London Labour and the London Poor: Selection (Classics) Page 16

  To ‘toss the pieman’ is a favourite pastime with costermongers’ boys and all that class; some of them aspire to the repute of being gourmands, and are critical on the quality of the comestible. If the pieman win the toss, he receives 1d. without giving a pie; if he lose, he hands it over for nothing. The pieman himself never ‘tosses’, but always calls head or tail to his customer. At the week’s end it comes to the same thing, they say, whether they toss or not: ‘I’ve taken as much as 2s. 6d. at tossing, which I shouldn’t have had if I hadn’t done so. Very few people buy without tossing, and the boys in particular. Gentlemen “out on the spree” at the late public-houses will frequently toss when they don’t want the pies, and when they win they will amuse themselves by throwing the pies at one another, or at me. Sometimes I have taken as much as half-a-crown, and the people of whom I had the money have never eaten a pie. The boys has the greatest love of gambling, and they seldom, if ever, buys without tossing.’ One of the reasons why the street boys delight in tossing, is, that they can often obtain a pie by such means when they have only a halfpenny wherewith to gamble. If the lad wins he gets a penny pie for his halfpenny.

  For street mince-meat pies the pieman usually makes 5lb. of mincemeat at a time, and for this he will put in 2 doz. of apples, 1lb. of sugar, 1lb. of currants, 2lb. of ‘critlings’ (critlings being the refuse left after boiling down the lard), a good bit of spice to give the critlings a flavour, and plenty of treacle to make the mince-meat look rich.

  The ‘gravy’ which used to be given with the meat-pies was poured out of an oil-can, and consisted of a little salt and water browned. A hole was made with the little finger in the top of the meat pie, and the ‘gravy’ poured in until the crust rose. With this gravy a person in the line assured me that he has known pies four days old to go off very freely, and be pronounced excellent. The street piemen are mostly bakers, who are unable to obtain employment at their trade. ‘I myself,’ said one, ‘was a bread and biscuit baker. I have been at the pie business now about two years and a half, and can’t get a living at it. Last week my earnings were not more than 7s. all the week through, and I was out till three in the morning to get that.’ The piemen seldom begin business till six o’clock, and some remain out all night. The best time for the sale of pies is generally from ten at night to one in the morning.

  Calculating that there are only fifty street piemen plying their trade in London, the year through, and that their average earnings are 8s. a week, we find a street expenditure exceeding 3,000l., and a street consumption of pies amounting nearly to three quarters of a million yearly.

  To start in the penny pie business of the streets requires 1l. for a ‘can’, 2s. 6d. for a ‘turn-halfpenny’ board to gamble with, 12s. for a gross of tin pie-dishes, 8d. for an apron, and about 6s. 6d. for stock money – allowing 1s. for flour, 1s. 3d. for meat, 2d. for apples, 4d. for eels, 2s. for pork flare or fat, 2d. for sugar, ½d. for cloves, 1d. for pepper and salt, 1d. for an egg to wash the pies over with, 6d. for baking, and 1d. for charcoal to keep the pies hot in the streets. Hence the capital required would be about 2l. in all.

  of the Street-sellers of Plum ‘Duff’ or Dough

  [pp. 207–8] Plum dough is one of the street-eatables – though perhaps it is rather a violence to class it with the street-pastry – which is usually made by the vendors. It is simply a boiled plum, or currant, pudding, of the plainest description. It is sometimes made in the rounded form of the plum-pudding; but more frequently in the ‘roly-poly’ style. Hot pudding used to be of much more extensive sale in the streets. One informant told me that twenty or thirty years ago, batter, or Yorkshire, pudding, ‘with plums in it’, was a popular street business. The ‘plums’, as in the orthodox plum-puddings, are raisins. The street-vendors of plum ‘duff’ are now very few, only six as an average, and generally women, or if a man be the salesman he is the woman’s husband. The sale is for the most part an evening sale, and some vend the plum dough only on a Saturday night. A woman in Leather-lane, whose trade is a Saturday night trade, is accounted ‘one of the best plum duffs’ in London, as regards the quality of the comestible, but her trade is not considerable.

