Of the Street-Sale of Vegetables.

The seller of fruit in the streets confines his traffic far more closely to fruit, than does the vegetable-dealer to vegetables. Within these three or four years many street-traders sell only fruit the year through; but the purveyor of vegetables now usually sells fish with his cabbages, turnips, cauliflowers, or other garden stuff. The fish that he carries out on his round generally consists of soles, mackerel, or fresh or salt herrings. This combination of the street-green-grocer and street-fishmonger is called a “general dealer.”

The general dealers are usually accompanied by boys (as I have elsewhere shown), and sometimes by their wives. If a woman be a general dealer, she is mostly to be found at a stall or standing, and not “going a round.”

The general dealer “works” everything through the season. He generally begins the year with sprats or plaice: then he deals in soles until the month of May. After this he takes to mackerel, haddocks, or red herrings. Next he trades in strawberries or raspberries. From these he will turn to green and ripe gooseberries; thence he will go to cherries; from cherries he will change to red or white currants; from them to plums or green-gages, and from them again to apples and pears, and damsons. After these he mostly “works” a few vegetables, and continues with them until the fish season begins again. Some general dealers occasionally trade in sweetmeats, but this is not usual, and is looked down upon by the “trade.”

“I am a general dealer,” said one of the better class; “my missis is in the same line as myself, and sells everything that I do (barring green stuff.) She follows me always in what I sell. She has a stall, and sits at the corner of the street. I have got three children. The eldest is ten, and goes out with me to call my goods for me. I have had inflammation in the lungs, and when I call my goods for a little while my voice leaves me. My missis is lame. She fell down a cellar, when a child, and injured her hip. Last October twelvemonth I was laid up with cold, which settled on my lungs, and laid me in my bed for a month. My missis kept me all that time. She was ‘working’ fresh herrings; and if it hadn’t been for her we must all have gone into the workhouse. We are doing very badly now. I have no work to do. I have no stock-money to work with, and I object to pay 1s. 6d. a week for the loan of 10s. Once I gave a man 1s. 6d. a week for ten months for the loan of 10s., and that nearly did me up. I have had 8s. of the same party since, and paid 1s. a week for eight weeks for the loan of it. I consider it most extortionate to have to pay 2d. a day for the loan of 8s., and won’t do it. When the season gets a bit better I shall borrow a shilling of one friend and a shilling of another, and then muddle on with as much stock-money as I can scrape together. My missis is at home now doing nothing. Last week it’s impossible to say what she took, for we’re obliged to buy victuals and firing with it as we take it. She can’t go out charing on account of her hip. When she is out, and I am out, the children play about in the streets. Only last Saturday week she was obligated to take the shoes off her feet to get the children some victuals. We owe two weeks’ rent, and the landlord, though I’ve lived in the house five years, is as sharp as if I was a stranger.”

