Facsimiles of newspaper pages

So much for the early struggles of the “Thunderer”—a title given to it from the powerful articles contributed to it by Edward Stirling—and as its later efforts in the cause of justice are shown in the Times scholarships at Oxford, as its very appearance betokens its vast importance, and as its history has been given by many much abler pens than ours, we will return to our subject.

In 1798, a house in Stanhope Street having been broken open and robbed, the following singular announcement was issued by the proprietor, and appeared in the Daily Advertiser:—

A few nights after, a packet, with the following letter enclosed, was dropped into the area of the house: “Sir,—You are quite a gemman. Not being used to your Madeira, it got into our upper works, or we should never have cribbed your papers; they be all marched back again with the red book. Your ale was mortal good; the tankard and spoons were made into a white soup, in Duke’s Place, two hours afore daylite. The old family watch cases were at the same time made into a brown gravy, and the guts, new christened, are on their voyage to Holland. If they had not been transported, you should have them again, for you are quite the gemman; but you know, as they have been christened, and got a new name, they would no longer be of your old family. And soe, sir, we have nothing more to say, but that we are much obligated to you, and shall be glad to sarve and visit you, by nite or by day, and are your humble sarvants to command.” Honour had then, it would appear, not quite departed from among thieves.

At the end of last century a provincial attorney advertised an estate for sale, or to be exchanged for another, stating that he was appointed Plenipotentiary to treat in the business; that he had ample credentials, and was prepared to ratify his powers; that he would enter into preliminaries either upon the principle of the statu quo or uti possidetis; that he was ready to receive the project of any person desirous to make the purchase or exchange, and to deliver his contre projet and sine quâ non, and, indeed, at once give his ultimatum, assuring the public that as soon as a definitive treaty should be concluded, it would be ratified by his constituent and duly guaranteed. He was evidently astonished at his own unexpected importance.

Some curious and amusing statistics of advertising in the second year of this century are given by Mr Daniel Stuart, at one time co-proprietor of the Morning Post with Coleridge, when it was in the meridian of its fame. He says: “The Morning Herald and the Times, then leading papers, were neglected, and the Morning Post, by vigilance and activity, rose rapidly. Advertisements flowed in beyond bounds. I encouraged the small miscellaneous advertisements in the front page, preferring them to any others, upon the rule that the more numerous the customers, the more independent and permanent the custom. Besides numerous and various advertisements, I interest numerous and various readers looking out for employment, servants, sales, and purchasers, etc. etc. Advertisements act and react. They attract readers, promote circulation, and circulation attracts advertisements. The Daily Advertiser, which sold to the public for twopence halfpenny, after paying a stamp-duty of three-halfpence, never had more than half a column of news; it never noticed Parliament, but it had the best foreign intelligence before the French Revolution. The Daily Advertiser lost by its publication, but it gained largely by its advertisements, with which it was crammed full. Shares in it sold by auction at twenty years’ purchase. I recollect my brother Peter saying, that on proposing to a tradesman to take shares in a new paper, he was answered with a sneer and a shake of the head—‘Ah! none of you can touch the Daily!’ It was the paper of business, filled with miscellaneous advertisements, conducted at little expense, very profitable, and taken in by all public-houses, coffee-houses, etc., but by scarcely any private families. It fell in a day by the scheme of Grant, a printer, which made all publicans proprietors of a rival, the Morning Advertiser, the profits going to a publicans’ benefit society; and they, of course, took in their own paper;—an example of the danger of depending on any class. Soon after I joined the Morning Post, in the autumn of 1795, Christie, the auctioneer, left it, on account of its low sale, and left a blank, a ruinous proclamation of decline. But in 1802 he came to me again, praying for readmission. At that time particular newspapers were known to possess particular classes of advertisements: the Morning Post, horses and carriages; the Public Ledger, shipping and sales of wholesale foreign merchandise; the Morning Herald and Times, auctioneers; the Morning Chronicle, books. All papers had all sorts of advertisements, it is true, but some were more remarkable than others for a particular class, and Mr Perry, who aimed at making the Morning Chronicle a very literary paper, took pains to produce a striking display of book advertisements. This display had something more solid for its object than vanity. Sixty or seventy short advertisements, filling three columns, by Longman, one day, by Cadell, etc., another—‘Bless me, what an extensive business they must have!’ The auctioneers to this day stipulate to have all their advertisements inserted at once, that they may impress the public with great ideas of their extensive business. They will not have them dribbled out, a few at a time, as the days of sale approach. The journals have of late years adopted the same rule with the same design. They keep back advertisements, fill up with pamphlets, and other stuff unnecessary to a newspaper, and then come out with a swarm of advertisements in a double sheet to astonish their readers, and strike them with high ideas of the extent of their circulation, which attracts so many advertisers. The meagre days are forgotten, the days of swarm are remembered.”

