Cheapjack: Being The True History Of A Young Man's Adventures As A Fortune-Teller, Grafter, Knocker-Worker, And Mounted Pitcher On The Market-Places And Fairgrounds Of A Modern But Still Romantic England
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Fair
Jacket: N/A
Pages: Tanning and foxing
Markings: Fair - Rubbed edges and bumping on spine and corners
From the bustling market squares and travelling fairgrounds of interwar England emerges Cheapjack, a vivid and candid memoir by Philip Allingham — a young man who cast aside convention to live by his wits as a fortune-teller, grafter, knocker-worker, and mounted pitcher among the itinerant trading classes. With disarming honesty and a sharp eye for character, Allingham chronicles his immersion into a hidden stratum of British society, one governed by its own codes, customs, and colourful cast of rogues, hustlers, and dreamers, all eking out a living on the margins of respectable England. A remarkable document of working-class life and street culture in the 1930s, Cheapjack presents a world that was already vanishing even as Allingham wrote about it — a romantic underworld of patter merchants and travelling showmen that mainstream society rarely glimpsed, let alone recorded. Allingham's prose carries the irresistible energy of a fairground barker: warm, unpretentious, and alive with authentic detail. Published by Frederick A. Stokes Company in 1934, this is social history told from the inside, leaving the reader to wonder just how many such worlds exist, unseen, just beyond the edge of the ordinary.
Author: Philip Allingham
Format: Hardback
Published: 1934, Frederick A. Stokes Company
Genre: Biography
Condition remarks:
Book: Fair
Jacket: N/A
Pages: Tanning and foxing
Markings: Fair - Rubbed edges and bumping on spine and corners
From the bustling market squares and travelling fairgrounds of interwar England emerges Cheapjack, a vivid and candid memoir by Philip Allingham — a young man who cast aside convention to live by his wits as a fortune-teller, grafter, knocker-worker, and mounted pitcher among the itinerant trading classes. With disarming honesty and a sharp eye for character, Allingham chronicles his immersion into a hidden stratum of British society, one governed by its own codes, customs, and colourful cast of rogues, hustlers, and dreamers, all eking out a living on the margins of respectable England. A remarkable document of working-class life and street culture in the 1930s, Cheapjack presents a world that was already vanishing even as Allingham wrote about it — a romantic underworld of patter merchants and travelling showmen that mainstream society rarely glimpsed, let alone recorded. Allingham's prose carries the irresistible energy of a fairground barker: warm, unpretentious, and alive with authentic detail. Published by Frederick A. Stokes Company in 1934, this is social history told from the inside, leaving the reader to wonder just how many such worlds exist, unseen, just beyond the edge of the ordinary.