The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London (24 page)

Often selling appeared more random. In
Sketches by Boz
, Dickens reported that stagecoach offices were well known for their miscellaneous sellers: ‘Heaven knows why’, it is considered ‘quite impossible any man can mount a coach without requiring at least sixpenny-worth of oranges, a penknife, a pocket-book, a last year’s annual, a pencil-case, a piece of sponge, and a small series of caricatures’. Later, with the coming of the railways, at least one item of street-selling became more directly linked to the voyage itself. Now one of the prerequisites for setting out on a journey was a penknife: newspapers and books all had uncut edges, and in every train compartment passengers had to be busy with their knives before they could settle down to read. In
Dombey and Son
the very wealthy Mr Dombey’s office, off Leadenhall Street in the City, is situated in a court ‘where perambulating merchants’ sold ‘slippers, pocket-books, sponges, dogs’ collars, and Windsor soap; and sometimes a pointer or an oil-painting’.

Jewellery was sold on the streets from cases, as well as in pubs by sellers showing off a few chains held at arm’s length or sticking a few pins decoratively in their own clothes – sailors treating their girls tended to be good customers. (The illustration on p. 358 shows a woman selling goods from a tub on the right.) Pubs were also good places for pedlars to persuade listeners of the efficacy of their magic potions: medicines for people and animals; salves to knit broken bones, heal cuts and bruises; or pastes to remove stains and soot. The pedlar in
Oliver Twist
sells one such product that removes ‘rust, dirt, mildew, spick, speck, spot, or spatter, from silk, satin, linen, cambric, cloth, crape, stuff, carpet, merino, muslin, bombazeen, or woollen stuff. Wine-stains, fruit-stains, beer-stains, water-stains, paint-stains, pitch-stains, any stains...One penny a square!’ Items of every kind were on offer: malacca canes, or the smallest Bible in the world, or a Punch and Judy squeaker, or a bird-warbler.

In the 1840s, a type of proto water pistol – flexible metal tubes filled with scented water, which young boys enjoyed squirting at passers-by – became such a nuisance that legislation was passed to prevent its sale by hawkers. However, this toy was probably not as annoying, if only because it was
not as common, as a toy sold at Greenwich Fair, known as ‘All the Fun of the Fair’: ‘a mischievous little wooden instrument, with a rasp or toothed wheel’, which, when run down someone’s back, made a noise that sounded like fabric being torn. ‘These are for sale by thousands at every fair...Mr. B— and myself got scraped a dozen times the other day by the girls in the crowds as we passed along...You are obliged to take it with good humor, but I cannot say that I think it a very refined amusement.’ Refined or not, the writer nonetheless soon found himself buying one, whereupon ‘a couple of girls came up, and...wanted to know if I was not ashamed to be getting one, thinking, as well they might, that I was a little too gray and too bald to be amusing myself in that way; but if the jades had not fled in no time, I certainly would have scraped them in return.’

On a more sober and necessary note, ready and waiting on the streets leading into the City that were tramped every morning by ranks of City workers, were rows of shoeblacks: in the days before routine street paving, every respectable worker needed to have his shoes cleaned after walking to work. In the early part of the century, blacking, or shoe polish, came in liquid form, and boys equipped themselves with paintbrushes, enquiring, ‘Japan your shoes, your honour?’ Blacking paste became available in cake form from the 1820s. Dickens is irrevocably linked to this new product after his ordeal at Warren’s Blacking Factory, at 30 Hungerford Old Stairs.
⁵⁰
It was so easy to use that shoeblacks vanished from the streets, but in 1851 the Ragged School set up a Shoeblack Society, and soon their red-coated shoeblacks were seen throughout the city at fixed pitches. The charge was 1d for brushing a gentleman’s shoes and trousers, from which the boys earned about 10s a week in summer but in the winter only half that. (This is surprising: one would have expected the wet season to require more shoe-cleaning, not less.) Of this, the boys kept 6d a day, about a third of their earnings; a third went to the Society for its overheads, while the remaining third was put into a savings account for each boy. Boys of good conduct were
transferred from the lowest-earning pitch to more valuable ones. Because they were moved regularly, the value of each pitch was known, and the boys had to report their earnings honestly. In the first year, despite the Society having taken in twenty-seven boys with criminal records, only two had to be discharged for dishonesty. Five were given the fares to emigrate; five got good jobs; one was ‘restored to his friends’; three left of their own accord; four were sacked for misconduct and two for incompetence; while the rest continued as shoeblacks. Twenty-five of these boys supported their parents on their earnings.

