shown that some wives pursue one (itinerant or stationary) calling,
while the husband pursues another. The trades in which the husband and
wife (and I may here remark that when I speak of “wives,” I include
all, so regarded in street life, whether legally united or not)--the
trades in which the woman is, more than in any others, literally the
help-mate of the man, are the costermonger’s (including the flower, or
root, sellers) and the crockery-ware people. To the costermonger some
help is often indispensable, and that of a wife is the cheapest and
the most honest (to say nothing of the considerations connected with a
home) which can be obtained. Among the more prosperous costermongers
too, especially those who deal in fish, the wife attends to the
stall while the husband goes “a round,” and thus a greater extent of
business is transacted. In the root and crockery-trades the woman’s
assistance is necessary when barter takes place instead of sale, as
the husband may be ignorant of the value of the old female attire
which even “high-hip ladies,” as they were described to me, loved to
exchange for a fuchsia or a geranium; for a glass cream-jug or a china
ornament. Of the married women engaged in any street-trade, I believe
nineteen-twentieths are the wives of men also pursuing some street
avocation.
2. There are, however, large classes of female street-sellers who may
be looked upon as exceptions, the wife selling in the streets while the
husband is engaged in some manual labour, but they are only partially
exceptions. In the sale of wash-leathers, for instance, are the wives
of many Irish bricklayers’ labourers; the woman may be constantly
occupied in disposing of her wares in the streets or suburbs, and the
man labouring at any building; but in case of the deprivation of work,
such a man will at once become a street-seller, and in the winter many
burly Irish labourers sell a few nuts or “baked taties,” or a few
pairs of braces, or some article which seems little suitable for the
employment of men of thews and muscle. In the course of my present
inquiry I have, in only very rare instances, met with a poor Irishman,
who had not a reason always at his tongue’s end to justify anything he
was doing. Ask a bricklayer’s labourer why, in his youth and strength,
he is selling nuts, and he will at once reply: “Sure thin, your honnur,
isn’t it better than doin’ nothing? I must thry and make a pinny, ’til
I’m in worruk again, and glory be to God, I hope that’ll be soon.”
An experienced man, who knows all the street-folk trading in
Whitechapel and its neighbourhood, and about Spitalfields, told me that
he could count up 100 married women, in different branches of open-air
commerce, and of them only two had husbands who worked regularly
in-doors. The husband of one woman works for a slop-tailor, the other
is a bobbin turner; the tailor’s wife sells water-cresses every morning
and afternoon; the turner’s wife is a “small-ware woman.” The tailor,
however, told my informant that his eyesight was failing him, that his
earnings became less and less, that he was treated like dirt, and would
go into some street-trade himself before long. When the man and his
wife are both in the street-trade, it is the case in three instances
out of four (excluding of course the costermongers, root-sellers, and
crock-man’s pursuits) that the couple carry on different callings.
[Illustration: THE STREET COMB SELLER.
[_From a Daguerreotype by_ BEARD.]]
In the full and specific accounts I gave of the largest body of
street-sellers, viz., the costermongers, I showed that concubinage
among persons of all ages was the rule, and marriage the exception. It
was computed that, taking the mass of costermongers, only one couple in
twenty, living together, were married, except in Clerkenwell, where the
costers are very numerous, and where the respected incumbent at certain
seasons marries poor persons gratuitously; there one couple in ten were
really man and wife.
Of the other classes of women street-sellers, directly the reverse is
the case; of those living as man and wife, one couple in twenty may be
_unmarried_. An intelligent informant thought this average too high,
and that it was more probably one in sixteen. But I incline to the
opinion of one in twenty, considering how many of the street-traders
have “seen better days,” and were married before they apprehended
being driven to a street career. In this enumeration I include only
street-_traders_. Among such people as ballad singers, concubinage,
though its wrongfulness is far better understood than among ignorant
costermongers, is practised even more fully; and there is often among
such classes even worse than concubinage--a dependance, more or less,
on the wages of a woman’s prostitution, and often a savage punishment
to the wretched woman, if those wages of sin are scant or wanting.