  The vendors of plum dough are the street-sellers who live by vending other articles, and resort to plum dough, as well as to other things, ‘as a help’. This dough is sold out of baskets in which it is kept hot by being covered with cloths, sometimes two and even three, thick; and the smoke issuing out of the basket, and the cry of the street-seller, ‘Hot plum duff, hot plum’, invite custom. A quartern of flour, 5d.; ½ lb. Valentia raisins, 2d.; dripping and suet in equal proportions, 2½d.; treacle, ½d.; and all-spice, ½d. – in all 10½d.; supply a roly-poly of twenty pennyworths. The treacle, however, is only introduced ‘to make the dough look rich and spicy’, and must be used sparingly.

  The plum dough is sold in slices at ½d. or 1d. each, and the purchasers are almost exclusively boys and girls – boys being at least three-fourths of the revellers in this street luxury. I have ascertained – as far as the information of the street-sellers enables me to ascertain – that take the year through, six ‘plum duffers’ take 1s. a day each, for four winter months, including Sundays, when the trade is likewise prosecuted. Some will take from 4s. to 10s. (but rarely 10s.) on a Saturday night, and nothing on other nights, and some do a little in the summer. The vendors, who are all stationary, stand chiefly in the street-markets and reside near their stands, so that they can get relays of hot dough.

  If we calculate then 42s. a week as the takings of six persons, for five months, so including the summer trade, we find that upwards of 200l. is expended in the street purchase of plum dough, nearly half of which is profit. The trade, however, is reckoned among those which will disappear altogether from the streets.

  The capital required to start is: basket, 1s. 9d.; cloths, 6d.; pan for boiling, 2s.; knife, 2d.; stock-money, 2s.; in all about, 7s. 6d.

  Of the Street-sellers of Cakes, Tarts, &c.

  [p. 208] These men and boys – for there are very few women or girls in the trade – constitute a somewhat numerous class. They are computed (including Jews) at 150 at the least, all regular hands, with an addition, perhaps, of 15 or 20, who seek to earn a few pence on a Sunday, but have some other, though poorly remunerative, employment on the week-days. The cake and tart-sellers in the streets have been, for the most part, mechanics or servants; a fifth of the body, however, have been brought up to this or to some other street-calling.

  The cake-men carry their goods on a tray slung round their shoulders when they are offering their delicacies for sale, and on their heads when not engaged in the effort to do business. They are to be found in the vicinity of all public places. Their goods are generally arranged in pairs on the trays; in bad weather they are covered with a green cloth.

  None of the street-vendors make the articles they sell; indeed, the diversity of those articles renders that impossible. Among the regular articles of this street-sale are ‘Coventrys’, or three-cornered puffs with jam inside; raspberry biscuits; cinnamon biscuits; ‘chonkeys’, or a kind of mince-meat baked in crust; Dutch butter-cakes; Jews’ butter-cakes; ‘bowlas’, or round tarts made of sugar, apple, and bread; ‘jumbles’, or thin crisp cakes made of treacle, butter, and flour; and jams, or open tarts with a little preserve in the centre.

