We may suppose each tankard named after a victory—the greater the victory, the greater the tankard; and can imagine the gratifying display of loyalty in emptying those tankards to the perdition of “Popery and wooden shoes.”

Besides the tankard for drinking beer or wine, there was also the Water Tankard. In Ben Jonson’s comedy of “Every Man in his Humour,” 1598, Cob, the water-carrier of the Old Jewry, says:—“I dwell, sir, at the sign of the Water Tankard, hard by the Green Lattice. I have paid scot and lot there many time this eighteen years.” These water-tankards were used for carrying water from the conduits to the houses, and were therefore a professional sign of the water-carriers. The measures held about three gallons, and were shaped like a truncated cone, with an iron handle and hoops like a pail, and were closed with a cork, bung, or stopple. In Wilkinson’s “Londina Illustrata,” there is an engraving of Westcheap as it appeared in the year 1585, copied from a drawing of the period, in which the Little Conduit is seen with a quantity of water-tankards ranged round it.

Amongst the other articles of furniture which are represented on the signboard we must first of all notice that useful article the Looking Glass, which was the favourite sign of the booksellers on London Bridge. Thus, one of John Bunyan’s works, “The Saints’ Triumph, or the Glory of Saints with Jesus Christ discovered in a Divine Ejaculation by J. B.,” was printed by J. Millet for J. Blare, at the Looking Glass on London Bridge, in 1688. The French booksellers also used it: for instance, Nicholas Despréaux, or Dupré, a bookseller of the seventeenth century, who lived near the church of St Etienne du Mont, at Paris. Its origin was this:—Speculum, a looking-glass, was in the middle ages a common name for a certain class of books. We find, as early as 1332, a work entitled “Speculum Historiale in consuetudine Parisiensi;” then there is the “Grand Speculum Historiale,” the great historical work of Vincent of Beauvais, one of the most celebrated books of the Middle Ages; “Speculum Humanæ Salvationis;” “Speculum Humanæ Vitæ;” “Speculum Vitæ Christæ,” “a boke that is clepid the Myrrour of the blessed lyffe of our Lorde J’hu cryste;” the “Mirrour of Magistrates;” “Le miroir de l’ame pécheresse,” and innumerable other Speculums. These Speculums were amongst the first books that were printed; many of the early booksellers adopted the Bible as their sign, whilst others chose the Speculum, which they translated and made more fit for the signboard under the name of the Looking Glass.

A curious fact is connected with this so common title of the Speculum for early religious books. When the first pioneers in the art of printing were pondering over their new invention, during the transition period from block-printing to printing with detached letters, Guttenberg, in 1436, entered into an agreement with John Riffe, Anthony Heilman, and Andrew Dreizehn, in which speculation the three associates were to furnish the necessary funds, whilst Guttenberg was to pay them one half of any profits, the other half being for himself. After a certain time the association broke up, differences arose about the liquidation, and a lawsuit was the consequence. The documents of this lawsuit are still in existence; from them it appears that they kept their invention a secret, and called themselves “Spiegelmachers,” (makers of looking-glasses,) which looking-glasses, according to the evidence of witnesses, had found a very ready sale amongst the pilgrims who at that period congregated at Aix-la-Chapelle on the occasion of some religious festival. But as apparently no extra number of mirrors were sold on that occasion, and there does not appear to have been any new invention in the art of making them, it is evident that the looking-glasses sold were the Speculum books, which undoubtedly would be readily purchased by the pilgrims to the holy shrine. This opinion is still more corroborated by the mention made in the evidence of a Press, which could scarcely be used in the manufacture of looking-glasses. It is therefore most probable that, as the art of printing was at this period still in its infancy, and the printed works were sold rather as an imitation or facsimile[565] of the written manuscripts, this art was still kept a secret; by so doing, its early practitioners were not only safe from competition, but also from the attacks and opposition by which the new invention would have been assailed by all those connected with the business of transcribing and illuminating.[566]

Other pieces of furniture are the Cabinet, a common upholsterer’s sign in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the Three Crickets, or little stools, which we gather from a trades token of the seventeenth century, was in Crooked Lane; and the Cradle, a peculiar sign, occurs in Taylor’s “Carrier’s Cosmography,” 1637, where he gives a rather curious insight into the postal arrangements of that time:—

“Those that will send any letter to Edinbourgh, that so they may be conveyed to and fro to any parts of the kingdome of Scotland, the poste doth lodge at the signe of the kings armes or the Cradle at the upper end of Cheapside, from whence every Monday any that have occasion may send.”

