The Victorian City Page 17

  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.’

  Often selling appeared more random.
In Sketches by Boz, Dickens reported that stagecoach offices were well known for their miscellaneous sellers: ‘Heaven knows why’, it is considered ‘quite impossible any man can mount a coach without requiring at least sixpenny-worth of oranges, a penknife, a pocket-book, a last year’s annual, a pencil-case, a piece of sponge, and a small series of caricatures’. Later, with the coming of the railways, at least one item of street-selling became more directly linked to the voyage itself. Now one of the prerequisites for setting out on a journey was a penknife: newspapers and books all had uncut edges, and in every train compartment passengers had to be busy with their knives before they could settle down to read. In Dombey and Son the very wealthy Mr Dombey’s office, off Leadenhall Street in the City, is situated in a court ‘where perambulating merchants’ sold ‘slippers, pocket-books, sponges, dogs’ collars, and Windsor soap; and sometimes a pointer or an oil-painting’.

  Jewellery was sold on the streets from cases, as well as in pubs by sellers showing off a few chains held at arm’s length or sticking a few pins decoratively in their own clothes – sailors treating their girls tended to be good customers. (The illustration on p. 358 shows a woman selling goods from a tub on the right.) Pubs were also good places for pedlars to persuade listeners of the efficacy of their magic potions: medicines for people and animals; salves to knit broken bones, heal cuts and bruises; or pastes to remove stains and soot. The pedlar in Oliver Twist sells one such product that removes ‘rust, dirt, mildew, spick, speck, spot, or spatter, from silk, satin, linen, cambric, cloth, crape, stuff, carpet, merino, muslin, bombazeen, or woollen stuff. Wine-stains, fruit-stains, beer-stains, water-stains, paint-stains, pitch-stains, any stains...One penny a square!’ Items of every kind were on offer: malacca canes, or the smallest Bible in the world, or a Punch and Judy squeaker, or a bird-warbler.

  In the 1840s, a type of proto water pistol – flexible metal tubes filled with scented water, which young boys enjoyed squirting at passers-by – became such a nuisance that legislation was passed to prevent its sale by hawkers. However, this toy was probably not as annoying, if only because it was not as common, as a toy sold at Greenwich Fair, known as ‘All the Fun of the Fair’: ‘a mischievous little wooden instrument, with a rasp or toothed wheel’, which, when run down someone’s back, made a noise that sounded like fabric being torn. ‘These are for sale by thousands at every fair...Mr. B— and myself got scraped a dozen times the other day by the girls in the crowds as we passed along...You are obliged to take it with good humor, but I cannot say that I think it a very refined amusement.’ Refined or not, the writer nonetheless soon found himself buying one, whereupon ‘a couple of girls came up, and...wanted to know if I was not ashamed to be getting one, thinking, as well they might, that I was a little too gray and too bald to be amusing myself in that way; but if the jades had not fled in no time, I certainly would have scraped them in return.’

  On a more sober and necessary note, ready and waiting on the streets leading into the City that were tramped every morning by ranks of City workers, were rows of shoeblacks: in the days before routine street paving, every respectable worker needed to have his shoes cleaned after walking to work. In the early part of the century, blacking, or shoe polish, came in liquid form, and boys equipped themselves with paintbrushes, enquiring, ‘Japan your shoes, your honour?’ Blacking paste became available in cake form from the 1820s. Dickens is irrevocably linked to this new product after his ordeal at Warren’s Blacking Factory, at 30 Hungerford Old Stairs.50 It was so easy to use that shoeblacks vanished from the streets, but in 1851 the Ragged School set up a Shoeblack Society, and soon their red-coated shoeblacks were seen throughout the city at fixed pitches. The charge was 1d for brushing a gentleman’s shoes and trousers, from which the boys earned about 10s a week in summer but in the winter only half that. (This is surprising: one would have expected the wet season to require more shoe-cleaning, not less.) Of this, the boys kept 6d a day, about a third of their earnings; a third went to the Society for its overheads, while the remaining third was put into a savings account for each boy. Boys of good conduct were transferred from the lowest-earning pitch to more valuable ones. Because they were moved regularly, the value of each pitch was known, and the boys had to report their earnings honestly. In the first year, despite the Society having taken in twenty-seven boys with criminal records, only two had to be discharged for dishonesty. Five were given the fares to emigrate; five got good jobs; one was ‘restored to his friends’; three left of their own accord; four were sacked for misconduct and two for incompetence; while the rest continued as shoeblacks. Twenty-five of these boys supported their parents on their earnings.

  Children, especially boys, made up a large segment of the street-selling world, and the founder of the Shoeblack Society described the ‘two currents’ that ran along every street, one ‘five or six feet above the pavement, one two feet below that’, the boys creating the lower one. On this lower level, equally ubiquitous, were the newsboys, who permeated every street in the West End and the City. By 1829, London was served by seven morning papers and six evening ones. At mid-century, one newsboy described his day. It began three hours before dawn, when he left his home to walk to the alley off Fleet Street where the morning papers were printed. There he and the other newsboys collected the papers that his employer, a newsagent, had ordered, folding, packing and bundling up the regular country orders to despatch by the first morning post, then carrying them to the main post office at St Martin’s-le-Grand, a few hundred yards away. After that they waited outside their masters’ shops; when the owners arrived to open up, they took down the big wooden shutters, bundled up more papers and set off on their rounds.

  Some people ordered a newspaper every morning; others, for a reduced charge, rented a paper for a set number of hours, at a cost ranging from 6d to 1s a week, depending on the length of time it was kept, and the more or less popular hours. To purchase The Times at mid-century cost 6d a day, or £8 per annum, while rental was as little as £1 6s a year. If that was still too expensive, it was possible to rent the previous day’s paper by the hour, at half the price of the current day’s paper. All these orders had to be organized, and collections and redeliveries made for the rentals. At about nine the boys stopped for breakfast before returning to the shop to collect more papers to sell in the streets or at railway stations: ‘Times, Times – to-day’s Times! Morning Chronicle! Post! Advertiser! Illustrated News! Who’s for to-day’s paper? Paper, gentlemen! News, news! Paper, paper, paper!’ At one they stopped for dinner, going home to their mothers if they lived near by. Many women performed piecework at home, either sewing for subcontractors, making matches or artificial flowers (both notoriously poorly paid), or sewing sacks and bags for the corn trade, the wool trade or other commercial uses. But many of the boys had mothers who were out at work all day, as charwomen, laundresses, market porters, street sellers or fishwomen; many more had no mother living. For these boys, lunch was a penny loaf eaten on the street, or perhaps bread and coffee at a stall, maybe even a pie if they were in funds.

  After lunch they returned to their pitches, then it was back to the shop to prepare the afternoon papers for the evening mails. The rented newspapers had to be collected and reallocated, and – as any newspapers remaining unsold at the end of the day lost half their value and, after two days, all value – the boys ran an informal exchange programme. They met between four and five every afternoon on Catherine Street and at St Martin’s-le-Grand and the calls began: ‘Ad. for Chron.’, ‘Post for Times’, ‘Herald for Ad.’ But the trades were not always simple. Six o’clock was the hour that the last post left from the main post office, to reach the country that same afternoon. As posting time grew ever closer, the negotiations became more complex, with some chains involving three, four, or even as many as eight or ten papers. But timing was key. After the boys had amassed as many papers as they had orders for, and traded away as many as their employers no longer needed, they returned to their shops to make
up the bags once more before heading to the post office. Policemen were always on duty outside the entrance to St Martin’s-le-Grand, keeping the way clear for the last-minute rush – this was a known sight of the city, with guidebooks recommending it to visitors. (The painter George Elgar Hicks’ The General Post-Office, One Minute to Six was a huge success when it was shown at the Royal Academy in 1860.) Newsboys who were old hands at the game sometimes made a great show, waiting down the road until the clock began to strike six – on the sixth stroke, the gate closed for the day – dashing up in fine style on the penultimate stroke, to the cheers of the crowd. With the final stroke, their day was over, until three hours before dawn the next morning.