by George Augustus Sala (uncredited).
Originally published in Household Words (Bradbury & Evans) vol.5 #108 (17 Apr 1852).
A Stern legislature has laid its red, or rather blue, right hand, in the shape of police enactments, upon many of the Cries of London. No more may the portly dustman toll his bell, and with lusty lungs make quiet streets re-echo to his cry of "Dust-ho!" The young sweep's shrill announcement of his avocation is against the law; and the sweep himself—first mute, perforce—has now ceded his place to the Ramoneur voluntarily, and has vanished altogether. Of the Cries which the New Police Act has not included in its ban, many have come to disuse, and must be numbered now with old fashions and old-fashioned people. The Cries are dead, and the criers, too. The "small-coal-man," and the vender of saloop; the merchant who so loudly declared in our boyhood, that if he had as much money as he could tell, he would not cry young lambs to sell; the dealer in sweet-stuff, who sang in so fine a barytone voice, and with so unctuous an emphasis, the one unvarying refrain, "My brandy-balls! my brandy-balls! My slap-up, slap-up brandy-balls!" the seller of rottenstone and emery, who, by way of rider to the announcement of his wares, added strong adjurations; the reduced gentlewoman, who cried "cats'-meat!" in so subdued a tone (she flourished before my time, and I only regard her in a traditional light);—all these are gone. There was a work published towards the close of the last century, full of copperplate pictures of the various London criers, with notices of their "Cries." Look through the book now, and you will find few not obsolete. We have grown luxurious, and cry, "Pine apples, a penny a slice!"—moral, and have superseded the tossing pieman, who cried, "Toss or buy! up and win 'em!" by a gaudy "hot-pie depôt," with plate-glass windows and mahogany fixtures. We have grown fastidious, and have deserted "'Taters, all hot!" for the "Irish fruit warehouse;" the voice of him who cried, "One a penny, two a penny, hot cross-buns!" is hushed. Lord help us! where are we going to? The cry of "kearots" and "sparrowgrass" will go next, I suppose; "cats'-meat" will no longer be allowed to be cried; "milk ho!" is doomed; the cries of "butcher!" and "baker!" will be rendered illegal, and contrary to the statute in those cases made and provided.
But as I write, floats on the ambient air, adown the quiet street in which I live, softly through the open window, gently to my pleased ears, a very familiar and welcome cry. I have always heard that cry, and always shall, I hope. It was cried in London streets years before I was born, and will be cried years after I am dead. It never varies, never diminishes in volume or sonorous melody, this cry; for, as the world wags, and they that dwell in it live and die, they must be clothed—and, amidst the wear and tear of life, their clothes are worn and torn, too;—so we shall always have old clothes to buy or sell; and for many a year, down many a quiet street, through many an open window, shall float that old familiar cry—"Old Clo'!"
My first recollections of Old Clo' are entwined with the remembrance of a threat, very awful and terrifying to me then, of being imprisoned in the bag of an old clothesman, and forthwith conveyed away. My threatener was a nurse-maid, who, if I remember right, left our service in consequence of the mysterious disappearance of a new silk dress, which she solemnly averred my mother to "have worn clean out;" and the clothesman was a dreadful old man, with a long, tangled, grey-reddish beard, a hawk nose, which, like the rebuke of the nautical damsel at Wapping Old Stairs, was never without a tear, and a bag of alarming size. I am not ashamed of saying, now, that I perfectly believed this clothesman (a harmless Israelite, no doubt,) to be capable of effecting my capture and abduction on the commission of any juvenile indiscretion whatsoever; and that he, and "the sweep," a mysterious bogey I was often menaced with, but never saw; a black dog, addicted to sitting on the shoulders of naughty children; and a "big, black man," supposed to be resident in the back kitchen, whence he made periodical irruptions for the purpose of devouring insubordinate juveniles, formed in their glomerate natures the incarnation, to my youthful and confused mind, of a certain personage who shall be nameless, but who has been likened to a roaring lion.
