Nasby in Exile: or, Six Months of Travel in England, Ireland, Scotland, France, Germany, Switzerland and Belgium, with many things not of travelLocke, David Ross
Philosophy
Nasby in Exile: or, Six Months of Travel in England, Ireland, Scotland, France, Germany, Switzerland and Belgium, with many things not of travel
Locke, David Ross
Europe -- Description and travel
Their ingenuity in advertising is as good as that of their
trans-Atlantic brethren. You see vast vans driven slowly up and down the
streets, built up twenty feet with canvass, showing an emaciated mortal,
with scarcely an hour of life in him, with the legend underneath,
"Before taking Gobson's Elixir," and the same party dressed, and walking
the streets with the physical perfection of a prize fighter, and
underneath, "After taking Gobson's Elixir." Transparencies at night
flash forth the miraculous virtues of "Hopkins' Saline Draught," and
there isn't an inch of dead wall anywhere that has not its burden of
announcements. Long processions of ragged men the most of them too old
and weak to do anything else, march along the sidewalks sandwiched
between two boards, each one bearing testimony to the virtues of some
wonderful compound, there being enough of them to weary the eye and make
one wish he could go somewhere where advertising was impossible.
One of these human sandwiches remarked to me that the boards were a
little uncomfortable in the Summer, but the two made a mighty good
overcoat in the Winter.
And as if there was not enough of it already, an enterprising Yankee is
here with a steam whale, ninety feet long, spouting water sixty feet
high, the machinery and crew concealed in the boat on which it rests,
which is to ply up and down the beautiful Thames, bearing upon either
side the announcement of a liver pill. The proprietor gives him ten
thousand dollars for the use of it for the season, and bears all the
expenses of running it. It is very like a whale, and as it attracts much
attention will doubtless pay a handsome profit to the man by whom it has
been engaged.
The papers are full of such advertising, the only difference between
England and America being that the advertisements here are more
elegantly written, and couched in really superior English which ours are
not, always. The English shoemaker who turns doctor, employs the best
literary talent at command to write his announcements, and he pays more
liberally than the magazines do the same men. Many a London writer,
struggling for fame and a place in literature, makes a handsome addition
to his slender income by going into the service of these patent medicine
vendors.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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