One of the most notable innovations in nineteenth-century literary culture was mechanical rather than imaginative: the printing machine introduced by the London-based German inventor Friedrich Koenig in 1811. It replaced the old-fashioned rectangular hand-press with a more efficient, steam-powered, cylinder, thereby hugely increasing publishing capacity. Over the succeeding decades technology developed to the point that by the mid-1850s the wonderful machine had increased production ten-fold and beyond, from around 500 printed sheets per hour to more than 8,000. To give but one instance, the most successful London daily newspaper, The Times, saw its print capacity multiplied at a stroke as a result of these innovations. Pre-Koenig, in the first decade of the nineteenth century, the paper had daily runs of between 2,500 and 3,000 copies, but by 1855 it sold around 60,000 per diem. This rapid growth in sales of the 'Thunderer', as it was nicknamed, is indicative of the expansion of print culture in the Victorian era. From the 1830s onwards there was both an insatiable appetite for print and, for the first time, the means to satisfy that craving, making this period the first era of mass-market publishing in Great Britain.

Facilitated by the contemporary industrialization - as it might be called - of print culture, some entrepreneurial publishers turned their attention to the needs of what E. P. Thomson has taught us to think of as the newly made working class. If the era from the 1720s to the 1740s – according to orthodox literary history – was the period in which the emergence of the English novel catered to the cultural tastes of a newly literate middle class, then, a century later, the decades from the 1820s to the 1840s are often seen as the age in which, in analogous fashion, ‘penny literature’ served the literary appetites of a nascent working-class reading public.

The subject of the ensuing pages is advertising by ‘perfumers’, a late Georgian term most commonly applied to barbers who had expanded their business into the manufacture and sale of products in the areas of grooming and beautification: skin lotions, toothpastes and, most importantly of all, hair oils (hair lotions, dyes and tonics were the most lucrative of the perfumers' products). They discuss the controversy regarding the best method of dressing the hair that exercised contemporary manufacturers and consumers alike: animal fat or vegetable fat, or, most particularly, bear's grease or macassar? As well as examining the promotional strategies of the perfumers, most notable of whom were Alexander Rowland and Son, they of the famed Macassar Oil, and James Atkinson, proprietor of the most well-known of all animal fat-based hair dressings, Atkinson's Bear's Grease, I also attend to various satirical works that deal with the dressing of the hair. Tonsorial, or ‘crinicultural’, satire is a fascinating sub-genre of Romantic period comic writing, and varies widely in its intent; some has clear political resonance, such as the mid-1790s political satire that greeted Pitt's introduction of a tax on hair powder (such as John Wolcot's Hair Powder: A Plaintive Epistle to Mr Pitt or the anonymous The Minister's Head Dressed According to Law, or a Word of Comfort to Hair-Dressers (both 1795), while others are less sociopolitically engaged comic treatments of the dressing of the hair (such as the Useful Advice to Hair-Dressers, Barbers & c., by John Moor (1810)).

In evidence given to the Parliamentary Committee on the Laws relating to Lotteries on 7 April 1808, the lottery-office entrepreneur and indefatigable self-publicist Thomas Bish declared that ‘Publicity to a Lottery is certainly necessary’. This chapter addresses that publicity, focusing most particularly upon a fascinating but little-known moment in English social history: the final draw of the English State Lottery, which was held in October 1826. It also pays much attention to Bish himself, as the figure most associated with the lottery in the minds of the contemporary English public. The proprietor of lottery offices at Cornhill, Charing Cross and in several provincial cities, Bish became a figure of some fame and notoriety in the early part of the nineteenth century on account of his striking lottery puffs. Here I examine his promotional methods, contextualise them against the background of the increasing middle-class disapproval of lotteries which led to their eventual abolition, and discuss the satirical response to the abolition of the lottery, to Thomas Bish, and to the final draw – the ‘Last, the downright Last’ as S. T. Coleridge called it, a body of work to which such important Romantic period figures as Charles Lamb and Thomas Hood made significant contributions.

In The Tin Trumpet (1836), Horace Smith's whimsical commonplace book which was published under the pseudonym ‘Jefferson Saunders’, the entries for the letter ‘D’ begin thus:

In 1825, The Times published a ‘Parody of a Cambridge Examination Paper’ in which students, instead of being assessed on their knowledge of scripture or the classical languages, were examined on subjects of decidedly more interest to the would-be fashionable Corinthian: London theatres, the finest tailors and shoemakers, and the pleasures of the Fancy (‘Who was Prime Minister when Cribb defeated Molyneux? and where did the battle take place? Explain the terms – “milling, fibbing, cross-buttock, neck and crop, bang up, and prime”’). Advertisers feature heavily in the examination, with the candidates being asked to ‘enumerate the patentees … of liquid blacking’ and to engage in practical criticism of a sole-proprietor jingle by a poetical barber-surgeon:

The examination also tests students' command of the best-advertised quack medicines, beginning with an exhortation to sketch the topography of Samuel Solomon's premises in Liverpool and concluding by asking candidates to demonstrate a sound knowledge of some of the principal brands of proprietorial medicines: