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LONDON LABOUR
AND THE LONDON POOR

A Cyclopædia of the Condition and Earnings
OF
THOSE THAT WILL WORK
THOSE THAT CANNOT WORK, AND
THOSE THAT WILL NOT WORK

BY
HENRY MAYHEW

THE LONDON STREET-FOLK
COMPRISING
STREET SELLERS · STREET BUYERS · STREET FINDERS
STREET PERFORMERS · STREET ARTIZANS · STREET LABOURERS

WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS

VOLUME TWO

CONTENTS
OF
VOLUME II.

THE STREET-FOLK.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

LONDON LABOUR
AND
THE LONDON POOR.
VOL. II.

THE STREET-FOLK.
BOOK THE SECOND.

INTRODUCTION.

In commencing a new volume I would devote a few pages to the consideration of the import of the facts already collected concerning the London Street-Folk, not only as regards the street-people themselves, but also in connection with the general society of which they form so large a proportion.

The precise extent of the proportion which the Street-Traders bear to the rest of the Metropolitan Population is the first point to be evolved; for the want, the ignorance, and the vice of a street-life being in a direct ratio to the numbers, it becomes of capital importance that we should know how many are seeking to pick up a livelihood in the public thoroughfares. This is the more essential because the Government returns never have given us, and probably never will give us, any correct information respecting it. The Census of 1841 set down the “Hawkers, Hucksters, and Pedlars” of the Metropolis as numbering 2045; and from the inquiries I have made among the street-sellers as to the means taken to obtain a full account of their numbers for the next population return, the Census of 1851 appears likely to be about as correct in its statements concerning the Street Traders and Performers as the one which preceded it.

According to the accounts which have been collected during the progress of this work, the number of the London Street-People, so far as the inquiry has gone, is upwards of 40,000. This sum is made up of 30,000 Costermongers; 2000 Street-Sellers of “Green-Stuff,” as Watercresses, Chickweed, and Groundsell, Turf, &c.; 4000 Street Sellers of Eatables and Drinkables; 1000 selling Stationery, Books, Papers, and Engravings in the streets; and 4000 other street-sellers vending manufactured articles, either of metal, crockery, textile, chemical, or miscellaneous substances, making altogether 41,000, or in round numbers say 40,000 individuals. The 30,000 costermongers may be said to include 12,000 men, 6000 women, and 12,000 children.

The above numbers comprise the main body of people selling in the London streets; hence if we assert that, with the vendors of second-hand articles, as old metal, glass, linen, clothes, &c., and mineral productions, such as coke, salt, and sand, there are about 45,000 street-traders in the Metropolis, we shall not, I am satisfied, be very far from the truth.

The value of the Capital, or Stock in Trade, of these people, though individually trifling, amounts, collectively, to a considerable sum of money—indeed, to very nearly 40,000l., or at the rate of about 1l. per head. Under the term Capital are included the donkeys, barrows, baskets, stalls, trays, boards, and goods belonging to the several street-traders; and though the stock of the water-cress, the small-ware, the lucifer, the flower, or the chickweed and groundsell seller may not exceed in value 1s., and the basket or tray upon which it is carried barely half that sum, that of the more prosperous costermonger, possessed of his barrow and donkey; or of the Cheap John, with his cart filled with hardware; or the Packman, with his bale of soft wares at his back, may be worth almost as many pounds as the others are pence.

The gross amount of trade done by the London Street-Sellers in the course of the year is so large that the mind is at first unable to comprehend how, without reckless extravagance, want can be in any way associated with the class. After the most cautious calculation, the results having been checked and re-checked in a variety of ways, so that the conclusion arrived at might be somewhat near and certainly not beyond the truth, it appears that the “takings” of the London Street-Sellers cannot be said to be less than 2,500,000l. per annum. But vast as this sum may seem, and especially when considered as only a portion of the annual expenditure of the Metropolitan Poor, still, when we come to spread the gross yearly receipts over 40,000 people, we find that the individual takings are but 62l. per annum, which (allowing the rate of profit to be in all cases even 50 per cent., though I am convinced it is often much less) gives to each street-trader an annual income of 20l. 13s. 4d., or within a fraction of 8s. a week, all the year round. And when we come to deduct from this the loss by perishable articles, the keep of donkeys, the wear and tear, or hire, of barrows—the cost of stalls and baskets, together with the interest on stock-money (generally at the rate of 4s. a week—and often 1s. a day—for 1l., or 1040l. per cent. per annum), we may with safety assert that the average gain or clear income of the Metropolitan Street-Sellers is rather under than over 7s. 6d. a week. Some of the more expert street-traders may clear 10s. or even 15s. weekly throughout the year, while the weekly profit of the less expert, the old people, and the children, may be said to be 3s. 6d. These incomes, however, are the average of the gross yearly profits rather than the regular weekly gains; the consequence is, that though they might be sufficient to keep the majority of the street-sellers in comparative comfort, were they constant and capable of being relied upon, from week to week—but being variable and uncertain, and rising sometimes from nothing in the winter to 1l. a week in the summer, when street commodities are plentiful and cheap, and the poorer classes have money wherewith to purchase them—and fluctuating moreover, even at the best of times, according as the weather is wet or fine, and the traffic of the streets consequently diminished or augmented—it is but natural that the people subject to such alternations should lack the prudence and temperance of those whose incomes are more regular and uniform.

To place the above facts clearly before the reader the following table has been prepared. The first column states the titles of the several classes of street-sellers; the second, the number of individuals belonging to each of these classes; the third, the value of their respective capitals or stock in trade; the fourth, the gross amount of trade done by them respectively every year; the fifth, the average yearly takings of each class; and the sixth, their average weekly gains. This gives us, as it were, a bird’s-eye view of the earnings and pecuniary condition of the various kinds of street-sellers already treated of. It is here cited, as indeed all the statistics in this work are, as an approximation to the truth rather than a definite and accurate result.

Now, according to the above estimate, it would appear that the gross annual receipts of the entire body of street-sellers (for there are many besides those above specified—as for instance, the vendors of second-hand articles, &c.) may be estimated in round numbers at 3,000,000l. sterling, and their clear income at about 1,000,000l. per annum. Hence, we are enabled to perceive the importance of the apparently insignificant traffic of the streets; for were the street-traders to be prohibited from pursuing their calling, and so forced to apply for relief at the several metropolitan unions, the poor-rates would be at the least doubled. The total sum expended in the relief of the London poor, during 1848, was 725,000l., but this we see is hardly three-fourths of the income of the street-traders. Those, therefore, who would put an end to the commerce of our streets, should reflect whether they would like to do so at the cost of doubling the present poor-rates and of reducing one-fortieth part of the entire metropolitan population from a state of comparative independence to absolute pauperism.

However unsatisfactory it may be to the aristocratic pride of the wealthy commercial classes, it cannot be denied that a very important element of the trade of this vast capital—this marvellous centre of the commerce of the world—I cite the stereotype phrases of civic eloquence, for they are at least truths—it is still undeniable, I say, that a large proportion of the commerce of the capital of Great Britain is in the hands of the Street-Folk. This simple enunciation might appear a mere platitude were it not that the street-sellers are a proscribed class. They are driven from stations to which long possession might have been thought to give them a quasi legal right; driven from them at the capricious desire of the shopkeepers, some of whom have had bitter reason, by the diminution of their own business, to repent their interference. They are bandied about at the will of a police-officer. They must “move on” and not obstruct a thoroughfare which may be crammed and blocked with the carriages of the wealthy until to cross the road on foot is a danger. They are, in fine, a body numbering thousands, who are allowed to live in the prosecution of the most ancient of all trades, sale or barter in the open air, by sufferance alone. They are classed as unauthorized or illegal and intrusive traders, though they “turn over” millions in a year.

The authorities, it is true, do not sanction any general arbitrary enforcement of the legal proscription of the Street-Folk, but they have no option if a section of shopkeepers choose to say to them, “Drive away from our doors these street-people.” It appears to be sufficient for an inferior class of tradesmen—for such the meddlers with the street-folk generally seem to be—merely to desire such a removal in order to accomplish it. It is not necessary for them to say in excuse, “We pay heavy rents, and rates, and taxes, and are forced to let our lodgings accordingly; we pay for licences, and some of us as well pay fines for giving short weight to poor people, and that, too, when it is hardly safe to give short weight to our richer patrons; but what rates, taxes, or licences do these street-traders pay? Their lodgings may be dear enough, but their rates are nominally nothing” (being charged in the rent of their rooms). “From taxes they are blessedly exempt. They are called upon to pay no imposts on their property or income; they defray merely the trifling duties on their tobacco, beer, tea, sugar, coffee” (though these by the way—the chief articles in the excise and customs returns—make up one-half of the revenue of the country). “They ought to be put down. We can supply all that is wanting. What may become of them is simply their own concern.”

The Act 50 Geo. III., c. 41, requires that every person “carrying to sell or exposing to sale any goods, wares, or merchandize,” shall pay a yearly duty. But according to s. 23, “nothing in this Act shall extend to prohibit any person or persons from selling (by hawking in the streets) any printed papers licensed by authority; or any fish, fruit, or victuals.” Among the privileged articles are also included barm or yeast, and coals. The same Act, moreover, contains nothing to prohibit the maker of any home-manufacture from exposing his goods to sale in any town-market or fair, nor any tinker, cooper, glazier, or other artizan, from going about and carrying the materials of his business. The unlicensed itinerant vendors of such things however as lucifer-matches, boot-laces, braces, fuzees, or any wares indeed, not of their own manufacture, are violators of the law, and subject to a penalty of 10l., or three months’ imprisonment for each offence. It is in practice, however, only in the hawking of such articles as those on which the duty is heavy and of considerable value to the revenue (such as tea, tobacco, or cigars), that there is any actual check in the London streets.

Nevertheless, a large proportion of the street-trading without a licence is contrary to law, and the people seeking to obtain a living by such means are strictly liable to fine or imprisonment, while even those street-traders whom the Act specially exempts—as for instance the street-sellers of fish, fruit, and vegetables, and of eatables and drinkables, as well as the street artizans, and who are said to have the right of “exposing their goods to sale in any market or fair in every city, borough, town-corporate, and market-town”—even these, I say, are liable to be punished for obstructing the highway whenever they attempt to do so.

Now these are surely anomalies which it is high time, in these free-trade days, should cease. The endeavour to obtain an honest and independent livelihood should subject no man to fine or imprisonment; nor should the poor hawker—the neediest perhaps of all tradesmen—be required to pay 4l. a year for the liberty to carry on his business when the wealthy shopkeeper can do so “scot-free.” Moreover, it is a glaring iniquity that the rich tradesman should have it in his power, by complaining to the police, to deprive his poorer rival of the right to dispose of his goods in the streets. It is often said, in justification, that as the shopkeepers pay the principal portion of the rates and taxes, they must be protected in the exercise of their business. But this, in the first place, is far from the truth. As regards the taxes, the poorer classes pay nearly half of the national imposts: they pay the chief portion of the malt duty, and that is in round numbers 5,000,000l. a year; the greater part of the spirit duty, which is 4,350,000l.; the tobacco duty, 4,250,000l.; the sugar duty, 4,500,000l.; and the duty on tea, 5,330,000l.; making altogether 23,430,000l., out of about 50,000,000l. Concerning the rates, however, it is not so easy to estimate what proportion the poor people contribute towards the local burdens of the country; but if they are householders, they have to pay quota of the parish and county expenses directly, and, if lodgers, indirectly in the rent of their apartments. Hence it is evident, that to consider the street-sellers unworthy of being protected in the exercise of their calling because they pay neither rates nor taxes, is to commit a gross injustice, not only to the street-sellers themselves by forcing them to contribute in their tea and sugar, their beer, gin, and tobacco, towards the expenses of a Government which exerts itself rather to injure than benefit them, but likewise to the ratepayers of the parish; for it is a necessary consequence, if the shopkeepers have the power to deprive the street-dealers of their living whenever the out-of-door tradesmen are thought to interfere with the business of those indoors (perhaps by underselling them), that the street-dealers, being unable to live by their own labour, must betake themselves to the union and live upon the labour of the parishioners, and thus the shopkeepers may be said to enrich themselves at the expense, not only of the poor street-people, but likewise of their brother ratepayers.

Nor can it be said that the Street-Sellers are interlopers upon these occasions, for if ancient custom be referred to, it will be found that the Shopkeepers are the real intruders, they having succeeded the Hawkers, who were, in truth, the original distributors of the produce of the country.

But though no body of Shopkeepers, nor, indeed, any other class of people individually, should possess the power to deprive the Hawkers of what is often the last shift of struggling independence—the sale of a few goods in the street—still it is evident that the general convenience of the public must be consulted, and that, were the Street-Traders to be allowed the right of pitching in any thoroughfare they pleased, many of our principal streets would be blocked up with costers’ barrows, and the kerb of Regent-street possibly crowded like that of the New Cut, with the hawkers and hucksters that would be sure to resort thither; while those thoroughfares which, like Fleet-street and Cheapside, are now almost impassable at certain times of the day, from the increased traffic of the City, would be rendered still more impervious by the throngs of street-sellers that the crowd alone would be sure to attract to the spot.

Under the circumstances, therefore, it becomes necessary that we should provide for the vast body of Street-Sellers some authorized place of resort, where they might be both entitled and permitted to obtain an honest living according to Act of Parliament. To think for a moment of “putting down” street-trading is to be at once ignorant of the numbers and character of the people pursuing it. To pass an Act declaring 50,000 individuals rogues and vagabonds, would be to fill our prisons or our workhouses with men who would willingly earn their own living. Besides, the poor will buy of the poor. Subject the petty trader to fine and imprisonment as you please, still the very sympathy and patronage of the petty purchaser will in this country always call into existence a large body of purveyors to the poorer classes. I would suggest, therefore, and I do so after much consideration, and an earnest desire to meet all the difficulties of the case, that a number of “poor men’s markets” be established throughout London, by the purchase or rental of plots of ground in the neighbourhood of the present street-markets; that a small toll be paid by each of the Street-Sellers attending such markets, for the right to vend their goods there—that the keeper or beadle of each market be likewise an Inspector of Weights and Measures, and that any hawker found using “slangs” of any kind, or resorting to any imposition whatever, be prohibited entering the market for the future—that the conduct and regulation of the markets be under the direction of a committee consisting of an equal number of shareholders, sellers, and working men—the latter as representatives of the buyers—and that the surplus funds (if any, after paying all expenses, together with a fair interest to the shareholders of the market) should be devoted to the education of the children of the hawkers before and after the hours of sale. There might also be a penny savings’-bank in connection with each of the markets, and a person stationed at the gates on the conclusion of the day’s business, to collect all he could from the hawkers as they left.

There are already a sufficient number of poor-markets established at the East end of the town—though of a different character, such as the Old Clothes Exchange—to prove the practicability of the proposed plan among even the pettiest traders. And I am convinced, after long deliberation, that such institutions could not but tend to produce a rapid and marked improvement in the character of the London Hawkers.

This is the only way evident to me of meeting the evil of our present street-life—an evil which is increasing every day, and which threatens, ere long, almost to overwhelm us with its abominations. To revile the street-people is stark folly. Their ignorance is no demerit to them, even as it is no merit to us to know the little that we do. If we really wish the people better, let us, I say again, do for them what others have done for us, and without which (humiliating as it may be to our pride) we should most assuredly have been as they are. It is the continued forgetfulness of this truth—a truth which our wretched self-conceit is constantly driving from our minds—that prevents our stirring to improve the condition of these poor people; though, if we knew but the whole of the facts concerning them, and their sufferings and feelings, our very fears alone for the safety of the state would be sufficient to make us do something in their behalf. I am quite satisfied, from all I have seen, that there are thousands in this great metropolis ready to rush forth, on the least evidence of a rising of the people, to commit the most savage and revolting excesses—men who have no knowledge of the government of the country but as an armed despotism, preventing their earning their living, and who hate all law, because it is made to appear to them merely as an organised tyranny—men, too, who have neither religious nor moral principles to restrain the exercise of their grossest passions when once roused, and men who, from our very neglect of them, are necessarily and essentially the dangerous classes, whose existence we either rail at or deplore.

The rate of increase among the street-traders it is almost impossible to arrive at. The population returns afford us no data for the calculation, and the street-people themselves are unable to supply the least information on the subject; all they can tell us is, that about 20 years ago they took a guinea for every shilling that they get now. This heavy reduction of their receipts they attribute to the cheapness of commodities, and the necessity to carry and sell a greater quantity of goods in order to get the same profit, as well as to the increase in the number of street-traders; but when questioned as to the extent of such increase, their answers are of the vaguest possible kind. Arranging the street-people, however, as we have done, into three distinct classes, according to the causes which have led to their induction into a street-life, viz., those who are born and bred to the streets—those who take to the streets—and those who are driven to the streets, it is evident that the main elements of any extraordinary increase of the street-folk must be sought for among the two latter classes. Among the first the increase will, at the utmost, be at the same rate as the ordinary increase of the population—viz., 1½ per cent. per annum; for the English costermongers and street-traders in general appear to be remarkable rather for the small than the large number of their children, so that, even supposing all the boys and girls of the street-sellers to be brought up to the same mode of life as their father, we could not thus account for any enormous increase among the street-folk. With those, however, who take to the streets from the love of a “roving life,” or the desire to “shake a free leg”—to quote the phrases of the men themselves—or are driven to the streets from an inability to obtain employment at the pursuit to which they have been accustomed, the case is far different.

That there is every day a greater difficulty for working men to live by their labour—either from the paucity of work, or from the scanty remuneration given for it—surely no one will be disposed to question when every one is crying out that the country is over-populated. Such being the case, it is evident that the number of mechanics in the streets must be daily augmenting, for, as I have before said, street-trading is the last shift of an unemployed artizan to keep himself and his family from the “Union.” The workman out of work, sooner than starve or go to the parish for relief, takes to making up and vending on his own account the articles of his craft, whilst the underpaid workman, sooner than continue toiling from morning till midnight for a bare subsistence, resorts to the easier trade of buying and selling. Again, even among the less industrious of the working classes, the general decline in wages has tended, and is continually tending, to make their labour more and more irksome to them. There is a cant abroad at the present day, that there is a special pleasure in industry, and hence we are taught to regard all those who object to work as appertaining to the class of natural vagabonds; but where is the man among us that loves labour? for work or labour is merely that which is irksome to perform, and which every man requires a certain amount of remuneration to induce him to perform. If men really loved work they would pay to be allowed to do it rather than require to be paid for doing it. That occupation which is agreeable to us we call amusement, and that and that only which is disagreeable we term labour, or drudgery, according to the intensity of its irksomeness. Hence as the amount of remuneration given by way of inducement to a man to go through a certain amount of work becomes reduced, so does the stimulus to work become weakened, and this, through the decline of wages, is what is daily taking place among us. Our operatives are continually ceasing to be producers, and passing from the creators of wealth into the exchangers or distributors of it; becoming mere tradesmen, subsisting on the labour of other people rather than their own, and so adding to the very non-producers, the great number of whom is the main cause of the poverty of those who make all our riches. To teach a people the difficulty of living by labour is to inculcate the most dangerous of all lessons, and this is what we are daily doing. Our trading classes are increasing at a most enormous rate, and so giving rise to that exceeding competition, and consequently, to that continual reduction of prices—all of which must ultimately fall upon the working man. This appears to me to be the main cause of the increase of the London street people, and one for which I candidly confess I see no remedy.

OF THE STREET-SELLERS OF SECOND-HAND ARTICLES.

I have already treated of the street-commerce in such things as are presented to the public in the form in which they are to be cooked, eaten, drank, or used. They have comprised the necessaries, delicacies, or luxuries of the street; they have been either the raw food or preparations ready cooked or mixed for immediate consumption, as in the case of the street eatables and drinkables; or else they were the proceeds of taste (or its substitute) in art or literature, or of usefulness or ingenuity in manufacture.

All these many objects of street-commerce may be classified in one well-known word: they are bought and sold first-hand. I have next to deal with the second-hand sellers of our streets; and in this division perhaps will be found more that is novel, curious, and interesting, than in that just completed.

