Chamberss Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 | Page 2

in persuading the public, by
some means or other, that it is to their advantage to deal with him, or he
must wait patiently and perseveringly until they have found that out,
which they will inevitably do if it is a fact. No shop ever pays its
expenses, as a general rule, for the first ten or twenty months, unless it
be literally crammed down the public throat by the instrumentality of
the press and the boarding; and it is therefore a question, whether it is
cheaper to wait for a business to grow up, like a young plant, or to force
it into sudden expansion by artificial means. When a business is
manageable by one or two hands, the former expedient is the better one,

and as such is generally followed, after a little preliminary advertising,
to apprise the neighbourhood of its whereabouts. But when the
proprietor has an army of assistants to maintain and to salarise, the case
is altogether different: the expense of waiting, perhaps for a couple of
years, would swallow up a large capital. On this account, he finds it
more politic to arrest the general attention by a grand stir in all quarters,
and some obtrusive demonstration palpable to all eyes, which shall
blazon his name and pretensions through every street and lane of
mighty London. Sometimes it is a regiment of foot, with placarded
banners; sometimes one of cavalry, with bill-plastered vehicles and
bands of music; sometimes it is a phalanx of bottled humanity,
crawling about in labelled triangular phials of wood, corked with woful
faces; and sometimes it is all these together, and a great deal more
besides. By this means, he conquers reputation, as a despot sometimes
carries a throne, by a coup d'état, and becomes a celebrity at once to the
million, among whom his name is infinitely better known than those of
the greatest benefactors of mankind. All this might be tolerable enough
if it ended here; but, unhappily, it does not. Experiment has shewn that,
just as gudgeons will bite at anything when the mud is stirred up at the
bottom of their holes, so the ingenuous public will lay out their money
with anybody who makes a prodigious noise and clatter about the
bargains he has to give. The result of this discovery is, the wholesale
daily publication of lies of most enormous calibre, and their circulation,
by means which we shall briefly notice, in localities where they are
likely to prove most productive.
The advertisement in the daily or weekly papers, the placard on the
walls or boardings, the perambulating vans and banner-men, and the
doomed hosts of bottle-imps and extinguishers, however successful
each may be in attracting the gaze and securing the patronage of the
multitude, fail, for the most part, of enlisting the confidence of a certain
order of customers, who, having plenty of money to spend, and a
considerable share of vanity to work upon, are among the most hopeful
fish that fall into the shopkeeper's net. These are the female members of
a certain order of families--the amiable and genteel wives and
daughters of the commercial aristocracy, and their agents, of this great
city. They reside throughout the year in the suburbs: they rarely read

the newspapers; it would not be genteel to stand in the streets spelling
over the bills on the walls; and the walking and riding equipages of
puffing are things decidedly low in their estimation. They must,
therefore, be reached by some other means; and these other means are
before us as we write, in the shape of a pile of circular-letters in
envelopes of all sorts--plain, hot-pressed, and embossed; with
addresses--some in manuscript, and others in print--some in a
gracefully genteel running-hand, and others decidedly and rather
obtrusively official in character, as though emanating from government
authorities--each and all, however, containing the bait which the
lady-gudgeon is expected to swallow. Before proceeding to open a few
of them for the benefit of the reader, we must apprise him of a curious
peculiarity which marks their delivery. Whether they come by post, as
the major part of them do, not a few of them requiring a double stamp,
or whether they are delivered by hand, one thing is remarkable--they
always come in the middle of the day, between the hours of eleven in
the forenoon and five in the afternoon, when, as a matter of course, the
master of the house is not in the way. Never, by any accident, does the
morning-post, delivered in the suburbs between nine and ten, produce
an epistle of this kind. Let us now open a few of them, and learn from
their contents what is the shopkeeper's estimate of the gullibility of the
merchant's wife, or his daughter, or of the wife or