Lodewijk Muns

Street cries

‘Street cries’ is the somewhat misleading term used for the vocal advertisements of itinerant traders. New mackerel! – Knives, scissors and razors to grind! – Hot spiced gingerbread, smoking hot! – Do you want any matches?

The term is misleading – given the various meanings of ‘crying’ (which will no doubt cause confusion about the title of this post). The ‘cry’ is actually a ‘call’ (German Ruf, Dutch roep): a verbal message or signal, uttered in a raised voice.

In the ‘affluent West’ street traders and their cries have long since disappeared. What one can hear in the markets nowadays is at best a pale reflection of the cacophony that until about 1900 used to be a characteristic part of the urban soundscape.

In a surprisingly rich and continous tradition, composers have made musical use of street cries – the earliest example dates from the 13th century. This practice of musical quotation is the subject of three episodes of my podcast, Beyond the Bony Labyrinth.

Better known is the tradition of printed images depicting pedlars, which is primarily associated with Paris and London. Series of such prints are usually entitled Les cris de Paris or The cries of London. Although the criers are often depicted open-mouthed and with their texts, they lack what made the cry a cry: the audible element. It was only in the 19th century that attempts were made to capture that missing element in musical notation. This is the subject of my essay, Speech Melody, Street Cries and Musical Notation.

What follows is a kind of footnote to both that essay and the podcast. It is (after some preliminaries) about a rare instance of a printed image and a musical composition entering into a direct commercial relationship: a case in which a song served as the picture’s advertising ‘cry’, so to speak.

Sweet blooming lavender

Flower sellers distinguished themselves from most of their colleagues by offering a luxury item, which probably led them to interact more frequently with a higher-class clientele. Perhaps that’s why their ‘cry’ was more like a song than most other cries.

Of all the London cries, the lavender sellers’ was the longest-lived. Still heard in the 1930s, Won’t you buy my sweet blooming lavender has been printed and recorded several times.[¹][²]

It is a somewhat elaborate song with a text that doesn’t lack a certain poetic quality. The b-l alliteration in that opening line may sound both sensual and sentimentally melancholic (dependent, of course, on the singer).

The popular image of the mostly female lavender seller (but not the tune) inspired a once-popular song by the composer Edward German. Who’ll buy my lavender (1896) purports to be a seller’s cry, but musically and poetically it belongs somewhere between pseudo-folksong and operetta.[³]

Ladies fair, I bring to you
Lavender with spikes of blue;
Sweeter plant was never found
Growing in our English fround.
Who’ll buy my lavender? Who’ll buy?
(Lyrics by Caryl Battersby)

Primroses, primroses…

Primroses were another flower that was often sold on the street, sometimes with a version of the same tune as lavender.[⁴] A very different tune for the same commodity, more of a melodic signal, was recorded in writing in 1832 by William Gardiner.[⁵]

Gardiner, a hosier and musician, deserves recognition for producing one of the oddest and longest book titles in the history of music aesthetics: The Music of Nature; Or, an Attempt to Prove That What Is Passionate and Pleasing in the Art of Singing, Speaking, and Performing Upon Musical Instruments, Is Derived from the Sounds of the Animated World: With Curious and Interesting Illustrations. Among the curious illustrations are musical notations of the ‘cries’ of dogs, cows and donkeys.

Gardiner was also a pioneer in the preservation of street cries as a form of cultural heritage. As early as 1832, he noted that London’s street cries were doomed to be silenced, and urged his readers:

Let us not forget these morceaux of melody, but put them down as recollections of an age that is past.

…two bunches a penny!

A century before Edward German portrayed an operettic lavender seller, the composer James Hook turned his attention to the seller of primroses. Hook turned out songs in astonishing quantities. For Vauxhall Gardens alone – a kind of amusement park – he wrote over 2,000.

One of these is Two Bunches a Penny Primroses: A Favourite Song Sung by Mrs. Franklin (Words by Mr. Upton), published in 1793.[⁶]

When Nature first salutes the Spring,
And fields all green appear,
The feathered tribe their matins sing,
And hail the verdant year ;
Yet, though the country has its sweets,
Unknown to those in town,
‘Tis sweet to hear in London streets,
What’s cried both up and down.
Two bunches a penny, primroses!
Two bunches a penny!

Mr. Upton’s poetry is mediocre at best, but the (implicit) comparison of pedlars’ cries with birdsong is worth some consideration. Just like city birds, street vendors have to compete with their own kind, and also with other street noise. Their cries must not only be clearly audible, but also distinctive, instantly recognisable. For both, it is a matter of survival.

