mentioned by Goldsmith as characteristic of a village inn. These “Jew pictures” are now yielding to others.
Most of these articles were varnished, and 2s. or 2s. 6d. each was frequently the price asked, 1s. 6d. being taken “if no better could be done,” and sometimes 1s. A smaller amount per single picture was always taken, if a set were purchased. These productions were prepared principally for street-sale and for hawkers. The frames were narrower and meaner-looking than in the present street-pictures of the kind; they were stained like the present frames, in imitation of maple, but far less skilfully. Sometimes they were a black japan; sometimes a sorry imitation of mahogany.
In the excitement of the Reform Bill era, the street-pictures in frames most in demand were Earl Grey, Earl Spencer’s (or Lord Althorp), Lord Brougham’s, and Lord John Russell’s. O’Connell’s also “sold well,” as did William IV. “Queen Adelaide,” I was told, “went off middling, not much more than half as good as William.” Towards the close of King William’s life, the portraits of the Princess Victoria of Kent were of good sale in the streets, and her Royal Highness was certainly represented as a young lady of undue plumpness, and had hardly justice done to her portraiture. The Duchess of Kent, also, I was informed, “sold fairish in the streets.” In a little time, the picture in a frame of the Princess Victoria of Kent, with merely an alteration in the title, became available as Queen Victoria I., of Great Britain and Ireland. Since that period, there have been the princes and princesses, her Majesty’s offspring, who present a strong family resemblance.
The street pictures, so to speak, are not unfrequently of a religious character. Pictures of the Virgin and Child, of the Saviour seated at the Last Supper, of the Crucifixion, or of the different saints, generally coloured. The principal purchasers of these “religious pictures” are the poorer Irish. I remember seeing, in the course of an inquiry among street-performers last summer, the entire wall of a poor street-dancer’s one room, except merely the space occupied by the fireplace, covered with small coloured pictures in frames, the whole of which, the proprietor told me, with some pride, he had picked up in the streets, according as he could spare a few pence. Among them were a crucifix (of bone), and a few medallions, of a religious character, in plaster or wax. This man was of Italian extraction; but I have seen the same thing in the rooms of the Roman Catholic Irish, though never to the same extent.
The general subjects now most in demand for street-sale are, “Lola Montes,” “Louis Philippe and his Queen,” “The Sailor’s Return,” “The Soldier’s Return,” and the “Parting” of the same individuals, Smugglers, in different situations, Poachers also; “Turpin’s Ride to York,” the divers feats attributed to Jack Sheppard (but less popular than “Turpin’s Ride,”) “Courtship,” “Marriage” (the one a couple caressing, and the other bickering), “Father Mathew” (in very black large boots), “Napoleon Bonaparte crossing the Alps,” and his “Farewell to his Troops at Fontainebleau,” “Scenes of Piracy.” None of these subjects are modern; “Lola Montes” (a bold-faced woman, in a riding-habit), being the newest. “Why,” said one man familiar with the trade, “there hasn’t been no Louis Napoleon in a frame-picture for the streets, nor Cobdens, nor Feargus O’Connors, nor Sir John Franklins; what is wanted for us is something exciting.”
The prices of frame-pictures (as I sometimes heard them called) made expressly for street-sale, vary from 1d. to 1s. a pair. The 1d. a pair are about six inches by four, very rude, and on thin paper, and with frames made of lath-wood (stained), but put together very compactly. The cheaper sorts are of prints bought at the swag-shops, or of waste-dealers, sometimes roughly coloured, and sometimes plain. The greatest sale is of those charged from 2d. to 4d. the pair.
Some of the higher-priced pictures are painted purposely for the streets, but are always copies of some popular engraving, and their sale is not a twentieth of the others. These frame-pictures were, and are, generally got up by a family, the girls taking the management of the paper-work, the boys of the wood. The parents have, many of them, been paper-stainers. This division of labour is one reason of the exceeding cheapness of this street branch of the fine arts. These working artists—or whatever they are to be called—also prepare and frame for street-sale the plates given away in the first instance with a number of a newspaper or a periodical, and afterwards “to be had for next to nothing.” The prevalence of such engravings has tended greatly to diminish the sale of the pictures prepared expressly for the streets.
