The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London (43 page)

From March to October, wink men also purchased their stock at Billingsgate, where they could have their periwinkles prepared for them by the dealer for an extra 4d a week. Periwinkles were profitable, and wink men made up to 12s a week in summer, but in winter, when winkles were out of season and they switched to mussels and whelks, their income dropped to about 5s a week. The wink men had one of the most eccentric cries, calling, ‘Winketty-winketty-wink-wink-wink – wink-wink – wicketty-wicketty-wink – fine fresh winketty-winks wink wink’.
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Servant girls were good customers, the wink men said: ‘It’s reckoned a nice present from a young man to his sweetheart.’ Old people too ‘that lives by themselves…and [have] nothing to do pertickler’ also favoured winks, as extracting each one with a pin was ‘a pleasant way of making time long over a meal’.

Among the most popular prepared-food sellers were the hot-potato men, who began to sell in the streets from the 1830s. The potatoes were cooked
in bulk in cookshops (see p. 291), for a fee of 9d for a hundredweight (112 pounds), and were then transferred in smaller quantities to a portable tin box with legs, square or oval, and sometimes brightly polished, sometimes cheerfully painted. A few had brass ornaments, or were even solid brass, with patriotic names emblazoned on them as if they were steam engines: ‘The Royal Union Jack’, ‘The Royal George’ and ‘The Prince of Wales’. They had a hinged lid and a charcoal fire at the bottom under the main compartment to keep the potatoes hot, with a small pipe for the escaping steam. A recess on one side held salt, one on the other butter. The hot-potato season was August to April, and the hours of darkness were the best selling-time: one vendor told Mayhew that at ten o’clock on any given night he could walk down any street in the Borough in south London, a notoriously impoverished district, and sell 3s worth – thirty-six potatoes – right away.

Hot-potato men sold their wares from tin containers, the potatoes being kept warm by the charcoal fire underneath. The men expected to sell several dozen a night, so it is unsurprising that this illustrator stressed how heavy the containers were.

Equally popular were the muffin men, who patrolled the middle-class suburbs around teatime, ringing their small bells (except on Sundays: they still patrolled then but went bell-less on the Sabbath).
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They carried their goods in oilskin-covered baskets wrapped in flannel or green-baize lining to retain the heat, either over their arms or on their heads. Muffin men were young boys or old men – that is, those who could not earn a better living in some other trade – for the muffins generally came from one manufacturer, and his ‘lads’ had to pay for their own uniform of white sleeves and white apron, as well as the basket, blanket and bell. (Among the few sellers to carry goods on their heads, they wore caps rather than hats.) They received 3d for every 1s-worth of muffins they sold, and they could carry only a single shilling’s-worth before the muffins got cold. Given those geographical and physical limitations, and the fact that most people bought muffins only at teatime, being a muffin man was not profitable.

Neither was being a pieman. These men either had fixed pitches, or were flying piemen, walking the streets carrying a tray about three feet square, either on their heads or hanging from a strap around their necks. In the 1840s, the Corn Laws kept the price of flour high and, with it, the cost of pies.
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To maintain their price at the expected penny, the piemen were forced to scrimp: their pies were made with cheap shortening, or had less filling, or poor-quality meat. Many of the legends of cats’-meat, or worse, in pies spring from this period. In 1833, Sam Weller advises the horrified Mr Pickwick, ‘Wery good thing is weal pie, when you…is quite sure it ain’t kittens,’ but in summer ‘fruits is in, cats is out’. The legend of Sweeney Todd, the barber who murdered customers for his neighbour to bake into
pies, was also created in the Hungry Forties. Even the repeal of the Corn Laws did not help, because once flour became cheaper, pie shops began to open, which damaged the street-trade of the piemen even further.

