Palace and Hovel; Or, Phases of London LifeKirwan, Daniel Joseph
History
Palace and Hovel; Or, Phases of London Life
Kirwan, Daniel Joseph
London (England) -- Description and travel; London (England) -- Social life and customs
This quarter is the principal resort of the "costermongers" of
London. The word "costermonger" has an equivalent which is better
known as "peddler." All those who vend or hawk vegetables, fruit,
carrion meat, game, fowl, ginger beer, nuts, or, in fact, any of the
numerous articles or commodities of refuse merchandise found on the
barrows and wagons of the London peddlers, are called by the London
term "costermongers." The word is an old one used by Shakespeare,
and therefore has, if none other, the merit of antiquity of the most
genuine kind.
There are in London proper, embracing its suburbs, of both
sexes--including men, women, and children--according to information
which I had procured from the police and physicians, who have means of
knowing, about 23,000 costermongers. These people are from daybreak
until midnight in the open air, I might say, for their marketing is
done as early as four or five o'clock in the morning; and then, after
an hour or so spent in marketing, comes the cheap, scanty breakfast,
consisting of a pound of bread, a "saveloy," which is a sort of a
sausage, at a penny a piece, about four inches long and two inches in
circumference, quite succulent to the costermonger's palate, or perhaps
a piece of beef or bacon of the kind that is vended from barrows in the
London streets at two pence a pound, the refuse of the butchers' shops
and pieces unfit for a ready sale.
Among these refuse pieces are small portions of ham, shoulders, and
pork, fragments of bacon, "snag" pieces, and mutton, and a very
suspicious veal, which is often sold by these same hawkers in the
suburbs to old maids for cats' meat. Sometimes the "coster" will take
a pint of sloppy coffee, which he gets for three half-pence, with his
brief breakfast; at other times he prefers a quartern of gin "neat,"
at two-pence; and again he will be satisfied with a mug of beer at
two-pence. As early as 7 o'clock in the morning the hideous noises,
which can only come from the throat of a costermonger, are heard in the
London streets, awakening those who wish to sleep late, and, to make
matters worse, no person, unless the costermonger himself, can by any
application ever understand the exact words of their cries. They are
only to be recognized by sound, and, therefore, it is always necessary
to appear at a window or doorway in order to discover the precise
article which the coster wishes you to buy.
[Sidenote: SALE OF WATER CRESSES.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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