Many stationary street-sellers use merely baskets, or trays, either supported in their hand, or on their arm, or else they are strapped round their loins, or suspended round their necks. These are mostly fruit-women, watercress, blacking, congreves, sheep’s-trotters, and ham-sandwich sellers.
Many stationary street-sellers stand on or near the bridges; others near the steam-packet wharfs or the railway terminuses; a great number of them take their pitch at the entrance to a court, or at the corners of streets; and stall-keepers with oysters stand opposite the doors of public-houses.
It is customary for a street-seller who wants to “pitch” in a new locality to solicit the leave of the housekeeper, opposite whose premises he desires to place his stall. Such leave obtained, no other course is necessary.
Of Fruit-stall Keepers.
I had the following statement from a woman who has “kept a stall” in Marylebone, at the corner of a street, which she calls “my corner,” for 38 years. I was referred to her as a curious type of the class of stall-keepers, and on my visit, found her daughter at the “pitch.” This daughter had all the eloquence which is attractive in a street-seller, and so, I found, had her mother when she joined us. They are profuse in blessings; and on a bystander observing, when he heard the name of these street-sellers, that a jockey of that name had won the Derby lately, the daughter exclaimed, “To be sure he did; he’s my own uncle’s relation, and what a lot of money came into the family! Bless God for all things, and bless every body! Walnuts, sir, walnuts, a penny a dozen! Wouldn’t give you a bad one for the world, which is a great thing for a poor ’oman for to offer to do.” The daughter was dressed in a drab great-coat, which covered her whole person. When I saw the mother, she carried a similar great-coat, as she was on her way to the stall; and she used it as ladies do their muffs, burying her hands in it. The mother’s dark-coloured old clothes seemed, to borrow a description from Sir Walter Scott, flung on with a pitchfork. These two women were at first very suspicious, and could not be made to understand my object in questioning them; but after a little while, the mother became not only communicative, but garrulous, conversing—with no small impatience at any interruption—of the doings of the people in her neighbourhood. I was accompanied by an intelligent costermonger, who assured me of his certitude that the old woman’s statement was perfectly correct, and I found moreover from other inquiries that it was so.
“Well, sir,” she began, “what is it that you want of me? Do I owe you anything? There’s half-pay officers about here for no good; what is it you want? Hold your tongue, you young fool,” (to her daughter, who was beginning to speak;) “what do you know about it?” [On my satisfying her that I had no desire to injure her, she continued to say after spitting, a common practice with her class, on a piece of money, “for luck,”] “Certainly, sir, that’s very proper and good. Aye, I’ve seen the world—the town world and the country. I don’t know where I was born; never mind about that—it’s nothing to nobody. I don’t know nothing about my father and mother; but I know that afore I was eleven I went through the country with my missis. She was a smuggler. I didn’t know then what smuggling was—bless you, sir, I didn’t; I knew no more nor I know who made that lamp-post. I didn’t know the taste of the stuff we smuggled for two years—didn’t know it from small beer; I’ve known it well enough since, God knows. My missis made a deal of money that time at Deptford Dockyard. The men wasn’t paid and let out till twelve of a night—I hardly mind what night it was, days was so alike then—and they was our customers till one, two, or three in the morning—Sunday morning, for anything I know. I don’t know what my missis gained; something jolly, there’s not a fear of it. She was kind enough to me. I don’t know how long I was with missis. After that I was a hopping, and made my 15s. regular at it, and a haymaking; but I’ve had a pitch at my corner for thirty-eight year—aye! turned thirty-eight. It’s no use asking me what I made at first—I can’t tell; but I’m sure I made more than twice as much as my daughter and me makes now, the two of us. I wish people that thinks we’re idle now were with me for a day. I’d teach them. I don’t—that’s the two of us don’t—make 15s. a week now, nor the half of it, when all’s paid. D—d if I do. The d—d boys take care of that.” [Here I had a statement of the boys’ tradings, similar to what I have given.] “There’s ‘Canterbury’ has lots of boys, and they bother me. I can tell, and always could, how it is with working men. When mechanics is in good work, their children has halfpennies to spend with me. If they’re hard up, there’s no halfpennies. The pennies go to a loaf or to buy a candle. I might have saved money once, but had a misfortunate family. My husband? O, never mind about him. D—n him. I’ve been a widow many years. My son—it’s nothing how many children I have—is married; he had the care of an ingine. But he lost it from ill health. It was in a feather-house, and the flue got down his throat, and coughed him; and so he went into the country, 108 miles off, to his wife’s mother. But his wife’s mother got her living by wooding, and other ways, and couldn’t help him or his wife; so he left, and he’s with me now. He has a job sometimes with a greengrocer, at 6d. a day and a bit of grub; a little bit—very. I must shelter him. I couldn’t turn him out. If a Turk I knew was in distress, and I had only half a loaf, I’d give him half of that, if he was ever such a Turk—I would, sir! Out of 6d. a day, my son—poor fellow, he’s only twenty-seven!—wants a bit of ’baccy and a pint of beer. It ’ud be unnatural to oppose that, wouldn’t it, sir? He frets about his wife, that’s staying with her mother, 108 miles off; and about his little girl; but I tell him to wait, and he may have more little girls. God knows, they come when they’re not wanted a bit. I joke and say all my old sweethearts is dying away. Old Jemmy went off sudden. He lent me money sometimes, but I always paid him. He had a public once, and had some money when he died. I saw him the day afore he died. He was in bed, but wasn’t his own man quite; though he spoke sensible enough to me. He said, said he, ‘Won’t you have half a quartern of rum, as we’ve often had it?’ ‘Certainly, Jemmy,’ says I, ‘I came for that very thing.’ Poor fellow! his friends are quarrelling now about what he left. It’s 56l. they say, and they’ll go to law very likely, and lose every thing. There’ll be no such quarrelling when I die, unless it is for the pawn-tickets. I get a meal now, and got a meal afore; but it was a better meal then, sir. Then look at my expenses. I was a customer once. I used to buy, and plenty such did, blue cloth aprons, opposite Drury-lane theatre: the very shop’s there still, but I don’t know what it is now; I can’t call to mind. I gave 2s. 6d. a yard, from twenty to thirty years ago, for an apron, and it took two yards, and I paid 4d. for making it, and so an apron cost 5s. 4d.—that wasn’t much thought of in those times. I used to be different off then. I never go to church; I used to go when I was a little child at Sevenoaks. I suppose I was born somewhere thereabouts. I’ve forgot what the inside of a church is like. There’s no costermongers ever go to church, except the rogues of them, that wants to appear good. I buy my fruit at Covent-garden. Apples is now 4s. 6d. a bushel there. I may make twice that in selling them; but a bushel may last me two, three, or four days.”
