“There’s some what we calls ‘gully-hunters’ as goes about with a sieve, and near the gratings find perhaps a few ha’pence. Years ago we used to find a little now and then, but we may go about now and not find twopence in a week. I don’t think any shoreman ever finds much. But years ago, in the city, perhaps a robbery might be committed, and then they might be afraid of being found out, and chuck the things down the drains.
“I come from Oxfordshire, about four miles from Henley-’pon-Thames. I haven’t got now quite so many clods to tramp over, nor so many hills to climb.
“I gets two shillings a-dozen if I sells the rats to a dealer, but if I takes ’em to the pit myself I gets three shillings. Rats has come down lately. There’s more pits, and they kills ’em cheaper; they used to kill ’em at six shillings a-dozen.
“I’ve got five children. These here are not all belonging to me. Their mother’s gone out a-nussing, and my wife’s got to mind ’em.
“My oldest son is sixteen. He’s off for a sailor. I had him on me for two years doin’ nothink. He couldn’t get a place, and towards the last he didn’t care about it. He would go to sea; so he went to the Marine School, and now he’s in the East Ingy Sarvice. My second is at a coal-shed. He gets three shillings a-week; but, Lord, what’s that? He eats more than that, let alone clothes, and he wears out such a lot of shoe-leather. There’s a good deal of wear and tear, I can tell yer, in carrying out coals and such-like.”
The Penny Mouse-trap Maker.
This man lived in a small cottage at the back of Bethnal Green-road, and the little railed space in front of the humble dwelling was littered with sundry evidences of the inmate’s ingenuity. Here was a mechanical carriage the crippled father had made to drive himself along, and a large thaumatrope, or disc of painted figures, that seemed to move while revolving rapidly before the eye; and this, I afterwards learnt, the ingenious cripple had made, as a street exhibition, for a poor man, whom he was anxious to put in the way of doing something for himself.
The principal apartment in the little two-roomed house was blocked up with carpenters’ benches, and long planks were resting against the wall, while the walls themselves were partly covered with tools and patterns of the craft pursued; and in one corner there were heaps of the penny mouse-traps and penny money-boxes, that formed the main articles of manufacture.
In a little room adjoining this, and about the size of a hen-house, I found the cripple himself in bed, but still sitting up with a small desk-like bench before him, and engaged in the act of cutting and arranging the wires for the little wooden traps in which he dealt. And as I sat by his bedside he told me the following story:—
“I am,” he said, “a white-wood toy-maker, in a small way; that is, I make a variety of cheap articles,—nothing beyond a penny,—in sawed and planed pine-wood. I manufacture penny and halfpenny money-boxes, penny and halfpenny toy bellows, penny carts, penny garden-rollers, penny and halfpenny dolls’ tables and washhand-stands, chiefly for baby-houses; penny dressers, with drawers, for the same purpose; penny wheelbarrows and bedsteads; penny crossbows; and the mouse-trap that I am about now. I make all the things I have named for warehouses—for what are called the cheap Birmingham and Sheffield houses. I am paid the same price for whatever I make, with the exception of the mouse-trap. For the principal part of the penny articles that I make I get 7s. for twelve dozen, that is 7d. a-dozen; and for the halfpenny articles I get 3s. 6d., at the rate of 3½d. a-dozen. For the penny mouse-traps, however, I am paid only 1l. for thirty-six dozen, and that’s a shilling less than I get for the same quantity of the other shilling articles; whilst for the penny boxes I’m paid only at the rate of a halfpenny each.