers or books they are “working.” The former is what is usually denominated in street technology, “board work.” A few of the standing patterers give street recitations or dialogues.
Some of the “illustrations” most “in vogue” of late for the boards of the standing patterers were,—the flogging of the nuns of Minsk, the blood streaming from their naked shoulders, (anything against the Emperor of Russia, I was told, was a good street subject for a painting); the young girl, Sarah Thomas, who murdered her mistress in Bristol, dragged to the gallows by the turnkeys and Calcraft, the hangman; Calcraft himself, when charged with “starving his mother;” Haynau, in the hands of the draymen; the Mannings, and afterwards the Sloanes. The two last-mentioned were among the most elaborate, each having a series of “compartments,” representing the different stages of the events in which those heroes and heroines flourished. I shall speak afterwards of street-artists who are the painters of these boards, and then describe the pictures more fully. There are also, as before alluded to, what may be called “cocks” in street paintings, as well as street literature.
Two of the most favourite themes of the standing patterers were, however, the “Annals of the White House in Soho-square,” and the “Mysteries of Mesmerism.” Both supplied subjects to the boards.
The White House was a notorious place of ill fame. Some of the apartments, it is said, were furnished in a style of costly luxury; while others were fitted up with springs, traps, and other contrivances, so as to present no appearance other than that of an ordinary room, until the machinery was set in motion. In one room, into which some wretched girl might be introduced, on her drawing a curtain as she would be desired, a skeleton, grinning horribly, was precipitated forward, and caught the terrified creature in his, to all appearance, bony arms. In another chamber the lights grew dim, and then seemed gradually to go out. In a little time some candles, apparently self-ignited, revealed to a horror stricken woman, a black coffin, on the lid of which might be seen, in brass letters, Anne, or whatever name it had been ascertained the poor wretch was known by. A sofa, in another part of the mansion, was made to descend into some place of utter darkness; or, it was alleged, into a room in which was a store of soot or ashes.
Into the truth or exaggeration of these and similar statements, it is not my business to inquire; but the standing patterer made the most of them. Although the house in question has been either rebuilt or altered—I was told that each was the case—and its abominable character has ceased to apply to it for some years, the patterer did not scruple to represent it as still in existence (though he might change the venue as to the square at discretion) and that all the atrocities perpetrated—to which I have not ventured even to allude—were still the ordinary procedures of “high life.” Neither did the standing patterer scruple, as one man assured me, to “name names;” to attribute vile deeds to any nobleman or gentleman whose name was before the public; and to embellish his story by an allusion to a recent event. He not unfrequently ended with a moral exhortation to all ladies present to avoid this “abode of iniquity for the rich.” The board was illustrated with skeletons, coffins, and other horrors; but neither on it, nor in a hardly intelligible narrative which the patterer sold, was there anything indecent.
The “Mysteries of Mesmerism” was an account of the marvels of that “newly-discovered and most wonderful power in natur and art.” With it Dr. Elliotson’s, or some well-known name, was usually associated, and any marvel was “pattered,” according to the patterer’s taste and judgment. The illustrations were of persons, generally women, in a state of coma, but in this also there was no indecency; nor was there in the narrative sold.
Of these two popular exhibitions there are, I am informed, none now in town, and both, I was told, was more the speculations of a printer, who sent out men, than in the hands of the regular patterers.