Generally, however, it did not designate so respectable a business; the “Compleat Vintner,” 1720, explains the secret arcana of that sign:—

From the last interpretation of this sign to the Colt in the Cradle (see under Humorous Signs) is but a step.

The Trunk was the sign of Caleb Swinock, a bookseller in St Paul’s Churchyard in 1684, for which it is difficult to find any rational explanation; almost equally incomprehensible is the sign of the Green Bellows, (le soufflet vert,) which was that of Johan Stoll and Peter Cesaris, booksellers and printers in the Rue St Jacques, Paris, in 1473.[567] This sign was also to be seen in other towns of France, as in Abbeville, where a stone bas-relief sign of the seventeenth century, with the inscription “le vert soufflet,” remains at the present day in the front of a house in the Rue des Jacobins. It may have been adopted in allusion to the occult sciences and alchemy, green being the emblematical colour of Hope.

The Golden Candlestick was the sign of a Marriage Insurance office in Newgate Street, in 1711, a time when there was a mania for insurance offices of every description; the Three Candlesticks occurs on a trades token of the Old Bailey in 1649. A publican in Tamworth, Staffordshire, has taken the Coffee-pot for a sign, probably on the strength of the derivation of “lucus a non lucendo,” because he sells no coffee; the Royal Coffee-mill was the more appropriate sign of Paul Greenwood, in Clothfair, for he was a seller of “Coffee-powder.”[568] Then there is the Sugar-loaf, a common grocer’s sign of former times, the selection of which showed great disinterestedness on their part, the article being that on which the least profit was made. Campbell said, in 1757:—

“There is indeed one article which they [the Grocers] must sell to their loss, sugars. A custom has prevailed (but why?) amongst the Grocers, to sell sugar for the prime cost, and are out of pocket by the sale,[395] with paper, packthread, and their labour in breaking and weighing it out. The expense of some shops in London, for the article of paper and packthread for sugars, amounts to £60 or £70 per annum; but this they lay upon the other articles. The customer had much better allow him a profit upon his sugars, than pay extravagant prices for tea and other comodities.”

At present, we understand, loaf-sugar is not sold exactly at cost price, but moist sugar is, whence many grocers refuse to sell that article to strangers unless something else be bought at the same time. At No. 44 Fenchurch Street, a very old established grocery firm still carries on business under the sign of the Three Sugar Loaves. The house presents much the same appearance it had in the last century, with the gilt sugar-loaves above the doorway, and is one of the few places of business in London conducted in the ancient style. The small old-fashioned window panes, the complete absence of all show and decoration, the cleanliness of the interior, and the quiet order of the assistants in their long white aprons, betoken the respectable old tea-warehouse, and impress the passer-by with a complete conviction as to the genuineness of its articles. That the sugar-loaf was not always exclusively a grocer’s sign, nor the Three Balls a pawnbroker’s, appears from the following advertisement in the Postman, February 3-6, 1711:—

“THOMAS SETH at the Sugarloaf in Fore Street, Pawnbroker, is going to leave his house, and to leave off the said business: all persons concerned are desired to fetch away their Goods on or before the fourth of March next, else they will be disposed off and sold.”

Here is another curious advertisement:—

“A TANNY MORE [tawny Moor] with short bushy hair, very well shaped, in a grey livery lined with yellow, about 17 or 18 years of age, with a silver collar about his neck with these directions:—‘Captain George Hastings’ Boy, Brigadier in the King’s Horse guards.’ Whosoever brings him to the Sugarloaf in the Pall Mall shall have forty shillings Reward.”—London Gazette, March 23, 1685.