Mr. Babbage, in his “Economy of Machinery and Manufactures,” says, concerning the employment of materials of little value: “The worn-out saucepan and tin-ware of our kitchens, when beyond the reach of the tinker’s art, are not utterly worthless. We sometimes meet carts loaded with old tin kettles and worn-out iron coal-skuttles traversing our streets. These have not yet completed their useful course; the less corroded parts are cut into strips, punched with small holes, and varnished with a coarse black varnish for the use of the trunk-maker, who protects the edges and angles of his boxes with them; the remainder are conveyed to the manufacturing chemists in the outskirts, who employ them in combination with pyroligneous acid, in making a black dye for the use of calico-printers.”

Mr. Babbage has here indicated one portion of the nature of the street-trade in second-hand articles—the application of worn-out materials to a new purpose. But this second-hand commerce of the streets—for a street-commerce it mainly is, both in selling and buying—has a far greater extent than that above indicated, and many ramifications. Under the present head I shall treat only of street sellers, unless when a street purchase may be so intimately connected with a street sale that for the better understanding of the subject it may be necessary to sketch both. Of the Street-Buyers and the Street-Finders, or Collectors, both connected with the second-hand trade, I shall treat separately.

In London, where many, in order to live, struggle to extract a meal from the possession of an article which seems utterly worthless, nothing must be wasted. Many a thing which in a country town is kicked by the penniless out of their path even, or examined and left as meet only for the scavenger’s cart, will in London be snatched up as a prize; it is money’s worth. A crushed and torn bonnet, for instance, or, better still, an old hat, napless, shapeless, crownless, and brimless, will be picked up in the street, and carefully placed in a bag with similar things by one class of street-folk—the Street-Finders. And to tempt the well-to-do to sell their second-hand goods, the street-trader offers the barter of shapely china or shining glass vessels; or blooming fuchsias or fragrant geraniums for “the rubbish,” or else, in the spirit of the hero of the fairy tale, he exchanges, “new lamps for old.”

Of the street sale of second-hand articles, with all the collateral or incidental matter bearing immediately on the subject, I shall treat under the following heads, or under such heads as really constitute the staple of the business, dismissing such as may be trifling or exceptional. Of these traffickers, then, there are five classes, the mere enumeration of the objects of their traffic being curious enough:—

1. The Street-Sellers of Old Metal Articles, such as knives, forks, and butchers’ steels; saws, hammers, pincers, files, screw-drivers, planes, chisels, and other tools (more frequently those of the workers in wood than of other artisans); old scissors and shears; locks, keys, and hinges; shovels, fire-irons, trivets, chimney-cranes, fenders, and fire-guards; warming-pans (but rarely now); flat and Italian irons, curling-tongs; rings, horse-shoes, and nails; coffee and tea-pots, urns, trays, and canisters; pewter measures; scales and weights; bed-screws and keys; candlesticks and snuffers; niggards, generally called niggers (i. e., false bottoms for grates); tobacco and snuff-boxes and spittoons; door-plates, numbers, knockers, and escutcheons; dog-collars and dog-chains (and other chains); gridirons; razors; coffee-mills; lamps; swords and daggers; gun and pistol-barrels and locks (and occasionally the entire weapon); bronze and cast metal figures; table, chair, and sofa castors; bell-pulls and bells; the larger buckles and other metal (most frequently brass) articles of harness furniture; compositors’ sticks (the depositories of the type in the first instance); the multifarious kinds of tin-wares; stamps; cork-screws; barrel-taps; ink-stands; a multiplicity of culinary vessels and of old metal lids; footmen, broken machinery, and parts of machinery, as odd wheels, and screws of all sizes, &c., &c.

2. The Street-Sellers of Old Linen, Cotton, and Woollen Articles, such as old sheeting for towels; old curtains of dimity, muslin, cotton, or moreen; carpeting; blanketing for house-scouring cloths; ticking for beds and pillows; sacking for different purposes, according to its substance and quality; fringes; and stocking-legs for the supply of “jobbing worsted,” and for re-footing.

I may here observe that in the street-trade, second-hand linen or cotton is often made to pay a double debt. The shirt-collars sold, sometimes to a considerable extent and very cheap, in the street-markets, are made out of linen which has previously been used in some other form; so is it with white waistcoats and other habiliments. Of the street-folk who vend such wares I shall speak chiefly in the fourth division of this subject, viz. the second-hand street-sellers of miscellaneous articles.

3. The Street-Sellers of Old Glass and Crockery, including the variety of bottles, odd, or in sets, or in broken sets; pans, pitchers, wash-hand basins, and other crockery utensils; china ornaments; pier, convex, and toilet glasses (often without the frames); pocket ink-bottles; wine, beer, and liqueur glasses; decanters; glass fish-bowls (occasionally); salt-cellars; sugar-basins; and lamp and gas glasses.

4. The Street-Sellers of Miscellaneous Articles. These are such as cannot properly be classed under any of the three preceding heads, and include a mass of miscellaneous commodities: Accordions and other musical instruments; brushes of all descriptions; shaving-boxes and razor-strops; baskets of many kinds; stuffed birds, with and without frames; pictures, with and without frames; desks, work-boxes, tea-caddies, and many articles of old furniture; boot-jacks and hooks; shoe-horns; cartouche-boxes; pocket and opera glasses; rules, and measures in frames; backgammon, and chess or draught boards and men, and dice; boxes of dominoes; cribbage-boards and boxes, sometimes with old packs of cards; pope-boards (boards used in playing the game of “Pope,” or “Pope Joan,” though rarely seen now); “fish,” or card counters of bone, ivory, or mother of pearl (an equal rarity); microscopes (occasionally); an extensive variety of broken or faded things, new or long kept, such as magic-lanterns, dissected maps or histories, &c., from the toy warehouses and shops; Dutch clocks; barometers; wooden trays; shells; music and books (the latter being often odd volumes of old novels); tee-totums, and similar playthings; ladies’ head-combs; umbrellas and parasols; fishing-rods and nets; reins, and other parts of cart, gig, and “two-horse” harness; boxes full of “odds and ends” of old leather, such as water-pipes; and a mass of imperfect metal things, which had “better be described,” said an old dealer, “as from a needle to an anchor.”

5. The Street-Sellers of Old Apparel, including the body habiliments, constituting alike men’s, women’s, boys’, girls’, and infants’ attire: as well as hats, caps, gloves, belts, and stockings; shirts and shirt-fronts (“dickeys”); handkerchiefs, stocks, and neck-ties; furs, such as victorines, boas, tippets, and edgings; beavers and bonnets; and the other several, and sometimes not easily describable, articles which constitute female fashionable or ordinary wear.

I may here observe, that of the wares which once formed a portion of the stock of the street-sellers of the fourth and fifth divisions, but which are now no longer objects of street sale, were, till within the last few years, fans; back and shoulder boards (to make girls grow straight!); several things at one time thought indispensable to every well-nurtured child, such as a coral and bells; belts, sashes, scabbards, epaulettes, feathers or plumes, hard leather stocks, and other indications of the volunteer, militia, and general military spirit of the early part of the present century.

Before proceeding immediately with my subject, I may say a few words concerning what is, in the estimation of some, a second-hand matter. I allude to the many uses to which that which is regarded, and indeed termed, “offal,” or “refuse,” or “waste,” is put in a populous city. This may be evidenced in the multiform uses to which the “offal” of the animals which are slaughtered for our use are put. It is still more curiously shown in the uses of the offal of the animals which are killed, not for our use, but for that of our dogs and cats; and to this part of the subject I shall more especially confine the remarks I have to make. My observations on the uses of other waste articles will be found in another place.

What in the butcher’s trade is considered the offal of a bullock, was explained by Mr. Deputy Hicks, before the last Select Committee of the House of Commons on Smithfield Market: “The carcass,” he said, “as it hangs clear of everything else, is the carcass, and all else constitutes the offal.”

The carcass may be briefly termed the four quarters, whereas the offal then comprises the hide, which in the average-sized bullock that is slaughtered in London is worth 12s.; but with the hide are sold the horns, which are worth about 10d. to the comb-makers, who use them to make their “tortoise-shell” articles, and for similar purposes. The hoofs are worth 2d. to the glue-makers, or prussiate of potash manufacturers. What “comes out of a bullock,” to use the trade term, is the liver, the lights (or lungs), the stomach, the intestinal canal (sometimes 36 yards when extended), and the gall duct. These portions, with the legs (called “feet” in the trade), form what is styled the tripe-man’s portion, and are disposed of to him by the butcher for 5s. 6d. Separately, the value of the liver is 8d., of the lights, 6d. (both for dogs’-meat), and of the legs which are worked into tooth-brush handles, dominoes, &c., 1s. The remaining 3s. 4d. is the worth of the other portion. The heart averages rather more than 1s.; the kidneys the same; the head, 1s. 9d.; the blood (which is “let down the drain” in all but the larger slaughtering houses) 1½d. (being 3d. for 9 gallons); the tallow (7 stone) 14s.; and the tail, I was told, “from nothing to 2s.,” averaging about 6d.; the tongue, 2s. 6d. Thus the offal sells, altogether, first hand, for 1l. 18s. 6d.

I will now show the uses to which what is far more decidedly pronounced “offal,” and what is much more “second-hand” in popular estimation, viz., a dead horse, is put, and even a dead horse’s offal, and I will then show the difference in this curious trade between the Parisian and London horse offal.

The greatest horse-slaughtering establishments in France are at Montfaucon, a short distance from the capital. When the animal has been killed, it is “cut up,” and the choicer portions of the flesh are eaten by the work-people of the establishment, and by the hangers-on and jobbers who haunt the locality of such places, and are often men of a desperate character. The rest of the carcass is sold for the feeding of dogs, cats, pigs, and poultry, a portion being also devoted to purposes of manure. The flesh on a horse of average size and fatness is 350 lbs., which sells for 1l. 12s. 6d. But this is only one of the uses of the dead animal.

The skin is sold to a tanner for 10s. 6d. The hoofs to a manufacturer of sal ammonia, or similar preparations, or of Prussian blue, or to a comb or toy-maker, for 1s. 4d. The old shoes and the shoe-nails are worth 2½d. The hair of the mane and tail realizes 1½d. The tendons are disposed of, either fresh or dried, to glue-makers for 3d.—a pound of dried tendons (separated from the muscles) being about the average per horse. The bones are bought by the turners, cutlers, fan-makers, and the makers of ivory black and sal ammoniac, 90 lbs. being an average weight of the animal’s bones, and realizing 2s. The intestines wrought into the different preparations required of the gut-makers, or for manure, are worth 2d.

The blood is used by the sugar-refiners, and by the fatteners of poultry, pigeons, and turkeys (which devour it greedily), or else for manure. When required for manure it is dried—20 lbs. of dried blood, which is the average weight, being worth 1s. 9d. The fat is removed from the carcass and melted down. It is in demand for the making of gas, of soap, and (when very fine) of—bear’s grease; also for the dubbing or grease applied to harness and to shoe-leather. This fat when consumed in lamps communicates a greater portion of heat than does oil, and is therefore preferred by the makers of glass toys, and by enamellers and polishers. A horse at Montfaucon has been known to yield 60 lbs. of fat, but this is an extreme case; a yield of 12 lbs. is the produce of a horse in fair condition, but at these slaughterhouses there are so many lean and sorry jades that 8 lbs. may be taken as an average of fat, and at a value of 6d. per lb. Nor does the list end here; the dead and putrid flesh is made to teem with life, and to produce food for other living creatures. A pile of pieces of flesh, six inches in height, layer on layer, is slightly covered with hay or straw; the flies soon deposit their eggs in the attractive matter, and thus maggots are bred, the most of which are used as food for pheasants, and in a smaller degree of domestic fowls, and as baits for fish. These maggots give, or are supposed to give, a “game flavour” to poultry, and a very “high” flavour to pheasants. One horse’s flesh thus produces maggots worth 1s. 5d. The total amount, then, realized on the dead horse, which may cost 10s. 6d., is as follows:—

The carcass of a French horse is also made available in another way, and which relates to a subject I have lately treated of—the destruction of rats; but this is not a regularly-accruing emolument. Montfaucon swarms with rats, and to kill them the carcass of a horse is placed in a room, into which the rats gain access through openings in the floor contrived for the purpose. At night the rats are lured by their keenness of scent to the room, and lured in numbers; the openings are then closed, and they are prisoners. In one room 16,000 were killed in four weeks. The Paris furriers gave from three to four francs for 100 skins, so that, taking the average at 3s. of our money, 16,000 rat-skins would return 24l.

In London the uses of the dead horse’s flesh, bones, blood, &c., are different.

Horse-flesh is not—as yet—a portion of human food in this country. In a recent parliamentary inquiry, witnesses were examined as to whether horse-flesh was used by the sausage-makers. There was some presumption that such might be the case, but no direct evidence. I found, however, among butchers who had the best means of knowing, a strong conviction that such was the case. One highly-respectable tradesman told me he was as certain of it as that it was the month of June, though, if called upon to produce legal evidence proving either that such was the sausage-makers’ practice, or that this was the month of June, he might fail in both instances.

I found among street-people who dealt in provisions a strong, or, at any rate, a strongly-expressed, opinion that the tongues, kidneys, and hearts of horses were sold as those of oxen. One man told me, somewhat triumphantly, as a result of his ingenuity in deduction, that he had thoughts at one time of trying to establish himself in a cats’-meat walk, and made inquiries into the nature of the calling: “I’m satisfied the ’osses’ ’arts,” he said, “is sold for beastesses’; ’cause you see, sir, there’s nothing as ’ud be better liked for favourite cats and pet dogs, than a nice piece of ’art, but ven do you see the ’osses’ ’arts on a barrow? If they don’t go to the cats, vere does they go to? Vy, to the Christians.”

I am assured, however, by tradesmen whose interest (to say nothing of other considerations) would probably make them glad to expose such practices, that this substitution of the equine for the bovine heart is not attempted, and is hardly possible. The bullock’s heart, kidneys, and tongue, are so different in shape (the heart, more especially), and in the colour of the fat, while the rough tip of the ox’s tongue is not found in that of the horse, that this second-hand, or offal kind of animal food could not be palmed off upon any one who had ever purchased the heart, kidneys, or tongue of an ox. “If the horse’s tongue be used as a substitute for that of any other,” said one butcher to me, “it is for the dried reindeer’s—a savoury dish for the breakfast table!” Since writing the above, I have had convincing proof given me that the horses’ tongues are cured and sold as “neats.” The heart and kidneys are also palmed, I find, for those of oxen!! Thus, in one respect, there is a material difference between the usages, in respect of this food, between Paris and London.

One tradesman, in a large way of business—with many injunctions that I should make no allusion that might lead to his being known, as he said it might be his ruin, even though he never slaughtered the meat he sold, but was, in fact, a dead salesman or a vendor of meat consigned to him—one tradesman, I say, told me that he fancied there was an unreasonable objection to the eating of horse-flesh among us. The horse was quite as dainty in his food as the ox, he was quite as graminivorous, and shrunk more, from a nicer sense of smell, from anything pertaining to a contact with animal food than did the ox. The principal objection lies in the number of diseased horses sold at the knackers. My informant reasoned only from analogy, as he had never tasted horse-flesh; but a great-uncle of his, he told me, had relished it highly in the peninsular war.

The uses to which a horse’s carcass are put in London are these:—The skin, for tanning, sells for 6s. as a low average; the hoofs, for glue, are worth 2d.; the shoes and nails, 1½d.; the mane and tail, 1½d.; the bones, which in London (as it was described to me) are “cracked up” for manure, bring 1s. 6d.; the fat is melted down and used for cart-grease and common harness oil; one person acquainted with the trade thought that the average yield of fat was 10 lbs. per horse (“taking it low”), another that it was 12 lbs. (“taking it square”), so that if 11 lbs. be accepted as an average, the fat, at 2d. per lb., would realize 1s. 10d. Of the tendons no use is made; of the blood none; and no maggots are reared upon putrid horse-flesh, but a butcher, who had been twenty years a farmer also, told me that he knew from experience that there was nothing so good as maggots for the fattening of poultry, and he thought, from what I told him of maggot-breeding in Montfaucon, that we were behind the French in this respect.

Thus the English dead horse—the vendor receiving on an average 1l. from the knacker,—realizes the following amount, without including the knacker’s profit in disposing of the flesh to the cats’-meat man; but computing it merely at 2l. we have the subjoined receipts:—

The French dead horse, then, is made a source of nearly 5s. higher receipt than the English. On my inquiring the reason of this difference, and why the blood, &c., were not made available, I was told that the demand by the Prussian blue manufacturers and the sugar refiners was so fully supplied, and over-supplied, from the great cattle slaughter-houses, that the private butchers, for the trifling sum to be gained, let the blood be wasted. One bullock slaughterer in Fox and Knot-yard, who kills 180 cattle in a week, receives only 1l. for the blood of the whole number, which is received in a well in the slaughter-house. The amount paid for blood a few years back was more than double its present rate. Under these circumstances, I was told, it would be useless trying to turn the wasted offal of a horse to any profitable purpose. There is, I am told, on an average, 1000 horses slaughtered every week in London, and this, at 2l. 10s. each animal, would make the value of the dead horses of the metropolis amount to 130,000l. per annum.

Were it not that I might be dwelling too long on the subject, I might point out how the offal of the skins was made to subserve other purposes from the Bermondsey tan-yards; and how the parings and scrapings went to the makers of glue and size, and the hair to the builders to mix with lime, &c., &c.

I may instance another thing in which the worth of what in many places is valueless refuse is exemplified, in the matter of “waste,” as waste paper is always called in the trade. Paper in all its glossiest freshness is but a reproduction of what had become in some measure “waste,” viz. the rags of the cotton or linen fabric after serving their original purpose. There is a body of men in London who occupy themselves entirely in collecting waste paper. It is no matter of what kind; a small prayer-book, a once perfumed and welcome love-note, lawyers’ or tailors’ bills, acts of parliament, and double sheets of the Times, form portions of the waste dealer’s stock. Tons upon tons are thus consumed yearly. Books of every description are ingredients of this waste, and in every language; modern poems or pamphlets and old romances (perfect or imperfect), Shakespeare, Molière, Bibles, music, histories, stories, magazines, tracts to convert the heathen or to prove how easily and how immensely our national and individual wealth might be enhanced, the prospectuses of a thousand companies, each certain to prove a mine of wealth, schemes to pay off the national debt, or recommendations to wipe it off, auctioneers’ catalogues and long-kept letters, children’s copy-books and last century ledgers, printed effusions which have progressed no further than the unfolded sheets, uncut works and books mouldy from age—all these things are found in the insatiate bag of the waste collector, who of late has been worried because he could not supply enough! “I don’t know how it is, sir,” said one waste collector, with whom I had some conversation on the subject of street-sold books, with which business he was also connected, “I can’t make it out, but paper gets scarcer or else I’m out of luck. Just at this time my family and me really couldn’t live on my waste if we had to depend entirely upon it.”

I am assured that in no place in the world is this traffic carried on to anything approaching the extent that it is in London. When I treat of the street-buyers I shall have some curious information to publish on the subject. I do but allude to it here as one strongly illustrative of “second-hand” appliances.

Of the Street-Sellers of Second-Hand Metal Articles.

I have in the preceding remarks specified the wares sold by the vendors of the second-hand articles of metal manufacture, or (as they are called in the streets) the “old metal” men. The several articles I have specified may never be all found at one time upon one stall, but they are all found on the respective stalls. “Aye, sir,” said one old man whom I conversed with, “and there’s more things every now and then comes to the stalls, and there used to be still more when I were young, but I can’t call them all to mind, for times is worse with me, and so my memory fails. But there used to be a good many bayonets, and iron tinder-boxes, and steels for striking lights; I can remember them.”

Some of the sellers have strong heavy barrows, which they wheel from street to street. As this requires a considerable exertion of strength, such part of the trade is carried on by strong men, generally of the costermongering class. The weight to be propelled is about 300 lbs. Of this class there are now a few, rarely more than half-a-dozen, who sell on commission in the way I have described concerning the swag-barrowmen.

These are the “old metal swags” of street classification, but their remuneration is less fixed than that of the other swag-barrowmen. It is sometimes a quarter, sometimes a third, and sometimes even a half of the amount taken. The men carrying on this traffic are the servants of the marine-store dealers, or vendors of old metal articles, who keep shops. If one of these people be “lumbered up,” that is, if he find his stock increase too rapidly, he furnishes a barrow, and sends a man into the streets with it, to sell what the shopkeeper may find to be excessive. Sometimes if the tradesman can gain only the merest trifle more than he could gain from the people who buy for the melting-pot, he is satisfied.

