The numbers of men, women and children who made their living in the streets of the country’s cities were immense. Henry Mayhew, the first volumes of whose masterly social survey, London Labour and the London Poor, were published in 1851, estimated that in London alone the number of costermongers – ‘that is to say those street sellers attending the London “green” and “fish” markets’ – appeared to be ‘from the best data at [his] command, now 30,000 men, women and children’.
The costermongering class extends itself yearly [Mayhew continued]; and it is computed that for the last five years it has increased considerably faster than the general metropolitan population. This increase is derived from all the children of costermongers following the father’s trade, but chiefly from working men, such as the servants of greengrocers or of innkeepers, when out of employ, ‘taking a coster’s barrow’ for a livelihood; and the same being done by mechanics and labourers out of work. At the time of the famine in Ireland, it is calculated, that the number of Irish obtaining a living in the London streets must have been at least doubled.1
Costermongers – who got their name from ‘costard’, a large, ribbed apple – were a rough, quarrelsome, mostly illiterate set of men much given to fighting, drinking and gambling, to tattooing their arms and throwing bricks at policemen. Anxious to keep the secrets of their trade from the police and potential rivals they spoke to each other in an esoteric language, incomprehensible to the uninitiated, which involved the use of an extensive cryptic vocabulary and an ability to pronounce words backwards. ‘I tumble to your Barrikin’ meant ‘I understand you’; ‘cool the esclop’, ‘look at the police’; ‘flatch kanurd’, half drunk; and ‘a top of reeb’, a pot of beer. Few costermongers troubled to marry the women they lived with; most – although not above cheating their customers – were honest among themselves and kind to their donkeys and children, though ‘perhaps in a rough way’; hardly any had been inside a church or could read or write. Mayhew reported the conversation he had with one of them, almost verbatim, omitting oaths and slang:
Well, times is bad, Sir … When I served the Prince of Naples not far from here (I presume he alluded to the Prince of Capua) I did better … He was a good customer, and was very fond of peaches. I used to sell them to him, at 12S the plasket when they was new. The plasket held a dozen, and cost me 6s at Covent-garden – more sometimes; but I didn’t charge him more when they did. He was the Prince o’ Naples, was my customer; but I don’t know what he was like, for I never saw him. I’ve heard that he was the brother of the King of Naples. I can’t say where Naples is, but if you ask at Euston-square, they’ll tell you the fare there and the time to go it in. Why don’t you ask at the square? I never heard of the Pope being a neighbour of the King of Naples. Do you mean living next door to him? But I don’t know nothing of the King of Naples, only the prince. I don’t know what the Pope is. Is he any trade? It’s nothing to me, when he’s no customer of mine. I have nothing to say about nobody that ain’t no customers. My crabs is caught in the sea, in course. I gets them at Billingsgate. I never saw the sea, but it’s salt-water, I know. I can’t say whereabouts it lays. I believe it’s in the hands of the Billingsgate salesmen. I’ve worked the streets and the courts at all times. I’ve worked them by moonlight, … I can’t say how far the moon’s off us. It’s nothing to me, but I’ve seen it a good bit higher than St Paul’s. I don’t know nothing about the sun. Why do you ask? It must be nearer than the moon for it’s warmer, – and if they’re both fire, that shows it. It’s like the taproom grate and that bit of a gas-light; to compare the two is. What was St Paul’s that the moon was above? A church, sir; so I’ve heard. I never was in a church. O, yes, I’ve heard of God; he made heaven and earth; I never heard of his making the sea; that’s another thing, and you can best learn about that at Billingsgate.2
‘No, I never heard about this here creation you speaks about,’ another costermonger said to Mayhew.
In coorse God Almighty made the world, and the poor bricklayers’ labourers built the houses afterwards – that’s my opinion; but I can’t say, for I’ve never been in no schools and knows nothing about it. I have heered a little about our Saviour. They seem to say he was a goodish kind of man; but if he says as how a cove’s to forgive a feller as hits you, I should say he know’d nothing about it. In coorse the gals lads goes and lives with thinks our walloping ’em wery cruel, but we don’t. Why don’t we? Why, because we don’t … On a Sunday I goes out selling. As for going to church, why, I can’t afford it – besides, to tell the truth, I don’t like it well enough. Plays, too, ain’t in my line much. I’d sooner go to a dance – it’s more livelier … The songs are out and out, and makes our gals laugh. The smuttier the better, I thinks. Bless you, the gals like it as much as we do … When I was fourteen I took up with a gal … I used to walk out of a night with her and give her half-pints of beer at the publics. She were about thirteen, and used to dress werry nice.