In the same gossiping manner Stuart speaks again of this rage for swarming advertisements: “The booksellers and others crowded to the Morning Post, when its circulation and character raised it above all competitors. Each was desirous of having his cloud of advertisements inserted at once in the front page. I would not drive away the short, miscellaneous advertisements by allowing space to be monopolised by any class. When a very long advertisement of a column or two came, I charged enormously high, that it might be taken away without the parties being able to say it was refused admission. I accommodated the booksellers as well as I could with a few new and pressing advertisements at a time. That would not do: they would have the cloud; then, said I, there is no place for the cloud but the last page, where the auctioneers already enjoy that privilege. The booksellers were affronted, indignant. The last page! To obtain the accommodation refused by the Morning Post, they set up a morning paper, the British Press; and to oppose the Courier, an evening one—the Globe. Possessed of general influence among literary men, could there be a doubt of success?” The Globe has stood the test of time, and though it has seen vicissitudes, and has changed its politics within recent years, it now seems as firmly established as any of its contemporaries that is independent of connection with a morning paper.

We have now reached the end of our journey so far as the education of advertisers and the development of advertisements are concerned. By the commencement of the present century matters were very nearly as we find them now; and so in the following chapters only those examples which have peculiar claims to attention will be submitted.

CHAPTER XI.
CURIOUS AND ECCENTRIC ADVERTISEMENTS.

Advertisements of the kind which form the subject of this chapter have been so often made matter of comment and speculation, have so often received the attention of essayists and the ridicule of comic writers, that it is hard to keep out of the beaten track, and to find anything fresh to say upon a topic which seems utterly exhausted. Yet the store of fun is so great, and the excellence of many old and new stories so undoubted, that courage is easily found for this the most difficult part of the present work. Difficult, because there is an embarrassment of riches, an enormous mine of wealth, at command, and the trouble is not what to put in, but what to leave out, from a chapter on quaint and curious advertisements. Difficult again, because some of the best stories have been told in so many and such various guises, that until arriving at the ends it is hard to tell they have a common origin, and then the claims of each version are as near as possible equal. There is, however, a way out of all difficulties, and the way in this is to verify the advertisements themselves, and pay no attention to the apocrypha to which they give rise; and though it is a tedious proceeding, and one which shows little in return for the pains taken, it may be something to our readers to know, that curious as many of the specimens given are, they are real and original, and that in the course of our researches we have unearthed many impostures in the way of quotations from advertisements which have never yet appeared, unless private views of still more private copies of papers have been allowed their promulgators. There is, after all, little reason for a display of inventive power, for the real material is so good, and withal so natural, as to completely put the finest fancy to a disadvantage. It has already been remarked that in the whole range of periodical literature there is no greater curiosity than the columns daily devoted to advertisements in the Times. From them, says a writer a few years back, “the future historian will be able to glean ample and correct information relative to the social habits, wants, and peculiarities of this empire. How we travel, by land or sea—how we live, and move, and have our being—is fully set forth in the different announcements which appear in a single copy of that journal. The means of gratifying the most boundless desires, or the most fastidious taste, are placed within the knowledge of any one who chooses to consult its crowded columns. Should a man wish to make an excursion to any part of the globe between Cape Horn and the North Pole, to any port in India, to Australia, to Africa, or to China, he can, by the aid of one number of the Times, make his arrangements over his breakfast. In the first column he will find which ‘A 1 fine, fast-sailing, copper-bottomed’ vessel is ready to take him to any of those distant ports. Or, should his travelling aspirations be of a less extended nature, he can inform himself of the names, size, horse-power, times of starting, and fares, of numberless steamers which ply within the limits of British seas. Whether, in short, he wishes to be conveyed five miles—from London to Greenwich—or three thousand—from Liverpool to New York—information equally conclusive is afforded him. The head of the second, or sometimes the third column, is interesting to a more extensive range of readers—namely, to the curious; for it is generally devoted to what may be called the romance of advertising. The advertisements which appear in that place are mysterious as melodramas, and puzzling as rebuses.” These incentives to curiosity will receive attention a little further on; meanwhile we will turn to those which are purely curious or eccentric.