Strangely enough, this old clothesman of mine (he was dreadfully old when I first knew him) doesn't seem to get any older, and cries "Clo'!" to this day with undiminished voice and bag. I am not afraid of him now, and have even held conversations with him touching the statistics and profits of his trade. But I dream about him sometimes, and never look at that very large bag of his without a certain sort of awed and hushed curiosity. Very curious are early impressions in their ineffaceability. We can remember the father or the sister who died when we were babes almost, with minute distinctness; and yet forget what happened the day before yesterday. How well we can remember the history of Jack Horner, and the adventures of the other Jack, who rose in life through the instrumentality of a bean-stalk; and yet, how often we forget the matter of the first leader in the Morning Bellower, before we have got half through the second one!
The subject of left-off garments has always been an interesting one to me, for it is fertile in the vagabond-picturesque, a quality I much affect. Yet are there many mysteries connected with the old clothes question; which, though I have studied it somewhat profoundly, I am as yet unable to fathom. To what I do know, however, the reader is perfectly welcome.
The statistics of ancient habiliments have already been fully and admirably touched upon, in "another place," as honourable Members say. The aspect of Rag Fair, Cloth Fair, Petticoat Lane, and Holywell Street, have, moreover, been described over and over again; so that my lay will be, perhaps, only an old song to a questionably new tune, after all. But there is nothing new under the sun to speak of, and to be entirely original would be, too, as out of the fashion, as it is out of my power to be so.
Imprimis, of old clothesmen. Why should the Hebrew race appear to possess a monopoly in the purchase and sale of dilapidated costume? Why should their voices, and theirs alone, be employed in the constant iteration of the talismanic monosyllables "Old Clo'?" Is it because Judas carried the bag that all the children of Israel are to trudge through London streets from morn till eve with sack on shoulder? In Glasgow, they say, the Irish have commenced the clothes trade, and have absolutely pushed the Jew clothesmen from their stools. I can scarcely believe so astounding an assertion. I could as soon imagine an Israelitish life-guardsman as a Hibernian old clothesman. I can't—can you—can anybody—imagine the strident, guttural "Ogh Clo'" of the Hebrew, the mot d'ordre, the shibboleth, the password of his race, transposed into the mellifluous buttermilky notes of the sister isle?
My old clothesmen are all of the "people." Numerous are they, persevering, all-observant, astute, sagacious, voluble yet discreet, prudent yet speculative. They avoid crowded main streets, and prefer shadier and quieter thoroughfares. These do they perambulate indefatigably at all seasons, in all weathers. Lives there the man who ever saw an old clothesman with an umbrella? I mean using it for the purpose an umbrella is generally put to. He may have, and very probably has, half-a-dozen in his bag, or somewhere about him, but never was he known to elevate one above his head.
I am sorry to gird at an established idea, but duty compels me to do so. Artists generally represent the old clothesman with three, and sometimes four, hats superposed one above the other. Now, though I have seen him with many hats in his hands or elsewhere, I never yet saw him with more than one hat on his head; and I have been assured by a respectable member of the fraternity, with whom I lately transacted business, that the three-hat tradition has no foundation whatever; in fact, that it is a mere device of the enemy, as shallow a libel as the ballad of "Hugh of Lincoln," or the assertion that Jews cannot expectorate, but must, nolens volens, slobber. The three-hatted clothesman, if he ever existed, is obsolete; but I incline to consider him a myth, an æsthetic pre-Raphaelite abstraction, like the Sphinx, or the woman caressing her Chimæra.
The old old clothesman is, I am sorry to say, becoming every day a swan of blacker hue. Young Israel has taken the field, and Old Jewry—old, bearded, gabardined, bent-backed Jewry is nearly extinct. It may be, perhaps, that after a certain age he abandons the bag, and laying in a large stock of crockery-ware, and vouchers for enormous sums, retires to the East, where he awaits the goods which the gods of diplomacy provide him.