Their customer base became confined almost entirely to boys, who worked in the streets, eating coffee-stall breakfasts, shellfish at lunch, hot eels or pea soup for dinner, perhaps with a potato, and a pie to fill in the gaps when they could afford it. What the boys loved about piemen was their method of charging. A pie cost a penny, but all piemen were willing to toss a coin for one: if the customer won, he got the pie free; if the pieman won, the pieman kept both pie and penny. Tossing for a pie was part of the language. Dickens used it regularly: in
Pickwick Papers
the stagecoach driver warns his passengers: ‘Take care o’ the archvay, gen’lm’n. “Heads,” as the pieman says’. In
David Copperfield
, little Miss Mowcher is like ‘a goblin pieman’ as she tosses up the two half-crowns she is paid, as did Montague Tigg in
Martin Chuzzlewit
, spinning a coin ‘in the air after the manner of a pieman’.

Pies were available all year round, but some foodstuffs were sold seasonally. Greenwich’s Easter Fair saw the last of the men selling hot green peas, which they ladled out of a tin pot into basins in halfpenny servings, alongside other dishes that remained popular for longer: pickled salmon ‘(fennel included)’, oysters, whelks and that fairground favourite, gingernuts. Fried fish, although becoming more popular in town, especially near pubs, was still mostly considered a racecourse delicacy. At Epsom in 1850 there were fifty fried-fish sellers, whose customers were mostly the boys who held the carriage-horses’ heads and did odd jobs, or were themselves sellers of other goods. Fried-fish sellers charged a penny for a piece of fish and a slice of bread, sold from newspaper-lined trays that hung from straps around their necks.

Some vendors set up on Sundays at working-class excursion spots, such as Hornsey Wood House, or on roads near pubs in the suburbs. Gooseberries or pottles of strawberries were popular on steamer excursions downriver to Greenwich on a summer Sunday too: ‘the working-people’s Sunday dessert’, they were sometimes called. The seller’s cry for strawberries was, mysteriously, ‘Hoboys!’ and was a sign summer had arrived.

Many drinks, naturally, were seasonal. Hot elder wine was sold in the winter in penny and halfpenny measures, with a small piece of toast alongside, to dip into the wine. This, said one street seller, appealed to the working classes, ‘but not the better order of them’. Peppermint water, too, was a winter drink: it was mint extract, purchased from a chemist, and diluted, sometimes with pepper added to give it more kick. Curds-and-whey sellers were occasionally still seen after the 1820s, although their drink was considered old-fashioned. There were also a few sellers of rice milk, which was four quarts of milk boiled to every pound of rice, sweetened and flavoured with allspice, and served hot, a cup for a penny. The customers for this were the very poor, who substituted it for a meal.

The weather had an effect on many other food and drink sellers’ trades. Cold weather obviously improved the chances of selling warming items like pea soup or pease pudding. One freezing winter, the young George Sanger, living with his showman father in the off-season, bought sugar and oil of peppermint, borrowed some pans to boil it up in and made peppermint rock to sell to the skaters on Bow Common and Hackney Marshes at a penny a lump, making several shillings’ profit in a few hours. Spring and summer brought the arrival of cooling drinks. Outside Rag Fair, in Houndsditch in the East End in the 1850s, a girl with ‘a horse-pail full of ice’ was selling something that looked like ‘frozen soap-suds’ in halfpenny eggcup sizes. In the same decade, ice cream first appeared, initially sold by Italian vendors, later by hokey-pokey men who were natives of Whitechapel and New Cut, with ‘Neapolitan’ ices that were rumoured to be frozen mashed turnip.
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More commonly available, outdoors as well as in, were ale, porter and stout, all sold by potboys employed by pubs and taverns. They walked the streets, smartly dressed in white aprons and white sleeves, usually carrying wooden frames divided lengthways into two compartments, into which they slotted their foaming cans, with a measuring jug hooked on the side, although some preferred long sticks with up to twenty cans dangling by
their wire handles. On weekday evenings these boys had set routes to supply local residents with their supper beer, but householders could also call to a potboy as he passed, as Dick Swiveller does in
The Old Curiosity Shop
. In the 1830s, Dickens wrote that at teatime householders opened their doors ‘and screamed out “Muffins” with all their might’, before retreating indoors until nine o’clock, when a potboy’s passing produced a repeat performance.