The record of these notices to the public is so extensive, and its ramifications so multifarious, that so far as those advertisements which simply contain blunders are concerned, we must be satisfied with a simple summary, and in many cases leave our readers to make their own comments. Here is a batch of those whose comicality is mainly dependent upon sins against the rules of English composition. We will commence with the reward offered for “a keyless lady’s gold watch,” which is, though, but a faint echo of the “green lady’s parasol” and the “brown silk gentleman’s umbrella” anecdotes; but the former we give as actually having appeared, while so far the two latter require verification. A lady advertises her desire to obtain a husband with “a Roman nose having strong religious tendencies.” A nose with heavenly tendencies we can imagine, but even then it would not be Roman. “A spinster particularly fond of children,” informs the public that she “wishes for two or three having none of her own.” Then a dissenter from grammar as well as from the Church Established wants “a young man to look after a horse of the Methodist persuasion;” a draper desires to meet with an assistant who would “take an active and energetic interest in a small first-class trade, and in a quiet family;” and a chemist requests that “the gentleman who left his stomach for analysis, will please call and get it, together with the result.” Theatrical papers actually teem with advertisements which, either from technology or an ignorance of literary law, are extremely funny, and sometimes alarming, and even the editorial minds seem at times to catch the infection. One of these journals, in a puff preliminary of a benefit, after announcing the names of the performers and a list of the performances, went on: “Of course every one will be there, and for the edification of those who are absent, a full report will be found in our next paper.” This is worthy of a place in any collection: “One pound reward—Lost, a cameo brooch, representing Venus and Adonis on the Drumcondra-road, about ten o’clock, on Tuesday evening.” And so is this: “The advertiser, having made an advantageous purchase, offers for sale, on very low terms, about six dozen of prime port wine, late the property of a gentleman forty years of age, full in the body and with a high bouquet.” The lady spoken of in the following would meet with some attention from the renowned Barnum: “To be sold cheap, a splendid grey horse, calculated for a charger, or would carry a lady with a switch tail.” But she would find a formidable rival in the gentleman whose advertisement we place as near as possible, so as to make a pair: “To be sold cheap, a mail phaeton, the property of a gentleman with a moveable head, as good as new.” Students of vivisection, and lovers of natural history generally, would have been glad to meet with this specimen of life after decapitation: “Ten shillings reward—Lost by a gentleman, a white terrier dog, except the head, which is black.” And as congenial company we append this: “To be sold, an Erard grand piano, the property of a lady, about to travel in a walnut wood case with carved legs.”