There is, or perhaps was, an opinion prevalent that the street “old metals” in this way of business got rid of stolen goods in such a manner as the readiest mode of sale, some of which were purposely rusted, and sold at almost any price, so that they brought but a profit to the “fence,” whose payment to the thief was little more than the price of old metal at the foundry. I understand, however, that this course is not now pursued, nor is it likely that it ever was pursued to any extent. The street-seller is directly under the eye of the police, and when there is a search for stolen goods, it is not very likely that they would be paraded, however battered or rusted for the purpose, before men who possessed descriptions of all goods stolen. Until the establishment of the present system of police, this might have been an occasional practice. One street-seller had even heard, and he “had it from the man what did it,” that a last-maker’s shop was some years back broken into in the expectation that money would be met with, but none was found; and as the thieves could not bring away such heavy lumbering things as lasts, they cursed their ill-luck, and brought away such tools as they could stow about their persons, and cover with their loose great coats. These were the large knives, fixed to swivels, and resembling a small scythe, used by the artizan to rough hew the block of beech-wood; and a variety of excellent rasps and files (for they must be of the best), necessary for the completion of the last. These very tools were, in ten days after the robbery, sold from a street-barrow.

The second-hand metal goods are sold from stalls as well as from barrows, and these stalls are often tended by women whose husbands may be in some other branch of street-commerce. One of these stalls I saw in the care of a stout elderly Jewess, who was fast asleep, nodding over her locks and keys. She was awakened by the passing policeman, lest her stock should be pilfered by the boys: “Come, wake up, mother, and shake yourself,” he said, “I shall catch a weazel asleep next.”

Some of these barrows and stalls are heaped with the goods, and some are very scantily supplied, but the barrows are by far the best stocked. Many of them (especially the swag) look like collections of the different stages of rust, from its incipient spots to its full possession of the entire metal. But amongst these seemingly useless things there is a gleam of brass or plated ware. On one barrow I saw an old brass door-plate, on which was engraven the name of a late learned judge, Baron B——; another had formerly announced the residence of a dignitary of the church, the Rev. Mr. ——.

The second-hand metal-sellers are to be seen in all the street-markets, especially on the Saturday nights; also in Poplar, Limehouse, and the Commercial-road, in Golden-lane, and in Old-street and Old-street-road, St. Luke’s, in Hoxton and Shoreditch, in the Westminster Broadway, and the Whitechapel-road, in Rosemary-lane, and in the district where perhaps every street calling is pursued, but where some special street-trades seem peculiar to the genius of the place, in Petticoat-lane. A person unacquainted with the last-named locality may have formed an opinion that Petticoat-lane is merely a lane or street. But Petticoat-lane gives its name to a little district. It embraces Sandys-row, Artillery-passage, Artillery-lane, Frying-pan-alley, Catherine Wheel-alley, Tripe-yard, Fisher’s-alley, Wentworth-street, Harper’s-alley, Marlborough-court, Broad-place, Providence-place, Ellison-street, Swan-court, Little Love-court, Hutchinson-street, Little Middlesex-street, Hebrew-place, Boar’s-head-yard, Black-horse-yard, Middlesex-street, Stoney-lane, Meeting-house-yard, Gravel-lane, White-street, Cutler-street, and Borer’s-lane, until the wayfarer emerges into what appears the repose and spaciousness of Devonshire-square, Bishopsgate-street, up Borer’s-lane, or into what in the contrast really looks like the aristocratic thoroughfare of the Aldgate High-street, down Middlesex-street; or into Houndsditch through the halls of the Old Clothes Exchange.

All these narrow streets, lanes, rows, passages, alleys, yards, courts, and places, are the sites of the street-trade carried on in this quarter. The whole neighbourhood rings with street cries, many uttered in those strange east-end Jewish tones which do not sound like English. Mixed with the incessant invitations to buy Hebrew dainties, or the “sheepest pargains,” is occasionally heard the guttural utterance of the Erse tongue, for the “native Irish,” as they are sometimes called, are in possession of some portion of the street-traffic of Petticoat-lane, the original Rag Fair. The savour of the place is moreover peculiar. There is fresh fish, and dried fish, and fish being fried in a style peculiar to the Jews; there is the fustiness of old clothes; there is the odour from the pans on which (still in the Jewish fashion) frizzle and hiss pieces of meat and onions; puddings are boiling and enveloped in steam; cakes with strange names are hot from the oven; tubs of big pickled cucumbers or of onions give a sort of acidity to the atmosphere; lemons and oranges abound; and altogether the scene is not only such as can only be seen in London, but only such as can be seen in this one part of the metropolis.

When I treat of the street-Jews, I shall have information highly curious to communicate, and when I come to the fifth division of my present subject, I shall more particularly describe Petticoat-lane, as the head-quarters of the second-hand clothes business.

I have here alluded to the character of this quarter as being one much resorted to formerly, and still largely used by the sellers of second-hand metal goods. Here I was informed that a strong-built man, known as Jack, or (appropriately enough) as Iron Jack, had, until his death six or seven years ago, one of the best-stocked barrows in London. This, in spite of remonstrances, and by a powerful exercise of his strength, the man lifted, as it were, on to the narrow foot-path, and every passer-by had his attention directed almost perforce to the contents of the barrow, for he must make a “detour” to advance on his way. One of this man’s favourite pitches was close to the lofty walls of what, before the change in their charter, was one of the East India Company’s vast warehouses. The contrast to any one who indulged a thought on the subject—and there is great food for thought in Petticoat-lane—was striking enough. Here towered the store-house of costly teas, and silks, and spices, and indigo; while at its foot was carried on the most minute, and apparently worthless of all street-trades, rusty screws and nails, such as only few would care to pick up in the street, being objects of earnest bargaining!

An experienced man in the business, who thought he was “turned 50, or somewhere about that,” gave me the following account of his trade, his customers, &c.

“I’ve been in most street-trades,” he said, “and was born to it, like, for my mother was a rag-gatherer—not a bad business once—and I helped her. I never saw my father, but he was a soldier, and it’s supposed lost his life in foreign parts. No, I don’t remember ever having heard what foreign parts, and it don’t matter. Well, perhaps, this is about as tidy a trade for a bit of bread as any that’s going now. Perhaps selling fish may be better, but that’s to a man what knows fish well. I can’t say I ever did. I’m more a dab at cooking it (with a laugh). I like a bloater best on what’s an Irish gridiron. Do you know what that is, sir? I know, though I’m not Irish, but I married an Irish wife, and as good a woman as ever was a wife. It’s done on the tongs, sir, laid across the fire, and the bloater’s laid across the tongs. Some says it’s best turned and turned very quick on the coals themselves, but the tongs is best, for you can raise or lower.” [My informant seemed interested in his account of this and other modes of cookery, which I need not detail.] “This is really a very trying trade. O, I mean it tries a man’s patience so. Why, it was in Easter week a man dressed like a gentleman—but I don’t think he was a real gentleman—looked out some bolts, and a hammer head, and other things, odds and ends, and they came to 10½d. He said he’d give 6d. ‘Sixpence!’ says I; ‘why d’ you think I stole ’em?’ ‘Well,’ says he, ‘if I didn’t think you’d stole ’em, I shouldn’t have come to you.’ I don’t think he was joking. Well, sir, we got to high words, and I said, ‘Then I’m d—d if you have them for less than 1s.’ And a bit of a crowd began to gather, they was most boys, but the p’liceman came up, as slow as you please, and so my friend flings down 1s., and puts the things in his pocket and marches off, with a few boys to keep him company. That’s the way one’s temper’s tried. Well, it’s hard to say what sells best. A latch-lock and keys goes off quick. I’ve had them from 2d. to 6d.; but it’s only the lower-priced things as sells now in any trade. Bolts is a fairish stock, and so is all sorts of tools. Well, not saws so much as such things as screwdrivers, or hammers, or choppers, or tools that if they’re rusty people can clean up theirselves. Saws ain’t so easy to manage; bed-keys is good. No, I don’t clean the metal up unless it’s very bad; I think things don’t sell so well that way. People’s jealous that they’re just done up on purpose to deceive, though they may cost only 1d. or 2d. There’s that cheese-cutter now, it’s getting rustier and there’ll be very likely a better chance to sell it. This is how it is, sir, I know. You see if a man’s going to buy old metal, and he sees it all rough and rusty, he says to himself, ‘Well, there’s no gammon about it; I can just see what it is.’ Then folks like to clean up a thing theirselves, and it’s as if it was something made from their own cleverness. That was just my feeling, sir, when I bought old metals for my own use, before I was in the trade, and I goes by that. O, working people’s by far my best customers. Many of ’em’s very fond of jobbing about their rooms or their houses, and they come to such as me. Then a many has fancies for pigeons, or rabbits, or poultry, or dogs, and they mostly make up the places for them theirselves, and as money’s an object, why them sort of fancy people buys hinges, and locks, and screws, and hammers, and what they want of me. A clever mechanic can turn his hand to most things that he wants for his own use. I know a shoemaker that makes beautiful rabbit-hutches and sells them along with his prize cattle, as I calls his great big long-eared rabbits. Perhaps I take 2s. 6d. or 3s. a day, and it’s about half profit. Yes, this time of the year I make good 10s. 6d. a week, but in winter not 1s. a day. That would be very poor pickings for two people to live on, and I can’t do without my drop of beer, but my wife has constant work with a first-rate laundress at Mile End, and so we rub on, for we’ve no family living.”

This informant told me further of the way in which the old metal stocks sold in the streets were provided; but that branch of the subject relates to street-buying. Some of the street-sellers, however, buy their stocks of the shopkeepers.

I find a difficulty in estimating the number of the second-hand metal-ware street-sellers. Many of the stalls or barrows are the property of the marine-store shopkeepers, or old metal dealers (marine stores being about the only things the marine-store men do not sell), and these are generally placed near the shop, being indeed a portion of its contents out of doors. Some of the marine-store men (a class of traders, by the by, not superior to street-sellers, making no “odious” comparison as to the honesty of the two), when they have purchased largely—the refuse iron for instance after a house has been pulled down—establish two or three pitches in the street, confiding the stalls or barrows to their wives and children. I was told by several in the trade that there were 200 old metal sellers in the streets, but from the best information at my command not more than 50 appear to be strictly street-sellers, unconnected with shop-keeping. Estimating a weekly receipt, per individual, of 15s. (half being profit), the yearly street outlay among this body alone amounts to 1950l.

Of the Street-Sellers of Second-Hand Metal Trays, &c.

There are still some few portions of the old metal trade in the streets which require specific mention.

Among these is the sale of second-hand trays, occasionally with such things as bread-baskets. Instead of these wares, however, being matters of daily traffic, they are offered in the streets only at intervals, and generally on the Saturday and Monday evenings, while a few are hawked to public-houses. An Irishman, a rather melancholy looking man, but possessed of some humour, gave me the following account. His dress was a worn suit, such as masons work in; but I have seldom seen so coarse, and never on an Irishman of his class, except on a Sunday, so clean a shirt, and he made as free a display of it as if it were the choicest cambric. He washed it, he told me, with his own hands, as he had neither wife, nor mother, nor sister. “I was a cow-keeper’s man, your honour,” he said, “and he sent milk to Dublin. I thought I might do betthur, and I got to Liverpool, and walked here. Have I done betthur, is it? Sorry a betthur. Would I like to returren to Dublin? Well, perhaps, plaze God, I’ll do betthur here yit. I’ve sould a power of different things in the sthreets, but I’m off for counthry work now. I have a few therrays left if your honour wants such a thing. I first sould a few for a man I lodged along wid in Kent-street, when he was sick, and so I got to know the therrade. He tould me to say, and it’s the therruth, if anybody said, ‘They’re only second-hand,’ that they was all the betthur for that, for if they hadn’t been real good therrays at first, they would niver have lived to be second-hand ones. I calls the bigghur therrays butlers, and the smhaller, waithers. It’s a poor therrade. One woman’ll say, ‘Pooh! ould-fashioned things.’ ‘Will, thin, ma’am,’ I’ll say, ‘a good thing like this is niver ould-fashioned, no more than the bhutiful mate and berrid, and the bhutiful new praties a coming in, that you’ll be atin off of it, and thratin’ your husband to, God save him. No lady iver goes to supper widout her therray.’ Yes, indeed, thin, and it is a poor therrade. It’s the bhutiful therrays I’ve sould for 6d. I buys them of a shop which dales in sich things. The perrofit! Sorry a perrofit is there in it at all at all; but I thries to make 4d. out of 1s. If I makes 6d. of a night it’s good worruk.”

These trays are usually carried under the arm, and are sometimes piled on a stool or small stand, in a street market. The prices are from 2d. to 10d., sometimes 1s. The stronger descriptions are sold to street-sellers to display their goods upon, as much as to any other class. Women and children occasionally sell them, but it is one of the callings which seems to be disappearing from the streets. From two men, who were familiar with this and other second-hand trades, I heard the following reasons assigned for the decadence. One man thought it was owing to “swag-trays” being got up so common and so cheap, but to look “stunning well,” at least as long as the shininess lasted. The other contended that poor working people had enough to do now-a-days to get something to eat, without thinking of a tray to put it on.

If 20 persons, and that I am told is about the number of sellers, take in the one or two nights’ sale 4s. a week each, on second-hand trays (33 per cent. being the rate of profit), the street expenditure is 208l. in a year.

In other second-hand metal articles there is now and then a separate trade. Two or three sets of small fire-irons may be offered in a street-market on a Saturday night; or a small stock of flat and Italian irons for the laundresses, who work cheap and must buy second-hand; or a collection of tools in the same way; but these are accidental sales, and are but ramifications from the general “old metal” trade that I have described. Perhaps, in the sale of these second-hand articles, 20 people may be regularly employed, and 300l. yearly may be taken.

In Petticoat-lane, Rosemary-lane, Whitecross-street, Ratcliff-highway, and in the street-markets generally, are to be seen men, women, and children selling dinner knives and forks, razors, pocket-knives, and scissors. The pocket-knives and scissors are kept well oiled, so that the weather does not rust them. These goods have been mostly repaired, ground, and polished for street-commerce. The women and children selling these articles are the wives and families of the men who repair, grind, and polish them, and who belong, correctly speaking, to the class of street-artizans, under which head they will be more particularly treated of. It is the same also with the street-vendors of second-hand tin saucepans and other vessels (a trade, by the way, which is rapidly decreasing), for these are generally made of the old drums of machines retinned, or are old saucepans and pots mended for use by the vendors, who are mostly working tinmen, and appertain to the artizan class.

Of the Street-Sellers of Second-Hand Linen, &c.

I now come to the second variety of the several kinds of street-sellers of second-hand articles. The accounts of the street-trade in second-hand linens, however, need be but brief; for none of the callings I have now to notice supply a mode of subsistence to the street-sellers independently of other pursuits. They are resorted to whenever an opportunity or a prospect of remuneration presents itself by the class of general street-sellers, women as well as men—the women being the most numerous. The sale of these articles is on the Saturday and Monday nights, in the street-markets, and daily in Petticoat and Rosemary lanes.

One of the most saleable of all the second-hand textile commodities of the streets, is an article the demand for which is certainly creditable to the poorer and the working-classes of London—towels. The principal supply of this street-towelling is obtained from the several barracks in and near London. They are a portion of what were the sheets (of strong linen) of the soldiers’ beds, which are periodically renewed, and the old sheeting is then sold to a contractor, of whom the street-folk buy it, and wash and prepare it for market. It is sold to the street-traders at 4d. per pound, 1 lb. making eight penny towels; some (inferior) is as low as 2d. The principal demand is by the working-classes.

“Why, for one time, sir,” said a street-seller to me, “there wasn’t much towelling in the streets, and I got a tidy lot, just when I knew it would go off, like a thief round a corner. I pitched in Whitecross-street, and not far from a woman that was making a great noise, and had a good lot of people about her, for cheap mackarel weren’t so very plenty then as they are now. ‘Here’s your cheap mack’rel,’ shouts she, ‘cheap, cheap, cheap mac-mac-mac-mack’rel. Then I begins: ‘Here’s your cheap towelling; cheap, cheap, cheap, tow-tow-tow-tow-ellings. Here’s towels a penny a piece, and two for twopence, or a double family towel for twopence.’ I soon had a greater crowd than she had. O, yes! I gives ’em a good history of what I has to sell; patters, as you call it; a man that can’t isn’t fit for the streets. ‘Here’s what every wife should buy for her husband, and every husband for his wife,’ I goes on. ‘Domestic happiness is then secured. If a husband licks his wife, or a wife licks her husband, a towel is the handiest and most innocent thing it can be done with, and if it’s wet it gives you a strong clipper on the cheek, as every respectable married person knows as well as I do. A clipper that way always does me good, and I’m satisfied it does more good to a gentleman than a lady.’ Always patter for the women, sir, if you wants to sell. Yes, towels is good sale in London, but I prefer country business. I’m three times as much in the country as in town, and I’m just off to Ascot to sell cards, and do a little singing, and then I’ll perhaps take a round to Bath and Bristol, but Bath’s not what it was once.”

Another street-seller told me that, as far as his experience went, Monday night was a better time for the sale of second-hand sheetings, &c., than Saturday, as on Monday the wives of the working-classes who sought to buy cheaply what was needed for household use, usually went out to make their purchases. The Saturday-night’s mart is more one for immediate necessities, either for the Sunday’s dinner or the Sunday’s wear. It appears to me that in all these little distinctions—of which street-folk tell you, quite unconscious that they tell anything new—there is something of the history of the character of a people.

“Wrappers,” or “bale-stuff,” as it is sometimes styled, are also sold in the streets as second-hand goods. These are what have formed the covers of the packages of manufactures, and are bought (most frequently by the Jews) at the wholesale warehouses or the larger retail shops, and re-sold to the street-people, usually at 1½d. and 2d. per pound. These goods are sometimes sold entire, but are far more often cut into suitable sizes for towels, strong aprons, &c. They soon get “bleached,” I was told, by washing and wear.

“Burnt” linen or calico is also sold in the streets as a second-hand article. On the occasion of a fire at any tradesman’s, whose stock of drapery had been injured, the damaged wares are bought by the Jewish or other keepers of the haberdashery swag-shops. Some of these are sold by the second-hand street dealers, but the traffic for such articles is greater among the hawkers. Of this I have already given an account. The street-sale of these burnt (and sometimes designedly burnt) wares is in pieces, generally from 6d. to 1s. 6d. each, or in yards, frequently at 6d. per yard, but of course the price varies with the quality.

I believe that no second-hand sheets are sold in the streets as sheets, for when tolerably good they are received at the pawn-shops, and if indifferent, at the dolly-shops, or illegal pawn-shops. Street folk have told me of sheets being sold in the street-markets, but so rarely as merely to supply an exception. In Petticoat-lane, indeed, they are sold, but it is mostly by the Jew shopkeepers, who also expose their goods in the streets, and they are sold by them very often to street-traders, who convert them into other purposes.

The statistics of this trade present great difficulties. The second-hand linen, &c., is not a regular street traffic. It may be offered to the public 20 days or nights in a month, or not one. If a “job-lot” have been secured, the second-hand street-seller may confine himself to that especial stock. If his means compel him to offer only a paucity of second-hand goods, he may sell but one kind. Generally, however, the same man or woman trades in two, three, or more of the second-hand textile productions which I have specified, and it is hardly one street-seller out of 20, who if he have cleared his 10s. in a given time, by vending different articles, can tell the relative amount he cleared on each. The trade is, therefore, irregular, and is but a consequence, or—as one street-seller very well expressed it—a “tail” of other trades. For instance, if there has been a great auction of any corn-merchant’s effects, there will be more sacking than usual in the street-markets; if there have been sales, beyond the average extent, of old household furniture, there will be a more ample street stock of curtains, carpeting, fringes, &c. Of the articles I have enumerated the sale of second-hand linen, more especially that from the barrack-stores, is the largest of any.

The most intelligent man whom I met with in this trade calculated that there were 80 of these second-hand street-folk plying their trade two nights in the week; that they took 8s. each weekly, about half of it being profit; thus the street expenditure would be 1664l. per annum.

