For Julie, with love, Happy Birthday !!! ♥✿♥✿♥✿
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“Cries of London” 1792 - 1795 by Francis Wheatley
“Itinerant traders of London” 1804 by William Marshall Craig

“Cries of London”

A popular tradition dating back centuries

William Marshall Craig’s itinerants or Francis Wheatley series about “The Cries of London” exist in a popular tradition of illustrated prints of the Cries of London that began in the 17th century. This was preceded by verse such as ‘London Lackpenny’, attributed to the 15th-century poet John Lydgate, which recorded an oral culture of hawkers’ cries that is as old as the city itself.

In the 20th century, the ‘Cries of London’ found their way onto cigarette cards, chocolate boxes and, famously, tins of Yardley talcum powder, becoming divorced from the reality they once represented as time went by, copied and recopied by different artists.

The sentimentally cheerful tones applied by hand to the prints, that were contrived to appeal to the casual purchaser, chime with the resilience required by traders selling in the street. And it is our respect for their spirit and resourcefulness which may account for the long lasting popularity of these poignant images of the self-respecting poor who turned their trades into performances. By making the streets their theatre, they won the lasting affections of generations of Londoners in the process, and came to manifest the very soul of the city.

Even now, it is impossible to hear the cries of market traders and newspaper sellers without succumbing to their spell, as the last reverberations of a great cacophonous symphony echoing across time and through the streets of London.


Music:
“The last rose of summer” (Thomas Moore 1805) by Maureen Hegarty
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