Differing somewhat, though still of the same kind, is the advertisement of a governess, who, among other things, notifies that “she is a perfect mistress of her own tongue.” If she means what she says, she deserves a good situation and a high rate of wages. An anecdote is told of a wealthy widow who advertised for an agent, and, owing to a printer’s error, which made it “a gent,” she was inundated with applications by letter, and pestered by personal attentions. This story requires, however, a little assistance, and may be taken for what it is worth. Not long ago, a morning paper contained an announcement that a lady going abroad would give “a medical man” £100 a year to look after “a favourite spaniel dog” during her absence. This may not be funny, but it is certainly curious, and in these days, when starvation and misery are rampant, when men are to be found who out of sheer love kill their children rather than trust them to the tender mercies of the parish officials, and when these same officials are proved guilty of constructive homicide, it is indeed noticeable. A kindred advertisement, also real and unexaggerated, asks for “an accomplished poodle nurse. Wages £1 per week.” This has double claims upon our attention here, for in addition to the amount offered for such work, there is a doubt as to the actual thing required. Is it a nurse for accomplished poodles, or an accomplished nurse? And, if the latter, what in the name of goodness and common sense is accomplishment at such work? Do poodles require peculiar nursery rhymes and lullabies, or are they nursed, as a vulgar error has it about West-country babies, head downwards? This is not the exact expression used with regard to the infants; but it will do. We will conclude this short list of peculiarities with two which deserve notice. The first is the notice of a marriage, which ends, “No cards, no cake, no wine.” This is evidently intended for friends other than those “at a distance,” whose polite attention is so constantly invoked. The remaining specimen appeared in the Irish Times, and runs thus: “To Insurance Offices.—Whatever office the late William H. O’Connell, M.D. life was insured will please to communicate or call on his widow, 23 South Frederick Street, without delay.” One hardly knows which to admire most, the style or the insouciance of the demand.

Of curious advertisements which are such independent of errors, selfishness, or moral obliquity, we have in the purely historical part of this work given plenty specimens from olden times; but there are still a few samples of the peculiarities of our ancestors which will bear repetition in this chapter, more especially as most of them have not before been unearthed from their original columns. Before quoting any of those which are purely advertisements in the ordinary sense of the word, we will present to our readers a curious piece of puffery which appeared in an Irish paper for May 30, 1784, and which from its near connection with open and palpable advertising, and from its whimsical character, will not be at all out of place, and will doubtless prove interesting, especially to those of a theatrical turn of mind, as it refers to the gifted Sarah Siddons’s first appearance in Dublin. The article runs thus: “On Saturday, Mrs Siddons, about whom all the world has been talking, exposed her beautiful, adamantine, soft, and lovely person, for the first time, at Smock-Alley Theatre, in the bewitching, melting, and all-tearful character of Isabella. From the repeated panegyrics in the impartial London newspapers, we were taught to expect the sight of a heavenly angel; but how were we supernaturally surprised into the most awful joy, at beholding a mortal goddess. The house was crowded with hundreds more than it could hold,—with thousands of admiring spectators, that went away without a sight. This extraordinary phenomenon of tragic excellence! this star of Melpomene! this comet of the stage! this sun of the firmament of the Muses! this moon of blank verse! this queen and princess of tears! this Donnellan of the poisoned bowl! this empress of the pistol and dagger! this chaos of Shakspeare! this world of weeping clouds! this Juno of commanding aspects! this Terpsichore of the curtains and scenes! this Proserpine of fire and earthquake! this Katterfelto of wonders! exceeded expectation, went beyond belief, and soared above all the natural powers of description! She was nature itself! She was the most exquisite work of art! She was the very daisy, primrose, tuberose, sweet-brier, furze-blossom, gilliflower, wall-flower, cauliflower, auricula, and rosemary! In short, she was the bouquet of Parnassus! Where expectation was raised so high, it was thought she would be injured by her appearance; but it was the audience who were injured:—several fainted before the curtain drew up! When she came to the scene of parting with her wedding-ring, ah! what a sight was there! the very fiddlers in the orchestra, ‘albeit, unused to the melting mood,’ blubbered like hungry children crying for their bread and butter; and when the bell rang for music between the acts, the tears ran from the bassoon players’ eyes in such plentiful showers, that they choked the finger stops; and making a spout of the instrument, poured in such torrents on the first fiddler’s book, that, not seeing the overture was in two sharps, the leader of the band actually played in one flat. But the sobs and sighs of the groaning audience, and the noise of corks drawn from the smelling-bottles, prevented the mistake between flats and sharps being discovered. One hundred and nine ladies fainted! forty-six went into fits! and ninety-five had strong hysterics! The world will scarcely credit the truth, when they are told, that fourteen children, five old women, one hundred tailors, and six common-councilmen, were actually drowned in the inundation of tears that flowed from the galleries, the slips, and the boxes, to increase the briny pond in the pit; the water was three feet deep; and the people that were obliged to stand upon the benches, were in that position up to their ankles in tears! An Act of Parliament against her playing any more will certainly pass.” As this effusion appeared almost immediately after the famous actress’s first appearance, we are hardly wrong in considering it as half an advertisement. It must certainly have helped to draw good houses during the rest of her stay.

