Petticoat Lane is a market in Spitalfields, in the East End of London in the modern borough of Tower Hamlets. By 1608, it was a commercial district for the selling of second-hand clothing. It later became a centre for master weavers and clothing dyeing due to the settling of Huguenot refugees in the late 17th century.

In London Labour and the London Poor edition:

Phase 1

London Considered as a Great World. (The Great World of London): "Again, as regards the metropolitan people, the polite Parisian is not more widely different from the barbarous Botecudo, than, is the lack-a-daisical dandy at Almack's from the Billingsgate "rough." Ethnologists have reduced the several varieties of mankind into five distinct types; but surely the judges who preside at the courts in Westminster are as morally distinct from the Jew "fences" of Petticoat Lane as the Caucasian from the Malayan race. Is not the "pet parson," too, of some West End Puseyite Chapel as ethically and physically different from the London prize-fighter, and he again from the CityAlderman, as is the Mongol from the Negro, or the Negro from the Red Indian."

Statement of a Prostitute. (Volume 1): "We can’t sell clothes in the house, except any lodger wants them; and clothes nearly all goes to the Jews in Petticoat-lane."

Of the Street-Sellers of Rhubarb and Spice. (Volume 1): "Two of us live in Mary Axe, anoder live in, what dey call dat—Spitalfield, and de oder in Petticoat-lane. De one wat live in Spitalfield is old man, I dare say going for 70. De one in Petticoat-lane not mush above 30. I am little better dan 73, and de oder wat live in Mary Axe about 40."

Phase 2

Of the Children Street-Sellers of London. (Volume 1) [as “Petticoat”]

Of the Irish “Refuse”-Sellers. (Volume 1)

Statement of a Young Pickpocket. (Volume 1)

OF THE WOMEN STREET-SELLERS. (Volume 1)

Of the Street-Sellers of Petticoat and Rosemary-Lanes. (Volume 2)

Of the Old Clothes Exchange. (Volume 2)

Rosemary-lane. (Volume 2)

Of the Street-Buyers of Rags, Broken Metal, Bottles, Glass, and Bones. (Volume 2)

Of the Trades and Localities of the Street-Jews. (Volume 2)

Of the Pursuits, Dwellings, Traffic, etc., of the Jew-Boy Street-Sellers. (Volume 2)

Bone-Grubbers and Rag-Gatherers. (Volume 2)

Statement of a Young Pickpocket. (Volume 1)

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