Do Not Read This Title

Just because it's a good excuse to avoid what I'm supposed to be looking for it amuses me to see the same issues being raised in letters to the editor or being complained about in newspaper columns. Plus some extra bits at the end because they were interesting.

BREAD.
Mr EDITOR—Flour of the very best quality is now selling at fifteen shillings per cwt., and bread at four pence the two-pound loaf, the same price it cost when flour was twenty-one shilling per cwt. Surely in common honesty the fall of six shillings per cwt. should have caused a fall of one penny per loaf, but, say the bakers, we have our stores filled with old flour bought at the former price. Thus they not only store up for a monopoly but charge beyond the fair market price for an inferior—perhaps damaged article. What will the corporation say to this. Will they wink at this overcharge!— Yours truly.

Australasian Chronicle, 28 January 1843

( Price rises due to crop failures )

( Imperishable bread )

( The Brown Loaf )

I might have grumbled last year about my inability to find anything about fishing/fish markets in early Hobar. Obviously, being on the coast and with the problems supplying the growing population with farmed meat, fishing would have been a important industry. Yes?

The extract below is from a longer article about a new market being established, with a list of those taking up stalls. Fish selling, it seems, was not a large scale enterprise at the time.

And here we cannot but remark the pleasure we feel in seeing so many respectable persons commence dealing in fish, which has so long been as it were a forbidden article except to gourmands and the improvident. Fishermen had in truth no encouragement to embark in their labourious work when they could not ensure themselves a ready or a fair sale, however fortunate their catch, and even then not without hawking the fish all about the streets until they were worn out with fatigue and disappointment, and obliged to spend half their gains for refreshment in the public house, in many cases leading to excess. But now by regular shops being opened, the public will know where to go when they want to buy, and the fisherman will be encouraged to go farther out to sea to procure newer and better species for a market that they will be sure of when they bring them up the river.

Hobart Town Courier, 14 February 1834

(I might have to rethink this bit of story.)

( A couple of related articles, that I'm putting here so I can find them later. )