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Updated: June 22, 2025
The space in front of the cathedral was cleared at about eleven, and cocked hats and red-striped trousers then became the most noticeable feature. The crowd was jolly and perhaps a little cynical; picture-postcard hawkers made most of the noise, and for some reason or other a forlorn peasant took this opportunity to offer for sale two equally forlorn hedgehogs.
They were, perhaps, more apparent than usual on the present occasion; for in the short distance he had to go he saw two hawkers of halfpenny sheets bawling down unintelligible tidings to maids in the areas, and two or three groups gathered together in the sunshiny morning at the corners of the streets.
Their conclusions were fully justified from their own point of view, in a material sense. The hawkers who passed through Helpston were mostly men of substance, putting-up at the 'Blue Bell, and ordering the best of everything from kitchen and cellar; while the poet among them was a starving wretch, over head and ears in debt, and with one foot in the workhouse.
It was as though she had gone to sleep the night before, and waked again upon this scene unchanged, brilliant, full of colour, a chaos of decoration confluences of noisy, garish streams of life, eddies of petty labour. Craftsmen crowded one upon the other in dark bazaars; merchants chattered and haggled on their benches; hawkers clattered and cried their wares.
They promised they would never more deal with any but sober, honest hawkers, such as sell good little books, Christmas carols, and harmless songs, and desired the fiddler's woman never to call there again. This little incident afterward confirmed Mrs. Jones in a plan she had before some thoughts of putting in practice.
This is the Sidi Jamatkhana or caste-hall: and long before you reach the door threading your way through a crowd of squatting hawkers, your ears are assailed by the most deafening noise, reminding you forcibly of the coppersmith's bazaar with an accompaniment of rythmic drumming. The cause is not far to seek.
Wherever I looked I seemed to see nothing but the titanic tread-mill and to hear the clatter of its cogs: within, where the presses rumbled deep in the ground below me, where the telegraph clicked in the adjoining room and overhead the typesetting-machines rattled incessantly; without, in the medley of the street, the cries of the hawkers, the clang of car gongs, and the never-ending shuffle of feet.
The baby was not hers, but belonged to a woman who had just been arrested on a serious charge and taken to Glenbury jail; the hawkers with whom she had associated disclaimed all responsibility for the child. "The only thing to be done is to send it to the Union," said the police sergeant.
We are afraid, however, that the ingenious writers who supply the hawkers and ballad-singers, have very nearly monopolised that department, and are probably better qualified to hit the taste of their customers, than Mr. Southey, or any of his brethren, can yet pretend to be.
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.
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