When we affirm that brokers’ shops are strange places, and that if an
authentic history of their contents could be procured, it would furnish
many a page of amusement, and many a melancholy tale, it is necessary
to explain the class of shops to which we allude. Perhaps when we make
use of the term ‘Brokers’ Shop,’ the minds of our readers will at once
picture large, handsome warehouses, exhibiting a long perspective of
French-polished dining-tables, rosewood chiffoniers, and mahogany
wash-hand-stands, with an occasional vista of a four-post bedstead and
hangings, and an appropriate foreground of dining-room chairs. Perhaps
they will imagine that we mean an humble class of second-hand furniture
repositories. Their imagination will then naturally lead them to that
street at the back of Long-acre, which is composed almost entirely of
brokers’ shops; where you walk through groves of deceitful,
showy-looking furniture, and where the prospect is occasionally
enlivened by a bright red, blue, and yellow hearth-rug, embellished
with the pleasing device of a mail-coach at full speed, or a strange
animal, supposed to have been originally intended for a dog, with a
mass of worsted-work in his mouth, which conjecture has likened to a
basket of flowers.
This, by-the-bye, is a tempting article to young wives in the humbler
ranks of life, who have a first-floor front to furnish—they are lost in
admiration, and hardly know which to admire most. The dog is very
beautiful, but they have a dog already on the best tea-tray, and two
more on the mantel-piece. Then, there is something so genteel about
that mail-coach; and the passengers outside (who are all hat) give it
such an air of reality!
The goods here are adapted to the taste, or rather to the means, of
cheap purchasers. There are some of the most beautiful _looking_
Pembroke tables that were ever beheld: the wood as green as the trees
in the Park, and the leaves almost as certain to fall off in the course
of a year. There is also a most extensive assortment of tent and
turn-up bedsteads, made of stained wood, and innumerable specimens of
that base imposition on society—a sofa bedstead.
A turn-up bedstead is a blunt, honest piece of furniture; it may be
slightly disguised with a sham drawer; and sometimes a mad attempt is
even made to pass it off for a book-case; ornament it as you will,
however, the turn-up bedstead seems to defy disguise, and to insist on
having it distinctly understood that he is a turn-up bedstead, and
nothing else—that he is indispensably necessary, and that being so
useful, he disdains to be ornamental.
How different is the demeanour of a sofa bedstead! Ashamed of its real
use, it strives to appear an article of luxury and gentility—an attempt
in which it miserably fails. It has neither the respectability of a
sofa, nor the virtues of a bed; every man who keeps a sofa bedstead in
his house, becomes a party to a wilful and designing fraud—we question
whether you could insult him more, than by insinuating that you
entertain the least suspicion of its real use.
To return from this digression, we beg to say, that neither of these
classes of brokers’ shops, forms the subject of this sketch. The shops
to which we advert, are immeasurably inferior to those on whose outward
appearance we have slightly touched. Our readers must often have
observed in some by-street, in a poor neighbourhood, a small dirty
shop, exposing for sale the most extraordinary and confused jumble of
old, worn-out, wretched articles, that can well be imagined. Our wonder
at their ever having been bought, is only to be equalled by our
astonishment at the idea of their ever being sold again. On a board, at
the side of the door, are placed about twenty books—all odd volumes;
and as many wine-glasses—all different patterns; several locks, an old
earthenware pan, full of rusty keys; two or three gaudy
chimney-ornaments—cracked, of course; the remains of a lustre, without
any drops; a round frame like a capital O, which has once held a
mirror; a flute, complete with the exception of the middle joint; a
pair of curling-irons; and a tinder-box. In front of the shop-window,
are ranged some half-dozen high-backed chairs, with spinal complaints
and wasted legs; a corner cupboard; two or three very dark mahogany
tables with flaps like mathematical problems; some pickle-jars, some
surgeons’ ditto, with gilt labels and without stoppers; an unframed
portrait of some lady who flourished about the beginning of the
thirteenth century, by an artist who never flourished at all; an
incalculable host of miscellanies of every description, including
bottles and cabinets, rags and bones, fenders and street-door knockers,
fire-irons, wearing apparel and bedding, a hall-lamp, and a room-door.
Imagine, in addition to this incongruous mass, a black doll in a white
frock, with two faces—one looking up the street, and the other looking
down, swinging over the door; a board with the squeezed-up inscription
‘Dealer in marine stores,’ in lanky white letters, whose height is
strangely out of proportion to their width; and you have before you
precisely the kind of shop to which we wish to direct your attention.
