"02Che iiipettator," Opril 6th, 1850
EASTER MONDAY was 01 real holiday to the thousands of toilers in London. The day was beautiful ; and the crowds who filled the Parks, and sallied as far as Greenwich and Hampton Court, were enormous. Greenwich Fair of course carried the palm ; it is stated that nearly 100,000 persons were there, who had journeyed variously by steamer, high road, and rail. On the railway, indeed, it is pleasantly told by one observer, the army of porters were swept from their posts by the crowd like chaff before the wind ; all demands for tickets, and all attempts at anything like assortment of passengers in grades, were scouted as official pedantry, or joked off as pure facetiousness. " Third- classes " rejoiced in a successful assault on the sumptuous carriages intended for their monied betters ; and first-class dandies, in "delicate fig," were fain to be thankful for the few square inches of standing-room meted to them in the crushing boxes " opprobriated " to the poor. In Greenwich Fair there was a sad decline in fat ladies, a degeneracy in prodigious infants, and a shortcoming in intellectual brutes ; with a vast increase of incentives to utilitarian outlay—as the "warranted correct likeness by the photo-cosmoramic process, for one penny," and the like.
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