Alice, a peddler, was a Welsh packer who worked in villages around Lanfer in 1885. John thomas Collection, National Library of Wales
Before the appearance of railways, buses and automobiles, when the isolated farm was only one day away from the nearest store, the nearest department store was a street vendor who called.
Wheeled transportation was still very expensive at that time, and most rural roads were not repaired, so most of these traveling salesmen were carrying goods. Their backpacks usually weigh 8% (1 pounds, or about 5 kilograms, not much lighter than their owners), and they also hide a bunch of odds and ends of treasures, from household items to horsehair wigs, all neatly placed in drawers. Because customers are almost all women, bestsellers are almost all beauty products; Readers of Anne of the Green Gables may remember that she bought a dye to dye her green hair from a vendor.
Over the years, the fixtures of these rural scenes have many names; They are buffers, or tweeds, or packers, or dust jackets. Some people are liars, but a high proportion of them are more or less honest businessmen, because it is impossible to build a profitable round without providing reasonable services to customers. It is estimated that by the mid-19th century, an honest packer could earn more than a pound a week on the road in England, when his income was considerable.
For hundreds of years, packers have been a welcome sight for many customers. Writer H.V. Morton told us: "He is the most exciting person in the lives of girls and women. When he takes out trays from distant towns and presents them with vanity clothes and trifles, their eyes shine." The prisoners in the farmhouse where they stayed at night thought they were lucky to entertain the packer because he was their news publisher, their storyteller and friend.
I'm very interested in this. Of course, in the process of recording the decline and decline of this ancient lifestyle, packers can't survive the arrival of the modern world. The exact time of species extinction is still controversial; In Britain, historians may point out that in 181, it became law for traders to buy expensive annual licenses in order to trade. However, there is evidence that the prosperity of packmen is at least a little longer than that; According to census data, at least in Britain, the sharp decline in the number of packmen can be traced back to 1841-1851, when the total number of packmen plummeted from more than 17, to 2,5, a drop of more than 85%. Henry Mayhew, whose vivid investigation of London laborers and the poor in London is our biggest information base about the marginal life in Victorian era, noticed in 1851 that "this system is not as popular as it was a few years ago." He found that only five backpackers and dozens of "idiots" and "idiots" were still active in the capital at that time, and concluded: "This trade has now almost completely become a national trade."
I met the last Cornish after jumping.
Henry Mayhew. Mayhew is a pioneering journalist. He is best remembered for his book The London Labour and the London Poor, which has four volumes and tells the oral history of the middle Victorian working class. What surprises me about the pictures provided by Wikileaks
is that considering all the above, several packmen have lived in more remote areas of this country for 7 years. After three pence buses drove them away from London, they have been trudging hard, and the railway has reached almost any settlement in Britain. Most of the reason is that even in the mid-192s, roads in some places were more like trails, and hills were dangerous enough to become obstacles for motor vehicles. This is the remnant of Bree who survived in a forgotten world like a dinosaur. They do this mainly on the edge of the Celtics: in the highlands of Scotland, the hills of central Wales, and the farthest areas of Cornwall. It was at this last time, around 1926, somewhere south of King Arthur's fortress in TinTagel, that H.V. Morton met someone who we could reasonably assume was the last Cornwall Indian.
I should stop here to introduce Morton, who is not often remembered now. He fought in a great war in the hot land of Palestine, where he contracted a painful disease and thought he was going to die. Suffering from homesickness, Morton "solemnly cursed me for wandering around the world stupidly all the time ... I felt ashamed and sad over Jerusalem, and realized that I knew little about Britain. I am ashamed to think that I have wandered so far around the world and neglected those lovely things near my home so often ... I swear that if the pain on my neck doesn't end in the windy mountain of Palestine forever, I will go home and look for England.
It was to fulfill this vow that Morton found himself bowling on a country road in the western lizard at the southernmost tip of Cornwall a few years later. Although he didn't know it, he was almost at the last moment of his trip, because "a stranger … is a novelty to them", so he could travel around the country and greet strangers confidently. In fact, Morton is also a staunch nostalgic. He deliberately followed a route through all the most beautiful areas in the country and avoided all industrial towns. Nevertheless, his longing for a disappearing country and his often interesting memories are still readable. We can be glad that his road took him through the alley in the south of St. Justice, because we have no better description than his < P >. In his last days, I met him by the roadside. He is a poor old man with a large group of people around him, so I asked him if he could give him a ride. "No," he said, thanking me. I can't give him a lift because he can't get where he wants to go-he points to the car.
"give it to her," I corrected.
"Give it to her," he said, meeting me on the way.
"This fixed connection," Morton noticed. Two people were sitting on the side of the road, sharing a pipe of tobacco, and then chatting.
"how long have you been a packer?" ? I asked him.
I think this question is ridiculous; I wouldn't be surprised if he answered me: "Well, I started my journey and worked for Eli in Nablus. Nablus was a general merchant in Sidon. Since 6 BC, he came to England once a year with a batch of pearl seeds, and then he threw them into the sea. When the Romans left, I made a rare deal, trading strops for knives.
"Over the years, Sur," he replied.
"Then you must be almost seventy?" ?