Very rarely now is the gabardine—that long, loose, shapeless garment, the same on which Antonio spat—to be seen in London streets. I recollect the time when nearly all the old clothesmen wore it, and I am certain my clothesman—the bogey of my childhood—was wont to be habited therein. Young Israel wears cut-away coats, and chains, and rings; has eschewed the beard for the curl known as aggravator, the chin tuft, and the luxuriant fringe of whisker; carries the bag jauntily, not wearily and cumbrously, as Old Jewry did. But the inside is the same, the sagacity, the perseverance, the bargaining—oh! the keen bargaining is as keen as ever.
Then there is the bagless clothesman—the apparently bagless one at least—the marchand sans sac. You may be in the street, and meet a gentleman attired in the first style of fashion, walking easily along, twirling his cane, and thinking, it would seem, of nothing at all. Passing him, you catch his eye; you find out that he has not got that piercing black eye and that acutely aquiline nose for nothing. He sidles up to you, and in an insinuating sotto voce, something between a stage "aside" and an invitation to "buy a little dawg" from a Regent-street fancier, asks you the momentous question, "Have you anything to shell, sir?"
The interrogatory may have been put in Kensington, and you may live at Mile-end; but the bagless clothesman will not be deterred by any question of distance from accompanying you. He would walk by your side from Indus to the Pole, with that peculiar sidling, shuffling gait of his, on the bare chance of the reversion of a single pair of pantaloons. And, should you so far yield to his seductive entreaties as to summon him to your domicile, he will produce, with magical rapidity, from some unknown receptacle, a BAG—when, or where, or whence, or how obtained, it is not within the compass of human ken to know.
A marvellous article is that bag. It will hold everything and anything: always stuffed to repletion, it will hold more. The last straw, it has been aphoristically observed, breaks the camel's back; but trusses of trousers, stacks of paletóts, ricks of waistcoats, thrust into this much-enduring bag, seem not to tax its powers of endurance to anything above a moderate degree. As to breaking the bag's back, it is far more likely that it would dislocate the dorsal vertebræ of any novice bold enough to carry it than its own.
A friend of mine met with a bagless clothesman on the Queen's highway, and in his habit as he lived. Being about to leave London, he acknowledged the soft impeachment of having a few old clothes to dispose of, and of which he thought he might as well make a few shillings. Trousers, waistcoats, and coats were produced, and passed in review, and then my friend yielded to a Machiavelic suggestion of the clothesman relative to old boots. Remembering the existence of a dilapidated pair of Wellingtons under the parlour sofa, he descended to fetch them, leaving—infelix puer!—the clothesman alone. He reascended: the usual chaffering, bickering, and eventual bargain-driving took place. The money agreed on was paid, and the clothesman departed. But—oh duplicity of clothesmankind!—the nefarious Israelite had stuffed into his bag the only pair of evening dress continuations my friend possessed. There was likewise a blue satin handkerchief with a white spot—what is popularly, I believe, known as a bird's-eye fogle—which was missing; and though, of course, I would not insinuate anything to the disadvantage of the carriers of the bag, the disappearance will be allowed to be strange. Mrs. Gumm, however, my friend's landlady, (who has sheltered so many medical students beneath her roof that she may almost be considered a member of the profession, and who reads the "Lancet" on Sunday afternoons with quite a relish), Mrs. Gumm now stoutly avers that he did annex them; declaring, in addition, her firm belief that he appropriated at the same time, and stowed away in his bag, a feather-bed of considerable size, and a miniature portrait of the Otaheitan chief who was supposed to have eaten a portion of Captain Cook: which portrait was presented to her by the Rev. Fugue Trumpetstop, an earnest man, and now minister of finance to King Kamehameha XXXIII. of the Sandwich Islands. I think that if there had been a chest of drawers or a four-post bed missing, the dealer in decayed apparel would have been suspected as the spoliator.