Costermongers’ children were very rarely sent even to Ragged Schools and were put to work at an early age, usually before they were seven; and when the boys were about fourteen they started in business on their own and with a woman of their own, settling the arrangement by giving the girl a silk handkerchief which was usually taken back after a time, either as a gambling pledge or as a scarf for themselves. Costermongers were renowned for ‘dressing flash’, as they called it, and were inordinately proud of their silk neckerchieves and, indeed, of all their clothes. Most wore a kind of uniform of long cord waistcoats with huge and numerous pockets and shining brass or mother-of-pearl buttons, seamed trousers fitting tightly at the knee and billowing out over highly polished boots, and a worsted skull-cap or a cloth cap pulled very much down on one side of a head covered with ringlets at the front and with long hair, ‘Newgate-Knocker style’, hanging down over the ears. The general costume of the women was a black straw bonnet with a few ribbons or flowers, a printed cotton gown with a silk handkerchief tucked into the neck, and petticoats worn short, ‘ending at the ankles just high enough to show the whole of the much admired boots’.
The life of the coster-girls is as severe as that of the boys [Mayhew thought]. Between four and five in the morning they have to leave home for the markets, and sell in the streets until about nine. Those that have more kindly parents, return then to breakfast, but many are obliged to earn the morning’s meal for themselves. After breakfast, they generally remain in the streets until about ten o’clock at night; many having nothing during all that time but one meal of bread and butter and coffee, to enable them to support the fatigue of walking from street to street with a heavy basket on their heads.3
Yet once they had ‘learnt the markets’ – and such tricks of the trade as boiling oranges to make them swell – and were able to fend for themselves, costermongers lived quite comfortably. Taking the more prosperous with the less successful, the English with the Irish and the men with the women, Mayhew estimated that 10s a week was, perhaps, ‘a fair average of the earnings of the entire body the year through’; but some made well over £1 10s a week. They could afford to frequent ‘two-penny hops’ and those rowdy and bawdy temporary theatres known as penny gaffs; and they could spend a good deal on drink and food as well as upon clothes. They always managed to have what they called a ‘relish’ for breakfast and tea, ‘a couple of herrings, a bit of bacon, or what not’; and while waiting for a market would often spend a shilling on the cakes, crisp butter biscuits and ‘three cornered puffs sold by the Jews’. ‘The owners toss for them, and so enable the young coster to indulge his two favourite passions at the same time – his love of pastry and his love of gambling.’ For dinner on weekdays they commonly had saveloys or meat pies with a pint of beer or a glass of neat gin, and on Sundays a shoulder of mutton with plenty of potatoes or a dish of kidney puddings, hot eels, pickled whelks and oysters.
There were thousands of street sellers, though, who could never afford such fare, men who, having failed in other occupations, had
come to the trade late in life and never learned to bargain successfully at the markets. ‘They’re inferior salesmen, too,’ one of their more enterprising and experienced competitors said of them. ‘And if they have fish left that won’t keep, it’s a dead loss to them’, for
they aren’t up to the trick of selling it cheap at a distance where the coster ain’t known; or of quitting it to another, for candle-light sale. Some of these poor fellows lose every penny. They’re mostly middle-aged when they begin costering. They’ll generally commence with oranges or herrings. We pity them. We say, ‘Poor fellows! they’ll find it out by-and-by.’ It’s awful to see some poor women, too, trying to pick up a living in the streets by selling nuts or oranges. It’s awful to see them, for they can’t set about it right; besides that, there’s too many before they start. They don’t find a living, it’s only another way of starving.4
Mayhew’s volumes contain numerous examples of the pitiable plight to which the poorest and least successful street sellers were reduced. One young orphaned flower-girl of fifteen told him how she contrived to make a home for her younger brother and sister with the 6d a day she earned from selling primroses, carnations and violets in the streets. She paid 2s a week for a bed in a dark, bare, dank room in Drury Lane which was rented by an Irishman and his wife whose own bed was separated from hers by an old curtain. She shared the bed with her brother, aged thirteen, and her sister, eleven; and she was proud that she ‘could get them a bit of bread and had never troubled the parish’. The two girls went out on their rounds every morning, wearing torn, dark print frocks and broken black chip bonnets. The elder sister had a pair of worn-out shoes, the younger went barefoot. ‘We live on bread and tea,’ the elder said, ‘and sometimes a fresh herring of a night. Sometimes we don’t eat a bit all day when we’re out; sometimes we take a bit of bread with us … My sister can’t eat taturs; they sicken her … We never pawned anything; we have nothing they would take in at the pawnshop.’