There is no recording of this song, so you’ll have to do with my piano playing.

James Hook: Two Bunches a Penny, Primroses (1793). Lodewijk Muns 2026

Unlike German’s lavender song, the poetry does not cast the singer in the role of the flower seller. Only the refrain (at 0:44) contains the words of her cry, Two bunches a penny, primroses. The word order seems to have been chosen for its rhythm (more fluent than Primroses, two bunches a penny).

These lines are clearly set apart as a quotation by a change in tempo and time signature. It is unlikely that this melody is an exact copy of the original cry. But since the cry must have been familiar to the intended audience, one would expect the composer to have preserved at least some similarity to the original.

Art, commerce, and the picturesque

Hook’s Two bunches a penny is remarkable not so much because it incorporates a street cry, but because it appears to be an early and exceptional case of music composed specifically to promote the sale of another commodity – not primroses, but the engraving of a primrose seller. This seems probable if we consider that both the song and the picture were published in the same year and under the same title, Two bunches a penny.

The saccharine image shows a low-cut young woman or adolescent girl, assisted by two children and a dog. It is the first of a series of Cries of London that came on the market over a span of a few years. The prints were based on oil paintings by Francis Wheatley, who had previously specialised in high society portraiture. The original oil paintings were exhibited at the Royal Academy previous to their publication in print (1792-1795).

The young woman’s mouth is open, but she seems to be murmuring to herself rather than singing. The angelic faces and rosebud lips of the three characters must have held a certain erotic-sentimental appeal for prospective buyers. One can only wonder how they could sustain such a sentimental aestheticisation in the face of the harsh reality of lower class life. The incongruity did no go unnoticed by contemporary critics.[⁷]

A kind of explanation or justification can be found in a newspaper advertisement issued by the publisher Colnaghi & Co in 1795.[⁸]

In the civilized countries of Europe, the prevalence of polite manners softens down the rough originality of feature, and produces a similarity very unfavourable to the picturesque. It is among the lower ranks of life we are to look for the strong trait of national character.

The Courts of St. James or St. Petersburg, or Vienna or Rome, equally produce gentlemen, but the peasant of Switzerland, the poissard of Paris, and the lazzarone of Naples are genuine and original characters; and, in this point of view, few natural characters are more boldly marked than the lower order of people in the City of London.

With a view to delineate these features, so striking to the foreigner of every country, and to the philosopher of this, Messrs. Colnaghi & Co. respectfully beg leave to inform their friends and public that they have undertaken an uncommonly beautiful and highly ornamental work […].

This may count as a textbook explanation of the “picturesque” as an aesthetic concept applied to human beings. The equalising effect of civilised, ”polite manners” is contrasted with “natural” or “national” character and “rough originality” – a phenomenon worthy of “the philosopher’s” attention.

However, this advertisement could or should have been written for a very different series of Cries. It is hard to find any “rough originality” in Wheatley’s series of barely distinguishable young females and a few nondescript elderly men.

Hook’s feel-good music would have been a more suitable advertisement. Whether or not it was written with the express purpose of promoting Wheatley’s print remains a matter of conjecture. Some circumstantial evidence suggests that it is likely. The painter was seriously in debt, and by the end of 1793 was declared bankrupt. It would explain his choice for the potentially lucrative project, and some musical promotion by the popular Mrs. Franklin would have been helpful. It is also known that Wheatley had been associated with Vauxhall as a decorator, and was closely acquainted with its owner.[⁹]

If true, this would be a rare early instance of music specifically produced to advertise a commercial pictorial project – of art putting into practice precisely what it represents: advertising.

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1. Sharp, C.J. and Gilchrist, A.G. ‘Street Cries’, Journal of the Folk-Song Society, 4(15), 1910, pp. 97–102. ↩︎
2. ‘Singing Histories: London’ (no date). English Folk Dance and Song Society. ↩︎
3. German, E. and Battersby, C. Who’ll Buy My Lavender? London 1896. Sung by Grace Moore (1937), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFV4ppsnMOQ ↩︎
4. See 1. ↩︎
5. Gardiner, W. The Music of Nature [etc.]. London: Longman [etc.] 1832 ↩︎
6. Hook, J. A Collection of Favorite Songs sung by Mr. Darley [etc.] at Vauxhall Gardens. London: A. Bland & Weller 1793. ↩︎
7. Webster, M. Francis Wheatley. London: The Paul Mellon Foundation for British Art [etc.] 1970. ↩︎
8. Roberts, W. F. Wheatley, R. A.: His Life and Works. London: Otto 1910. ↩︎
9. See 7, 8. ↩︎