The Sugar-loaf is also a public-house sign, though not a very appropriate one. The Blue Bowl, suggestive of punch-making, occurs on three public-houses in Bristol; but much more significant for a resort of thirsty souls is that of the Three Funnels, (les Trois Entonnoirs,) which in the time of Louis XIV. was the sign of a tavern in Paris, mostly patronised by the University people. An equally expressive sign, the Sieve, was used by John Johnson, in Aldermansbury, 1669, and “Richard Harris in Trinity Minories.”

We now arrive at kitchen utensils: foremost amongst these ranks the Gridiron, which was very common in the sixteenth century, and may perhaps have been a jocular rendering of the Portcullis. The Frying Pan is still a constant ironmonger’s sign—thus in Highcross Street, Leicester, there is a gigantic gilt specimen with the inscription “the Family Fry Pan.” There are trades tokens of “John Vere, at y^e Frying Pan in Islington, Mealman,” which, considered in connexion with pancakes, one can understand; but it certainly looks out of place at the door of Samuel Wadsell, bookseller at the Golden Frying Pan, in Leadenhall Street, 1680. The Copper Pot (le Pot de Cuivre) at Dijon, in France, was the sign of one of the oldest inns in that country. It was opened in 1250 and continued till the middle of the seventeenth century. The society of the Mère Folle held their meetings at this house.

The Pewter Platter occurs both in France and in England; it was famous as a carriers’ inn in St John Street, Clerkenwell, in 1681. At this inn Curll’s translators, in pay, were lodged, and had to sleep three in a bed, and there “he and they were for ever at work to deceive the publick.”[569] In mediæval Paris it was a common sign, and gave its name to several streets. Two of the inns victimised by that incorrigible scamp Villon, bore this sign:—

Probably it was a very early sign for eating-houses.

The Pump is a common ale-house sign, and occurs as such on a token of Tooley Street, with the following lines:—

which, as Mr Burn (Beaufoy Tokens) observes, may be a travesty of a verse in Histrio-Mastrix, 1610:—

Another token belonging to Chick Lane, West Smithfield, represents a hand grasping the handle of a pump; and a publican in Old Swinford, who combines engineering with his trade, has a similar sign with the words, “Hands to the Pump.” In the reign of Charles I. there was a public-house, the Blue Pump, in Blackfriars, near the famous Hollands Leaguer. It represented a man, evidently a sailor, pumping with all his might, and the legend ran:—“Poor Tom’s last refuge.”[571] With the pump we may place the Bucket, which was the sign of a shop in Aldersgate Street, of which there are trades tokens extant, and the Tub, the name of a tavern in Jermyn Street, in the reign of Charles II., as appears from a letter sent, (not written, for she could not write,) by Nell Gwynn, from Windsor in 1684, to her milliner and factotum, addressed “To Madam Jennings, over against the Tub tavern in Jermyn Street, London.” Another utensil, the Dust-pan, is common with hardware shops. There is one in Islington, at a shop next to the house in which Charles Lamb lived; at night it is illuminated, and hence called the Illuminated Dust-pan. Lastly, there is the Hour-glass, a colossal specimen carved in wood, in Upper Thames Street, near All Hallows Church, and the Golden Jar, which was the sign of a china shop, as we see in the Country Journal, or Craftsman, for April 25, 1730, where Anne Cibber acquaints the public that she is removed from Charles Street to the Golden Jar in Tavistock Street, carrying on two trades which now are rarely associated in London, viz., “All sorts of chinaware, and the best teas, coffees, chocolate,” &c. Now-a-days the jars, painted red and green, are the usual oilman’s sign, representing those vessels in which oil is kept in Eastern countries, and in which Ali Baba’s forty thieves came to such an untimely end. Formerly oil used to be imported in this country in similar jars, hence their adoption as trade emblems.