After the beer was finished, the pots, which were the property of the pub, were hung on the house-railings outside, to be collected by the potboys early the following morning, just as the milkmaids collected their jugs from the same place. In
Nicholas Nickleby
, there is one square in Soho that is almost entirely let out in lodgings, in which ‘every doorway [is] blocked up and rendered nearly impassable by a motley collection of children and porter pots of all sizes, from the baby in arms and the half-pint pot, to the full-grown girl and half-gallon can’. Even in the shabby-genteel, upper-middle-class neighbourhood of Miss Tox, in
Dombey and Son
, somewhere in a backstreet in Mayfair, ‘the top of every rail…[is] decorated with a pewter-pot’.

Theatres were lucrative places for night-time food selling: many street sellers either specialized in ready-made food for theatregoers, or they doubled up, working one line during the day and another at night. The Britannia theatre in the East End, a working-class house that seated nearly 4,000 people, had ‘no drink supplied, beyond the contents of the porter-can’, observed Dickens. However, ‘Huge ham sandwiches, piled on trays like deal in a timber-yard, were handed about for sale to the hungry, and there was no stint of oranges, cakes, brandy-balls, or other similar refreshments.’ Ham-sandwich sellers, wearing white aprons and white sleeves, and carrying trays or flat baskets covered with white cloths, also stood outside the theatres, often selling until 4 a.m. to those out on the town.

After the theatres closed in the West End, many of the audiences in the 1850s headed for the ham-and-beef shop at the corner of Bow Street, calling out for ham, beef or ‘German sausage sandwiches’, ‘half a pound of “cold round”, or three-pennyworth of “brisket”’. It was possible to eat at the shop, but most people took their orders away, ‘neatly rolled up in paper’, to eat on the street or at home, as Martin Chuzzlewit did when he
‘bought some cold beef, and ham, and French bread, and butter’, returning to his tavern room to eat it. These shops served sandwiches and cold meat all day, with hot meals at set hours. In the 1820s, according to the fictional
Real Life in London
, there was a chain of ‘fourteen to twenty’ ham and beef shops, where hot boiled beef and ham were available ‘at moderate prices’, and the offcuts were served to the less prosperous for a penny. By the 1840s and 1850s, this type of shop had window displays to tempt the hungry: a ‘long window-board lined with pewter, in which wells had been sunk like small baths to receive the puddles of gravy in which joints of meat were perpetually steaming…[together with] a pagoda of boiled beef…pegged into a pile with a metal skewer’. For 2d, a helping was put into a piece of newspaper, or customers brought their own dishes, ‘and those who have basins take gravy away’.

Oysters were sold on the street during the day, but at night oyster houses came into their own, after the dancing saloons closed between two and four in the morning, opening when ordinary hard-working people were going to bed. (There were also oyster houses in the City, but these were closed in the evenings.) In the 1850s, the oyster houses in the West End were scattered around the Haymarket, the red-light district, as well as in the Strand and close to the theatres and other late-night locations: at the Opera Colonnade by the Haymarket, on the corner of Leicester Square, in Rupert Street and Coventry Street, and near the Argyle Rooms, the Haymarket theatre and the Opera House. More were on Holborn, such as the one described by Dickens in 1835 as being ‘on a magnificent scale’, with ‘a little red box with a green curtain’, behind which the customers could sit and eat.

In the 1820s, the oyster houses had been designed mostly as retail outlets, looking very much like fishmongers, with either plate-glass windows revealing trays of oysters, or with an open hatch to the street and a slab for displaying oysters and other food to passers-by. By the 1850s and 1860s, the ‘best shell fish shop in the metropolis’ was Scott’s Oyster House, at the north end of the Haymarket, which had a counter at the front and behind it a range of shellfish: lobster, prawns, crabs, mussels and periwinkles. The owner, his wife and three men served the customers, who either took the oysters away to eat elsewhere, stood at the counter and ate them then and
there, or went to the back room, where ‘clerks, swells, men about town, Englishmen and foreigners’ all mixed. Upstairs was ‘more select’, as well as the haunt of women supposedly of dubious reputation. Some oyster houses were simpler: ‘lobsters, crabs, pickled and kippered salmon, bloaters, and dried sprats’ were sold to customers who stood at the counter, eating and drinking and then ‘contentedly wip[ing] their hands on the jack-towel on its roller afterwards’.