Those Lively Regency Streets

Regency streets would have been fairly active and interesting places, what with knife grinders, pot  menders and chimney sweeps, milkmaids and streets sellers hawking everything from cherries to hot codlins -- not to mention the miscellany of enterprising pickpockets and cut purses and those generally operating on the windy side of the law.



Exciting, those Regency streets.

'Hot Codlins' are roasted apples, in case you didn't know and were wondering.



There was a little woman, as I've been told,

Who was not very young, nor yet very old;

Now this little woman her living got

By selling codlins, hot, hot, hot!




But I digress.



Along with all those buyers and sellers, intent upon the mystery of commerce, there were artists out there hustling a living.


You had your street musicians.  Most often, they'd be playing something portable, like a violin or a hurdy gurdy.  I do not feel impelled to discuss what a violin is, but hurdy gurdy's are kinda interesting.   



Hurdy gurdys, are instruments played by skill, to borrow phraseology from the insurance business.  When you turn a crank, this rubs a wheel against the strings to make the music.  A couple strings make a constant drone.  The little keyboard on the side presses other strings to change the pitch and play a melody.

There's a performance on a hurdy gurdy here.


To my mind, this sounds a little like a bagpipe. 

When I was playing bagpipe music on my computer a while back, my son came in and said, "Mom, there's something wrong with your sound card."
Which kinda sums it up.

 


The hurdy gurdy player and the barrel organ grinder were often accompanied by capuchin monkeys who entertained the customers and 'passed the hat'.

Hurdy gurdys aren't to be confused with barrel organs which are altogether larger affairs.  (The words were used interchangeably in the Regency, which is confusing.)  Barrel organs are also played by turning a crank, but barrel organs use pipes and bellows to play a tune encoded by pins.  Think music box. With a single tune. Very loud. 

The barrel organ exists in the Regency, but it's more a Victorian institution.  This to the right is a Victorian engraving of a barrel organ being played.



The music of barrel organs was not universally loved.  As one writer put it:


As our nerves are rather delicate (fine minds are in general attended with fine nerves) the faintest and most distant squeaking of a hurdy-gurdy is sufficient, so to speak, to knock us off our perch. The very instant that we hear it, the fear of coming horrors completely overpowers us; and throwing down our pen we make a frantic rush to our remotest coal-cellar, where with cotton in our ears we tremblingly abide until we think the danger past.  Punch 1860


What else?  -- You had your street singers, often accompanied by an instrument.  Yer jugglers.  Conjurors set up a table and showed off feats of magic and slight of hand.  There were dancing bears and trained dogs doing tricks.  There were even entire theatrical performances put on in the public streets by strolling players. 

There was the raree show or 'rarity show'.


The raree show was a portable peep show, carried around on a man's back.  It's described as: 
"

a raree-show . . .  has a very plain and mean external appearance; but if we look into it intently, the prospect inlarges by degrees, and gives us a most surprising and delightful entertainment, successively presenting to our view the greatest variety of nature and of art."  Memoirs of the Society of Grub Street 1737



The raree show box would have glass spyholes in it.  The pictures inside were set into viewing position by the operator pulling a string.  The great attraction was the raree operator's patter, explaining the wonders within for whoever was lucky enough to pay his farthing and look through the glass.  



And what was within?  Illustrations of the wonders of nature.  Art.  Drawings of topical interest.  Views of distant places. 

One writer describes a raree show as being, " really very comical and diverting."


And another says:


AS I was going through Smithfield the other day, I observed an old fellow with a wooden leg, drest in a sailor's habit, who courteously invited the passer-by to peep into his raree-show, for the small price of an halfpenny. His exhibitions, I found, were very well suited to the times, and quite in character for himself: for among other particulars, with which he amused the little audience of children that surrounded his box, I was mightily pleased to hear the following; "— There you see the British fleet "persuing the French ships, which are running "away—There you see Major-General Johnson beating the French soldiers in America, and "taking Count Dieskau prisoner — There you "see the Grand Monarque upon his knees before "King George, begging his life."   The Connoisseur, 1755



Raree shows were considered good fun, but a little . . . vulgar.  Contemporary writers speak of someone bombastic as "bawling out with the tone and gestures of raree show men."   The word itself was used to mean an empty amusement.  


Last but not least ... Punch and Judy.



Punch and Judy go way back.  Back to Sixteenth Century Italian Commedia del'arte.  Back to Seventeenth Century London.  Samuel Pepys attended an early version of Punch and Judy as a marionette show at Covent Garden.



By the Regency, the Punch and Judy performance had moved onto the  streets.  Marionettes, with the heavy equipment and multiple operators, had been replaced by a single puppeteer and hand puppets.    



The single puppeteer means only two puppets on stage, so Punch and Judy consists of a number of short scenes between two characters, one of them Punch.



Something about squawking, outraged Mr. Punch appealed to the Regency audience up and down the social scale.  Punch -- the puppet with the personality disorder.  Wild, cantankerous, so-much-not-a-pacifist Mr. Punch.  He carries a stick -- called a slapstick -- as big as himself and whaps it about freely.   He is gleefully self-satisfied.  "That's the way to do it," he says, pleased -- of course -- as Punch.



 

Big cities still have a vibrant street life.  What's your favorite 'free show' in the city?


Comments

[Patricia Rice]

Makes the streets of Regency London come to life, thank you! Rather like rolling New Orleans Jackson Square and the subways of NYC and other such places into one small area without regulations. It must have been exciting and overwhelming for anyone just in from the country!

[joanna bourne]

I like the 'no regs' thought. Apparently you just picked out your 'patch', started beating a drum and set let slip the dancing dogs.