Carrying the bag, and crying "oghclo!" seems a sort of novitiate, or apprenticeship, which all Hebrews are subjected to. They can flesh their maiden swords in the streets, without its being at all considered derogatory. I please myself with the theory, sometimes, that of the millionnaires I see rolling by in carriages; read of as giving magnificent balls and suppers; hear of as the pillars of commerce and the girders of public credit; many have in their youth passed through the dusky probation of the bag. Keen chaffering about ragged paletôts and threadbare trousers prepared them, finished them, gave them a sharper edge for the negotiation of the little bill and the sale of the undoubted specimens of the old masters. And from these to millions there were but few steps. There is a dear old dirty, frowsy, picturesque, muddy, ill-paved, worse-lighted, immensely rich old street in Frankfort, called the "Judenstrasse," a sort of compound of the worst parts of Duke's Place and St. Mary Axe, and the best parts of Petticoat Lane, and Church Lane, St. Giles's. Here dwell the Jews of Frankfort—as dirty, as frowsy, and as wealthy as their abiding-place. Departing at morn, and returning at eve, with the never-failing bag, you may see the young Israelites; sitting at the doors, smoking their pipes in tranquillity, are the patriarchs; gossiping at the windows are the daughters of Judah, in robes of rainbow-hued silks or satins, but with under-garments of equivocal whiteness; sprawling in the gutters amidst old clothes, pots, pans, household furniture, and offal, are the bright-eyed little children. I like much to walk in the Judenstrasse (after a good dinner at the Hôtel de Russie), smoking the pipe of peace and Hungarian tobacco; glancing now at the old clothes, now at the clothesmen; now at the little babies in the kennel—peeping cunningly at the heavy iron-stanchioned doors and the windows, protected at night (and for reasons, the rogues!) with iron-bound shutters. I conjecture how many colossal fortunes have been made out of that shabby, grubby, ill-smelling old street. How many latent Rothschilds there may be in its back attics; how many Sampayos yet to come are sprawling in its kennels! The discipline of the bag is well observed in the Judenstrasse, and prospers as it does everywhere else.
And this only brings me back to my starting point, and makes me perplexed, confused, bothered. Why should the Jews deal in old clothes? Not only in London or Frankfort: who has not heard the nasal chant of the Marchand d'habits in Paris, crying "Vieux habits, vieux galons!" Who has not seen him bartering with the grisette for the sale of her last Carnival's Debardeur dress? Who has not seen him slouching along, with a portion of the said Debardeur dress, in the shape of a pair of black velvet trousers, hanging over his arm; a pair of gold epaulettes sticking out of his coat-pocket; a cavalry sabre tucked under his arm, and an advocate's robe protruding from his as usual crammed bag? Who have not heard of the Gibraltar old clothesmen, or of the fights on board the Levant steamers between the Greeks and the Jews, on disputed questions, relative to the value of cast-off caftans and burnouses? I knew a young Turk once at Marseilles, who wore patent-leather boots, and perfumed himself indefatigably, but was not quite civilised for all that; for I remember making him a present of a large bottle of West India pickles, which, desiring him to taste, he ate, from the first Capsicum to the last Chilli; from the first to the last drop of the red-hot pickling vinegar, which he drank, all without one morsel of bread or meat; smacking his lips meanwhile, and saying "Mi piace, questo bastimento!" his usual expression when pleased. I remember asking him, when we were better acquainted, and he had acquired a more extended knowledge of the European languages, what were the characteristics of the Jews in Constantinople? "They are dogs," he said, simply, "and wear yellow handkerchiefs, and go about the streets of Stamboul selling old clothes." If in Turkey, why not in Persia, in Abyssinia, in Crim Tartary—anywhere ? There is something more in it than is dreamt of in my philosophy. For aught I know, though I believe it without knowledge, the Jews of Honan in China, or the black Jews of India, may deal in cast-off wearing apparel. Every Jew, millionnaire as he may become afterwards, seems to begin with the bag. A fabulously rich Israelite of whom I know something, was once solicited for some favour by a poorer member of his tribe. He declined acceding to the applicant's request. "Ah!" said his petitioner, spitefully (he was an ill-favoured old man, in a snuff-coloured coat, and a handkerchief tied round his head under his hat), "you're a very great man, no doubt, now; but I recollect the time when you used to sell pocket-handkerchiefs in the public-houses!" And so, no doubt, he had.
