now sold less fruit than ever to working people, but perhaps more
than ever to the dwellers in the smaller houses in the suburbs, and
to shopkeepers who were not in a large way of business. One man sold
baking apples, but not above a peck on an average weekly, to women whom
he knew to be the wives of working men, for he had heard them say,
“Dear me, I didn’t think it had been so late, there’s hardly time to
get the dumplings baked before my husband leaves work for his dinner.”
The course of my inquiries has shown me--and many employers whom I
have conversed with are of a similar opinion--that the well-conducted
and skilful artisan, who, in spite of slop competition, continues to
enjoy a fair rate of wages, usually makes a prudent choice of a wife,
who perhaps has been a servant in a respectable family. Such a wife is
probably “used to cooking,” and will oft enough make a pie or pudding
to eke out the cold meat of the Monday’s dinner, or “for a treat for
the children.” With the mass of the working people, however, it is
otherwise. The wife perhaps has been reared to incessant toil with
her needle, and does not know how to make even a dumpling. Even if
she possess as much knowledge, she may have to labour as well as her
husband, and if their joint earnings enable them to have “the added
pudding,” there is still the trouble of making it; and, after a weary
week’s work, rest is often a greater enjoyment than a gratification
of the palate. Thus something easily prepared, and carried off to the
oven, is preferred. The slop-workers of all trades never, I believe,
taste either fruit pie or pudding, unless a penny one be bought at a
shop or in the street; and even among mechanics who are used to better
diet, the pies and puddings, when wages are reduced, or work grows
slack, are the first things that are dispensed with. “When the money
doesn’t come in, sir,” one working-man said to me, “we mustn’t think of
puddings, but of _bread_.”
A costermonger, more observant than the rest, told me that there were
some classes to whom he had rarely sold fruit, and whom he had seldom
seen buy any. Among these he mentioned sweeps, scavengers, dustmen,
nightmen, gas-pipe-layers, and sewer-men, who preferred to any fruit,
“something to bite in the mouth, such as a penn’orth of gin.” My
informant believed that this abstinence from fruit was common to all
persons engaged in such offensive trades as fiddle-string making,
gut-dressing for whip-makers or sausage-makers, knackers, &c. He
was confident of it, as far as his own experience extended. It is,
moreover, less common for the women of the town, of the poorer sort,
to expend pence in fruit than in such things as whelks, shrimps, or
winks, to say nothing of gin. Persons, whose stomachs may be one week
jaded to excess, and the next be deprived of a sufficiency of proper
food, seek for stimulants, or, as they term it, “relishes.”
The fruit-sellers, meaning thereby those who deal principally in fruit
in the season, are the more intelligent costermongers. The calculation
as to what a bushel of apples, for instance, will make in half or
quarter pecks, puzzles the more ignorant, and they buy “second-hand,”
or of a middle-man, and consequently dearer. The Irish street-sellers
do not meddle much with fruit, excepting a few of the very best class
of them, and they “do well in it,” I was told, “they have such tongue.”
The improvement in the quality of the fruit and vegetables now in our
markets, and consequently in the necessaries and luxuries of the poorer
classes, is very great. Prizes and medals have been deservedly awarded
to the skilled and persevering gardeners who have increased the size
and heightened the flavour of the pine-apple or the strawberry--who
have given a thinner rind to the peach, or a fuller gush of juice to
the apricot,--or who have enhanced alike the bloom, the weight, and
the size of the fruit of the vine, whether as regards the classic
“bunch,” or the individual grape. Still these are benefits confined
mainly to the rich. But there is another class of growers who have
rendered greater services and whose services have been comparatively
unnoticed. I allude to those gardeners who have improved or introduced
our _every day_ vegetables or fruit, such as now form the cheapest
and most grateful and healthy enjoyments of the humbler portion of
the community. I may instance the introduction of rhubarb, which was
comparatively unknown until Mr. Myatt, now of Deptford, cultivated it
thirty years ago. He then, for the first time, carried seven bundles
of rhubarb into the Borough market. Of these he could sell only three,
and he took four back with him. Mr. Myatt could not recollect the price
he received for the first rhubarb he ever sold in public, but he told
me that the stalks were only about half the substance of those he now
produces. People laughed at him for offering “physic pies,” but he
persevered, and I have shown what the sale of rhubarb now is.
