“(3) To establish a monthly or fortnightly sheet—or little book for the poor—at ½d., or some trifle, full of pictures such as they would like, but free from impropriety. It might be called ‘The Coster’s Barrow,’ or some name which would take their fancy, and contain pictures for those who cannot read, and reading for those who can. Its contents should be instructive, and yet lively; as for instance, the ‘History of London Bridge,’ ‘History of a Codfish,’ ‘Travels of Whelks,’ ‘Dreams of St. Paul’s,’ (old History of England), ‘Voice from the Bottom of the Coal Exchange’ (Roman tales), ‘True Tale of Trafalgar,’ &c., &c. All very short articles, at which perhaps they might be angry, or praise, or abuse, or do anything, but still would read, or hear, and talk about. If possible, the little work might have a corner called, ‘The Next World’s Page,’ or any name of the kind, with nothing in it but the Lord’s Prayer, or the Creed, or the Ten Commandments, or a Parable, or Miracle, or discourse of Christ’s—in the exact words of Scripture—without any commentary; which could neither annoy the Roman Catholics nor others. Those parts in which the Douay version differs from ours might be avoided, and the Romanists be given to understand that they would always be avoided.
“The more difficult question of cheap amusements instead of the demoralizing ones now popular, is one which as yet I cannot see my way through—-but it is one which must be grappled with if any good is to be done.
“I write thus,” adds my correspondent, “because I feel you are a fellow-worker—so far as your labours show it, for the cause of God’s poor—and therefore will sympathize in anything another worker can say from experience on the same subject.”
Such are the opinions of two of my correspondents—each looking at the subject from different points of view—the one living among the people of whom he treats, and daily witnessing the effects of the several plans now in operation for the moral and physical improvement of the poor, and the other in frequent intercourse with the tramps and lurkers, on their vagrant excursions through the country, as well as with the resident poor of his own parish—the former living in friendly communion with those of whom he writes, and the latter visiting them as their spiritual adviser and material benefactor.
I would, however, before passing to the consideration of the next subject, here pause to draw special attention to the distinctive features of the several classes of people obtaining their livelihood in the streets. These viewed in regard to the causes which have induced them to adopt this mode of life, may be arranged in three different groups, viz.:
(1.) Those who are bred to the streets.
(2.) Those who take to the streets.
(3.) Those who are driven to the streets.
The class bred to the streets are those whose fathers having been street-sellers before them, have sent them out into the thoroughfares at an early age to sell either watercresses, lavender, oranges, nuts, flowers, apples, onions, &c., as a means of eking out the family income. Of such street-apprenticeship several notable instances have already been given; and one or two classes of juvenile street-sellers, as the lucifer match, and the blacking-sellers, still remain to be described. Another class of street-apprentice is to be found in the boys engaged to wheel the barrows of the costers, and who are thus at an early age tutored in all the art and mystery of street traffic, and who rarely abandon it at maturity. These two classes may be said to constitute the natives of the streets—the tribe indigenous to the paving-stones—imbibing the habits and morals of the gutters almost with their mothers’ milk. To expect that children thus nursed in the lap of the kennel, should when men not bear the impress of the circumstances amid which they have been reared, is to expect to find costermongers heroes instead of ordinary human beings. We might as well blame the various races on the face of the earth for those several geographical peculiarities of taste, which constitute their national characteristics. Surely there is a moral acclimatisation as well as a physical one, and the heart may become inured to a particular atmosphere in the same manner as the body; and even as the seed of the apple returns, unless grafted, to its original crab, so does the child, without training, go back to its parent stock—the vagabond savage. For the bred and born street-seller, who inherits a barrow as some do coronets, to be other than he is—it has here been repeatedly enunciated—is no fault of his but of ours, who could and yet will not move to make him otherwise. Might not “the finest gentleman in Europe” have been the greatest blackguard in Billingsgate, had he been born to carry a fish-basket on his head instead of a crown? and by a parity of reasoning let the roughest “rough” outside the London fish-market have had his lot in life cast, “by the Grace of God, King, Defender of the Faith,” and surely his shoulders would have glittered with diamond epaulettes instead of fish scales.