The trades which the Jews most affect, I was told by one of themselves,
are those in which, as they describe it, “there’s a chance;” that
is, they prefer a trade in such commodity as is not subjected to a
fixed price, so that there may be abundant scope for speculation, and
something like a gambler’s chance for profit or loss. In this way, Sir
Walter Scott has said, trade has “all the fascination of gambling,
without the moral guilt;” but the absence of moral guilt in connection
with such trading is certainly dubious.
The wholesale trades in foreign commodities which are now principally
or solely in the hands of the Jews, often as importers and exporters,
are, watches and jewels, sponges--fruits, especially green fruits,
such as oranges, lemons, grapes, walnuts, cocoa-nuts, &c., and dates
among dried fruits--shells, tortoises, parrots and foreign birds,
curiosities, ostrich feathers, snuffs, cigars, and pipes; but cigars
far more extensively at one time.
The localities in which these wholesale and retail traders reside are
mostly at the East-end--indeed the Jews of London, as a congregated
body, have been, from the times when their numbers were sufficient to
institute a “settlement” or “colony,” peculiar to themselves, always
resident in the eastern quarter of the metropolis.
Of course a wealthy Jew millionaire--merchant, stock-jobber, or
stock-broker--resides where he pleases--in a villa near the Marquis
of Hertford’s in the Regent’s-park, a mansion near the Duke of
Wellington’s in Piccadilly, a house and grounds at Clapham or
Stamford-hill; but these are exceptions. The quarters of the Jews
are not difficult to describe. The trading-class in the capacity of
shopkeepers, warehousemen, or manufacturers, are the thickest in
Houndsditch, Aldgate, and the Minories, more especially as regards
the “swag-shops” and the manufacture and sale of wearing apparel.
The wholesale dealers in fruit are in Duke’s-place and Pudding-lane
(Thames-street), but the superior retail Jew fruiterers--some of
whose shops are remarkable for the beauty of their fruit--are in
Cheapside, Oxford-street, Piccadilly, and most of all in Covent-garden
market. The inferior jewellers (some of whom deal with the first
shops) are also at the East-end, about Whitechapel, Bevis-marks,
and Houndsditch; the wealthier goldsmiths and watchmakers having,
like other tradesmen of the class, their shops in the superior
thoroughfares. The great congregation of working watchmakers is
in Clerkenwell, but in that locality there are only a few Jews.
The Hebrew dealers in second-hand garments, and second-hand wares
generally, are located about Petticoat-lane, the peculiarities of which
place I have lately described. The manufacturers of such things as
cigars, pencils, and sealing-wax; the wholesale importers of sponge,
bristles and toys, the dealers in quills and in “looking-glasses,”
reside in large private-looking houses, when display is not needed
for purposes of business, in such parts as Maunsell-street, Great
Prescott-street, Great Ailie-street, Leman-street, and other parts
of the eastern quarter known as Goodman’s-fields. The wholesale
dealers in foreign birds and shells, and in the many foreign things
known as “curiosities,” reside in East Smithfield, Ratcliffe-highway,
High-street (Shadwell), or in some of the parts adjacent to the Thames.
In the long range of river-side streets, stretching from the Tower
to Poplar and Blackwall, are Jews, who fulfil the many capacities
of slop-sellers, &c., called into exercise by the requirements of
seafaring people on their return from or commencement of a voyage. A
few Jews keep boarding-houses for sailors in Shadwell and Wapping. Of
the localities and abodes of the poorest of the Jews I shall speak
hereafter.
Concerning the street-trades pursued by the Jews, I believe there
is not at present a single one of which they can be said to have a
monopoly; nor in any one branch of the street-traffic are there so many
of the Jew traders as there were a few years back.
This remarkable change is thus to be accounted for. Strange as the
fact may appear, the Jew has been undersold in the streets, and he
has been beaten on what might be called his own ground--the buying of
old clothes. The Jew boys, and the feebler and elder Jews, had, until
some twelve or fifteen years back, almost the monopoly of orange and
lemon street-selling, or street-hawking. The costermonger class had
possession of the theatre doors and the approaches to the theatres;
they had, too, occasionally their barrows full of oranges; but the Jews
were the daily, assiduous, and itinerant street-sellers of this most
popular of foreign, and perhaps of all, fruits. In their hopes of sale
they followed any one a mile if encouraged, even by a few approving
glances. The great theatre of this traffic was in the stage-coach
yards in such inns as the Bull and Mouth, (St. Martin’s-le-Grand),
the Belle Sauvage (Ludgate-hill), the Saracen’s Head (Snow-hill), the
Bull (Aldgate), the Swan-with-two-Necks (Lad-lane, City), the George
and Blue Boar (Holborn), the White Horse (Fetter-lane), and other such
places. They were seen too, “with all their eyes about them,” as one
informant expressed it, outside the inns where the coaches stopped
to take up passengers--at the White Horse Cellar in Piccadilly, for
instance, and the Angel and the (now defunct) Peacock in Islington.
