Peddler

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A peddler, Brit. pedlar, also known as a canvasser, solicitor, or monger (with negative connotations since the 16th century), is a travelling vendor of goods.

Contents

[edit] History

The origin of the word, known in English since 1225, is unknown.

Peddlers usually travelled by foot, carrying their wares, or by means of a person- or animal-drawn cart or wagon (making the peddler a hawker).

Modern peddlers may use motorized vehicles to transport themselves and their commodities. Typically, they operate door-to-door or at organized events such as fairs.

In many economies this work was often left to nomadic minorities, such as gypsies, travellers, or Yeniche, offering a varied assortment of goods and services, both evergreens and (notoriously suspicious) novelties. Peddlers sometimes doubled as performers, supposed healers, or fortune-tellers.

While peddlers had a significant role in supplying isolated populations even with fairly basic and diverse goods such as pots and pans, horses, and news, their market share has in modern times been drastically reduced as increasing density of population and buying power encouraged sedentary, even specialized sales points, while modern transport, mail order, refrigeration and other technology allow even rural clients alternative channels of purchase.

In the United States, the era of the traveling peddler probably peaked in the decades just before the Civil War. The large advances in industrial mass production and freight transportation as a result of the war laid the groundwork for the beginnings of modern retail and distribution networks. Further, the rise of popular mail order catalogues (such as Montgomery Ward which began in 1872) offered another way for people in rural or other remote areas to obtain items not readily available in local stores.

In the modern economy a new breed of peddler, generally encouraged to dress respectably to inspire confidence with the general public, has been sent into the field as an aggressive form of direct marketing by companies pushing their specific products, sometimes to help launch novelties, sometimes on a permanent basis. In a few cases this has even been used as the core of a business and on a large scale.

[edit] Types and specific names

Tinware was manufactured in Berlin, Connecticut, as early as 1770, and tin, steel and iron goods were peddled from Connecticut through the North American colonies- the Connecticut clock maker and clock peddler was the 18th-century embodiment of Yankee ingenuity.

Literal compounds formed from these synonyms are:

Metaphoric compounds, most pejorative, formed from these synonyms are:

Names, most archaic, of product- or industry-specific types of peddlers include:

Names, some pejorative, of other sub- or supertypes or close relatives of peddlers include:

Pedlar is the British English spelling of peddler. Although there are basic similarities between the activities in the Old World and the New World there are also significant differences. In Britain the word was more specific to an individual selling small items of household goods from door to door. It was not usually applied to gypsies.

  • Food traders were normally badgers
  • sellers of chapbooks were chapmen; compare the term Stationer which described a bookseller (usually near a university) whose shop was fixed and permanent.

[edit] See also

[edit] Sources and references

  • This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
  • J.R. Dolan (1964). Yankee Peddlers of Early America.
  • R.L. Wright (1927). Hawkers and Walkers in Early America.
  • EtymologyOnLine & [1]
  • Spufford, M., (1984) The Great Reclothing of Rural England: Petty Chapmen and their Wares in the Seventeenth Century
  • Spufford, M., (1981) Small Books and Pleasant Histories

Popular Fiction and its Readership in seventeenth Century England

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