The Victorian City

by Judith Flanders

  Horses in the afterlife caused further, and vastly worse, smells. In the 1820s, it was estimated that 400 horses a week were slaughtered via licensed horse-butchers (more commonly known as knackers’ yards); by mid-century the number had risen to 1,000 horses weekly, and knackers’ yards dotted the poorer districts – more prosperous neighbourhoods wouldn’t dream of housing such a place as the ‘sickening stench’, said Mayhew, came ‘leaking in through every crevice’. At Holborn Hill in Islington, Bermondsey, Whitechapel and Wandsworth, there were more than twenty all told. Smaller yards processed up to sixty horses weekly; the larger yards around 150. Live horses as well as dead arrived, and the biggest yards had contracts with brewers, coal merchants and omnibus companies, who used, and used up, horses at a great rate.

  The yards boiled up the flesh in great vats, by law at night, so as to cause the least possible nuisance from the dreadful smell, and also because the cats’-meat men started their rounds first thing in the morning. In theory, horsemeat was not sold for human consumption, but most people were sure that it was. The tongues were also sold, in the guise of ox tongues, the hearts and kidneys masquerading as ox hearts and kidneys. The rest was not discarded, either: manes and tails were sold to upholsterers for horsehair upholstery; hooves went to glue-makers; shoes and nails were sold back to blacksmiths and ironmongers for reuse. Early in the century bones went to button manufacturers and, when mechanization later made that uneconomic, they were processed to make manure, while the fat was skimmed off and sold as harness oil and axle grease. The skins went to tanners, which were mostly situated in Bermondsey, and provided another stench, giving the district literally its own air.

  6.

  SELLING THE STREETS

  The streets were a place to go to, not to go through, in the nineteenth century. There was a thriving shop trade, but for many people, purchases were made on the streets, both central and suburban. The sellers were rather like the horses: so ubiquitous that counting them was an afterthought. Mayhew estimated in the late 1840s and early 1850s that there were 30,000 adults, and an uncounted number of children, who sold goods and services on the streets. The census, by contrast, lists fewer than 3,700 street sellers in 1851. The reality, no doubt, is somewhere between the two. Even taking a halfway-house figure suggests that one out of every 150 people in London was selling something outdoors.

  Street selling was, at best, a subsistence-level job. Mayhew suggested that averaged together, a street seller earned 10s weekly over the entire year: on £26 a year, no one was doing more than surviving. Earnings might rise to 30s a week in the summer, but winter was hard for almost all street sellers. Many of them lost entire days of income in the rain: this included most street entertainers; those who provided services on the streets – knife-grinders, tinkers who mended pots and pans, people who recaned chairs; or those reliant on the whims of passers-by – children selling lavender, or violet sellers, or those offering fruit and sweets. Rain drove ballad and broadsheet sellers under cover, too, as their entire stock could be wiped out by a sudden shower. Yet others prospered during bad weather. Those who sold staples such as vegetables and fish did well: housewives and servants were pleased to stay indoors and have their dinners walk past them. Umbrella pedlars, too, appeared when it rained, heading for theatres and pleasure gardens, or the pubs or doorways, where those who had unwisely set out unprotected were sheltering. In summer, and in good weather, these ‘mush-fakers’ (mush from mushroom, for the shape of the umbrella) switched from selling to buying, walking the poorer districts and calling, ‘Sixpence for any old humbrellar,’ and then in the better-off residential districts, arriving with a bag of supplies, calling, ‘Humrellars to mend!’

  At the poorest end of the food trade were the watercress sellers. Watercress was a fresh green that many bought daily in penny bundles at breakfast or teatime. There was little profit in it, and the start-up costs were correspondingly small: for a penny outlay a buyer got ‘a full market hand, or as much as I can take hold of at one time without spilling; for threepence you should have a lap full enough to earn about a shilling off’. Cress sellers were therefore the very young or the very old. Girls started to sell cresses when they were about seven, moving after a few years into more profitable lines. Yet the work was not easy. Cresses were sold in bulk at Farringdon, Waterloo and Hackney markets. Farringdon and Waterloo were closer for the central London sellers, but Hackney was near the cress beds, and, for those who could manage the extra two- or three-mile walk in each direction, it was worth it: by cutting out the middleman at the city markets, they could earn an extra 3d to 4d a day.

