The year is
1927. Philip Allingham, aged 21, stares out
of an office window near Piccadilly Circus,
musing on life’s futility. He has tried his
hand at pretty well every job his parents
would consider respectable, and failed at
every one of them. He is bored and broke.
‘Suddenly it dawned on me – and the relief
at the discovery was extraordinary – that
there was nothing at all to prevent me from
earning my living reading the future in
other people’s hands.’
So begins the
career recounted by Allingham in this
thrillingly vivid and richly comic memoir.
Or, rather, the series of careers, as the
subtitle reveals: ‘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.’ Billed by its original publishers
as ‘an astonishing autobiography of an
English gentleman turned county fair
mountebank’, Cheapjack was an instant
best-seller when it first appeared, in 1934,
but has long been unobtainable. This reprint
includes a new introduction by Francis Wheen
and an afterword by Julia Jones, biographer
of Philip’s sister, the great crime novelist
Margery Allingham, whose involvement with
Cheapjack was kept secret.
