18th Century Tinkers

Last updated: Jan 7, 2024

In The Criers and Hawkers of London, Sean Shesgreen writes:

Tinkers belonged with the lowest vendors, because their trade was dirty, poorly paid, and in little demand. Their calling was often an excuse for begging or thieving. In the eyes of the law, there was little distinction between tinkers and vagrants. Justices of the Peace hunted tinkers to punish them as vagabonds. To such justices, these men were guilty of ‘colouring their vagabondage with a show of labour’. There were justices who believed that, as the craftiest and most impudent of all vagrants, tinkers should be fined and flogged all the more severely on account of their hypocrisy in pretending to be honest workers.

Anthony Sanders of St Giles-without-Cripplegate made his livelihood by ‘carrying about certain kettles and skelletts and other articles of merchandise and crying in a loud voice, these words, to wit, “Have you any work for a tinker?”’ on March 17 1685, he was convicted as an ‘idle and vagrant person’. But he got off lightly, perhaps because he pleaded guilty. He was fined 3 shillings and 6 pence, but not whipped.

• The Cryes of the City of London Drawne after the Life: A braſs pott or an iron pot to mend, 1688
• A Brass Pott or an Iron Pott to mend in The Criers and Hawkers of London
• A tinker by Edme Bouchardon, c. 1730s
• The Lamentable Fall of Madam Geneva Sepr 29 1736
• The itinerant handy craftsman, or, Caleb turn’d tinker, by Hubert François Gravelot, 1740
• The Golden Farmer and the Tinker, 1740
• London Cries: A tinker and his wife by Paul Sandby, c. 1759
• Il Pentolajo, 1760-1770
• A tinker with a boy and a dog, drawn by William Henry Pyne, 1769-1843
• Cris de Paris: Chaudronnier, chaudronnier, c. 1774-1775
• The state tinkers, 1780
• A tinker and his wife travelling on a windy day, c. 1785-1804
• Tinker by Franz Feyerabend, 1790
• Any work for the tinker? in The New Cries of London, 1803