Violets at a penny, by Theodosia Verrall

An original magazine feature written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this magazine feature, written in 1861, a woman describes the girls who bought flowers at a London wholesale market before dawn and sold them in the streets.

At half past four on an April morning the flower market is already full, though the gas lamps are still lit and the sky above the glass roof is the colour of a slate. The growers’ carts have come in from the country through the night, and the stalls are heaped so high with roses, stocks, wallflowers and moss that the whole building smells like a garden after rain. It is the loveliest sight in London, and very few Londoners have ever seen it.

Among the buyers, who are mostly sharp-eyed tradesmen in aprons, move the flower-girls. There were perhaps forty of them on the morning of my visit, the youngest not above eight years old and the eldest perhaps sixteen. Most were barefoot. Some had shawls; many had nothing over their thin cotton frocks but an old sack folded about the shoulders. They do not buy by the basket, as the tradesmen do, but by the bunch, with pennies counted out of a twist of paper.

I fell into talk with one of them, a girl of twelve called Polly, who had a baby brother tied to her back in a shawl and a tongue as quick as any costermonger’s. She told me that she must spend sixpence on violets, which she would split into twelve smaller bunches on the church steps and sell at a penny each to gentlemen going to their offices. If the morning was fine she might double her money. If it rained, nobody stopped. ‘Then I eats the loss,’ she said, ‘and nothing else.’

I watched her bargain with a grower twice her size and three times her age. She turned over his violets one bunch at a time, sniffed them, pronounced them ‘yesterday’s’, and walked away; and he called her back and let her have seven bunches for sixpence. She gave me a look of the purest triumph.

When I offered her a shilling she would not take it. ‘I ain’t a beggar, missus,’ she said. ‘Buy a bunch if you like.’ I bought two. They were the best violets I have ever had.

I have thought a great deal about Polly since. She works harder than most clerks, keeps a family on less than a clerk spends on his dinner, and has never been to school a day in her life. I do not know whether she will be alive in ten years. I hope that the next time my readers buy a penny bunch on their way to the City, they will look at the hand that holds it out.

“The writer presents the flower-girls only as pitiful victims.”

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