Baker Street Elementary & The Victorian Web Presents The Life and Times in Victorian London

Transcription

1 Baker Street Elementary & The Victorian Web Presents The Life and Times in Victorian London

2 Baker Street Elementary & The Victorian Web The Life and Times in Victorian London # 41 Victorian Costermongers: "A Penny Profit out of the Poor Man's Dinner -- 06/08/2017

3 Welcome to topic number 41 today we will be looking at the costermongers who are common during our Victorian period. Copyright 2017, Fay, Mason, Mason

4 Victoria's reign is the costermonger's heyday even though the word had been coined in the early sixteenth century (coster is a corruption of costard, a kind of apple).

5 Costermongers are far from rich. It is estimated there are between thirty and forty thousand of them, quite a large number in a city of under two and a half million.

6 There is no mystery about what they do; they buy fruit and vegetables wholesale and sell them retail.

7 They are hawkers, since only a minority have fixed stalls or standings. The rest cry out their wares as they walk the streets with barrows, donkey carts, or shallows.

8 Earnings range from an average ten shillings a week to thirty, at a time when a collier's wages is around twenty.

9 Saturday night and Sunday morning are busiest. Men are paid on Saturday evening, while Sunday's dinner has yet to be bought.

10 At the market, brightness is the first thing you notice: naphtha flares, candles, gas jets, grease lamps, the fires of the chestnut roasters.

11 Then the noise: hundreds of traders at hundreds of stalls calling out their wares: 'Chestnuts, a penny a score hree a penny, Yarmouth bloaters 'Now's your time, beautiful whelks a penny a lot 'Penny a lot, fine russetts 'Come and look at 'em, here's toasters' Ho! Ho! Hi- i- i. Here's your turnips. '

12 Everything cheap and of use (or of no use) to the poor is there: saucepans, crockery, old shoes, trays, handkerchiefs, umbrellas, shirts.

13 There are thirty- two big street markets in London where costers live together in colonies in courtyards and alleyways.

14 Home for a family is almost invariably a single small room.

15 They distrust all authority, be it banks, the law, or a sovereign Parliament (they had no vote in the 1 840s, of course).

16 Cheating is wide spread. Weights are flattened to make them look bigger and heavier, measures are fitted with thick or false bottoms, so a quart measuring pot might hold only a pint and a half.

17 Half the costermonger population are coster born and bred. Girls can start work at six years old selling watercress in the day, nuts in the pubs at night.

18 Boys of seven join their fathers, often supplying a treble voice for the street cries as adults are usually hoarse from shouting.

19 Two to three thousand costers are probably Irish, driven out of Ireland by the recent Famine.

20 Twelve thousand or so are people down on their luck: labourers, mechanics, inn servants, greengrocers' assistants.

21 These late comers fare poorly, generally being middle- aged and unversed in all the dodges or tricks.

22 They even have their own dress code. In the late 1 840s they wear long waistcoats of sandy or 'rat skin coloured' corduroy with brass buttons or buttons stamped with a fox or stag's head.

23 Neckerchiefs called king's men were of green silk. Only actual starvation can induce a coster to pawn his king's man, and it is the first thing to be redeemed when he has borrowed enough to start again.

24 There is also back slang, a secret language exclusive to costers. It relies heavily on the written word. Some say it is used to cheat customers but that's unlikely.

25 Others say it is to keep prices and profits hidden from outsiders And not everybody bothers to learn it, particularly those not born to the trade.

26 "We pity the costers, " one man said. "It's just another way of starving. "

27 So we have completed topic 41 in our series Yes, but we ll be back with another topic soon

28 Original Source Material for for this topic: Sullivan, Dick. Victorian Costermongers: "A Penny Profit out of the Poor Man's Dinner

29 Baker Street Elementary The Life and Times in Victorian London IS CREATED THROUGH THE INGENUITY & HARD WORK OF: JOE FAY LIESE SHERWOOD-FABRE GEORGE P. LANDOW RUSTY MASON & STEVE MASON WE ARE EXTREMELY THANKFUL TO LIESE AND GEORGE FOR THEIR SUPPORT OF THIS PROJECT