  The girls arrived at the markets daily by 4 a.m. Buying in the dark, by candlelight or gas, was a skilled job: it was not easy to see whether the produce was fresh, or whether the suppliers were passing off the previous day’s wilted remainders. In winter, the damp produce froze solid on the walk back to town and could no longer be separated into penny bunches, so the new cresses had to be washed under the market pump, before being carefully mixed with the tired cresses left from the day before. The girls then walked back, either to stand in a favoured spot where commuters passed by, or headed for the residential districts, following a regular route, carrying the families’ breakfast greens in a flat, shallow basket on their heads, while the very poorest used a tin tray suspended from their necks by a string. They sold until about 8.30 in the morning, before returning to their lodgings for a breakfast of tea and bread; or, if their parents were themselves already out selling, which was likely, the girls continued with their route until they had made the penny profit needed to buy coffee and bread and butter from a coffee stall. Then they started again, selling through the streets for the teatime and then the late-supper market, until about 10 p.m., at which point, having walked up to fifteen miles daily, they returned home to bed, to get up the next morning at three once more.

  Henry Mayhew claimed that in 1850 he had walked forty-six miles of ‘the principal thoroughfares’ in London, and found on average fourteen stalls to the mile, of which a dozen sold fish or fruit. The main purveyors were the costermongers. Some were prosperous, with a pony or donkey, and a cart with a rail at the back to hold a tray of vegetables, and the rest of the stock in the cart; others had a cart with sides, front and back, that folded down to display the produce. Still others had a barrow with cords tied to the handle, pulled by a donkey; for the less successful, there was the handbarrow, some of which had rails, all sloping from back to front, with the goods placed on top on a wooden tray and sometimes marked by small, brightly coloured flags at the four corners. The least prosperous stood with a basket on the streets. One woman in the 1860s had a pitch in the gutter outside a pub in Lamb’s Conduit Street in Bloomsbury. This had the advantage that, under the pub’s flaring gaslight, she was visible to customers on their way home. (It probably also threw off a little residual heat, which she no doubt welcomed.) Her produce was routinely just a few lettuces and onions.

  Many of the more successful costermongers employed a boy, aged between ten and sixteen, who, for 2d or 3d a day and his food, called the goods, his piping voice carrying further over the street noise. (The poor diet of the working classes delayed puberty; many sixteen-year-olds had voices that had not yet broken.) Costermongers and their boys started for the markets at four o’clock in the summer, six in the winter. Once their produce was prepared, they set off to sell it. If a coster had regular customers, he might finish his rounds by noon, after which he sent the boy out on his own, letting him keep any money he earned over a set sum, while he took up another line to sell. Most costermongers expected to start before dawn, sell ‘greens of a morning, and go...round to the public [houses] with nuts of an evening, till about ten o’clock at night’.

  Pubs were a popular selling site. Many sellers stocked food to be eaten with the drinks the customers had bought, and publicans welcomed those with ‘relishes’, whose sharp and salty tastes encouraged drinking. But many other sellers offered items that were quite
independent of the setting. In the late 1840s, Henry Mayhew sat and watched the sellers in one pub: in seventy-five minutes he saw four selling sheep’s trotters, three with shrimp, pickled whelks and periwinkles, two baked-potato men, eight with ballads and song-sheets, eight more selling matches and three selling braces. According to Mayhew, while he watched ‘Not one of these effected a sale,’ yet it is unlikely that so many sellers would return so frequently without some result.

  Suburban dwellers marked the passing of the seasons by the variation of street sellers, not only of seasonal food, but of manufactured goods and of services. In autumn, red-flannel draught excluders were sold; in summer the men selling flypaper reappeared. The latter wore top hats encircled with strips of the paper dotted with dead flies, to show how well it worked, and they shouted, ‘Catch ’em alive-o!’ (Often they were trailed by small boys lobbing dead insects at their hats, to see if they could get them to stick.) In spring came the first of the root sellers, as they were called, women who sold potted plants, as well as children with bunches of sweetbriar or violets. Indeed, flowers were suddenly everywhere: ‘The signs of spring-time that come to the Londoner’s ear’ included the women’s ‘shrill cry of “Two bunches a-penny – sweet wa-a-ll-flowers!”’ The Londoner’s eye was greeted by the sight of wagons, ‘the tops of which are a bright canary-yellow, with their hundred roots of blooming primroses’, while the barrow-men shouted, ‘All a-blowing! All a-growing!’ Equally springlike were the women crying, ‘Any o-ornaments for your fire stove!’, selling paper cut-outs and coloured shavings to fill the empty grates once the warm weather arrived. In summer came the gravellers, a man and a boy with a horse and cart: ‘wherever he sees that the walks are grown dingy or moss-grown, he knocks boldly at the door, and demands to be set to work.’ Householders might as well say yes at once, shrugged one resigned suburban resident, for otherwise the men would keep coming back until they ‘bore[d] you into consenting’. In winter the same men reappeared to sweep snow off the paths and pavements, while costers and greengrocers turned themselves into ice sellers when there was a hard frost, going up to ponds on common land and chipping off enough to fill a basket or cart to sell around the neighbourhood.48 In late December, many costermongers went ‘Christmasing’, cutting holly, ivy, evergreen boughs and mistletoe on common land and selling it to the cry of ‘Holly! Holly!! Holly-o!!! Christmas Holly oh!’ In April they sold lilac, in May, hawthorn blossom, and on the Saturday before Palm Sunday there were palm fronds in their carts.

