Shop-signs were one of the most conspicuous features of the streets of old London.  In days when the numbering of houses was unknown, the use of signs was indispensable for identification; and greatly must they have contributed to the quaint and picturesque appearance of the streets.  Some projected far over the narrow roadway—­competition to attract attention and custom is no modern novelty—­some were fastened to posts or pillars in front of the houses.  By the time of Charles II the overhanging signs had become a nuisance and a danger, and in the seventh year of that King’s reign an Act was passed providing that no sign should hang across the street, but that all should be fixed to the balconies or fronts or sides of houses.  This Act was not strictly obeyed; and large numbers of signs were hung over the doors, while many others were affixed to the fronts of the houses.  Eventually, in the second half of the eighteenth century, signs gradually disappeared and the streets were numbered.  There were occasional survivals which are to be found to this day, such as the barber’s pole, accompanied sometimes by the brass basin of the barber-surgeon, the glorified canister of a grocer or the golden leg of a hosier; and inn signs have never failed us; but by the close of the eighteenth century most of the old trade signs which flaunted themselves in the streets had disappeared.

The sellers of tobacco naturally hung out their signs like other tradesfolk.  Signs in their early days were, no doubt, chosen to intimate the trades of those who used them, and in the easy-going old-fashioned days when it was considered the right and natural thing for a son to be brought up to his father’s trade and to succeed him therein, they long remained appropriate and intelligible.  Later, as we shall see, they became meaningless in many cases.  But in the days when tobacco-smoking first came into vogue, the signs chosen naturally had some reference to the trade they indicated, and one of the earliest used was the sign of the “Black Boy,” in allusion to the association of the negro with tobacco cultivation.  The “Black Boy” existed as a shop-sign before tobacco’s triumph, for Henry Machyn in his “Diary,” so early as December 30, 1562, mentions a goldsmith “dwellying at the sene of the Blake Boy, in the Cheep”; but the early sellers of tobacco soon fastened on this appropriate sign.  The earliest reference to such use may be found in Ben Jonson’s “Bartholomew Fair,” 1614, where, in the first scene, Humphrey Waspe says:  “I thought he would have run mad o’ the Black Boy in Bucklersbury, that takes the scurvy, roguy tobacco there.”  Later, the “Black Boy,” like other once significant signs, became meaningless and was used in connexion with various trades.  Early in the eighteenth century a bookseller at the sign of the “Black Boy” on London Bridge was advertising Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe”; another bookseller traded at the “Black Boy” in Paternoster Row in 1712.  Linendrapers,