“Why, sir,” said another vegetable-dealer, who was a robust-looking young man, very clean in his person, and dressed in costermonger corduroy, “I can hardly say what my business is worth to me, for I’m no scholard. I was brought up to the business by my mother. I’ve a middling connection, and perhaps clear 3s. a day, every fine day, or 15s. or 16s. a week; but out of that there’s my donkey to keep, which I suppose costs 6d. a day, that’s seven sixpences off. Wet or fine, she must be fed, in coorse. So must I; but I’ve only myself to keep at present, and I hire a lad when I want one. I work my own trap. Then things is so uncertain. Why, now, look here, sir. Last Friday, I think it was--but that don’t matter, for it often happens--fresh herrings was 4s. the 500 in the morning, and 1s. 6d. at night, so many had come in. I buy at Billingsgate-market, and sometimes of a large shopkeeper, and at Covent-garden and the Borough. If I lay out 7s. in a nice lot of cabbages, I may sell them for 10s. 6d., or if it isn’t a lucky day with me for 8s., or less. Sometimes people won’t buy, as if the cholera was in the cabbages. Then turnips isn’t such good sale yet, but they may be soon, for winter’s best for them. There’s more bilings then than there’s roastings, I think. People like broth in cold weather. I buy turnips by the ‘tally.’ A tally’s five dozen bunches. There’s no confinement of the number to a bunch; it’s by their size; I’ve known twelve, and I’ve known twice that. I sell three parts of the turnips at 1d. a bunch, and the other part at 1-1/2d. If I get them at 3s. 6d. the tally I do well on turnips. I go the same rounds pretty regularly every day, or almost every day. I don’t object to wet weather so much, because women don’t like to stir out then, and so they’ll buy of me as I pass. Carrots I do little in; they’re dear, but they’ll be cheaper in a month or two. They always are. I don’t work on Sundays. If I did, I’d get a jacketing. Our chaps would say: ‘Well, you are a scurf. You have a round; give another man a Sunday chance.’ A gentleman once said to me, when I was obligated to work on a Sunday: ‘Why don’t you leave it off, when you know it ain’t right?’ ‘Well, sir,’ said I, and he spoke very kind to me, ‘well, sir, I’m working for my dinner, and if you’ll give me 4s. or 3s. 6d., I’ll tumble to your notion and drop it, and I’ll give you these here cowcumbers,’ (I was working cowcumbers at that time) ‘to do what you like with, and they cost me half-a-crown.’ In potatoes I don’t do a great deal, and it’s no great trade. If I did, I should buy at the warehouses in Tooley-street, where they are sold in sacks of 1 cwt.; 150 lbs. and 200 lbs., at 2s. 9d. and 3s. the cwt. I sell mine, tidy good, at 3 pound 2d., and a halfpenny a pound, but as I don’t do much, not a bushel a day, I buy at market by the bushel at from 1s. 6d. to 2s. I never uses slangs. I sold three times as many potatoes as I do now four years back. I don’t know why, ’cept it be that the rot set people again them, and their taste’s gone another way. I sell a few more greens than I did, but not many. Spinach I don’t do only a little in it. Celery I’m seldom able to get rid on. It’s more women’s work. Ing-uns the same.”

I may add that I found the class, who confined their business principally to the sale of vegetables, the dullest of all the costermongers. Any man may labour to make 1s. 6d. of cabbages or turnips, which cost him 1s., when the calculation as to the relative proportion of measures, &c. is beyond his comprehension.

Pursuing the same mode of calculation as has been heretofore adopted, we find that the absolute quantity of vegetables sold in the London streets by the costers is as follows:

20,700,000 lbs. of potatoes (home grown) 39,800,000 „ (foreign) 23,760,133 cabbages, 3,264,800 turnips, 616,666 junks of turnip tops, 601,000 carrots, 567,300 brocoli and cauliflowers, 219,000 bushels of peas, 8,893 „ beans, 22,110 „ french beans, 25,608 dozens of vegetable marrows, 489 dozen bundles of asparagus, 9,120 „ rhubarb, 4,350 „ celery, 561,600 lettuces, 13,291 dozen hands of radishes, 499,533 bushels of onions, 23,600 dozen bunches of spring onions, 10,920 bushels of cucumbers, 3,290 dozen bunches of herbs.

OF THE “ARISTOCRATIC” VEGETABLE-SALE.

In designating these dealers I use a word not uncommon among the costermongers. These aristocratic sellers, who are not one in twenty, or perhaps in twenty-five, of the whole body of costermongers, are generally men of superior manners and better dressed than their brethren. The following narrative, given to me by one of the body, shows the nature of the trade:--

“It depends a good deal upon the season and the price, as to what I begin with in the ‘haristocratic’ way. My rounds are always in the suburbs. I sell neither in the streets, nor squares in town. I like it best where there are detached villas, and best of all where there are kept mistresses. They are the best of all customers to men like me. We talk our customers over among ourselves, and generally know who’s who. One way by which we know the kept ladies is, they never sell cast-off clothes, as some ladies do, for new potatoes or early peas. Now, my worst customers, as to price, are the ladies--or gentlemen--they’re both of a kidney--what keeps fashionable schools. They are the people to drive a bargain, but then they buy largely. Some buy entirely of costermongers. There’s one gent. of a school-keeper buys so much and knows so well what o’clock it is, that I’m satisfied he saves many a pound a year by buying of us ’stead of the greengrocers.

