The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London (23 page)

The next sellers were the watercress girls, followed by the costermongers, then the fishmongers’, the butchers’ and the bakers’ boys to take the daily orders. The cress girls and the costers wore the standard street-dress
of the working poor. Early in the century, for the men, this was breeches, thereafter replaced by cord trousers, with shirts and waistcoats or smocks, sometimes a jacket, a cloth cap and always a silk kingsman neckerchief – a coster had to be very hard up not to have one. The girls wore cotton dresses, usually pinned up out of the mud, frequently with two aprons, a coloured one covered by a white one, with a shawl, a silk neckerchief if it was affordable, and a black velvet or straw bonnet, or, if they carried their goods on their heads, a folded handkerchief. Delivery boys all wore clothing that denoted their trade: bakers’ boys in white, with aprons; the butchers’ boys in light-blue smocks and dark-blue aprons (which matched the bright-blue ink with which butchers wrote out the orders), and all wearing caps.

After that, the day really began, with a procession that, daily or weekly, included the cats’-meat man, wearing a shiny black hat and waistcoat, with black sleeves, blue apron and corduroy trousers, and always with a blue-and- white spotted handkerchief tied around his neck, selling his horsemeat by the pound, or in small pieces on skewers for a farthing.
⁴⁹
Other goods regularly available from itinerant sellers in the suburbs included: footstools; embroidery frames; clothes horses, clothes-pegs and clothes line; sponges, chamois leathers, brushes and brooms; kitchen skewers, toasting-forks and other tinware; razors and penknives; trays, keyrings and small items of jewellery; candlesticks, tools, trivets, pots and pans; bandboxes and hatboxes; blackleading for kitchen ranges and grates, matches and glue; china ornaments and crockery; sheets, shirts, laces, thread, ribbons, artificial flowers, buttons, studs, handkerchiefs; pipes, tobacco, snuff, cigars; spectacles, hats, combs and hairbrushes; firewood and sawdust. The hearthstone-brick
men (before detergent, abrasives were needed to clean floors and cooking utensils) also purchased old bottles and bones for resale.

For it was not a one-way trade, from the streets to the houses. Many of the traders were buying from, not selling to, the households. Sometimes, as with the hearthstone men, the trade was in both directions. Crockery sellers exchanged their wares for old clothes, trading a tea service for a suit of clothes, a hat and boots ‘in decent condition’; an old coat might be exchanged for a sugar basin; a pair of wellington boots for a glass. One crockery seller started with crockery worth 15s and, on a good day, ended with 1s in cash, plus two or three old shirts, a couple of coats, a suit of livery, a dress, a pair of boots or two, and a waistcoat, carrying them all on his back, with his crockery balanced on his head, ‘and werry probably a humberella or two under my arm, and five or six old hats in my hand’. Thus laden, he tramped up to twenty-five miles a day.

As with their colleagues in the second-hand clothes market, old-clothes men were said to be Jewish and were usually elderly. They carried a bag for the clothes, while whatever hats they had bought that day were perched on top of their own. Traditionally they made themselves known by carrying a small clock under one arm, the striker of which they twanged as they walked along, calling, ‘Old clo’!’ Many middle-class housewives considered selling clothes to be not quite respectable, and so the old-clothes men prided themselves on their discretion: ‘A form, half-concealed by a curtain, appears at a window...a finger is hastily raised, and then the figure as hastily retires. It is enough; the Jew saunters across the road, glances with apparent carelessness around, and slips quietly into the house, of which the door is conveniently ajar, and the whole business is managed with that secrecy so greatly desired by penurious but highly respectable householders.’