From the sublime to the ridiculous there is but one step; and from old clothesmen to old clothes there is but half a one. Let us consider old clothes.
Under which head, I beg to be understood, I include old hats, old boots, old linen, old anything, in fact, in which man delighteth to array himself. With the ladies (bless them!) I will not pretend, just now, to meddle; they have their own distinctive old clothes dealers—their revendeuses à la toilette, there proprietors of shops where ladies' wardrobes are purchased. There are Eleusinian mysteries connected with this branch of the clothes trade; dark stories of duchesses' white satin dresses, and dowager countesses' crimson-velvet robes, about which I must have more certain information ere I discourse thereon. To the uninitiated, the "Ladies' Wardrobe" is, as no doubt it is proper it should be, a mystery—a glimmering haze of dusky little shops in back streets, pink silk stockings, white satin shoes, soiled ostrich feathers, ladies' maids, and ladies themselves, shawled and muffled, and with a cab waiting at the corner of the street. Fubsy women in printed gowns and aprons are dimly visible through the haze, sometimes; and the tallyman has something, mysteriously, to do with the matter. I will inquire into it.
But of the old clothes appertaining to the masculine gender. If you want to see old clothes, and old clothesmen in their glory, go to Cloth Fair, or the Clothes Exchange. You will have to pay a small toll on entrance towards the support of the market, but that is nothing. I should not so particularly advise you to take care of your pockets on this occasion; but I should most decidedly caution you to take care of the clothes of which those pockets form a part; for it is by no means improbable that half-a-dozen Jews will fall on you at once, and tug fiercely at your garments; not with any bellicose intention, but simply with the understanding that you must have something to sell; and that, carrying no bag, and being somewhat eccentric, you are actuated by a desire to sell what you stand upright in.
During the whole of the time the market lasts, one incessant series of pacific fights takes place. Rapidly, in twos and threes, and sometimes by dozens and half-dozens, swarm in the clothesmen who have been perambulating the streets since early morn. In a trice, on these erst buyers, now sellers, fall new buyers. What have they got to shell? For Moses' sake, vat have they got to shell? For all the Prophets' sake, give them the refusal! Oh! versh the bagsh? Oh! vat ish there in it? Oh! vat you vant? Oh! vat you give? The gigantic bag is forcibly removed from the shoulders of the resisting clothesman; it and he are tugged, hauled, hustled, jostled, about. At last, he selects the merchant with whom he is desirous of doing business, and on that merchant's shopboard the multifarious contents of the wondrous bag will be vomited forth. Lord help us! will it never have done disgorging garments? More coats, more waistcoats, more continuations; a shower of hats; any quantities of pairs of boots, silk handkerchiefs, umbrellas, boys' caps, pattens; and, sir, I am not exaggerating when I state, that this marvellous sack may, and has been very often known to, contain, and subsequently disgorge, such miscellaneous trifles as a few pounds of dripping, a birdcage, a live poodle, a theodolite, and an or-molu clock. All is fish that comes to the clothesman's net—all clothes that come to his bag. He would buy your head if it were loose.
On every merchant's shopboard similar heaps of hydra-natured garments are tumbling out of similar sacks. Then ensues frantic yelling, screeching, lung-tearing, ear-piercing bargain-making. They gibber, they howl, they clutch each other fiercely, and grapple over a farthing like wolves. See yonder yellow-visaged old mercator, with salt rheum in his eye, and a beard like the beard of an insolvent goat, grown careless of his personal appearance. He is from Amsterdam, and can speak no English; yet he gibbers, and clutches, and grapples with the keenest of his British brethren. He holds up his fingers to denote how much he will give, and no more. For Moses' sake, another finger! S'help me, you 're robbing me! S'help me, it's yoursh! And the mercator has the best of the bargain, for your Jew, when a seller, is as loth to refuse money as he is, when a buyer, to part with it.
