Sunny Brighton 



common night's catch. Some people say that the 

 smacks never put to sea until the men have spent 

 every shilling they have got, arid are obliged to sail. 

 If truth lies at the bottom of a well, it is the well of 

 a fishing boat, for there is nothing so hard to get at 

 as the truth about fish. At the time when society 

 was pluming itself on the capital results attained by 

 the Fisheries Exhibition in London, and gentlemen 

 described in the papers how they had been to market 

 and purchased cod at sixpence a pound, one shilling 

 and eightpence a pound was the price in the Brighton 

 fishmongers' shops, close to the sea. Not the least 

 effect was produced in Brighton; fish remains at 

 precisely the same price as before all this ridiculous 

 trumpeting. But while the fishmongers charge two- 

 pence each for fresh herrings, the old women bring 

 them to the door at sixteen a shilling. The poor who 

 live in the old part of Brighton, near the markets, 

 use great quantities of the smaller and cheaper fish, 

 and their children weary of the taste to such a degree 

 that when the girls go out to service they ask to be 

 excused from eating it. 



The fishermen say they can often find a better 

 market by sending their fish to Paris; much of the 

 fish caught off Brighton goes there. It is fifty miles 

 to London, and 250 to Paris; how then can this be? 

 Fish somehow slip through ordinary rules, being 

 slimy of surface; the maxims of the writers on 

 demand and supply are quite ignored, and there is 

 no groping to the bottom of this well of truth. 



Just at the corner of some of the old streets that 

 come down to the King's Road one or two old fisher- 

 men often stand. The front one props himself 

 against the very edge of the buildings, and peers 

 round into the broad sunlit thoroughfare ; his brown 



55 