We may close this chapter, not inappropriately with the Key, a sign once largely used, not only by locksmiths, as at present, but by all manners of shops; thus there was a celebrated tavern, at the corner of Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, circa 1690, and many others that could be mentioned. The Golden Key is named in an old advertisement, speaking of some sports and pastimes which many English gentlemen are now attempting to revive:—

“RICHARD FENNEY, Esquire of Alaxton in Leicestershire, about a forthnight since, lost a lanner from that place; she has neither Bells nor Varvels; she is a white Hawk, and her long feathers and sarcels are both in the blood. If any one give tidings thereof to Mr Lambert at the Golden Key, in Fleet Street, they shall have 40 shillings for their pains.”—Mercurius Publicus, August 30 to September 6, 1660.

The Lock and Key is a sign of a public-house in West Smithfield, and was, during the Commonwealth, that of a house in the parish of St Dunstan, belonging to Praise God Barebones, citizen and leather-seller of London. There is a MS. in the British Museum,[572] containing a petition of Barebones against Elisabeth and James Spight, the latter an infant under age, offered to the court of judicature for determination of differences touching houses burned or demolished by the fire of 1666. From that paper it appears that Elisabeth Spight paid £40 a year for the rent of the Lock and Key.

CHAPTER XII.
DRESS; PLAIN AND ORNAMENTAL.

Of this class only a few signs are to be found; one of the most common is the Hat, the usual hatter’s sign, although it may also be found before taverns and public-houses, in which case, however, it is probable that it was the previous sign of the house, which the publican on entering left unaltered; or it may have been used to suggest “a house of call” to the trade. The age of each individual hat-sign may sometimes be gathered from its shape; thus there is one in Whitechapel, made out of tin, representing the cocked hat worn at the end of the last century; it is evidently a relic of that time. The continental hatters using this sign, occasionally indulged in a little humour. A hatter at Ghent in the sixteenth century added to it this distich:—

And a Dutch hatter made a still more unpleasant allusion to the brains of his customers:—

Dr Franklin used to tell an amusing story of a journeyman hatter, his companion when young, who on commencing business for himself, was anxious to get a handsome signboard, with a proper inscription. This he composed himself as follows:—

Above the inscription was the ordinary figure of a hat. But he thought he would submit the composition to his friends for amendment. The first he showed it to thought the word “hatter” tautologous, because followed by the words “makes hats,” which showed he was a hatter; it was struck out. The next observed that the word “makes” might as well be omitted, because his customers would not care who made the hats; if good, and to their mind, they would buy, by whomsoever made. He struck that out also. A third said he thought that the words “for ready money” were useless, as it was not the custom of the place to sell on credit—every one who purchased expected to pay. These, too, were parted with, and the inscription then stood, “John Thompson sells Hats.” “Sells Hats!” says his next friend; “why, who expects you to give them away? What, then, is the use of the word?” It was struck out, and HATS was all that remained attached to the name John Thompson. Even this inscription, brief as it was, was reduced ultimately to “John Thompson,” with the figure of the hat above it.

The Hat and Feathers was almost equally common in those days, when no full-fledged gallant could be deemed complete without his fluttering ribbons and plume. The puritanical Philip Stubbe in his “Anatomie of Abuses,” 1585, is very hard upon this fashion:—

“Another sort, (as phantasticall as the rest,) are content with no kind of hat, without a great bunch of feathers of divers and sondrie colours, peaking on top of their heades, not unlike (I dare not saie) cockes combes, but as Sternes of Pride and ensignes of vanitie and these fluttering sailes and feathered flagges of defiaunce to virtue, (for so they are,) are so advanced in Ailgnia [Anglia] that euery child has thē in his Hatte or Cappe. Many get good living by deying and selling of them, and not a fewe proue themselues more than fooles in wearyng of them.”

Decker calls the “swell” of his day “our feathered ostrich,” and in his comedy of the “Sun’s Darling” he mentions “some alderman’s son wondrous giddy and light-headed, one that blew his patrimony away in feathers and tobacco.” There is one sign of the Hat and Feathers still in existence, a publican’s, at Grantchester, in Cambridgeshire.