3. The widows in the street-trades are very generally the widows of
street-sellers. I believe that very few of the widows of mechanics,
when left unprovided for on their husbands’ demise, resort to street
traffic. If they have been needle-women before marriage, they again
seek for employment at needle-work; if they have been servants, they
become charwomen, or washerwomen, or again endeavour to obtain a
livelihood in domestic service.
There are some to whom those resources are but starvation, or a step
from starvation, or whom they fail entirely, and then they “_must_ try
the streets,” as they will describe it. If they are young and reckless,
they become prostitutes; if in more advanced years, or with good
principles, they turn street-sellers; but this is only when destitution
presses sharply.
4. The single women in the street-callings are generally the daughters
of street-sellers, but their number is not a twentieth of the others,
excepting they are the daughters of Irish parents. The costermongers’
daughters either help their parents, with whom they reside, or carry on
some similar trade; or they soon form connections with the other sex,
and easily sever the parental tie, which very probably has been far
too lax or far too severe. I made many inquiries, but I did not hear
of any unmarried young woman, not connected with street-folk by birth
or rearing, such as a servant maid,--endeavouring to support herself
when out of work or place by a street avocation. Such a person will
starve on slop millinery or slop shirt-making; or will, as much or more
from desperation than from viciousness, go upon the town. With the
Irish girls the case is different: brought up to a street-life, used
to whine and blarney, they grow up to womanhood in street-selling, and
as they rarely form impure connections, and as no one may be induced
to offer them marriage, their life is often one of street celibacy. A
young Irishwoman, to whom I was referred in the course of my inquiry
among fruit-sellers, had come to London in the hopes of meeting her
brother, with whom she was to emigrate; but she could learn nothing of
him, and, concluding that he was dead, became an apple-seller. She sat,
when I saw her, on cold wintry days, at the corner of a street in the
Commercial-road, seemingly as much dead as alive, and slept with an
aunt, also a single woman, who was somewhat similarly circumstanced;
and thus these two women lived on about 6_d._ a day each. Their joint
bed was 1_s._ a week, and they contrived to subsist on what remained
when this shilling was paid. The niece referred me, not without a
sense of pride, to her priest, as to her observance of her religious
duties, and declared that where she lodged there were none but women
lodgers, and those chiefly her own countrywomen. I believe such cases
are not uncommon. A few, who have had the education of ladies (as in
the case of an envelope-seller whose statement I gave), are driven to
street-trading, but it is as a desperate grasp at something to supply
less bitter bread, however little of it, than is supplied in the
workhouse. I have many a time heard poor women say: “God knows, sir,
I should live far better, and be better lodged and better cared for
in the house (they seldom call it workhouse), but I’d rather live on
2_d._ a day.” Into the question of out and in-door relief I need not
now enter, but the prevalent feeling I have indicated is one highly
honourable to the English poor. I have heard it stated that the utter
repugnance to a workhouse existence was weaker than it used to be among
the poor, but I have not met with anything to uphold such an opinion.
Such constitute the several classes of women street-sellers. I shall
now proceed to speak of the habits and characters of this peculiar
portion of the street-folk.
_As regards the religion_ of the women in street-trades, it is not
difficult to describe it. The Irishwomen are Roman Catholics. Perhaps
I am justified in stating that they are _all_ of that faith. The truth
of this assertion is proved, moreover, to as full a demonstration as
it very well can be proved without actual enumeration, by the fact
that the great majority of the Irishwomen in the streets are from the
Catholic provinces of Connaught, Leinster, and Munster; there are
very few from Ulster, and not one-twentieth of the whole from any
one of the other provinces. Perhaps, again, it is not extravagant to
estimate that three-fourths of the women and girls from the sister
island, now selling things in the streets, have been, when in their
own country, connected through their husbands or parents with the
cultivation of the land. It is not so easy to speak of what the
remaining fourth were before they became immigrants. Some were the
wives of mechanics, who, when their husbands failing to obtain work
in London became street-traders, had adopted the same pursuits. I met
with one intelligent man having a stall of very excellent fruit in
Battle-bridge, who had been a brogue-maker. He had been in business
on his own account in Tralee, but mended the indifferent profits of
brogue-making by a little trade in “dry goods.” This, he told me with
a cautious glance around him and in a half whisper, though it was
twenty-eight years since he left his country, meant smuggled tobacco.
