My Cries Of London Scraps
As part of this year’s Bartholomew Fair in Smithfield, I shall be giving an illustrated lecture in St Bartholomew’s Church at 7pm on Friday 15th September about my love for the CRIES OF LONDON, showing my favourite images of four hundred years of street life in the capital.
These modest Victorian die-cut scraps are the latest acquisition in my ever-growing collection of the Cries of London. The Costermonger scrap has the name “W. Straker, Ludgate Hill” rubber-stamped on the reverse and – sure enough – by pulling the London Trade Directory for 1880 off the shelf, I found William Straker, Silver & Copperplate Engraver, Printer, Die Sinker, Wholesale Stationer & Stamp Cutter, 49/63 Ludgate Hill. These mass-produced images appeal to me with their vigorous life, portraying their subjects with their mouths wide open enthusiastically crying their wares – all leading players in the drama of street life in nineteenth century London.
Newspaper seller (The Star was published in London from 1788-1960)
Sandwich-board man (Dan Leno started his career in Babes in the Wood at Drury Lane in 1888)
Milkman
Sweep
Watercress seller
Crossing sweeper
Shoe-shine
Buttonhole seller
Costermonger
You may also like to take a look at these other sets of the 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
More John Player’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
I am looking forward very much to your talk on Friday. I have also booked to visit Hoxton Hall, 195 Mare Street, a Roman amphitheatre and church crypt in Clerkenwell on Saturday. A full semi-weekend of interesting things!
The majority of scraps show traders in full cry. One of my favourite parts of the film of Lionel Bart’s Oliver, is how the director wove together all of the fictional street cries into the song “Who will buy?” I realise that it was a stylised pastiche, but it still appeals to me.