Victorian adverts

The picture at the head of this post (by John Orlando Parry) is entitled ‘The Poster Man’ and dates from 1835. Two things made this explosion of advertising possible: the growth in literacy and the invention of the steam-powered printing press.  A surprisingly large number of the posters in the illustration are for theatres and concerts; in newspapers and magazines, most of the adverts would have been for quack remedies, food (particularly if it was sold in jars) and beverages. For the poster men who feared they might run out of wall space, the railways must have come as a godsend.  The illustration below shows, in exaggerated form, what early railways stations much have looked like.

Many of the adverts which are plastered all over the station contain catch phrases rather than product names – catch phrases of the kind that Mr Breeze, the advertising copywriter in Mr Blackwood’s Fabularium, was paid to invent.