He found it advisable, on account of being “wanted” by the revenue
officers, to leave Tralee in great haste. He arrived in London, got
employment as a bricklayer’s labourer, and sent for his wife to join
him. This she did, and from her first arrival, sold fruit in the
streets. In two or three years the husband’s work among the builders
grew slack, and he then took to the streets. Another man, a shoemaker,
who came from Dublin to obtain work in London, as he was considered “a
good hand,” could not obtain it, but became a street-seller, and _his_
wife, previously to himself, had resorted to a street-trade in fruit.
He became a widower and married as “his second,” the daughter of an
Irish carpenter who had been disappointed in emigrating from London,
and whose whole family had become fruit-sellers. A third man, who had
worked at his trade of a tailor in Cork, Waterford, Wicklow, and Dublin
(he “tramped” from Cork to Dublin) had come to London and been for many
years a street-seller in different capacities. His wife and daughter
now assist him, or trade independently, in selling “roots.” “Rayther,”
this man said, “than put up wid the wages and the _ter-ratement_
(said very emphatically) o’ thim slop masters at the Aist Ind, I’d
sill myself as a slave. The sthraits doesn’t degrade a man like thim
thieves o’ the worruld.” This man knew, personally, ten Irish mechanics
who were street-sellers in London, as were their wives and families,
including some five-and-twenty females.
I adduce these and the following details somewhat minutely, as they
tend to show by what class of Irish immigrants the streets of the
imperial metropolis are stocked with so large a body of open-air
traders.
There is also another class of women who, I am informed on good
authority, sometimes become street-sellers, though I met with no
instance myself. The orphan children of poor Irish parents are, on the
demise of their father and mother sometimes taken into a workhouse and
placed out as domestic servants. So, as regards domestic servants, are
the daughters of Irish labourers, by their friends or the charitable.
As the wages of these young girls are small and sometimes nominal, the
work generally hard, and in no few instances the food scanty and the
treatment severe, domestic service becomes distasteful, and a street
life “on a few oranges and limmons” is preferred. There is, moreover,
with some of this class another cause which almost compels the young
Irish girl into the adoption of some street calling. A peevish
mistress, whose numerous family renders a servant necessary, but whose
means are small or precarious, becomes bitterly dissatisfied with the
awkwardness or stupidity of her Irish handmaiden; the girl’s going, or
“teasing to go,” every Sunday morning to mass is annoying, and the girl
is often discharged, or discharges herself “in a huff.” The mistress,
perhaps, with the low tyranny dear to vulgar minds, refuses her servant
a character, or, in giving one, suppresses any good qualities, and
exaggerates the failings of impudence, laziness, lying, and dirtiness.
Thus the girl cannot obtain another situation, and perforce perhaps she
becomes a street-seller.
The readiness with which young Irish people thus adapt themselves to
all the uncertainties and hardships of a street life is less to be
wondered at when we consider that the Irish live together, or at any
rate associate with one another, in this country, preserving their
native tastes, habits, and modes of speech. Among their tastes and
habits, a dislike to a street life does not exist as it does among
English girls.
The poor Irish females in London are for the most part regular in their
attendance at mass, and this constant association in their chapels is
one of the links which keeps the street-Irish women so much distinct
from the street-English. In the going to and returning from the Roman
Catholic chapels, there is among these people--I was told by one of the
most intelligent of them--a talk of family and secular matters,--of
the present too high price of oranges to leave full 6_d._ a day at
two a penny, and the probable time when cherries would be “in” and
cheap, “plaze God to prosper them.” In these colloquies there is an
absence of any interference by English street-sellers, and an unity of
conversation and interest peculiarly Irish. It is thus that the tie of
religion, working with the other causes, keeps the Irish in the London
streets knitted to their own ways, and is likely to keep them so, and,
perhaps, to add to their number.
