London Labour and the London Poor: Selection (Classics)

by Henry Mayhew

  There is no doubt my informant was a modest, and, in her way, a worthy woman. But it may be doubted if any English girl, after seven years of domestic service, would have so readily adapted herself to a street calling. Had an English girl been living among, and used to the society of women who supported themselves by street labour, her repugnance to such a life might have been lessened; but even then, I doubt if she, who had the virtue to resist the offers told of by my Irish informant, could have made the attempt to live by selling fruit. I do not mean that she would rather have fallen into immoral courses than honestly live upon the sale of strawberries, but that she would have struggled on and striven to obtain any domestic labour in preference to a street occupation.

  Of a Widow, a Street-seller

  [pp. 523–4] A woman, apparently about 50, strong-built and red-faced, speaking in a loud tone, and what people of her class account a hearty manner, gave me the following account. I can readily condense it, for in her street career there was nothing very novel. She was the daughter of a costermonger, and she married a costermonger before she was 20. On my hinting that sometimes the marriage ceremony was not considered indispensable, the good woman laughed and said, ‘married, or as good, it’s hall as one – but we was married.’ The marriage was not one of unalloyed happiness, for the couple often wrangled and occasionally fought. This was told to me with some laughter, and with perfect good humour; for the widow seemed interested to have a listener. She did not, I feel confident, exaggerate the merits of the deceased, nor, perhaps, his failings. He was the best judge of fish in the streets, she said, and was the neatest hand in cutting it up, or showing it off; he was not ‘a bad sort’, and was very fond of his children. When sober and at work he was a quiet fellow, without a cross word for a whole morning, but when drunk, which was far too often (unless very drunk, and then he was silly), he went about tearing and swearing ‘like one o’clock’. But if he saw his wife take but a glass or two, to do her good, he went on like a madman, and as if he never touched it himself. He never had nothing to say to other women – if he had she would have clawed their eyes out, and his’n too – he was as good that way as any nobleman could be, and he was a fine man to look at; and on a Sunday, when he dressed hisself, he was beautiful. He was never in a church in his life, and didn’t trouble hisself about such things; they was no concern of his’n.

  It may be thought that I have treated this matter too lightly, but the foregoing is really the substance, and certainly it is the tone, of the widow’s talk, which she poured forth freely, without expressing wonder why any one, a perfect stranger, cared to listen to such a history. She needed but a few hints and leading questions to make her talk on. Nor is this an uncommon quality even among classes who would be shocked to be classed, in any respect, with the Widowed Street-Seller. Their own career, their own sayings and doings, hopes and disappointments, alone interest masses of people, and with the simplicity which not seldom pertains to selfishness, they will readily talk of all that interests themselves, as if it must necessarily interest others. On the whole, though the departed costermonger was greatly deplored by his widow and family, they did very well without him, and carry on the business to this day. He died four or five years back.

  I have no doubt this widow is a shrewd sales woman enough. I have heard her cry ‘mack’rel, live mack’rel, eight a shilling, mack’rel!’ and at other times, ‘Eight a bob, fine mack’rel, mack’rel, eight a bob, eight a bob!’ On my inquiring as to the cause of this difference in her cries, the fish-seller laughed and said, ‘I cries eight a bob when I sees people as I thinks is likely to like slang; to others I cries eight a shilling, which no doubt is the right way of talking.’

  OF THE CHILDREN STREET-SELLERS OF LONDON

  [pp. 524–37] When we consider the spirit of emulation, of imitation, of bravado, of opposition, of just or idle resentment, among boys, according to their training, companionship, natural disposition, and, above all, home treatment, it seems most important to ascertain how these feelings and inclinations are fostered or stimulated by the examples of the free street-life of other lads to be seen on every side. There is no doubt that to a large class of boys, whose parents are not in poverty, the young street ruffian is a hero.

  If this inquiry be important, as it unquestionably is, concerning boys, how much more important is it, when it includes the female children of the streets; when it relates to the sex who, in all relations of life, and in all grades of society, are really the guardians of a people’s virtue.

  The investigation is, again, rendered more interesting and more important, when it includes those children who have known no guidance from parent, master, or relative, but have been flung into the streets through neglect, through viciousness, or as outcasts from utter destitution. Mixed with the children who really sell in the streets, are the class who assume to sell that they may have the better chance to steal, or the greater facility to beg.

  Before I classify what I consider to be the causes which have driven children to a street career, with all its hardening consequences, I may point out that culpability cannot be imputed to them at the commencement of their course of life. They have been either untaught, mistaught, maltreated, neglected, regularly trained to vice, or fairly turned into the streets to shift for themselves. The censure, then, is attributable to parents, or those who should fill the place of parents – the State, or society. The exceptions to this culpability as regards parents are to be found in the instances where a costermonger employs his children to aid him in his business occupation, which the parents, in their ignorance or prejudices, may account as good as any other, and the youths thus become unfit, perhaps, for any other than a scrambling street life. A second exception may be where the children in a poor family (as continually happens among the Irish in London) must sell in the streets, that they may eat in any place.

