THE BILLSTICKER.
The subject of our present sketch is a personage of no small importance,
and of that, by the way, judging by his despotic management of a coterie of
small boys usually to be found at his heels, no one is more fully conscious than
himself. He may be said to live in the eye of the public as much, if not more,
than any other man of his day; and is, whatever pretenders may choose to think,
or cavillers to say to the contrary, essentially a public character. He is a
literary man in a sense at once the most literal and extensive, and he caters
for the major part of the population almost the only literature that they ever
peruse. He is a publisher to boot, whose varied and voluminous works, unscathed
by criticism, are read by all the world, and go through no end of editions. It
is an axiom of somebody's - whose, we forget just now - that most men look at
the world, and all things in it, through the medium of their own profession. If
that be the case; how does the billsticker regard it? what tricks does his fancy
play him? what are the myths ever revolving before his imagination? Is there a
golden age looming in the distant future of his hopes? a good time coming, when
every wall and hoarding, every house-front, window-shutter, and now interdicted
inclosure - from the "palaces of crowned kings," down to the humblest
"habitations of all things that dwell" - shall be patent to his paste-brush,
open as charity to his broadsheet, and when he shall no longer be compelled to
trudge beneath his heavy load in all weathers, through weary miles of mud and
rain, in search of a sanctuary where the art and mystery of his calling is not
forbidden? When he sleeps at peace, after the labours of the day, does he dream
of vast timber - hoards in endless perspective, without a single broadside on
their virgin surfaces, all waiting to receive, in a shower of double-royal
posters, the contributions of the press? And if after supping upon apocryphal
pork-sausages, he should happen to have the nightmare, does the vampire-visage
of the fiend bestriding the paste-pot which sits so heavily on his chest, bear
on its lurid forehead the dreadful inscription, or does it shriek in his
horror-stricken ears the terrible accents "Billstickers, beware ?"
We
cannot respond to these interrogatories. Unfortunately, we have not the
privilege of his bosom confidences, and have been obliged to derive what
knowledge we possess with regard to him from careful observation, and some small
application of that inductive system of philosophy recommended by Bacon, to
which the world owes so much, and by means of which what must be is predicated
from what is. We have seen the billsticker under all the mutations of his
humanity: in busy times, when his services were well paid, and in slack times,
when placards grew mouldy on their hoardings for want of decent burial; at
election times, when Whig, Tory, and Radical competed for his patronage; and in
times of general distress, when the auctioneer nearly alone monopolised his
labours. We have seen him at early morn, papering the gable-end of a house forty
feet aloft; and at dusty-not dewy- eve, with the stealthiness of an Italian
pasquinader, planting quack-doctor puffs breast-high upon forbidden ground. We
have seen him, armed with ladder and peel-which, be it known, is a pole with a
cross-bar on the top of it-prepared to fasten his proclamations as high as the
chimney-tops; or with paste-pot and hand-bills alone, making a less ambitious
round of professional calls upon his patients - the dead-walls. There is one
singularity in his profession which is a mystery to us; we allude to the fact,
which we daresay the reader has himself observed, that the billsticker
invariably pastes over his bills on both sides - that, having stuck them to the
wall or the hoarding, he is never content with that, but incontinently gives
them a coat of paste on the outer and printed side as well. This, which appears
to us a sheer work of supererogation, is perhaps mysteriously connected with
some important element in the process, without which it would be incomplete; but
we confess we cannot fathom it, and must leave it to future investigators to
explain.
If the billsticker has puzzled us, we have had the satisfaction
of seeing him puzzled in his turn, and that more than once. He is usually
sagacious enough in his way, and, as much as most men, a dab at his trade, in
the prosecution of which anything like hesitation on his part is the last thing
to be observed. But we have seen him charged with announcements in
Hebrew, addressed to our friends the sons of Israel, and seriously perplexed,
while conning the square letters, as to which end of the poster had the most
right to stand uppermost on the wall; and we have known him, when the spectators
couldn't help him to a conclusion, to solve the problem in a practical way, by
placing a couple of copies side by side, one on its head, the other on its feet,
in accordance, it may be supposed, with the prudent maxim, that it is better to
lose a part than to risk the whole. Some years ago, too, we beheld him
struggling on a very windy day in the flapping folds of a monster-sheet, upon
which were printed the two words, in letters a foot long each, "WHERE'S ELIZA?"
and nothing more. Who Eliza was he could not inform us, and he shook his
shaggy head in a way sufficiently ominous when we asked for the information. It
was evidently a poser, as well for him as for us; and it is a remarkable event
in the annals of billsticking, that that pertinent inquiry and public
interrogation has remained unanswered up to the present moment. We should like
to know who Eliza was, in order that we might become more interested in
her whereabouts; but after indulging in painful speculations on the subject, we
can come to no other conclusion than one which may be nothing more than
conjecture after all. It may be - we cannot vouch for it - but it may be
that Eliza is the Christian name of some modern Thisbe unhappily lost in the
wilderness of this great Babylon, for whose restoration her love-loin and
bewildered Pyramus distractedly appeals to London Wall through the medium of the
billsticker.