“Perhaps I begin the season in the haristocratic way, with early lettuces for salads. I carry my goods in handsome baskets, and sometimes with a boy, or a boy and a girl, to help me. I buy my lettuces by the score (of heads) when first in, at 1s. 6d., and sell them at 1-1/2d. each, which is 1s. profit on a score. I have sold twenty, and I once sold thirty score, that way in a day. The profit on the thirty was 2l. 5s., but out of that I had to pay three boys, for I took three with me, and our expenses was 7s. But you must consider, sir, that this is a precarious trade. Such goods are delicate, and spoil if they don’t go off. I give credit sometimes, if anybody I know says he has no change. I never lost nothing.

“Then there’s grass (asparagus), and that’s often good money. I buy all mine at Covent-garden, where it’s sold in bundles, according to the earliness of the season, at from 5s. to 1s., containing from six to ten dozen squibs (heads). These you have to take home, untie, cut off the scraggy ends, trim, and scrape, and make them level. Children help me to do this in the court where I live. I give them a few ha’pence, though they’re eager enough to do it for nothing but the fun. I’ve had 10s. worth made ready in half an hour.

“Well, now, sir, about grass, there’s not a coster in London, I’m sure, ever tasted it; and how it’s eaten puzzles us.” [I explained the manner in which asparagus was brought to table.] “That’s the ticket, is it, sir? Well, I was once at the Surrey, and there was some macaroni eaten on the stage, and I thought grass was eaten in the same way, perhaps; swallowed like one o’clock,” [rather a favourite comparison among the costers.]

“I have the grass--it’s always called, when cried in the streets, ‘Spar-row gra-ass’--tied up in bundles of a dozen, twelve to a dozen, or one over, and for these I never expect less than 6d. For a three or four dozen lot, in a neat sieve, I ask 2s. 6d., and never take less than 1s. 3d. I once walked thirty-five miles with grass, and have oft enough been thirty miles. I made 7s. or 8s. a day by it, and next day or two perhaps nothing, or may-be had but one customer. I’ve sold half-crown lots, on a Saturday night, for a sixpence; and it was sold some time back at 2d. a bundle, in the New Cut, to poor people. I dare say some as bought it had been maid-servants and understood it. I’ve raffled 5s. worth of grass in the parlour of a respectable country inn of an evening.

“The costers generally buy new potatoes at 4s. to 5s. the bushel, and cry them at ‘three-pound-tuppence;’ but I’ve given 7s. a bushel, for choice and early, and sold them at 2d. a pound. It’s no great trade, for the bushel may weigh only 50 lb., and at 2d. a pound that’s only 8s. 4d. The schools don’t buy at all until they’re 1d. the pound, and don’t buy in any quantity until they’re 1s. 6d. the 25 lb. One day a school ’stonished me by giving me 2s. 6d. for 25 lb., which is the general weight of the half bushel. Perhaps the master had taken a drop of something short that morning. The schools are dreadful screws, to be sure.

“Green peas, early ones, I don’t buy when they first come in, for then they’re very dear, but when they’re 4s. or 3s. 6d. a bushel, and that’s pretty soon. I can make five pecks of a bushel. Schools don’t touch peas ’till they’re 2s. a bushel.

“Cowcumbers were an aristocratic sale. Four or five years ago they were looked upon, when first in, and with a beautiful bloom upon them, as the finest possible relish. But the cholera came in 1849, and everybody--’specially the women--thought the cholera was in cowcumbers, and I’ve known cases, foreign and English, sent from the Borough Market for manure.

“I sell a good many mushrooms. I sometimes can pick up a cheap lot at Covent Garden. I make them up in neat sieves of three dozen to eight dozen according to size, and I have sold them at 4s. the sieve, and made half that on each sieve I sold. They are down to 1s. or 1s. 6d. a sieve very soon.

“Green walnuts for pickling I sell a quantity of. One day I sold 20s. worth--half profit--I got them so cheap, but that was an exception. I sold them cheap too. One lady has bought a bushel and a half at a time. For walnut catsup the refuse of the walnut is used; it’s picked up in the court, where I’ve got children or poor fellows for a few ha’pence or a pint of beer to help me to peel the walnuts.”