Here and there meat was being sold by Dutch auction, a brisk business.  Umbrellas, articles of clothing, quack medicines, were disposed of in the same way, giving occasion for much coarse humour.  The market-night is the sole out-of-door amusement regularly at hand for London working people, the only one, in truth, for which they show any real capacity.  Everywhere was laughter and interchange of good-fellowship.  Women sauntered the length of the street and back again for the pleasure of picking out the best and cheapest bundle of rhubarb, or lettuce, the biggest and hardest cabbage, the most appetising rasher; they compared notes, and bantered each other on purchases.  The hot air reeked with odours.  From stalls where whelks were sold rose the pungency of vinegar; decaying vegetables trodden under foot blended their putridness with the musty smell of second-hand garments; the grocers’ shops were aromatic; above all was distinguishable the acrid exhalation from the shops where fried fish and potatoes hissed in boiling grease.  There Lambeth’s supper was preparing, to be eaten on the spot, or taken away wrapped in newspaper.  Stewed eels and baked meat pies were discoverable through the steam of other windows, but the fried fish and potatoes appealed irresistibly to the palate through the nostrils, and stood first in popularity.

The people were of the very various classes which subdivide the great proletarian order.  Children of the gutter and sexless haunters of the street corner elbowed comfortable artisans and their wives; there were bareheaded hoidens from the obscurest courts, and work-girls whose self-respect was proof against all the squalor and vileness hourly surrounding them.  Of the women, whatsoever their appearance, the great majority carried babies.  Wives, themselves scarcely past childhood, balanced shawl-enveloped bantlings against heavy market-baskets.  Little girls of nine or ten were going from stall to stall, making purchases with the confidence and acumen of old housekeepers; slight fear that they would fail to get their money’s worth.  Children, too, had the business of sale upon their hands:  ragged urchins went about with blocks of salt, importuning the marketers, and dishevelled girls carried bundles of assorted vegetables, crying, ’A penny all the lot!  A penny the ‘ole lot!’

The public-houses were full.  Through the gaping doors you saw a tightly-packed crowd of men, women, and children, drinking at the bar or waiting to have their jugs filled, tobacco smoke wreathing above their heads.  With few exceptions the frequenters of the Walk turned into the public-house as a natural incident of the evening’s business.  The women with the babies grew thirsty in the hot, foul air of the street, and invited each other to refreshment of varying strength, chatting the while of their most intimate affairs, the eternal ‘says I,’ ‘says he,’ ‘says she,’ of vulgar converse.  They stood indifferently by the side of liquor-sodden creatures whose look was pollution.  Companies of girls, neatly dressed and as far from depravity as possible, called for their glasses of small beer, and came forth again with merriment in treble key.