The Victorian City

by Judith Flanders

  Their customer base became confined almost entirely to boys, who worked in the streets, eating coffee-stall breakfasts, shellfish at lunch, hot eels or pea soup for dinner, perhaps with a potato, and a pie to fill in the gaps when they could afford it. What the boys loved about piemen was their method of charging. A pie cost a penny, but all piemen were willing to toss a coin for one: if the customer won, he got the pie free; if the pieman won, the pieman kept both pie and penny. Tossing for a pie was part of the language. Dickens used it regularly: in Pickwick Papers the stagecoach driver warns his passengers: ‘Take care o’ the archvay, gen’lm’n. “Heads,” as the pieman says’. In David Copperfield, little Miss Mowcher is like ‘a goblin pieman’ as she tosses up the two half-crowns she is paid, as did Montague Tigg in Martin Chuzzlewit, spinning a coin ‘in the air after the manner of a pieman’.

  Pies were available all year round, but some foodstuffs were sold seasonally. Greenwich’s Easter Fair saw the last of the men selling hot green peas, which they ladled out of a tin pot into basins in halfpenny servings, alongside other dishes that remained popular for longer: pickled salmon ‘(fennel included)’, oysters, whelks and that fairground favourite, gingernuts. Fried fish, although becoming more popular in town, especially near pubs, was still mostly considered a racecourse delicacy. At Epsom in 1850 there were fifty fried-fish sellers, whose customers were mostly the boys who held the carriage-horses’ heads and did odd jobs, or were themselves sellers of other goods. Fried-fish sellers charged a penny for a piece of fish and a slice of bread, sold from newspaper-lined trays that hung from straps around their necks.

  Some vendors set up on Sundays at working-class excursion spots, such as Hornsey Wood House, or on roads near pubs in the suburbs. Gooseberries or pottles of strawberries were popular on steamer excursions downriver to Greenwich on a summer Sunday too: ‘the working-people’s Sunday dessert’, they were sometimes called. The seller’s cry for strawberries was, mysteriously, ‘Hoboys!’ and was a sign summer had arrived.

  Many drinks, naturally, were seasonal. Hot elder wine was sold in the winter in penny and halfpenny measures, with a small piece of toast alongside, to dip into the wine. This, said one street seller, appealed to the working classes, ‘but not the better order of them’. Peppermint water, too, was a winter drink: it was mint extract, purchased from a chemist, and diluted, sometimes with pepper added to give it more kick. Curds-and-whey sellers were occasionally still seen after the 1820s, although their drink was considered old-fashioned. There were also a few sellers of rice milk, which was four quarts of milk boiled to every pound of rice, sweetened and flavoured with allspice, and served hot, a cup for a penny. The customers for this were the very poor, who substituted it for a meal.

  The weather had an effect on many other food and drink sellers’ trades. Cold weather obviously improved the chances of selling warming items like pea soup or pease pudding. One freezing winter, the young George Sanger, living with his showman father in the off-season, bought sugar and oil of peppermint, borrowed some pans to boil it up in and made peppermint rock to sell to the skaters on Bow Common and Hackney Marshes at a penny a lump, making several shillings’ profit in a few hours. Spring and summer brought the arrival of cooling drinks. Outside Rag Fair, in Houndsditch in the East End in the 1850s, a girl with ‘a horse-pail full of ice’ was selling something that looked like ‘frozen soap-suds’ in halfpenny eggcup sizes. In the same decade, ice cream first appeared, initially sold by Italian vendors, later by hokey-pokey men who were natives of Whitechapel and New Cut, with ‘Neapolitan’ ices that were rumoured to be frozen mashed turnip.97

  More commonly available, outdoors as well as in, were ale, porter and stout, all sold by potboys employed by pubs and taverns. They walked the streets, smartly dressed in white aprons and white sleeves, usually carrying wooden frames divided lengthways into two compartments, into which they slotted their foaming cans, with a measuring jug hooked on the side, although some preferred long sticks with up to twenty cans dangling by their wire handles. On weekday evenings these boys had set routes to supply local residents with their supper beer, but householders could also call to a potboy as he passed, as Dick Swiveller does in The Old Curiosity Shop. In the 1830s, Dickens wrote that at teatime householders opened their doors ‘and screamed out “Muffins” with all their might’, before retreating indoors until nine o’clock, when a potboy’s passing produced a repeat performance.