  Some suburban sellers had permanent pitches and a clearly understood arrangement with the local residents. Americans renting a house near Hyde Park were told that it was their house’s responsibility to send out ‘a cup of tea and a bit of something to eat’ twice a day to an elderly apple-woman who sat outside their house. In exchange, these sellers did small jobs and ran errands for the householders, as the ballad seller Silas Wegg’s sign offered in Our Mutual Friend:

  Errands gone

  On with fi

  Delity By

  Ladies and Gentlemen

  I remain

  Your humble Servt:

  Silas Wegg.

  (In Silas’s case, his services were not called on ‘half a dozen times in a year’ by the owners of the house he regarded as ‘his’.)

  Most sellers, however, walked the rounds of the streets on a regular daily or weekly schedule, at set times, days or seasons. First every morning came the sweeps, calling, ‘Sweep-o! Sw-e-e-e-p!’, followed by the dustman, ringing his bell and crying, ‘Dust-ho!’ as he arrived to collect the ashes that had been swept out of fireplaces. The sweeps needed to do their work before the fires were lit for the morning hot water. Large houses with many fires that were kept up all day sometimes called the sweep in once a month; more often, for most of the middle classes, it was once a quarter; while the working classes tried to get by with once a year – chimney fires were a sign that the sweep had not been recently enough. It cost up to 1s 6d to have the chimneys swept in an ordinary terraced house and, as a perk, the sweep kept the soot, which he sold on to market gardeners, as fertilizer.

  Sweeps and dustmen were followed by the milkmen and -maids. In the 1840s, one writer said that milkmaids were usually from Wales ‘and did, until of late’ wear national dress. More commonly, both men and women wore country smocks, usually white; the men had glazed pot-hats; the women white stockings, straw bonnets with white caps underneath, and woollen shawls. Men and women alike carried heavy wooden yokes over their shoulders, supporting milk-pails holding forty-eight quarts of milk, with a dozen or more supplementary cans hooked on the edges of the pails, ranging down from a quart size. The yokes were sometimes painted with the name of the dairy – ‘Sims, 122 Jermyn Street’ – and the names of an aristocratic customer as advertising. Arthur Munby, in Mayfair early one summer morning, noted one yoke boasting, ‘Wreathall, milkman to His Grace the Duke of Northumberland’, although another topped that with, ‘Stevens, By appointment to the Queen’. As they walked, the milkmaids called, ‘Milk-o,’ or just ‘Mi-o,’ contractions of ‘Milk, below,’ their warning to those in basement kitchens that supplies were coming down. For households with few servants or none, whose inhabitants could not stop work for every tradesman or woman, the milkmaid had a length of string with a hook at the end that she attached to one of her smaller cans and lowered it through the railings. (The milkmaid in Plate 1 is doing exactly this.) The can in which she had delivered the previous day’s milk was left hitched on to the area railings ready for collection. After the morning round, milkmaids walked the streets selling to passers-by, before returning for teatime and supper trades. One walked four miles to and from her dairy: after a 5.30 start she trudged her routes until 7 p.m., earning 9s a week and her meals.

  The next sellers were the watercress girls, followed by the costermongers, then the fishmongers’, the butchers’ and the bakers’ boys to take the daily orders. The cress girls and the costers wore the standard street-dress of the working poor. Early in the century, for the men, this was breeches, thereafter replaced by cord trousers, with shirts and waistcoats or smocks, sometimes a jacket, a cloth cap and always a silk kingsman neckerchief – a coster had to be very hard up not to have one. The girls wore cotton dresses, usually pinned up out of the mud, frequently with two aprons, a coloured one covered by a white one, with a shawl, a silk neckerchief if it was affordable, and a black velvet or straw bonnet, or, if they carried their goods on their heads, a folded handkerchief. Delivery boys all wore clothing that denoted their trade: bakers’ boys in white, with aprons; the butchers’ boys in light-blue smocks and dark-blue aprons (which matched the bright-blue ink with which butchers wrote out the orders), and all wearing caps.

