STREET TRADES AMONG WOMEN.
"With hall the click there is to a woman's tongue you'd think she could
'patter' with the best of the men, but, Lor' bless you! a woman can't
'patter' any more'n she can make a coat, or sweep a chimley. And why she
can't beats me, and neither I nor nobody knows."
"To patter" is a verb conjugated daily by the street seller of any
pretensions. The coster needs less of it than most vendors, his wares
speaking for themselves; but the general seller of small-wares,
bootlaces, toys, children's books, and what not, must have a natural
gift, or acquire it as fast as possible. To patter is to rattle off with
incredible swiftness and fluency, not only recommendations of the goods
themselves, but any side thoughts that occur; and often a street-seller
is practically a humorous lecturer, a student of men and morals, and
gives the result in shrewd sentences well worth listening to. Half a
dozen derivations are assigned to the word, one being that it comes from
the rattled off _paternosters_ of the devout but hasty Catholic, who
says as many as possible in a given space of time. Be this as it may, it
is quite true that pattering is an essential feature of any specially
successful street-calling, and equally true that no woman has yet
appeared who possesses the gift.
In spite of this nearly fatal deficiency, innumerable women pursue
street trades, and, notwithstanding exposure and privation and the
scantiest of earnings, have every advantage over their sisters of the
needle. Rheumatism, born of bad diet and the penetrating rawness and
fogs of eight months of the English year, is their chief enemy; but as a
whole they are a strong, hardy, and healthy set of workers, who shudder
at the thought of bending all day over machine or needle, and thank the
fate that first turned them toward a street-calling. So conservative,
however, is working England, that the needlewoman, even at starvation
point, feels herself superior to a street-seller; and the latter is
quite conscious of this feeling, and resents it accordingly. With many
the adoption of such employment is the result of accident, and the women
in it divide naturally into four classes: (1) The wives of
street-sellers; (2) Mechanics, or laborers' wives who go out
street-selling while their husbands are at work, in order to swell the
family income; (3) The widows of former street-sellers; (4) Single
women.
Trades that necessitate pushing a heavy barrow, and, indeed, most of
those involving the carrying of heavy weights, are in the hands of men,
and also the more skilled trades, such as the selling of books or
stationery,--in short, the business in which patter is demanded.
Occasionally there is a partnership, and man and wife carry on the same
trade, she aiding him with his barrow, but for the most part they choose
different occupations. In the case of one man in Whitechapel who worked
for a sweater; the wife sold water-cresses morning and evening, while
the wife of a bobbin turner had taken to small-wares, shoe-laces, etc.
as a help. Both tailor and turner declared that, if things went on as
they were at present, they should take to the streets also; for earnings
were less and less, and they were "treated like dirt, and worse."
The women whose trades have been noted are dealers in fish, shrimps, and
winkles, and sometimes oysters, fruit, and vegetables,--fruit
predominating, orange-women and girls being as much a feature of London
street life as in the days of pretty Nelly Gwynne. Sheep-trotters, too,
are given over to women, with rice-milk, which is a favorite
street-dainty, requiring a good deal of preparation; they sell curds and
whey, and now and then, though very seldom, they have a coffee or
elder-wine stand, the latter being sold hot and spiced, as a preventive
of rheumatism and chill. To these sales they add fire-screens and
ornaments (the English grate in summer being filled with every order of
paper ornamentation), laces, millinery, cut flowers, boot and corset
laces, and small-wares of every description, including wash-leathers,
dressed and undressed dolls, and every variety of knitted articles,
mittens, cuffs, socks, etc.
It will be seen that the range in street trades is far wider for the
English than for the American woman, to whom it would almost never occur
as a possible means of livelihood. But London holds several thousands of
these women, a large proportion Irish, it is true, with a mixture of
other nationalities, but English still predominating. The Irishwoman is
more fluent, and can even patter in slight degree, but has less
intelligence, and confines herself to the lower order of trades. For
both Irish and English there is the same deep-seated horror of the
workhouse. All winter a young Irishwoman has sat at the corner of a
little street opening from the Commercial Road, a basket of apples at
her side, and her thin garments no protection against the fearful chill
of fog and mist. She had come to London, hoping to find a brother and go
over with him to America; but no trace of him could be discovered, and
so she borrowed a shilling and became an apple-seller.
"God knows," she said, "I'd be betther off in the house [workhouse], for
it's half dead I am entirely; but I'd rather live on twopence a day than
come to that."
