From all I can learn, the halfpenny-worth of fruit purchased most eagerly by a poor man, or by a child to whom the possession of a halfpenny is a rarity, is cherries. I asked a man “with a good connection,” according to his own account, as to who were his customers for cherries. He enumerated ladies and gentlemen; working-people; wagoners and carters (who “slipped them quietly into their pockets,” he said); parlour-livers (so he called the occupants of parlours); maid-servants; and soldiers. “Soldiers,” I was told, “are very fond of something for a change from their feed, which is about as regular as a prison’s.”
The currant, and the fruit of the same useful genus, the gooseberry, are sold largely by the costermongers. The price of the currants is 1_d._ or 2_d._ the half-pint, 1_d._ being the more usual charge. Of red currants there is the greatest supply, but the black “go off better.” The humbler classes buy a half-pint of the latter for a dumpling, and “they’re reckoned,” said my informant, “capital for a sore throat, either in jam or a pudding.” Gooseberries are also retailed by the half-pint, and are cheaper than currants--perhaps 1/2_d._ the half-pint is the average street-price. The working-classes do not use ripe gooseberries, as they do ripe currants, for dumplings, but they are sold in greater quantities and may be said to constitute, when first introduced, as other productions do afterwards, the working-people’s Sunday dessert. “Only you go on board a cheap steamer to Greenwich, on a fine summer Sunday,” observed a street-seller to me, “and you’ll see lots of young women with gooseberries in their handkerchiefs in their laps. Servant-maids is very good customers for such things as gooseberries, for they always has a penny to spare.” The costers sell green gooseberries for dumplings, and sometimes to the extent of a fourth of the ripe fruit. The price of green gooseberries is generally 1/2_d._ a pint dearer than the ripe.
When strawberries descend to such a price as places them at the costermonger’s command, the whole fraternity is busily at work, and as the sale can easily be carried on by women and children, the coster’s family take part in the sale, offering at the corners of streets the fragrant pottle, with the crimson fruit just showing beneath the green leaves at the top. Of all cries, too, perhaps that of “hoboys” is the most agreeable. Strawberries, however, according to all accounts, are consumed least of all fruits by the poor. “They like something more solid,” I was told, “something to bite at, and a penny pottle of strawberries is only like a taste; what’s more, too, the really good fruit never finds its way into penny pottles.” The coster’s best customers are dwellers in the suburbs, who purchase strawberries on a Sunday especially, for dessert, for they think that they get them fresher in that way than by reserving them from the Saturday night, and many are tempted by seeing or hearing them cried in the streets. There is also a good Sunday sale about the steam-wharfs, to people going “on the river,” especially when young women and children are members of a party, and likewise in the “clerk districts,” as Camden-town and Camberwell. Very few pottles, comparatively, are sold in public-houses; “they don’t go well down with the beer at all,” I was told. The city people are good customers for street strawberries, conveying them home. Good strawberries are 2_d._ a pottle in the streets when the season is at its height. Inferior are 1_d._ These are the most frequent prices. In raspberries the coster does little, selling them only to such customers as use them for the sake of jam or for pastry. The price is from 6_d._ to 1_s._ 6_d._ the pottle, 9_d._ being the average.