Part 15

Another street dog-seller, an intelligent man,--who, however did not know so much as my first informant of the state of the trade in the olden time,--expressed a positive opinion, that no dog-stealer was now a street-hawker (“hawker” was the word I found these men use). His reasons for this opinion, in addition to his own judgment from personal knowledge, are cogent enough: “It isn’t possible, sir,” he said, “and this is the reason why. We are not a large body of men. We stick pretty closely, when we are out, to the same places. We are as well-known to the police, as any men whom they most know, by sight at any rate, from meeting them every day. Now, if a lady or gentleman has lost a dog, or it’s been stolen or strayed--and the most petted will sometimes stray unaccountably and follow some stranger or other--why where does she, and he, and all the family, and all the servants, first look for the lost animal? Why, where, but at the dogs we are hawking? No, sir, it can’t be done now, and it isn’t done in my knowledge, and it oughtn’t to be done. I’d rather make 5_s._ on an honest dog than 5_l._ on one that wasn’t, if there was no risk about it either.” Other information convinces me that this statement is correct.

Of these street-sellers or hawkers there are now about twenty-five. There may be, however, but twenty, if so many, on any given day in the streets, as there are always some detained at home by other avocations connected with their line of life. The places they chiefly frequent are the Quadrant and Regent-street generally, but the Quadrant far the most. Indeed before the removal of the colonnade, one-half at least of all the dog-sellers of London would resort there on a very wet day, as they had the advantage of shelter, and generally of finding a crowd assembled, either lounging to pass the time, or waiting “for a fair fit,” and so with leisure to look at dogs. The other places are the West-end squares, the banks of the Serpentine, Charing-cross, the Royal Exchange, and the Bank of England, and the Parks generally. They visit, too, any public place to which there may be a temporary attraction of the classes likely to be purchasers--a mere crowd of people, I was told, was no good to the dog-hawkers, it must be a crowd of people that had money--such as the assemblage of ladies and gentlemen who crowd the windows of Whitehall and Parliament-street, when the Queen opens or prorogues the houses. These spectators fill the street and the Horse-guards’ portion of the park as soon as the street mass has dispersed, and they often afford the means of a good day’s work to the dog people.

Two dogs, carefully cleaned and combed, or brushed, are carried in a man’s arms for street-vending. A fine chain is generally attached to a neat collar, so that the dog can be relieved from the cramped feel he will experience if kept off his feet too long. In carrying these little animals for sale--for it is the smaller dogs which are carried--the men certainly display them to the best advantage. Their longer silken ears, their prominent dark eyes and black noses, and the delicacy of their fore-paws, are made as prominent as possible, and present what the masses very well call “quite a pictur.” I have alluded to the display of the _Spaniels_, as they constitute considerably more than half of the street trade in dogs, the “King Charleses” and the “Blenheims” being disposed of in nearly equal quantities. They are sold for lap-dogs, pets, carriage companions or companions in a walk, and are often intelligent and affectionate. Their colours are black, black and tan, white and liver-colour, chestnut, black and white, and entirely white, with many shades of these hues, and inter-blendings of them, one with another, and with gray.

The small _Terriers_ are, however, coming more into fashion, or, as the hawkers call it, into “vogue.” They are usually black, with tanned muzzles and feet, and with a keen look, their hair being short and smooth. Some, however, are preferred with long and somewhat wiry hair, and the colour is often strongly mixed with gray. A small Isle of Skye terrier--but few, I was informed know a “real Skye”--is sometimes carried in the streets, as well as the little rough dogs known as Scotch terriers. When a street-seller has a litter of terrier pups, he invariably selects the handsomest for the streets, for it happens--my informant did not know why, but he and others were positive that so it was--that the handsomest is the worst; “the worst,” it must be understood as regards the possession of choice sporting qualities, more especially of pluck. The terrier’s education, as regards his prowess in a rat-pit, is accordingly neglected; and if a gentleman ask, “Will he kill rats?” the answer is in the negative; but this is no disparagement to the sale, because the dog is sold, perhaps, for a lady’s pet, and is not wanted to kill rats, or to “fight any dog of his weight.”

The _Pugs_, for which, 40 to 50 years ago, and, in a diminished degree, 30 years back, there was, in the phrase of the day, “quite a rage,” provided only the pug was hideous, are now never offered in the streets, or so rarely, that a well-known dealer assured me he had only sold one in the streets for two years. A Leadenhall tradesman, fond of dogs, but in no way connected with the trade, told me that it came to be looked upon, that a pug was a fit companion for only snappish old maids, and “so the women wouldn’t have them any longer, least of all the old maids.”