A younger girl, aged eight, described an even more pitiable life. She was one of those who could be seen every morning at the cress market, haggling with the saleswomen over the price, shivering in their thin dresses as they washed the leaves at the pump, their fingers aching with cold. She had been ‘very near a twelve month on the streets,’ she said, her ‘long rusty hair standing out in all directions’, shuffling her feet ‘for fear that the large carpet slippers that served her for shoes would slip off’:
I go about the streets with water-creases, crying, ‘Four bunches a penny, water-creases!! … My mother learned me to needle-work and to knit when I was about five. I used to go to school, too; but I wasn’t there long. I’ve forgot all about it now, it’s such a time ago. The master whacked me … He hit me three times, ever so hard, across the face with his cane. The creases is so bad now that I haven’t been out with ’em for three days. They’re so cold, people won’t buy ’em; for when I goes up to them, they say, ‘They’ll freeze our bellies.’ Besides, in the market, they won’t sell a ha’penny handful now – they’re ris to a penny and tuppence. I used to go down to market along with another girl, as must be about fourteen, ’cos she does her back hair up. When we’ve bought a lot, we sits down on a doorstep, and ties up the bunches. We never goes home to breakfast till we’ve sold out; but, if it’s very late, then I buys a penn’orth of pudden, which is very nice with gravy … We children never play down there [in the market] ’cos we’re thinking of our living. No; people never pities me in the street – excepting one gentleman, and he says, says he, ‘What do you do out so soon in the morning?’ but he gave me nothink – he only walked away.
It’s very cold before winter comes on reg’lar – specially getting up of a morning. I gets up in the dark by the light of the lamp in the court …
I always give mother my money, she’s so very good to me. She don’t often beat me. She’s very poor, and goes out cleaning rooms sometimes, now she don’t work at the fur. I ain’t got no father, he’s a father-in-law. No; mother ain’t married again – he’s a father-in-law. He grinds scissors, and he’s very good to me. No; I don’t mean by that that he says kind things to me, for he never hardly speaks. When I gets home, I puts the room to rights: mother don’t make me do it, I does it myself. I cleans the chairs, though there’s only two to clean. I takes a tub and scrubbing-brush and flannel, and scrubs the floor – that’s what I do.
I don’t have no dinner. Mother gives me two slices of bread-and-butter and a cup of tea for breakfast, and then I go to till tea, and has the same. We has meat of a Sunday, and, of course, I should like to have it every day. Mother has just the same to eat as we has, but she takes more tea – three cups, sometimes. No; I never had no sweet-stuff; I never buy none – I don’t like it. Sometimes we has a game of ‘honeypots’ with the girls in the court, but not often. I knows a good many games, but I don’t play at ’em, ’cos going out with creases tire me. On a Friday night, too, I goes to a Jew’s house till eleven o’clock on a Saturday night. All I has to do is to snuff the candles and poke the fire. You see they keep their Sabbath then, and they won’t touch anything; so they gives me my wittals and 1½d, and I does it for ’em.
