THE LONDON ADVERTISER.
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.
Nearly all of them succeed. The British public are a medicine-taking people by nature. There are not many diseases upon the island naturally, but the inhabitants create a very large number by their habits. The universal use of beer—and vile stuff it is—is not conducive to general health, and the Englishman is about the heartiest eater on the globe. He is more than hearty—he verges very closely upon the gluttonous. Consequently he needs medicines, and the manufacturers adapt themselves to the market. There are more than a thousand “after dinner pills,” warranted to correct all the effect of “over-indulgence at the table,” which means that it will do something toward keeping up a man who eats about four times what he ought to, and drinks enough every year to drive an American or Frenchman into delirium tremens.
The market for these goods is world-wide, and enormous fortunes are amassed. I must say, however, that the trade is not in the best repute. Many brewers have been knighted, but no patent medicine man. In the matter of ennobling people the line must be drawn somewhere. Dickens’ barber drew it at the baker—the English draw it at the brewer.