Of the Street-Sellers of Second-hand Curtains.

Second-Hand Curtains, but only good ones, I was assured, can now be sold in the streets, “because common new ones can be had so cheap.” The “good second-hands,” however, sell readily. The most saleable of all second-hand curtains are those of chintz, especially old-fashioned chintz, now a scarce article; the next in demand are what were described to me as “good check,” or the blue and white cotton curtains. White dimity curtains, though now rarely seen in a street-market, are not bought to be re-used as curtains—“there’s too much washing about them for London”—but for petticoats, the covering of large pincushions, dressing-table covers, &c., and for the last-mentioned purpose they are bought by the householders of a small tenement who let a “well-furnished” bed-room or two.

The uses to which the second-hand chintz or check curtains are put, are often for “Waterloo” or “tent” beds. It is common for a single woman, struggling to “get a decent roof over her head,” or for a young couple wishing to improve their comforts in furniture, to do so piece-meal. An old bedstead of a better sort may first be purchased, and so on to the concluding “decency,” or, in the estimation of some poor persons, “dignity” of curtains. These persons are customers of the street-sellers—the second-hand curtains costing them from 8d. to 1s. 6d.

Moreen curtains have also a good sale. They are bought by working people (and by some of the dealers in second-hand furniture) for the re-covering of sofas, which had become ragged, the deficiency of stuffing being supplied with hay (which is likewise the “stuffing” of the new sofas sold by the “linen-drapers,” or “slaughter-houses”). Moreen curtains, too, are sometimes cut into pieces, for the re-covering of old horse-hair chairs, for which purpose they are sold at 3d. each piece.

Second-hand curtains are moreover cut into portions and sold for the hanging of the testers of bedsteads, but almost entirely for what the street-sellers call “half-teesters.” These are required for the Waterloo bedsteads, “and if it’s a nice thing, sir,” said one woman, “and perticler if it’s a chintz, and to be had for 6d., the women’ll fight for it.”

The second-hand curtains, when sold entire, are from 6d. to 2s. 6d. One man had lately sold a pair of “good moreens, only faded, but dyeing’s cheap,” for 3s. 6d.

Of the Street-Sellers of Second-hand Carpeting, Flannels, Stocking-legs, &c., &c.

I class these second-hand wares together, as they are all of woollen materials.

Carpeting has a fair sale, and in the streets is vended not as an entire floor or stair-carpet, but in pieces. The floor-carpet pieces are from 2d. to 1s. each; the stair-carpet pieces are from 1d. to 4d. a yard. Hearth-rugs are very rarely offered to street-customers, but when offered are sold from 4d. to 1s. Drugget is also sold in the same way as the floor-carpeting, and sometimes for house-scouring cloths.

“I’ve sold carpet, sir,” said a woman street-seller, who called all descriptions—rugs and drugget too—by that title; “and I would like to sell it regular, but my old man—he buys everything—says it can’t be had regular. I’ve sold many things in the streets, but I’d rather sell good second-hand in carpet or curtains, or fur in winter, than anything else. They’re nicer people as buys them. It would be a good business if it was regular. Ah! indeed, in my time, and before I was married, I have sold different things in a different way; but I’d rather not talk about that, and I make no complaints, for seeing what I see. I’m not so badly off. Them as buys carpet are very particular—I’ve known them take a tape out of their pockets and measure—but they’re honourable customers. If they’re satisfied they buy, most of them does, at once; without any of your ‘is that the lowest?’ as ladies asks in shops, and that when they don’t think of buying, either. Carpet is bought by working people, and they use it for hearth-rugs, and for bed-sides, and such like. I know it by what I’ve heard them say when I’ve been selling. One Monday evening, five or six years back, I took 10s. 9d. in carpet; there had been some great sales at old houses, and a good quantity of carpet and curtains was sold in the streets. Perhaps I cleared 3s. 6d. on that 10s. 9d. But to take 4s. or 5s. is good work now, and often not more than 3d. in the 1s. profit. Still, it’s a pretty good business, when you can get a stock of second-hands of different kinds to keep you going constantly.”

What in the street-trade is known as “Flannels,” is for the most part second-hand blankets, which having been worn as bed furniture, and then very probably, or at the same time, used for ironing cloths, are found in the street-markets, where they are purchased for flannel petticoats for the children of the poor, or when not good enough for such use, for house cloths, at 1d. each.

The trade in stocking legs is considerable. In these legs the feet have been cut off, further darning being impossible, and the fragment of the stocking which is worth preserving is sold to the careful housewives who attach to it a new foot. Sometimes for winter wear a new cheap sock is attached to the footless hose. These legs sell from ½d. to 3d. the pair, but very rarely 3d., and only when of the best quality, though the legs would not be saleable in the streets at all, had they not been of a good manufacture originally. Men’s hose are sold in this way more largely than women’s.

The trade in second-hand stockings is very considerable, but they form a part of the second-hand apparel of street-commerce, and I shall notice them under that head.

Of the Street-Sellers of Second-hand Bed-ticking, Sacking, Fringe, &c.

For bed-ticking there is generally a ready sale, but I was told “not near so ready as it was a dozen year or more back.” One reason which I heard assigned for this was, that new ticking was made so cheap (being a thin common cotton, for the lining of common carpet-bags, portmanteaus, &c.), that poor persons scrupled to give any equivalent price for good sound second-hand linen bed-ticking, “though,” said a dealer, “it’ll still wear out half a dozen of their new slop rigs. I should like a few of them there slop-masters, that’s making fortins out of foolish or greedy folks, to have to live a few weeks in the streets by this sort of second-hand trade; they’d hear what was thought of them then by all sensible people, which aren’t so many as they should be by a precious long sight.”

The ticking sold in the street is bought for the patching of beds and for the making of pillows and bolsters, and for these purposes is sold in pieces at from 2d. to 4d. as the most frequent price. One woman who used to sell bed-ticking, but not lately, told me that she knew poor women who cared nothing for such convenience themselves, buy ticking to make pillows for their children.

Second-hand Sacking is sold without much difficulty in the street-markets, and usually in pieces at from 2d. to 6d. This sacking has been part of a corn sack, or of the strong package in which some kinds of goods are dispatched by sea or railway. It is bought for the mending of bedstead sacking, and for the making of porters’ knots, &c.

Second-hand Fringe is still in fair demand, but though cheaper than ever, does not, I am assured, “sell so well as when it was dearer.” Many of my readers will have remarked, when they have been passing the apartments occupied by the working class, that the valance fixed from the top of the window has its adornment of fringe; a blind is sometimes adorned in a similar manner, and so is the valance from the tester of a bedstead. For such uses the second-hand fringe is bought in the street-markets in pieces, sometimes called “quantities,” of from 1d. to 1s.

Second-hand Table-cloths used to be an article of street-traffic to some extent. If offered at all now—and one man, though he was a regular street-seller, thought he had not seen one offered in a market this year—they are worn things such as will not be taken by the pawnbrokers, while the dolly-shop people would advance no more than the table-cloth might be worth for the rag-bag. The glazed table-covers, now in such general use, are not as yet sold second-hand in the streets.

I was told by a street-seller that he had heard an old man (since dead), who was a buyer of second-hand goods, say that in the old times, after a great sale by auction—as at Wanstead-house (Mr. Wellesley Pole’s), about 30 years ago—the open-air trade was very brisk, as the street-sellers, like the shop-traders, proclaimed all their second-hand wares as having been bought at “the great sale.” For some years no such “ruse” has been practised by street-folk.

Of the Street-Sellers of Second-Hand Glass and Crockery.

These sellers are another class who are fast disappearing from the streets of London. Before glass and crockery, but more especially glass, became so low-priced when new, the second-hand glass-man was one of the most prosperous of the open-air traders; he is now so much the reverse that he must generally mix up some other calling with his original business. One man, whose address was given to me as an experienced glass-man, I found selling mackarel and “pound crabs,” and complaining bitterly that mackarel were high, and that he could make nothing out of them that week at 2d. each, for poor persons, he told me, would not give more. “Yes, sir,” he said, “I’ve been in most trades, besides having been a pot-boy, both boy and man, and I don’t like this fish-trade at all. I could get a pot-boy’s place again, but I’m not so strong as I were, and it’s slavish work in the place I could get; and a man that’s not so young as he was once is chaffed so by the young lads and fellows in the tap-room and the skittle-ground. For this last three year or more I had to do something in addition to my glass for a crust. Before I dropped it as a bad consarn, I sold old shoes as well as old glass, and made both ends meet that way, a leather end and a glass end. I sold off my glass to a rag and bottle shop for 9s., far less than it were worth, and I swopped my shoes for my fish-stall, and water-tub, and 3s. in money. I’ll be out of this trade before long. The glass was good once; I’ve made my 15s. and 20s. a week at it: I don’t know how long that is ago, but it’s a good long time. Latterly I could do no business at all in it, or hardly any. The old shoes was middling, because they’re a free-selling thing, but somehow it seems awkward mixing up any other trade with your glass.”

The stall or barrow of a “second-hand glass-man” presented, and still, in a smaller degree, presents, a variety of articles, and a variety of colours, but over the whole prevails that haziness which seems to be considered proper to this trade. Even in the largest rag and bottle shops, the second-hand bottles always look dingy. “It wouldn’t pay to wash them all,” said one shopkeeper to me, “so we washes none; indeed, I b’lieve people would rather buy them as they is, and clean them themselves.”

The street-assortment of second-hand glass may be described as one of “odds and ends”—odd goblets, odd wine-glasses, odd decanters, odd cruet-bottles, salt-cellars, and mustard-pots; together with a variety of “tops” to fit mustard-pots or butter-glasses, and of “stoppers” to fit any sized bottle, the latter articles being generally the most profitable. Occasionally may still be seen a blue spirit-decanter, one of a set of three, with “brandy,” in faded gold letters, upon it, or a brass or plated label, as dingy as the bottle, hung by a fine wire-chain round the neck. Blue finger-glasses sold very well for use as sugar-basins to the wives of the better-off working-people or small tradesmen. One man, apparently about 40, who had been in this trade in his youth, and whom I questioned as to what was the quality of his stock, told me of the demand for “blue sugars,” and pointed out to me one which happened to be on a stand by the door of a rag and bottle shop. When I mentioned its original use, he asked further about it, and after my answers seemed sceptical on the subject. “People that’s quality,” he said, “that’s my notion on it, that hasn’t neither to yarn their dinner, nor to cook it, but just open their mouths and eat it, can’t dirty their hands so at dinner as to have glasses to wash ’em in arterards. But there’s queer ways everywhere.”

At one time what were called “doctors’ bottles” formed a portion of the second-hand stock I am describing. These were phials bought by the poorer people, in which to obtain some physician’s gratuitous prescription from the chemist’s shop, or the time-honoured nostrum of some wonderful old woman. For a very long period, it must be borne in mind, all kinds of glass wares were dear. Small glass frames, to cover flower-roots, were also sold at these stalls, as were fragments of looking-glass. Beneath his stall or barrow, the “old glass-man” often had a few old wine or beer-bottles for sale.

At the period before cast-glass was so common, and, indeed, subsequently, until glass became cheap, it was not unusual to see at the second-hand stalls, rich cut-glass vessels which had been broken and cemented, for sale at a low figure, the glass-man being often a mender. It was the same with China punch-bowls, and the costlier kind of dishes, but this part of the trade is now unknown.

There is one curious sort of ornament still to be met with at these stalls—wide-mouthed bottles, embellished with coloured patterns of flowers, birds, &c., generally cut from “furniture prints,” and kept close against the sides of the interior by the salt with which the bottles are filled. A few second-hand pitchers, teapots, &c., are still sold at from 1d. to 6d.

There are now not above six men (of the ordinary street-selling class) who carry on this trade regularly. Sometimes twelve stalls or barrows may be seen; sometimes one, and sometimes none. Calculating that each of the six dealers takes 12s. weekly, with a profit of 6s. or 7s., we find 187l. 4s. expended in this department of street-commerce. The principal place for the trade is in High-street, Whitechapel.

Of the Street-Sellers of Second-Hand Miscellaneous Articles.

I have in a former page specified some of the goods which make up the sum of the second-hand miscellaneous commerce of the streets of London.

I may premise that the trader of this class is a sort of street broker; and it is no more possible minutely to detail his especial traffic in the several articles of his stock, than it would be to give a specific account of each and several of the “sundries” to be found in the closets or corners of an old-furniture broker’s or marine-store seller’s premises, in describing his general business.

The members of this trade (as will be shown in the subsequent statements) are also “miscellaneous” in their character. A few have known liberal educations, and have been established in liberal professions; others have been artisans or shopkeepers, but the mass are of the general class of street-sellers.

I will first treat of the Second-Hand Street-Sellers of Articles for Amusement, giving a wide interpretation to the word “amusement.”

The backgammon, chess, draught, and cribbage-boards of the second-hand trade have originally been of good quality—some indeed of a very superior manufacture; otherwise the “cheap Germans” (as I heard the low-priced foreign goods from the swag-shops called) would by their superior cheapness have rendered the business a nullity. The backgammon-boards are bought of brokers, when they are often in a worn, unhinged, and what may be called ragged condition. The street-seller “trims them up,” but in this there is nothing of artisanship, although it requires some little taste and some dexterity of finger. A new hinge or two, or old hinges re-screwed, and a little pasting of leather and sometimes the application of strips of bookbinder’s gold, is all that is required. The backgammon-boards are sometimes offered in the streets by an itinerant; sometimes (and more frequently than otherwise in a deplorable state, the points of the table being hardly distinguishable) they are part of the furniture of a second-hand stall. I have seen one at an old book-stall, but most usually they are vended by being hawked to the better sort of public-houses, and there they are more frequently disposed of by raffle than by sale. It is not once in a thousand times, I am informed, that second-hand “men” are sold with the board. Before the board has gone through its series of hands to the street-seller, the men have been lost or scattered. New men are sometimes sold or raffled with the backgammon-boards (as with the draught) at from 6d. to 2s. 6d. the set, the best being of box-wood.

Chess-boards and men—for without the men of course a draught, or the top of a backgammon-board suffices for chess—are a commodity now rarely at the disposal of the street-sellers; and, as these means of a leisurely and abstruse amusement are not of a ready sale, the second-hand dealers do not “look out” for them, but merely speculate in them when the article “falls in their way” and seems a palpable bargain. Occasionally, a second-hand chess apparatus is still sold by the street-folk. One man—upon whose veracity I have every reason to rely—told me that he once sold a beautiful set of ivory men and a handsome “leather board” (second-hand) to a gentleman who accosted him as he saw him carry them along the street for sale, inviting him to step in doors, when the gentleman’s residence was reached. The chess-men were then arranged and examined, and the seller asked 3l. 3s. for them, at once closing with the offer of 3l.; “for I found, sir,” he said, “I had a gentleman to do with, for he told me he thought they were really cheap at 3l., and he would give me that.” Another dealer in second-hand articles, when I asked him if he had ever sold chess-boards and men, replied, “Only twice, sir, and then at 4s. and 5s. the set; they was poor. I’ve seen chess played, and I should say it’s a rum game; but I know nothing about it. I once had a old gent for a customer, and he was as nice and quiet a old gent as could be, and I always called on him when I thought I had a curus old tea-caddy, or knife-box, or anything that way. He didn’t buy once in twenty calls, but he always gave me something for my trouble. He used to play at chess with another old gent, and if, after his servant had told him I’d come, I waited ’til I could wait no longer, and then knocked at his room door, he swore like a trooper.”

Draught-boards are sold at from 3d. to 1s. second-hand. Cribbage-boards, also second-hand, and sometimes with cards, are only sold, I am informed, when they are very bad, at from 1d. to 3d., or very good, at from 2s. 6d. to 5s. One street-seller told me that he once sold a “Chinee” cribbage-board for 18s., which cost him 10s. “It was a most beautiful thing,” he stated, “and was very high-worked, and was inlaid with ivory, and with green ivory too.”

The Dice required for the playing of backgammon, or for any purpose, are bought of the waiters at the club-houses, generally at 2l. the dozen sets. They are retailed at about 25 per cent. profit. Dice in this way are readily disposed of by the street-people, as they are looked upon as “true,” and are only about a sixth of the price they could be obtained for new ones in the duly-stamped covers. A few dice are sold at 6d. to 1s. the set, but they are old and battered.

There are but two men who support themselves wholly by the street-sale and the hawking of the different boards, &c., I have described. There are two, three, or sometimes four occasional participants in the trade. Of these one held a commission in Her Majesty’s service, but was ruined by gaming, and when unable to live by any other means, he sells the implements with which he had been but too familiar. “He lost everything in Jermyn-street,” a man who was sometimes his comrade in the sale of these articles said to me, “but he is a very gentlemanly and respectable man.”

The profits in this trade are very uncertain. A man who was engaged in it told me that one week he had cleared 2l., and the next, with greater pains-taking, did not sell a single thing.

The other articles which are a portion of the second-hand miscellaneous trade of this nature are sold as often, or more often, at stalls than elsewhere. Dominoes, for instance, may be seen in the winter, and they are offered only in the winter, on perhaps 20 stalls. They are sold at from 4d. a set, and I heard of one superior set which were described to me as “brass-pinned,” being sold in a handsome box for 5s., the shop price having been 15s. The great sale of dominoes is at Christmas.

Pope-Joan boards, which, I was told, were fifteen years ago sold readily in the streets, and were examined closely by the purchasers (who were mostly the wives of tradesmen), to see that the print or paint announcing the partitions for “intrigue,” “matrimony,” “friendship,” “Pope,” &c., were perfect, are now never, or rarely, seen. Formerly the price was 1s. to 1s. 9d. In the present year I could hear of but one man who had even offered a Pope-board for sale in the street, and he sold it, though almost new, for 3d.

“Fish,” or the bone, ivory, or mother-o’-pearl card counters in the shape of fish, or sometimes in a circular form, used to be sold second-hand as freely as the Pope-boards, and are now as rarely to be seen.

Until about 20 years ago, as well as I can fix upon a term from the information I received, the apparatus for a game known as the “Devil among the tailors” was a portion of the miscellaneous second-hand trade or hawking of the streets. In it a top was set spinning on a long board, and the result depended upon the number of men, or “tailors,” knocked down by the “devil” (top) of each player, these tailors being stationed, numbered, and scored (when knocked down) in the same way as when the balls are propelled into the numbered sockets in a bagatelle-board. I am moreover told that in the same second-hand calling were boards known as “solitaire-boards.” These were round boards, with a certain number of holes, in each of which was a peg. One peg was removed at the selection of the player, and the game consisted in taking each remaining peg, by advancing another over its head into any vacant hole, and if at the end of the game only one peg remained in the board, the player won; if winning it could be called when the game could only be played by one person, and was for “solitary” amusement. Chinese puzzles, sometimes on a large scale, were then also a part of the second-hand traffic of the streets. These are a series of thin woods in geometrical shapes, which may be fitted into certain forms or patterns contained in a book, or on a sheet. These puzzles are sold in the streets still, but in smaller quantity and diminished size. Different games played with the teetotum were also a part of second-hand street-sale, but none of these bygone pastimes were vended to any extent.

From the best data I have been able to obtain it appears that the amount received by the street-sellers or street-hawkers in the sale of these second-hand articles of amusement is 10l. weekly, about half being profit, divided in the proportions I have intimated, as respects the number of street-sellers and the periods of sale; or 520l. expended yearly.

I should have stated that the principal customers of this branch of second-hand traders are found in the public-houses and at the cigar-shops, where the goods are carried by street-sellers, who hawk from place to place.

These dealers also attend the neighbouring, and, frequently in the summer, the more distant races, where for dice and the better quality of their “boards,” &c., they generally find a prompt market. The sale at the fairs consists only of the lowest-priced goods, and in a very scant proportion compared to the races.

Of the Street-Sellers of Second-hand Musical Instruments.

Of this trade there are two branches; the sale of instruments which are really second-hand, and the sale of those which are pretendedly so; in other words, an honest and a dishonest business. As in street estimation the whole is a second-hand calling, I shall so deal with it.