Children, especially boys, made up a large segment of the street-selling world, and the founder of the Shoeblack Society described the ‘two currents’ that ran along every street, one ‘five or six feet above the pavement, one two feet below that’, the boys creating the lower one. On this lower level, equally ubiquitous, were the newsboys, who permeated every street in the West End and the City. By 1829, London was served by seven morning papers and six evening ones. At mid-century, one newsboy described his day. It began three hours before dawn, when he left his home to walk to the alley off Fleet Street where the morning papers were printed. There he and the other newsboys collected the papers that his employer, a newsagent, had ordered, folding, packing and bundling up the regular country orders to despatch by the first morning post, then carrying them to the main post office at St Martin’s-le-Grand, a few hundred yards away. After that they waited outside their masters’ shops; when the owners arrived to open up, they took down the big wooden shutters, bundled up more papers and set off on their rounds.

Some people ordered a newspaper every morning; others, for a reduced charge, rented a paper for a set number of hours, at a cost ranging from 6d to 1s a week, depending on the length of time it was kept, and the more or less popular hours. To purchase
The Times
at mid-century cost 6d a day, or £8 per annum, while rental was as little as £1 6s a year. If that was still too expensive, it was possible to rent the previous day’s paper by the hour, at half the price of the current day’s paper. All these orders had to be organized, and collections and redeliveries made for the rentals. At about nine the boys stopped for breakfast before returning to the shop to collect
more papers to sell in the streets or at railway stations: ‘
Times
,
Times
– to-day’s
Times
!
Morning Chronicle
!
Post
!
Advertiser
!
Illustrated News
! Who’s for to-day’s paper? Paper, gentlemen! News, news! Paper, paper, paper!’ At one they stopped for dinner, going home to their mothers if they lived near by. Many women performed piecework at home, either sewing for subcontractors, making matches or artificial flowers (both notoriously poorly paid), or sewing sacks and bags for the corn trade, the wool trade or other commercial uses. But many of the boys had mothers who were out at work all day, as charwomen, laundresses, market porters, street sellers or fishwomen; many more had no mother living. For these boys, lunch was a penny loaf eaten on the street, or perhaps bread and coffee at a stall, maybe even a pie if they were in funds.

After lunch they returned to their pitches, then it was back to the shop to prepare the afternoon papers for the evening mails. The rented newspapers had to be collected and reallocated, and – as any newspapers remaining unsold at the end of the day lost half their value and, after two days, all value – the boys ran an informal exchange programme. They met between four and five every afternoon on Catherine Street and at St Martin’s-le-Grand and the calls began: ‘
Ad.
for
Chron.
’, ‘
Post
for
Times’
, ‘
Herald
for
Ad.
’ But the trades were not always simple. Six o’clock was the hour that the last post left from the main post office, to reach the country that same afternoon. As posting time grew ever closer, the negotiations became more complex, with some chains involving three, four, or even as many as eight or ten papers. But timing was key. After the boys had amassed as many papers as they had orders for, and traded away as many as their employers no longer needed, they returned to their shops to make up the bags once more before heading to the post office. Policemen were always on duty outside the entrance to St Martin’s-le-Grand, keeping the way clear for the last-minute rush – this was a known sight of the city, with guidebooks recommending it to visitors. (The painter George Elgar Hicks’
The General Post-Office, One Minute to Six
was a huge success when it was shown at the Royal Academy in 1860.) Newsboys who were old hands at the game sometimes made a great show, waiting down the road until the clock began to strike six – on the sixth stroke, the gate closed for the day – dashing up in fine style on the
penultimate stroke, to the cheers of the crowd. With the final stroke, their day was over, until three hours before dawn the next morning.

