Mr. Joseph Hanson, The Haberdasher | Page 3

price.
Warned by his predecessor's fate, the next comer adopted a newer and a
nobler style of attracting public attention. He called himself a steady
trader of the old school, abjured cheapness as synonymous with
cheating, disclaimed everything that savoured of a puff, denounced
handbills and advertisements, and had not a ticket in his whole shop.
He cited the high price of his articles as proofs of their goodness, and

would bare held himself disgraced for ever if he had been detected in
selling a reasonable piece of goods. "He could not," he observed,
"expect to attract the rabble by such a mode of transacting business; his
aim was to secure a select body of customers amongst the nobility and
gentry, persons who looked to quality and durability in their purchases,
and were capable of estimating the solid advantages of dealing with a
tradesman who despised the trumpery artifices of the day."
So high-minded a declaration, enforced too by much solemnity of
utterance and appearance--the speaker being a solid, substantial,
middle-aged man, equipped in a full suit of black, with a head nicely
powdered, and a pen stuck behind his ear--such a declaration from so
important a personage ought to have succeeded; but somehow or other
it did not. His customers, gentle and simple, were more select than
numerous, and in another six months the high-price man failed just as
the low-price man had failed before him.
Their successor, Mr. Joseph Hanson, claimed to unite in his own person
the several merits of both his antecedents. Cheaper than the cheapest,
better, finer, more durable, than the best, nothing at all approaching his
assortment of linendrapery had, as he swore, and his head shopman, Mr.
Thomas Long, asseverated, ever been seen before in the streets of
Belford Regis; and the oaths of the master and the asseverations of the
man, together with a very grand display of fashions and finery, did
really seem, in the first instance at least, to attract more customers than
had of late visited those unfortunate premises.
Mr. Joseph Hanson and Mr. Thomas Long were a pair admirably suited
to the concern, and to one another. Each possessed pre-eminently the
various requisites and qualifications in which the other happened to be
deficient. Tall, slender, elderly, with a fine bald head, a mild
countenance, a most insinuating address, and a general air of faded
gentility, Mr. Thomas Long was exactly the foreman to give
respectability to his employer; whilst bold, fluent, rapid, loud, dashing
in aspect and manner, with a great fund of animal spirits, and a
prodigious stock of assurance and conceit, respectability was, to say the
truth, the precise qualification which Mr. Joseph Hanson most needed.

Then the good town of Belford being divided, like most other country
towns, into two prevailing factions, theological and political, the
worthies whom I am attempting to describe prudently endeavoured to
catch all parties by embracing different sides; Mr. Joseph Hanson being
a tory and high-churchman of the very first water, who showed his
loyalty according to the most approved faction, by abusing his
Majesty's ministers as revolutionary, thwarting the town-council,
getting tipsy at conservative dinners, and riding twenty miles to attend
an eminent preacher who wielded in a neighbouring county all the
thunders of orthodoxy; whilst the soft-spoken Mr. Thomas Long was a
Dissenter and a radical, who proved his allegiance to the House of
Brunswick (for both claimed to be amongst the best wishers to the
present dynasty and the reigning sovereign) by denouncing the
government as weak and aristocratic, advocating the abolition of the
peerage, getting up an operative reform club, and going to chapel three
times every Sunday.
These measures succeeded so well, that the allotted six months (the
general period of failure in that concern) elapsed, and still found Mr.
Joseph Hanson as flourishing as ever in manner, and apparently
flourishing in trade; they stood him, too, in no small stead, in a matter
which promised to be still more conducive to his prosperity than
buying and selling feminine gear,--in the grand matter (for Joseph
jocosely professed to be a forlorn bachelor upon the lookout for a wife)
of a wealthy marriage.
One of the most thrifty and thriving tradesmen in the town of Belford,
was old John Parsons, the tinman. His spacious shop, crowded with its
glittering and rattling commodities, pots, pans, kettles, meat-covers, in
a word, the whole batterie de cuisine, was situate in the narrow,
inconvenient lane called Oriel Street, which I have already done myself
the honour of introducing to the courteous reader, standing betwixt a
great chemist on one side, his windows filled with coloured jars, red,
blue, and green, looking like painted glass, or like the fruit made of
gems in Aladdin's garden, (I am as much taken myself with those