At this season of the year, when fairs are frequent and the river steamers with their bands of music run oft and regularly, and out-door music may be played until late, the calling of the street-musician is “at its best.” In the winter he is not unfrequently starving, especially if he be what is called “a chance hand,” and have not the privilege of playing in public-houses when the weather renders it impossible to collect a street audience. Such persons are often compelled to part with their instruments, which they offer in the streets or the public-houses, for the pawnbrokers have been so often “stuck” (taken in) with inferior instruments, that it is difficult to pledge even a really good violin. With some of these musical men it goes hard to part with their instruments, as they have their full share of the pride of art. Some, however, sell them recklessly and at almost any price, to obtain the means of prolonging a drunken carouse.

From a man who is now a dealer in second-hand musical instruments, and is also a musician, I had the following account of his start in the second-hand trade, and of his feelings when he first had to part with his fiddle.

“I was a gentleman’s footboy,” he said, “when I was young, but I was always very fond of music, and so was my father before me. He was a tailor in a village in Suffolk and used to play the bass-fiddle at church. I hardly know how or when I learned to play, but I seemed to grow up to it. There was two neighbours used to call at my father’s and practise, and one or other was always showing me something, and so I learned to play very well. Everybody said so. Before I was twelve, I’ve played nearly all night at a dance in a farm-house. I never played on anything but the violin. You must stick to one instrument, or you’re not up to the mark on any if you keep changing. When I got a place as footboy it was in a gentleman’s family in the country, and I never was so happy as when master and mistress was out dining, and I could play to the servants in the kitchen or the servants’ hall. Sometimes they got up a bit of a dance to my violin. If there was a dance at Christmas at any of the tenants’, they often got leave for me to go and play. It was very little money I got given, but too much drink. At last master said, he hired me to be his servant and not for a parish fiddler, so I must drop it. I left him not long after—he got so cross and snappish. In my next place—no, the next but one—I was on board wages, in London, a goodish bit, as the family were travelling, and I had time on my hands, and used to go and play at public-houses of a night, just for the amusement of the company at first, but I soon got to know other musicians and made a little money. Yes, indeed, I could have saved money easily then, but I didn’t; I got too fond of a public-house life for that, and was never easy at home.”

I need not very closely pursue this man’s course to the streets, but merely intimate it. He had several places, remaining in some a year or more, in others two, three, or six months, but always unsettled. On leaving his last place he married a fellow-servant, older than himself, who had saved “a goodish bit of money,” and they took a beer-shop in Bermondsey. A “free and easy” (concert), both vocal and instrumental, was held in the house, the man playing regularly, and the business went on, not unprosperously, until the wife died in child-bed, the child surviving. After this everything went wrong, and at last the man was “sold up,” and was penniless. For three or four years he lived precariously on what he could earn as a musician, until about six or seven years ago, when one bitter winter’s night he was without a farthing, and had laboured all day in the vain endeavour to earn a meal. His son, a boy then of five, had been sent home to him, and an old woman with whom he had placed the lad was incessantly dunning for 12s. due for the child’s maintenance. The landlord clamoured for 15s. arrear of rent for a furnished room, and the hapless musician did not possess one thing which he could convert into money except his fiddle. He must leave his room next day. He had held no intercourse with his friends in the country since he heard of his father’s death some years before, and was, indeed, resourceless. After dwelling on the many excellences of his violin, which he had purchased, “a dead bargain,” for 3l. 15s., he said: “Well, sir, I sat down by the last bit of coal in the place, and sat a long time thinking, and didn’t know what to do. There was nothing to hinder me going out in the morning, and working the streets with a mate, as I’d done before, but then there was little James that was sleeping there in his bed. He was very delicate then, and to drag him about and let him sleep in lodging-houses would have killed him, I knew. But then I couldn’t think of parting with my violin. I felt I should never again have such another. I felt as if to part with it was parting with my last prop, for what was I to do? I sat a long time thinking, with my instrument on my knees, ’til—I’m sure I don’t know how to describe it—I felt as if I was drunk, though I hadn’t even tasted beer. So I went out boldly, just as if I was drunk, and with a deal of trouble persuaded a landlord I knew to lend me 1l. on my instrument, and keep it by him for three months, ’til I could redeem it. I have it now, sir. Next day I satisfied my two creditors by paying each half, and a week’s rent in advance, and I walked off to a shop in Soho, where I bought a dirty old instrument, broken in parts, for 2s. 3d. I was great part of the day in doing it up, and in the evening earned 7d. by playing solos by Watchorn’s door, and the Crown and Cushion, and the Lord Rodney, which are all in the Westminster-road. I lodged in Stangate-street. There was a young man—he looked like a respectable mechanic—gave me 1d., and said: ‘I wonder how you can use your fingers at all such a freezing night. It seems a good fiddle.’ I assure you, sir, I was surprised myself to find what I could do with my instrument. ‘There’s a beer-shop over the way,’ says the young man, ‘step in, and I’ll pay for a pint, and try my hand at it.’ And so it was done, and I sold him my fiddle for 7s. 6d. No, sir, there was no take in; it was worth the money. I’d have sold it now that I’ve got a connection for half a guinea. Next day I bought such another instrument at the same shop for 3s., and sold it after a while for 6s., having done it up, in course. This it was that first put it into my head to start selling second-hand instruments, and so I began. Now I’m known as a man to be depended on, and with my second-hand business, and engagements every now and then as a musician, I do middling.”

In this manner is the honest second-hand street-business in musical instruments carried on. It is usually done by hawking. A few, however, are sold at miscellaneous stalls, but they are generally such as require repair, and are often without the bow, &c. The persons carrying on the trade have all, as far as I could ascertain, been musicians.

Of the street-sale of musical instruments by drunken members of the “profession” I need say little, as it is exceptional, though it is certainly a branch of the trade, for so numerous is the body of street-musicians, and of so many classes is it composed, that this description of second-hand business is being constantly transacted, and often to the profit of the more wary dealers in these goods. The statistics I shall show at the close of my remarks on this subject.

Of the Music “Duffers.”

Second-Hand Guitars are vended by the street-sellers. The price varies from 7s. 6d. to 15s. Harps form no portion of the second-hand business of the streets. A drum is occasionally, and only occasionally, sold to a showman, but the chief second-hand traffic is in violins. Accordions, both new and old, used to sell readily in the streets, either from stalls or in hawking, “but,” said a man who had formerly sold them, “they have been regularly ‘duffed’ out of the streets, so much cheap rubbish is made to sell. There’s next to nothing done in them now. If one’s offered to a man that’s no judge of it, he’ll be sure you want to cheat him, and perhaps abuse you; if he be a judge, of course it’s no go, unless with a really good article.”

Among the purchasers of second-hand musical instruments are those of the working-classes who wish to “practise,” and the great number of street-musicians, street-showmen, and the indifferently paid members of the orchestras of minor (and not always of minor) theatres. Few of this class ever buy new instruments. There are sometimes, I am informed, as many as 50 persons, one-fourth being women, engaged in this second-hand sale. Sometimes, as at present, there are not above half the number. A broker who was engaged in the traffic estimated—and an intelligent street-seller agreed in the computation—that, take the year through, at least 25 individuals were regularly, but few of them fully, occupied with this traffic, and that their weekly takings averaged 30s. each, or an aggregate yearly amount of 190l. The weekly profits run from 10s. to 15s., and sometimes the well-known dealers clear 40s. or 50s. a week, while others do not take 5s. Of this amount about two-thirds is expended on violins, and one-tenth of the whole, or nearly a tenth, on “duffing” instruments sold as second-hand, in which department of the business the amount “turned over” used to be twice, and even thrice as much. The sellers have nearly all been musicians in some capacity, the women being the wives or connections of the men.

What I have called the “dishonest trade” is known among the street-folk as “music-duffing.” Among the swag-shopkeepers, at one place in Houndsditch more especially, are dealers in “duffing fiddles.” These are German-made instruments, and are sold to the street-folk at 2s. 6d. or 3s. each, bow and all. When purchased by the music-duffers, they are discoloured so as to be made to look old. A music-duffer, assuming the way of a man half-drunk, will enter a public-house or accost any party in the street, saying: “Here, I must have money, for I won’t go home ’til morning, ’til morning, ’til morning, I won’t go home ’til morning, ’til daylight does appear. And so I may as well sell my old fiddle myself as take it to a rogue of a broker. Try it anybody, it’s a fine old tone, equal to any Cremonar. It cost me two guineas and another fiddle, and a good ’un too, in exchange, but I may as well be my own broker, for I must have money any how, and I’ll sell it for 10s.”

Possibly a bargain is struck for 5s.; for the duffing violin is perhaps purposely damaged in some slight way, so as to appear easily reparable, and any deficiency in tone may be attributed to that defect, which was of course occasioned by the drunkenness of the possessor. Or possibly the tone of the instrument may not be bad, but it may be made of such unsound materials, and in such a slop-way, though looking well to a little-practised eye, that it will soon fall to pieces. One man told me that he had often done the music-duffing, and had sold trash violins for 10s., 15s., and even 20s., “according,” he said, “to the thickness of the buyer’s head,” but that was ten or twelve years ago.

It appears that when an impetus was given to the musical taste of the country by the establishment of cheap singing schools, or of music classes, (called at one time “singing for the million”), or by the prevalence of cheap concerts, where good music was heard, this duffing trade flourished, but now, I am assured, it is not more than a quarter of what it was. “There’ll always be something done in it,” said the informant I have before quoted, “as long as you can find young men that’s conceited about their musical talents, fond of taking their medicine (drinking). If I’ve gone into a public-house room where I’ve seen a young gent that’s bought a duffing fiddle of me, it don’t happen once in twenty times that he complains and blows up about it, and only then, perhaps, if he happens to be drunkish, when people don’t much mind what’s said, and so it does me no harm. People’s too proud to confess that they’re ever ‘done’ at any time or in anything. Why, such gents has pretended, when I’ve sold ’em a duffer, and seen them afterwards, that they’ve done me!”

Nor is it to violins that this duffing or sham second-hand trade is confined. At the swag-shops duffing cornopeans, French horns, and clarionets are vended to the street-folk. One of these cornopeans may be bought for 14s.; a French horn for 10s.; and a clarionet for 7s. 6d.; or as a general rule at one-fourth of the price of a properly-made instrument sold as reasonably as possible. These things are also made to look old, and are disposed of in the same manner as the duffing violins. The sale, however, is and was always limited, for “if there be one working man,” I was told, “or a man of any sort not professional in music, that tries his wind and his fingers on a clarionet, there’s a dozen trying their touch and execution on a violin.”

Another way in which the duffing music trade at one time was made available as a second-hand business was this:—A band would play before a pawnbroker’s door, and the duffing German brass instruments might be well-toned enough, the inferiority consisting chiefly in the materials, but which were so polished up as to appear of the best. Some member of the band would then offer his brass instrument in pledge, and often obtain an advance of more than he had paid for it.

One man who had been himself engaged in what he called this “artful” business, told me that when two pawnbrokers, whom he knew, found that they had been tricked into advancing 15s. on cornopeans, which they could buy new in Houndsditch for 14s., they got him to drop the tickets of the pledge, which they drew out for the purpose, in the streets. These were picked up by some passer-by—and as there is a very common feeling that there is no harm, or indeed rather a merit, in cheating a pawnbroker or a tax-gatherer—the instruments were soon redeemed by the fortunate finder, or the person to whom he had disposed of his prize. Nor did the roguery end here. The same man told me that he had, in collusion with a pawnbroker, dropped tickets of (sham) second-hand musical instruments, which he had bought new at a swag-shop for the very purpose, the amount on the duplicate being double the cost, and as it is known that the pawnbrokers do not advance the value of any article, the finders were gulled into redeeming the pledge, as an advantageous bargain. “But I’ve left off all that dodging now, sir,” said the man with a sort of a grunt, which seemed half a sigh and half a laugh; “I’ve left it off entirely, for I found I was getting into trouble.”

The derivation of the term “duffing” I am unable to discover. The Rev. Mr. Dixon says, in his “Dovecote and Aviary,” that the term “Duffer,” applied to pigeons, is a corruption of Dovehouse,—but query? In the slang dictionaries a “Duffer” is explained as “a man who hawks things;” hence it would be equivalent to Pedlar, which means strictly beggar—being from the Dutch Bedclaar, and the German Bettler.

Of the Street-Sellers of Second-Hand Weapons.

The sale of second-hand pistols, for to that weapon the street-sellers’ or hawkers’ trade in arms seems confined, is larger than might be cursorily imagined.

There must be something seductive about the possession of a pistol, for I am assured by persons familiar with the trade, that they have sold them to men who were ignorant, when first invited to purchase, how the weapon was loaded or discharged, and seemed half afraid to handle it. Perhaps the possession imparts a sense of security.

The pistols which are sometimes seen on the street-stalls are almost always old, rusted, or battered, and are useless to any one except to those who can repair and clean them for sale.

There are three men now selling new or second-hand pistols, I am told, who have been gunmakers.

This trade is carried on almost entirely by hawking to public-houses. I heard of no one who depended solely upon it, “but this is the way,” one intelligent man stated to me, “if I am buying second-hand things at a broker’s, or in Petticoat-lane, or anywhere, and there’s a pistol that seems cheap, I’ll buy it as readily as anything I know, and I’ll soon sell it at a public-house, or I’ll get it raffled for. Second-hand pistols sell better than new by such as me. If I was to offer a new one I should be told it was some Brummagem slop rubbish. If there’s a little silver-plate let into the wood of the pistol, and a crest or initials engraved on it—I’ve got it done sometimes—there’s a better chance of sale, for people think it’s been made for somebody of consequence that wouldn’t be fobbed off with an inferior thing. I don’t think I’ve often sold pistols to working-men, but I’ve known them join in raffles for them, and the winner has often wanted to sell it back to me, and has sold it to somebody. It’s tradesmen that buy, or gentlefolks, if you can get at them. A pistol’s a sort of a plaything with them.”

On my talking with a street-dealer concerning the street-trade in second-hand pistols, he produced a handsome pistol from his pocket. I inquired if it was customary for men in his way of life to carry pistols, and he expressed his conviction that it was, but only when travelling in the country, and in possession of money or valuable stock. “I gave only 7s. 6d. for this pistol,” he said, “and have refused 10s. 6d. for it, for I shall get a better price, as it’s an excellent article, on some of my rounds in town. I bought it to take to Ascot races with me, and have it with me now, but it’s not loaded, for I’m going to Moulsey Hurst, where Hampton races are held. You’re not safe if you travel after a great muster at a race by yourself without a pistol. Many a poor fellow like me has been robbed, and the public hear nothing about it, or say it’s all gammon. At Ascot, sir, I trusted my money to a booth-keeper I knew, as a few men slept in his booth, and he put my bit of tin with his own under his head where he slept, for safe keeping. There’s a little doing in second-hand pistols to such as me, but we generally sell them again.”

Of second-hand guns, or other offensive weapons, there is no street sale. A few “life-preservers,” some of gutta percha, are hawked, but they are generally new. Bullets and powder are not sold by the pistol-hawkers, but a mould for the casting of bullets is frequently sold along with the weapon.

Of these second-hand pistol-sellers there are now, I am told, more than there were last year. “I really believe,” said one man, laughing, but I heard a similar account from others, “people were afraid the foreigners coming to the Great Exhibition had some mischief in their noddles, and so a pistol was wanted for protection. In my opinion, a pistol’s just one of the things that people don’t think of buying, ’til it’s shown to them, and then they’re tempted to have it.”

The principal street-sale, independently of the hawking to public-houses, is in such places as Ratcliffe-highway, where the mates and petty officers of ships are accosted and invited to buy a good second-hand pistol. The wares thus vended are generally of a well-made sort.

In this traffic, which is known as a “straggling” trade, pursued by men who are at the same time pursuing other street-callings, it may be estimated, I am assured, that there are 20 men engaged, each taking as an average 1l. a week. In some weeks a man may take 5l.; in the next month he may sell no weapons at all. From 30 to 50 per cent. is the usual rate of profit, and the yearly street outlay on these second-hand offensive or defensive weapons is 1040l.

One man who “did a little in pistols” told me, “that 25 or 30 years ago, when he was a boy, his father sometimes cleared 2l. a week in the street-sale and hawking of second-hand boxing-gloves, and that he himself had sometimes carried the ‘gloves’ in his hand, and pistols in his pocket for sale, but that now boxing-gloves were in no demand whatever among street-buyers, and were ‘a complete drug.’ He used to sell them at 3s. the set, which is four gloves.”

Of the Street-Sellers of Second-hand Curiosities.

Several of the things known in the street-trade as “curiosities” can hardly be styled second-hand with any propriety, but they are so styled in the streets, and are usually vended by street-merchants who trade in second-hand wares.

Curiosities are displayed, I cannot say temptingly (except perhaps to a sanguine antiquarian), for there is a great dinginess in the display, on stalls. One man whom I met wheeling his barrow in High-street, Camden-town, gave me an account of his trade. He was dirtily rather than meanly clad, and had a very self-satisfied expression of face. The principal things on his barrow were coins, shells, and old buckles, with a pair of the very high and wooden-heeled shoes, worn in the earlier part of the last century.

The coins were all of copper, and certainly did not lack variety. Among them were tokens, but none very old. There was the head of “Charles Marquis Cornwallis” looking fierce in a cocked hat, while on the reverse was Fame with her trumpet and a wreath, and banners at her feet, with the superscription: “His fame resounds from east to west.” There was a head of Wellington with the date 1811, and the legend of “Vincit amor patriæ.” Also “The R. Hon. W. Pitt, Lord Warden Cinque Ports,” looking courtly in a bag wig, with his hair brushed from his brow into what the curiosity-seller called a “topping.” This was announced as a “Cinque Ports token payable at Dover,” and was dated 1794. “Wellingtons,” said the man, “is cheap; that one’s only a halfpenny, but here’s one here, sir, as you seem to understand coins, as I hope to get 2d. for, and will take no less. It’s ‘J. Lackington, 1794,’ you see, and on the back there’s a Fame, and round her is written—and it’s a good speciment of a coin—‘Halfpenny of Lackington, Allen & Co., cheapest booksellers in the world.’ That’s scarcer and more vallyballer than Wellingtons or Nelsons either.” Of the current coin of the realm, I saw none older than Charles II., and but one of his reign, and little legible. Indeed the reverse had been ground quite smooth, and some one had engraved upon it “Charles Dryland Tunbridg.” A small “e” over the “g” of Tunbridg perfected the orthography. This, the street-seller said, was a “love-token” as well as an old coin, and “them love-tokens was getting scarce.” Of foreign and colonial coins there were perhaps 60. The oldest I saw was one of Louis XV. of France and Navarre, 1774. There was one also of the “Republique Francaise” when Napoleon was First Consul. The colonial coins were more numerous than the foreign. There was the “One Penny token” of Lower Canada; the “one quarter anna” of the East India Company; the “half stiver of the colonies of Essequibo and Demarara;” the “halfpenny token of the province of Nova Scotia,” &c. &c. There were also counterfeit halfcrowns and bank tokens worn from their simulated silver to rank copper. The principle on which this man “priced” his coins, as he called it, was simple enough. What was the size of a halfpenny he asked a penny for; the size of a penny coin was 2d. “It’s a difficult trade is mine, sir,” he said, “to carry on properly, for you may be so easily taken in, if you’re not a judge of coins and other curiosities.”

The shells of this man’s stock in trade he called “conks” and “king conks.” He had no “clamps” then, he told me, but they sold pretty well; he described them as “two shells together, one fitting inside the other.” He also had sold what he called “African cowries,” which were as “big as a pint pot,” and the smaller cowries, which were “money in India, for his father was a soldier and had been there and saw it.” The shells are sold from 1d. to 2s. 6d.

The old buckles were such as used to be worn on shoes, but the plate was all worn off, and “such like curiosities,” the man told me, “got scarcer and scarcer.”

Many of the stalls which are seen in the streets are the property of adjacent shop or store-keepers, and there are not now, I am informed, more than six men who carry on this trade apart from other commerce. Their average takings are 15s. weekly each man, about two-thirds being profit, or 234l. in a year. Some of the stands are in Great Wyld-street, but they are chiefly the property of the second-hand furniture brokers.

Of the Street-Sellers of Second-hand Telescopes and Pocket Glasses.

In the sale of second-hand telescopes only one man is now engaged in any extensive way, except on mere chance occasions. Fourteen or fifteen years ago, I was informed, there was a considerable street sale in small telescopes at 1s. each. They were made at Birmingham, my informant believed, but were sold as second-hand goods in London. Of this trade there is now no remains.

