A third class of beggars called Mumpers, is also found on the signboard under the name of the Three Mumpers.
Thus, after having gone through all ranks of society, from the palace to the cottage, and from the sceptre to Tom’s staff with a fox-tail, we now come to the great leveller Death, who also was represented on the signboard. There were the Three Death’s-heads in Wapping, of which house trades tokens are extant; probably it was an apothecary’s, though it was a ghastly sign for his customers. Undertakers were also strictly professional in their choice. In the eighteenth century there were the Four Coffins over against Somerset House,[540] and another in Fleet Street, the sign of Stephen Roome,[541] whose son was the unfortunate author whom Pope has “gibbeted” in the Dunciad, as afflicted with a “funereal frown.” Savage, one of Pope’s literary sicarii, calls Roome “a perfect town-author,”[542] and has drawn his portrait in “An Author to be let, by Iscariot Hackney:”—
“Had it not been more laudable for Mr Roome, the son of an undertaker, to have borne a link and a mourning staff, in the long procession of a funeral—or even been more decent in him to have sung psalms according to education, in an Anabaptist meeting, than to have been altering the Jovial Crew or Merry Beggars into a wicked imitation of the Beggars’ Opera?”
Another undertaker, James Maddox, clerk and coffin-maker of St Olave’s, had for a sign the Sugar-loaf and three Coffins. The addition of the sugar-loaf has, of course, nothing to do with his profession, for when death calls, the sweets of life are past. It was simply the sign of a former tenant, suspended in front or fixed in the wall of the house. Although the undertakers of the present day do not display signs as of old, they advertise their calling quite as effectually. The men who in their handbills solicit us to try their “economic funerals,” or to test one of their “three guinea respectable interments,—one trial only asked,” are commercial with the rest of the age, although we might wish that they would force themselves a little less upon our attention. One undertaker recently hit upon what he deemed a brilliant method of advertising his cheap funerals. He selected some good names from the “Court Guide,” and sent out hundreds of telegrams announcing the low prices at which a “body” could be interred. Some reached their destination just as the lady or gentleman “body” was sitting down to dinner, others as the “parties” were dressing, or in the act of leaving home; but although the scheme failed, the name of the undertaker and his prices were firmly fixed in people’s memories, and he received, instead of orders, numerous cautions not to telegraph in that way again.
An undertaker in Islington, some years ago, exhibited in his window some pleasing artistic efforts of his children, which must have greatly comforted the father. “Master A., aged 12 years,” had produced a grinning skeleton, garnished with worms and cross-bones; and “Miss B., aged 10,” had painted in colours a section of a vault, with coffin heads, skulls, and sexton’s tools, neatly arranged right and left. The drawings were framed and glazed, and parental pride had placed them in the best spot in the windows.
[444] Notes and Queries.
[445] Roxburghe Ballads, iii., fol. 253.
[446] Akerman’s Trades Tokens.
[447] “Richardsoniana,” London, 1776, p. 159.