Scraping a living in the early 19th century: contemporary drawings.
John Thomas Smith's artistic eye recorded buildings, streets and a diverse range of people in the burgeoning metropolis in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
This post presents images from his 1817 publication, Vagabondiana or Anecdotes of Mendicant Wanderers Through the Streets of London. In this book he focused on beggary, or mendicity (the practice of asking for food or money because you are poor).
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In three previous blog posts, I outlined John Thomas Smith’s background and concentrated on his engravings of buildings. See:
Vagabondiana starts by noting that “beggary… had become so dreadful in London, that the more active interference of the legislature was deemed absolutely necessary” to reduce it.
“Concluding, therefore, from the reduction of the metropolitan beggars, that several curious characters would disappear…, it occurred to the author of the present publication, that likenesses of the most remarkable of them, with a few particulars of their habits, would not be unamusing to those to whom they have been a pest for several years.”
The book then presents a series of portraits of “mendicant wanderers” of the streets, “drawn from the life by John Thomas Smith”, accompanied by his written observations.
Below is a selection of some of these characters.
George Dyball was a blind man, “remarkable for his leader, [his dog] Nelson, whose tricks displayed in an extraordinary degree the sagacity and docility of the canine race”.
In response to Dyball’s plea “Pray pity the blind”, Nelson would whine, lift his eyes with an “importunate turn of the head” and “rub the tin box against [the spectators’] knees”. He would take any money placed in the box in his mouth to his master, “joyfully wagging his tail”.
The next picture is of another blind beggar, “perhaps one of the most cunning and witty of his tribe”. He first claimed to be French, and later Spanish, and sometimes made people “believe that he fought in the field of Watlerloo.”
He would change his hairstyle and alter his voice to become a different character. Sometimes he wore a painted portrait of a marine, who had lost his sight at Gibraltar, on a tin plate across his chest, thereby assuming the character of the marine.
Next is a “walking beggar, attended by a boy,… well known about Finsbury Square and Bunhill Row; sometimes he stands at the gates of Wesley's meeting-house”.
“Do, my worthy, tender-hearted Christians, remember the blind,” he would say, “pray pity the stone dark blind.”
The image below “affords a remarkable instance of sobriety in a blind man, who never tasted gin in his life”. He could be found in “beggarly-famed” Bethnal Green, selling halfpenny ballads.
Charles Wood, another blind man, had an organ and a dancing dog named Bob. He would announce:
“Ladies and Gentlemen, this is the real learned French dog; please to encourage him; throw anything down to him, and see how nimbly he'll pick it up, and give it to his poor blind master. Look about, Bob; be sharp ; see what you're about, Bob."
Bob would pick up any money thrown and put it in his master’s pocket.
Next, John Thomas Smith highlights a “meritorious pair” of characters termed “industrious beggars” and “true objects of compassion, as they never associate with the common street-beggars”.
The first, Priscilla, made patchwork quilts in the parish of St James, Clerkenwell, often sitting against the wall of the Spa Fields reservoir. “She threads her own needle, cuts her own patches, and fits them entirely herself.”
The second, Taylor, a blind shoe-maker, lived at 6 Saffron Hill and supported a family “by his attention to his stands, which are sometimes at Whitehall, and the wall by Whitfield's Chapel, Tottenham Court Road.”
However, Thomas Smith warns, “Industrious beggars are sometimes confounded with sturdy impostors”.
An example of the latter, he says, is a man whose employment was to cut chains out of a piece of ash and who agreed to sit for the artist for half an hour in exchange for two shillings. After 10 minutes the man complained “that he could get twice the money in less time either at Charing Cross or Hyde Park Corner”.
He then refused the offer of bread, cheese and beer, so Thomas Smith offered him a steak of veal for his lunch. “After slowly turning his head, without giving the least motion of his body, he sneeringly observed, that the veal had no fat.”
The man insisted he was not a beggar, noting that he had not been in prison and worked with tools, although he did not actually sell many chains. True, his hat was on the ground while he worked “and if people would put money into it, surely it was not for him to turn it out”.
After the artist paid him, “for which he did not condescend to make the least acknowledgement, he exclaimed on leaving the house, ‘Now that you have draughted me off, I suppose you'll make a fine deal of money of it.’”
By contrast, Joseph Thake and is son were “truly industrious persons”. Unable to find work and determined not to beg, they made “puzzles” out of pieces of willow containing small stones, “serving as children's rattles, or as an amusement for grown persons, who,… after taking them to pieces, are puzzled to put them together again”.