As I have already, under the street-sale of fish, given an account of the oyster stall-keeper, as well as the stationary dealers in sprats, and the principal varieties of wet fish, there is no necessity for me to continue this part of my subject.
We have now, in a measure, finished with the metropolitan costermongers. We have seen that the street-sellers of fish, fruit, and vegetables constitute a large proportion of the London population; the men, women, and children numbering at the least 30,000, and taking as much as 2,000,000l. per annum. We have seen, moreover, that these are the principal purveyors of food to the poor, and that consequently they are as important a body of people as they are numerous. Of all classes they should be the most honest, since the poor, least of all, can afford to be cheated; and yet it has been shown that the consciences of the London costermongers, generally speaking, are as little developed as their intellects; indeed, the moral and religious state of these men is a foul disgrace to us, laughing to scorn our zeal for the “propagation of the gospel in foreign parts,” and making our many societies for the civilization of savages on the other side of the globe appear like a “delusion, a mockery, and a snare,” when we have so many people sunk in the lowest depths of barbarism round about our very homes. It is well to have Bishops of New Zealand when we have Christianized all our own heathen; but with 30,000 individuals, in merely one of our cities, utterly creedless, mindless, and principleless, surely it would look more like earnestness on our parts if we created Bishops of the New-Cut, and sent “right reverend fathers” to watch over the “cure of souls” in the Broadway and the Brill. If our sense of duty will not rouse us to do this, at least our regard for our own interests should teach us, that it is not safe to allow this vast dungheap of ignorance and vice to seethe and fester, breeding a social pestilence in the very heart of our land. That the costermongers belong essentially to the dangerous classes none can doubt; and those who know a coster’s hatred of a “crusher,” will not hesitate to believe that they are, as they themselves confess, one and all ready, upon the least disturbance, to seize and disable their policeman.
It would be a marvel indeed if it were otherwise. Denied the right of getting a living by the street authorities, after having, perhaps, been supplied with the means of so doing by the parish authorities—the stock which the one had provided seized and confiscated by the other—law seems to them a mere farce, or at best, but the exercise of an arbitrary and despotic power, against which they consider themselves justified, whenever an opportunity presents itself, of using the same physical force as it brings to bear against them. That they are ignorant and vicious as they are, surely is not their fault. If we were all born with learning and virtue, then might we, with some show of justice, blame the costermongers for their want of both; but seeing that even the most moral and intelligent of us owe the greater part, if not the whole, of our wisdom and goodness to the tuition of others, we must not in the arrogance of our self-conceit condemn these men because they are not like ourselves, when it is evident that we should have been as they are, had not some one done for us what we refuse to do for them. We leave them destitute of all perception of beauty, and therefore without any means of pleasure but through their appetites, and then we are surprized to find their evenings are passed either in brutalizing themselves with beer, or in gloating over the mimic sensuality of the “penny gaff.” Without the least intellectual culture is it likely, moreover, that they should have that perception of antecedents and consequents which enables us to see in the shadows of the past the types of the future—or that power of projecting the mind into the space, as it were, of time, which we in Saxon-English call fore-sight, and in Anglo-Latin pro-vidence—a power so godlike that the latter term is often used by us to express the Godhead itself? Is it possible, then, that men who are as much creatures of the present as the beasts of the field—instinctless animals—should have the least faculty of pre-vision? or rather is it not natural that, following the most precarious of all occupations—one in which the subsistence depends upon the weather of this the most variable climate of any—they should fail to make the affluence of the fine days mitigate the starvation of the rainy ones? or that their appetites, made doubly eager by the privations suffered in their adversity, should be indulged in all kinds of excess in their prosperity—their lives being thus, as it were, a series of alternations between starvation and surfeit?