subs. (streets’).—A hawker of street ballads; a PAPERWORKER (q.v.), or RUNNING PATTERER (q.v.). Cf., CROAK. ‘Printed for the FLYING-STATIONER’ is the imprimatur on hundreds of broadsheets from the eighteenth century onwards.
1785. GROSE, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, s.v. Ballad singers and hawkers of penny histories.
1851–61. H. MAYHEW, London Labour and the London Poor, Vol. I., p. 228. That order or species of the pattering genus known as FLYING STATIONERS, from the fact of their being continually on the move while describing the attractions of the ‘papers’ they have to sell.
1886. Athenæum, 31 July, p. 139. Scores of tracts were issued in the Newgate region, from Giltspur Street to Blowbladder Street, whence numbers of FLYING STATIONERS drew their supplies long before either of the Catnachs were born.
