I include razor paste under this head, as sometimes, and at one time more frequently than now, the same individual sold both articles, though not at the same time.
There are twelve street-sellers of razor-paste, but they seem to prefer “working” the distant suburbs, or going on country rounds, as there are often only three in London. It is still vended, I am told, to clerks, who use it to sharpen their pen-knives, but the paste, owing to the prevalence of the use of steel pens, is now almost a superfluity, compared to what it was. It is bought also, and frequently enough in public-houses, by working men, as a means of “setting” their razors. The vendors make the paste themselves, except two, who purchase of a street-seller. The ingredients are generally fuller’s earth (1d.), hog’s lard (1d.), and emery powder (2d.). The paste is sold in boxes carried on a tray, which will close and form a sort of case, like a backgammon board. The quantity I have given will make a dozen boxes (each sold at 1d.), so that the profit is 7d. in the 1s., for to the 4d. paid for ingredients must be added 1d., for the cost of a dozen boxes. The paste is announced as “warranted to put an edge to a razor or pen-knife superior to anything ever before offered to the public.” The street-sellers offer to prove this by sharpening any gentleman’s pen-knife on the paste spread on a piece of soldier’s old belt, which sharpening, when required, they accomplish readily enough. One of these paste-sellers, I was told, had been apprenticed to a barber; another had been a cutler, the remainder are of the ordinary class of street-sellers.
Calculating that 6 men “work” the metropolis daily, taking 2s. each per day (with 1s. 2d. profit), we find 187l. the amount of the street outlay.
Of the Street-Sellers of Crackers and Detonating Balls.
This trade, I am informed by persons familiar with it, would be much more frequently carried on by street-folk, and in much greater numbers, were it not the one which of all street callings finds the least toleration from the police. “You must keep your eyes on both corners of the street,” said one man, “when you sell crackers; and what good is it the police stopping us? The boys have only to go to a shop, and then it’s all right.”
The trade is only known in the streets at holiday seasons, and is principally carried on for a few days before and after the 5th of November, and again at Christmas-tide. “Last November was good for crackers,” said one man; “it was either Guy Faux day, or the day before, I’m not sure which now, that I took 15s., and nearly all of boys, for waterloo crackers and ball crackers (the common trade names), ‘waterloo’ being the ‘pulling crackers.’ At least three parts was ball crackers. I sold them from a barrow, wheeling it about as if it was hearthstone, and just saying quietly when I could, ‘Six a penny crackers.’ The boys soon tell one another. All sorts bought of me; doctors’ boys, school boys, pages, boys as was dressed beautiful, and boys as hadn’t neither shoes nor stockings. It’s sport for them all.” The same man told me he did well at what he called “last Poram fair,” clearing 13s. 6d. in three days, or rather evenings or nights. “Poram fair, sir,” he said, “is a sort of feast among the Jews, always three weeks I’ve heard, afore their Passover, and I then work Whitechapel and all that way.”
I inquired of a man who had carried on this street trade for a good many years, it might be ten or twelve, if he had noticed the uses to which his boy-customers put his not very innocent wares, and he entered readily into the subject.
“Why, sir,” he said, “they’re not all boy-customers, as you call them, but they’re far the most. I’ve sold to men, and often to drunken men. What larks there is with the ball-crackers! One man lost his eye at Stepney Fair, but that’s 6 or 7 years ago, from a lark with crackers. The rights of it I never exactly understood, but I know he lost his eye, from the dry gravel in the ball-cracker bouncing into it. But it’s the boys as is fondest of crackers. I sold ’em all last Christmas, and made my 5s. and better on Boxing-day. I was sold out before 6 o’clock, as I had a regular run at last—just altogether. After that, I saw one lad go quietly behind a poor lame old woman and pull a Waterloo close behind her ear; he was a biggish boy and tidily dressed; and the old body screamed, ‘I’m shot.’ She turned about, and the boy says, says he, ‘Does your grandmother know you’re out? It’s a improper thing, so it is, for you to be walking out by yourself.’ You should have seen her passion! But as she was screaming out, ‘You saucy wagabone! You boys is all wagabones. People can’t pass for you. I’ll give you in charge, I will,” the lad was off like a shot.
“But one of the primest larks I ever saw that way was last winter, in a street by Shoreditch. An old snob that had a bulk was making it all right for the night, and a lad goes up. I don’t know what he said to the old boy, but I saw him poke something, a last I think it was, against the candle, put it out, and then run off. In a minute, three or four lads that was ready, let fly at the bulk with their ball-crackers, and there was a clatter as if the old snob had tumbled down, and knocked his lasts down; but he soon had his head out—he was Irish, I think—and he first set up a roar like a Smithfield bull, and he shouts, ‘I’m kilt intirely wid the murthering pistols! Po-lice! Po-o-lice!’ He seemed taken quite by surprise—for they was capital crackers—I think he couldn’t have been used to bulks, or he would have been used to pelting; but how he did bellow, surely.
“I think it was that same night too, I saw a large old man, buttoned up, but seeming as if he was fine-dressed for a party, in a terrible way in the Commercial-road. I lived near there then. There was three boys afore me—and very well they did it—one of ’em throws a ball-cracker bang at the old gent’s feet, just behind him, and makes him jump stunning, and the boy walks on with his hands in his pocket, as if he know’d nothing about it. Just after that another boy does the same, and then the t’other boy; and the old gent—Lord, how he swore! It was shocking in such a respectable man, as I told him, when he said, I’d crackered him! ‘Me cracker you,’ says I; ‘it ’ud look better if you’d have offered to treat a poor fellow to a pint of beer with ginger in it, and the chill off, than talk such nonsense.’ As we was having this jaw, one of the boys comes back and lets fly again; and the old gent saw how it was, and he says, ‘Now, if you’ll run after that lad, and give him a d——d good hiding, you shall have the beer.’ ‘Money down, sir,’ says I, ‘if you mean honour bright;’ but he grumbled something, and walked away. I saw him soon after, talking to a Bobby, so I made a short cut home.”