London: The Biography

Others became street-sellers, and were recognisable figures with nicknames such as the Cocksparrow or the Early Bird. They were envied by “unemployed little ones, who look upon having the charge of a basket of fruit, to be carried in any direction, as a species of independence.” This is an interesting vision which these children possessed; to have even the smallest means of earning a living allowed you to become master or mistress of the streets, to wander as you will. Small boys and girls, known as “anybody’s children,” were hired by costermongers or small tradesmen to sell stock upon commission. Each child would undertake to bring back an amount for the wares he or she had been given, and could keep as “bunse” anything earned beyond that figure. At first light the children would assemble in the various street-markets. A boy would run up to the barrows of costermongers with the plea, “D’you want me, Jack?” or “Want a boy, Bill?” They waited all day to “see if they’re wanted” and, if they were fortunate, became the favourites of certain costermongers. A boy was often employed at “crying” the goods which he and his master were pushing in a barrow. This might appear to be a charming custom, except that “we find the natural tone completely annihilated at a very early age, and a harsh, hoarse, guttural, disagreeable mode of speaking acquired.” Here the physical effects of living in the city are clearly delineated; London wearied even the voices of the young, and turned high notes into harsh ones.

Another occupation for the children of London was to provide light entertainment for the citizens. Many small boys, for example, used to keep pace with the trams “not merely by using their legs briskly, but by throwing themselves every now and then on their hands and progressing a few steps (so to speak) with their feet in the air.” The favourite locale for this energetic activity was Baker Street, where the children cartwheeled “to attract attention and obtain the preference if a job were in prospect; done, too, in hopes of a halfpenny being given the urchin for his agility.” This display in the streets is an aspect of theatrical London, too, but the spectacle had its consequences. Mayhew examined the hands of one “urchin” and noticed that “the fleshy parts of the palm were as hard as soling-leather, as hard, indeed, as the soles of the child’s feet, for he was barefooted.” So the city hardened its street children in every sense. The unhappy process is complemented by the description of their “stolid and inexpressive” countenances.

When the children worked “on their own hook” there were certain items which they could not sell. No child could master the sale of patent medicines because they did not have the experience to gull the public, nor were they skilful at selling “last dying speeches.” More curious, however, is the evident fact that these street juveniles did not sell such childish items as marbles or spinning tops. The reason here may be more profound. Who would wish to purchase items of childhood innocence and play from those who had always been denied such things?

Street children had their penny gaffs, commonly known as “low” theatres, where amateur dramatic representations were performed for an audience which also came from the street. They became a byword for filth and indecency. There were other forms of drama for more affluent London children, however, principal among them the toy theatre. It was sold with characters “penny plain and two pence coloured” which were cut out, pasted on to cardboard, glued to wires or sticks, and then pushed upon a wooden or cardboard stage. Play-acting was essentially a London pastime crucially combining the tradition of the caricature or satirical print, to be seen in the windows of every print-seller, with that of the London drama or pantomime.

The earliest of these childhood spectacles was manufactured in 1811, and they soon became immensely popular. When George Cruikshank was dilatory in their publication “the boys used to go into his shop and abuse him like anything for his frequent delays in publishing continuations of his plays.” The toy theatre was part of the history of London spectacle, in other words, emerging from the gothic and the phantasmagoric. It imitated the humour and heterogeneity of the London stage, also, with burlesques and buffooneries: The Sorrows of Werther became The Sorrows of Water, or Love, Liquor and Lunacy.

It was a city of melodrama in many respects, where the young loved to act and to recite. One of the daily reading lessons at London schools was taken from the drama, and there was a perfect “itch for acting” among the young boys and girls. In Vanity Fair (1847-8) Thackeray depicts two London boys as having a pronounced “taste for painting theatrical characters.” Another Londoner, writing of the early 1830s, stated that “nearly every boy had a toy theatre.”