Now the air is darkened with legs and arms of garments held up to be inspected as to their condition. The buyer pokes, and peers into, and detects naplessness, and spies out patches, and is aware of rents, and smells out black and blue reviver, and noses darns and discovers torn linings; the seller, meanwhile, watching every movement with lynx-eyed inquietude. A lull takes place—a very temporary lull, while this inspection is going on; but only wait an instant, and you shall hear the howling, screeching, and see the clutching and grappling commence de novo. The air feels hot, and there is a fetid, squalid odour of rags. Jew boys stand in the midst of the market calling sweet-stuff and hot cakes for sale. Hark at Mammon and Gammon yelling at each other, browbeating, chaffering in mutilated English and bastard Hebrew. They do make a great noise, certainly; but is there not a little buzz, a trifling hum of business in the area of the Royal Exchange just before the bell rings? Does not Capel Court resound sometimes to the swell of human voices ? Is not the immaculate Auction Mart itself occasionally anything but taciturn, when the advowson of a comfortable living is to be sold ? We can make bargains, and noises about them, too, for other things besides old clothes.
Look at that heap of old clothes—that Pelion upon Ossa of ostracised garments. A reflective mind will find homilies, satires, aphorisms, by the dozen—thought-food by the ton weight, in that pile of dress-offal. There is my lord's coat, bespattered by the golden mud on Fortune's highway; threadbare in the back with much bowing; the embroidery tarnished, the spangles all blackened; a Monmouth Street laced coat. Revivified, coaxed, and tickled into transitory splendour again, it may lend vicarious dignity to some High Chamberlain, or Stick-in-Waiting, at the court of the Emperor Soulouque. There is a scarlet uniform coat, heavily embroidered, which, no doubt, has dazzled many a nursemaid in its day. It will shine at masquerades now; or, perchance, be worn by Mr. Belton, of the Theatres Royal; then emigrate, may be, and be the coat of office of the Commander-in-Chief of King Quashiboo's body-guard; or, with the addition of a cocked hat and straps, form the coronation costume of King Quashiboo himself. And there is John the footman's coat, with ruder embroidery, but very like my lord's coat for all that. There, pell-mell, cheek by jowl, in as strange juxtaposition, and as strange equality, as corpses in a plague-pit, are the groom's gaiters and my Lord Bishop's spatterdashes; with, save the mark! poor Pat's ill-darned, many-holed brogues, his bell-crowned felt hat, his unmistakeable blue coat with the brass buttons, high in the collar, short in the waist, long in the tails, and ragged all over. There is no distinction of ranks; no precedence of rank, and rank alone, here. Patrick's brogues, if they were only sound and whole, instead of holey, would command a better price than my lord's torn black silk small-clothes; yon groom's gaiters are worth double the episcopal spatterdashes; and that rough fustian jacket would fetch more than the tattered dress-coat with only one sleeve, albeit 'twas made by Stultz, and was once worn by Beau Smith.
Where are the people, I wonder, to whom these clothes belonged? Who will wear them next? Will the episcopal spatterdashes grace the calves of a Low Church greengrocer? Will John the footman's coat be transferred to Sambo or Mungo, standing on cucumber-shinned extremities on the foot-board of a chariot belonging to some militia field-marshal or other star of the Upper Ten Thousand of New York? Who was John, and whose footman was he? How many a weary mile the poor Jews have walked to get these sweepings of civilisation together, and make for a moment a muck-heap of fashion in Cloth Fair—a dunghill of vanity for chapmen to huckster over! All the lies and the subterfuges of dress, the padded coats and whale-boned waistcoats, the trousers that were patched in places where the skirts hid them, have come naked to this bankruptcy. The surtout that concealed the raggedness of the body-coat beneath; the body-coat that buttoned over the shirtless chest; the boots which were not Wellingtons, as in their strapped-down hypocrisy they pretended to be, but old Bluchers; all are discovered, exposed, turned inside out, here. If the people who wore them could only be treated in the same manner—what remarkably unpleasant things we should hear about one another, to be sure!
