Mr. Joseph Hanson, The Haberdasher | Page 2

mighty engine of trade? What is
half the march of intellect, but puffery? Why do little children learn
their letters at school, but that they may come hereafter to read puffs at
college? Why but for the propagation of puffs do honorary lecturers
hold forth upon science, and gratuitous editors circulate literature? Are
not gas-lights chiefly used for their illumination, and steamboats for
their spread? And shall not history, which has given to one era the
name of the age of gold, and has entitled another the age of silver, call
this present nineteenth century the age of puffs?
Take up the first thing upon your table, the newspaper for instance, or

the magazine, the decorated drawing-box, the Bramah pen, and twenty
to one but a puff more or less direct shall lurk in the patent of the one,
while a whole congeries of puffs shall swarm in bare and undisguised
effrontery between the pages of the other.
Walk into the streets;--and what meet you there? Puffs! puffs! puffs!
From the dead walls, chalked over with recommendations to purchase
Mr. Such-an-one's blacking, to the walking placard insinuating the
excellences of Mr. What-d'ye-call-him's Cream Gin*--from the bright
resplendent brass-knob, garnished with the significant words "Office
Bell," beside the door of an obscure surveyor, to the spruce carriage of
a newly arrived physician driving empty up and down the street,
everything whether movable or stationary is a puff.
* He was a genius in his line (I had almost written an evil genius) who
invented that rare epithet, that singular combination of the sweetest and
purest of all luxuries, the most healthful and innocent of dainties,
redolent of association so rural and poetical, with the vilest
abominations of great cities, the impure and disgusting source of
misery and crime. Cream Gin! The union of such words is really a
desecration of one of nature's most genial gifts, as well as a burlesque
on the charming old pastoral poets; a flagrant offence against morals,
and against that which in its highest sense may almost be considered a
branch of morality--taste.
But shops form, of course, the chief locality of the craft of puffing. The
getting off of goods is its grand aim and object. And of all shops those
which are devoted to the thousand and one articles of female decoration,
the few things which women do, and the many which they do not want,
stand pre-eminent in this great art of the nineteenth century.
Not to enter upon the grand manoeuvres of the London establishments,
the doors for carriages to set down and the doors for carriages to take
up, indicating an affluence of customers, a degree of crowd and
inconvenience equal to the King's Theatre, on a Saturday night, or the
queen's drawing-room on a birthday, and attracting the whole female
world by that which in a fashionable cause the whole female world
loves so dearly, confusion, pressure, heat and noise;--to say nothing of

those bold schemes which require the multitudes of the metropolis to
afford them the slightest chance of success, we in our good borough of
Belford Regis, simple as it stands, had, as I have said, as pretty a show
of speculating haberdashers as any country town of its inches could
well desire; the most eminent of whom was beyond all question or
competition, the proprietor of the New Waterloo Establishment, Mr.
Joseph Hanson, late of London.
His shop displayed, as I have already intimated, one of the largest and
showiest frontages in the market-place, and had been distinguished by a
greater number of occupants and a more rapid succession of failures in
the same line than any other in the town.
The last tenant, save one, of that celebrated warehouse--the penultimate
bankrupt--had followed the beaten road of puffing, and announced his
goods as the cheapest ever manufactured. According to himself, his
handbills, and his advertisements, everything contained in that shop
was so very much under prime cost, that the more he sold the sooner he
must be ruined. To hear him, you would expect not only that he should
give his ribbons and muslins for nothing, but that he should offer you a
premium for consenting to accept of them, Gloves, handkerchiefs,
nightcaps, gown-pieces, every article at the door and in the window
was covered with tickets, each nearly as large as itself, tickets that
might be read across the market-place; and townspeople and
country-people came flocking round about, some to stare and some to
buy. The starers were, however, it is to be presumed, more numerous
than the buyers, for notwithstanding his tickets, his handbills, and his
advertisements, in less than six months the advertiser had failed, and
that stock never, as it's luckless owner used to say, approached for
cheapness, was sold off at half its original