“Honest Thake” and his son sold them in St Paul’s Churchyard “at the moderate price of sixpence a-piece”.
Joseph Johnson, below, was a former merchant seaman invalided by wounds and “obliged to gain a living on shore”. He started by singing on Tower Hill before becoming a “Regular Chaunter” on “the public streets”.
He built a model of the ship Nelson and placed it on his cap. “He can, by a bow of thanks, or a supplicating inclination to a drawing-room window, give [it] the appearance of sea-motion.”
The next picture is “another black man of great notoriety, Charles M’Gee, a native of Ribon, in Jamaica, born in 1744, and whose father died at the great age of 108”. He usually stood at the bottom of Ludgate Hill and was “supposed to be worth money”.
A city pastry cook had recently given him a smart coat. The “portrait, when in his 73d year, was drawn on the 9th of October, 1815, in the parlour of a public-house, the sign of the Twelve Bells, opposite to the famous well of St. Brigit”.
John McNally, from County Tyrone, “lost the use of his legs by a log, that crushed both his thighs, when an apprentice at Cork”. However “his head, shoulders, and chest… are exactly those of Hercules.”
He was well known in Parliament Street, Whitehall and the “Surrey foot” of Westminster Bridge, drawn in his “truck” by two dogs, Boxer and Rover, “by which contrivance he has increased his income beyond all belief.”
When their master was “dead drunk”, the dogs “very cordially united their efforts to convey him to his lodgings…, and perhaps with more safety than if he had governed them, frequently taking a circuitous route during street repairs, in order to obtain the clearest path”.
The “Jew mendicant” in the next picture, who had lost the use of his legs, was placed every morning in a wheeled box “so that he may be drawn about the neighbourhood of Petticoat-lane, and exhibited as an object of charity”.
It was “impossible for a Jew or a Christian to pass without giving him alms, though he never begs but of his own people; a custom highly creditable to the Jews”.
The next “character… is a constant sweeper of the crossing at the top of Ludgate-Hill”, who wears “a cloth round his head, as he is on that account frequently noticed by elderly maiden city-dames, who mistake him for one of their own sex”.
Below is a “lad, who occasionally sweeps the crossing at the end of Prince's street, Hanover-square”. He was “so sickly” when he was drawn that he was unrecognisable as the “vender of matches” whose portrait was drawn two years previously (see the second of the two images below). “The boy occasionally sings the old match song.”
William Frasier had lost both his hands in military service. “His allowance as a maimed soldier not being sufficient to maintain his large family, he is obliged to depend on the benevolence of such of the public who purchase boot-laces of him.”
Bemoaning the loss of many of London’s old street customs and entertainments, John Thomas Smith tells us that, now, instead “the streets are infested by such fellows as the one exhibited in the adjoining plate, who… exhibit all sorts of grimace and ribaldry to extort money from their numerous admirers”.
Bill Row and John Taylor were “grubbers”, making a living from anything they could find in “the dirt from between the stones with a crooked bit of iron”. Nails from horse-shoes could be sold as “the best iron that can be made use of for gun-barrels”.
They might also “now and then find rings that have been drawn off with the gloves, or small money that has been washed by the showers between the stones”. They would often be paid to “clear gully-holes and common sewers, the stench of which is so great that their breath becomes pestilential.”
The man in the next picture mimicked birdsongs “by means of a folded bit of tin… held between the teeth”. To “engage the attention of the credulous, he pretends, as his lips are nearly closed, to draw his tones from two tobacco-pipes, using one for the fiddle, the other for the bow, and never fails to collect an attentive audience”.
Another musician, who was blind, sang old ballads while accompanying himself by drawing a bow across a string of catgut stretched over an inflated bladder and tied at both ends of a mop stick. Boys would frequently burst the bladder, so “he fortunately hit upon a mode of equally charming the ear, by substituting a tin tea-canister”.
John Thomas Smith’s drawings of London’s beggars and “mendicants” are keenly observed and filled with respect for their humanity. His prose, while sometimes sounding harsh and frequently ironic, reveals his compassion.
In the preface to Vagabondiana, John Thomas Smith quotes from James Granger’s Biographical History of England:
“A skilful anatomist would find little or no difference, in dissecting the body of a king and that of the meanest of his subjects; and a judicious philosopher would discover a surprising conformity in discussing the nature and qualities of their minds.”
A number of John Thomas Smith's books have been reproduced digitally by Google Books, the Internet Archive (archive.org) and other websites, including the Ex-Classics Web Site
Walks available for booking
For a schedule of forthcoming London On The Ground guided walks, please click here.
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