Many boys, however, did not have an employer. They worked for themselves, standing outside offices, clubs and, especially, coaching inns or, later, railway stations and bus stops, selling a wide variety of items. Other children sold services. Much casual labour had to do with horses, in stables or on the streets. Boys hung about livery stables, where they helped the stable-hands for a few pennies, or for food. Dickens’ fiction teems with boys like Kit Nubbles in
The Old Curiosity Shop
who goes out to ‘see if I can find a horse to hold’ so he can ‘buy something nice’; another character in the same novel hands his pony and phaeton to a man ‘lingering hard by in expectation of the job’, while in
Dombey and Son
Mr Carker calls ‘a man at a neighbouring way to hold his horse’. All these men and boys expected to earn a penny for standing with a horse for up to half an hour. (Any longer than that and the horse needed to be taken to a stable.) One boy, in fiction, was a bit more entrepreneurial. In the 1821 comic novel
Real Life in London
, man leaves his horse with a boy while he visits his club. On his return he finds the boy hiring out his horse in penny rides to other street boys and this was, supposedly, his ‘
fifteenth
trip’ – which, to work as comedy, must at least have held the possibility of truth.

More usual was the boy who was given some bread and butter for helping a shopboy to polish the brass on the door of a chemist’s shop; or those who stood by the restaurants and saloons in the Haymarket late at night, hoping for pennies for opening cab doors ‘and putting their ragged coat-tails against the muddy wheels to protect the dresses of those alighting’. A woman who sold sheep’s trotters had a crippled son who cleaned knives for a family; although not paid, he was fed, which alone was enough to make a difference in mother and son’s weekly accounts. During a frost, when pipes froze, boys knocked on doors in residential districts, offering to wait in line at the standpipe for the householders; or they marched along the streets calling, ‘Water – water! any water wanted?’ and for 2d filled the householders’ buckets.

Boys haunted railway stations, carrying bags or helping porters push carts. Some were cab runners, waiting near the cabstands at stations, then
running behind any cab that left loaded with luggage. When the cab reached the passenger’s destination, the boy got the luggage down and (unless prevented by the passenger’s own servants) carried it into the house, for which he was then tipped. Attitudes to these porters varied widely. One journalist claimed that the runners shouted abuse if they weren’t permitted to take the luggage, preying in particular on women and servants; an American tourist, on the contrary, reported them waiting ‘very humbly’ for ‘Anything y’r honor pleases’.

Running porters performed the same service for omnibus passengers, waiting at stops by the railway stations and following buses when passengers got on with luggage. A journalist in the 1850s watched as a group of six boys, ranging in age from about seventeen to twelve or thirteen, ran behind his bus from Paddington to the Bank, in the City. At each stop, when a passenger with luggage got out, one boy peeled off to carry the bag home for a tip. The final boy, aged about fourteen, had to fight off ‘a half-drunken porter of forty’ who was standing at the Bank omnibus stop, also waiting for passengers with luggage. These older men, frequently unemployable alcoholics, were one of the reasons the boys ran in packs. The boy who won this job earned a penny or two for carrying a bag half a mile, having already run five miles from the station, but as the boys took it in turn to serve the first passenger, some of their journeys were shorter. Altogether, the journalist was told, the boy averaged three trips a day, on a good day earning 1s 3d, on a bad one 8d or 9d. His lodgings cost him 6d a week, and his food consumed the rest: like the crossing-sweepers, he worked barefoot, unable to afford the wear and tear on his boots.

A grown-up version of these boy porters, and slightly better paid, were the ticket porters of the City, one of whom, the stalwart and faithful Trotty Veck, was created by Dickens in a Christmas story,
The Chimes
. Ticket porters – recognizable by their ticket, their badge of office, which had to be worn, and by their white aprons – were licensed by the City to function as letter carriers and messengers: when in
Bleak House
Esther needs to send an urgent message to her guardian, she writes it at a coffee house, and sends it by ticket porter. They were also licensed to carry goods weighing up to three hundredweight (136 pounds) within a radius of three miles. Across the City
there were wooden pitching places, upright blocks on which parcels could be balanced while porters got their breath back. Despite these loads, the porters were stereotypically considered lazy. ‘Trotty’ was an exception, as his name suggests, but in
David Copperfield
Dickens presented the general view, as David watches a ticket porter dawdling along with a letter. ‘He was taking his time about his errand, then; but when he saw me...he swung into a trot, and came up panting as if he had run himself into a state of exhaustion.’