ABSTRACT
The Pedlars Acts of 1870, 1871 and 1881 radically changed the law in a 'free trade' direction by replacing the licence with a cheap annual police permit. In 1871 Dr William Guy bemoaned the fact that only one of London's local authorities had availed itself of powers under an Act of 1855 to employ paid crossing-sweepers. Crossing-sweepers were also often covert beggars, as well as look-outs for thieves. Victorian entertainers were not confined, as they tend to be in modern times, to a few locales like cinema queues, the London Underground and a few market places. The term 'busking' in the mid nineteenth century meant peddling in pubs, seeking work as an entertainer there, or selling obscene songs in the street, but by the late nineteenth century seems to have taken on its modern connotations of street entertaining. Street entertainers were not on the whole viewed as beggars under the Vagrancy Act, though the legal area is a little grey.
