Of the Street-Sellers of Manufactured Articles.

These traders consist of: (1) The vendors of metal articles; (2) Of chemical articles; (3) Of China, glass, and stone articles; (4) Of linen, cotton, and other textile fabrics; and (5) Of miscellaneous articles. In this classification I do not include second-hand articles, nor yet the traffic of those who make the articles they sell, and who are indeed street-artizans rather than street-sellers.

Under the first head are included, the vendors of razors, table and penknives, tea-trays, dog-collars, key-rings, articles of hardware, small coins and medals, pins and needles, jewellery, snuffers, candlesticks, articles of tin-ware, tools, card-counters, herring-toasters, trivets, gridirons, pans, tray-stands (as in the roasting of meat), and Dutch ovens.

Of the second description are the vendors of blacking, black-lead, lucifer matches, corn-salves, grease-removing compositions, china and glass cements, plating-balls, rat and beetle poisons, crackers, detonating-balls, and cigar-lights.

Under the third head come all street-sold articles of China, glass, or stone manufacture, including not only “crockery,” but vases, chimney-ornaments, and stone fruit.

The fourth head presents the street-vending of cotton, silken, and linen-manufactures; such as sheetings, shirtings, a variety of laces, sewing cotton, threads and tapes, articles of haberdashery and of millinery, artificial flowers, handkerchiefs, and pretended smuggled goods.

Among the fifth class, or the “miscellaneous” street-sellers, are those who vend cigars, pipes, tobacco and snuff-boxes and cigar-cases, accordions, spectacles, hats, sponge, combs and hair-brushes, shirt-buttons and coat-studs, “lots,” rhubarb, wash-leather, paper-hangings, dolls, Bristol and other toys, saw-dust, fire-wood, and pin-cushions.

There are many other manufactured articles sold in the streets, but their description will be more proper under the head of Street Artisans.

The street-sellers of manufactured articles present, as a body, so many and often such varying characteristics, that I cannot offer to give a description of them as a whole, as I have been able to do with other and less diversified classes.

Among them are several distinct and peculiar street-characters, such as the pack-men, who carry their cotton or linen goods in packs on their backs, and are all itinerants. Then there are duffers, who vend pretended smuggled goods, handkerchiefs, silks, tobacco or cigars; also, the sellers of sham sovereigns and sham gold rings for wagers. The crockery-ware and glass-sellers (known in the street-trade as “crocks”), are peculiar from their principle of bartering. They will sell to any one, but they sell very rarely, and always clamour in preference for an exchange of their wares for wearing-apparel of any kind. They state, if questioned, that their reason for doing this is--at least I heard the statement from some of the most intelligent among them--that they do so because, if they “sold outright,” they required a hawker’s license, and could not sell or “swop” so cheap.

Some of the street-sellers of manufactured articles are also patterers. Among these are the “cheap Jacks,” or “cheap Johns;” the grease and stain removers; the corn-salve and plate-ball vendors; the sellers of sovereigns and rings for wagers; a portion of the lot-sellers; and the men who vend poison for vermin and go about the streets with live rats clinging to, or running about, their persons.

This class of street-sellers also includes many of the very old and the very young; the diseased, crippled, maimed, and blind. These poor creatures sell, and sometimes obtain a charitable penny, by offering to sell such things as boxes of lucifer-matches; cakes of blacking; boot, stay, and other laces; pins, and sewing and knitting-needles; tapes; cotton-bobbins; garters; pincushions; combs; nutmeg-graters; metal skewers and meat-hooks; hooks and eyes; and shirt-buttons.

The rest of the class may be described as merely street-sellers; toiling, struggling, plodding, itinerant tradesmen.