‘Photograph of three men standing beside a large barrel with tray of shrimps on the top of it.’ 12 September, 1884, Catalogue ref: COPY 1/369/220
These shrimp sellers were standing outside Greenwich Park, in south east London. The photograph provides some information about the daily lives of adult and child street sellers. On the left, a boy can be seen looking at the camera.
The photograph was commissioned by Charles H. Spurgeon, a Baptist minister who wanted to create lantern-slides of working people for his sermons. In the 1880s, there were roughly 30,000 street sellers or costermongers in London, selling their goods from barrows, baskets or carts. Others sold their products at fixed stalls.
It is possible to out more about the lives of street sellers in the Victorian period from ‘London Labour and the London Poor’ by contemporary investigative journalist Henry Mayhew. His four volume collection of interviews and engravings captures the lives of London’s working classes in the mid- 19th century.