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Description: | An interesting piece of ephemera. This sheet features two columns of text, labelled questions and answers. Questions include 'Are you sure to succeed?', 'Do you dread the result?', 'Must it be kept secret?'. The parallel answers are 'That is my Secret', 'Put on your thinking cap', 'My lips are sealed' - and so on. These questions and answers are derived from a mildly flirtatious parlour game, which has a history stretching back to before the nineteenth century. On 27 September 1784 the following game advertisement appeared in the newspaper the Baltimore Intelligencer - 'Just published and for sale ... a new and elegant edition of the much admired Conversation Cards, containing a variety of amusing, entertaining and innocent questions and answers in the art of courtship. Each pack contains sixty-four cards, thirty-two questions in black and thirty-two answers in red.' Apparently one player would read a question and another of the opposite sex would follow with a randomly-drawn answer, to everyone's amusement. This, the first commercial game produced in America, was based on hand-written antecedents. The game may well be much older than this. 'Conversation Biscuits' were a clever adaption of this card game. Huntley & Palmers, however, were not the first to hit on the idea of stamping the flirtatious mottoes on their biscuits, thus enabling customers to play the game while having a cup of tea - and then eat the 'mottoes'! One of the first sweets produced in the eighteenth century by Terry's of York was a 'Conversation Lozenge', which was stamped with questions such as "Do you flirt?". Other confectionary companies followed suit. Dobson's of Calderdale, for example, who had family connections with Terry's, produced bride cakes, funeral biscuits and conversation lozenges, which were inscribed with mottoes such as "Take Ye Not Strong Drink?" and "Always Speak the Truth". They were scented with rose, vanilla or violet. James Joyce even mentions such lozenges in 'Finnegan's Wake'. An illustration of Conversation Biscuits can be found on the website, see 'Biscuit Catalogue, 1884', which also shows that the popularity of the idea resulted in a Spanish version of the biscuit. | Format: | image/jpeg | License: | http://www.sopse.org.uk/ixbin/hixclient.exe?a=query&p=gateway&f=generic_sitetext%2ehtm&_IXFIRST_=1&_IXMAXHITS_=1&cms_con_core_subtype%3acms_con_text_what=copyright&%3acms_sys_group=%22sopse%22 | Publisher: | Huntley & Palmers | Rights holder: | Reading Borough Council (Reading Museum Service) | Subjects: | social history trade | Temporal: | start=1880-01-01; end=1880-12-31; | Source: | Sense of place SE | Identifier: | http://www.sopse.org.uk/ixbin/hixclient.... | Language: | en-GB | Format: | image/jpeg | Go to resource |
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