Seen in a high wind, the London billsticker presents a
picturesque appearance: his costume, though in accordance with no recognised
fashion, from being rather frayed and fragmentary, exhibits those characteristic
points which the artist loves to sketch; and being, when on his rounds,
ponderously loaded around the loins with good stowage of damp paper and
printers' ink, he may be compared, as he struggles sturdily forwards "in the eye
of the blast," along the soaking street, to one of those heavy Dutch bottoms
beating down Channel against a head-wind, which we see on a gusty day from the
shore of Kent. Sometimes the weather is too much for him, and then, like the
good Vrow Vanderdunk, he is obliged to run into the nearest port until the storm
has blown over. For mere rain he cares nothing-perhaps rather likes it; it
liquidates his paste, and clears the footpath of idlers, who are apt to
discommode him in his operations, and who, in fine weather, follow him from
hoard to hoard with the laudable desire of reaping the first-fruits which he
disseminates from the free of knowledge. He is the centre of attraction to a
peculiar do-nothing class, and sometimes is followed at a cautious distance by
an eccentric satellite, who seems to derive no end of amusement by supplementing
his labours in a singular way. This genius is one of the small boys before
alluded to, who, like the sparrows in London streets, are here, there, and
everywhere to be met with. He possesses two accomplishments which he is desirous
that the whole world should witness and applaud, and he makes our friend of the
paste-pot the medium of the glorification which he covets and enjoys. Dogging
him to a hoarding or a wall, no sooner has the billsticker posted a broadside
within his reach, and vanished round the corner, than up steps Master Tommy
Toes, carefully pulls it down while the paste is wet, and sticks it up again
wrong end upwards; then, pitching himself suddenly on his hands, and quivering
his bare heels aloft in the air, he reads the whole proclamation through in a
loud and sonorous voice, for the benefit of all and sundry who may choose to
listen. If he gets a copper for the performance, so much the better; if you
throw him one, he puts it in his mouth, as the most convenient pocket at hand;
but copper or no copper, he jumps head upwards again when his feat is
accomplished, and looks round him with an air of triumph, as much as to say:
"Let me see you do that, if you can !" It has been suggested to us, that this
performance of Master Tommy's is but one of the multitudinous modifications of
the puff-system, resorted to by some speculative tradesman, whose agent the boy
is, to draw attention to his announcements; but seeing that when the policeman
appears, Toes incontinently takes to his heels - that he has no shoes, no hat,
no shirt, and but a shred of a jacket, nothing, in short, to boast of but the
faculties of standing upon his head and reading large print - we reject the
suspicion as groundless, and unworthy of the respectabilities of trade.
it is not uninteresting to glance at the educational effect of the billsticker'
s labours upon the mass of the London population. It is well known that among
the very lowest order of society, the number of adults who can read fluently is
always much greater on the average of the population in large towns, and in the
metropolis especially, than it is in rural hamlets and villages. This is not
owing to the difference in early education, but to the difference of association
in after-life. The child of the rustic labourer is as well taught- we are
inclined to think better taught - than the children of the poor born in great
cities. But of the numbers who learn to read, of the purely agricultural class,
a very large proportion forget the acquirement before they grow up to be men -
that is, they forget it so far as to make reading a difficulty and not a
pleasure; and hence it is that the taste for and the habit of reading is so
greatly less common with field-labourers than with the corresponding class in
towns and cities. Now, it strikes us that the billsticker is in no small degree
at the bottom of this difference. His handiwork stares the public in the face,
let them turn which way they will; and it is a sheer impossibility for a lad who
has once learned the art of reading, to lose it in London, unless he be both
wilfully blind and destitute of human curiosity. To thousands and tens of
thousands, the placarded walls and hoardings of the city are the only school of
instruction open to them, whence they obtain all the knowledge they possess of
that section of the world and society which does not lie patent to their
personal observation. It is thence they derive their estimate of the different
celebrities -in commerce, in literature, and in art, of the time in which they
live, and are enabled to become in some measure acquainted with the progress of
the age. Perhaps few men, even among the best educated, could be found who would
willingly let drop the knowledge they have gained, although without intending
it, from this gratuitous source.
Thus, then, the billsticker is a public
benefactor, and, like any man who honestly pursues an honest trade, profits
others in profiting himself. But, like all responsible public functionaries, he
is open to the shafts of slander - liable to the breath of detraction. There are
not wanting men of no mark, fellows never elevated to the paste-pot and peel,
who have been heard to demand sarcastically, what proportion the number of
posters which he sticks against the wall bears to the number delivered to him
from the printer - what is the precise per-centage which satisfies a
billsticker's conscience - and what the exact amount of the overplus which be
sells for waste paper. Let us hope that these dark and ugly insinuations are but
the offspring of mere malevolence and envy, having no real foundation in the
practices of the profession. It is true we have known parties so mistrustful on
this score, as to turn their own billstickers upon occasion, especially at times
when parish politics ran high, and paper - war was mercilessly waged upon the
walls; but we cannot conscientiously recommend the system of "every man his own
billsticker," inasmuch as we have noticed, times without number, that bills thus
unprofessionally stuck are extremely liable to become prematurely overlaid when
the legitimate operator comes upon his round. Further, it may chance that an
amateur billsticker may get himself into trouble, through ignorance of details
with which the regular professional is intimately acquainted. Though the
majority of hoardings - if bill-stickable at all - are free to all paste-pots,
that is by no means the case with them all. Many which are of long standing are
private property, and are let in compartments to the members of the profession,
who of course tolerate no trespassers upon their domains, and would inflict the
penalties of invasion upon any one caught in the act of violating their
privileges. To such irregular aspirants to this honourable profession we commend
the admonition, familiar to us on brick-walls and park-enclosures- STICK NO
BILLS.
Charles Manby Smith, Curiosities of London Life, 1853
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Bill-posting —The ordinary charge for hoardings is from a penny to twopence per sheet of “double crown” or “ double demy,” but very great judgment is required both in selecting stations and composing the bill itself. One chief point to bear in mind is to have as little in your bill as possible. Another is to have something novel and striking to the eye. All the best stations are in private hands, and must be treated for in detail. Be careful in all cases to have a written agreement. “Fly posting” – ie. Bills placed broadcast on unprotected stations – may be done very cheaply.
Charles Dickens (Jr.), Dickens's Dictionary of London, 1879