  After the beer was finished, the pots, which were the property of the pub, were hung on the house-railings outside, to be collected by the potboys early the following morning, just as the milkmaids collected their jugs from the same place. In Nicholas Nickleby, there is one square in Soho that is almost entirely let out in lodgings, in which ‘every doorway [is] blocked up and rendered nearly impassable by a motley collection of children and porter pots of all sizes, from the baby in arms and the half-pint pot, to the full-grown girl and half-gallon can’. Even in the shabby-genteel, upper-middle-class neighbourhood of Miss Tox, in Dombey and Son, somewhere in a backstreet in Mayfair, ‘the top of every rail…[is] decorated with a pewter-pot’.

  Theatres were lucrative places for night-time food selling: many street sellers either specialized in ready-made food for theatregoers, or they doubled up, working one line during the day and another at night. The Britannia theatre in the East End, a working-class house that seated nearly 4,000 people, had ‘no drink supplied, beyond the contents of the porter-can’, observed Dickens. However, ‘Huge ham sandwiches, piled on trays like deal in a timber-yard, were handed about for sale to the hungry, and there was no stint of oranges, cakes, brandy-balls, or other similar refreshments.’ Ham-sandwich sellers, wearing white aprons and white sleeves, and carrying trays or flat baskets covered with white cloths, also stood outside the theatres, often selling until 4 a.m. to those out on the town.

  After the theatres closed in the West End, many of the audiences in the 1850s headed for the ham-and-beef shop at the corner of Bow Street, calling out for ham, beef or ‘German sausage sandwiches’, ‘half a pound of “cold round”, or three-pennyworth of “brisket”’. It was possible to eat at the shop, but most people took their orders away, ‘neatly rolled up in paper’, to eat on the street or at home, as Martin Chuzzlewit did when he ‘bought some cold beef, and ham, and French bread, and butter’, returning to his tavern room to eat it. These shops served sandwiches and cold meat all day, with hot meals at set hours. In the 1820s, according to the fictional Real Life in London, there was a chain of ‘fourteen to twenty’ ham and beef shops, where hot boiled beef and ham were available ‘at moderate prices’, and the offcuts were served to the less prosperous for a penny. By the 1840s and 1850s, this type of shop had window displays to tempt the hungry: a ‘long window-board lined with pewter, in which wells had been sunk like small baths to receive the puddles of gravy in which joints of meat were perpetually steaming…[together with] a pagoda of boiled beef…pegged into a pile with a metal skewer’. For 2d, a helping was put into a piece of newspaper, or customers brought their own dishes, ‘and those who have basins take gravy away’.

  Oysters were sold on the street during the day, but at night oyster houses came into their own, after the dancing saloons closed between two and four in the morning, opening when ordinary hard-working people were going to bed. (There were also oyster houses in the City, but these were closed in the evenings.) In the 1850s, the oyster houses in the West End were scattered around the Haymarket, the red-light district, as well as in the Strand and close to the theatres and other late-night locations: at the Opera Colonnade by the Haymarket, on the corner of Leicester Square, in Rupert Street and Coventry Street, and near the Argyle Rooms, the Haymarket theatre and the Opera House. More were on Holborn, such as the one described by Dickens in 1835 as being ‘on a magnificent scale’, with ‘a little red box with a green curtain’, behind which the customers could sit and eat.

  In the 1820s, the oyster houses had been designed mostly as retail outl
ets, looking very much like fishmongers, with either plate-glass windows revealing trays of oysters, or with an open hatch to the street and a slab for displaying oysters and other food to passers-by. By the 1850s and 1860s, the ‘best shell fish shop in the metropolis’ was Scott’s Oyster House, at the north end of the Haymarket, which had a counter at the front and behind it a range of shellfish: lobster, prawns, crabs, mussels and periwinkles. The owner, his wife and three men served the customers, who either took the oysters away to eat elsewhere, stood at the counter and ate them then and there, or went to the back room, where ‘clerks, swells, men about town, Englishmen and foreigners’ all mixed. Upstairs was ‘more select’, as well as the haunt of women supposedly of dubious reputation. Some oyster houses were simpler: ‘lobsters, crabs, pickled and kippered salmon, bloaters, and dried sprats’ were sold to customers who stood at the counter, eating and drinking and then ‘contentedly wip[ing] their hands on the jack-towel on its roller afterwards’.

