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Updated: June 12, 2025
The white booths, following the direction of the course in their sinuous lines, looked like stately white marble streets and crescents in the dim, uncertain light of that hour which, between May 31 and June 1, is neither day nor night. Under the stands and around the booths, tabernacling beneath costermongers' barrows, and even lying out openly sub dio, were still the hundreds of human beings.
And the outer world, on its side, was equally indifferent. It left the villagers to go their own queer way, and recognized as it does in the case of other separate groups of folk, such as fishermen or costermongers that what seemed singular in them was probably justified by the singularity of their circumstances.
It was by no means the choicest part of the parish: the drainage was imperfect, the houses miserable; but wretched as it was it was a favourite haunt of the poor, and it swarmed with inhabitants of very various degrees of respectability. Costermongers abounded, strings of barrows were drawn up on the pavement, and the refuse of their stock lay rotting in the gutter.
Here ballad-bellowing, and organ grinding, and voices of costermongers, singing of poor men's luxuries, never ceased all through the hum of day, and penetrated far into the frowzy repose of latest night.
It is still quite early, two or three costermongers' carts are being wheeled along by their owners, fresh from Covent Garden; a lark belonging to the house opposite is singing merrily despite its small cage, and Lippa smiles as she recalls the old saying, 'Blessed is the bride whom the sun shines on.
They had met to talk about their grievances, and Lord Shaftesbury had attended the gathering and promised to help them, telling them to write to him if they required further assistance. The noble Knight of the Garter was not only interested in the costermongers themselves, but in their animals too.
He held a tallow candle to illuminate the copious narrative of his misfortunes; and the one reader he obtained was a fat man, who scratched his head, and remarked to Amelius that he didn't like foreigners. Starving boys and girls lurked among the costermongers' barrows, and begged piteously on pretence of selling cigar-lights and comic songs.
He looked at her with glaring eyes. If a man born a gentleman is ever in the mood to kick his wife to death, as costermongers do, he was in that mood. He had lost control over himself as completely as she had, and while she was only a desperate, hysteric girl, he was a violent man. "I did it because I did not mean to have them here," he said. "I did it because I won't have them here."
I did not find, and I hope my congregation did not find, that I faltered in my message that evening. I even venture to think that Mr. Ramsey's statements, which I shall repeat as faithfully as possible, will scarcely seem as convincing here as they did when he poured them forth so fluently to the costermongers and navvies of the Bethnal Green Road; and if this be true of Mr.
Walking northwards, the explorer finds himself in freer air, amid broader ways, in a district of dwelling-houses only; the roads seem abandoned to milkmen, cat's-meat vendors, and costermongers.
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