Practically she was living on very little more. An aunt, also a
street-seller, had taken her in. She rented a small room near by, for
which they paid two shillings a week, their whole expenses averaging
sixpence each a day. Naturally they were half starved; but they
preferred this to "the house," and no one who has examined these
retreats can blame them.
It is the poor who chiefly patronize these street-sellers, and they
swarm where the poor are massed. The "Borough," on the Surrey side of
the river, with its innumerable little streets and lanes, each more
wretched than the last, has hundreds of them, no less than the
better-known East End. Leather Lane, one of the most crowded and
distinctive of the quarters of the poor, though comparatively little
known, has also its network of alleys and courts opening from it, and is
one of the most crowded markets in the city, rivalling even Petticoat
Lane. The latter, whose time-honored name has foolishly been changed to
Middlesex Street, is an old-clothes market, and presents one of the most
extraordinary sights in London; but the trade is chiefly in the hands
of men, though their wives usually act as assistants and determine the
quality of a garment till the masculine sense has been educated up to
the proper point. Any very small, very old, and very dirty street at any
point has its proportion of street-sellers, whose dark, grimy,
comfortless rooms are their refuge at night. Other rooms of a better
order are occupied, it may be, by some relative or child to be
supported; and higher still rank those that are counted homes, where
husband and wife meet when the day's work is done.
Like the needlewomen, the diet of the majority is meagre and poor to a
degree. The Irishwoman is much more ready to try to make the meal hot
and relishable than the Englishwoman, though even she confines herself
to cheap fish and potatoes, herring or plaice at two a penny.
A quiet, very respectable looking woman, the widow of a coster, sold
cakes of blacking and small-wares, and gave her view of this phase of
the question.
"It's cheaper, their way of doing. Oh, yes, but not so livening. I could
live cheaper on fish and potatoes than tea and bread and butter; but
that ain't it. They're more trouble, an' when you've been on your legs
all day, an' get to your bit of a home for a cup of tea, you want a bit
of rest, and you can't be cooking and fussing with fish. There's always
a neighbor to give you a jug of boiling water, if you've no time for
fire, or it's summer, and tea livens you up a bit where a herring won't.
I take mine without milk, and like it better without, and often I don't
have butter on me bread. But I get along, and, please God, I'll be able
to keep out of the 'house' to the end."
The married women fare better. The men decline to be put off with bread
and tea, and the cook-shops and cheap markets help them to what they
call good living. They buy "good block ornaments," that is, small pieces
of meat, discolored but not dirty nor tainted, which are set out for
sale on the butcher's block. Tripe and cowheel are regarded as dainties,
and there is the whole range of mysterious English preparations of
questionable meat, from sausage and polonies to saveloys and cheap pies.
Soup can be had, pea or eel, at two or three pence a pint, and beer, an
essential to most of them, is "threepence a pot [quart] in your own
jugs." A savory dinner or supper is, therefore, an easy matter, and the
English worker fares better in this respect than the American, for whom
there is much less provision in the way of cheap food and cook-shops. In
fact the last are almost unknown with us, the cheap restaurant by no
means taking their place. Even with bread and tea alone, there is a good
deal more nourishment, since English bread is never allowed to rise to
the over-lightness which appears an essential to the American buyer. The
law with English breads and cakes of whatever nature appears to be to
work in all the flour the dough can hold, and pudding must be a slab,
and bread compact and dense to satisfy the English palate. Dripping is
the substitute for butter, and the children eat the slice of bread and
dripping contentedly. Fat of any sort is in demand, the piercing rawness
of an English winter seeming to call for heating food no less than that
of the Esquimaux for its rations of blubber and tallow. But the majority
of the women leave dripping for the children, and if a scrap of butter
cannot be had, rest contented with bread and tea, and an occasional pint
of beer. For workingwomen as a class, however, there is much less
indulgence in this than is supposed. To the men it is as essential as
the daily meals, and the women regard it in the same way. "We do well
enough with our tea, but a man must have his pint," they say; and this
principle is applied to the children, the girls standing by while the
boys take their turn at the "pot of mild."
This for the best order of workers. Below this line are all grades of
indulgence ending with the woman who earns just enough for the measure
of gin that will give her a day or an hour of unconsciousness and
freedom from any human claim. But the pressure of numbers and of
competing workers compels soberness, the steadiest and most capable
being barely able to secure subsistence, while below them is every
conceivable phase of want and struggle, more sharply defined and with
less possibility of remedy than anything found in the approximate
conditions on American soil.