Jemmy Catnach’s Cries Of London
Jemmy (James) Catnach of Monmouth Court was celebrated for publishing ballads, penny awfuls, and children’s farthing and halfpenny chapbooks. As publisher, compositor and poet, he established the Seven Dials Press in 1813.
Notorious for playing fast and loose with the truth, he published a sensational pamphlet in 1818, claiming that a butcher in Drury Lane was selling sausages made of human flesh, and ended up in the Middlesex House of Detention in Clerkenwell.
Such was Catnach’s love for ballads, he kept a fiddler on the premises at one time so that ballad singers could come in and audition their compositions for publication. Of all the Cries of London I have published these are most modestly produced and crudely wrought images, yet I love them for their strong images and graphic vitality.
Clothes Pegs, Props & Lines – Come buy and save your clothes from dirt, they’ll save you washing many a shirt!
Filberts – I sell them for a groat a pound and warrant them all good and sound!
Sweep – If you rightly understand me, with my brush, broom and my rake, such cleanly work I’ll make…
Peas & Beans – Come buy my Windsor beans and peas, you’ll see no more this year like these!
Toys for Girls & Boys – only a penny, or a dirty phial or bottle
Strawberries – Strawberries & cream are charming and sweet, mix them and try how delightful to eat
When Good Friday comes, Hot Cross Buns!
Oranges – I sell them at two for a penny, ripe, juicy and sweet, just fit for to eat, so customers buy a good many
Milk Below! – Rain, frost or snow, or hot or cold, I travel up and down, the cream & milk you buy from me is the best in town for custards, puddings, or for tea, there’s none like those you’ll buy from me
Crumpling Codlings – Come buy my Crumpling Codlings, some of them you may eat raw, of the rest make dumplings
Cherries – Here’s round and sound, black and white heart cherries, twopence a pound!
Toy Lambs to sell – If I had as much money as I could tell, I never would cry young lambs to sell!
You may also like to take a look at these other sets of the Cries of London I have collected
More John Player’s Cries of London
More Samuel Pepys’ Cries of London
Geoffrey Fletcher’s Pavement Pounders
William Craig Marshall’s Itinerant Traders
H.W.Petherick’s London Characters
John Thomson’s Street Life in London
Aunt Busy Bee’s New London Cries
Marcellus Laroon’s Cries of London
William Nicholson’s London Types
Francis Wheatley’s Cries of London
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana of 1817
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana II
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana III
Thomas Rowlandson’s Lower Orders
More of Thomas Rowlandson’s Lower Orders
Adam Dant’s New Cries of Spittlefields
To save others the task of googling, codlings are apples.
http://www.foodsofengland.co.uk/codlins.htm
I love the donkey.
Winderful pictures, Thank You!!????????
You might like to know that two books by Charles Hindley about Catnach and his press have been reissued by Cambridge University Press: ‘History of the Catnach Press
At Berwick-upon-Tweed, Alnwick and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in Northumberland, and Seven Dials, London’ (https://bit.ly/3jaHwJF) and ‘The Life and Times of James Catnach, (Late of Seven Dials), Ballad Monger’ (https://bit.ly/31fJl1S).