Lovers of the gentle craft maybe interested to know that what was perhaps the earliest advertisement of Izaak Walton’s famous little book “The Compleat Angler” was published in one of Wharton’s Almanacs. It is on the back of the dedication-leaf to “Hemeroscopeion: Anni Æra Christianæ, 1654.” Hemeroscopeion was William Lilly, and the almanac appeared in 1653, the year in which Walton’s book was printed. The advertisement says:—

The publication of births, marriages, and deaths seems to have begun almost as soon as newspapers were in full swing. At first only the names of the noble and eminent were given, but soon the notices got into much the same form as we now find them. One advantage of the old style was that the amount a man died worth was generally given, though how the exact sum was known directly he died passes our comprehension, unless it was then the fashion to give off the secret with the latest breath. Even under such circumstances we should hesitate to believe some people of our acquaintance, who have tried now and again, but have never yet succeeded in telling the truth about their own affairs or those of their relatives. And doubtless many an heir felt sadly disappointed, on taking his property, to find it amount to less than half of the published sum. Notices of marriages and deaths were frequent before the announcement of births became fashionable; and in advertisements the real order of things has been completely changed, as obituaries began, marriages followed, and births came last of all. In the first number of the Gentleman’s Magazine, January 1731, we find deaths and marriages published under separate heads, and many papers of the time did likewise. The Grub Street Journal gave them among the summary of Domestic News, each particular item having the initials of the paper from which it was taken appended, as was done with all other information under the same head; for which purpose there was at the top of the article the information that C. meant Daily Courant, P. Daily Post-Boy, D. P. Daily Post, D. J. Daily Journal, D. A. Daily Advertiser, S. J. St James’s Evening Post, W. E. Whitehall Evening Post, and L. E. London Evening Post. In the number for February 7, 1734, we find this:—

About the same time we find in the same paper another paragraph worthy of notice:—

On March 14, also of 1734, there is this:—

And on the 28th this:—

And so on, there being announcements in every number, many of which showed differences in the daily-paper notices. There are also plenty of marriage announcements, which, as a rule, give the amounts obtained with the ladies, and sometimes the gentlemen’s fortunes. The following is from the G. S. J. of February 21, 1734:—

A few weeks later on there is this:—

And on April 25 this:—

There are in the Journal, as well as in contemporary and earlier papers, occasional references to births as well, but none calling for any comment at our hands. In the Gentleman’s Magazine of February 1736 there are two notices of deaths, one commencing the list, which is curious, and the other immediately following, which cannot fail to be interesting:—

Also the Earl of Derby, and several men who are noted to have died worth sums varying from £13,000 to £100,000, find obituary notices. These give particulars of the lives of the deceased, and the ways in which the various properties are disposed of, very different from the short announcements of modern days. Thus we find that by the death of the Hon. Walter Chetwynd, the barony of Rathdown in the county of Dublin, and viscounty of Chetwynd of Beerhaven in the county of Cork, both in the peerage of Ireland, became extinct, but that his brother, John Chetwynd, was consoled by an estate of £3000 per annum; that Mrs Eliza Barber succumbed to “an illness she had contracted in Newgate on a prosecution of her master, a baronet of Leicestershire, of which being honourably acquitted, and a copy of her indictment granted, she had brought an action of £1000 damages;” that Mr Fellows was an eminent sugar-baker; and that Gilbert Campbell had during his life got himself into trouble for misinterpreting his duties as an attorney. The marriage lists have also the admirable fashion of giving the sums of money obtained with the brides or bridegrooms as the case may be, and in some instances the amounts of revenue.

