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Updated: June 10, 2025
It is all part of the general problem of the day, and the street-sellers, whether costers or those of lower degree, look forward apprehensively to changes which seem on the way, and puzzle their untaught minds as to why each avenue of livelihood seems more and more barred against them.
It was just sicca they my agent and the managers and a' had thocht would stand between me and winning a success in London. And as it's turned out it's the costers are my firmest friends in the great city! Real folk know one anither, wherever they meet. If I just steppit oot upon the stage and sang a bit song or twa, I'd no be touring the world to-day.
Laverty, Winans, Niblo, the Costers, Hones, Whitneys, Schermerhorns, Sol Kipp, Doctor Vache, Ogden Hoffman, Nat Blount, and scores more of bon vivants, hail fellows well met, would here end their ride for the day by 'smiling' with the worthy Corporal, and wash down any of their former improprieties with a sip of his ne plus ultra, which was always kept in reserve for a special nightcap.
Out of Leather Lane, with its ancient houses swarming with inhabitants and in all stages of decay and foulness, open other lanes as unsavory, through which the costers drive their barrows, chaffering with dishevelled women, who bear a black eye or other token that the British husband has been exercising his rights, and who find bargaining for a bunch of turnips or a head of cabbage an exhilarating change.
But among the customers, whose number all but forbade our passage through the street, with the noise of their feet and voices, there were, far beyond counting, those short, stubbed girls and women as typically cockney still as the costers ever were. They were of a plinth-like bigness up and down, and their kind, plain, common faces were all topped with narrow-brimmed sailor-hats, mostly black.
It wasn't given to us all to have a social tone, but the Costers surely had one and kept it in constant use; whereas the Wards, next door to them, were possessed of no approach to any, and indeed had the case been other, had they had such a consciousness, would never have employed it, would have put it away on a high shelf, as they put the last-baked pie, out of Freddy's and Charley's reach heaven knows what they two would have done with it.
It was Saturday night, and as they dipped down into the slums that lie under the shadow of the Abbey, Old Pye Street, Peter's Street, and Duck Lane were aflare with the coarse lights of open naphtha lamps, and all but impassable with costers' barrows.
They were now going by Clapham Common with an unbroken stream of vehicles of every sort coaches with outriders, landaus, hansom cabs, omnibuses, costers' spring carts and barrows. Every coach carried its horn, and every horn was blown at the approach to every village. The sun was hot, and the roads were rising to the horses' fetlocks in dust.
'Dear children, if you love me and I think you do, in dreams and out of them prepare the mystic circle and consult the Amulet! They did. As once before, when the sun had shone in August splendour, they crouched in a circle on the floor. Now the air outside was thick and yellow with the fog that by some strange decree always attends the Cattle Show week. And in the street costers were shouting.
Near Petticoat Lane, one of the oddest of London's odd corners, small newsboys rush up and take a cupful as critically as I have seen them take waffles from the old women purveyors of these delicacies about City Hall Park and Park Row, while hungry costers and workmen appear to find it the most satisfactory of meals.
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