Moreover, the importation of foreign “pines” may be cited as another
instance of the increased luxuries of the poor. The trade in this
commodity was unknown until the year 1842. At that period Mr. James
Wood and Messrs. Claypole and Son, of Liverpool, imported them from
the Bahamas, a portion being conveyed to Messrs. Keeling and Hunt, of
London. Since that period the trade has gradually increased until,
instead of 1000 pines being sent to Liverpool, and a portion of them
conveyed to London, as at first, 200,000 pines are now imported to
London alone. The fruit is brought over in “trees,” stowed in numbers
from ten to thirty thousand, in galleries constructed fore and aft
in the vessel, which is so extravagantly fragrant, that it has to
be ventilated to abate the odour. But for this importation, and but
for the trade having become a part of the costermonger’s avocation,
hundreds and thousands in London would never have tasted a pine-apple.
The quality of the fruit has, I am informed, been greatly improved
since its first introduction; the best description of “pines” which
Covent-garden can supply having been sent out to graft, to increase
the size and flavour of the Bahaman products, and this chiefly for the
regalement of the palates of the humbler classes of London. The supply
from the Bahamas is considered inexhaustible.
Pine-apples, when they were first introduced, were a rich harvest to
the costermonger. They made more money “working” these than any other
article. The pines cost them about 4_d._ each, one with the other, good
and bad together, and were sold by the costermonger at from 1_s._ to
1_s._ 6_d._ The public were not aware then that the pines they sold
were “salt-water touched,” and the people bought them as fast as they
could be sold, not only by the whole one, but at 1_d._ a slice,--for
those who could not afford to give 1_s._ for the novelty, had a slice
as a taste for 1_d._ The costermongers used then to have flags flying
at the head of their barrows, and gentlefolk would stop them in the
streets; indeed, the sale for pines was chiefly among “the gentry.” The
poorer people--sweeps, dustmen, cabmen--occasionally had pennyworths,
“just for the fun of the thing;” but gentlepeople, I was told, used
to buy a whole one to take home, so that all the family might have
a taste. One costermonger assured me that he had taken 22_s._ a day
during the rage for pines, when they first came up.
I have before stated that when the season is in its height the
costermonger prefers the vending of fruit to the traffic in either
fish or vegetables; those, however, who have regular rounds and “a
connection,” must supply their customers with vegetables, if not
fish, as well as fruit, but the costers prefer to devote themselves
principally to fruit. I am unable, therefore, to draw a comparison
between what a coster realises in fruit, and what in fish, as the two
seasons are not contemporary. The fruit sale is, however, as I have
shown in p. 54, the costermonger’s harvest.
All the costermongers with whom I conversed represented that the
greater cheapness and abundance of fruit had been anything but a
benefit to them, nor did the majority seem to know whether fruit was
scarcer or more plentiful one year than another, unless in remarkable
instances. Of the way in which the introduction of foreign fruit
had influenced their trade, they knew nothing. If questioned on the
subject, the usual reply was, that things got worse, and people didn’t
buy so much fruit as they did half-a-dozen years back, and so less was
sold. That these men hold such opinions must be accounted for mainly by
the increase in their numbers, of which I have before spoken, and from
their general ignorance.
The fruit of which there is the readiest sale in the streets is one
usually considered among the least useful--cherries. Probably, the
greater eagerness on the part of the poorer classes to purchase this
fruit arises from its being the first of the fresh “green” kind which
our gardens supply for street-sale after the winter and the early
spring. An intelligent costermonger suggested other reasons. “Poor
people,” he said, “like a _quantity_ of any fruit, and no fruit is
cheaper than cherries at 1_d._ a pound, at which I have sold some
hundreds of pounds’ weight. I’m satisfied, sir, that if a cherry could
be grown that weighed a pound, and was of a finer flavour than ever was
known before, poor people would rather have a number of little ones,
even if they was less weight and inferior quality. Then boys buy, I
think, more cherries than other fruit; because, after they have eaten
’em, they can play at cherry-stones.”
