Forgive me for location dropping, but I was at Chasewater Railway steam day recently, and in the shop I bought a Victorian Household memorabelia pack filled with replical printed sundries from the era. Made by the Memorabilia Pack Company, it’s just one of several historically themed replica packs. This one, I was delighted to find, contained a copy of the first Exchange and Mart (where you can find people willing to trade songs for sewing machines), a tax return form for declaring your carriages and male servants, a brochure on blankets, a colour advert for globe gas lamps and best of all – a folded A5 pamplet (above) for the amazing, astounding Carbolic Smoke Ball! Cure all your ailments, or £100s is yours! (Except, it wasn’t – and it went down in legal history because of it.) Perfectly lovely and with so much over the top Victorian marketing, it reminds me just how close to the bone Steampunk faux-adverts can be (as seen in the cover pages of “Larklight” for example).

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 14th, 2007 at 10:12 pm by Tinkergirl and is filed under Steampunk Images.