‘When Eros first arose [1893] he did so from a bed of flowers and perfume, for at his base sat the flower girls of London, those baskets full of posies, so fresh and so cheap…They were one of the sights of London and more people looked at them and bought their wares than looked at Eros.’
This quotation comes from Goodbye Piccadilly, the memoir of theatre historian Walter Macqueen-Pope, which describes some of the women selling flowers on the streets of London’s West End. In doing so he contributes to the mythologising of a specific type of street trader: the flower girl. This creative process of representation obscured the realities of life for those selling flowers in the London streets in the early 20th century.
One of the most famous of these representations is Eliza Doolittle in the 1912 play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw, and latterly in the 1964 film My Fair Lady adapted from the play. Both the play and the film dress Eliza in a battered black straw hat, and a grubby black coat, and this costume was part of the iconography of the flower girl from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s, used in postcard images and photographic publications of London street life. Henry Mayhew in his 1861 survey of London Labour and the London Poor wrote at length about flower girls, admitting their numbers were unknown. Very little has been written by historians about the flower selling trade as a whole, particularly because of scant historical data and partly because of the perception of the trade as ‘feminine’, and this includes flower girls, whose trade is the definition of ephemeral and transitory. In her article Flower-Girls and Fictions: Selling on the Streets Kristina Huneault argues that this historic lack of detailed information on female street sellers provided a blank space for artists and writers (such as Shaw) to fill with a complex mixture of romanticism and sexual ambivalence in ‘the geographic fabric of London’.
This creative but pervasive process served to obscure the material realities of the work for female flower sellers of any age, which required both skill and fortitude. The generic term ‘flower girls’ was a gendered subsection of the category of ‘costermongers’; those who sold vegetables, plants and flower from handcarts on the street. Costermongers (both male and female) were a key part of London’s street economy, as the number of street markets and stalls in London increased exponentially to provide food and commodities to an increasing population from the mid 19th century onwards. Unlike costermongers who sold from hand barrows, the flower girls sold from baskets, or their arms. With no financial outlay required to buy or hire a barrow, flower girls could move easily around London to find custom. Like those selling fruit and vegetables, the lower girls would buy the cheapest goods available at the wholesale markets, the most central of which was Covent Garden Market in Westminster.
Cheap in this instance did not always mean poor quality as the street sellers could take advantage of any seasonal gluts where the grower had sent an oversupply to market. The market traders had to sell them quickly to avoid waste and the flower sellers were happy to buy them. The flower girl’s working day was long, starting around 4am or 5am buying the stock for the day from the wholesalers at Covent Garden, and finishing in the evening selling to theatre goers in Shaftesbury Avenue. Once the stock of seasonal flowers such as violets, roses, carnations, pinks and daffodils had been bought, it would be carried in the seller’s basket to be made up into buttonholes and posies. With no workshop or shop to work in, and needing proximity to their passing customers, the seller would make up the posies and gentlemen’s buttonholes in the open air.
To make the buttonholes and posies, the flower girl bound flower stems and fern together with thin wire before wrapping the composite stem in decorative silver paper. This process required manual dexterity; however cold your fingers might be, any damage to the petals or stems would affect your sales. The day’s income, whatever the weather, had to be sufficient both for your personal needs and buying stock the following day. All the items the seller created had to be sold on the day as the ephemeral nature of the goods meant they would not last more than a day. Once the items were ready, the seller could move onto a preferred spot pitch, selling as she went, or she could remain on the move, finding custom as she went.
The mythologising of the flower girls in literature hid not only the challenging realities of their working lives but ignored their agency as working class women. As street sellers responsible for buying stock and making their own goods, and crucially owning their own income, the flower sellers were entrepreneurial and de facto business owners in their own right. According to family legend, George Fage’s grandmother, Eliza Fage (née Reardon) was the inspiration for Eliza Doolittle. Born in 1880, she seems to have worked as a flower seller all her life. She sometimes had a fixed pitch but most often moved around the West End carrying her basket of flowers, posies and buttonholes, and selling to selling to ‘toffs and stage door johnnies’ by the theatres on Shaftesbury Avenue. Sadly, Fage’s life was one of poverty and hardship: She brought up eight children in four rooms largely estranged from her husband, and died by her own hand in the 1930s.
The life of another flower seller Ellen Keeley illustrates the potency of the flower girl myth. Born in 1860, twenty years earlier than Fage, Ellen Keeley died in 1949 at the age of 82, leaving an estate of £6,367, (equivalent to £193,920 in October 2024). She had lived in Covent Garden since birth, and her estate included the leasehold of three properties, the freehold of two houses, a barrow hire business and the goodwill, stock and fittings of a florist shop. All the properties, including the barrow hire premises which hired out barrows to street sellers across London, and the florist shop, were in close proximity to the market ensuring access to both customers and goods. Ellen was a respected member of the social and commercial networks which centred on the wholesale flower, fruit and vegetable market of Covent Garden, and this status was illustrated by the hundreds of market traders and porters who lined the route of her funeral processions, and by the hundreds of funeral wreaths commissioned for the event.
Ellen’s death and her funeral were reported in the press, where she was described as a successful business woman. However all the coverage highlighted her previous occupation as a flower girl: the Daily Herald described her as ‘London’s best known flower-girl’, while both the Weekly Despatch and the floristry trade journal The Florist led with the fact that she had been a flower girl, from the age of five, selling flowers from the steps of St Paul’s Church in Covent Garden with her mother.
According to census records Ellen and her mother were both listed as flowerseller/hawkers in 1871 and 1881. However, by 1891 when Ellen was twenty-five, theywere both ‘florists’ ‘by their own account’ meaning they owned their own floristrybusiness. This seems to have been the small shop which Ellen opened in the frontroom of their home in Covent Garden, and which was run after Ellen’s death by hersister until the 1950s.
Ellen’s trajectory from street to shop was noteworthy not only because she moved from the street to the petty bourgeoisie of retail business ownership, but also because her previous life as a flower girl provided a romantic counterpoint to the idea of Ellen as a business woman. In fact female small business owners such as Ellen were not uncommon. Carry van Lieshout shows that 27-30% of the small business owning population between 1851 and 1911 in England and Wales were women, many whom particularly in the female dominated trades, were operating out of their own homes. As a street seller, Ellen had been able to exercise autonomy and entrepreneurial skill, but by creating her own shop, she became part of this group of respectable working women.
Ellen’s position was undoubtedly enhanced by her family’s barrow leasing business. Started by her father’s family when they arrived in London from Ireland in the early 19th century, they built barrows out of workshop premises in Covent Garden, and by the time of Ellen’s death, were hiring out barrows to traders in retail markets across London. Clearly this working class family had amassed enough capital over time for Ellen’s estate to include two successful businesses (the flower shop and the barrow business) as well as a number of properties in Covent Garden. The presentation of Ellen’s early life as a flower girl in counterpoint to the later successes is used to illustrate how far she has come socially and financially, whilst obscuring the reality of her family situation. By leaving the streets to sell her wares within a bricks and mortar space, Ellen essentially crosses from the mythic to the respectable.
The stories of both Eliza Fage and Ellen Keeley show how the mythologised image of the London flower girl overshadows the complex lives of individual women. The lived experience of these women, like that of many other working class Victorian women, is hidden behind an image woven by contemporary social attitudes and artistic creation, but it is the role of the historian to uncover those details which have been obscured behind the flowers, the perfume and the cheap posies.