This man’s wife told me afterwards, that last winter, after an attack of rheumatism, all their stock-money was exhausted, and her husband sat day by day at home almost out of his mind; for nothing could tempt him to apply to the parish, and “he would never have mentioned his sufferings to me,” she said; “he had too much pride.” The loan of a few shillings from a poor costermonger enabled the man to go to market again, or he and his family would now have been in the Union.
As to the quantity of shell-fish sold in the streets of London, the returns before-cited give the following results:
Oysters 124,000,000 Lobsters 60,000 Crabs 50,000 Shrimps 770,000 pts. Whelks 4,950,000 Mussels 1,000,000 qts. Cockles 750,000 qts. Periwinkles 3,640,000 pts.
Shrimp selling, as I have stated, is one of the trades to which the street-dealer often confines himself throughout the year. The sale is about equally divided between the two sexes, but the men do the most business, walking some of them fifteen to twenty miles a day in a “round” of “ten miles there and ten back.”
The shrimps vended in the streets are the Yarmouth prawn shrimps, sold at Billingsgate at from 6_d._ to 10_d._ a gallon, while the best shrimps (chiefly from Lee, in Essex,) vary in price from 10_d._ to 2_s._ 6_d._ a gallon; 2_s._ being a common price. The shrimps are usually mixed by the street-dealers, and they are cried, from stalls or on rounds, “a penny half-pint, fine fresh s’rimps.” (I heard them called nothing but “s’rimps” by the street-dealers.) The half-pint, however, is in reality but half that quantity. “It’s the same measure as it was thirty years back,” I was told, in a tone as if its antiquity removed all imputation of unfair dealing. Some young men “do well on s’rimps,” sometimes taking 5_s._ in an hour on a Saturday evening, “when people get their money, and wants a relish.” The females in the shrimp line are the wives, widows, or daughters of costermongers. They are computed to average 1_s._ 6_d._ a day profit in fine, and from 9_d._ to 1_s._ in bad weather; and, in snowy, or very severe weather, sometimes nothing at all.
One shrimp-seller, a middle-aged woman, wrapped up in a hybrid sort of cloak, that was half a man’s and half a woman’s garment, gave me the following account. There was little vulgarity in either her language or manner.