Hawker's license, 1863

License for a hawker to trade on foot, 1863

Printed by Whiting, London, 402 x 270mm (Rickards Collection, University of Reading, License 6)

Security printing was one way of preventing fraud. This license was printed by the firm of Whiting, which specialised in a method of colour printing known as compound-plate printing. In this case, a block of metal was engraved and then divided into parts. Each part was then inked in a different colour, the block reassembled and printed in relief. This printing method was first used in the production of banknotes and lottery bills in the early nineteenth century. Sir William Congreve developed his own press for compound-plate printing in 1819-20 and produced tickets for the coronation of George IV in 1821. From then on, the technique was used frequently to print borders for official documents, labels for selling reams of paper, and other types of document that needed to be secure from fraud or to suggest authenticity.

Its use for the production of this document - a license to sell goods by hawking - is unusual. This license is printed in three colours - red, green and black - and represents a particularly lavish method of printing such a prosaic document that was only valid for six months. In this case, Thomas Palmer of Kings Cliffe, Northampton, has been licensed to sell his goods on foot from 31 July 1863 to 31 January 1864, for which he has paid the considerable sum of one pound, approximately three times the average working-class weekly wage at the time. The license was issued at Hemel Hempstead on behalf of the Inland Revenue, based in London. The entries on the form were handwritten using pencil before being overwritten in pen by the sub-distributor of the licenses, whose signature is not decipherable. Below this signature are listed the various restrictions imposed on hawking and warnings against forgery, stipulated in the 1860 Act of Parliament that legislated the licensing of hawkers.

Although street selling was a common practice in London throughout the nineteenth century (and still an important form of trading in the city today), most other towns and cities in Britain enforced strict regulations on the practice from the 1820s onwards. In provincial towns, new market halls were constructed in response to middle-class fears of civil disorder, insanitary practices and fraud associated with the open-air markets of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The lavish nature of this license indicates the new importance attached to the regulation of street trading in provincial towns in the mid-Victorian period. It also might have acted as a deterrent to the practice of street trading itself: the form would have been expensive to produce; the license very expensive to obtain by any prospective hawker.