  After that, the day really began, with a procession that, daily or weekly, included the cats’-meat man, wearing a shiny black hat and waistcoat, with black sleeves, blue apron and corduroy trousers, and always with a blue-and- white spotted handkerchief tied around his neck, selling his horsemeat by the pound, or in small pieces on skewers for a farthing.49 Other goods regularly available from itinerant sellers in the suburbs included: footstools; embroidery frames; clothes horses, clothes-pegs and clothes line; sponges, chamois leathers, brushes and brooms; kitchen skewers, toasting-forks and other tinware; razors and penknives; trays, keyrings and small items of jewellery; candlesticks, tools, trivets, pots and pans; bandboxes and hatboxes; blackleading for kitchen ranges and grates, matches and glue; china ornaments and crockery; sheets, shirts, laces, thread, ribbons, artificial flowers, buttons, studs, handkerchiefs; pipes, tobacco, snuff, cigars; spectacles, hats, combs and hairbrushes; firewood and sawdust. The hearthstone-brick men (before detergent, abrasives were needed to clean floors and cooking utensils) also purchased old bottles and bones for resale.

  For it was not a one-way trade, from the streets to the houses. Many of the traders were buying from, not selling to, the households. Sometimes, as with the hearthstone men, the trade was in both directions. Crocker
y sellers exchanged their wares for old clothes, trading a tea service for a suit of clothes, a hat and boots ‘in decent condition’; an old coat might be exchanged for a sugar basin; a pair of wellington boots for a glass. One crockery seller started with crockery worth 15s and, on a good day, ended with 1s in cash, plus two or three old shirts, a couple of coats, a suit of livery, a dress, a pair of boots or two, and a waistcoat, carrying them all on his back, with his crockery balanced on his head, ‘and werry probably a humberella or two under my arm, and five or six old hats in my hand’. Thus laden, he tramped up to twenty-five miles a day.

  As with their colleagues in the second-hand clothes market, old-clothes men were said to be Jewish and were usually elderly. They carried a bag for the clothes, while whatever hats they had bought that day were perched on top of their own. Traditionally they made themselves known by carrying a small clock under one arm, the striker of which they twanged as they walked along, calling, ‘Old clo’!’ Many middle-class housewives considered selling clothes to be not quite respectable, and so the old-clothes men prided themselves on their discretion: ‘A form, half-concealed by a curtain, appears at a window...a finger is hastily raised, and then the figure as hastily retires. It is enough; the Jew saunters across the road, glances with apparent carelessness around, and slips quietly into the house, of which the door is conveniently ajar, and the whole business is managed with that secrecy so greatly desired by penurious but highly respectable householders.’

  Other purchasers were equally stealthy, not to save the face of the householders, but because the sellers were disposing of goods they didn’t technically own. The least honest servants sold the family’s food. In Great Expectations, the cook to the chaotic Pocket household is found lying ‘insensibly drunk’, with a packet of butter ready to sell beside her. Other servants saw various forms of recycling as their perquisites. Well-regulated households, according to advice books, produced no food waste: everything was reused in leftovers or transformed into other dishes, with the residue going to feed dogs, cats or chickens, or to fertilize the garden. But many servants sold on the waste, called wash, to dealers who purchased it as pig-feed (hence the word ‘hogwash’). Some bought wash to feed their own pigs, kept in market gardens around the edges of the city or even in many inner-city slums (see p. 208); others were middlemen, buying wash in bulk from coffee houses, eating houses and cookshops. Dealers sold the wash for 4d to 6d per bucket, hiring boys to go door to door, for 2s a week plus their meals, or sometimes for as little as 1d a bucket. Cooks sold hare and rabbit skins after they had cut up the meat for cooking: at mid-century hare skins were worth up to 2s 2d each. There was even a trade in used tea leaves. In most households, after the tea had been made, the leaves were rinsed, dried and sprinkled on the carpets before sweeping, to help collect the dust. Once this had been done, some charwomen sold the leaves to unscrupulous dealers who mixed them with new tea leaves, selling the tea at bargain prices. It was these very women and their kind who were most likely to purchase the lowest-priced tea, and who were drinking what they had lately swept up.