From all I can learn, the halfpenny-worth of fruit purchased most
eagerly by a poor man, or by a child to whom the possession of a
halfpenny is a rarity, is cherries. I asked a man “with a good
connection,” according to his own account, as to who were his customers
for cherries. He enumerated ladies and gentlemen; working-people;
wagoners and carters (who “slipped them quietly into their pockets,”
he said); parlour-livers (so he called the occupants of parlours);
maid-servants; and soldiers. “Soldiers,” I was told, “are very fond of
something for a change from their feed, which is about as regular as a
prison’s.”
The currant, and the fruit of the same useful genus, the gooseberry,
are sold largely by the costermongers. The price of the currants is
1_d._ or 2_d._ the half-pint, 1_d._ being the more usual charge. Of red
currants there is the greatest supply, but the black “go off better.”
The humbler classes buy a half-pint of the latter for a dumpling, and
“they’re reckoned,” said my informant, “capital for a sore throat,
either in jam or a pudding.” Gooseberries are also retailed by the
half-pint, and are cheaper than currants--perhaps 1/2_d._ the half-pint
is the average street-price. The working-classes do not use ripe
gooseberries, as they do ripe currants, for dumplings, but they are
sold in greater quantities and may be said to constitute, when first
introduced, as other productions do afterwards, the working-people’s
Sunday dessert. “Only you go on board a cheap steamer to Greenwich,
on a fine summer Sunday,” observed a street-seller to me, “and you’ll
see lots of young women with gooseberries in their handkerchiefs in
their laps. Servant-maids is very good customers for such things as
gooseberries, for they always has a penny to spare.” The costers sell
green gooseberries for dumplings, and sometimes to the extent of a
fourth of the ripe fruit. The price of green gooseberries is generally
1/2_d._ a pint dearer than the ripe.
When strawberries descend to such a price as places them at the
costermonger’s command, the whole fraternity is busily at work, and as
the sale can easily be carried on by women and children, the coster’s
family take part in the sale, offering at the corners of streets the
fragrant pottle, with the crimson fruit just showing beneath the green
leaves at the top. Of all cries, too, perhaps that of “hoboys” is the
most agreeable. Strawberries, however, according to all accounts,
are consumed least of all fruits by the poor. “They like something
more solid,” I was told, “something to bite at, and a penny pottle
of strawberries is only like a taste; what’s more, too, the really
good fruit never finds its way into penny pottles.” The coster’s best
customers are dwellers in the suburbs, who purchase strawberries on
a Sunday especially, for dessert, for they think that they get them
fresher in that way than by reserving them from the Saturday night, and
many are tempted by seeing or hearing them cried in the streets. There
is also a good Sunday sale about the steam-wharfs, to people going
“on the river,” especially when young women and children are members
of a party, and likewise in the “clerk districts,” as Camden-town and
Camberwell. Very few pottles, comparatively, are sold in public-houses;
“they don’t go well down with the beer at all,” I was told. The city
people are good customers for street strawberries, conveying them home.
Good strawberries are 2_d._ a pottle in the streets when the season is
at its height. Inferior are 1_d._ These are the most frequent prices.
In raspberries the coster does little, selling them only to such
customers as use them for the sake of jam or for pastry. The price is
from 6_d._ to 1_s._ 6_d._ the pottle, 9_d._ being the average.
The great staple of the street trade in green fruit is apples. These
are first sold by the travelling costers, by the measure, for pies,
&c., and to the classes I have described as the makers of pies. The
apples, however, are soon vended in penny or halfpenny-worths, and
then they are bought by the poor who have a spare penny for the
regalement of their children or themselves, and they are eaten without
any preparation. Pears are sold to the same classes as are apples.
The average price of apples, as sold by the costermonger, is 4_s._ a
bushel, and six a penny. The sale in halfpenny and pennyworths is very
great. Indeed the costermongers sell about half the apples brought to
the markets, and I was told that for one pennyworth of apples bought
in a shop forty were bought in the street. Pears are 9_d._ a bushel,
generally, dearer than apples, but, numerically, they run more to the
bushel.
The costers purchase the French apples at the wharf, close to
London-bridge, on the Southwark side. They give 10_s._, 12_s._, 18_s._,
or 20_s._ for a case containing four bushels. They generally get from
9_d._ to 1_s._ profit on a bushel of English, but on the French apples
they make a clear profit of from 1_s._ 3_d._ to 2_s._ a bushel, and
would make more, but the fruit sometimes “turns out damaged.” This
extra profit is owing to the French giving better measure, their four
bushels being about five market bushels, as there is much straw packed
up with the English apples, and none with the French.