The principal seller of second-hand telescopes takes a stand on Tower Hill or by the Coal Exchange, and his customers, as he sells excellent “glasses,” are mostly sea-faring men. He has sold, and still sells, telescopes from 2l. 10s. to 5l. each, the purchasers generally “trying” them, with strict examination, from Tower Hill, or on the Custom-House Quay. There are, in addition to this street-seller, six and sometimes eight others, who offer telescopes to persons about the docks or wharfs, who may be going some voyage. These are as often new as second-hand, but the second-hand articles are preferred. This, however, is a Jewish trade which will be treated of under another head.

An old opera-glass, or the smaller articles best known as “pocket-glasses,” are occasionally hawked to public-houses and offered in the streets, but so little is done in them that I can obtain no statistics. A spectacle seller told me that he had once tried to sell two second-hand opera-glasses at 2s. 6d. each, in the street, and then in the public-houses, but was laughed at by the people who were usually his customers. “Opera-glasses!” they said, “why, what did they want with opera-glasses? wait until they had opera-boxes.” He sold the glasses at last to a shopkeeper.

Of the Street-Sellers of other Miscellaneous Second-Hand Articles.

The other second-hand articles sold in the streets I will give under one head, specifying the different characteristics of the trade, when any striking peculiarities exist. To give a detail of the whole trade, or rather of the several kinds of articles in the whole trade, is impossible. I shall therefore select only such as are sold the more extensively, or present any novel or curious features of second-hand street-commerce.

Writing-desks, tea-caddies, dressing-cases, and knife-boxes used to be a ready sale, I was informed, when “good second-hand;” but they are “got up” now so cheaply by the poor fancy cabinet-makers who work for the “slaughterers,” or furniture warehouses, and for some of the general-dealing swag-shops, that the sale of anything second-hand is greatly diminished. In fact I was told that as regards second-hand writing-desks and dressing-cases, it might be said there was “no trade at all now.” A few, however, are still to be seen at miscellaneous stalls, and are occasionally, but very rarely, offered at a public-house “used” by artisans who may be considered “judges” of work. The tea-caddies are the things which are in best demand. “Working people buy them,” I was informed, and “working people’s wives. When women are the customers they look closely at the lock and key, as they keep ‘my uncle’s cards’ there” (pawnbroker’s duplicates).

One man had lately sold second-hand tea-caddies at 9d., 1s., and 1s. 3d. each, and cleared 2s. in a day when he had stock and devoted his time to this sale. He could not persevere in it if he wished, he told me, as he might lose a day in looking out for the caddies; he might go to fifty brokers and not find one caddy cheap enough for his purpose.

Brushes are sold second-hand in considerable quantities in the streets, and are usually vended at stalls. Shoe-brushes are in the best demand, and are generally sold, when in good condition, at 1s. the set, the cost to the street-seller being 8d. They are bought, I was told, by the people who clean their own shoes, or have to clean other people’s. Clothes’ brushes are not sold to any extent, as the “hard brush” of the shoe set is used by working people for a clothes’ brush. Of late, I am told, second-hand brushes have sold more freely than ever. They were hardly to be had just when wanted, in a sufficient quantity, for the demand by persons going to Epsom and Ascot races, who carry a brush of little value with them, to brush the dust gathered on the road from their coats. The coster-girls buy very hard brushes, indeed mere stumps, with which they brush radishes; these brushes are vended at the street-stalls at 1d. each.

In Stuffed Birds for the embellishment of the walls of a room, there is still a small second-hand street sale, but none now in images or chimney-piece ornaments. “Why,” said one dealer, “I can now buy new figures for 9d., such as not many years ago cost 7s., so what chance of a second-hand sale is there?” The stuffed birds which sell the best are starlings. They are all sold as second-hand, but are often “made up” for street-traffic; an old bird or two, I was told, in a new case, or a new bird in an old case. Last Saturday evening one man told me he had sold two “long cases” of starlings and small birds for 2s. 6d. each. There are no stuffed parrots or foreign birds in this sale, and no pheasants or other game, except sometimes wretched old things which are sold because they happen to be in a case.

The street-trade in second-hand Lasts is confined principally to Petticoat and Rosemary lanes, where they are bought by the “garret-masters” in the shoemaking trade who supply the large wholesale warehouses; that is to say, by small masters who find their own materials and sell the boots and shoes by the dozen pairs. The lasts are bought also by mechanics, street-sellers, and other poor persons who cobble their own shoes. A shoemaker told me that he occasionally bought a last at a street stall, or rather from street hampers in Petticoat and Rosemary lanes, and it seemed to him that second-hand stores of street lasts got neither bigger nor smaller: “I suppose it’s this way,” he reasoned; “the garret-master buys lasts to do the slop-snobbing cheap, mostly women’s lasts, and he dies or is done up and goes to the “great house,” and his lasts find their way back to the streets. You notice, sir, the first time you’re in Rosemary-lane, how little a great many of the lasts have been used, and that shows what a terrible necessity there was to part with them. In some there’s hardly any peg-marks at all.” The lasts are sold from 1d. to 3d. each, or twice that amount in pairs, “rights and lefts,” according to the size and the condition. There are about 20 street last-sellers in the second-hand trade of London—“at least 20,” one man said, after he seemed to have been making a mental calculation on the subject.

Second-hand harness is sold largely, and when good is sold very readily. There is, I am told, far less slop-work in harness-making than in shoemaking or in the other trades, such as tailoring, and “many a lady’s pony harness,” it was said to me by a second-hand dealer, “goes next to a tradesman, and next to a costermonger’s donkey, and if it’s been good leather to begin with—as it will if it was made for a lady—why the traces’ll stand clouting, and patching, and piecing, and mending for a long time, and they’ll do to cobble old boots last of all, for old leather’ll wear just in treading, when it might snap at a pull. Give me a good quality to begin with, sir, and it’s serviceable to the end.” In my inquiries among the costermongers I ascertained that if one of that body started his donkey, or rose from that to his pony, he never bought new harness, unless it were a new collar if he had a regard for the comfort of his beast, but bought old harness, and “did it up” himself, often using iron rivets, or clenched nails, to reunite the broken parts, where, of course, a harness-maker would apply a patch. Nor is it the costermongers alone who buy all their harness second-hand. The sweep, whose stock of soot is large enough to require the help of an ass and a cart in its transport; the collector of bones and offal from the butchers’ slaughter-houses or shops; and the many who may be considered as co-traders with the costermonger class—the greengrocer, the street coal-seller by retail, the salt-sellers, the gravel and sand dealer (a few have small carts)—all, indeed, of that class of traders, buy their harness second-hand, and generally in the streets. The chief sale of second-hand harness is on the Friday afternoons, in Smithfield. The more especial street-sale is in Petticoat and Rosemary lanes, and in the many off-streets and alleys which may be called the tributaries to those great second-hand marts. There is no sale of these wares in the Saturday night markets, for in the crush and bustle generally prevailing there at such times, no room could be found for things requiring so much space as sets of second-hand harness, and no time sufficiently to examine them. “There’s so much to look at, you understand, sir,” said one second-hand street-trader, who did a little in harness as well as in barrows, “if you wants a decent set, and don’t grudge a shilling or two—and I never grudges them myself when I has ’em—so that it takes a little time. You must see that the buckles has good tongues—and it’s a sort of joke in the trade that a bad tongue’s a d——d bad thing—and that the pannel of the pad ain’t as hard as a board (flocks is the best stuffing, sir), and that the bit, if it’s rusty, can be polished up, for a animal no more likes a rusty bit in his mouth than we likes a musty bit of bread in our’n. O, a man as treats his ass as a ass ought to be treated—and it’s just the same if he has a pony—can’t be too perticler. If I had my way I’d ’act a law making people perticler about ’osses’ and asses’ shoes. If your boot pinches you, sir, you can sing out to your bootmaker, but a ass can’t blow up a farrier.” It seems to me that in these homely remarks of my informant, there is, so to speak, a sound practical kindliness. There can be little doubt that a fellow who maltreats his ass or his dog, maltreats his wife and children when he dares.

Clocks are sold second-hand, but only by three or four foreigners, Dutchmen or Germans, who hawk them and sell them at 2s. 6d. or 3s. each, Dutch clocks only being disposed of in this way. These traders, therefore, come under the head of Street-Foreigners. “Ay,” one street-seller remarked to me, “it’s only Dutch now as is second-handed in the streets, but it’ll soon be Americans. The swags is some of them hung up with Slick’s;” [so he called the American clocks, meaning the “Sam Slicks,” in reference to Mr. Justice Hallyburton’s work of that title;] “they’re hung up with ’em, sir, and no relation whatsomever (pawnbroker) ’ll give a printed character of ’em (a duplicate), and so they must come to the streets, and jolly cheap they’ll be.” The foreigners who sell the second-hand Dutch clocks sell also new clocks of the same manufacture, and often on tally, 1s. a week being the usual payment.

Cartouche-boxes are sold at the miscellaneous stalls, but only after there has been what I heard called a “Tower sale” (sale of military stores). When bought of the street-sellers, the use of these boxes is far more peaceful than that for which they were manufactured. Instead of the receptacles of cartridges, the divisions are converted into nail boxes, each with its different assortment, or contain the smaller kinds of tools, such as awl-blades. These boxes are sold in the streets at ½d. or 1d. each, and are bought by jobbing shoemakers more than by any other class.

Of the other second-hand commodities of the streets, I may observe that in Trinkets the trade is altogether Jewish; in Maps, with frames, it is now a nonentity, and so it is with Fishing-rods, Cricket-bats, &c.

In Umbrellas and Parasols the second-hand traffic is large, but those vended in the streets are nearly all “done up” for street-sale by the class known as “Mush,” or more properly “Mushroom Fakers,” that is to say, the makers or fakers (facere—the slang fakement being simply a corruption of the Latin facimentum) of those articles which are similar in shape to mushrooms. I shall treat of this class and the goods they sell under the head of Street-Artisans. The collectors of Old Umbrellas and Parasols are the same persons as collect the second-hand habiliments of male and female attire.

The men and women engaged in the street-commerce carried on in second-hand articles are, in all respects, a more mixed class than the generality of street-sellers. Some hawk in the streets goods which they also display in their shops, or in the windowless apartments known as their shops. Some are not in possession of shops, but often buy their wares of those who are. Some collect or purchase the articles they vend; others collect them by barter. The itinerant crock-man, the root-seller, the glazed table-cover seller, the hawker of spars and worked stone, and even the costermonger of the morning, is the dealer in second-hand articles of the afternoon and evening. The costermonger is, moreover, often the buyer and seller of second-hand harness in Smithfield. I may point out again, also, what a multifariousness of wares passes in the course of a month through the hands of a general street-seller; at one time new goods, at another second-hand; sometimes he is stationary at a pitch vending “lots,” or “swag toys;” at others itinerant, selling braces, belts, and hose.

I found no miscellaneous dealer who could tell me of the proportionate receipts from the various articles he dealt in even for the last month. He “did well” in this, and badly in the other trade, but beyond such vague statements there is no precise information to be had. It should be recollected that the street-sellers do not keep accounts, or those documents would supply references. “It’s all headwork with us,” a street-seller said, somewhat boastingly, to me, as if the ignorance of book-keeping was rather commendable.

Of Second-hand Store Shops.

Perhaps it may add to the completeness of the information here given concerning the trading in old refuse articles, and especially those of a miscellaneous character, the manner in which, and the parties by whom the business is carried on, if I conclude this branch of the subject by an account of the shops of the second-hand dealers. The distance between the class of these shopkeepers and of the stall and barrow-keepers I have described is not great. It may be said to be merely from the street to within doors. Marine-store dealers have often in their start in life been street-sellers, not unfrequently costermongers, and street-sellers they again become if their ventures be unsuccessful. Some of them, however, make a good deal of money in what may be best understood as a “hugger-mugger way.”

On this subject I cannot do better than quote Mr. Dickens, one of the most minute and truthful of observers:—

“The reader must often have perceived 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-bottles, 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 armour 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 chandlers’-shop-keepers’ sons, are all stage-struck: they ‘get 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 broad-swords, 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 canvass 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 Surry 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 debtors’ 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.”

Of the Street-sellers of Second-hand Apparel.

The multifariousness of the articles of this trade is limited only by what the uncertainty of the climate, the caprices of fashion, or the established styles of apparel in the kingdom, have caused to be worn, flung aside, and reworn as a revival of an obsolete style. It is to be remarked, however, that of the old-fashioned styles none that are costly have been revived. Laced coats, and embroidered and lappeted waistcoats, have long disappeared from second-hand traffic—the last stage of fashions—and indeed from all places but court or fancy balls and the theatre.

The great mart for second-hand apparel was, in the last century, in Monmouth-street; now, by one of those arbitrary, and almost always inappropriate, changes in the nomenclature of streets, termed Dudley-street, Seven Dials. “Monmouth-street finery” was a common term to express tawdriness and pretence. Now Monmouth-street, for its new name is hardly legitimated, has no finery. Its second-hand wares are almost wholly confined to old boots and shoes, which are vamped up with a good deal of trickery; so much so that a shoemaker, himself in the poorer practice of the “gentle craft,” told me that blacking and brown paper were the materials of Monmouth-street cobbling. Almost every master in Monmouth-street now is, I am told, an Irishman; and the great majority of the workmen are Irishmen also. There were a few Jews and a few cockneys in this well-known street a year or two back, but now this branch of the second-hand trade is really in the hands of what may be called a clan. A little business is carried on in second-hand apparel, as well as boots and shoes, but it is insignificant.

The head-quarters of this second-hand trade are now in Petticoat and Rosemary lanes, especially in Petticoat-lane, and the traffic there carried on may be called enormous. As in other departments of commerce, both in our own capital, in many of our older cities, and in the cities of the Continent, the locality appropriated to this traffic is one of narrow streets, dark alleys, and most oppressive crowding. The traders seem to judge of a Rag-fair garment, whether a cotton frock or a ducal coachman’s great-coat, by the touch, more reliably than by the sight; they inspect, so to speak, with their fingers more than their eyes. But the business in Petticoat and Rosemary lanes is mostly of a retail character. The wholesale mart—for the trade in old clothes has both a wholesale and retail form—is in a place of especial curiosity, and one of which, as being little known, I shall first speak.

Of the Old Clothes Exchange.

The trade in second-hand apparel is one of the most ancient of callings, and is known in almost every country, but anything like the Old Clothes Exchange of the Jewish quarter of London, in the extent and order of its business, is unequalled in the world. There is indeed no other such place, and it is rather remarkable that a business occupying so many persons, and requiring such facilities for examination and arrangement, should not until the year 1843 have had its regulated proceedings. The Old Clothes Exchange is the latest of the central marts, established in the metropolis.

Smithfield, or the Cattle Exchange, is the oldest of all the markets; it is mentioned as a place for the sale of horses in the time of Henry II. Billingsgate, or the Fish Exchange, is of ancient, but uncertain era. Covent Garden—the largest Fruit, Vegetable, and Flower Exchange—first became established as the centre of such commerce in the reign of Charles II.; the establishment of the Borough and Spitalfields markets, as other marts for the sale of fruits, vegetables, and flowers, being nearly as ancient. The Royal Exchange dates from the days of Queen Elizabeth, and the Bank of England and the Stock-Exchange from those of William III., while the present premises for the Corn and Coal Exchanges are modern.

Were it possible to obtain the statistics of the last quarter of a century, it would, perhaps, be found that in none of the important interests I have mentioned has there been a greater increase of business than in the trade in old clothes. Whether this purports a high degree of national prosperity or not, it is not my business at present to inquire, and be it as it may, it is certain that, until the last few years, the trade in old clothes used to be carried on entirely in the open air, and this in the localities which I have pointed out in my account of the trade in old metal (p. [10], vol. ii.) as comprising the Petticoat-lane district. The old clothes trade was also pursued in Rosemary-lane, but then—and so indeed it is now—this was but a branch of the more centralized commerce of Petticoat-lane. The head-quarters of the traffic at that time were confined to a space not more than ten square yards, adjoining Cutler-street. The chief traffic elsewhere was originally in Cutler-street, White-street, Carter-street, and in Harrow-alley—the districts of the celebrated Rag-fair.

The confusion and clamour before the institution of the present arrangements were extreme. Great as was the extent of the business transacted, people wondered how it could be accomplished, for it always appeared to a stranger, that there could be no order whatever in all the disorder. The wrangling was incessant, nor were the trade-contests always confined to wrangling alone. The passions of the Irish often drove them to resort to cuffs, kicks, and blows, which the Jews, although with a better command over their tempers, were not slack in returning. The East India Company, some of whose warehouses adjoined the market, frequently complained to the city authorities of the nuisance. Complaints from other quarters were also frequent, and sometimes as many as 200 constables were necessary to restore or enforce order. The nuisance, however, like many a public nuisance, was left to remedy itself, or rather it was left to be remedied by individual enterprise. Mr. L. Isaac, the present proprietor, purchased the houses which then filled up the back of Phil’s-buildings, and formed the present Old Clothes Exchange. This was eight years ago; now there are no more policemen in the locality than in other equally populous parts.

Of Old Clothes Exchanges there are now two, both adjacent, the one first opened by Mr. Isaac being the most important. This is 100 feet by 70, and is the mart to which the collectors of the cast-off apparel of the metropolis bring their goods for sale. The goods are sold wholesale and retail, for an old clothes merchant will buy either a single hat, or an entire wardrobe, or a sackful of shoes,—I need not say pairs, for odd shoes are not rejected. In one department of “Isaac’s Exchange,” however, the goods are not sold to parties who buy for their own wearing, but to the old clothes merchant, who buys to sell again. In this portion of the mart are 90 stalls, averaging about six square feet each.

In another department, which communicates with the first, and is two-thirds of the size, are assembled such traders as buy the old garments to dispose of them, either after a process of cleaning, or when they have been repaired and renovated. These buyers are generally shopkeepers, residing in the old clothes districts of Marylebone-lane, Holywell-street, Monmouth-street, Union-street (Borough), Saffron-hill (Field-lane), Drury-lane, Shoreditch, the Waterloo-road, and other places of which I shall have to speak hereafter.

The difference between the first and second class of buyers above mentioned, is really that of the merchant and the retail shopkeeper. The one buys literally anything presented to him which is vendible, and in any quantity, for the supply of the wholesale dealers from distant parts, or for exportation, or for the general trade of London. The other purchases what suits his individual trade, and is likely to suit regular or promiscuous customers.

In another part of the same market is carried on the retail old clothes trade to any one—shopkeeper, artisan, clerk, costermonger, or gentlemen. This indeed, is partially the case in the other parts. “Yesh, inteet,” said a Hebrew trader, whom I conversed with on the subject, “I shall be clad to shell you one coat, sir. Dish von is shust your shize; it is verra sheep, and vosh made by one tip-top shnip.” Indeed, the keenness and anxiety to trade—whenever trade seems possible—causes many of the frequenters of these marts to infringe the arrangements as to the manner of the traffic, though the proprietors endeavour to cause the regulations to be strictly adhered to.

The second Exchange, which is a few yards apart from the other is known as Simmons and Levy’s Clothes Exchange, and is unemployed, for its more especial business purposes, except in the mornings. The commerce is then wholesale, for here are sold collections of unredeemed pledges in wearing apparel, consigned there by the pawnbrokers, or the buyers at the auctions of unredeemed goods; as well as draughts from the stocks of the wardrobe dealers; a quantity of military or naval stores, and such like articles. In the afternoon the stalls are occupied by retail dealers. The ground is about as large as the first-mentioned exchange, but is longer and narrower.

In neither of these places is there even an attempt at architectural elegance, or even neatness. The stalls and partitions are of unpainted wood, the walls are bare, the only care that seems to be manifested is that the places should be dry. In the first instance the plainness was no doubt a necessity from motives of prudence, as the establishments were merely speculations, and now everything but business seems to be disregarded. The Old Clothes Exchanges have assuredly one recommendation as they are now seen—their appropriateness. They have a threadbare, patched, and second-hand look. The dresses worn by the dealers, and the dresses they deal in, are all in accordance with the genius of the place. But the eagerness, crowding, and energy, are the grand features of the scene; and of all the many curious sights in London there is none so picturesque (from the various costumes of the buyers and sellers), none so novel, and none so animated as that of the Old Clothes Exchange.

