Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 12, 2025
In vociferation the butchers doubtless excelled; their 'Lovely, lovely, lovely! and their reiterated 'Buy, buy, buy! rang clangorous above the hoarse roaring of costermongers and the din of those who clattered pots and pans. Here and there meat was being sold by Dutch auction, a brisk business.
In the daytime I talked to costermongers, street venders, the unemployed, and the corner loafers. One night I put my plain clothes on and spent the night with the "wharf rats" on the banks of the Thames. For seven days and for seven nights I continuously told that simple story told it in few words, closing always with an appeal for a change of life.
Every one knows what a multitude of things beds, sauce-pans, knives and forks, shovels and tongs, napkins, nut-crackers, and what not, are indispensable to the business of housekeeping. Just so with whaling, which necessitates a three-years' housekeeping upon the wide ocean, far from all grocers, costermongers, doctors, bakers, and bankers.
Women of loose class, flower-girls, fruit-sellers, and costermongers turned the forecastle into a pleasure-house where the pleasures were not always secret; where native modesty suffered no affright, and physical good cheer, with ribald paraphrase, was notable everywhere. "How did it happen, Michael?"
Now that he is matured, he is gratified if he can make drunken costermongers stare, so he must have been a very forward creature when his conceit was in full blossom. He began by spouting little recitations, and gradually practised until he could take his part in amateur stage performances.
The cab stopped, and out jumped a man in a coarse Petersham great-coat, whity-brown neckerchief, faded black suit, gamboge-coloured top-boots, and one of those large-crowned hats, formerly seldom met with, but now very generally patronised by gentlemen and costermongers. ‘Mr.
Here dwell costermongers, rag-pickers and street-cleaners; here the sweater hath his haunts. Huge rookeries and tenements, whose every brick exudes filth, teem with miserable folk. Each room has one or more families, from the second cellar at the bottom to the garret at the top. No greensward, no park, no blade of grass. Whole districts are as bare of beauty as an enlarged ash-heap.
Then he seated himself in the barge, and had a sail on the Thames, followed by innumerable beggars, sycophants, and costermongers. Swarms of frightened turtles were seen hurrying away in front of the cavalcade. "Such a set of white-washed heads heads with all outside heads with little inside and heads nobody knew what they had been made for, never before were seen displayed in one string.
Costermongers wander aimlessly, calling "walnuts" with a cry so melancholy that it sounds as the wail of the hopelessly lost may be imagined to sound when their anguish has been deadened by the monotony of a million years. About two or three o'clock decent working men in their best clothes emerge from the houses in such streets as Nassau Street.
We were within three miles of Westminster and Charing Cross, the government offices of a fifth of mankind were all within an hour's stroll, great economic changes were going on under our eyes, now the hoardings flamed with election placards, now the Salvation Army and now the unemployed came trailing in procession through the winter-grey streets, now the newspaper placards outside news-shops told of battles in strange places, now of amazing discoveries, now of sinister crimes, abject squalor and poverty, imperial splendour and luxury, Buckingham Palace, Rotten Row, Mayfair, the slums of Pimlico, garbage-littered streets of bawling costermongers, the inky silver of the barge-laden Thames such was the background of our days.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking