7. The Street-sellers of Live Animals—including the dealers in dogs, squirrels, birds, gold and silver fish, and tortoises.
8. The Street-sellers of Mineral Productions and Curiosities—as red and white sand, silver sand, coals, coke, salt, spar ornaments, and shells.
These, so far as my experience goes, exhaust the whole class of street-sellers, and they appear to constitute nearly three-fourths of the entire number of individuals obtaining a subsistence in the streets of London.
The next class are the Street-Buyers, under which denomination come the purchasers of hareskins, old clothes, old umbrellas, bottles, glass, broken metal, rags, waste paper, and dripping.
After these we have the Street-Finders, or those who, as I said before, literally “pick up” their living in the public thoroughfares. They are the “pure” pickers, or those who live by gathering dogs’-dung; the cigar-end finders, or “hard-ups,” as they are called, who collect the refuse pieces of smoked cigars from the gutters, and having dried them, sell them as tobacco to the very poor; the dredgermen or coal-finders; the mud-larks, the bone-grubbers; and the sewer-hunters.
Under the fourth division, or that of the Street-Performers, Artists, and Showmen, are likewise many distinct callings.
1. The Street-Performers, who admit of being classified into (a) mountebanks—or those who enact puppet-shows, as Punch and Judy, the fantoccini, and the Chinese shades. (b) The street-performers of feats of strength and dexterity—as “acrobats” or posturers, “equilibrists” or balancers, stiff and bending tumblers, jugglers, conjurors, sword-swallowers, “salamanders” or fire-eaters, swordsmen, etc. (c) The street-performers with trained animals—as dancing dogs, performing monkeys, trained birds and mice, cats and hares, sapient pigs, dancing bears, and tame camels. (d) The street-actors—as clowns, “Billy Barlows,” “Jim Crows,” and others.
2. The Street Showmen, including shows of (a) extraordinary persons—as giants, dwarfs, Albinoes, spotted boys, and pig-faced ladies. (b) Extraordinary animals—as alligators, calves, horses and pigs with six legs or two heads, industrious fleas, and happy families. (c) Philosophic instruments—as the microscope, telescope, thaumascope. (d) Measuring-machines—as weighing, lifting, measuring, and striking machines; and (e) miscellaneous shows—such as peep-shows, glass ships, mechanical figures, wax-work shows, pugilistic shows, and fortune-telling apparatus.
3. The Street-Artists—as black profile-cutters, blind paper-cutters, “screevers” or draughtsmen in coloured chalks on the pavement, writers without hands, and readers without eyes.
4. The Street Dancers—as street Scotch girls, sailors, slack and tight rope dancers, dancers on stilts, and comic dancers.