Another old hatter’s sign is the Hat and Beaver, which at present may be seen at the door of a publican’s in Leicester. Shopbills of this once common sign occur amongst the Banks Collection, representing a beaver seated on the edge of a stream, with a hat above him. The relation between the two is evident, and about as gratifying to the beaver as it was to the widow of the hanged man to hear the gallows named. The beaver hats worn in England at the time of Edward III., and long after, were made in Flanders and Picardy. From the Privy Purse expenses of Henry VIII. we see that the king paid in 1532:—

“Item, the xxiij day [of October] for a hath and plume for the King in Boleyn, xv shillings.”

“On 27 May MDLV. (ij of Queen Mary) Sir William Cecil [afterwards Lord Burghley] being then at Callice [Calais] bought [as appears from his MS. Diary] three hats for his children at xxd each.”

The Protestant refugees, however, from Flanders and France, introduced the manufacture of these hats into England when they settled in Norwich; by a statute 5 and 6 Edw. VI., the manufacture of felt and thrummed hats was confined to Norwich and the corporate and market towns in that county.[575] As for the shapes of the hats worn at that period we must again refer to Stubbe’s satirical account:—

“Some tymes they use them sharpe on the crowne, pearking up like the speare or shaft of a steeple, standing a quarter of a yarde above the crowne of their heades, some more, some lesse, as pleases the fantasies of their inconstant mindes; othersome be flat and broad in the crowne like the battlements of a house. Another sort have round crownes, sometymes with one kinde of bande, sometymes with another, now blacke, now whyte, now russet, now red, now green, now yellowe, now this, now that, never content, with one colour or fashion two daies to an ende.”[576]

Felt hats for a long time were exclusively worn by the aristocracy. Stow tells us that “about the beginning of Henry VIII. began the making of Spanish feltes in England, by Spaniardes and Dutchmen, before which time, and long since the English used to ride, and goe winter and sommer in knitcapps, cloth hoods, and the best sort in silk throm’d Hatts.” These caps were enforced by a statute of 13th Queen Elizabeth, which gives, at the same time, a curious picture of the fashions of that period:—

“If any person above six yeares of age, (except maidens, ladies, gentlewomen, nobles, knights, gentlemen of twenty marks by year in lands, and their heirs, and such as have borne office of worship,) have not worn upon the Sundays and Holidays, (except it be in the time of his travell out of the citie, towne, or hamlet, where he dwelleth,) uppon his head one cap of wool knit, thicked, and dressed in England, and onely dressed and finished by some of the trade of cappers, shall be fined 3s. 4d. for each day’s transgression.”

These caps, termed statute caps, are frequently alluded to by the dramatists and authors of that period. Rosalind, for instance, in “Love’s Labour Lost,” taunts her lover with the words: “Well, better wits have worn plain statute caps.” The act was repealed in the year 1597. The sign of the Cap and Stocking, still in Leicester, commemorates the once-flourishing trade of that town in those articles. The quantity of workmen who found occupations in the manufacture of the above-named “statute caps,” (which came chiefly from Leicestershire and the surrounding districts,) was one of the principal reasons why it was so often protected by parliamentary statutes. Fuller enumerates not less than fifteen callings, “besides other exercises,” all employed in the trade of capmaking, beginning with the woolcarder, and ending with the bandmaker. The Hat and Star, which occurs on the bill of Master Bates in St Paul’s Churchyard, who sold all sorts of fine “caines, whippes, spurres,”[577] &c., if not a simple quartering of two signs, possibly originated in the clasp ornament of precious stones, formerly worn in the hat. The Leghorn Hat, at the end of the last century, was generally a turner’s sign, because the members of that trade sold straw hats imported from Leghorn. In St John Street, Clerkenwell, there was an old established public-house, and place of resort, called the Three Hats. It is mentioned by Bickerstaff in his comedy of “The Hypocrite,” where Mawworm thus alludes to it:—

“Till I went after him, [Dr Cantwell,] I was little better than the devil, my conscience was tanned with sin, like a piece of neat’s leather, and had no more feeling than the sole of my shoe; always a roving after fantastical delights; I used to go every Sunday evening to the Three Hats at Islington; it’s a public-house . . . mayhap your Ladyship may know it. I was a great lover of skittles, too, but now I cannot bear them.”