Other purchasers were equally stealthy, not to save the face of the householders, but because the sellers were disposing of goods they didn’t technically own. The least honest servants sold the family’s food. In
Great Expectations
, the cook to the chaotic Pocket household is found lying ‘insensibly drunk’, with a packet of butter ready to sell beside her. Other servants saw various forms of recycling as their perquisites. Well-regulated households, according to advice books, produced no food waste: everything was reused in
leftovers or transformed into other dishes, with the residue going to feed dogs, cats or chickens, or to fertilize the garden. But many servants sold on the waste, called wash, to dealers who purchased it as pig-feed (hence the word ‘hogwash’). Some bought wash to feed their own pigs, kept in market gardens around the edges of the city or even in many inner-city slums (see p. 208); others were middlemen, buying wash in bulk from coffee houses, eating houses and cookshops. Dealers sold the wash for 4d to 6d per bucket, hiring boys to go door to door, for 2s a week plus their meals, or sometimes for as little as 1d a bucket. Cooks sold hare and rabbit skins after they had cut up the meat for cooking: at mid-century hare skins were worth up to 2s 2d each. There was even a trade in used tea leaves. In most households, after the tea had been made, the leaves were rinsed, dried and sprinkled on the carpets before sweeping, to help collect the dust. Once this had been done, some charwomen sold the leaves to unscrupulous dealers who mixed them with new tea leaves, selling the tea at bargain prices. It was these very women and their kind who were most likely to purchase the lowest-priced tea, and who were drinking what they had lately swept up.

Other street sellers offered not goods, but services. Tinkers routinely trawled the streets, calling, ‘Pots and Kettles to Mend! – Copper or Brass to Mend’, as they pushed a cart with a small fire-pot, over which they soldered items for repair. ‘Chairs to mend’ men carried a supply of canes and rushes, fixing broken rush-bottomed or cane seats on doorsteps and front gardens. ‘Knives to Grind’ men carried a grinder powered by a small foot-treadle in their carts. With this they sharpened scissors and knives for housewives (3s for a dozen table-knives, or carving knives at 4d each in 1827), honed cleavers at markets, and even whetted penknives for office workers in the days before steel-nibbed pens were common. Until the invention of stainless steel in the twentieth century, knives could not be immersed in water, as the pin holding the blade to the handle rusted and the knife fell apart. By the 1850s, men walked the streets with patent knife-cleaning machines: the knives were inserted blade first into a box and when a handle was turned the blades were buffed by emery paper. Other new services in the 1850s were less high-tech: the Ragged School – a charity that aimed to get children off the streets, educating them and finding them trades – organized for its little
girls to ‘attend the dwelling-houses of the neighbourhood every morning, and brush and wash the steps for 1d a door’.

Thus suburban streets, so quiet in the twenty-first century, were in Dickens’ time a hubbub of noise from dawn until well past dusk, so much so that the never-ending din was a staple of comic writing. In
Punch
in 1857, ‘Edwin the poet’ is in the throes of inspiration:

Edwin (composing). Where the sparkling fountain never ceases –

Female Demon. ‘Wa-ter-creece-ses!’

Edwin. And liquid music on the marble floor tinkles –

Male Demon. ‘Buy my perriwinkles!’

Edwin. Where the sad Oread oft retires to weep –

Black Demon. ‘Sweep! Sweep!! Sweep!!!’

Edwin. And tears that comfort not must ever flow –

Demon from Palestine. ‘Clo! Clo! Old Clo!’

Edwin. There let me linger beneath the trees –

Italian Demon. ‘Buy, Im-magees!’

Edwin. And weave long grasses into lovers’ knots –

Demon in a white apron. ‘Pots! Pots!! Pots!!!’

Edwin. Oh! what vagrant dreams the fancy hatches –

Ragged Old Demon. ‘Matches! Buy Matches!’

Edwin. She opes her treasure-cells, like Portia’s caskets –

Demon with Cart. ‘Baskets, any Baskets!’

Edwin. Spangles the air with thousand-coloured silks –

Old Demon. ‘Buy my Wilks! Wilks! Wilks!’

Edwin. Garments which the fairies might make habits –

Lame Demon. ‘Rabbits, Hampshire Rabbits!’

Edwin. Visions like those the Interpreter of Bunyan’s –

Demon with a Stick. ‘Onions, a Rope of Onions!’

Edwin. And give glowing utterances to their kin –

Dirty Demon. ‘Hare’s skin or Rabbit skin!’

Edwin. In thoughts so bright the aching senses blind –

Demon with Wheel. ‘Any knives or sissors [sic] to grind!’

Edwin. Though gone, the Deities that long ago –

Grim Demon. ‘Dust-Ho! Dust-Ho!!’

Edwin. Yet, from her radient bow [sic] no Iris settles –

Swarthy Demon. ‘Mend your Pots and Kettles!’

Edwin. And sad and silent is the ancient seat –

Demon with Skewers. ‘Cat’s M-e-a-t!’...

