“I’m an Irish boy, and near turned sixteen, and I’ve been silling fly-papers for between eight and nine year. I must have begun to sill them when they first come out. Another boy first tould me of them, and he’d been silling them about three weeks before me. He used to buy them of a party as lives in a back-room near Drury-lane, what buys paper and makes the catch ’em alive himself. When they first came out they used to charge sixpence a-dozen for ’em, but now they’ve got ’em to twopence ha’penny. When I first took to silling ’em, there was a tidy lot of boys at the business, but not so many as now, for all the boys seem at it. In our court alone I should think there was above twenty boys silling the things.
“At first, when there was a good time, we used to buy three or four gross together, but now we don’t do more than half a gross. As we go along the streets we call out different cries. Some of us says, ‘Fly-papers, fly-papers, ketch ’em all alive.’ Others make a kind of song of it, singing out, ‘Fly-paper, ketch ’em all alive, the nasty flies, tormenting the baby’s eyes. Who’d be fly-blow’d, by all the nasty blue-bottles, beetles, and flies?’
“People likes to buy of a boy as sings out well, ’cos it makes ’em laugh.
“I don’t think I sell so many in town as I do in the borders of the country, about Highbury, Croydon, and Brentford. I’ve got some regular customers in town about the City-prison and the Caledonian-road; and after I’ve served them and the town custom begins to fall off, then I goes to the country.
“We goes two of us together, and we takes about three gross. We keep on silling before us all the way, and we comes back the same road. Last year we sould very well in Croydon, and it was the best place for gitting a price for them; they’d give a penny a-piece for ’em there, for they didn’t know nothing about them. I went off one day at tin o’clock and didn’t come home till two in the morning. I sould eighteen dozen out in that d’rection the other day, and got rid of them before I had got half-way.
“But flies are very scarce at Croydon this year, and we haven’t done so well. There ain’t half as many flies this summer as last.
“Some people says the papers draws more flies than they ketches, and that when one gets in, there’s twenty others will come to see him.
“It’s according to the weather as the flies is about. If we have a fine day it fetches them out, but a cold day kills more than our papers.
“We sills the most papers to little cook-shops and sweetmeat-shops. We don’t sill so many at private-houses. The public-houses is pretty good customers, ’cos the beer draws the flies. I sould nine dozen at one house—a school—at Highgate, the other day. I sould ’em two for three-ha’pence. That was a good hit, but then t’other days we loses. If we can make a ha’penny each we thinks we does well.
“Those that sills their papers at three a-penny buys them at St. Giles’s, and pays only three-ha’pence a dozen for them, but they an’t half as big and good as those we pays tuppence-ha’penny a dozen for.