But the true “nature” of London is not shrubbery or parkland, but human nature. At night beneath the shade of the trees, according to the Earl of Rochester, “Are buggeries, rapes and incests made” while Rosamond’s Pond on the south-west side of St. James’s Park became notorious for suicides.
In Spring Gardens were a bowling green and butts for target practice. In the New Spring Gardens, later Vauxhall Gardens, there were avenues and covered walks. Small green refreshment huts sold wine and punch, snuff and tobacco, sliced ham and quartered chicken, while ladies of doubtful morals sauntered among the trees with gold watches dangling from their necks as a token of their trade. The apprentices and their girls would visit Spa Fields in Clerkenwell or the Grotto Gardens in Rosoman Street, where they were encouraged to consume tea or ices or alcohol, to the accompaniment of song, music and generally “low” entertainment.
Much of that vigour has now vanished. The parks are now characteristically restful places within the noise and uproar of London. They attract those who are unhappy or ill at ease. The idle and the vagrant sleep more easily beneath the trees, together with those who are simply exhausted by the city. London parks have often been called the “lungs” of the city, but the sound is that of sleep. “It being mighty hot and I weary,” Pepys wrote on 15 July 1666, “lay down upon the grass by the canalle [in St. James’s Park], and slept awhile.” It is a world of weariness which Hogarth depicted in an engraving that shows a London dyer and his family return from Sadler’s Wells. The landscape behind them is one of sylvan charm but they are returning on the dusty road to the city. The plump and pregnant wife is dressed according to city fashion, and sports a fan with a classical motif upon it; but she is pregnant because she has cuckolded her husband, and the man himself looks tired and dejected as he carries an infant in his arms. Their two other children fight, and their dog looks at the canal which takes water from Islington into the conduits of London. Everything denotes heat and enervation, as an expedition out of London comes to its inevitable end. In more recent days, too, exhausted and fretful citizens still come back to London from their “outings” like prisoners returning to gaol.
CHAPTER 17. Music, Please
By the middle of the nineteenth century the pleasure gardens were outmoded, and their legacy lay in the concert rooms which sprang up within the city. In 1763 it was advertised that in the “great room” of Spring Gardens the seven-year-old Mozart would be seen “playing the Harpsichord in a Perfection it surmounts all … Imagination.” But formal music-making was not the only music of London. London’s arias and laments began with the first street trader and have continued ever since. It has often been noted that the “low” culture of the native Londoner can revitalise and refashion the forces of traditional culture. The spectacle of the infant Mozart playing in a music room is complemented by Handel’s remark that “hints of his very best songs have several of them been owing to the sounds in his ears of cries in the streets.” In the city, “high” and “low” are inextricably mingled.
We hear the merchants of medieval Cheapside, singing out in London Lickpenny with “Strabery ripe” and “Cherryes in the ryse.” “Here is Parys thred, finest in the land … Hot shepe’s feete … Makerell … ryshes grene!” The costermonger sold “Costards!,” which were big apples, but in later centuries the “coster,” with his horse and cart, cried out, “Soles, oh! … Live haddick … Ee-ee-eels alive, oh! … Mackareel! mack-mack-mackareel!” So it continued, down other streets and other centuries. “Pretty Maids Pretty Pins Pretty Women … Buy My Great Eeels … Diddle Diddle Diddle Dumplens Ho … Any Card Matches or Savealls … Buy any Wax or Wafers … Old Shoes for Some Brooms … Buy a Rabbit a Rabbet … Buy a Fork or Fire Shovel … Crab Crab Crab any Crab … Buy my fat Chickens … Old Chairs to mend … Any Kitchen Stuff Have You Maids … 4 Pair For A Shilling Holland Socks … Buy My 4 Ropes of Hard Onyons … Any Work for John Cooper … New River Water.”
Volumes have been written about these London cries, and we also have images of the tradespeople who uttered them. This identification was another way of deciphering the chaos of the city and of creating out of the poor or “lower order” a gallery of characters. The seller of cod, for example, wears an old apron, while the vendor of shoes sports a cape. The seller of dried hake carries the basket of that commodity upon her head, but the vendor of oranges and lemons carries her bounty at her waist. The Irish were known to sell rabbits and milk, the Jews old clothes and hare-skins, the Italians looking-glasses and pictures. The old woman selling fire-shovels dresses herself in an old-fashioned cone-shaped hat as a representation of the wintry months. Countrywomen entering the metropolis to sell their wares characteristically wore red cloaks and straw hats, while the countrymen wove flowers in their hair. Those who sold fish were generally the poorest, while women selling clothes were the most smartly dressed.
Yet the clothing of most street vendors bears the unmistakable mark of destitution, with worn and tattered dresses or coats. Many of these tradespeople were crippled or deformed and, as the editor of Marcellus Laroon’s The Cryes of the City of London Drawne after the Life, Sean Shesgreen, has noted, “If they give one impression more than any other, it is a care-worn melancholy.” Laroon’s portraits are distinctly individual, unlike “types” or categories, and in his art we can see the lineaments of specific fate and circumstance. The distinctive features he depicted in the 1680s remain the silent token of many generations who have walked crying through the streets of the city.
Even as the poor trader died-or left some scanty stock to another-his or her cry was taken up like an echo. It was certainly true that, as Addison wrote in 1711, “People know the Wares they deal in rather by their Tunes than by their Words.” The words were often indistinct or indistinguishable: the mender of old chairs was recognised by his low and melancholy note, while the retailer of broken glass specialised in a sort of plaintive shriek quite appropriate to his goods. But even the music itself might become confused and confusing. The vendor of shrimps could adopt the same tune as the vendor of watercress, and potatoes were sold with the same cry as that of cherries.
There was also in the passage of years, or centuries, the steady clipping or abbreviation of jargon. “Will you buy any milk today, mistress” became “Milk maids below,” then “Milk below,” then “Milk-o” and, finally, “Mieu” or “Mee-o.” “Old clothes” became “Ogh clo” or “owld clo.” “Salted hake” became “Poor Jake” or “Poor Jack”; then “Poor John” became the recognisable phrase for the vendors of dried cod. The chimney-sweep’s cry became “’we-ep” or “’e-ep” and Pierce Egan, author of Life in London, recalled “one man from whom I could never make out more than happy happy happy now.”
As London grew larger and noisier, the cries became louder-perhaps, even, more desperate and more hysterical. From a distance of half a mile, they were a low, steady and continuous roar much like a fall of water; they became a Niagara of voices. But in the middle of the city, they were a great turmoil of notes. London to foreign observers was “a distracted City” and Samuel Johnson noted that “The attention of a new-comer is generally first struck by the multiplicity of the cries that stun him in the street.” Stun, stunner, stunning-it is a true London word. As the print salesman said of his wares placed in an upturned umbrella-“It’ll show stunnin’, and sell as yer goes.”