Street Life: The “Cries” in British Visual Culture, 1711-1877

Street Food

The food sold on the street in urban hubs was varied and seasonal. London in particular had a complex and nimble provisioning system that enabled fast distribution of fresh fruit, vegetables, meat, and seafoods from central London, the Thames estuary, the adjacent counties of Essex and Kent, and even Europe. At dawn, London street vendors typically visited the major markets, notably Spitalfields and (for fish) Billingsgate, to buy their wares from retailers. They then walked to their usual pitches, using a wheelbarrow or donkey if they had sufficient funds to own either. Fruit and vegetables were grown on market farms close to the center of London until the land came to be used for building in the late nineteenth century, with neighboring dairy farms supplying manure to enrich the soil. Milk vendors would trek to dairy farms at four o’clock in the morning to milk the cows, a practice that ended in the 1870s when milk and fresh produce were transported from outside of the metropolis by train. Because their accommodations were typically inadequate for cooking, vendors of baked goods would buy them from bakers or retailers. The purchasers of street food were typically working class and poor, though more affluent customers would buy and enjoy a cookie, muffin, pie, pudding, or portion of oysters. Many of the cries mentioned the price, a critical detail for those living on subsistence budgets.

Nostalgia for a past when life was simpler and more wholesome underpinned the creation and consumption of the Cries images. The genre promoted the myth that the British enjoyed plentiful and wholesome food but, in reality, foodstuffs were often adulterated. Milk, in particular, was watered down, and chalk and flour were often added to increase thickness. Commercial kitchens were not subjected to inspections as food trucks are today, and customers sometimes succumbed to bacterial infections and other ailments as a result of food contamination. The delicious ice cream made and sold by immigrant Italians was a particular source of illness. Food factories and “dark kitchens” were established in London in the early years of the nineteenth century. Today’s highly processed foods seem almost healthy compared to many of these products, which typically contained additives, including chromium of lead, sulphate of copper, and strychnine.

John Young (1755-1825) after Johann Gerhard Huck (c.1758-1811). The Oyster Girl, 1786. Mezzotint. London: J. Young. The Lewis Walpole Library, 786.04.01.13+

John Young (1755-1825) after Johann Gerhard Huck (c.1758-1811). The Grape Girl, 1786. Mezzotint. London: J. Young. The Lewis Walpole Library, 786.04.01.14+

This pair of mezzotints was engraved and published by John Young from drawings made by the German portrait and history painter Johann Gerhard Huck. Young and Huck met in London when they served as apprentices to the celebrated mezzotint engraver Valentine Green, who subsequently employed Huck to make drawings of historical subjects for publication. Young’s publication evidently was a separate, collaborative, commercial venture.

The mezzotints would have been produced to capitalize on the vogue for “fancy” pictures, which were popularized in Britain by the French painter Philippe Mercier. Fancy pictures were idealized, often sentimental genre paintings, their subjects typically women, children, and pet animals, often depicted in impoverished circumstances to excite feelings of pity. Typically engraved and widely circulated, they appealed to the type of consumer who acquired Wheatley’s Cries engravings.

Fancy pictures often depicted young women selling flowers or fresh produce, taken from the Cries playbook, and these images typically carried an erotic charge. Female oyster sellers were often associated with sexual licentiousness, an inference drawn from their peripatetic occupation, which often necessitated selling to men in pubs; their poverty; and the salacious connotations of oysters, which resemble female genitalia. Huck and Young’s subjects, clad unrealistically in expensive clothes like Wheatley’s vendors, are demure, but the young women were clearly being offered up, like their wares, for male consumption.

Henri Merke (fl.1798-1814) after Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827). Hot Cross Bunns, Two a Penny Bunns, 1799. Etching with aquatint. London: R. Ackermann. The Lewis Walpole Library, 799.05.04.01+

Henri Merke (fl.1798-1814) after Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827). Water Cresses, Come Buy My Water Cresses, 1799. Etching with aquatint. London: R. Ackermann. The Lewis Walpole Library, 799.05.04.01+

In 1799, the expatriate German print- and book-publishing magnate Rudolph Ackermann published Cries of London, a series of eight prints in etching and aquatint made by the Swiss engraver Henri Merke after drawings by the well-known watercolorist and caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson. The prints parody Francis Wheatley’s idealized depictions of street vendors. The figures in Hot Cross Bunns, Two a Penny Bunns are based on Wheatley’s New Mackrel, New Mackrel (displayed on the adjacent wall), but Rowlandson’s seller is a sturdy woman wearing working-class street clothes rather than Wheatley’s elegant fashion plate. The street cry “Good Friday comes this Month, the old woman runs, / With one or two a Penny hot cross Bunns” was first recorded in 1733 and later adapted as a nursery rhyme.

In Water Cresses, Come Buy My Water Cresses, a young woman and her oldest child thrust bunches of watercress at an elderly man as he knocks on the door of Mrs. Burke’s brothel. Two sex workers hang out of the window mocking him. Street vendors—often children and adolescents, who were among the very poorest of them—bought the watercress at markets in the early morning and made it into bundles, selling them mainly to working-class clientele, who relished the peppery snack.

Pieter Angillis (1685–1734)
Vegetable Seller, Covent Garden, c. 1726
Oil on panel
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1973.1.2

Covent Garden became London’s most significant produce market after the Great Fire of London in 1666. Initially a wide range of foodstuffs was available, but in 1670 it was decreed that only herbs, flowers, fruit, roots, and vegetables could be sold there. Covent Garden was a favorite subject for the cosmopolitan, French-born artist Pieter Angillis, who practiced in Antwerp and Dusseldorf before he moved to London in 1719. Angillis was familiar with the paintings and prints of produce markets and still lifes of fruit and vegetables that were popular in northern European art. His vendor sells root vegetables—carrots, turnips, and leeks.

