The ordinary street apparatus for roasting chestnuts is simple. A round pan, with a few holes punched in it, costing 3d. or 4d. in a marine-store shop, has burning charcoal within it, and is surmounted by a second pan, or kind of lid, containing chestnuts, which are thus kept hot. During my inquiry, chestnuts were dear. “People don’t care,” I was told, “whether chestnuts is three and six, as they are now, or one and six a peck, as I hope they will be afore long; they wants the same pennyworths.”
Chestnuts are generally bought wholesale in Duke’s-place, on the Sunday mornings, for street sale; but some street-dealers buy them of those costermongers, whose means enable them “to lay in” a quantity. The retail customers are, for the most part, boys and girls, or a few labourers or street people. The usual price is sixteen a penny.
Roasted apples used to be vended in the streets, and often along with roasted chestnuts, but it is a trade which has now almost entirely disappeared, and its disappearance is attributed to the prevalence of potato cans.
I had the following account from a woman, apparently between sixty and seventy, though she said she was only about fifty. What she was in her youth, she said, she neither knew nor cared. At any rate she was unwilling to converse about it. I found her statement as to chestnuts corroborated:—
“The trade’s nothing to what it was, sir,” she said. “Why when the hackney coaches was in the streets, I’ve often sold 2s. worth of a night at a time, for a relish, to the hackneymen that was waiting their turn over their beer. Six and eight a penny was enough then; now people must have sixteen; though I pays 3s. a peck, and to get them at that’s a favour. I could make my good 12s. a week on roasted chestnuts and apples, and as much on other things in them days, but I’m half-starved now. There’ll never be such times again. People didn’t want to cut one another’s throats in the street business then. O, I don’t know anything about how long ago, or what year—years is nothing to me—but I only know that it was so. I got a penny a piece then for my roasted apples, and a halfpenny for sugar to them. I could live then. Roasted apples was reckoned good for the tooth-ache in them days, but, people change so, they aren’t now. I don’t know what I make now in chestnuts and apples, which is all I sells—perhaps 5s. a week. My rent’s 1s. 3d. a week. I lives on a bit of fish, or whatever I can get, and that’s all about it.”
The absolute quantity of oranges, lemons, and nuts sold annually in the London streets is as follows:
| Oranges | 15,400,000 | |
| Lemons | 154,000 | |
| Spanish and Barcelona nuts | 24,000 | bushels |
| Brazil do. | 3,000 | „ |
| Chestnuts | 6,500 | „ |
| Walnuts | 24,000 | „ |
| Coker-nuts | 400,000 | nuts |
Of “Dry” Fruit Selling in the Streets.
The sellers of “dry fruit” cannot be described as a class, for, with the exception of one old couple, none that I know of confine themselves to its sale, but resort to it merely when the season prevents their dealing in “green fruit” or vegetables. I have already specified what in commerce is distinguished as “dry fruit,” but its classification among the costers is somewhat narrowed.
The dry-fruit sellers derive their supplies partly from Duke’s-place, partly from Pudding-lane, but perhaps principally from the costers concerning whom I have spoken, who buy wholesale at the markets and elsewhere, and who will “clear out a grocer,” or buy such figs, &c. as a leading tradesman will not allow to be sent, or offered, to his regular customers, although, perhaps, some of the articles are tolerably good. Or else the dry-fruit men buy a damaged lot of a broker or grocer, and pick out all that is eatable, or rather saleable.