Specimen No. 6 in a Catalogue of Trades

Read the small engraved cartouche before you let the flowers pull the eye. There the vendor is caught and pinned: CRIES of LONDON No 6, and beneath it his own shout copied out in a clerk's cursive, All a growing, a growing, here's Flowers for your Gardens. Call this print the great honest ledger of the street, for it is honest, and it is a ledger — the man is not named, he is numbered; his voice is not heard, it is transcribed; he enters the sheet already sorted, filed sixth in a run where the seventh and eighth will be some other trade wearing some other apron, and the catalogue that flatters him is the same catalogue that shelves him.

The limitation sits in the numbering, and only against the numbering does the skill blaze. The tonal aquatint lays a soft graded weather across the terraces behind, dusk-brown fading into a washed continental sky, and the drawing of the barrow is truthful down to its spoked wheel, its patient laden donkey, its potted evergreens hung with gilt baubles like a small captured forest wheeled indoors. Call the etcher a fine cartographer of hardware — he is; he can render a flowerpot's lip and the scarlet of a waistcoat with the confidence of a man mapping ground he knows.

Yet mark what the mapping cannot hold, and here the praise and the verdict are one throat singing. This is the great taxonomist's plate, the herbal of the poor, the field-guide to labour — and every name is its conviction, for a herbal exists to prove the specimen replaceable. He draws a type so exact that no person survives the drawing; the series was never able to hold a man, only to breed a genus, and the number six is not an address but a shelf-mark.

So call it knowledge, this filing of the living into a drawer — the grand encyclopaedia of the street that knows nothing of the street; the sovereign inventory that has counted its subjects and learned not one; the archive that mistakes possession for understanding and the numbering for the man. Watch the barrow's near wheel where it bites the paved shadow, and the donkey's ear turned back to listen. The animal is given no number, and so escapes the science. The man is given six, and is entered, and is known by no one who wrote him down. — NM