Taverner’s Steet Food begins by imagining a working day for a London street seller, immediately presenting the reader with a worker’s-eye-view of the experience of retailing mackerel, cherries, asparagus and pies in the nation’s capital. The description could, we are told, be situated at any date within the book’s range – from c. 1600 to the early years of the twentieth century – such were the continuities in this line of work across a period when, conventional historical accounts would have it, life in the metropolis was undergoing a dramatic transformation. That this modernization narrative looks less compelling when viewed through the history of hawking is the central argument of the book.
It is one that Taverner develops by drawing on ‘a diverse assemblage of material’, at the heart of which are references to 858 individual street sellers and 443 specific acts of street selling for the period 1600–1825, drawn from a range of legal and regulatory records, and supplemented for later years with evidence drawn from the famous surveys of Mayhew and Booth, and for the whole period by images and music from the ‘Cries of London’ genre. What this allows is the piecing together of a fine-grained, ground-level account of hawking that centres the everyday experiences of actual workers, a history from below of working-class life in the capital. To say the resulting picture is richly textured would be an understatement, and Taverner excels at transporting us to the world he explores. It is one where a diverse range of women and men of all ages sold fruit, veg, milk, fish, baked goods – especially during the late seventeenth century ‘baking bonanza’ – and exotic imports – sugar, coconuts, pineapples – to both working- and middle-class Londoners. Some did so from permanent stalls and in well-known street markets; others utilized the perennial tools of the trade, the barrow and the basket, to meet demand with mobility, and all made use of the voice to advertise their wares: ‘Hot pudding pies, hot!’ The book’s experiential focus even extends to considerations of the conditions under foot that hawkers had to contend with, the carefully adapted clothing they wore and the changing lighting levels in the capital that shaped their working environment.
This granular approach to the nuts-and-bolts of street selling is skilfully combined with the consideration of larger conceptual and historical questions, and two contributions to wider debates stand out. One is Taverner’s important conclusions on the relationship between work and identity in this period. Whilst hawkers can be said to have ‘expressed a working identity’, it was a messy one, reflecting the fact that there were considerable variations in the wealth, status and income of street sellers, who were drawn from across a ‘many layered working class’ in the city. Their work was often ad hoc, flexible and informal, contributing to a working identity that was ‘less concise and discrete than most others but significant nonetheless’. It is a valuable reminder of how complex the formation of work-based identities could be in this period, something that was true not only for hawkers but more broadly – for the many women who were never accorded occupational titles, and, as historians are increasingly coming to recognize, even for those men who could lay claim to a clear occupational title: their working lives and identities were often more unstable and varied than the title suggested. What hawkers represent is not so much a case-study of an unusual relationship between work and identity, but a useful example of what was commonly a complex dynamic for early modern working people.
The second significant contribution of the book is its sophisticated challenge to narratives of modernization. By situating ordinary Londoners at the heart of the story, Taverner again and again discovers that the transformative march of urban modernity was experienced as ‘halting, contradictory and incomplete’ by the vast majority of the city’s inhabitants, at least before the twentieth century. The persistence of travelling on foot; the ongoing use of traditional technologies for moving goods; the patchy progress of paving and lighting schemes; the endurance of a light touch approach to regulation on the part of local authorities, all meant that the everyday experience of hawking so painstakingly reconstructed by Taverner, and by implication much else about working-class life in the city, was, if not entirely unchanging, remarkably enduring. Historians are often drawn to the telling of stories of radical change; Taverner resists that, and the result is a history that is no less fascinating and thought-provoking. Indeed, this highly accomplished first book should be on the reading lists not only of historians of work, of food and drink and of London, but of any historian interested in processes of change and continuity in English society over the past 400 years.