Business is carried on in the wholesale department of the Old Clothes Exchanges every day during the week; and in the retail on each day except the Hebrew Sabbath (Saturday). The Jews in the old clothes trade observe strictly the command that on their Sabbath day they shall do no manner of work, for on a visit I paid to the Exchange last Saturday, not a single Jew could I see engaged in any business. But though the Hebrew Sabbath is observed by the Jews and disregarded by the Christians, the Christian Sabbath, on the other hand, is disregarded by Jew and Christian alike, some few of the Irish excepted, who may occasionally go to early mass, and attend at the Exchange afterwards. Sunday, therefore, in “Rag-fair,” is like the other days of the week (Saturday excepted); business closes on the Sunday, however, at 2 instead of 6.

On the Saturday the keen Jew-traders in the neighbourhood of the Exchanges may be seen standing at their doors—after the synagogue hours—or looking out of their windows, dressed in their best. The dress of the men is for the most part not distinguishable from that of the English on the Sunday, except that there may be a greater glitter of rings and watch-guards. The dress of the women is of every kind; becoming, handsome, rich, tawdry, but seldom neat.

Of the Wholesale Business at the Old Clothes Exchange.

A considerable quantity of the old clothes disposed of at the Exchange are bought by merchants from Ireland. They are then packed in bales by porters, regularly employed for the purpose, and who literally build them up square and compact. These bales are each worth from 50l. to 300l., though seldom 300l., and it is curious to reflect from how many classes the pile of old garments has been collected—how many privations have been endured before some of these habiliments found their way into the possession of the old clothesman—what besotted debauchery put others in his possession—with what cool calculation others were disposed of—how many were procured for money, and how many by the tempting offers of flowers, glass, crockery, spars, table-covers, lace, or millinery—what was the clothing which could first be spared when rent was to be defrayed or bread to be bought, and what was treasured until the last—in what scenes of gaiety or gravity, in the opera-house or the senate, had the perhaps departed wearers of some of that heap of old clothes figured—through how many possessors, and again through what new scenes of middle-class or artizan comfort had these dresses passed, or through what accidents of “genteel” privation and destitution—and lastly through what necessities of squalid wretchedness and low debauchery.

Every kind of old attire, from the highest to the very lowest, I was emphatically told, was sent to Ireland.

Some of the bales are composed of garments originally made for the labouring classes. These are made up of every description of colour and material—cloth, corduroy, woollen cords, fustian, moleskin, flannel, velveteen, plaids, and the several varieties of those substances. In them are to be seen coats, great-coats, jackets, trousers, and breeches, but no other habiliments, such as boots, shirts, or stockings. I was told by a gentleman, who between 40 and 50 years ago was familiar with the liberty and poorer parts of Dublin, that the most coveted and the most saleable of all second-hand apparel was that of leather breeches, worn commonly in some of the country parts of England half a century back, and sent in considerable quantities at that time from London to Ireland. These nether habiliments were coveted because, as the Dublin sellers would say, they “would wear for ever, and look illigant after that.” Buck-skin breeches are now never worn except by grooms in their liveries, and gentlemen when hunting, so that the trade in them in the Old Clothes Exchange, and their exportation to Ireland, are at an end. The next most saleable thing—I may mention, incidentally—vended cheap and second-hand in Dublin, to the poor Irishmen of the period I speak of, was a wig! And happy was the man who could wear two, one over the other.

Some of the Irish buyers who are regular frequenters of the London Old Clothes Exchange, take a small apartment, often a garret or a cellar, in Petticoat-lane or its vicinity, and to this room they convey their purchases until a sufficient stock has been collected. Among these old clothes the Irish possessors cook, or at any rate eat, their meals, and upon them they sleep. I did not hear that such dealers were more than ordinarily unhealthy; though it may, perhaps, be assumed that such habits are fatal to health. What may be the average duration of life among old clothes sellers who live in the midst of their wares, I do not know, and believe that no facts have been collected on the subject; but I certainly saw among them some very old men.

Other wholesale buyers from Ireland occupy decent lodgings in the neighbourhood—decent considering the locality. In Phil’s-buildings, a kind of wide alley which forms one of the approaches to the Exchange, are eight respectable apartments, almost always let to the Irish old clothes merchants.

Tradesmen of the same class come also from the large towns of England and Scotland to buy for their customers some of the left-off clothes of London.

Nor is this the extent of the wholesale trade. Bales of old clothes are exported to Belgium and Holland, but principally to Holland. Of the quantity of goods thus exported to the Continent not above one-half, perhaps, can be called old clothes, while among these the old livery suits are in the best demand. The other goods of this foreign trade are old serges, duffles, carpeting, drugget, and heavy woollen goods generally, of all the descriptions which I have before enumerated as parcel of the second-hand trade of the streets. Old merino curtains, and any second-hand decorations of fringes, woollen lace, &c., are in demand for Holland.

Twelve bales, averaging somewhere about 100l. each in value, but not fully 100l., are sent direct every week of the year from the Old Clothes Exchange to distant places, and this is not the whole of the traffic, apart from what is done retail. I am informed on the best authority, that the average trade may be stated at 1500l. a week all the year round. When I come to the conclusion of the subject, however, I shall be able to present statistics of the amount turned over in the respective branches of the old clothes trade, as well as of the number of the traffickers, only one-fourth of whom are now Jews.

The conversation which goes on in the Old Clothes Exchange during business hours, apart from the “larking” of the young sweet-stuff and orange or cake-sellers, is all concerning business, but there is, even while business is being transacted, a frequent interchange of jokes, and even of practical jokes. The business talk—I was told by an old clothes collector, and I heard similar remarks—is often to the following effect:—

“How much is this here?” says the man who comes to buy. “One pound five,” replies the Jew seller. “I won’t give you above half the money.” “Half de money,” cries the salesman, “I can’t take dat. Vat above the 16s. dat you offer now vill you give for it? Vill you give me eighteen? Vell, come, give ush your money, I’ve got ma rent to pay.” But the man says, “I only bid you 12s. 6d., and I shan’t give no more.” And then, if the seller finds he can get him to “spring” or advance no further, he says, “I shupposh I musht take your money even if I loosh by it. You’ll be a better cushtomer anoder time.” [This is still a common “deal,” I am assured by one who began the business at 13 years old, and is now upwards of 60 years of age. The Petticoat-laner will always ask at least twice as much as he means to take.]

For a more detailed account of the mode of business as conducted at the Old Clothes Exchange I refer the reader to p. 368, vol. i. Subsequent visits have shown me nothing to alter in that description, although written (in one of my letters in the Morning Chronicle), nearly two years ago. I have merely to add that I have there mentioned the receipt of a halfpenny toll; but this, I find, is not levied on Saturdays and Sundays.

I ought not to omit stating that pilfering one from another by the poor persons who have collected the second-hand garments, and have carried them to the Old Clothes Exchange to dispose of, is of very rare occurrence. This is the more commendable, for many of the wares could not be identified by their owner, as he had procured them only that morning. If, as happens often enough, a man carried a dozen pairs of old shoes to the Exchange, and one pair were stolen, he might have some difficulty in swearing to the identity of the pair purloined. It is true that the Jews, and crock-men, and others, who collect, by sale or barter, masses of old clothes, note all their defects very minutely, and might have no moral doubt as to identity, nevertheless the magistrate would probably conclude that the legal evidence—were it only circumstantial—was insufficient. The young thieves, however, who flock from the low lodging-houses in the neighbourhood, are an especial trouble in Petticoat-lane, where the people robbed are generally too busy, and the article stolen of too little value, to induce a prosecution—a knowledge which the juvenile pilferer is not slow in acquiring. Sometimes when these boys are caught pilfering, they are severely beaten, especially by the women, who are aided by the men, if the thief offers any formidable resistance, or struggles to return the blows.

Of the Uses of Second-hand Garments.

I have now to describe the uses to which the several kinds of garments which constitute the commerce of the Old Clothes Exchange are devoted, whether it be merely in the re-sale of the apparel, to be worn in its original form or in a repaired or renovated form; or whether it be “worked up” into other habiliments, or be useful for the making of other descriptions of woollen fabrics; or else whether it be fit merely for its last stages—the rag-bag for the paper-maker, or the manure heap for the hop-grower.

Each “left-off” garment has its peculiar after uses, according to its material and condition. The practised eye of the old clothes man at once embraces every capability of the apparel, and the amount which these capabilities will realize; whether they be woollen, linen, cotton, leathern, or silken goods; or whether they be articles which cannot be classed under any of those designations, such as macintoshes and furs.

A surtout coat is the most serviceable of any second-hand clothing, originally good. It can be re-cuffed, re-collared, or the skirts re-lined with new or old silk, or with a substitute for silk. It can be “restored” if the seams be white and the general appearance what is best understood by the expressive word “seedy.” This restoration is a sort of re-dyeing, or rather re-colouring, by the application of gall and logwood with a small portion of copperas. If the under sleeve be worn, as it often is by those whose avocations are sedentary, it is renewed, and frequently with a second-hand piece of cloth “to match,” so that there is no perceptible difference between the renewal and the other parts. Many an honest artisan in this way becomes possessed of his Sunday frock-coat, as does many a smarter clerk or shopman, impressed with a regard to his personal appearance.

In the last century, I may here observe, and perhaps in the early part of the present, when woollen cloth was much dearer, much more substantial, and therefore much more durable, it was common for economists to have a good coat “turned.” It was taken to pieces by the tailor and re-made, the inner part becoming the outer. This mode prevailed alike in France and England; for Molière makes his miser, Harpagon, magnanimously resolve to incur the cost of his many-years’-old coat being “turned,” for the celebration of his expected marriage with a young and wealthy bride. This way of dealing with a second-hand garment is not so general now as it was formerly in London, nor is it in the country.

If the surtout be incapable of restoration to the appearance of a “respectable” garment, the skirts are sold for the making of cloth caps; or for the material of boys’ or “youths’” waistcoats; or for “poor country curates’ gaiters; but not so much now as they once were. The poor journeymen parsons,” I was told, “now goes for the new slops; they’re often green, and is had by ’vertisements, and bills, and them books about fashions which is all over both country and town. Do you know, sir, why them there books is always made so small? The leaves is about four inches square. That’s to prevent their being any use as waste paper. I’ll back a coat such as is sometimes sold by a gentleman’s servant to wear out two new slops.”

Cloaks are things of as ready sale as any kind of old garments. If good, or even reparable, they are in demand both for the home and foreign trades, as cloaks; if too far gone, which is but rarely the case, they are especially available for the same purposes as the surtout. The same may be said of the great-coat.

Dress-coats are far less useful, as if cleaned up and repaired they are not in demand among the working classes, and the clerks and shopmen on small salaries are often tempted by the price, I was told, to buy some wretched new slop thing rather than a superior coat second-hand. The dress-coats, however, are used for caps. Sometimes a coat, for which the collector may have given 9d., is cut up for the repairs of better garments.

Trousers are re-seated and repaired where the material is strong enough; and they are, I am informed, now about the only habiliment which is ever “turned,” and that but exceptionally. The repairs to trousers are more readily effected than those to coats, and trousers are freely bought by the collectors, and as freely re-bought by the public.

Waistcoats—I still speak of woollen fabrics—are sometimes used in cap-making, and were used in gaiter-making. But generally, at the present time, the worn edges are cut away, the buttons renewed or replaced by a new set, sometimes of glittering glass, the button-holes repaired or their jaggedness gummed down, and so the waistcoat is reproduced as a waistcoat, a size smaller. Sometimes a “vest,” as waistcoats are occasionally called, is used by the cheap boot-makers for the “legs” of a woman’s cloth boots, either laced or buttoned, but not a quarter as much as they would be, I was told, if the buttons and button-holes of the waistcoat would “do again” in the boot.

Nor is the woollen garment, if too thin, too worn, or too rotten to be devoted to any of the uses I have specified, flung away as worthless. To the traders in second-hand apparel, or in the remains of second-hand apparel, a dust-hole is an unknown receptacle. The woollen rag, for so it is then considered, when unravelled can be made available for the manufacture of cheap yarns, being mixed with new wool. It is more probable, however, that the piece of woollen fabric which has been rejected by those who make or mend, and who must make or mend so cheaply that the veriest vagrant may be their customer, is formed not only into a new material, but into a material which sometimes is made into a new garment. These garments are inferior to those woven of new wool, both in look and wear; but in some articles the re-manufacture is beautiful. The fabric thus snatched, as it were, from the ruins of cloth, is known as shoddy, the chief seat of manufacture being in Dewsbury, a small town in Yorkshire. The old material, when duly prepared, is torn into wool again by means of fine machinery, but the recovered wool is shorter in its fibre and more brittle in its nature; it is, indeed, more a woollen pulp than a wool.

Touching this peculiar branch of manufacture, I will here cite from the Morning Chronicle a brief description of a Shoddy Mill, so that the reader may have as comprehensive a knowledge as possible of the several uses to which his left-off clothes may be put.

“The small town of Dewsbury holds, in the woollen district, very much the same position which Oldham does in the cotton country—the spinning and preparing of waste and refuse materials. To this stuff the name of “shoddy” is given, but the real and orthodox “shoddy” is a production of the woollen districts, and consists of the second-hand wool manufactured by the tearing up, or rather the grinding, of woollen rags by means of coarse willows, called devils; the operation of which sends forth choking clouds of dry pungent dirt and floating fibres—the real and original “devil’s dust.” Having been, by the agency of the machinery in question, reduced to something like the original raw material, fresh wool is added to the pulp in different proportions, according to the quality of the stuff to be manufactured, and the mingled material is at length reworked in the usual way into a little serviceable cloth.

“There are some shoddy mills in the neighbourhood of Huddersfield, but the mean little town of Dewsbury may be taken as the metropolis of the manufacture. Some mills are devoted solely to the sorting, preparing, and grinding of rags, which are worked up in the neighbouring factories. Here great bales, choke full of filthy tatters, lie scattered about the yard, while the continual arrival of loaded waggons keeps adding to the heap. A glance at the exterior of these mills shows their character. The walls and part of the roof are covered with the thick clinging dust and fibre, which ascends in choky volumes from the open doors and glassless windows of the ground floor, and which also pours forth from a chimney, constructed for the purpose, exactly like smoke. The mill is covered as with a mildewy fungus, and upon the gray slates of the roof the frowzy deposit is often not less than two inches in depth.

“In the upper story of these mills the rags are stored. A great ware-room is piled in many places from the floor to the ceiling with bales of woollen rags, torn strips and tatters of every colour peeping out from the bursting depositories. There is hardly a country in Europe which does not contribute its quota of material to the shoddy manufacturer. Rags are brought from France, Germany, and in great quantities from Belgium. Denmark, I understand, is favourably looked upon by the tatter merchants, being fertile in morsels of clothing, of fair quality. Of domestic rags, the Scotch bear off the palm; and possibly no one will be surprised to hear, that of all rags Irish rags are the most worn, the filthiest, and generally the most unprofitable. The gradations of value in the world of rags are indeed remarkable. I was shown rags worth 50l. per ton, and rags worth only 30s. The best class is formed of the remains of fine cloth, the produce of which, eked out with a few bundles of fresh wool, is destined to go forth to the world again as broad cloth, or at all events as pilot cloth. Fragments of damask and skirts of merino dresses form the staple of middle-class rags; and even the very worst bales—they appear unmitigated mashes of frowzy filth—afford here and there some fragments of calico, which are wrought up into brown paper. The refuse of all, mixed with the stuff which even the shoddy-making devil rejects, is packed off to the agricultural districts for use as manure, to fertilize the hop-gardens of Kent.

“Under the rag ware-room is the sorting and picking room. Here the bales are opened, and their contents piled in close, poverty-smelling masses, upon the floor. The operatives are entirely women. They sit upon low stools, or half sunk and half enthroned amid heaps of the filthy goods, busily employed in arranging them according to the colour and the quality of the morsels, and from the more pretending quality of rags carefully ripping out every particle of cotton which they can detect. Piles of rags of different sorts, dozens of feet high, are the obvious fruits of their labour. All these women are over eighteen years of age, and the wages which they are paid for ten hours’ work are 6s. per week. They look squalid and dirty enough; but all of them chatter and several sing over their noisome labour. The atmosphere of the room is close and oppressive; and although no particularly offensive smell is perceptible, there is a choky, mildewy sort of odour—a hot, moist exhalation—arising from the sodden smouldering piles, as the workwomen toss armfuls of rags from one heap to another. This species of work is the lowest and foulest which any phase of the factory system can show.

“The devils are upon the ground floor. The choking dust bursts out from door and window, and it is not until a minute or so that the visitor can see the workmen moving amid the clouds, catching up armfuls of the sorted rags and tossing them into the machine to be torn into fibry fragments by the whirling revolutions of its teeth. The place in which this is done is a large bare room—the uncovered beams above, the rough stone walls, and the woodwork of the unglazed windows being as it were furred over with clinging woolly matter. On the floor, the dust and coarse filaments lie as if ‘it had been snowing snuff.’ The workmen are coated with the flying powder. They wear bandages over their mouths, so as to prevent as much as possible the inhalation of the dust, and seem loath to remove the protection for a moment. The rag grinders, with their squalid, dust-strewn garments, powdered to a dull grayish hue, and with their bandages tied over the greater part of their faces, move about like reanimated mummies in their swathings, looking most ghastly. The wages of these poor creatures do not exceed 7s. or 8s. a week. The men are much better paid, none of them making less than 18s. a week, and many earning as much as 22s. Not one of them, however, will admit that he found the trade injurious. The dust tickles them a little, they say, that is all. They feel it most of a Monday morning, after being all Sunday in the fresh air. When they first take to the work it hurts their throats a little, but they drink mint tea, and that soon cures them. They are all more or less subject to ‘shoddy fever,’ they confess, especially after tenting the grinding of the very dusty sorts of stuff—worsted stockings, for example. The shoddy fever is a sort of stuffing of the head and nose, with sore throat, and it sometimes forces them to give over work for two or three days, or at most a week; but the disorder, the workmen say, is not fatal, and leaves no particularly bad effects.

“In spite of all this, however, it is manifestly impossible for human lungs to breathe under such circumstances without suffering. The visitor exposed to the atmosphere for ten minutes experiences an unpleasant choky sensation in the throat, which lasts all the remainder of the day. The rag grinders, moreover, according to the best accounts, are very subject to asthmatic complaints, particularly when the air is dull and warm. The shoddy fever is said to be like a bad cold, with constant acrid running from the nose, and a great deal of expectoration. It is when there is a particularly dirty lot of rags to be ground that the people are usually attacked in this way, but the fever seldom keeps them more than two or three days from their work.

“In other mills the rags are not only ground, but the shoddy is worked up into coarse bad cloth, a great proportion of which is sent to America for slave clothing (and much now sold to the slop-shops).

“After the rags have been devilled into shoddy, the remaining processes are much the same, although conducted in a coarser way, as those performed in the manufacture of woollen cloth. The weaving is, for the most part, carried on at the homes of the workpeople. The domestic arrangements consist, in every case, of two tolerably large rooms, one above the other, with a cellar beneath—a plan of construction called in Yorkshire a “house and a chamber.” The chamber has generally a bed amid the looms. The weavers complain of irregular work and diminished wages. Their average pay, one week with another, with their wives to wind for them—i. e., to place the thread upon the bobbin which goes into the shuttle—is hardly so much as 10s. a week. They work long hours, often fourteen per day. Sometimes the weaver is a small capitalist with perhaps half a dozen looms, and a hand-jenny for spinning thread, the workpeople being within his own family as regular apprentices and journeymen.”

Dr. Hemingway, a gentleman who has a large practice in the shoddy district, has given the following information touching the “shoddy fever”:—

“The disease popularly known as ‘shoddy fever,’ and which is of frequent occurrence, is a species of bronchitis, caused by the irritating effect of the floating particles of dust upon the mucous membrane of the trachea and its ramifications. In general, the attack is easily cured—particularly if the patient has not been for any length of time exposed to the exciting cause—by effervescing saline draughts to allay the symptomatic febrile action, followed by expectorants to relieve the mucous membrane of the irritating dust; but a long continuance of employment in the contaminated atmosphere, bringing on as it does repeated attacks of the disease, is too apt, in the end, to undermine the constitution, and produce a train of pectoral diseases, often closing with pulmonary consumption. Ophthalmic attacks are by no means uncommon among the shoddy-grinders, some of whom, however, wear wire-gauze spectacles to protect the eyes. As regards the effect of the occupation upon health, it may shorten life by about five years on a rough average, taking, of course, as the point of comparison, the average longevity of the district in which the manufacture is carried on.”