Plums and damsons are less purchased by the humbler classes than
apples, or than any other larger sized fruit which is supplied
abundantly. “If I’ve worked plums or damsons,” said an experienced
costermonger, “and have told any woman pricing them: ‘They don’t look
so ripe, but they’re all the better for a pie,’ she’s answered, ‘O, a
plum pie’s too fine for us, and what’s more, it takes too much sugar.’”
They are sold principally for desserts, and in penny-worths, at 1_d._
the half-pint for good, and 1/2 _d._ for inferior. Green-gages are
50 per cent. higher. Some costers sell a cheap lot of plums to the
eating-house keepers, and sell them more readily than they sell apples
to the same parties.
West Indian pine-apples are, as regards the street sale, disposed
of more in the city than elsewhere. They are bought by clerks and
warehousemen, who carry them to their suburban homes. The slices at
1/2_d._ and 1_d._ are bought principally by boys. The average price of
a “good street pine” is 9_d._
Peaches are an occasional sale with the costermongers’, and are
disposed of to the same classes as purchase strawberries and pines. The
street sale of peaches is not practicable if the price exceed 1_d._ a
piece.
Of other fruits, vended largely in the streets, I have spoken under
their respective heads.
The returns before cited as to the quantity of home-grown and foreign
green fruit sold in London, and the _proportion_ disposed of by the
costermongers give the following results (in round numbers), as to the
absolute quantity of the several kinds of green fruit (oranges and nuts
excepted) “distributed” throughout the metropolis by the street-sellers.
343,000 bushels of apples, (home-grown)
34,560 „ apples, (foreign)
176,500 „ pears, (home-grown)
17,235 „ pears, (foreign)
1,039,200 lbs. of cherries, (home-grown)
176,160 „ cherries, (foreign)
11,766 bushels of plums,
100 „ greengages,
548 „ damsons,
2,450 „ bullaces,
207,525 „ gooseberries,
85,500 sieves of red currants,
13,500 „ black currants,
3,000 „ white currants,
763,750 pottles of strawberries,
1,762 „ raspberries,
30,485 „ mulberries,
6,012 bushels of hazel nuts,
17,280 lbs. of filberts,
26,563 „ grapes,
20,000 pines.
OF THE ORANGE AND NUT MARKET.
In Houndsditch there is a market supported principally by
costermongers, who there purchase their oranges, lemons, and nuts.
This market is entirely in the hands of the Jews; and although a few
tradesmen may attend it to buy grapes, still it derives its chief
custom from the street-dealers who say they can make far better
bargains with the Israelites, (as they never refuse an offer,) than
they can with the Covent-garden salesmen, who generally cling to their
prices. This market is known by the name of “Duke’s-place,” although
its proper title is St. James’s-place. The nearest road to it is
through Duke’s-street, and the two titles have been so confounded that
at length the mistake has grown into a custom.
Duke’s-place--as the costers call it--is a large square yard, with the
iron gates of a synagogue in one corner, a dead wall forming one entire
side of the court, and a gas-lamp on a circular pavement in the centre.
The place looks as if it were devoted to money-making--for it is quiet
and dirty. Not a gilt letter is to be seen over a doorway; there is
no display of gaudy colour, or sheets of plate-glass, such as we see
in a crowded thoroughfare when a customer is to be caught by show. As
if the merchants knew their trade was certain, they are content to
let the London smoke do their painter’s work. On looking at the shops
in this quarter, the idea forces itself upon one that they are in
the last stage of dilapidation. Never did property in Chancery look
more ruinous. Each dwelling seems as though a fire had raged in it,
for not a shop in the market has a window to it; and, beyond the few
sacks of nuts exposed for sale, they are empty, the walls within being
blackened with dirt, and the paint without blistered in the sun, while
the door-posts are worn round with the shoulders of the customers, and
black as if charred. A few sickly hens wander about, turning over the
heaps of dried leaves that the oranges have been sent over in, or roost
the time away on the shafts and wheels of the nearest truck. Excepting
on certain days, there is little or no business stirring, so that many
of the shops have one or two shutters up, as if a death had taken
place, and the yard is quiet as an inn of court. At a little distance
the warehouses, with their low ceilings, open fronts, and black sides,
seem like dark holes or coal-stores; and, but for the mahogany backs
of chairs showing at the first floors, you would scarcely believe the
houses to be inhabited, much more to be elegantly furnished as they
are. One of the drawing-rooms that I entered here was warm and red with
morocco leather, Spanish mahogany, and curtains and Turkey carpets;
while the ormolu chandelier and the gilt frames of the looking-glass
and pictures twinkled at every point in the fire-light.
