Philobiblon

Wikipedia describes George Augustus Sala, the 19th-century journalist and writer as “voluble”, and that hardly covers it – he’s not a man to use five words when he could think of 50, but he’s nevertheless engaging, if distinctly lightweight. I’m reading his Twice Round the Clock or the Hours of the Day and Night in London (1859). He starts at 4am, at Bllingsgate Market. Since I’m staying now in Somers Town, thought I’d share this segment. (“Offal” means odd lots of different kinds of fish, or pieces of fish.)

“‘Offal’ is bought only by the ‘fryers’ … [He] buy(s) 15 to 20 doubles [baskets] of one kind or another; and in the season the habitues of the market say he will purchase from 25 to 30 bushells of periwinkles and whelks … this Rothschild of the offal tribe, resides in Somers Town. To him resort to purchase stock those innumerable purveyors of fried fish who make our courts and bye-streets redolent with the oleaginous perfums of their hissing cauldrons.” (p. 21)

The feel of Somers Town now – still crowded, old, a little down-at-heel, makes it easy to imagine these sellers plying their wares. (Although not as bad as a decade or so, a cab driver was telling me, when it used to be a serious red-light district, of which now only traces remain.)

At 5am Sala’s in Printing House Square, as The Times starts distribution:

“The tables are covered with huge piles of newspapers spread out the full size of the sheet. These are, with dazzling celerity, folded by legions of stout porters, and straightaway carried to the door, where cabs and carts, and lift express phaeton-like vehicles, are in readiness to convey them to the railway stations. The quantity … is prodigious,l but your astonishment will be increased when I tell you that this only forms the stock purchased every morning by those gigantic newsagents, Messrs Smith and Son, of the Strand. As the largest consumers, the Times naturally allows them a priority of supply, and it is not for a considerable period after they have received their orders that the great body of newsagents and newsvenders — the ‘trade’ as they are generically termed — are admitted, grumbling intensely, to buy the number of quires or copies which they expect to sell or lend that day.” (p. 35)

At 6am he’s in Covent Garden market…

“And so from all outlying nursery-grounds and market-gardens about London: from Brompton, Fulham, Brentford, Chicwick, Turnham Green and Kew; from sober Hackey, and Dalston and Kingsland, bank-clerk beloved; from Totten ham and Edmonton, sacred to John Gilpin, his hat and wig; from saintly Clapham and Brixton, equally interested in piety, sugar-naking, and the funds, come, too heavy to gallop, too proud to trot, but sternly stalking in elephantine dignity of profession, the great carts found to Covent Garden.” (p. 43 – Not too many of those places today are recognisable from those descriptions.)

But some of the produce comes from further afield: “Black steamers from Rotterdam and Anterwep belch forth volumes of smoke at the Tower stairs, and discharge cargoes of peaces and potatoes.” (p. 45)

At 7am he’s imagining himself in aristoractic nurseries:

“Many meek-faced, plainly-dressed young ladies, of native and foreign extraction, attached as governesses to the aristocratic families in question, are already in the school-room, sorting their pupils’ copy-books, or preparing for the early repetition of the music lesson, which is drummed and thrummed over in the morning pending the arrival of Signor Papadaggi or Herr Hammerer, who comes for an hour and earns a guinea. The governess, Miss Grissell, does not work more than 12 hours a day, and she earns perhaps 50 guineas a year against Papadaggi’s 1,500 and Hammerer’s 2,000. But then, she’s only a governess. Her life is somewhat hard, and lonely, and miserable, and might afford, to an ill-regulated mind, some cause for grumbling: but it is her duty to be patient, and not to repine.” (p.55)

Their sisters in taverns are also at work:

“Young ladies who officiate in the bar, and look very drowsy, in their curl-papers and cotton-print dresses, are rubbing the pewter counters and the brass-work of the beer-engines, the funnels and whisky noggins, washing the glasses, polishing up the mahogy, cutting up the pork pies which Mr Watling’s man has just left, displaying the Banbury cakes and Epping sausages under crystal canopies. … I like the barmaid, for she is often pretty, always civil, works about 14 hours a day for her keep and from 18 to 20 pounds a year, is frequently a kinless orphan out of that admirable Licensed Victuallers’ School, and is, in nine cases out of ten, as chaste as Diana.”

At 8am the shops start opening:

“In the magnificent linendrapery establishments of Oxford and Regents Street, the cast shop-fronts, museums of fashion in plate-glass cases, offer a series of animated tableuax poses plastiques in the shape of young ladies in morning costume, and young gentlemen in whiskers and white neckcloths, faultlessly complete as to costume, with the exception that they are yet in their shirt sleeves, who are accomplishing the difficult and myserious feat known as “dressing” the shop window. By their nimble and practiced hands the riched piled velvet mantles are displayed, the moire and glace silks arranged in artful folds, the laces and gauzes, the innumerable whim-whams and fribble-frabble of fashion, elaborately shown, and to their best advantage.” (p. 77 Not much has changed there then.)

At 9am: breakfast

“Are those eggs we see in the coffee-shop windows, by the side of the lean chop with a curly tail, the teapot with the broken spout, and the boulder-looking kidneys, ever eaten, and if so, what secret do the coffee-shop propreitors possess of keeping them from entire discomposition? For I have watched these eggs for weeks together, and known them by bits of straw and flecks of dirt mucilaginously adhering to their shells, to be the self-same eggs; yet when I have entered the unpretending house of refreshment, and ordered “tea and an egg” I have seen the agile but dingy handmaiden swiftly approach the window, slide the glass panel back with numble (though dusky) fingers, convey an egg to the mysterious kitchen in the background, and in a few minutes place the edible before me boiled, yet with suffient marks of straw upon it to enable me to discern my ancient friend.” (p. 79)

He’s of his time, of course, but it does feel like Sala’s heart is in the right place…