“Shoddy fever” is, in fact, a modification of the very fatal disease induced by what is called “dry grinding” at Sheffield; but of course the particles of woollen filament are less fatal in their influence than the floating steel dust produced by the operation in question.

At one time shoddy cloth was not good and firm enough to be used for other purposes than such as padding by tailors, and in the inner linings of carriages, by coach-builders. It was not used for purposes which would expose it to stress, but only to a moderate wear or friction. Now shoddy, which modern improvements have made susceptible of receiving a fine dye (it always looked a dead colour at one period), is made into cloth for soldiers’ and sailors’ uniforms and for pilot-coats; into blanketing, drugget, stair and other carpeting, and into those beautiful table-covers, with their rich woollen look, on which elegantly drawn and elaborately coloured designs are printed through the application of aquafortis. Thus the rags which the beggar could no longer hang about him to cover his nakedness, may be a component of the soldier’s or sailor’s uniform, the carpet of a palace, or the library table-cover of a prime-minister.

There is yet another use for old woollen clothes. What is not good for shoddy is good for manure, and more especially for the manure prepared by the agriculturists in Kent, Sussex, and Herefordshire, for the culture of a difficult plant—hops. It is good also for corn land (judiciously used), so that we again have the remains of the old garment in our beer or our bread.

I have hitherto spoken of woollen fabrics. The garments of other materials are seldom diverted from their original use, for as long as they will hold together they can be sold for exportation to Ireland, though of course for very trifling amounts.

The black Velvet and Satin Waistcoats—the latter now so commonly worn—are almost always resold as waistcoats, and oft enough, when rebound and rebuttoned, make a very respectable looking garment. Nothing sells better to the working-classes than a good second-hand vest of the two materials of satin or velvet. If the satin, however, be so worn and frayed that mending is impossible, the back, if not in the same plight, is removed for rebacking of any waistcoat, and the satin thrown away, one of the few things which in its last stage is utterly valueless. It is the same with silk waistcoats, and for the most part with velvet, but a velvet waistcoat may be thrown in the refuse heap with the woollen rags for manure. The coloured waistcoats of silk or velvet are dealt with in the same way. At one time, when under-waistcoats were worn, the edges being just discernible, quantities were made out of the full waistcoats where a sufficiency of the stuff was unworn. This fashion is now becoming less and less followed, and is principally in vogue in the matter of white under-waistcoats. For the jean and other vests—even if a mixture of materials—there is the same use as what I have described of the black satin, and failing that, they are generally transferable to the rag-bag.

Hats have become in greater demand than ever among the street-buyers since the introduction into the London trade, and to so great an extent, of the silk, velvet, French, or Parisian hats. The construction of these hats is the same, and the easy way in which the hat-bodies are made, has caused a number of poor persons, with no previous knowledge of hat-making, to enter into the trade. “There’s hundreds starving at it,” said a hat-manufacturer to me, “in Bermondsey, Lock’s-fields, and the Borough; ay, hundreds.” This facility in the making of the bodies of the new silk hats is quite as available in the restoration of the bodies of the old hats, as I shall show from the information of a highly-intelligent artisan, who told me that of all people he disliked rich slop-sellers; but there was another class which he disliked more, and that was rich slop-buyers.

The bodies of the stuff or beaver hats of the best quality are made of a firm felt, wrought up of fine wool, rabbits’ hair, &c., and at once elastic, firm, and light. Over this is placed the nap, prepared from the hair of the beaver. The bodies of the silk hats are made of calico, which is blocked (as indeed is the felt) and stiffened and pasted up until “only a hat-maker can tell,” as it was expressed to me, “good sound bodies from bad; and the slop-masters go for the cheap and bad.” The covering is not a nap of any hair, but is of silk or velvet (the words are used indifferently in the trade) manufactured for the purpose. Thus if an old hat be broken, or rather crushed out of all shape, the body can be glazed and sized up again so as to suit the slop hatter, if sold to him as a body, and that whether it be of felt or calico. If, however, the silk cover of the hat be not worn utterly away, the body, without stripping off the cover, can be re-blocked and re-set, and the silk-velvet trimmed up and “set,” or re-dyed, and a decent hat is sometimes produced by these means. More frequently, however, a steeping shower of rain destroys the whole fabric.

Second-hand Caps are rarely brought into this trade.

Such things as drawers, flannel waistcoats, and what is sometimes called “inner wear,” sell very well when washed up, patched—for patches do not matter in a garment hidden from the eye when worn—or mended in any manner. Flannel waistcoats and drawers are often in demand by the street-sellers and the street-labourers, as they are considered “good against the rheumatics.” These habiliments are often sold unrepaired, having been merely washed, as the poor men’s wives may be competent to execute an easy bit of tailoring; or perhaps the men themselves, if they have been reared as mechanics; and they believe (perhaps erroneously) that so they obtain a better bargain. Shirts are repaired and sold as shirts, or for old linen; the trade is not large.

Men’s Stockings are darned up, but only when there is little to be done in darning, as they are retailed at 2d. the pair. The sale is not very great, for the supply is not. “Lots might be sold,” I was informed, “if they was to be had, for them flash coves never cares what they wears under their Wellingtons.”

The Women’s Apparel is sold to be re-worn in its original form quite as frequently, or more frequently, than it is mended up by the sellers; the purchasers often preferring to make the alterations themselves. A gown of stuff, cotton, or any material, if full-sized, is frequently bought and altered to fit a smaller person or a child, and so the worn parts may be cut away. It is very rarely also that the apparel of the middle-classes is made into any other article, with the sole exception, perhaps, of silk gowns. If a silk gown be not too much frayed, it is easily cleaned and polished up, so as to present a new gloss, and is sold readily enough; but if it be too far gone for this process, the old clothes renovator is often puzzled as to what uses to put it. A portion of a black silk dress may be serviceable to re-line the cuffs of the better kind of coats. There is seldom enough, I was told, to re-line the two skirts of a surtout, and it is difficult to match old silk; a man used to buying a good second-hand surtout, I was assured, would soon detect a difference in the shade of the silk, if the skirts were re-lined from the remains of different gowns, and say, “I’ll not give any such money for that piebald thing.” Skirts may be sometimes re-lined this way on the getting up of frock coats, but very rarely. There is the same difficulty in using a coloured silk gown for the re-covering of a parasol. The quantity may not be enough for the gores, and cannot be matched to satisfy the eye, for the buyer of a silk parasol even in Rosemary-lane may be expected to be critical. When there is enough of good silk for the purposes I have mentioned, then, it must be borne in mind, the gown may be more valuable, because saleable to be re-worn as a gown. It is the same with satin dresses, but only a few of them, in comparison with the silk, are to be seen at the Old Clothes’ Exchange.

Among the purposes to which portions of worn silk gowns are put are the making of spencers for little girls (usually by the purchasers, or by the dress-maker, who goes out to work for 1s. a day), of children’s bonnets, for the lining of women’s bonnets, the re-lining of muffs and fur-tippets, the patching of quilts (once a rather fashionable thing), the inner lining or curtains to a book-case, and other household appliances of a like kind. This kind of silk, too, no matter in how minute pieces, is bought by the fancy cabinet-makers (the small masters) for the lining of their dressing-cases and work-boxes supplied to the warehouses, but these poor artisans have neither means nor leisure to buy such articles of those connected with the traffic of the Old Clothes’ Exchange, but must purchase it, of course at an enhanced price, of a broker who has bought it at the Exchange, or in some establishment connected with it. The second-hand silk is bought also for the dressing of dolls for the toy-shops, and for the lining of some toys. The hat-manufacturers of the cheaper sort, at one time, used second-hand silk for the padded lining of hats, but such is rarely the practice now. It was once used in the same manner by the bookbinders for lining the inner part of the back of a book. If there be any part of silk in a dress not suitable for any of these purposes it is wasted, or what is accounted wasted, although it may have been in wear for years. It is somewhat remarkable, that while woollen and even cotton goods can be “shoddied”—and if they are too rotten for that, they are made available for manure, or in the manufacture of paper—no use is made of the refuse of silk. Though one of the most beautiful and costly of textile fabrics, its “remains” are thrown aside, when a beggar’s rags are preserved and made profitable. There can be little doubt that silk, like cotton, could be shoddied, but whether such a speculation would be remunerative or not is no part of my present inquiry.

There is not, as I shall subsequently show, so great an exportation of female attire as might be expected in comparison with male apparel; the poorer classes of the metropolis being too anxious to get any decent gown when within their slender means.

Stays, unless of superior make and in good condition, are little bought by the classes who are the chief customers of the old-clothes’ men in London. I did not hear any reason for this from any of the old-clothes’ people. One man thought, if there was a family of daughters, the stays which had became too small for the elder girl were altered for the younger, and that poor women liked to mend their old stays as long as they would stick together. Perhaps, there may be some repugnance—especially among the class of servant-maids who have not had “to rough it”—to wear street-collected stays; a repugnance not, perhaps, felt in the wearing of a gown which probably can be washed, and is not worn so near the person. The stays that are collected are for the most part exported, a great portion being sent to Ireland. If they are “worn to rags,” the bones are taken out; but in the slop-made stays, it is not whalebone, but wood that is used to give, or preserve the due shape of the corset, and then the stays are valueless.

Old Stockings are of great sale both for home wear and foreign trade. In the trade of women’s stockings there has been in the last 20 or 25 years a considerable change. Before that period black stockings were worn by servant girls, and the families of working people and small tradesmen; they “saved washing.” Now, even in Petticoat-lane, women’s stockings are white, or “mottled,” or some light-coloured, very rarely black. I have heard this change attributed to what is rather vaguely called “pride.” May it not be owing to a more cultivated sense of cleanliness? The women’s stockings are sold darned and undarned, and at (retail) prices from 1d. to 4d.; 1d. or 2d. being the most frequent prices.

The petticoats and other under clothing are not much bought second-hand by the poor women of London, and are exported.

Women’s caps used to be sold second-hand, I was told, both in the streets and the shops, but long ago, and before muslin and needlework were so cheap.

I heard of one article which formerly supplied considerable “stuff” (the word used) for second-hand purposes, and was a part, but never a considerable part, of the trade at Rag-fair. These were the “pillions,” or large, firm, solid cushions which were attached to a saddle, so that a horse “carried double.” Fifty years ago the farmer and his wife, of the more prosperous order, went regularly to church and market on one horse, a pillion sustaining the good dame. To the best sort of these pillions was appended what was called the “pillion cloth,” often of a fine, but thin quality, which being really a sort of housing to the horse, cut straight and with few if any seams, was an excellent material for what I am informed was formerly called “making and mending.” The colour was almost exclusively drab or blue. The pillion on which the squire’s lady rode—and Sheridan makes his Lady Teazle deny “the pillion and the coach-horse,” the butler being her cavalier—was a perfect piece of upholstery, set off with lace and fringes, which again were excellent for second-hand sale. Such a means of conveyance may still linger in some secluded country parts, but it is generally speaking obsolete.

Boots and Shoes are not to be had, I am told, in sufficient quantity for the demand from the slop-shops, the “translators,” and the second-hand dealers. Great quantities of second-hand boots and shoes are sent to Ireland to be “translated” there. Of all the wares in this traffic, the clothing for the feet is what is most easily prepared to cheat the eye of the inexperienced, the imposition having the aids of heel-ball, &c., to fill up crevices, and of blacking to hide defects. Even when the boots or shoes are so worn out that no one will put a pair on his feet, though purchaseable for about 1d., the insoles are ripped out; the soles, if there be a sufficiency of leather, are shaped into insoles for children’s shoes, and these insoles are sold in bundles of two dozen pairs at 2d. the bundle. So long as the boot or shoe be not in many holes, it can be cobblered up in Monmouth-street or elsewhere. Of the “translating” business transacted in those localities I had the following interesting account from a man who was lately engaged in it.

“Translation, as I understand it (said my informant), is this—to take a worn, old pair of shoes or boots, and by repairing them make them appear as if left off with hardly any wear—as if they were only soiled. I’ll tell you the way they manage in Monmouth-street. There are in the trade ‘horses’ heads’—a ‘horse’s head’ is the foot of a boot with sole and heel, and part of a front—the back and the remainder of the front having been used for refooting boots. There are also ‘stand-bottoms’ and ‘lick-ups.’ A ‘stand-bottom’ is where the shoe appears to be only soiled, and a ‘lick-up’ is a boot or shoe re-lasted to take the wrinkles out, the edges of the soles having been rasped and squared, and then blacked up to hide blemishes, and the bottom covered with a ‘smother,’ which I will describe. There is another article called a ‘flyer,’ that is, a shoe soled without having been welted. In Monmouth-street a ‘horse’s head’ is generally retailed at 2s. 6d., but some fetch 4s. 6d.—that’s the extreme price. They cost the translator from 1s. a dozen pair to 8s., but those at 8s. are good, and are used for the making up of Wellington boots. Some ‘horses’ heads’—such as are cut off that the boots may be re-footed on account of old fashion, or a misfit, when hardly worn—fetch 2s. 6d. a pair, and they are made up as new-footed boots, and sell from 10s. to 15s. The average price of feet (that is, for the ‘horse’s head,’ as we call it) is 4d., and a pair of backs say 2d.; the back is attached loosely by chair stitching, as it is called, to the heel, instead of being stitched to the in-sole, as in a new boot. The wages for all this is 1s. 4d. in Monmouth-street (in Union-street, Borough, 1s. 6d.); but I was told by a master that he had got the work done in Gray’s-inn-lane at 9d. Put it, however, at 1s. 4d. wages—then, with 4d. and 2d. for the feet and back, we have 1s. 10d. outlay (the workman finds his own grindery), and 8d. profit on each pair sold at a rate of 2s. 6d. Some masters will sell from 70 to 80 pairs per week: that’s under the mark; and that’s in ‘horses’ heads’ alone. One man employs, or did lately employ, seven men on ‘horses’ heads’ solely. The profit generally, in fair shops, in ‘stand-bottoms,’ is from 1s. 6d. to 2s. per pair, as they sell generally at 3s. 6d. One man takes, or did take, 100l. in a day (it was calculated as an average) over the counter, and all for the sort of shoes I have described. The profit of a ‘lick-up’ is the same as that of a ‘stand-bottom.’ To show the villanous way the ‘stand-bottoms’ are got up, I will tell you this. You have seen a broken upper-leather; well, we place a piece of leather, waxed, underneath the broken part, on which we set a few stitches through and through. When dry and finished, we take what is called a ‘soft-heel-ball’ and ‘smother’ it over, so that it sometimes would deceive a currier, as it appears like the upper leather. With regard to the bottoms, the worn part of the sole is opened from the edge, a piece of leather is made to fit exactly into the hole or worn part, and it is then nailed and filed until level. Paste is then applied, and ‘smother’ put over the part, and that imitates the dust of the road. This ‘smother’ is obtained from the dust of the room. It is placed in a silk stocking, tied at both ends, and then shook through, just like a powder-puff, only we shake at both ends. It is powdered out into our leather apron, and mixed with a certain preparation which I will describe to you (he did so), but I would rather not have it published, as it would lead others to practise similar deceptions. I believe there are about 2000 translators, so you may judge of the extent of the trade; and translators are more constantly employed than any other branch of the business. Many make a great deal of money. A journeyman translator can earn from 3s. to 4s. a day. You can give the average at 20s. a week, as the wages are good. It must be good, for we have 2s. for soling, heeling, and welting a pair of boots; and some men don’t get more for making them. Monmouth-street is nothing like what it was; as to curious old garments, that’s all gone. There’s not one English master in the translating business in Monmouth-street—they are all Irish; and there is now hardly an English workman there—perhaps not one. I believe that all the tradesmen in Monmouth-street make their workmen lodge with them. I was lodging with one before I married a little while ago, and I know the system to be the same now as it was then, unless, indeed, it be altered for the worse. To show how disgusting these lodgings must be, I will state this:—I knew a Roman Catholic, who was attentive to his religious duties, but when pronounced on the point of death, and believing firmly that he was dying, he would not have his priest administer extreme unction, for the room was in such a filthy and revolting state he would not allow him to see it. Five men worked and slept in that room, and they were working and sleeping there in the man’s illness—all the time that his life was despaired of. He was ill nine weeks. Unless the working shoemaker lodged there he would not be employed. Each man pays 2s. a week. I was there once, but I couldn’t sleep in such a den; and five nights out of the seven I slept at my mother’s, but my lodging had to be paid all the same. These men (myself excepted) were all Irish, and all teetotallers, as was the master. How often was the room cleaned out, do you say? Never, sir, never. The refuse of the men’s labour was generally burnt, smudged away in the grate, smelling terribly. It would stifle you, though it didn’t me, because I got used to it. I lodged in Union-street once. My employer had a room known as the ‘barracks;’ every lodger paid him 2s. 6d. a week. Five men worked and slept there, and three were sitters—that is, men who paid 1s. a week to sit there and work, lodging elsewhere. A little before that there were six sitters. The furniture was one table, one chair, and two beds. There was no place for purposes of decency: it fell to bits from decay, and was never repaired. This barrack man always stopped the 2s. 6d. for lodging, if he gave you only that amount of work in the week. The beds were decent enough; but as to Monmouth-street! you don’t see a clean sheet there for nine weeks; and, recollect, such snobs are dirty fellows. There was no chair in the Monmouth-street room that I have spoken of, the men having only their seats used at work; but when the beds were let down for the night, the seats had to be placed in the fire-place because there was no space for them in the room. In many houses in Monmouth-street there is a system of sub-letting among the journeymen. In one room lodged a man and his wife (a laundress worked there), four children, and two single young men. The wife was actually delivered in this room whilst the men kept at their work—they never lost an hour’s work; nor is this an unusual case—it’s not an isolated case at all. I could instance ten or twelve cases of two or three married people living in one room in that street. The rats have scampered over the beds that lay huddled together in the kitchen. The husband of the wife confined as I have described paid 4s. a week, and the two single men paid 2s. a week each, so the master was rent free; and he received from each man 1s. 6d. a week for tea (without sugar), and no bread and butter, and 2d. a day for potatoes—that’s the regular charge.”

In connection with the translation of old boots and shoes, I have obtained the following statistics. There are—

employing upwards of 2000 men in making-up and repairing old boots and shoes; besides hundreds of poor men and women who strive for a crust by buying and selling the old material, previously to translating it, and by mending up what will mend. They or their children stand in the street and try to sell them.

Monmouth-street, now the great old shoe district, has been “sketched” by Mr. Dickens, not as regards its connection with the subject of street-sale or of any particular trade, but as to its general character and appearance. I first cite Mr. Dickens’ description of the Seven Dials, of which Monmouth-street is a seventh:—

“The stranger who finds himself in ‘The Dials’ for the first time, and stands, Belzoni-like, at the entrance of seven obscure passages, uncertain which to take, will see enough around him to keep his curiosity and attention awake for no inconsiderable time. From the irregular square into which he has plunged, the streets and courts dart in all directions, until they are lost in the unwholesome vapour which hangs over the house-tops, and renders the dirty perspective uncertain and confined; and, lounging at every corner, as if they came there to take a few gasps of such fresh air as has found its way so far, but is too much exhausted already, to be enabled to force itself into the narrow alleys around, are groups of people, whose appearance and dwellings would fill any mind but a regular Londoner’s with astonishment.

“In addition to the numerous groups who are idling about the gin-shops and squabbling in the centre of the road, every post in the open space has its occupant, who leans against it for hours, with listless perseverance. It is odd enough that one class of men in London appear to have no enjoyment beyond leaning against posts. We never saw a regular bricklayer’s labourer take any other recreation, fighting excepted. Pass through St. Giles’s in the evening of a week-day, there they are in their fustian dresses, spotted with brick-dust and whitewash, leaning against posts. Walk through Seven Dials on Sunday morning: there they are again, drab or light corduroy trowsers, Blucher boots, blue coats, and great yellow waistcoats, leaning against posts. The idea of a man dressing himself in his best clothes, to lean against a post all day!