Free London Labour and the London Poor: Selection (Classics) by Henry Mayhew

say, and this is a very common question put by them whenever they see an engraving.
    ‘Here’s one of the passages that took their fancy wonderfully,’ my informant observed:
    “With glowing cheeks, flashing eyes, and palpitating bosom, Venetia Trelawney rushed back into the refreshment-room, where she threw herself into one of the arm-chairs already noticed. But scarcely had she thus sunk down upon the flocculent cushion, when a sharp click, as of some mechanism giving way, met her ears; and at the same instant her wrists were caught in manacles which sprang out of the arms of the treacherous chair, while two steel bands started from the richly carved back and grasped her shoulders. A shriek burst from her lips – she struggled violently, but all to no purpose: for she was a captive – and powerless!
    “We should observe that the manacles and the steel bands which had thus fastened upon her, were covered with velvet, so that they inflicted no positive injury upon her, nor even produced the slightest abrasion of her fair and polished skin.”
    Here all my audience,’ said the man to me, ‘broke out with – “Aye! that’s the way the harristocrats hooks it. There’s nothing o’ that sort among us; the rich has all the barrikin to themselves.” “Yes, that’s the b— way the taxes goes in,” shouted a woman.
    ‘Anything about the police sets them a talking at once. This did when I read it:
    “The Ebenezers still continued their fierce struggle, and, from the noise they made, seemed as if they were tearing each other to pieces, to the wild roar of a chorus of profane swearing. The alarm, as Bloomfield had predicted, was soon raised, and some two or three policemen, with their bull’s-eyes, and still more effective truncheons, speedily restored order.”
    “The blessed crushers is everywhere,” shouted one. “I wish I’d been there to have had a shy at the eslops,” said another. And then a man sung out: “O, don’t I like the Bobbys?”
    ‘If there’s any foreign languages which can’t be explained, I’ve seen the costers,’ my informant went on, ‘annoyed at it – quite annoyed. Another time I read part of one of Lloyd’s numbers to them – but they like something spicier. One article in them – here it is – finishes in this way:
    “The social habits and costumes of the Magyar
noblesse
have almost all the characteristics of the corresponding class in Ireland. This word
noblesse
is one of wide significance in Hungary; and one may with great truth say of this strange nation, that ‘
qui n’est point noble n’est rien.’”
    “I can’t tumble to that barrikin,” said a young fellow; “it’s a jaw-breaker. But if this here – what d’ ye call it, you talk about – was like the Irish, why they was a rum lot.” “Noblesse,” said a man that’s considered a clever fellow, from having once learned his letters, though he can’t read or write. “Noblesse! Blessed if I know what he’s up to.” Here was a regular laugh.’
    From other quarters I learned that some of the costermongers who were able to read, or loved to listen to reading, purchased their literature in a very commercial spirit, frequently buying the periodical which is the largest in size, because when ‘they’ve got the reading out of it,’ as they say, ‘it’s worth a halfpenny for the barrow.’
    Tracts they will rarely listen to, but if any persevering man
will
read tracts, and state that he does it for their benefit and improvement, they listen without rudeness, though often with evident unwillingness. ‘Sermons or tracts,’ said one of their body to me, ‘give them the ‘orrors.’ Costermongers purchase, and not unfrequently, the first number of a penny periodical, ‘to see what it’s like.’
    The tales of robbery and bloodshed, of heroic, eloquent, and gentlemanly highwaymen, or of gipsies turning out to be nobles, now interest the costermongers but little, although they found great delight in