Lost labor: street cries and the representation of urban nostalgia

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Acknowledgements

The author thanks the two journal’s anonymous readers for their helpful suggestions on an earlier version of this essay. The research for this article was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, in the form of a Research Opportunity Grant administered by York University.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on the contributor

Tina Young Choi, Associate Professor of English at York University, is the author of Anonymous Connections: The Body and Narratives of the Social in Victorian Britain (University of Michigan Press, 2015) and of Victorian Contingencies: Experiments in Science, Literature, and Play (Stanford University Press, forthcoming 2021).

Notes

1 A number of critics have noted that Rossetti’s poem alludes to the period’s street cries, both as practiced by sellers of the period and as represented in children’s books (Lysack 2008, 30–34; Norcia 2012). Lorraine Janzen Kooistra (1997) observes that while Rossetti intended the poem for an adult audience, others occasionally (and increasingly, as the century progressed) perceived its appeal for younger readers.

2 For the sake of clarity, when referring to the genre (as opposed to the verbal calls themselves) throughout this paper, I use the capitalized form: “Street Cries.”

3 Mayhew writes that the “earliest record of London cries is … as old as the days of Henry V” ([1861] 1968, 1:7). For the early history of Street Cries through the eighteenth century, see chapters 1–5 of Shesgreen (2002).

4 At the same time, many felt that the overall amount of street noise, including that from traffic and street musicians, increased over the first half of the nineteenth century – as did public complaints about such aural assaults (2003, 45–47); noted mathematician Charles Babbage’s 1864 “Chapter on Street Nuisances” mentions street sellers, in addition to children, musicians, and tourists, as sources of urban noise (Picker 2003, 56–57).

5 Aimée Boutin describes a similar sense that traditional street selling and the cries associated with it were being lost in nineteenth-century France, though “it is difficult to measure accurately any timeline of the decline of peddling” (2015, 36). Nonetheless, representations of street cries, especially accounts nostalgic for a preindustrial Paris, seemed to grow more common over the course of the century, as did attempts at visual and aural classification (Boutin 2015, 35–60).

6 Mayhew quotes this passage in London Labour ([1861] 1968, 1:9).

7 Tuer notes that this practice of borrowing from earlier works was common in eighteenth-century examples as well (1885, 6–7).

8 For examples of this, see [Craig] (1804), and [Leighton] (1851). According to Arscott (1989) and Street (1989), contemporaneous artists working in other genres used architecture and setting in similar ways to conjure nostalgia for England’s past.

9 Similarly, late-nineteenth-century works depicting colonial natives, also often sold in sets, served both a taxonomizing function and a commodifying one, according to Ellen Strain, who writes that possessing a complete set of images was a proxy for the act of ownership asserted over peoples and resources (2003, 38, 42, 43).

10 An early volume, for example, shows the seller with hot coals under his tray of gingerbreads (Cries [c.1815], n.p.).

11 Tuer implies that the “maids” of the call refers to the “Irish or Welsh girls” who traditionally carried buckets of milk through the city streets (1885, 67), though many early-nineteenth-century Cries suggest that “maids” refers rather to the household servants to whom such calls appealed.

12 The second-hand-clothes dealer is elsewhere typically represented as untrustworthy (Cries 1799, 21; Cries [c.1809–1821], n.p.). The London Cries: The Figures in the Costume of the Last Century is a noteworthy exception, in that it uses the figure of the Jewish clothes-seller to warn against prejudiced stereotypes ([c.1823], 27).

13 He adds that, “As it is, even out at sea a large number of the cod die in the wells, from which they are immediately taken, and kept in ice” (“Fisheries” 1883, 955).

14 See, for example, the frontispieces of New Milk from the Cow ([c.1800–1820], n.p.) and of The New Cries of London (1823, 3).

15 Ibid.

16 Harris was first an employee, then manager for the Newbery firm, a business that had both publishing and patent medicine arms; he assumed ownership of the shop in front of St. Paul’s in 1801 (Shefrin 2004).

17 The verse repeats that found in an earlier, 1803 Darton and Harvey edition. Two later versions describe the orange-sellers as Irish (London Cries [c.1845–1862], 42–43; [Leighton] 1851, 4).

18 These works also frequently describe the orange itself as foreign. See, for example, “Fine China Oranges” (Cries 1806, 12) or “Sweet China Oranges” (New Cries 1823, 29); the latter concedes, however, that the oranges are not from China but, in fact, usually from Spain or Portugal (New Cries 1823, 30).

19 Very similar figures appear in other works, such as Harvey and Darton’s version (New Cries 1823, 29) and another published in New York City (London Cries [c.1835], title page).

20 The publisher for this version was located on Aylesbury Street, just a few streets north of Farringdon Market.

21 Smith’s volume was, according to Shesgreen, “the first history of the London Cries” (2002, 170).

22 In this regard, the figure of the simpler is, like the nettle-gathering Alice Wilson in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, a nostalgic figure, who embodies a forgotten knowledge drawn from nature in an age of mass-produced pills and urban chemists.

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Funding

The research for this article was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), in the form of a Research Opportunity Grant administered by York University.