Hot Cross Bunns, two a penny buns

This scene of a woman and three children buying hot cross buns from a street vendor, one of eight ‘cries of London’ subjects etched by Thomas Rowlandson in 1799, mocks the sentimental and idealised portrayal of street traders by the artist Thomas Wheatley, whose Cries of London series were exhibited and published in the 1790s. In this case, the seller and purchaser are based on those in Wheatley’s ‘New Mackrel, new Mackrel’ (61.33/8). Rowlandson has added a comic element, and drawn attention to the disparities between London’s rich and poor, by including in the background the figure of a large parson who hurries to get away from a woman with a baby and small boy begging.

The ‘Hot cross buns’ nursery rhyme, with its ‘One a penny, two a penny’ refrain, has its origin in the 18th-century street cry. The cry was first recorded in Poor Robin’s Almanack in 1733 as ‘Good Friday comes this Month, the old woman runs, / With one or two a Penny hot cross Bunns’. The London Chronicle published a variation as a song on 2-4 June 1767. Rowlandson’s seller cries ‘Hot cross Bunns two a penny Bunns’.