ADVERTISEMENTS.

Thames Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 17660, 10 August 1929, Page 5

ADVERTISEMENTS.

MATRIMONIAL VARIETIES. Advertisement, in one form or another, has been with us since mankind did anything in the world of which he had reason to be proud or otherwise. In the latter case his friends planned his publicity campaign. It was not, however, until the advent of newspapers that these advertisements crystallised into something more solid. In company with notices regarding sermons, politics and hats, matrimonial advertisements took their place in this new scheme. Matrimonial advertisements, which are creating so much interest in New Zealand to-day, must have started a year or two before 1759, as in that year they slipped across the Atlantic to Boston. The “Evening News” of that American city,, on February 23. 1759, produced a modestly-worded matrimonial advertisement which read as follows: —“To the ladies: Any young lady between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three, of a middling stature, brown hair, 'regular features and a lively, brisk eye; of good morals and not tinctured with anything that may sully so distinguished a form, possessed of three or four hundred pounds entirely at her own disposal. . . Such a one, by leaving a line directed for A.W. at the British Coffee House in King Street . . . will meet a person who flatters himself he shall not bo thought disagreeable by any lady answering that description.” Since those early days matrimonial agencies have sprung up all over the world. Britain alone has four periodicals devoted entirely to the subject, whilst in the United States—well, the States always do things by the gross.