London Labour and the London Poor, Vol. 1

by Henry Mayhew

Of the Street-sale of Memorandum-books and Almanacks.

The memorandum-books in demand in street-sale are used for weekly “rent-books.” The payment of the rent is entered by the landlord, and the production of one of these books, showing a punctuality of payment, perhaps for years, is one of the best “references” that can be given by any one in search of a new lodging. They are bought also for the entrance of orders, and then of prices, in the trade at chandler’s shops, &c., where weekly or monthly accounts are run. All, or nearly all, the street-stationers sell memorandum-books, and in addition to them, there may be, I am told, sometimes as many as fifty poor persons, including women and children, who sell memorandum-books with other trifling articles, not necessarily stationery, but such things as stay-laces or tapes. If a man sell memorandum-books alone it is because his means limit him to that stock, he being at the time, what I heard a patterer describe as, a “dry-bread cove.” The price is 6d. the dozen, or 9d. (with almanacks pasted inside the cover), and thirteen to the dozen. No more than 1d. is obtained in the streets for any kind of memorandum-books.

The almanack street trade, I heard on all hands, had become a mere nothing. “What else can you expect, sir,” said one street-seller, “when so many publicans sends almanacks round, or gives them away to their customers; and when the slop tailors’ shilling-a-day men thrust one into people’s hands at every corner? It was a capital trade once, before the duty was taken off—capital! The duty wasn’t in our way so much as in the shop-keepers’, though they did a good deal on the sly in unstamped almanacks. Why of a night in October I’ve many a time cleared 5s. and more by selling in the public-houses almanacks at 2d. and 3d. a-piece (they cost me 1s. and 1s. 2d. a dozen at that time). Anything that way, when Government’s done, has a ready sale; people enjoys it; and I suppose no man, as ever was, thinks it much harm to do a tax-gatherer! I don’t pay the income-tax myself (laughing). One evening I sold, just by Blackfriars-bridge, fourteen dozen of diamond almanacks to fit into hat-crowns. I was liable, in course, and ran a risk. I sold them mostly at 1d. a piece, but sometimes got 6d. for three. I cleared between 6s. and 7s. The ‘diamonds’ cost me 8d. a dozen.”

The street almanack trade is now carried on by the same parties as I have specified in my account of memorandum-books. Those sold are of any cheap kind, costing wholesale 6d. a dozen, but they are almost always announced as “Moore’s.”

Of the Street-sale of Pocket-books and Diaries.

The sale of pocket-books, in the streets, is not, I was told by several persons, “a living for a man now-a-days.” Ten years ago it was common to find men in the streets offering “half-crown pocket-books” for 1s., and holding them open so as to display the engravings, if there were any. The street-sale usually takes place in March, when the demand for the regular trade has ceased, and the publishers dispose of their unsold stock. The trade is now, I am assured, only about a tenth of its former extent. The reason assigned for the decline is that almanacks, diaries, &c., are so cheap that people look upon 1s. as an enormous price, even for a “beautiful morocco-bound pocket-book,” as the street-seller proclaims it. The binding is roan (a dressed sheep-skin, morocco being a goat-skin), an imitation of morocco, but the pocket-books are really those which in the October preceding have been published in the regular way of trade. Some few of them may, however, have been damaged, and these are bought by the street-people as a “job lot,” and at a lower price than that paid in the regular way; which is 4s. 6d. to 5s. 6d. the dozen, thirteen to the dozen. The “job lot” is sometimes bought for 2s. 6d. a dozen, and sold at 6d. each, or as low as 4d.,—for street-sellers generally bewail their having often to come down to “fourpenny-bits, as they’re going so much now.” One man told me that he was four days last March in selling a dozen pocket-books, though the weather was not unfavourable, and that his profit was 5s. Engravings of the “fashions,” the same man told me, were “no go now.” Even poorly-dressed women (but they might, he thought, be dress-makers) had said to him the last time he displayed a pocket-book with fashions—“They’re out now.” The principal supplier of pocket-books, &c., to the street-trade is in Bride-lane, Fleet-street. Commercial diaries are bought and sold at the same rate as pocket-books; but the sale becomes smaller and smaller.

I am informed that “last season” there were twenty men, all street-traders in “paper,” or “anything that was up,” at other times, selling pocket-books and diaries. For this trade Leicester-square is a favourite place. Calculating, from the best data I can command, that each of those men took 15s. weekly for a month (half of it their profit), we find 60l. expended in the streets in this purchase. Ledgers are sometimes sold in the streets; but as the sale is more a hawker’s than a regular street-seller’s, an account of the traffic is not required by my present subject.

Of the Street-sellers of Songs.

These street-traffickers, with the exception, in a great degree, of the “pinners-up,” are of the same class, but their callings are diversified. There are long song-sellers, ballad-sellers (who are generally singers of the ballads they vend, unless they are old and infirm, and offer ballads instead of begging), chaunters, pinners-up, and song-book-sellers. The three first-mentioned classes I have already described in their connection with the patterers; and I now proceed to deal with the two last-mentioned.

The “pinners-up” (whom I have mentioned as an exceptional body), are the men and women—the women being nearly a third of the number of the men—who sell songs which they have “pinned” to a sort of screen or large board, or have attached them, in any convenient way, to a blank wall; and they differ from the other song-sellers, inasmuch as that they are not at all connected with patter, and have generally been mechanics, porters, or servants, and reduced to struggle for a living as “pinners-up.”