Lives of Famous London Beggars: With Forty Portraits of the Most Remarkable.Smith, John Thomas
History
Lives of Famous London Beggars: With Forty Portraits of the Most Remarkable.
Smith, John Thomas
Beggars -- England -- London
Those who beg old shoes, such as Grannee Manoo, make as much as six or
seven shillings a day. They sell them to the people who live in cellars
in Monmouth Street, or stalls in Food and Raiment Alley, Rosemary Lane,
&c. These persons give them new soles, and are called Translators. In
Mountsorrel, Leicestershire, a cobbler of the name of Bates styles
himself a translator.
The plate of two Bone-pickers is the next to be described. The
physiognomy of the fellow who is stitching patches together to tack to
his coat, which consists of some hundreds of bits of old velvet,
carpets, &c., would baffle the skill of either Lavater or Spurzheim; it
has the mixture of the idiot, the goat, and the bull-dog. Such a visage
might have been useful to Spagnolet, or his pupil Salvator. In order to
discover a few of the habits of this character, he was followed for
several hours through many streets, alleys, and courts, in the parish of
St Martin's in the Fields. On his arrival at Moor's Yard, which is said
to have been a place for the execution of public criminals in early
times, he was accused of stealing door mats, and with some difficulty
extricated his tatters from the tugs of a couple of dogs. In Hartshorn
Lane, in the Strand, at one time the residence of Ben Jonson, he was
seen to take up a brick, and throw it at two curs fighting for a bone,
which he picked up and put into his bag. These bones are bought by the
burners at Haggerstone, Shoreditch, and Battlebridge, at two shillings
per bushel, in which half a bushel is given over, that being bone
measure.
[Illustration: PLATE XXVI.
Two bone-pickers, one of them stitching patches together to tack to his
coat.]
Bill Row and John Taylor, two grubbers, are introduced in the next
plate. These men, with Stephen Lloyd, form the sum total of their
description in London. They procure a livelihood by whatever they find
in grubbing out the dirt from between the stones with a crooked bit of
iron, in search of nails that fall from horse-shoes, which are allowed
to be the best iron that can be made use of for gun-barrels; and though
the streets are constantly looked over at the dawn of day by a set of
men in search of sticks, handkerchiefs, shawls, &c., that may have been
dropped during the night, yet these grubbers now and then find rings
that have been drawn off with the gloves, or small money that has been
washed by the showers between the stones. These men are frequently
employed to clear gully-holes and common sewers, the stench of which is
so great that their breath becomes pestilential; and its noxious quality
on one occasion had so powerful an effect on a man of the name of Dixie,
as to deprive him of two of his senses, smelling and tasting, and yet
Ned Flowers followed this calling for forty years.
[Illustration: PLATE XXVII.
Bill Row and John Taylor, two grubbers.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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