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PARTISAN REVI
non-authoritarian basis: "The costermongers are kind to their
dren, perhaps in a rough way, and the women make regular pets
them very often." Or, conversely, it plainly recognized and made
plicit the latent hostility which is part and parcel of that delicate
lation. It was very common for the father and son to quarrel by
time the boy reached adolescence, and for the boy, who knew
.
thoroughly by that age, to leave home and set out on his own.
of Mayhew's informants said of the coster boys,
"If
the father
him or snubs him, he'll tell his father to go to h-l, and he and
gal will start on their own account." Adolescent marriages were com–
mon; two or three out of everyone hundred boys of thirteen or
teen were either married to or living with a girl, who was usually
a couple of years older.
The patterers, as might be expected, were the least legalistic
and
the most irregular of all the street people as concerns marriage.
As
they were itinerants, they often practiced polygamy, and, like
the
legendary sailor, had a wife in every town. Mayhew had heard
<i
one "renowned" patterer who was married to four women and "had
lived in criminal intercourse with his own sister, and
his
own daughter
by one of his wives."
Yet this way of life-dirty and precarious and amoral-had
im–
mense attractions, the first of which was absolute freedom. There were
in the streets, usually among the patterers, well-educated people from
the middle class who had chosen to drop from that class into street
life. Mayhew tells of two brothers, street patterers, who were "well–
educated" and "respectably connected" who "candidly" confessed
that they preferred that kind of life to any other and would not leave
it if they could, and Mayhew remarked, somewhat ruefully, that
it
was an anthropological fact, always and universally true, that no one
in any culture who has adopted the nomadic way of life ever aban–
dons it, while, on the other hand, as in Indian country, the reverse
is often true and the "civilized" people will often become nomads.
According to Mayhew, the nomads are always characterized by twelve
distinct habitual attitudes: a repugnance to regular and continuous
labor; a want of providence in storing up for the future; a power
for enduring privation; an immoderate love of gaming; a love
of
"libidinous" dances; a love of witnessing the suffering of sentient
creatures; a delight in warfare and perilous sport; a desire for ven·