  In the daytime, there was a wider range of choices. There were taverns, public houses, eating houses, chophouses, ham-and-beef shops, alamode beef houses, oyster rooms, soup houses, pastry-cooks, cookshops and coffee houses. Some of these places overlapped in terms of what, and whom, they served, but most had a distinct profile. What is perhaps noticeably absent from this list is the restaurant, which did not emerge on the London eating scene until the 1860s. The Oxford English Dictionary lists several usages before this date, but they all refer either to restaurants in Europe or compare English establishments with their European counterparts. Sala, for example, mentions the Haymarket ‘restaurants’ only to dismiss them as places where they give you things ‘with French names’. Although initially all of these eating places seem not to be part of street life, their separation from the street was far more ambiguous than their names suggest.

  Most closely linked to street life were the pastry-cooks and the cookshops. Pastry-cooks supplied not just pastry but a variety of cooked dishes. When David Copperfield gives his first dinner party, the roast chicken, stewed beef, vegetables, cooked kidneys, sweet tart and jelly all come from the pastry-cook. Twenty years later, Dickens listed a similar range of food in an essay on how the day visitor in London managed to feed himself. (If it was a ‘herself’ who needed feeding, it was even more difficult.) In a pastry-cook’s window, Dickens’ visitor sees two old turtle-shells with ‘SOUPS’ painted on them, a dried-up sample meal spread out for display, and a box of stale or damaged cut-price pastry on a stool by the door. The welcome, warned Dickens, would be as glum and dispiriting as the display: every pastry-cook employed ‘a young lady…whose gloomy haughtiness…announced a deep-seated grievance against society’. A couple of years later a guidebook was more positive, recommending pastry-cooks for ‘a good cup of tea and a chop’, adding that ‘for a light meal, when you have a lady with you, there are several admirably conducted houses’.

  Cookshops, or bakeshops, although they often carried the same foodstuffs as the pastry-cooks, were regarded as places for the working classes, because earlier in the century they were where the working classes, without access to kitchen ranges or even kitchens, took their food to be cooked in a communal oven.98 For a Sunday dinner, the housewife had an earthenware dish divided into two unequal parts; on one side she piled potatoes, with ‘the modest joint’ on top; into the other she poured the pudding batter before carrying it all to the cookshop in the early morning and collecting it a few hours later. Thomas Wright, the working-class engineer, disapproved of cookshops: the ‘meat [is] burnt to a cinder outside, and red raw inside; and pies [have] scorched crusts and uncooked insides’, not to mention the fact that the joints were returned with ‘the marks of slicing’, as part of the meat had been shaved off by the cookshop owners, or ‘the print of the knife that has been used in lifting the tops of the pies, in order to toll the inside’. Happy were the artisans’ families who did not need to resort to the cookshop, but they were few and far between. Cookshops did their best business on Sundays, and on Christmas Day Dickens made a habit of going to the ‘shabby genteel’ neighbourhoods of Somers Town and Kentish Town at Christmas to ‘watch…the dinners’ coming and going.

  For the rest of the week, and the rest of the year, cookshops sold ready-cooked food, either to be eaten on the premises, or to be taken home. In Little Dorrit, there is ‘a dirty shop window in a dirty street, which was made almost opaque by the steam of hot meats, vegetables, and puddings…Within, were a few wooden partitions, behind which [sat] such customers as found it more convenient to take away their dinners in stomachs than in their hands.’ Beef, veal, ham, greens, potatoes and pudding were a typical menu. In Bethnal Green in the 1860s, offal was also available, with cows’ heels and baked sheep’s heads, which a family might eat on Saturday night, as well as food to supply ‘the immediate wants’ of passers-by: the same list of stodge-heavy offerings of puddings, pastry, pies and saveloys that David Copperfield had enumerated four decades earlier. For the main thing was to stave off the ever-present hunger. One street boy remembered a cookshop by Billingsgate market that specialized in pea soup, ‘exposed most temptingly in a large tank in one of the windows’. The soup cost 3d a basin, or 1d for a half-basin, and the ‘initiate’ chose his day carefully: ‘It was freshly made on Monday, and even then was good. On Tuesday, however, the thick residue at the bottom of the tank remaining unsold was left, and the usual ingredients…were added to it, making it much richer and more substantial. On Wednesday, this process was repeated, with the result that Wednesday’s soup was a thick pureé [sic] in which a spoon would stand erect.’ Street boys ordering a pennyworth of the Wednesday soup and a halfpenny-worth of bread ‘could go in the strength of that meal for twenty-four hours’.