"Well, I can't say it clearly," he replied, "but putting one thing on another, I believe it is true, and it must be false, Sue."
"Do you still have that heavy backpack?" ?
"Yes, Sue, I take him easily, although I am an old man."
But after many years and his burden, Morton's old man is still very flexible:
He takes off his waterproof coat, opens his bag and displays all kinds of sundry trays: cheap shaving brushes, razors, pins, suspenders, corsets, studs, photo frames, religious texts, black and white spotted aprons, combs, brushes and ribbons. The price is the same as that in a small shop.
"I suppose you have to change your inventory year after year to keep up with the trend?" ?
"yes, it's true, sur. When I first took me out, there was no saafety razor, and the faarm boys had never used hair oil. Now they are all Smurfs and gay people in the city.
This is the account of Morton in the jazz age published in 1927. When invited to show the latest article, packman showed a "disgusting smile" in his schoolbag: "Scissors cut off the tile-shaped head and block the cut hair with various slides."
"In the past," he said, "you must have never seen hair like this. Just like you planted seeds in Cornwall, the girls used brushes to brush their hair all day-I'm glad to see that they have cut it now. If you cut me with an axe now, think about the United Nations. I tell you they look like a row of flat cabbages, the United Nations! "This is different from the days when I sent a pack of hairpins to every witch I met."
"We started talking about the advantages of the packers' profession," the report concluded. "Like all professions, it has its secrets, but the vendors' views on its most important skills surprised Morton." If you want to make money in this game, "the packers warned,
" You need a quiet tongue on your head, of course I will tell ee. When I was a young man, there was a young Trevisi who asked his friends from Penzance to Bernanke Bay to find him with sticks, because young Joe just sucked up the story like a spoon, but he couldn't hold on. Well, Sur, that guy went from one farm to another, from one farm to another, from one farm to another, from one farm to another, from one farm to another, from one farm to another, from one farm to another, from one farm to another, from one farm to another. Sur, that guy went through the land selling shoelaces and spread trouble like you have ever seen! Before Buyi appeared more than twice, there was not a Marne or Uman who didn't know what other Marnes and Uman were wearing under their clothes. This is a fact, Sur.
"Why, Sue, they are too afraid to buy shoelaces from the United Nations! "Heere is young Joe," they would shout. "Close the doer! "So, the United Nations has gone and never appeared in these Payates again."
We solemnly meditate that this novelist's tragedy was born in his place. The old man knocked out his pipe and said that he must get along well. He refused to help, threw his big backpack on his shoulder, waved a stick and crossed a path in a scarred tin mine ruins. They said that this mine, which extends below the Atlantic Ocean, was mined before the time of Christ.
The old guy disappeared into the crater, walked carefully and beat with a stick. I watched him leave, and felt that he and the old mine were a group of people. For the packers, the same old ones may have been here before the Romans. One is out of date, one is dead, and the other is poor, old and lonely, walking slowly along the same sad road.
Envoi
I can't leave you without telling another favorite part of Morton's journey through Cornwall. Here he is, hunched over by a drizzle, lying in the courtyard of the church of Sen 'en at the end of Rand, and the gunfire of the sloop gave a monotonous warning to the sailors in the fog at the farthest end of England. He is investigating "the last monument in the country of monuments", apparently in vain hoping to find some epitaphs with literary value. Then he saw it ...
"The last stroke of real English poetry was written on the grave of Dionysius Williams, who left this life at the age of 5 on May 15th, 1799:
Life accelerated from one point to another, although it seemed that the motionless/cunning fugitive was sneaking fast/too subtle to see/but soon it was time for human beings, and we would be.
I stood in the rain and wrote it on a wet book, from which I got a cold feeling. Is this a quotation? If so, who wrote it? In the future, whenever I think of the end of the land, I will not see the jagged rocks and the sea, but the mossy stone above Dionysus's head (if he were alive, he would be 177 years old), the unlikely name, the rain that fell on it, and a gun rumbling in the sea fog in the distance ...
comes from another London guide, and a lot of strangers. John Badcock. Living pictures of London, 1828, and a guide to strangers …, by Jon Bielsq. London: W Clark, 1828; Rita Barton (editor). Life in Cornwall in the mid-19th century: excerpts from The West Briton from 1835 to 1854. Truro: Barton, 1971; John chartres and others (editor). Land history chapters in England and Wales. Cambridge, 4 volumes: Cup, 199; Lawrence Fontaine, History of European Vendors. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996; Michael Freeman and Derek Aldcroft (editors). Means of transport in Victorian England. Manchester: Mupu, 1988; David, hey. Packmen, Carriers and Packhorse Roads: trade and communication in North Derbyshire and South Yorkshire. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 198; Roger Leckie. "This is Chapman Billis' position." A preliminary study of Scottish Chapman, parkman and vendors. Journal of Scottish Antiques Association 12 (199); Henry Mayhew. London laborers and the poor in London; An encyclopedia about the conditions and income of those who can work, those who can't work and those who can't work. Privately published, 4 volumes: London 1851. H.v. Morton Looking for England. London: folio Association, 22; Margaret Stafford, The Great Seclusion in the English Country —— Little Chapman in the 17th century and his commodities. London: Hambleton, 1984.