_French Poodles_ are also of rare street-sale. One man had a white poodle two or three years ago, so fat and so round, that a lady, who priced it, was told by a gentleman with her, that if the head and the short legs were removed, and the inside scooped out, the animal would make a capital muff; yet even _that_ poodle was difficult of sale at 50_s._

Occasionally also an _Italian Greyhound_, seeming cold and shivery on the warmest days, is borne in a hawker’s arms, or if following on foot, trembling and looking sad, as if mentally murmuring at the climate.

In such places as the banks of the Serpentine, or in the Regent’s-park, the hawker does not carry his dogs in his arms, so much as let them trot along with him in a body, and they are sure to attract attention; or he sits down, and they play or sleep about him. One dealer told me that children often took such a fancy for a pretty spaniel, that it was difficult for either mother, governess, or nurse, to drag them away until the man was requested to call in the evening, bringing with him the dog, which was very often bought, or the hawker recompensed for his loss of time. But sometimes the dog-dealers, I heard from several, meet with great shabbiness among rich people, who recklessly give them no small trouble, and sometimes put them to expense without the slightest return, or even an acknowledgment or a word of apology. “There’s one advantage in my trade,” said a dealer in live animals, “we always has to do with principals. There’s never a lady would let her most favouritest maid choose her dog for her. So no parkisits.”

The species which I have enumerated are all that are now sold in the streets, with the exception of an odd “plum-pudding,” or coach-dog (the white dog with dark spots which runs after carriages), or an odd bull-dog, or bull-terrier, or indeed with the exception of “odd dogs” of every kind. The hawkers are, however, connected with the trade in sporting dogs, and often through the medium of their street traffic, as I shall show under the next head of my subject.

There is one peculiarity in the hawking of fancy dogs, which distinguishes it from all other branches of street-commerce. The purchasers are all of the wealthier class. This has had its influence on the manners of the dog-sellers. They will be found, in the majority of cases, quiet and deferential men, but without servility, and with little of the quality of speech; and I speak only of speech which among English people is known as “gammon,” and among Irish people as “blarney.” This manner is common to many; to the established trainer of race-horses for instance, who is in constant communication with persons in a very superior position in life to his own, and to whom he is exceedingly deferential. But the trainer feels that in all points connected with his not very easy business, as well, perhaps, as in general turf knowingness, his royal highness (as was the case once), or his grace, or my lord, or Sir John, was inferior to himself; and so with all his deference there mingles a strain of quiet contempt, or rather, perhaps, of conscious superiority, which is one ingredient in the formation of the manners I have hastily sketched.

The customers of the street-hawkers of dogs are ladies and gentlemen, who buy what may have attracted their admiration. The kept mistresses of the wealthier classes are often excellent customers. “Many of ’em, I know,” was said to me, “dotes on a nice spaniel. Yes, and I’ve known gentlemen buy dogs for their misses; I couldn’t be mistaken when I might be sent on with them, which was part of the bargain. If it was a two-guinea dog or so, I was told never to give a hint of the price to the servant, or to anybody. _I_ know why. It’s easy for a gentleman that wants to please a lady, and not to lay out any great matter of tin, to say that what had really cost him two guineas, cost him twenty.” If one of the working classes, or a small tradesman, buy a dog in the streets, it is generally because he is “of a fancy turn,” and breeds a few dogs, and traffics in them in hopes of profit.

The homes of the dog-hawkers, as far as I had means of ascertaining--and all I saw were of the same character--are comfortable and very cleanly. The small spaniels, terriers, &c.,--I do not now allude to sporting dogs--are generally kept in kennels, or in small wooden houses erected for the purpose in a back garden or yard. These abodes are generally in some open court, or little square or “grove,” where there is a free access of air. An old man who was sitting at his door in the summer evening, when I called upon a dog-seller, and had to wait a short time, told me that so quiet were his next-door neighbour’s (the street-hawker’s) dogs, that for some weeks, he did not know his newly-come neighbour was a dog-man; although he was an old nervous man himself, and couldn’t bear any unpleasant noise or smell. The scrupulous observance of cleanliness is necessary in the rearing or keeping of small fancy dogs, for without such observance the dog would have a disagreeable odour about it, enough to repel any lady-buyer. It is a not uncommon declaration among dog-sellers that the animals are “as sweet as nuts.” Let it be remembered that I have been describing the class of regular dog-sellers, making, by an open and established trade, a tolerable livelihood.