HERE – EDWIN GOES MAD.

In the 1820s, Rowlandson drew a street with a woman selling cucumbers from a wheelbarrow (the phallic implications of her vegetable also being clearly much on his mind); a man selling roasting jacks for kitchen fires; a seller of doormats, with his wares hanging from a long pole; and a man with teapots, flowerpots and chamber pots all laid out on the pavement. He carefully depicted each seller with his or her own specific method of transporting and displaying goods. Stationery, soap and remedy sellers carried boxes suspended from their necks by leather straps; rabbits and hares were sometimes transported in baskets or were more usually tied together and slung over a pole on the sellers’ shoulders, as were bonnet- and hatboxes; mats, brushes, brooms, clothesline and rope, fire-irons and skewers were all carried on the sellers’ shoulders. Knife-cleaners and grinders used barrows, as did men selling hearthstone and whiting, as well as cats’-meat men, whose carts were equipped with a little shelf in the front, used for chopping the meat to order. Shallow willow baskets with a strap at the waist were used by fruit women, while oval baskets with a handle were characteristically used by onion- or apple-sellers; ‘prickles’, narrow willow baskets, contained walnuts, holding about a gallon at a time, or were used by the wine trade for empties. The poorest sellers had old rusty tea trays: shoeblack boys kept their brushes and paste on these trays, while match sellers tied them around their necks with string. Even delivery boys had specialized containers: telegraph boys carried a ‘despatch-box’; doctors’ boys a ‘little double-flapped market-basket’; milliners’ boys baskets covered in oiled silk, to protect the contents from the damp. Vendors of every article or service under the sun passed through the centre of town. In Holborn in the early 1850s, Max Schlesinger saw within a short space of time a man selling coconuts and dates, a woman selling oranges, a man with dog collars ‘which he had formed in a chain round his neck’, a man offering to mark linen indelibly, another selling razor strops, as well as miscellaneous sellers of notebooks, cutlery, prints, caricatures and more: ‘it seemed as if the world were on sale at a penny a bit.’

Street sellers and shopkeepers coexisted, supported each other and were at war, all at the same time. Streets that were renowned as luxury shopping destinations, such as Regent Street, also drew their fair share of street sellers. Three in the afternoon was the fashionable shopping hour, and it was therefore the time that the street sellers crowded from Piccadilly Circus to St Martin’s Lane (that is, eastwards, away from the most fashionable section of the street). Not unnaturally the shopkeepers and the street sellers chafed on each other. In 1845, in one case out of many, a fruit-woman was arrested by a policeman at the behest of the shopkeepers in Shepherdess Walk, City Road, on the basis that they suffered ‘serious injury...by the competition of cheap itinerant traders’. From 1839, the Police Act had entitled – although not obliged – police to keep the roads and pavements clear of goods and blockages. The shopkeepers interpreted this to mean that the street sellers should be moved on, but the magistrate threw the case out. There was no law forbidding street trading, he said, and ‘If poor creatures like this are to be seized...merely because they use praiseworthy exertions to support themselves’, then the parish would have to support them, which would benefit neither the traders nor the shopkeepers, whose rates as a consequence would go up. The battles continued, while street sellers went on finding new locations for their trade. When the underground opened in 1863, they colonized this new space too, soon making it seem a natural place to be selling goods: ‘Let anyone wanting their Noise and Rubbish,’ snorted
Punch
, ‘go Underground for it.’

Some sellers concentrated on specific locations. Around the Covent Garden and Drury Lane theatres in the 1830s, when the playhouses stood in the midst of slums, visitors ‘were assailed by needy wretches’ running beside the coaches and selling programmes for the plays. Some sellers concentrated on becoming known as
the
purveyor of an item. Rhubarb, used as a drug because of its laxative properties, supposedly came from what was vaguely thought of as ‘the East’. In the late 1850s, a seller in Clare market dressed as ‘a genuine Turk’, carrying a sign declaring that ‘Hafiz Khan was made prisoner by the Russians [in the Crimean War, just ended]; and...after undergoing many barbarities by the cruel order of the Emperor, succeeded in escaping to England, and is now reduced to
the dreadful alternative of selling rhubarb (received direct from Turkey), in the public streets.’