Mr. Joseph Hanson, The Haberdasher

These are good days for great heroes; so far at least as regards the general spread and universal diffusion of celebrity. In the matter of fame, indeed, that grand bill upon posterity which is to be found written in the page of history, and the changes of empires, Alexander may, for aught I know, be nearly on a par with the Duke of Wellington; but in point of local and temporary tributes to reputation, the great ancient, king though he were, must have been far behind the great modern. Even that comparatively recent warrior, the Duke of Marlborough, made but a slight approach to the popular honours paid to the conqueror of Napoleon. A few alehouse signs and the ballad of "Marlbrook s'en va't en guerre," (for we are not talking now of the titles, and pensions, and palaces, granted to him by the Sovereign and the Parliament,) seem to have been the chief if not the only popular demonstrations vouchsafed by friends and enemies to the hero of Blenheim.

The name of Wellington, on the other hand, is necessarily in every man's mouth at every hour of every day. He is the universal godfather of every novelty, whether in art, in literature, or in science. Streets, bridges, places, crescents, terraces, and railways, on the land; steam-boats on the water; balloons in the air, are all distinguished by that honoured appellation. We live in Wellington squares, we travel in Wellington coaches, we dine in Wellington hotels, we are educated in Wellington establishments, and are clothed from top to toe (that is to say the male half of the nation) in Wellington boots, Wellington cloaks, Wellington hats, each of which shall have been severally purchased at a warehouse bearing the same distinguished title.

Since every market town and almost every village in the kingdom, could boast a Wellington house, or a Waterloo house, emulous to catch some gilded ray from the blaze of their great namesake's glory, it would have been strange indeed if the linendrapers and haberdashers of our good town of Belford Regis had been so much in the rear of fashion as to neglect this easy method of puffing off their wares. On the contrary, so much did our shopkeepers rely upon the influence of an illustrious appellation, that they seemed to despair of success unless sheltered by the laurels of the great commander, and would press his name into the service, even after its accustomed and legitimate forms of use seemed exhausted. Accordingly we had not only a Wellington house and a Waterloo house, but a new Waterloo establishment, and a genuine and original Duke of Wellington warehouse.

The new Waterloo establishment, a flashy dashy shop in the market-place, occupying a considerable extent of frontage, and "conducted (as the advertisements have it) by Mr. Joseph Hanson, late of London," put forth by far the boldest pretensions of any magazine of finery and frippery in the town; and it is with that magnificent store, and with that only, that I intend to deal in the present story.

If the celebrated Mr. Puff, he of the Critic, who, although Sheridan probably borrowed the idea of that most amusing personage from the auctioneers and picture-dealers of Foote's admirable farces, first reduced to system the art of profitable lying, setting forth methodically (scientifically it would be called in these days) the different genera and species of that flourishing craft--if Mr. Puff himself were to revisit this mortal stage, he would lift up his hands and eyes in admiration and astonishment at the improvements which have taken place in the art from whence he took, or to which he gave, a name (for the fact is doubtful) the renowned art of Puffing!

Talk of the progress of society, indeed! of the march of intellect, and the diffusion of knowledge, of infant schools and adult colleges, of gas-lights and rail-roads, of steam-boats and steam-coaches, of literature for nothing, and science for less! What are they and fifty other such nick-nacks compared with the vast strides made by this improving age in the grand art of puffing? Nay, are they not for the most part mere implements and accessories of that mighty engine of trade? What is half the march of intellect, but puffery? Why do little children learn their letters at school, but that they may come hereafter to read puffs at college? Why but for the propagation of puffs do honorary lecturers hold forth upon science, and gratuitous editors circulate literature? Are not gas-lights chiefly used for their illumination, and steamboats for their spread? And shall not history, which has given to one era the name of the age of gold, and has entitled another the age of silver, call this present nineteenth century the age of puffs?

Take up the first thing upon your table, the newspaper for instance, or the magazine, the decorated drawing-box, the Bramah pen, and twenty to one but a puff more or less direct shall lurk in the patent of the one, while a whole congeries of puffs shall swarm in bare and undisguised effrontery between the pages of the other.

Walk into the streets;--and what meet you there? Puffs! puffs! puffs! From the dead walls, chalked over with recommendations to purchase Mr. Such-an-one's blacking, to the walking placard insinuating the excellences of Mr. What-d'ye-call-him's Cream Gin*--from the bright resplendent brass-knob, garnished with the significant words "Office Bell," beside the door of an obscure surveyor, to the spruce carriage of a newly arrived physician driving empty up and down the street, everything whether movable or stationary is a puff.

* He was a genius in his line (I had almost written an evil genius) who invented that rare epithet, that singular combination of the sweetest and purest of all luxuries, the most healthful and innocent of dainties, redolent of association so rural and poetical, with the vilest abominations of great cities, the impure and disgusting source of misery and crime. Cream Gin! The union of such words is really a desecration of one of nature's most genial gifts, as well as a burlesque on the charming old pastoral poets; a flagrant offence against morals, and against that which in its highest sense may almost be considered a branch of morality--taste.

But shops form, of course, the chief locality of the craft of puffing. The getting off of goods is its grand aim and object. And of all shops those which are devoted to the thousand and one articles of female decoration, the few things which women do, and the many which they do not want, stand pre-eminent in this great art of the nineteenth century.

Not to enter upon the grand manoeuvres of the London establishments, the doors for carriages to set down and the doors for carriages to take up, indicating an affluence of customers, a degree of crowd and inconvenience equal to the King's Theatre, on a Saturday night, or the queen's drawing-room on a birthday, and attracting the whole female world by that which in a fashionable cause the whole female world loves so dearly, confusion, pressure, heat and noise;--to say nothing of those bold schemes which require the multitudes of the metropolis to afford them the slightest chance of success, we in our good borough of Belford Regis, simple as it stands, had, as I have said, as pretty a show of speculating haberdashers as any country town of its inches could well desire; the most eminent of whom was beyond all question or competition, the proprietor of the New Waterloo Establishment, Mr. Joseph Hanson, late of London.

His shop displayed, as I have already intimated, one of the largest and showiest frontages in the market-place, and had been distinguished by a greater number of occupants and a more rapid succession of failures in the same line than any other in the town.

The last tenant, save one, of that celebrated warehouse--the penultimate bankrupt--had followed the beaten road of puffing, and announced his goods as the cheapest ever manufactured. According to himself, his handbills, and his advertisements, everything contained in that shop was so very much under prime cost, that the more he sold the sooner he must be ruined. To hear him, you would expect not only that he should give his ribbons and muslins for nothing, but that he should offer you a premium for consenting to accept of them. Gloves, handkerchiefs, nightcaps, gown-pieces, every article at the door and in the window was covered with tickets, each nearly as large as itself, tickets that might be read across the market-place; and townspeople and country-people came flocking round about, some to stare and some to buy. The starers were, however, it is to be presumed, more numerous than the buyers, for notwithstanding his tickets, his handbills, and his advertisements, in less than six months the advertiser had failed, and that stock never, as it's luckless owner used to say, approached for cheapness, was sold off at half its original 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 have 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.