Although the same heterogeneous mixture of things will be found at all
these places, it is curious to observe how truly and accurately some of
the minor articles which are exposed for sale—articles of wearing
apparel, for instance—mark the character of the neighbourhood. Take
Drury-Lane and Covent-garden for example.
This is essentially a theatrical neighbourhood. There is not a potboy
in the vicinity who is not, to a greater or less extent, a dramatic
character. The errand-boys and chandler’s-shop-keepers’ sons, are all
stage-struck: they ‘gets up’ plays in back kitchens hired for the
purpose, and will stand before a shop-window for hours, contemplating a
great staring portrait of Mr. Somebody or other, of the Royal Coburg
Theatre, ‘as he appeared in the character of Tongo the Denounced.’ The
consequence is, that there is not a marine-store shop in the
neighbourhood, which does not exhibit for sale some faded articles of
dramatic finery, such as three or four pairs of soiled buff boots with
turn-over red tops, heretofore worn by a ‘fourth robber,’ or ‘fifth
mob;’ a pair of rusty broadswords, a few gauntlets, and certain
resplendent ornaments, which, if they were yellow instead of white,
might be taken for insurance plates of the Sun Fire-office. There are
several of these shops in the narrow streets and dirty courts, of which
there are so many near the national theatres, and they all have
tempting goods of this description, with the addition, perhaps, of a
lady’s pink dress covered with spangles; white wreaths, stage shoes,
and a tiara like a tin lamp reflector. They have been purchased of some
wretched supernumeraries, or sixth-rate actors, and are now offered for
the benefit of the rising generation, who, on condition of making
certain weekly payments, amounting in the whole to about ten times
their value, may avail themselves of such desirable bargains.
Let us take a very different quarter, and apply it to the same test.
Look at a marine-store dealer’s, in that reservoir of dirt,
drunkenness, and drabs: thieves, oysters, baked potatoes, and pickled
salmon—Ratcliff-highway. Here, the wearing apparel is all nautical.
Rough blue jackets, with mother-of-pearl buttons, oil-skin hats, coarse
checked shirts, and large canvas trousers that look as if they were
made for a pair of bodies instead of a pair of legs, are the staple
commodities. Then, there are large bunches of cotton
pocket-handkerchiefs, in colour and pattern unlike any one ever saw
before, with the exception of those on the backs of the three young
ladies without bonnets who passed just now. The furniture is much the
same as elsewhere, with the addition of one or two models of ships, and
some old prints of naval engagements in still older frames. In the
window, are a few compasses, a small tray containing silver watches in
clumsy thick cases; and tobacco-boxes, the lid of each ornamented with
a ship, or an anchor, or some such trophy. A sailor generally pawns or
sells all he has before he has been long ashore, and if he does not,
some favoured companion kindly saves him the trouble. In either case,
it is an even chance that he afterwards unconsciously repurchases the
same things at a higher price than he gave for them at first.
Again: pay a visit with a similar object, to a part of London, as
unlike both of these as they are to each other. Cross over to the
Surrey side, and look at such shops of this description as are to be
found near the King’s Bench prison, and in ‘the Rules.’ How different,
and how strikingly illustrative of the decay of some of the unfortunate
residents in this part of the metropolis! Imprisonment and neglect have
done their work. There is contamination in the profligate denizens of a
debtor’s prison; old friends have fallen off; the recollection of
former prosperity has passed away; and with it all thoughts for the
past, all care for the future. First, watches and rings, then cloaks,
coats, and all the more expensive articles of dress, have found their
way to the pawnbroker’s. That miserable resource has failed at last,
and the sale of some trifling article at one of these shops, has been
the only mode left of raising a shilling or two, to meet the urgent
demands of the moment. Dressing-cases and writing-desks, too old to
pawn but too good to keep; guns, fishing-rods, musical instruments, all
in the same condition; have first been sold, and the sacrifice has been
but slightly felt. But hunger must be allayed, and what has already
become a habit, is easily resorted to, when an emergency arises. Light
articles of clothing, first of the ruined man, then of his wife, at
last of their children, even of the youngest, have been parted with,
piecemeal. There they are, thrown carelessly together until a purchaser
presents himself, old, and patched and repaired, it is true; but the
make and materials tell of better days; and the older they are, the
greater the misery and destitution of those whom they once adorned.