In the London Journal of February 7, 1730, there is the following, which shows that the presentation of advertisement-books gratis is by no means a novelty:—

Also in 1730 two Roman histories, translated from the French by two Jesuit priests, appeared at the same time—one by Mr Ozell, the other by Mr Bundy—which caused the following advertisement to be inserted by the publishers of Ozell’s work:—

In the Bristol Gazette for Thursday, August 28, 1788, among advertisements of the ordinary kind, some of which are noticeable as emanating from Robert and Thomas Southey, we find the following:—

It is to be presumed that the line about short passengers refers to those who travel short journeys only, though a friend of ours, himself a Welshman, makes several jocular allusions to the conditions that used in the days of travelling by road in and about the Principality to be imposed on people of less than the average height. As these will be some day published in a volume, the title of which is already decided upon—“Cheese and Chuckles; or, Leeks and Laughter”—and which is intended for distribution among the bards at the annual Eisteddfod, we will not discount the sensation then to be derived from their publication, more especially as we have tried in vain and failed to understand them.

For those who take such interest in the poet Southey that anything connected with his family is regarded with favour, we present the following, from the same number of the Bristol Gazette, which was kindly forwarded by a gentleman on hearing that this work was in progress:—

There is also an advertisement in the paper from Thomas Southey, who has taken up quarters in Close Street, soliciting custom and describing his wares. Our correspondent, who is a gentleman of position at Neath, and whose veracity is undoubted, says: “My father was a correspondent of Southey’s, and in one of his letters Southey says he was very nearly settling in our Vale of Neath, in a country house, the owner of which was a strong Tory, but as Southey at that early period of his life was a great Radical, he was not allowed to rent the property! If this had not been so, he says, ‘my children would have been Cambrian instead of Cumbrian.’”

Among other old customs now fast falling into desuetude, there is in Cumberland and some other parts of the north of England a practice known as the Bridewain, which consists of the public celebration of weddings. A short time after courtship is commenced—as soon as the date of the marriage is fixed—the lovers give notice of their intentions, and on the day named all their friends for miles around assemble at the intending bridegroom’s house, and join in various pastimes. A plate or bowl is generally fixed in a convenient place, where each of the company contributes in proportion to his inclination and ability, and according to the degree of respect the couple are held in. By this custom a worthy pair have frequently been benefited with a sum of from fifty to a hundred pounds. The following advertisement for such a meeting is copied from the Cumberland Pacquet, 1786:—

These invitations were at this period far from rare, and another, calling folk to a similar festival, appeared in the same paper in 1789:—

A similar advertisement appears in the Pacquet in 1803, and contains some verses of a kind superior to that generally met in these appeals. It is called

A correspondent, writing in Hone’s Table-Book, date August 1827, says it was in the early part of the century “a prevalent custom to have ‘bidden weddings’ when a couple of respectability and of slender means were on the eve of marriage; in this case they gave publicity to their intentions through the medium of the Cumberland Pacquet, a paper published at Whitehaven, and which about twenty-nine years ago was the only newspaper printed in the county. The editor, Mr John Ware, used to set off the invitation in a novel and amusing manner, which never failed to insure a large meeting, and frequently the contributions made on the occasion, by the visitors, were of so much importance to the new-married couple that by care and industry they were enabled to make so good ‘a fend as niver to look ahint them.’” That this or a similar custom was practised commonly a generation ago in Wales, where it is even now occasional, a notice issued from Carmarthen shows. It is peculiar, and runs thus:—