Balthazar Nebot (active 1730–1765)
Morning in Covent Garden, not after 1749
Oil on canvas
The Lewis Walpole Library, LWL Ptg. 108

By the mid-eighteenth century, the famous produce market at Covent Garden piazza in central London had become a site of disorder, exacerbated by unauthorized sales of alcohol and the presence of men’s clubs and brothels. The shouts of drunken revelers would intermingle with the cries of vendors early in the morning. Nebot’s painting depicts a scene of disorder disrupting trade. A well-dressed, inebriated man apparently wearing a woman’s lace cap, sits on the roof of a sedan chair, clutching an artichoke. A woman in everyday clothes threatens a man lying on the ground with a turnip, presumably infuriated by his knocking over baskets of her produce. A building, which still exists, was constructed in 1830 to contain and regulate the market, though it remained chaotic.

Jean-Baptiste-Marie Poisson (active late 18th century)
Cris de Paris, dessinés d’après nature, 1774
Bound volume with 72 engravings
Paris: Jean-Baptiste-Marie Poisson
The Lewis Walpole Library, 82 775P
Shown: D’l’anis toute sucrée petits croquets pour un liard

The Cries was a well-established genre in eighteenth-century Paris, a vibrant hub for printmaking and print selling. The popularity of images of food vendors is unsurprising, given the French interest in gastronomy. Little is known about the Parisian engraver Jean-Baptiste-Marie Poisson, who, in 1775, self-published his Cris de Paris, a set of seventy-two engravings, each depicting a street vendor. He dedicated the publication to the king’s librarian, Jérôme-Frédéric Bignon, a significant gesture at a time when support for Louis XVI was waning. This plate depicts a seller of small cakes made of almond, egg, and flour, flavored with anise seed. A liard was the smallest French coin, equivalent to a British farthing.

Edward Jones (1752–1824)
Musical Bouquet, or, Popular Songs and Ballads, 1799
London: Edward Jones
The Lewis Walpole Library, 74 799 J76
Opening: Frontispiece (etched by Thomas Rowlandson) and title page

The Welsh harpist and composer Edward Jones had wide-ranging and cosmopolitan tastes in music, including popular songs and ballads, and he published several groundbreaking compilations that recuperated vernacular types of music. His Musical Bouquet included settings for an Egyptian love song, a lament on the death of a Cherokee chief, and ballads, all intended to be performed by amateur musicians. Rowlandson’s etching depicts a woman—presumably a ballad seller— singing, accompanied by a child playing a triangle. An audience of all ages surrounds her, including food vendors with their baskets. Jones’s songs were intended for performances in affluent domestic settings rather than on the street. Rowlandson’s audience is decorous and polite, far removed from the cacophonous street life shown in Hogarth’s The Enraged Musician. The distinctive soundscape of urban streets has inspired many composers. In the early seventeenth century, the composer and organist Orlando Gibbons attempted to evoke something of the acoustic quality of street life with his musical compilation Cries of London, not only capturing the cries of vendors, but also those of the homeless and marginalized. In one song, Gibbons lists ten types of fish, ten vegetables, and eleven fruits as well as six different pies and cakes. John Gay incorporated street sounds into his landmark Beggar’s Opera, which controversially rejected traditional operatic forms and introduced a vernacular idiom. The cries evolved over time, along with the types of food they were used to sell.

William Marshall Craig (1763 or 1764–1829)
Description of the Plates, Representing the Itinerant Traders of London in Their Ordinary Costume, 1804
31 colored etchings with letterpress London: Richard Phillips
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, DA688.C63 1804+
Shown: Watercresses; Milk Below!; Rhubarb; and Mackerel

The Cries genre often functions as a method of mapping a city by situating its vendors at their regular “pitches.” William Marshall Craig’s series is a notable example, charting London in both economic and spatial terms by providing a taxonomy of occupations and a guide to the specific physical spaces in which they conducted their trades. Each plate shows a single vendor or tradesperson in a specific place, and is accompanied by a text describing the occupational type and his or her wares or services as well as accounts of the architectural sites depicted and of their distinguished inhabitants both past and present.

John Thomson (1837–1921) and Adolphe Smith (Adolphe Smith Headingley) (1846–1924) 
Street Life in London: With Permanent Photographic Illustrations Taken from Life Expressly for this Publication, [1877–78] Printed book with woodburytype illustrations and letterpress
London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund, DA688.T46 1877+
Shown: The Seller of Shellfish

This volume is a collection of woodburytype (a photomechanical process patented in 1864) reproductions of photographs of working people that John Thomson made in London in the 1870s. They were published in his monthly magazine Street Life in London accompanied by texts based on interviews by the journalist and social reformer Adolphe Smith Headingley, usually referred to as “Adolphe Smith.” Influenced by Henry Mayhew’s groundbreaking 1851 survey, London Labour and the London Poor, Thomson and Smith’s publication is an early example of photojournalism and an encyclopedic taxonomy of street occupations that marks the transition of the Cries genre into a research tool in the emerging field of sociology. In the preface, Smith wrote, “The pictures we have obtained … tell their own tale of hardship and suffering, and will, we hope, lead to a better appreciation of the struggle for existence in the crowded alleys of our great city.”