Ten years ago this trade was ten times greater than it is now. The principal sale still is, and always was, at the street-markets on Saturday evenings. They are sold piled on a small stall, or carried under the arm. To sell 10s. worth on a Saturday night is an extraordinary sale, and 2s. 6d. is a bad one, and the frame-picturer must have “middling patter to set them off at all. ‘Twopence a pair!’ he’ll say; ‘only twopence a pair! Who’d be without an ornament to his dwelling?’”
There are now about fifty persons engaged in this sale on a Saturday night, of whom the majority are the artists or preparers of the pictures. On a Monday evening there are about twenty sellers; and not half that number on other evenings—but some “take a round in the suburbs.”
If these people take 10s. weekly for frame-pictures the year through, 1,040l. is yearly expended in this way. I estimate the average number at twenty daily. Their profits are about cent. per cent.; boys and working people buy the most. The trade is often promoted by a raffle at a public-house. Many mechanics, I was told, now frame their own pictures.
This trade used to be more extensively carried on in the streets than it is at present. The reasons I heard assigned for the decadence were the greater cheapness of musical productions generally, and the present fondness for lithographic embellishments to every polka, waltz, quadrille, ballad, &c., &c. “People now hates, I do believe, a bare music-sheet,” one street-seller remarked.
The street manuscript-music trade was, certainly, and principally, piratical. An air became popular perhaps on a sudden, as it was pointed out to me, in the case, of “Jump, Jim Crow.” At a musical publisher’s, such an affair in the first bloom of its popularity, would have been charged from 2s. to 3s. 6d., twenty-five years ago, and the street-seller at that time, often also a book-stall keeper, would employ, or buy of those who offered them for sale, and who copied them for the purpose, a manuscript of the demanded music, which he could sell cheap in comparison.
A man who, until the charges of which I have before spoken, kept a second-hand book-stall, in a sort of arched passage in the New Cut, Lambeth, sold manuscript-music, and was often “sadly bothered,” he said, at one time by the musical propensities of a man who looked like a journeyman tailor. This man, whenever he had laid out a trifle at the book-stall, looked over the music, and often pulled a small flute from his pocket, and began to play a few bars from one of the manuscripts, and this he continued doing, to the displeasure of the stall-keeper, until a crowd began to assemble, thinking, perhaps, that the flute-player was a street-musician; he was then obliged to desist. Of the kind of music he sold, or of its mode of production, this street-bookseller knew nothing. He purchased it of a man who carried it to his stall, and as he found it sell tolerably well, he gave himself no further trouble concerning it. The supplier of the manuscript pencilled on each sheet the price it was to be offered at, allowing the stall-keeper from 50 to 150 per cent. profit, if the price marked was obtained. “I haven’t seen anything of him, sir,” said the street-bookseller, “for a long while. I dare say he was some poor musicianer, or singer, or a reduced gentleman, perhaps, for he always came after dusk, or else on bad dark days.”
Although but partially connected with street-art, I may mention as a sample of the music sometimes offered in street-sale, that a book-stall keeper, three weeks ago showed me a pile of music which he had purchased from a “waste collector,” about eight months before, at 2½d. the pound. Among this was some MS. music, which I specify below, and which the book-stall keeper was confident, on very insufficient grounds, I think, had been done for street-sale.
The music had, as regards three-fourths of it, evidently been bound, and had been torn from the boards of the book, as only the paper portion is purchased for “waste.” Some, however, were loose sheets, which had evidently never been subjected to the process of stitching. I now cite some of the titles of this street-sale: “Le Petit Tambour. Sujet d’un Grand Rondeau pour le Piano Forte. Composé par L. Zerbini,” (MS.) “Di Tanti Palpiti. The Celebrated Cavatina, by Rossini, &c.” “Twenty Short Lessons, or Preludes in the most Convenient Keys for the Harp. Composed and Respectfully Dedicated to Lady Ann Collins. By John Baptist Meyer. Price 5s.” “An Cota Caol (given in the ancient Irish character.) The Slender Coat,” (MS.) “Cailin beog chruite na mbo (also in Irish). The Pretty Girl Milking the Cow,” (MS.)
There are now no persons regularly employed in preparing MS. music for the streets. But occasionally a person skilled in music writing will, when he or she, I was told, had nothing better in hand, do a little for the street sale, disposing of the MSS. to any street-stationer or bookseller. If four persons are this way employed, receiving 4s. a week each, the year through—which I am assured is the extent—we find upwards of 40l. thus earned, and about twice that sum taken by the street retailers.