Sundays and Newspaper Advertisements

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Sundays and Newspaper Advertisements

Newspapers are a daguerreotype of the social as well as political life of the community among which they are published. They represent each feature of its habits and occupations as truly as the colors of the artist bring before us the lineaments of our countenance.

To-morrow is Sunday. Let us discover, from the columns of to day’s metropolitan press, the way in which the multitude will spend the day. To find this we must read the advertisements: they emanate often from rude, unskilful hands, ignorant that the most frequent use of words is to pervert or conceal knowledge, whereas the news articles are either written or revised by men who are as shrewd, as unscrupulous, and often as strongly partisan, as any retained advocate.

First we will take up the Herald.¹ There are among its hundreds of advertisements only three “Religious Notices”—affording a pretty fair hint as to the proportion of the Herald’s readers who attend church.

Then, stowed away in an obscure corner of the paper, we find the record of recent deaths, the funeral ceremonies of which, if acquainted with any of the parties, you are invited to attend. You approve of crowding these records of mortality into the obscure corner—for you remember that however potent the deceased may have been in life, death reduces them all to the same level of insignificance.

Then you scan columns of “wants”—enough of them to show that many people must be in a state of restless discomfort. Some advertise for wives, some for children, some for lands in the country, some for lots in the city, some for employment, some for laborers, some for money—and so on through the thousand wants that perplex mortality.

A clue to the manner in which Sunday is spent by a large class, may be found in the list of steamboat excursions to all surrounding points of interest. Excursions to any distance, from three to twenty miles, and at prices ranging from six cents to half a dollar, are among the most prominent announcements for to-morrow.

Dropping the Herald, and taking up the Times² or Tribune,³ we find very few Sunday excursions advertised, but the deficiency is amply made up by the number and variety of the “Religious Notices.” These announcements deserve a longer criticism than we now have space to afford them. One gentleman wants you to come and hear him because he intends to spread himself on some newspaper topic, the merits of which the editors have fully exhausted during the week. Another founds his claim to your attendance on the fact that he is going to “pitch into” some rival preacher or sect. A third wants you to hear him because he is about to sail for Europe, and you won’t have a chance to hear him again for a long while. A fourth begs you to visit his church because he has just returned from Europe, and you of course have been unable to procure spiritual food during his absence. Others, with better taste, give merely the name of the minister and location of the church, resorting to no adventitious means of drawing a full house.

A reference to the Sunday occupations of the people would be incomplete if we omitted to allude to the Sunday newspapers—a species of literature very largely read, and indeed read by many who read little or nothing beside.

The influence exercised by these journals must be proportionately greater than that of first-class daily papers, most of the readers of which are well educated, and perusers of more than one paper, so that the influence exerted on their minds by any one is necessarily limited.

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