  All these things are made for the street-sellers by about a dozen Jew pastry-cooks, the most of whom reside about Whitechapel. They confine themselves to the trade, and make every description. On a fine holiday morning their shops, or rather bake-houses, are filled with customers, as they supply the small shops as well as the street-sellers of London. Each article is made to be sold at a halfpenny, and the allowance by the wholesale pastry-cook is such as to enable his customers to realise a profit of 4d. in 1s.; thus he charges 4d. a dozen for the several articles. Within the last seven years there has been, I am assured, a great improvement in the composition of these cakes, &c. This is attributable to the Jews having introduced superio
r dainties, and, of course, rendered it necessary for the others to vie with them; the articles vended by these Jews (of whom there are from 20 to 40 in the streets) are still pronounced, by many connoisseurs in street-pastry, as the best. Some sell penny dainties also, but not to a twentieth part of the halfpenny trade. One of the wholesale pastry-cooks takes 40l. a week. These wholesale men, who sometimes credit the street-people, buy ten, fifteen, or twenty sacks of flour at a time whenever a cheap bargain offers. They purchase as largely in Irish butter, which they have bought at 3d. or 2½d. the pound. They buy also ‘scrapings’, or what remains in the butter-firkins when emptied by the butter-sellers in the shops. ‘Good scrapings’ are used for the best cakes; the jam they make themselves. To commence the wholesale business requires a capital of 600l. To commence the street-selling requires a capital of only 10s.; and this includes the cost of a tray, about 1s. 9d.; a cloth 1s.; and a leathern strap, with buckle, to go round the neck, 6d.; while the rest is for stock, with a shilling or two as a reserve. All the street-sellers insist upon the impossibility of any general baker making cakes as cheap as those they vend. ‘It’s impossible, sir,’ said one man to me, ‘it’s a trade by itself; nobody else can touch it. They was miserable little things seven years ago.’

  OF THE STREET-SELLERS OF STATIONERY, LITERATURE, AND THE FINE ARTS

  [pp. 227–9] We now come to a class of street-folk wholly distinct from any before treated of. As yet we have been dealing principally with the uneducated portion of the street-people – men whom, for the most part, are allowed to remain in nearly the same primitive and brutish state as the savage – creatures with nothing but their appetites, instincts, and passions to move them, and made up of the same crude combination of virtue and vice – the same generosity combined with the same predatory tendencies as the Bedouins of the desert – the same love of revenge and disregard of pain, and often the same gratitude and susceptibility to kindness as the Red Indian – and, furthermore, the same insensitivity to female honour and abuse of female weakness, and the same utter ignorance of the Divine nature of the Godhead as marks either Bosjesman, Carib, or Thug.

  The costers and many other of the street-sellers before described, however, are bad – not so much from their own perversity as from our selfishness. That they partake of the natural evil of human nature is not their fault but ours, – who would be like them if we had not been taught by others better than ourselves to control the bad and cherish the good principles of our hearts.

  The street-sellers of stationery, literature, and the fine arts, however, differ from all before treated of in the general, though far from universal, education of the sect. They constitute principally the class of street-orators, known in these days as ‘patterers’, and formerly termed ‘mountebanks’, – people who, in the words of Strutt, strive to ‘help off their wares by pompous speeches, in which little regard is paid either to truth or propriety.’ To patter, is a slang term, meaning to speak. To indulge in this kind of oral puffery, of course, requires a certain exercise of the intellect, and it is the consciousness of their mental superiority which makes the patterers look down upon the costermongers as an inferior body, with whom they object either to be classed or to associate. The scorn of some of the ‘patterers’ for the mere costers is as profound as the contempt of the pickpocket for the pure beggar. Those who have not witnessed this pride of class among even the most degraded, can form no adequate idea of the arrogance with which the skilled man, no matter how base the art, looks upon the unskilled. ‘We are the haristocracy of the streets,’ was said to me by one of the street-folks, who told penny fortunes with a bottle. ‘People don’t pay us for what we gives ’em, but only to hear us talk. We live like yourself, sir, by the hexercise of our hinterllects – we by talking, and you by writing.’