[Anne Gracie]

Lovely post, Joanna. Reminds me of one time when a man was out in a street I know, playing the violin perfectly dreadfully. There is nothing more dreadful, I think, than a badly played violin. The cafe owner where I was having a coffee told me they'd originally made the mistake of slipping him a few dollars to move away, and now he came back regularly and did the whole street in an hour — everyone paying him to move on.

[Mary Jo Putney]

Your vivid word picture of the streets of London reminds me why people who came from the country found the city so noisy! Some of the street food sounds pretty good, though. *G*

[Angela]

I can just picture the street scenes in my mind's eye. I wish I could visit for the day.

Thanks for the link to what a hurdy gurdy sounds like. Love. it.

[Jane O]

I'm feeling very old!

When I was a child in Queens in the 1940s, there would occasionally be someone we called "the monkey grinder" who played a barrel organ (which we called a hurdy gurdy) while the monkey danced about and held out his cup for contributions. His appearance was one of the signs of spring.

There were also the knife grinder (a very useful fellow) and the rag man. The streets were also always filled with children playing.

I hadn't thought about it before, but the streets in those days were an actual locale, not simply a way to get from one place to another.

[joanna bourne]

Hi Angela --

I went looking for how a hurdy gurdy sounds, since I was curious, and came across that lovely man doing the performance. I had to laugh at him.

You know how we have many words from historical times and some pictures -- but we don't so much have the sounds and the smells?

That's one of the sounds from the Regency Streets.

[joanna bourne]

Hi Jane O --

I think we're losing that sense of the streets as a meeting place and playground.

This is SO MUCH the historical reality. Those grim tenements in the East End of London were cold and dark and crowded. Folks spent their days outside whenever the weather wasn't absolutely horrible.

Even in the mid-Twentieth Century, big cities had neighborhoods. Kids played in the streets and ran errands to the nearest grocery, perfectly at home, safe among two hundred adults hanging out the windows or sitting on the stoop who knew them and knew who belonged on the street and who didn't.

I wonder if we've lost this forever. I fear the city spaces become anonymous and dangerous and the city neighborhoods disappear.

Maybe city planners are beginning to take this into account. I hope so.

[joanna bourne]

Hi Mary Jo --

When I lived in Tehran, there were carts that came around with a cooked beet on them. I mean .. these were GIANT beets. The fellow would slice off a bit and give it to you on a plate.

And there were carts selling melon juice. Lovely.

[joanna bourne]

Hi Anne --

Paying him to move along. Oh, that's funny. That's exactly what the contemporary accounts say about the hurdy gurdy men. Everybody would pay them to move on.

The same tune, over and over again, must have been maddening.

[Valerie Bowman]

Thank you for this vivid and lively description of the streets of the Regency. And now I know what a hot codlin is!

[Regan Walker]

Jo, thanks for this great look at London's streets!--and don't forget the smells! Weren't sewage and garbage a real issue?

Regan
http://www.reganwalkerauthor.com

[Ella Quinn]

This reminds me very much of what one can still see today in Europe. I'm sad we've lost so much of it in the US.

[joanna bourne]

Hi Ella --

When they do urban re-development, lotsa times they try for that 'European Neighborhood' vibe. I like to see that. Maybe we're headed in the right direction.

[joanna bourne]

Hi Regan --

I've lived in towns that have no particular waste disposal system. Open sewers and so on.

You don't notice it so much, really.

[joanna bourne]

Hi Valerie --

Yes! Hot Codlins. I'd known the poem but had no idea what they were. (If someone had asked me, I would have said, fish.)

Isn't it wonderful the things you learn when you're looking for something else? I couldn't resist sharing that.

[Louis]

Fascinating.

Facinating time on the srteets.

[joanna bourne]

Hi Louis --

I think I would have enjoyed myself, wandering around in the Regency.

[Jo Banks]

How the heck does a codlin become a hot apple??Most odd there must be some old english connection somewhere I suppose .Though you do get coddled eggs so is to coddle to heat something?Mind you I find a stoop something I have never heard of I think you mean a porch?Talk about being divided by one language!

[Polly McCrillis]

In Boston, a couple blocks from Harvard I stopped to listen to a string quartet playing a Shubert piece many years ago. Dressed in concert black, music stands arranged in a U. Stepped off the train in Philadelphia and there was a blind man playing a Mozart symphony on a glass harp. Astonishing. Strings, horns, reeds, all the parts were there. As a music student in New Orleans I spent many out-of-class hours in the Quarter. There's a Regency feel to that city. Acrobats, musicians, painters, so much going on, weekends especially. We may have less street entertainment in the USA but what we have is amazing.

[joanna bourne]

Hi Jo Banks,

*g* I do love words, don't you.

Codlin is an old word for some varieties of cooking apples. Dates to the early Fifteenth Century. It's British usage, though I haven't heard it outside that poem.
Not clear where the word comes from.

The similar-sounding 'coddle' -- what we do to an egg -- seems to be of slightly more recent origin and comes from caudle, a warm drink for the sick.

Stoop, in this meaning, is a small porch. It's a generally Yankee sort of word. Northeast USA. I think of it as a Baltimore word because that's where I'd hear it.

This 'stoop' is from the Dutch stoep -- a small porch -- and comes to the US from the Dutch settlers in New York State.

I am now filled with a desire to track down just what kind of apples are codlins.

[joanna bourne]

Hi Polly --

I mentioned Baltimore above. I don't know whereas Baltimore is particularly known for its street performers, the way New Orleans is. But I remember Saturdays in the Mount Vernon Park. There'd usually be somebody playing.

[deniz]

Street singing! That's interesting. But I like the sound of bagpipes :-)