men with a
Saturday night's stock. As cobblers, they ply the craft of
"translation"--a trade, even in this lower acceptation of the term,
peculiarly liable to abuse. To the unlearned, it may be necessary to
state that translation is the act of converting old boots into new ones,
and is done with thin strips of varnished leather, and plenty of wax and
large nails. There are carpenters, whose ingenuity is confined to the
manufacture of money-boxes, cigar-cases, and children's stools. Smiths,
male and female, forge garden rakes, small pokers, and gridirons, as the
season may suggest. And then their wives and children, or other men's
wives and children, hawk them for sale in populous neighbourhoods on
market evenings. Tin funnels are sold "at the low price of a halfpenny."
Minute and useless candlesticks, wire forks, children's toys, and old
umbrellas, are a few specimens of this miscellaneous merchandise, the
sale of which brings bread to hundreds of families. They live in
foetid alleys, are not cleanly, and are sometimes intemperate; hence
they are peculiarly liable to the attacks of disease. During illness,
there are many things which the sick man craves which a parochial
officer cannot grant, and which a medical man could neither recommend
nor allow. The desire is gratified by the sale of a useful and
indispensable tool; and thus, by degrees, he exits off his own means of
subsistence. Then, like manufacturers of a higher grade, he may mistake
the public wants, and the articles he has made may remain unsaleable on
his hands, or he may fall into the error of over-production like a
Manchester house. Then, in seasons when those commodities which
constitute the common diet of the poor are scarce and dear, the persons
who deal in them who are unable to buy, or uncertain to sell, are thrown
back upon the few shillings which compose their capital. In large cities
and towns, and in the neighbourhood of great markets, there are crowds
of poor persons who gain their livelihood by the purchase and sale of
the articles of daily food, and their combined purchases form a large
item in the business of those markets. The costermongers, or
costardmongers, consist of various grades. That brisk-looking man, who
is riding so proudly in his donkey-cart, with his wife at his elbow, may
be a very mean person in the estimation of the passer-by, but, in his
world, he is a man of importance. He watches the "turns of the market,"
and being either i