At this house the earliest prototypes of Astley used to perform in 1758. There was Thomas, an Irishman, surnamed Tartar; then came Johnson, Sampson, Price, and Cunningham. The great Dr Johnson went here to see his namesake.

“Such a man, sir, said he, should be encouraged; for his performance show the extent of human powers in one instance, and thus tend to raise our opinion of the faculties of man. He shows what may be obtained by persevering application; so that every man may hope, by giving as much application, although, perhaps, he may never ride three horses at a time, or dance upon a wire, yet he may be equally expert in whatever profession he has chosen to pursue.”

Royalty also visited the place: “Yesterday his Royal Highness the Duke of York was at the Three Hats, Islington, to see the extraordinary feats of horsemanship exhibited there. There were near five hundred spectators.”[578] Sampson’s wife was the first female equestrian.

Horsemanship

At Mr Dingley’s, the Three Hats, Islington.

“MR SAMPSON begs leave to inform the public, that besides the usual feats which he exhibits, Mrs Sampson, to diversify the entertainment, and prove that the fair sex are by no means inferior to the male, either in Courage or Agility, will, this and every Evening during the Summer, perform various exercises in the same art, in which she hopes to acquit herself to the universal approbation of those Ladies and Gentlemen whose curiosity may induce them to honour her attempt with their company.”[579]

The Three Hats occurs amongst the trades tokens of the seventeenth century. There is one of the Three Hats and Nag’s Head in Southwark. In the seventeenth century the sign of the Three Hats at Leeuwarden, in Friesland, was accompanied by the following stanza:—

The Locks of Hair was the very appropriate sign of John Allen, a hairdresser on London Bridge in the last century, who sold “all sorts of hair, Curled or Uncurled; Bags, Roses, Cauls, Ribbons, Weaving Silk, Sewing Cards, and Blocks. With all Goods made use of by Peruke makers, at the lowest prices.”[581] The locks of hair were represented curled and tied. This sign appears to have been not unusual with the hairdressers of a former age. In 1649, there was one in St Dunstan’s-in-the-East, who had the Lock and Shears; which are represented on his trades token by a lock of hair between a pair of shears, intimating that the “unlovely lovelocks” were curtailed by him. What he would require the tokens for in his profession (they were used as farthings) it is difficult to guess, as apparently no such small change was needed. This sign was in accordance with the spirit of the times; short hair was the unmistakable mark of the godly puritan, just as the straggling love-lock hanging over the shoulder denoted the cavalier. For this reason, Decker advises the young cavalier Gull:—

“Thy hair, whose length before the rigorous edge of any puritanical pair of scissors should shorten the breadth of a finger, let the three house-wifely spinsters of Destiny rather curtail the thread of thy life. Oh, no! long hair is the only net that women spread abroad to entrap man in, and why should not men be as far above women in that comodity as they go far beyond them in others.”[582]

The Periwig was another common hairdresser’s sign. Even this had to submit to the favourite blue colour, for amongst the Banks bills there is one of John Thompson, in Brewer Street, Golden Square, who lived at the Blue Peruke and Star. The star evidently was the original sign, to which the wig had been added on account of the profession of the occupant of the house.

