ABOUT forty miles from London is a schoolmaster has had such success with boys as there are almost forty ministers and schoolmasters that were his scholars. His wife also teaches girls lacemaking, plain work, raising paste, sauces, and cookery to a degree of exactness. His price is £10 or £11 the year, with a pair of sheets and one spoon, to be returned if desired; coaches and other conveniencies pass every day within half a mile of the house, and ’tis but an easy journey to or from London.
And with these proofs that the schoolmaster was very much abroad at the time, we will take leave of the seventeenth century.
[27] A nominal censorship was continued till 1695, but the freedom of the press is considered by many to date from the year named above, and an inspection of the papers themselves would seem to justify the opinion.
CHAPTER VIII.
EARLY PART OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
It is now apparent that advertising has become recognised as a means of communication not only for the conveniencies of trade, but for political, lovemaking, fortune-hunting, swindling, and the thousand and one other purposes which are always ready to assert themselves in a large community. It is also evident that as years have progressed, advertising has become more and more necessary to certain trades, the principals in which a comparatively short time before would have scorned the idea of ventilating their wares through the columns of the public press. So it is therefore as well to notice the rates which were charged by some of the papers. This was before the duty was placed upon advertisements, when the arrangement was simply between one who wished a notice inserted in a paper, and another who possessed the power of making such insertion. It is of course impossible to tell what the rates were on all papers, but as some had notices of price per advertisement stated at foot, a fair estimate may be made. The first advertisements were so few that no notice was called for, and it was not until every newspaper looked forward to the possession of more or less that the plan of stating charges became common. About the period of which we are now writing, long advertisements were unknown; they generally averaged about eight lines of narrow measure, and were paid for at about a shilling each, with fluctuations similar in degree to those of the leading papers of the present day. Various rules obtained upon various papers. One journal, the “Jockey’s Intelligencer, or Weekly Advertisements for Horses and Second-Hand Coaches to be Bought and Sold,” which appeared towards the end of the seventeenth century, charged “a shilling for a horse or coach for notification, and sixpence for renewing.” Still later, the County Gentleman’s Courant seems to have been the first paper to charge by the line, and in one of its numbers appears the following rather non-sequitous statement: “Seeing promotion of trade is a matter which ought to be encouraged, the price of advertisements is advanced to twopence per line.” Very likely many agreed with the writer, who seems to have had a follower several years afterwards—a corn dealer, who during a great dearth stuck up the following notification: “On account of the great distress in this town, the price of flour will be raised one shilling per peck.” But neither of these men meant what he said, though doubtless he thought he did.
The first advertisement with which we open the century is of a semi-religious character, and betrays a very inquiring disposition on the part of the writer. Facts of the kind required are, however, too stubborn to meet with publication at the request of everybody, and if Mr Keith and other controversialists had been trammelled by them, there is every probability that the inquiry we now republish would never have seen the light:—
☞ WHEREAS the World has been told in public papers and otherwise of numerous conversions of quakers to the Church of England, by means of Mr Keith and others, and whereas the quakers give out in their late books and otherwise, that since Mr Keith came out of America, there are not ten persons owned by them that have left their Society, Mr Keith and others will very much oblige the world in publishing a true list of their proselytes.
The foregoing is from the Postman of March 1701, and in July the same paper contains a very different notice, which will give an idea of the amusements then in vogue, and rescue from oblivion men whose names, great as they are in the advertisement, seem to have been passed over unduly by writers on ancient sports and pastimes, who seem to regard Figg and Broughton as the fathers of the backsword and the boxing match:—