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Updated: October 15, 2026
With many the adoption of such employment is the result of accident, and the women in it divide naturally into four classes: The wives of street-sellers; Mechanics, or laborers' wives who go out street-selling while their husbands are at work, in order to swell the family income; The widows of former street-sellers; Single women.
After spending a year in the peaceful solitudes of Africa, to find himself amid the cries of street-sellers, the rolling of carriages, and the incessant movement of the great city, was too great a contrast to him. Pierre was overcome by languor; his head seemed too heavy for his body to carry; he mechanically entered a cab which conveyed him to the Hotel du Louvre.
My feelings can therefore be imagined when I was roused from an afternoon nap one warm summer's day by the voices of men and women. Several possibilities came into my mind, and I imparted them to my wife. "They may be keepers." "They may be poachers." "They may be boys birds'-nesting." "They may be street-sellers of ferns, moss, and so forth." "They may be collectors of specimens."
Class C consists of 75,000, or 8 per cent., subsisting on intermittent earnings of from 18s. to 21s. for a moderate- sized family. Low-skilled labourers, poorer artizans, street-sellers, small shopkeepers, largely constitute this class, the curse of whose life is not so much low wages as irregularity of employment, and the moral and physical degradation caused thereby.