I am a capital hand at bargaining. They can’t take me in … I know the quantities very well. When I’ve bought 3d of creases, I ties ’em up into as many little bundles as I can. They must look biggish, or the people won’t buy them, some puffs them out as much as they’ll go … I’m past eight, I am. I can’t read or write but I know how many pennies goes to a shilling, and two ha’pence goes to a penny, and four fardens goes to a penny. I knows, too, how many fardens goes to tuppence – eight. That’s as much as I wants to know for the markets.5
This little girl rarely earned more than 3d or 4d a day, but other street sellers, like the more successful costermongers, made enough to live quite comfortably. One, a tin-ware seller, had begun his working life as a pantry-boy. After some time he resolved to join the army but on the day of his enlistment into the 60th Rifles he had broken his leg and been permanently crippled. He had then found employment in a dust-yard at 10s a week, and had subsequently lived a vagrant life, sleeping in the arches of the Adelphi and eating the rotten oranges and other rubbish in the market at Covent Garden. He had contracted cholera and been admitted to a workhouse. On his discharge he had gone to work in a coal-shed for 10s a week, but was soon dismissed. He then ‘began to think seriously of some way of living’. He borrowed enough to buy 200 oranges and with the profits from their sale set himself up as a sugar boiler. From sugar boiling he turned to selling rings at a penny each, then, having bought a bundle of old umbrellas and taken the trouble to study the way they were made, he began in business as an umbrella repairer and salesman. For three years he prospered well enough; then decided he could do better as a mender and maker of saucepans and pots. ‘And I succeeded so well,’ he said, ‘that I abandoned the rainy-day system, and commenced manufacturing articles in tin-ware, such as [I now] sell in the streets, namely funnels, nutmeg graters, penny mugs, extinguishers, slicers, save-alls … and thanks to the Lord I am better off than ever I expected to be.’6
Covent Garden Market, where this man went for scraps of food, had for long been London’s biggest and busiest fruit and vegetable market. Established in 1656 as a few temporary stalls erected in the garden of Bedford House, it had become a thrice-weekly market by the end of the seventeenth century. It was not, however, until the closure of the other fruit and vegetable markets in London that it assumed its unrivalled pre-eminence. The Stocks Market, founded in the thirteenth century on the site of the present Mansion House and rebuilt after the Great Fire, had been closed in 1737; its successor, the Fleet Market, was cleared for the construction of Farringdon Street in 1826–30; and thereafter Covent Garden became so crowded that several large new buildings had to be constructed. From six in the morning it was packed with carts, vans, donkeys and barrows; with porters making their way through the crowds, their teeth clenched as they carried columns of heavy ha
mpers on their heads; with apple women sitting on porters’ knots and smoking pipes; with small flower-girls running past with bundles of violets; with costers in corduroy suits, greengrocers in blue aprons and countrymen in smocks and tattered straw hats. The flagstones were covered with walnut husks, grape skins and bits of white paper from crates of lemons, and they were stained green with squashed cabbage leaves. The air was filled with the smell of bruised or squashed fruit, of oranges, onions and bitter herbs. Charles Dickens, like Tom Pinch in Martin Chuzzlewit, enjoyed many a pleasant stroll in Covent Garden, ‘snuffing up the perfume of the fruits and flowers’, lingering at the doors of the herbalists, ‘gratefully inhaling scent as of veal-stuffing yet uncooked, dreamily mixed up with capsicums, brown paper and seeds’, ‘catching glimpses down side avenues of rows and rows of old women, seated on inverted baskets shelling peas’.7
Although ‘all was bustle and confusion’ at Covent Garden, there was no shouting as in other markets, rather a low murmuring hum, as of the sea at a distance. The row at Billingsgate, however, was deafening. Here, amid piles of smelly brown baskets, shining wet fish on slabs, herring scales, huge black oyster bags and fishmongers’ carts, salesmen and hucksters tried to shout each other down as they stood in their white aprons on top of their tables and competed for their customers’ attention, crying, ‘Ye-oo! Ye-o-o! Turbot! Turbot! All alive turbot! … Oy! Oy! Oy! Now’s your time! Fine grizzling sprats! All large and small … Hullo! Hullo! Hullo! Here! Fine cock crabs! All alive O! O! O! … Here! Here! Here you are, governor, had-had-had-haddick! All fresh and good! … Now or never, now or never, five brill and one turbot – have that lot for a pound!’ Inured to the din, foul-mouthed women with cods’ tails dangling from their aprons elbowed their way through the crowds; and porters pushed behind them in their bobbing hats which were so called after the shilling charge their wearers made for their services and which were said to have been modelled on the leather helmets worn by Henry V’s bowmen at Agincourt. Sailors wandered about in striped guernseys and red worsted caps; and the customers themselves walked from table to table, asking, ‘What’s the price, master?’, picking up a sole to smell it, knocking a crawling lobster back into its heap, peering into herring barrels and sackfuls of whelks, turning over smelts on their marble slabs.
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