It was necessary to write somewhat at length of so large a class
of women who _are_ professors of a religion, but of the others the
details may be brief; for, as to the great majority, religion is
almost a nonentity. For this absence of religious observances, the
women street-sellers make many, and sometimes, I must confess, valiant
excuses. They must work on a Sunday morning, they will say, or they
can’t eat; or else they tell you, they are so tired by knocking about
all the week that they must rest on a Sunday; or else they have no
clothes to go to church in, and ar’n’t a-going there just to be looked
down upon and put in any queer place as if they had a fever, and for
ladies to hold their grand dresses away from them as they walked in to
their grand pews. Then, again, some assert they are not used to sit
still for so long a time, and so fall asleep. I have heard all these
causes assigned as reasons for not attending church or chapel.
A few women street-sellers, however, _do_ attend the Sunday service
of the Church of England. One lace-seller told me that she did so
because it obliged Mrs. ------, who was the best friend and customer
she had, and who always looked from her pew in the gallery to see who
were on the poor seats. A few others, perhaps about an equal number,
attend dissenting places of worship of the various denominations--the
Methodist chapels comprising more than a half. If I may venture upon
a calculation founded on the result of my inquiries, and on the
information of others who felt an interest in the matter, I should say
that about five female street-sellers attended Protestant places of
worship, in the ratio of a hundred attending the Roman Catholic chapels.
_The localities in which the female street-sellers reside_ are
those (generally) which I have often had occasion to specify as the
abodes of the poor. They congregate principally, however, in the
neighbourhood of some street-market. The many courts in Ray-street,
Turnmill-street, Cow-cross, and other parts of Clerkenwell, are
full of street-sellers, especially costermongers, some of those
costermongers being also drovers. Their places of sale are in
Clerkenwell-green, Aylesbury-street, and St. John-street. Others
reside in Vine-street (late Mutton-hill), Saffron-hill, Portpool
Lane, Baldwin’s-gardens, and the many streets or alleys stretching
from Leather-lane to Gray’s-inn-lane, with a few of the better sort
in Cromer-street. Their chief mart is Leather-lane, now one of the
most crowded markets in London. The many who use the Brill as their
place of street-traffic, reside in Brill-row, in Ossulston-street,
Wilstead-street, Chapel-street, and in the many small intersecting
lanes and alleys connected with those streets, and in other parts
of Somers-town. The saleswomen in the Cripplegate street-markets,
such as Whitecross-street, Fore-street, Golden-lane, &c., reside
in Play-house-yard, and in the thick congregation of courts and
alleys, approximating to Aldersgate-street, Fore-street, Bunhill-row,
Chiswell-street, Barbican, &c., &c. Advancing eastward, the
female street-sellers in Shoreditch (including the divisions of
the Bishopsgate-streets Within and Without, Norton Folgate, and
Holywell-street) reside in and about Artillery-lane, Half-moon-street,
and the many narrow “clefts” (as they are called in one of Leigh
Hunt’s essays) stretching on the right hand as you proceed along
Bishopsgate-street, from its junction with Cornhill; “clefts” which, on
my several visits, have appeared to me as among the foulest places in
London. On the left-hand side, proceeding in the same direction, the
street-sellers reside in Long-alley, and the many yards connected with
that, perhaps narrowest, in proportion to its length, of any merely
pedestrian thoroughfare in London. Mixed with the poor street-sellers
about Long-alley, I may observe, are a mass of the tailors and
shoemakers employed by the east-end slop-masters; they are principally
Irish workmen, carrying on their crafts many in one room, to economise
the rent, while some of their wives are street-sellers.
The street-sellers in Spitalfields and Bethnal-green are so mixed
up as to their abodes with the wretchedly underpaid cabinet-makers
who supply the “slaughter-houses;” with slop-employed tailors and
shoemakers (in the employ of a class, as respects shoemakers, known as
“garret-masters” or middle-men, between the workman and the wholesale
warehouse-man), bobbin-turners, needle-women, slop-milliners, &c., that
I might tediously enumerate almost every one of the many streets known,
emphatically enough, as the “poor streets.” These poor streets are
very numerous, running eastward from Shoreditch to the Cambridge-road,
and southward from the Bethnal-green-road to Whitechapel and the
Mile End-road. The female street-sellers in Whitechapel live in
Wentworth-street, Thrawl-street, Osborne-street, George-yard, and in
several of their interminglements with courts and narrow streets.