  Scharf sketched the streets at Sunday dinnertime: the people in the top row are collecting their dinner beer, and a potboy with a wooden frame makes deliveries; the other two rows show dinners being carried home from the cookshops. Note the enthusiasm of the boy, centre right, who is carrying a pie.

  Coffee shops were of two sorts: those for the working classes and those for City gents. Some working-class coffee shops had a temperance tinge to them; many were used by working men as a meeting place, where communal newspapers could be read and political discussions held. Many workers tried to find a congenial regular spot between their lodgings and work, stopping there every morning instead of going to a coffee stall. It was a little more expensive, but it was warm, and there was a newspaper to read. In the late 1810s, there was one in Bear Street, leading into Leicester Square, where for 6d a month subscribers even had access to magazines. One man set up a coffee house in Greville Street, near Hatton Garden, in 1834; having ambitions for it, he offered his customers in addition to newspapers and magazines ‘several hundred volumes’ and ‘a conversation room’. Unfortunately his morals got in the way: refusing to adulterate his tea and coffee to make them go further, which, he said, all coffee houses did, he went bankrupt. (The fact that he was a ‘somewhat notorious’ political radical didn’t help him either.) Most coffee houses, however, did not aspire so high. Pierce Egan, in his novel Life in London, described one coffee shop as a haunt of ‘drunkenness, beggary, lewdness, and carelessness’, although this is more likely to be the middle class’s view of poverty than necessarily the prevailing state of affairs. The accompanying picture shows a small room with one candle, wooden tables and benches, and a few stools by the fire. Many people used the coffee shops as somewhere to stay warm. Thirty years after Egan, Sala visited an early-morning coffee shop that before dawn was giving shelter to ‘half a dozen homeless wretches’ who had paid for a single cup of coffee in order to be allowed to sit and doze indoors.

  The coffee houses clearly filled a need: from only a few dozen catering to artisans in 1815, they had increased in numbers by 1840 to nearly 2,000; there a full breakfast could be purchased for 3d. A coffee house in one working-class district served up to 900 customers a day, who had a choice of three rooms: the cheapest wa
s open from 4 a.m. to 10 p.m., where customers could enjoy a breakfast of coffee, bread and butter for 1½d; the second-grade room offered coffee, a penny loaf and a pennyworth of butter for 3d; or, in the most expensive room, customers could order a dinner where the coffee shop supplied the bread and the coffee but the diner brought his own cooked meat. The customer bringing cooked food, or a raw chop or a herring, which the waiter put on the gridiron over the fire, was a routine service. Dickens described one such coffee house near Covent Garden in 1860, watching, enchanted, as ‘a man in a high and long snuff-coloured coat, and shoes, and, to the best of my belief, nothing else but a hat…took out of his hat a large cold meat pudding’. The man was clearly a regular, because as soon as he sat down the waiter brought him tea, bread, and a knife and fork.99

  City coffee houses were of a different order. Some were quasi-hotels, letting out rooms. The Brontës on their first foray to London stayed at the Chapter Coffee-House in Paternoster Row, while the nearby London Coffee House, on the north side of Ludgate Hill, is where the fictional Arthur Clennam lodges in Little Dorrit. The mysterious Julius Handford, in Our Mutual Friend, lodges at the Exchequer Coffee-House, Palace Yard, in Westminster. These establishments were the meeting places of businessmen, and their decor matched their customers’ prosperity, with ‘cosy mahogany boxes’ (booths)100 and sanded floors in dark-panelled rooms always supplied with a vast range of newspapers: the New England Coffee-House had even the New York papers, ‘dated only twenty-one days back: so rapidly had they been transported over 3000 miles of ocean, and 230 of land!’ Specific trades patronized specific coffee houses. The Jerusalem Coffee House in Cowper’s Court, Cornhill, was linked to the East Indies, China and Australia trades; Garraway’s, in Exchange Alley, was linked to the Hudson Bay Company (and in Martin Chuzzlewit is called a ‘business coffee-room’). Legal London had its own coffee houses around the Inns of Court and Holborn. George’s was across from the new Royal Courts of Justice as well as near the solicitors clustered around Lincoln’s Inn. John’s Coffee-house, in a lane by the gatehouse of Gray’s Inn, is where David Copperfield goes to look for his old friend Tommy Traddles. He gives the waiter Traddles’ name and, because it is a legal haunt, the waiter knows off the top of his head which chambers Traddles is in, even though he is not particularly successful.