The Mysteries of London (Vol. 1-4). George W. M. Reynolds

      A clerk was busily employed in writing at a desk in the front office. The walls of this room were covered with placards, bills, and prospectuses, all announcing the most gigantic enterprises, and whose principal features were large figures expressing millions of money.

      These prospectuses were of various kinds. Some merely put forth schemes by which enormous profits were to be realised, but which had not yet arrived to that state of maturity (the point at which the popular gullibility has been laid hold of,) when Directors, Secretaries, and Treasurers can be announced in a flaming list. Others denoted that the projectors had triumphed over the little difficulty of obtaining good names to form a board; and the upper part of this class of prospectuses was embellished with a perfect array of M.P.'s, Aldermen, and Esquires.

      The prospectuses, one and all, set forth, with George-Robins-flourishes and poetico-hyperbolical flowers of rhetoric, the unparalleled and astounding advantages to be reaped from the enterprises respectfully submitted to public consideration and to the monied world especially. The face of the globe was a complete paradise according to those announcements. The interior of Africa was represented to be a perfect mine of gold by the projectors of a company to trade to those salubrious parts; the cannibals of the South Sea Islands became intelligent and interesting beings in the language of another association of speculators; the majestic scenery of the North Pole and the phenomena of the aurora borealis were held out by a colonising company as inducements to families to emigrate to Spitzbergen; the originators of a scheme for forming railways in Egypt expatiated upon the delights of travelling at the rate of sixty miles an hour through a land famous for its antiquarian remains, and along the banks of a river where the young alligators might be seen disporting in the sun; and numerous other prospectuses of majestic enterprises developed their original principles and prospective benefits to the astounded reader.

      One would have imagined that any individual with a five-pound note in his pocket, had only just to step into Mr. Tomlinson's office, take five shares in as many enterprises, pay one pound deposit upon each, and walk out again a man of vast wealth.

      Mr. Tomlinson himself was seated in a decently furnished room, which constituted the "private office." He was looking well, but somewhat careworn, and not quite so comfortable as a man who had passed through the Bankruptcy Court, got his certificate, and was in business once more, might be expected to look. In a word, he had a hard struggle to make his way respectably, and was compelled to meddle in many things that shocked his somewhat sensitive disposition.