ABSTRACT
I shall in this letter conclude my remarks on the hucksters or street-dealers of the metropolis. The classes of whom I have still to treat include the hucksters of street literature and arts - such as the "flying stationers" or dealers in last dying speeches and three yards of new and popular songs, the umbrella printsellers, the wall-song men, the play-bill sellers, and the vendors of four sheets of note-paper for a penny. All these are included under the term "street paper-sellers," and they constitute a large body of individuals. Those that remain are difficult to classify. They may be enumerated under the titles of dog-dealers, flower-girls, vendors of com salve and compositions for removing grease spots from cloth, sellers of small coins and jewellery, purchasers of hareskins. hawkers of hearthstones, sand, and gravel; and lastly, the most degraded of all, viz., the street pickers-up, or "bone-grubbers," and "mud-larks." These, with a few exceptions, exhaust the class of hucksters. It is true there are varieties that are still undescribed - such as the donkey-boys (but these belong to the suburbs of London itself); then there are the street vendors of gold fish, of cutlery, of hardware, of tea-trays, of slippers, of wash-leathers and sponges, of sheeting and table-covers, and of pretended smuggled goods; but these varieties of the order are far too limited in numbers to be worthy of special description.
