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Updated: June 10, 2025
Every kind of dingy trap went by, sometimes drawn by two, sometimes by only one horse shays half a century old jingled along; there were even donkey-carts. Esther and Sarah were astonished at the number of costers, but old John told them that that was nothing to what it was fifty years ago. The year that Andover won the block began seven or eight miles from Epsom.
He looked at all the contents of the windows as he passed; at the barrows of the costers and hawkers crowding up the side-streets; at the coarse-haired, bare-headed girls and women standing about in their shawls and big white aprons; at the weakling babies in their arms or about the thick, clumsy folds of their stained skirts; at the grimy, shuffling figures of their men-folk, against the accustomed background of the public-house corner, with its half-open door, and its fly-blown theatre-bills in the windows; at the drivers of the vans and carts, sleepily overlooking the huge horses, gigantic to the near view as some survival from the age of mammoths, which pushed gingerly, ploddingly, their tufted feet over the greasy stones; at foul interiors where through the blackness one discerned bent old hags picking over refuse; at the faces which, as he passed, made some special human appeal to him faces blurred with drink, faces pallid with under-feeding, faces worn into masks by the tension of trouble, faces sweetened by resignation, faces aglow with devil-may-care glee...he looked, as it were, into the pulsing heart of something which had scarcely seemed alive to him before.
I really thought the nor'-east wind had brought up a great haul with the flood-tide, and that innumerable costers were calling out some strange fish in the streets round Bonfire Corner; while our white cockatoo, `Ally Sloper, was having a bit of fun with himself and mother by imitating the cry!
These, frequently inundated by high tides, and left dry when the ebb begins, are some of the finest on the Thames. In the spring the grass grows almost as fast between the stumps as do the willow shoots. This is cut by men who make it part of the year's business to sell to the owners of the small dealers' carts and to costers. Formerly, when cows were kept in London, it was cut for their use.
Some London slum had been his cradle, the gutters of the great city the only University his feet had known, the costers' dialect was native to his tongue; yet no smug Churchman crowned with the laurels of the schools could so have stirred the blood of those wild lads, fresh from the boundless bush and lawless mining camps beneath Australian suns. "Prepare ter meet yer God!"
By the way, can anything be more loathsomely idiotic than the average music-hall ditty, with its refrain and its quaint stringing together of casual filthiness? If I had not wanted to fix a new picture on my mind I should have liked better to be in a tap-room among honestly brutal costers and scavengers than with that sniggering, winking gang.
The lady got out of her carriage, fed the animal some carrots from the cart, talked kindly to him right into his big, surprised ear, and stroked his nose. Presently the poor beast felt better and started off cheerfully with the heavy cart. When many costers learned that it was not only wicked but foolish to abuse their patient animals, they hunted for a white donkey to give the lady.
My reluctance proceeded from desire to remain with Sarah, when the time came; though the berth was exactly the thing I wanted, whenever I reasoned coolly on the subject. I shipped, accordingly, in a vessel of the Costers', called the William and Jane, bound to Holland and Canton, as her second-mate.
Among them were the fireworks, the masks and other appliances for commemorating the never-to-be-forgotten 'Gunpowder treason, and a couple of large balls of a dark-colored cord sometimes used by costers for securing their loads. That gave me an idea, too, as did the frowsily-smart female garments.
When he is disposed to be communicative, he soon gathers quite an audience in The Chequers, and should he drop a phrase like "George Robinson said to me, 'I've made my own book for Highflyer," or "Charley White, the Duke's Motto, wouldn't lay Mountebank any more," the awe-stricken costers stare.
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