  But notwithstanding the self-esteem of the patterers, I am inclined to think that they are less impressionable and less susceptible of kindness than the costers whom they despise. Dr Conolly has told us that, even among the insane, the educated classes are the most difficult to move and govern through their affections. They are invariably suspicious, attributing unworthy motives to every benefit conferred, and consequently incapable of being touched by any sympathy on the part of those who may be affected by their distress. So far as my experience goes it is the same with the street-patterers. Any attempt to befriend them is almost sure to be met with distrust. Nor does their mode of life serve in any way to lessen their misgivings. Conscious how much their own livelihood depends upon assumption and trickery, they naturally consider that others have some ‘dodge’, as they call it, or some latent object in view when any good is sought to be done them. The impulsive costermonger, however, approximating more closely to the primitive man, moved solely by his feelings, is as easily humanized by any kindness as he is brutified by any injury.

  The patterers, again, though certainly more intellectual, are scarcely less immoral than the costers. Their superior cleverness gives them the power of justifying and speciously glossing their evil practices, but serves in no way to restrain them; thus affording the social philosopher another melancholy instance of the evil of developing the intellect without the conscience – of teaching people to know what is morally beautiful and ugly, without teaching them at the same time to feel and delight in the one and abhor the other – or, in other words, of quickening the cunning and checking the emotions of the individual.

  Among the patterers marriage is as little frequent as among the costermongers; with the exception of the older class, who ‘were perhaps married before they took to the streets’. Hardly one of the patterers, however, has been bred to a street life; and this constitutes another line of demarcation between them and the costermongers.

  The costers, we have seen, are mostly hereditary wanderers – having been as it were born to frequent the public thoroughfares; some few of the itinerant dealers in fish, fruit, and vegetables, have it is true been driven by want of employment to adopt street-selling as a means of living, but these are, so to speak, the aliens rather than the natives of the streets. The patterers, on the other hand, have for the most part neither been born and bred nor driven to a street life – but have rather taken to it from a natural love of what they call ‘roving’. This propensity to lapse from a civilized into a nomad state – to pass from a settler into a wanderer – is a peculiar characteristic of the pattering tribe. The tendency however is by no means extraordinary; for ethnology teaches us, that whereas many abandon the habits of civilized life to adopt those of a nomadic state of existence, but very few of the wandering tribes give up vagabondising and betake themselves to settled occupations. The innate ‘love of a roving life’, which many of the street-people themselves speak of as the cause of their originally taking to the streets, appears to be accompanied by several peculiar characteristics; among the most marked of these are an indomitable ‘self-will’ or hatred of the least restraint or control – an innate aversion to every species of law or government, whether political, moral, or domestic – a stubborn, contradictory nature – an incapability of continuous labour, or remaining long in the same place occupied with the same object, or attending to the same subject – an unusual predilection for amusements, and especially for what partakes of the ludicrous – together with a great relish of all that is ingenious, and so finding extreme delight in tricks and frauds of every kind. There are two patterers now in the streets (brothers) – well-educated and respectably connected – who candidly confess they prefer that kind of life to any other, and would not leave it if they could.

  Nor are the patterers less remarkable than the costermongers for their utter absence of all religious feeling. There is, however, this distinction between the two classes – that whereas the creedlessness of the one is but the consequence of brutish ignorance, that of the other is the result of natural perversity and educated scepticism – as the street-patterers include many men of respectable connections, and even classical attainments. Among them, may be found the son
of a military officer, a clergyman, a man brought up to the profession of medicine, two Grecians of the Blue-coat School, clerks, shopmen, and a class who have been educated to no especial calling – some of the latter being the natural sons of gentlemen and noblemen – and who, when deprived of the support of their parents or friends, have taken to the streets for bread. Many of the younger and smarter men, I am assured, reside with women of the town, though they may not be dependent for their livelihood on the wages got by the infamy of these women. Not a few of the patterers, too, in their dress and appearance, present but little difference to that of the ‘gent’. Some wear a moustache, while others indulge in a Henri-Quatre beard. The patterers are, moreover, as a body, not distinguished by that good and friendly feeling one to another which is remarkable among costermongers. If an absence of heartiness and good fellowship be characteristic of an aristocracy – as some political philosophers contend – then the patterers may indeed be said to be the aristocrats of the streets.