ABSTRACT
The eighteenth century has been described as the golden age of the quack. The quack medicine advertisements must have kept whole armies of Grub Street copywriters occupied. Next to advertisements for quack doctors' medicines, publishers' notices are numerous. Early-eighteenth-century newspapers advertise a wide range of books from the sacred to the profane. Advertisements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries illustrate the social and cultural changes of those two hundred years. In the nineteenth century, advertisements reflected the growth of the railways and the introduction of private mechanized transport in the form of the penny-farthing bicycle and ultimately the safety bicycle. The advertisement columns of the newspapers give some idea of the variety of public entertainments on offer. The most amusing type of personal advertisement is the public apology that was prevalent in the provincial papers in the eighteenth century. From the early nineteenth century advertising agencies were formed to act as intermediaries between advertisers and newspapers.