  In the following details I shall consider all to be children who are under fifteen years of age. It is just beyond that age (or the age of puberty) that, as our prison statistics and other returns show, criminal dispositions are developed, ‘self-will’ becomes more imperious and headstrong, that destructive propensity, or taste, which we term the ruling passion or character of the individual is educed, and the density of the human being, especially when apart from the moulding and well-directed care of parents or friends, is influenced perhaps for life.

  The Causes, then, which fill our streets with children who either manifest the keen and sometimes roguish propensity of a precocious trader, the daring and adroitness of the thief, or the loutish indifference of the mere dull vagabond, content if he can only eat and sleep, I consider to be these:

  1. The conduct of parents, masters, and mistresses.

  2. The companionship and associations formed in tender years.

  3. The employment of children by costermongers and others who live by street traffic, and the training of costermongers’ children to a street life.

  4. Orphanhood, friendlessness, and utter destitution.

  5. Vagrant dispositions and tastes on the part of children, which cause them to be runaways.

  After this I shall treat of (a) the pursuits of the street-trading children; (b) their earnings; (c) the causes or influences which have induced children to adopt some especial branch of a street life; (d) their state of education; (e) their morals, religion, opinions, and conduct; (f) places and character of dwellings; (g) diet; (h) amusements; (i) clothing; (j) propensities.

  Concerning cause 1, viz., ‘The conduct of parents, masters, and mistresses’, I should have more to say were I treating of the juvenile criminals, instead of sellers in the streets. The brute tyranny of parents, manifested in the wreaking of any annoyances or disappointments they may have endured, in the passionate beating and cursing of their children, for trifling or for no causes, is among the worst symptoms of a depraved nature. This conduct may be the most common among the poor, for among them are fewer conventional restraints; but it exists among and debases other classe
s. Some parents only exercise this tyranny in their fits of drunkenness, and make that their plea in mitigation; but their dispositions are then only the more undisguisedly developed, and they would be equally unjust or tyrannical when sober, but for some selfish fear which checks them. A boy perhaps endures this course of tyranny some time, and then finding it increase he feels its further endurance intolerable, and runs away. If he have no friends with whom he can hope to find a shelter, the streets only are open to him. He soon meets with comrades, some of whom perhaps had been circumstanced like himself, and, if not strongly disposed to idleness and vicious indulgencies, goes through a course of horse-holding, errand-running, parcel-carrying, and such like, and so becomes, if honestly or prudently inclined, a street-seller, beginning with fuzees, or nuts, or some unexpensive stock. The where to buy and the how to sell he will find plenty to teach him at the lodging-houses, where he must sleep when he can pay for a bed.

  When I was collecting information concerning brace-selling I met with a youth of sixteen who about two years previously had run away from Birmingham, and made his way to London, with 2s. 6d. Although he earned something weekly, he was so pinched and beaten by a step-mother (his father was seldom at home except on Sunday) that his life was miserable. This went on for nearly a year, until the boy began to resist, and one Saturday evening, when beaten as usual, he struck in return, drawing blood from his step-mother’s face. The father came home before the fray was well ended; listened to his wife’s statement, and would not listen to the boy’s, and in his turn chastised the lad mercilessly. In five minutes after the boy, with aching bones and a bitter spirit, left his father’s house and made his way to London, where he was then vending cheap braces. This youth could neither read nor write, and seemed to possess no quickness or intelligence. The only thing of which he cared to talk was his step-mother’s treatment of him; all else was a blank with him, in comparison; this was the one burning recollection.

  I may here observe, that I heard of several instances of children having run away and adopted a street life in consequence of the violence of stepmothers far more than of step-fathers.

  I cite the foregoing instance, as the boy’s career was exactly that I have described; but the reader will remember, that in the many and curious narratives I have collected, how often the adult street-seller had begun such a life by being a runaway from domestic tyranny. Had this Birmingham boy been less honest, or perhaps less dull, it would have been far easier for him to have become a thief than a street-trader. To the gangs of young thieves, a new boy, who is not known to the police is often (as a smart young pickpocket, then known as the Cocksparrow, described it to me) ‘a God-send’.

  My readers will remember that in the collected statements of the street-folk, there are several accounts of runaways, but they were generally older than the age I have fixed, and it was necessary to give an account of one who comes within my classification of a child.

  I did not hear of any girls who had run away from their homes having become street-sellers merely. They more generally fall into a course of prostitution, or sometimes may be ostensibly street-sellers as a means of accosting men, and, perhaps, for an attractive pretence to the depraved, that they are poor, innocent girls, struggling for an honest penny. If they resort to the low lodging-houses, where the sexes are lodged indiscriminately, their ruin seems inevitable.

  2. That the ‘companionship and associations fortified in tender years’ lead many children to a street life is so evident, that I may be brief on the subject. There are few who are in the habit of noting what they may observe of poor children in the streets and quieter localities, who have not seen little boys playing at marbles, or gambling with halfpennies, farthings, or buttons, with other lads, and who have laid down their basket of nuts or oranges to take part in the play. The young street-seller has probably more halfpence at his command, or, at any rate, in his possession, than his non-dealing playmates; he is also in the undoubted possession of what appears a large store of things for which poor boys have generally a craving and a relish. Thus the little itinerant trader is envied and imitated.

  This attraction to a street career is very strong, I have ascertained, among the neglected children of the poor, when the parents are absent at their work. On a Saturday morning, some little time since, I was in a flagged court near Drury-lane, a wretched place, which was full of children of all ages. The parents were nearly all, I believe, then at work, or ‘on the look out for a job’, as porters in Covent Garden-market, and the children played in the court until their return. In one corner was a group of four or five little boys gambling and squabbling for nuts, of which one of the number was a vendor. A sharp-looking lad was gazing enviously on, and I asked him to guide me to the room of a man whom I wished to see. He did so, and I gave him a penny. On my leaving the court I found this boy the most eager of the players, gambling with the penny I had given him. I had occasion to return there a few hours after, and the same lad was leaning against the wall, with his hands in his pockets, as if suffering from listlessness. He had had no luck with the nut covey, he told me, but he hoped before long to sell nuts himself. He did not know his age, but he appeared to be about eleven. Only last week I saw this same lad hawking a basket, very indifferently stocked with oranges. He had raised a shilling, he said, and the ‘Early Bird’ (the nick-name of a young street-seller) had put him up to the way to lay it out. On my asking if his father (a journeyman butcher) knew what he was doing, he replied that so long as he didn’t bother his father he could do what he pleased, and the more he kept out of his (the father’s) way the better he would be liked and treated.

  The association of poor boys and girls with the children of the coster-mongers, and of the Irish fruit-sellers, who are employed in itinerant vending, is often productive of a strong degree of envy on the part of unemployed little ones, who look upon having the charge of a basket of fruit, to be carried in any direction, as a species of independence.

  3. ‘The employment of children by costermongers, and others who live by street traffic; and the training of costermongers’ children to a street life, is the ordinary means of increase among the street-folk.’

  The children of the costermongers become necessarily, as I have already intimated, street-dealers, and perhaps more innocently than in any other manner, by being required, as soon as their strength enables them, to assist their parents in their work, or sell trifles, single-handed, for the behoof of their parents. The child does but obey his father and the father does but rear the child to the calling by which his daily bread is won. This is the case particularly with the Irish, who often have large families, and bring them with them to London.

  There are, moreover, a great number of boys, ‘anybody’s children’, as I heard them called, who are tempted and trained to pursue an open-air traffic, through being engaged by costermongers or small tradesmen to sell upon commission, or, as it is termed, for ‘bunse’. In the curious, and almost in every instance novel, information which I gave to the public concerning the largest body of the street-sellers, the costermongers, this word ‘bunse’ (probably a corruption of bonus, bone being the slang for good) first appeared in print. The mode is this: a certain quantity of saleable, and sometimes of not very saleable, commodities is given to a boy whom a costermonger knows and perhaps employs, and it is arranged that the young commission-agent is to get a particular sum for them, which must be paid to the costermonger; I will say 3s., that being somewhere about the maximum. For these articles the lad may ask and obtain any price he can, and whatever he obtains beyond the stipulated 3s. is his own profit or ‘bunse’. The remuneration thus accruing to the boy-vendor of course varies very materially, according to the season of the year, the nature of the article, and the neighbourhood in which it is hawked. Much also depends upon whether the boy has a regular market for his commodities; whether he has certain parties to whom he is known and upon whom he can call to solicit custom; if he has, of course his facilities for disposing of his
stock in trade are much greater than in the case of one who has only the chance of attracting attention and obtaining custom by mere crying and bawling ‘Penny a piece, Col-ly-flowers’, ‘Five bunches a penny, Red-dish-es’, and such like. The Irish boys call this ‘having a back’, an old Hibernian phrase formerly applied to a very different subject and purpose.

  Another cause of the abundance of street-dealers among the boyish fraternity, whose parents are unable or unwilling to support them, is that some costers keep a lad as a regular assistant, whose duty it is to pull the barrow of his master about the streets, and assist him in ‘crying’ his wares. Sometimes the man and the boy call out together, sometimes separately and alternately, but mostly the boy alone has to do this part of the work, the coster’s voice being generally rough and hoarse, while the shrill sound of that of the boy re-echoes throughout the street along which they slowly move, and is far more likely to strike the ear, and consequently to attract attention, than that of the man. This mode of ‘practising the voice’ is, however, perfectly ruinous to it, as in almost every case of this description we find the natural tone completely annihilated at a very early age, and a harsh, hoarse, guttural, disagreeable mode of speaking acquired. In addition to the costers there are others who thus employ boys in the streets: the hawkers of coal do so invariably, and the milkmen – especially those who drive cows or have a cart to carry the milk-pails in. Once in the streets and surrounded with street-associates, the boy soon becomes inured to this kind of life, and when he leaves his first master, will frequently start in some branch of costermongering for himself, without seeking to obtain another constant employment.