A commercial traveller told me that he could never leave town by any
“mail” or “stage,” without being besieged by a small army of Jew boys,
who most pertinaciously offered him oranges, lemons, sponges, combs,
pocket-books, pencils, sealing-wax, paper, many-bladed pen-knives,
razors, pocket-mirrors, and shaving-boxes--as if a man could not
possibly quit the metropolis without requiring a stock of such
commodities. In the whole of these trades, unless in some degree in
sponges and blacklead-pencils, the Jew is now out-numbered or displaced.
I have before alluded to the underselling of the Jew boy by the Irish
boy in the street-orange trade; but the characteristics of the change
are so peculiar, that a further notice is necessary. It is curious to
observe that the most assiduous, and hitherto the most successful of
street-traders, were supplanted, not by a more persevering or more
skilful body of street-sellers, but simply by a more _starving_ body.
Some few years since poor Irish people, and chiefly those connected
with the culture of the land, “came over” to this country in great
numbers, actuated either by vague hopes of “bettering themselves” by
emigration, or working on the railways, or else influenced by the
restlessness common to an impoverished people. These men, when unable
to obtain employment, without scruple became street-sellers. Not
only did the adults resort to street-traffic, generally in its simplest
forms, such as hawking fruit, but the children, by whom they were
accompanied from Ireland, in great numbers, were put into the trade;
and if two or three children earned 2_d._ a day each, and their parents
5_d._ or 6_d._ each, or even 4_d._, the subsistence of the family was
better than they could obtain in the midst of the miseries of the
southern and western part of the Sister Isle. An Irish boy of fourteen,
having to support himself by street-trade, as was often the case, owing
to the death of parents and to divers casualties, would undersell the
Jew boys similarly circumstanced.
The Irish boy could live _harder_ than the Jew--often in his own
country he subsisted on a stolen turnip a day; he could lodge
harder--lodge for 1_d._ a night in any noisome den, or sleep in the
open air, which is seldom done by the Jew boy; he could dispense with
the use of shoes and stockings--a dispensation at which his rival in
trade revolted; he drank only water, or if he took tea or coffee,
it was as a meal, and not merely as a beverage; to crown the whole,
the city-bred Jew boy required some evening recreation, the penny or
twopenny concert, or a game at draughts or dominoes; but this the
Irish boy, country bred, never thought of, for _his_ sole luxury was a
deep sleep, and, being regardless or ignorant of all such recreations,
he worked longer hours, and so sold more oranges, than his Hebrew
competitor. Thus, as the Munster or Connaught lad could live on less
than the young denizen of Petticoat-lane, he could sell at smaller
profit, and did so sell, until gradually the Hebrew youths were
displaced by the Irish in the street orange trade.
It is the same, or the same in a degree, with other street-trades,
which were at one time all but monopolised by the Jew adults. Among
these were the street-sale of spectacles and sponges. The prevalence
of slop-work and slop-wages, and the frequent difficulty of obtaining
properly-remunerated employment--the pinch of want, in short--have
driven many mechanics to street-traffic; so that the numbers of
street-traffickers have been augmented, while no small portion of the
new comers have adopted the more knowing street avocations, formerly
pursued only by the Jews.
Of the other class of street-traders who have interfered largely with
the old-clothes trade, which, at one time, people seemed to consider a
sort of birthright among the Jews, I have already spoken, when treating
of the dealings of the crockmen in bartering glass and crockery-ware
for second-hand apparel. These traders now obtain as many old clothes
as the Jew clothes men themselves; for, with a great number of
“ladies,” the offer of an ornament of glass or spar, or of a beautiful
and fragrant plant, is more attractive than the offer of a small sum of
money, for the purchase of the left-off garments of the family.
The crockmen are usually strong and in the prime of youth or manhood,
and are capable of carrying heavy burdens of glass or china-wares, for
which the Jews are either incompetent or disinclined.
Some of the Jews which have been thus displaced from the street-traffic
have emigrated to America, with the assistance of their brethren.
The principal street-trades of the Jews are now in sponges, spectacles,
combs, pencils, accordions, cakes, sweetmeats, drugs, and fruits of all
kinds; but, in all these trades, unless perhaps in drugs, they are in a
minority compared with the “Christian” street-sellers.
There is not among the Jew street-sellers generally anything of the
concubinage or cohabitation common among the costermongers. Marriage is
the rule.