"They will talk of Russia, France, and that,
And mention how the money goes;
Each man will eat a pect of sprats,
That's the fashion at the Lord Mayor's show."
Some of these songs are indecent; almost all of them have a morbid
sympathy with criminals. Thus Redpath in the following lines is almost
made a martyr to his benevolence and Christian life.
"Alas! I am convicted, there's no one to blame--
I suppose you all know Leopold Redpath is my name;
I have one consolation, perhaps I've more,
All the days of my life _I ne'er injured the poor_.
"I procured for the widow and orphan their bread,
The naked I clothed, and the hungry I fed;
But still I am sentenced, you must understand,
Because I had broken the laws of the land.
"A last fond adieu to my heart-broken wife--
Leopold Redpath, your husband, 's transported for life;
Providence will protect you, love, do not deplore,
_Since your husband never hurted or injured the poor_.
* * * * *
"In London and Weybridge _I in splendour did dwell_,
_By the rich and the poor was respected right well_;
But now I'm going--oh! where shall I say--
A convict from England, oh! far, far away.
* * * * *
"I might have lived happy with my virtuous wife,
Kept away from temptation, from tumult and strife,
I'd enough to support me in happiness to live,
_But I wanted something more poor people for to give_."
The street singers of the metropolis seized upon the Waterloo Bridge
Tragedy as a fit subject for the exercise of their dismal strains. The
following is printed verbatim, from an illustrated broadsheet vended "at
the charge of one halfpenny:"--
"Oh such a year for dreadful murders
As this before was never seen;
In England, Ireland, Britain over,
Such horrid crimes has never been.
But this which now has been discovered
Very far exceeds the whole,
The very thought makes men to shudder,
How horrible for to unfold.
"See and read in every paper
This dreadful crime, this mystery,
Worse, far worse, than James Greenacre's
Is the London mystery.
"His body it was cut to pieces--
Oh how dreadful was his fate!
Then placed in brine and hid in secret--
Horrible for to relate.
The head and limbs had been divided--
Where parts was taken no one knows;
In a carpet bag they packed the body,
Over Waterloo bridge they did it throw.
"It is supposed that a female monster
Her victim's body onward dragged,
With no companion to assist her,
All packed within a carpet bag.
Justice determined is to take her,
When without doubt she'll punished be,
The atrocious female Greenacre
Of the Waterloo Bridge Tragedy."
The reader will see from these specimens how alien the costermonger race
is in sympathy and life from the respectable and the well-to-do. Their
songs are not ours, nor their aims nor conventional observances. What
wonder is it that they leave their wretched cellars all dirt and
darkness, and crowd round the public-house; or that at the costermongers'
house of call--in the midst of an atmosphere of gin and tobacco-smoke,
and under the influence of songs of very questionable merit--the poor
lads receive the education which is to stamp their character and to teach
them to grow up Ishmaelites, with their hands against every one, and
every one's hand against them. Society will not educate its poor; wonder
not then that they educate themselves, and that after a fashion not very
desirable in the eyes of the friends of morality, of order, and of law.