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Updated: June 10, 2025
They were in another lane thick with fog, which flared with the flame of torches stuck in costers' barrows which stood here and there barrows with fried fish upon them, barrows with second-hand-looking vegetables and others piled with more than second-hand-looking garments. Trade was not driving, but near one or two of them dirty, ill-used looking women, a man or so, and a few children stood.
But while we have been looking at these things the market has been getting emptier; and now there are only a few young lads left, who have little barrows and carts, and are called costers, and they are walking round the stalls and picking out what they will buy after the fishmongers have got all the best of the fish. It is time to go away, and soon Billingsgate will be nearly desolate.
"They put us in a room together then, and our counsel said how sorry they were, and shook hands, and went off to dinner and left us. I thought they might have waited with us and been a little late for dinner just that once; but no one waited except a lot of costers outside whom we did not know.
Strype describes Great Peter Street pithily as "very long and indifferent broad." Great Peter Street runs at its west end into Strutton Ground, a quaint place which recalls bygone days by other things than its name, which is a corruption of Stourton, from Stourton House. The street is thickly lined by costers' barrows, and on Saturday nights there is no room to pass in the roadway.
The very wallflowers and daffodils which crown the costers' barrows help to weave the spell; and, though pleasure-jaunts are out of the question, we welcome a call of duty which takes us, even for twenty-four hours, into "the country places, which God made and not man."
I'd be by hame in Scotland, belike I'd be workin' in the pit still. But whene'er I sing a character song I study that character. I know all aboot him. I ken hoo he feels and thinks, as weel as hoo he looks. Every character artist must do that, whether he is dealing with Scottish types or costers or whatever.
There were many costers and many barrows, but among them all hardly one so popular as "old Widgeon," who had been in the business forty years; and as he had chosen to remain a bachelor, an absolutely unheard-of state of things, he was an object of deepest interest to every woman in Leather Lane and its purlieus.
No man who looked upon that motley crowd could deny that, for good or evil, the love of the ring was confined to no class, but was a national peculiarity, deeply seated in the English nature, and a common heritage of the young aristocrat in his drag and of the rough costers sitting six deep in their pony cart.
Hilliard travelled back by the Great Western, after waiting about an hour; he had for companions half-a-dozen beer-muddled lads, who roared hymns and costers' catches impartially. His mind was haunted with deadly suspicions: he felt sick at heart. Eve's headache, undoubtedly, was a mere pretence for not accompanying Patty to-day.
Nearly all my costers were about, and they cried "Wayo!" with cordiality. Half the company on the field could not muster threepence in the world; many of them were probably hungry; many were far gone in drink; but all were eager for "sport." We shall have some talk presently about the bitter ennui of the poor man's life.
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