During the Victorian era, growers from 15,000 acres of market gardens descended daily on London's Covent Garden market. Many of young flower girls were orphans, living in boarding rooms crowded with other street traders.

Engravings and illustrations of the period show how the scene was bedlam; it was described in a contemporary guidebook: 'All night long the rumble of heavy wagons seldom ceases, and before daylight the market is crowded. The very loading of these wagons is a wonder, and the wall-like regularity with which cabbages, cauliflowers and turnips are built up to a height of some twelve feet is nothing short of a miracle.'

The flower market was held outside in the open, and was no less frenetic. The desperate cries of flower-sellers echoed through the expansive square. A contemporary guidebook tells how in spring the dealers sold bedding plants, and 'the pavement was aglow with colour of flower and leaf, and in the early summer hundreds of women and girls are busily occupied in shelling peas.' 

Victorian line drawings show the flower girls selling violets, stocks, pinks and roses, and anything that could be forced and was sweet-smelling. The colour and spectacle disguised the market's darker side, which Dickens described: 'One of the worst night-sights I know of in London is to be found in the children who prowl about this place; who sleep in the baskets, fight for the offal, dart at any objects they think they can lay their thieving hands on, dive under the carts and barrows, dodge the constables, and are perpetually making a blunt pattering on the pavement of the Piazza with the rain of their naked feet.'

Dickens is here uncharacteristically insensitive to the plight of London's poor and dispossessed. Henry Mayhew offers a very different and more sympathetic account, and tells of the plight of some of the market's younger traders. He speaks to a tiny and pathetic water-cress girl, who walked the streets in all weathers in a thin cotton gown, with a threadbare shawl wrapped round her shoulders. 'When she walked she shuffled along, for fear that the large carpet slippers that served her for shoes should slip off her feet.' She was just eight years old, crying 'Four bunches a penny, water-cresses'. In winter she could barely buy enough cress from Covent Garden or Farringdon markets to sell, and when she did offer them to customers in the streets she said 'they're so cold, people won't buy 'em; for when I goes up to them, they say, "They'll freeze our bellies".' And in summer there was so much cress about that it was sold 'cheap as dirt'. There were occasional good days: 'One day I took 1s 6d, and the cresses cost 6d; but it isn't often I get such luck as that. I oftener makes 3d or 4d.'

Such waifs grew up quickly and became dab hands at bargaining with other traders at the market, who were not beyond cheating a young child. 'They can't take me in. If the woman tries to give me a small handful of cresses, I says, "I ain't agoin' to have that for a ha'porth', and I go to the next basket, and so on, all round ... for 3d I has a lap full, enough to earn about a shilling.'

Life for the London poor was never easy.

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