The Nemesis of Cloth Fair is impartial, unyielding, inexorable. She has neither favourites nor partialities: a dress-coat—be it the choicest work of a Nugee or a Buckmaster—is to her an abomination, unless something can be made of it. She regardeth not a frock-coat, unless there is enough good cloth left in the skirts to make boys' caps of; a military stripe down a pair of trousers have no charms in her eyes; she is deaf to the voice of the embroidered vest, unless that vest be in good condition.
There are three orders of "Old Clothes," as regards the uses to which they may be applied: First class, Clothes good enough to be revivered, tricked, polished, teased, re-napped, and sold, either as superior second-hand garments, in second-hand-shop streets, or pawned for as much as they will fetch, and more than they are worth. Second class, Old Clothes, which are good enough to be exported to Ireland, to Australia, and the Colonies generally. Great quantities are sent to the South American Republics; and a considerably brisk trade in left-off wearing apparel is driven with that Great Northern Republic which asserts itself capable of inflicting corporal punishment on the whole of the universe. Wearing apparel is unconscionably dear in the land of freedom, and the cheap "bucks" of the model republic cannot always afford bran-new broadcloth. Third class, or very Old Clothes, include those that are so miserably dilapidated, so utterly tattered and torn, that they would have been, I am sure, despised and rejected even by the indifferently-dressed man who married "the maiden all forlorn." These tatters—"haillons" the French call them—have a glorious destiny before them. Like the phœnix, they rise again from their ashes. Torn to pieces by a machine, aptly called a "devil," in grim, brick factories, northwards, they are ground, pounded, tortured into "devil's dust," or "shoddy;" by a magic process, and the admixture of a little fresh wool, they burst into broadcloth again. I need say no more. When I speak of broadcloth and "devil's dust," my acute readers will know as much about it as I do: plate-glass-shops, middlemen, sweaters, dungs, cheap clothes, and nasty. Who shall say that the Marquis of Camberwell's footmen—those cocked-hatted, bouquetted, silk-stockinged Titans—may not have, in their gorgeous costume, a considerable spice of Patrick the bog-trotter's ragged breeches, and Luke the Labourer's fustian jacket?
We have traditions and superstitions about almost everything in life, from the hogs in the Hampstead sewers to the ghosts in a shut-up house. There are traditions and superstitions about old clothes. Fables of marvellous sums found in the pockets of left-off garments are current, especially among the lower orders. There was the Irish gentleman who found his waistcoat lined throughout with bank-notes; and the youth who discovered that all the buttons on a coat he had bought in Petticoat Lane, were sovereigns covered with cloth. Then there was Mary Jenkins, who, in the words of the Public Advertiser of February 14th, 1756, "deals in old clothes in Rag Fair, and sold a pair of breeches to a poor woman for sevenpence and a pint of beer. While they were drinking it in a public-house, the purchaser, in unripping the breeches, found, quilted in the waistband, eleven guineas in gold—Queen Anne's coin, and a thirty pound bank-note, dated in 1729; which last she did not know the value of, till she had sold it for a gallon of twopenny purl." There are so many stories of this sort about, in old newspapers and in old gossips' mouths, that a man, however credulous, is apt to suspect that a fair majority of them may be apocryphal. There is a tinge of superstition in the connection of money or fortune with clothes. Don't they put sixpence into a little boy's pocket, when he is first indued with braccæ bifurcatæ, the toga virilis of youthful Britons? Don't we say that a halfpenny with a cross on it will keep the deuce out of our pockets? Don't we throw old shoes after a person for luck? and what is luck but money?