The White Peruke, in Maiden Lane, was the sign of the barber, at whose lodgings Voltaire lived when on a visit to London; some of his letters to Swift are dated from that place. A white periwig was a highly fashionable object:—“Now, I think he looks very humorous and agreeable; I vow, in a white periwig he might do mischief; could he but talk and take snuff, there’s never a fop in town wou’d go beyond him.”—Cibber’s Double Gallant, 1707. So Shadwell, in “The Humorist,” 1671, describes Brisk, one of the dramatis personæ, as “a fellow that never wore a noble and polite garniture, or a white periwig.” Well might the barbers give the peruke the honour of this signboard, for the profits on that article must have been enormous. In Charles II.’s time, for instance, a fine peruke cost as much as £50; and hence the great respect Cibber paid to the one he wore in the character of Sir Fopling Flutter, which was brought on the stage in a sedan, and put on before the public. As the glory of Miltiades prevented Epaminondas from sleeping, so the beauty of this periwig disturbed the slumbers of Mr (afterwards Colonel) Brett, who in the end bought it from Cibber.[583] The thieves as well as the beaux knew the value of those wigs, and practised all manner of tricks to obtain them. Sometimes a boy, carried in a basket on the shoulders of a man, would snatch the “curly honour” off the head of the unsuspecting beau;[584] at other times they would cut holes in the leather backs of the coaches,[585] whilst the highwaymen were sure to include the periwig with the rest of the booty captured on the road. Though this article is now shorn of its honours, there is still a publican at Great Redisham, Suffolk, who carries on his trade under the sign of the Wig.

The French have a sign quite as absurd as our Blue Peruke—viz., The Golden Beard, (la barbe d’or,) which is carved in stone in the Rue des Bourdonnais, Paris, and also in the Marché aux Herbes, Amiens: both these signs date from the eighteenth century, but their origin is much older, as appears from the following:—

“The Duke of Lorraine, after the Battle of Nancy, wherein he killed Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy, went in procession to visit the body, clothed in deep mourning, with a golden beard fixed on, that reached down to his waist, (after the manner of the old heroes that were knighted for their prowess, who, on a signal victory over an enemy, were honoured with such a beard.)”—Richardsoniana, London, 1776, p. 47.

The Anodyne Necklace was as notorious in the eighteenth century, as Holloway’s Pills and Rowland’s Macassar Oil are in our day. Advertisements concerning it were continually appearing in the papers:—

“THE Anodyne Necklace for children’s teeth, women in labour, and distempers of the head; price 5s. Recommended by Dr Chamberlain. Sold up one pair of stairs at the sign of the Anodyne Necklace, without Temple Bar; at the Spanish Lady at the Royal Exchange, next Threadneedle Street; at the Indian Handkerchief, facing the New Stairs in Wapping,” &c.[586]

To attract attention, there was frequently some book of not very delicate character, advertised as “given away gratis” at this house. But as this kind of literature was sure to find a great many readers—more especially when the book could be had for nothing—a restriction was sometimes added that “this curious book will not be given away to any boys or girls, or any paultry person.” Such a pamphlet, for instance, was:—

“THE RABBIT-AFFAIR made clear in a full account of the whole matter, with the pictures engraved of the pretended rabbit-breeder herself, Mary Tofts, and of the rabbits, and of the persons who attended her during her pretended deliveries, showing who were and who were not deceived by her. ’Tis given gratis nowhere, but only up one pair of stairs at the sign of the Anodyne Necklace, recommended by Dr Chamberlain,” &c.—Daily Courant, Jan. 11, 1726.

This alluded to one of the most impudent frauds ever committed. A certain profligate woman, Mary Tofts by name, a native of Godalming, in Surrey, pretended to give birth to rabbits. The first delivery was a family of seventeen; she actually found people who believed her, and gave their attention to this phenomenon. Amongst them were Sir Richard Manningham, Dr St André, surgeon and anatomist to his Majesty, Dr Mowbray, &c. By these gentlemen she was brought to Lacy’s Bagnio, and the case was watched with intense interest; yet she succeeded in baffling and deluding their attention. At last the fraud came out by one of her accomplices informing upon her. Prints, books, and ballads were published upon the subject, Dr St André coming in for an extra share of ridicule; but whether the woman was in any way punished, is not on record. The last information respecting her was in the Weekly Miscellany, April 19, 1740:—“The celebrated rabbit-woman, of Godalmin’, in Surrey, was committed to Guilford gaol for receiving stolen goods.” She died in January 1763.

The Pearl of Venice is named in an advertisement of a watch lost, “made at Paris, not so broad as a shilling, in a case of black leather with gold nails.”[587] It was the sign of “Mr Leroy, in St James’ Street, Covent Garding.” The pearls of Venice were celebrated:—