Oysters

Oysters were so plentiful up to the beginning of the nineteenth century that Sam Weller could say: ‘Poverty and oysters always seem to go together . . . the poorer a place is, the greater call there seems to be for oysters . . . here’s a oyster stall to every half dozen houses [in Whitechapel]. The street’s lined vith ’em. Blessed if I don’t think that ven a man’s wery poor, he rushes out of his lodgings and eats oysters in reg’lar desperation.’*

In 1700, 200 cost 4s., and in 1840 they still only cost about 4d. a dozen. They were sold in the Fish Market at Billingsgate, which had grown in importance at the end of the seventeenth century. They were also sold on stalls and barrows, often apparently in association with gilt gingerbread. Smollet in Humphrey Clinker claims that the connoisseur preferred his oysters to have a green colour, which he took to indicate freshness, and that to this end they were sometimes kept for days in ‘slime pits’ covered with ‘vitriolic scum’. If this can be accepted as fact, many a death must surely have followed from eating them. However, about 1850 they seem quite suddenly to have become scarcer, partly from disease and partly because the beds had been over-dredged. In spite of cultivation, they have remained a luxury ever since.