The householders in Duke’s-place are all of the Jewish persuasion, and
among the costers a saying has sprung up about it. When a man has been
out of work for some time, he is said to be “Cursed, like a pig in
Duke’s-place.”
Almost every shop has a Scripture name over it, and even the
public-houses are of the Hebrew faith, their signs appealing to the
followers of those trades which most abound with Jews. There is the
“Jeweller’s Arms,” patronised greatly of a Sunday morning, when the
Israelite jewellers attend to exchange their trinkets and barter
amongst themselves. Very often the counter before “the bar” here may
be seen covered with golden ornaments, and sparkling with precious
stones, amounting in value to thousands of pounds. The landlord of this
house of call is licensed to _manufacture_ tobacco and cigars. There
is also the “Fishmongers’ Arms,” the resort of the vendors of fried
soles; here, in the evening, a concert takes place, the performers and
audience being Jews. The landlord of this house too is licensed to
manufacture tobacco and cigars. Entering one of these houses I found a
bill announcing a “Bible to be raffled for, the property of ----.” And,
lastly, there is “Benjamin’s Coffee-house,” open to old clothesmen;
and here, again, the proprietor is a licensed tobacco-manufacturer.
These facts are mentioned to show the untiring energy of the Jew when
anything is to be gained, and to give an instance of the curious manner
in which this people support each other.
Some of the nut and orange shops in Duke’s-place it would be impossible
to describe. At one sat an old woman, with jet-black hair and a
wrinkled face, nursing an infant, and watching over a few matted
baskets of nuts ranged on a kind of carpenter’s bench placed upon the
pavement. The interior of the house was as empty as if it had been to
let, excepting a few bits of harness hanging against the wall, and an
old salt-box nailed near the gas-lamp, in which sat a hen, “hatching,”
as I was told. At another was an excessively stout Israelite mother,
with crisp negro’s hair and long gold earrings, rolling her child on
the table used for sorting the nuts. Here the black walls had been
chalked over with scores, and every corner was filled up with sacks and
orange-cases. Before one warehouse a family of six, from the father
to the infant, were busy washing walnuts in a huge tub with a trap in
the side, and around them were ranged measures of the wet fruit. The
Jewish women are known to make the fondest parents; and in Duke’s-place
there certainly was no lack of fondlings. Inside almost every parlour
a child was either being nursed or romped with, and some little things
were being tossed nearly to the ceiling, and caught, screaming with
enjoyment, in the jewelled hands of the delighted mother. At other
shops might be seen a circle of three or four women--some old as if
grandmothers, grouped admiringly round a hook-nosed infant, tickling it
and poking their fingers at it in a frenzy of affection.
The counters of these shops are generally placed in the open streets
like stalls, and the shop itself is used as a store to keep the stock
in. On these counters are ranged the large matting baskets, some
piled up with dark-brown polished chestnuts--shining like a racer’s
neck--others filled with wedge-shaped Brazil-nuts, and rough hairy
cocoa-nuts. There are heaps, too, of newly-washed walnuts, a few
showing their white crumpled kernels as a sample of their excellence.
Before every doorway are long pot-bellied boxes of oranges, with the
yellow fruit just peeping between the laths on top, and lemons--yet
green--are ranged about in their paper jackets to ripen in the air.
In front of one store the paving-stones were soft with the sawdust
emptied from the grape-cases, and the floor of the shop itself was
whitened with the dry powder. Here stood a man in a long tasselled
smoking-cap, puffing with his bellows at the blue bunches on a tray,
and about him were the boxes with the paper lids thrown back, and
the round sea-green berries just rising above the sawdust as if
floating in it. Close by, was a group of dark-eyed women bending over
an orange-case, picking out the rotten from the good fruit, while a
sallow-complexioned girl was busy with her knife scooping out the
damaged parts, until, what with sawdust and orange-peel, the air smelt
like the pit of a circus.