Pictures of saints were pasted on the wall above the fireplace. The first were what he called thriving costers - mother, son and daughter. Home for a family was almost invariably a single small room. There were thirty-two big street markets in London where costers lived together in colonies in courtyards and alleyways. In November the Lord Mayor allowed sprats to be sold (he had the power to do so, presumably, because he controlled Billingsgate, otherwise his writ ended at the City walls.)Business was poor in early December but flared up briefly at Christmas with holly, ivy, and oranges, and then the dead new year began again. October saw apples fading out and oysters coming in. In September apples were the new best sellers but income fell sharply. August was the time for plums and greengages when earnings peaked at thirty-six shillings. July came in with cherries and soft fruit. April brought roots - wallflowers and sweet-scented stocks - and takings picked up. Weekly average takings were then only eight shillings. The trade itself was highly seasonal and January and February were starvation months in their own right fish was the mainstay but wholesale prices were often too high for poorer men. Three wet days in a row brought them close to starvation. "Go to whatever corner of the Metropolis you please," Mayhew ended, "and there is the same struggling to get a penny profit out of the poor man's Sunday dinner." Everything cheap and of use (or of no use) to the poor was there: saucepans, crockery, old shoes, trays, handkerchiefs, umbrellas, shirts.
'Be in time, be in time' barkers shouted outside the circus where the show was about to begin. Here's your turnips.' Butchers in blue aprons bellowed 'buy, buy, buy, buy, buy' outside their open fronted shops with gas jets wavering in the air. Then the noise: hundreds of traders at hundreds of stalls calling out their wares: 'Chestnuts, a penny a score', 'Three a penny, Yarmouth bloaters', 'Now's your time, beautiful whelks a penny a lot', 'Penny a lot, fine russetts', 'Come and look at 'em, here's toasters' (that is bloaters, again).'Ho! Ho! Hi-i-i.
Brightness was the first thing he noticed: naphtha flares, candles, gas jets, grease lamps, the fires of the chestnut roasters. Mayhew gives a very vivid account of a Saturday evening market in November. Men were paid on Saturday evening, while Sunday's dinner had still to be bought. Saturday night and Sunday morning were busiest. Earnings ranged from an average ten shillings a week to thirty at a time when a collier's wages was around twenty. The rest cried out their wares as they walked the streets with barrows, donkey carts, or shallows (trays carried on the head).In the 1840s they accounted for ten percent of the cheaper produce sold in Covent Garden's wholesale market, and a good third of Billingsgate's fish. Technically they were hawkers since only a minority had fixed stalls or standings. There was no mystery about what did they bought fruit and vegetables wholesale and sold them retail. Mayhew thought there were between thirty and forty thousand of them, quite a large number in a city of under two and a half million. Costermongers qualified because they were far from rich. Later they were published as London Labour and the London Poor. Mayhew gave us a detailed snapshot of their lives, habits and beliefs in a series of twice weekly articles for the Morning Chronicle in the late 1840s.
Ictoria's reign was the costermonger's heyday even though the word had been coined in the early sixteenth century (coster is a corruption of costard, a kind of apple).