The Petticoat-lane street-dealers are generally Jews, and live in
the poorer Jewish quarters, in Petticoat-lane and its courts, and
in the streets running on thence to Houndsditch. Rosemary-lane has
many street-sellers, but in the lane itself and its many yards and
blind alleys they find their domiciles. Westward in the metropolis
one of the largest street-markets is in Tottenham-court-road; and
in the courts between Fitzroy-market and Tottenham-court-road are
the rooms of the women vending their street goods. Those occupying
the Hampstead-road with their stalls--which is but a continuation
of the Tottenham-court-road market--live in the same quarters.
In what is generally called the St. George’s-market, meaning the
stalls at the western extremity of Oxford-street, the women who own
those stalls reside in and about Thomas-street, Tom’s-court, and
the wretched places--the very existence of which is perhaps unknown
to their aristocratic neighbourhood--about Grosvenor-square; some
of them lamentably wretched places. It might be wearisome to carry
on this enumeration further. It may suffice to observe, that in
the populous parts of Southwark, Lambeth, and Newington, wherever
there is a street-market, are small or old streets inhabited by the
street-sellers, and at no great distance. From the Obelisk at the
junction, or approximate junction, of the Westminster, Waterloo,
Blackfriars, Borough, and London-roads, in pretty well every direction
to the banks of the Thames, are a mass of private-looking streets--as
far as the absence of shops constitutes the privacy of a street--old
and half-ruinous, or modern and trim, in all of which perhaps may be
found street-sellers, and in some of which are pickpockets, thieves,
and prostitutes.
Of course it must be understood that these specified localities are
the residence of the male, as well as the female street-sellers, both
adults and children.
The proportion of female street-traders who reside in lodging-houses
may be estimated at one-tenth of the entire number. This may appear a
small proportion, but it must be remembered that the costermongering
women do not reside in lodging-houses--so removing the largest class of
street-folk from the calculation of the numbers thus accommodated--and
that the Irish who pursue street callings with any regularity generally
prefer living, if it be two or three families in a room, in a place
of their own. The female street-folk sleeping in lodging-houses,
and occasionally taking their meals there, are usually those who are
itinerant; the women who have a settled trade, especially a “pitch,”
reside in preference in some “place of their own.” Of the number in
lodging-houses one half may be regular inmates, some having a portion
of a particular room to themselves; the others are casual sojourners,
changing their night’s shelter as convenience prompts.
Of the female street-sellers residing in houses of ill fame there are
not many; perhaps not many more than 100. I was told by a gentleman
whose connection with parochial matters enabled him to form an
opinion, that about Whitecross-street, and some similar streets
near the Cornwall-road, and stretching away to the Blackfriars and
Borough-roads--(the locality which of any in London is perhaps the
most rank with prostitution and its attendant evils)--there might be
600 of those wretched women and of all ages, from 15 to upwards of
40; and that among them he believed there were barely a score who
occupied themselves with street-sale. Of women, and more especially
of girl, street-sellers, such as flower-girls, those pursuing immoral
courses are far more numerous than 100, but they do not often reside
in houses notoriously of ill-fame, but in their own rooms (and too
often with their parents) and in low lodging-houses. For women who are
street-sellers, without the practice of prostitution, to reside in a
house of ill-fame, would be a reckless waste of money; as I am told
that in so wretched a street as White-horse-street, the rent of a front
kitchen is 4_s._ 6_d._ a week; of a back kitchen, 3_s._ 6_d._; of a
front parlour, 6_s._; and of a back parlour, 4_s._ 6_d._; all being
meagrely furnished and very small. This is also accounted one of the
cheapest of all such streets. The rent of a street-seller’s unfurnished
room is generally 1_s._ 6_d._ or even 1_s._ a week; a furnished room is
3_s._ or 2_s._ 6_d._