The spaniels, terriers, &c., the stock of these hawkers, are either bred by them--and they all breed a few or a good many dogs--or they are purchased of dog-dealers (not street-sellers), or of people who having a good fancy breed of “King Charleses,” or “Blenheims,” rear dogs, and sell them by the litter to the hawkers. The hawkers also buy dogs brought to them, “in the way of business,” but they are wary how they buy any animal suspected to be stolen, or they may get into “trouble.” One man, a carver and gilder, I was informed, some ten years back, made a good deal of money by his “black-patched” spaniels. These dogs had a remarkable black patch over their eyes, and so fond was the dog-fancier, or breeder of them, that when he disposed of them to street-sellers or others, he usually gave a portrait of the animals, of his own rude painting, into the bargain. These paintings he also sold, slightly framed, and I have seen them--but not so much lately--offered in the streets, and hung up in poor persons’ rooms. This man lived in York-square, behind the Colosseum, then a not very reputable quarter. It is now Munster-square, and of a reformed character, but the seller of dogs and the donor of their portraits has for some time been lost sight of.

The prices at which fancy-dogs are sold in the streets are about the same for all kinds. They run from 10_s._ to 5_l._ 5_s._, but are very rarely so low as 10_s._, as “it’s only a very scrubby thing for that.” Two and three guineas are frequent street prices for a spaniel or small terrier. Of the dogs sold, as I have before stated, more than one-half are spaniels. Of the remainder, more than one-half are terriers; and the surplusage, after this reckoning, is composed in about equal numbers of the other dogs I have mentioned. The exportation of dogs is not above a twentieth of what it was before the appointment of the Select Committee, but a French or Belgium dealer sometimes comes to London to buy dogs.

It is not easy to fix upon any per-centage as to the profit of the street dog-sellers. There is the keep and the rearing of the animal to consider; and there is the same uncertainty in the traffic as in all traffics which depend, not upon a demand for use, but on the caprices of fashion, or--to use the more appropriate word, when writing on such a subject--of “fancy.” A hawker may sell three dogs in one day, without any extraordinary effort, or, in the same manner of trading, and frequenting the very same places, may sell only one in three days. In the winter, the dogs are sometimes offered in public houses, but seldom as regards the higher-priced animals.

From the best data I can command, it appears that each hawker sells “three dogs and a half, if you take it that way, splitting a dog like, every week the year through; that is, sir, four or five one week in the summer, when trade’s brisk and days are long, and only two or three the next week, when trade may be flat, and in winter when there isn’t the same chance.” Calculating, then, that seven dogs are sold by each hawker in a fortnight, at an average price of 50_s._ each, which is not a high average, and supposing that but twenty men are trading in this line the year through, we find that no less a sum than 9100_l._ is yearly expended in this street-trade. The weekly profit of the hawker is from 25_s._ to 40_s._ More than seven-eighths of these dogs are bred in this country, Italian greyhounds included.

A hawker of dogs gave me a statement of his life, but it presented so little of incident or of change, that I need not report it. He had assisted and then succeeded his father in the business; was a pains-taking, temperate, and industrious man, seldom taking even a glass of ale, so that the tenour of his way had been even, and he was prosperous enough.

I will next give an account of the connection of the hawkers of dogs with the “sporting” or “fancy” part of the business; and of the present state of dog “finding,” to show the change since the parliamentary investigation.

I may observe that in this traffic the word “fancy” has two significations. A dog recommended by its beauty, or any peculiarity, so that it be suitable for a pet-dog, is a “fancy” animal; so is he if he be a fighter, or a killer of rats, however ugly or common-looking; but the term “sporting dog” seems to become more and more used in this case: nor is the first-mentioned use of the word “fancy,” at all strained or very original, for it is lexicographically defined as “an opinion bred rather by the imagination than the reason, inclination, liking, caprice, humour, whim, frolick, idle scheme, vagary.”

[Illustration: THE STREET DOG-SELLER.]

OF THE STREET-SELLERS OF SPORTING DOGS.

The use, if use it may be styled, of sporting, or fighting dogs, is now a mere nothing to what it once was. There are many sports--an appellation of many a brute cruelty--which have become extinct, some of them long extinct. Herds of bears, for instance, were once maintained in this country, merely to be baited by dogs. It was even a part of royal merry-making. It was a sport altogether congenial to the spirit of Henry VIII.; and when his daughter, then Queen Mary, visited her sister Elizabeth at Hatfield House, now the residence of the Marquess of Salisbury, there was a bear-baiting for their delectation--_after mass_. Queen Elizabeth, on her accession to the throne, seems to have been very partial to the baiting of bears and of bulls; for she not unfrequently welcomed a foreign ambassador with such exhibitions. The historians of the day intimate--they dared do no more--that Elizabeth affected these rough sports the most in the decline of life, when she wished to seem still sprightly, active, and healthful, in the eyes of her courtiers and her subjects. Laneham, whose veracity has not been impeached--though Sir Walter Scott has pronounced him to be as thorough a coxcomb as ever blotted paper--thus describes a bear-bait in presence of the Queen, and after quoting his description I gladly leave the subject. I make the citation in order to show and contrast the former with the present use of sporting dogs.

“It was a sport very pleasant to see the bear, with his pink eyes leering after his enemies, approach; the nimbleness and wait of the dog to take his advantage; and the force and experience of the bear again to avoid his assaults: if he were bitten in one place, how he would pinch in another to get free; that if he were taken once, then by what shift with biting, with clawing, with roaring with tossing and tumbling, he would work and wind himself from them; and, when he was loose, to shake his ears twice or thrice, with the blood and the slaver hanging about his physiognomy.”

The suffering which constituted the great delight of the _sport_ was even worse than this, in bull-baiting, for the bull gored or tossed the dogs to death more frequently than the bear worried or crushed them.

The principal place for the carrying on of these barbarities was at Paris Garden, not far from St. Saviour’s Church, Southwark. The clamour, and wrangling, and reviling, with and without blows, at these places, gave a proverbial expression to the language. “The place was like a bear-garden,” for “gardens” they were called. These pastimes beguiled the _Sunday_ afternoons more than any other time, and were among the chief delights of the people, “until,” writes Dr. Henry, collating the opinions of the historians of the day, “until the refined amusements of the drama, possessing themselves by degrees of the public taste, if they did not mend the morals of the age, at least forced brutal barbarity to quit the stage.”

Of this sport in Queen Anne’s days, Strutt’s industry has collected advertisements telling of bear and bull-baiting at Hockley-in-the-Hole, and “Tuttle”-fields, Westminster, and of dog-fights at the same places. Marylebone was another locality famous for these pastimes, and for its breed of mastiffs, which dogs were most used for baiting the bears, whilst bull-dogs were the antagonists of the bull. Gay, who was a sufficiently close observer, and a close observer of street-life too, as is well shown in his “Trivia,” specifies these localities in one of his fables:--

“Both Hockley-hole and Mary-bone The combats of my dog have known.”

Hockley-hole was not far from Smithfield-market.

In the same localities the practice of these sports lingered, becoming less and less every year, until about the middle of the last century. In the country, bull-baiting was practised twenty times more commonly than bear-baiting; for bulls were plentiful, and bears were not. There are, perhaps, none of our older country towns without the relic of its bull-ring--a strong iron ring inserted into a large stone in the pavement, to which the baited bull was tied; or a knowledge of the site where the bull-ring was. The deeds of the baiting-dogs were long talked of by the vulgar. These sports, and the dog-fights, maintained the great demand for sporting dogs in former times.

The only sporting dogs now in request--apart, of course, from hunting and shooting (remnants of the old barbarous delight in torture or slaughter), for I am treating only of the street-trade, to which fox-hounds, harriers, pointers, setters, cockers, &c., &c., are unknown--are terriers and bull-terriers. Bull-dogs cannot now be classed as sporting, but only as fancy dogs, for they are not good fighters, I was informed, one with another, their mouths being too small.

The way in which the sale of sporting dogs is connected with street-traffic is in this wise: Occasionally a sporting-dog is offered for sale in the streets, and then, of course, the trade is direct. At other times, gentlemen buying or pricing the smaller dogs, ask the cost of a bull-dog, or a bull-terrier or rat-terrier, and the street-seller at once offers to supply them, and either conducts them to a dog-dealer’s, with whom he may be commercially connected, and where they can purchase those dogs, or he waits upon them at their residences with some “likely animals.” A dog-dealer told me that he hardly knew what made many gentlemen so fond of bull-dogs, and they were “the fonder on ’em the more blackguarder and varmint-looking the creatures was,” although now they were useless for sport, and the great praise of a bull-dog, “never flew but at head in his life,” was no longer to be given to him, as there were no bulls at whose heads he could now fly.

Another dog-dealer informed me--with what truth as to the judgment concerning horses I do not know, but no doubt with accuracy as to the purchase of the dogs--that Ibrahim Pacha, when in London, thought little of the horses which he saw, but was delighted with the bull-dogs, “and he weren’t so werry unlike one in the face hisself,” was said at the time by some of the fancy. Ibrahim, it seems, bought two of the finest and largest bull-dogs in London, of Bill George, giving no less than 70_l._ for the twain. The bull-dogs now sold by the street-folk, or through their agency in the way I have described, are from 5_l._ to 25_l._ each. The bull-terriers, of the best blood, are about the same price, or perhaps 10 to 15 per cent. lower, and rarely attaining the tip-top price.