COMELY, ENGAGING AND GAY, EXETER, 1844.

 J. SOLOMON and Co.,  City Tailoring and Oufitting Establishment at at 193, High Street Exeter, were responsible for these truly pathetic verses published in The Exeter and Plymouth Gazette of 14th December 1844:

At a season like this when the juvenile folks

Are beginning to count on their holiday jokes,

When numberless glad preparations appear,

To welcome the season of Christmas with cheer;

J. SOLOMON feels inclined to impress

The importance of buying their "Juvenile Dress."

If parents and guardians wish to be suited

With garments whose value was never disputed,

If they wish for their youths to be clad in a way

Which makes them look comely, engaging and gay

Let them purchase at once of J. SOLOMON

Those suits which such marks of approval have won.

The "Juvenile Dresses" of SOLOMON are made

In the newest of Fashion, with beautiful braid;

The dresses are formmed just to suit tender age

And therefore your children are sure to engage:

You'll not find them made in an old fashion'd style,

Which often makes persons with ridicule smile;

Their taste and their elegant neatness have won

Ten thousand approvals for J. SOLOMON,

These garments are made in a manner so firm,

That really we're quite at a loss for a term.

Your children may jon in the juvenile sport,

But they'll hurt not their garments so firmly they're wrought.

Then hasten this season , as thousands have done,

For the juvenile clothing of J. SOLOMON."

It is not easy to compose verses for commercial purposes. - I write assuredly as one who was once recruited to supply "poems" to an advertising campaign selling Life Insurance! - and J. Solomon & Co. have done their best.

I like the image of the little Victorian boys and girls being fitted out at Solomon's by proud parents and guardians, anxious that their children should be fashionable and beyond ridicule.  The bespoke posh kids and the aspiring ready mades.  

The composer, however, of these verses was not forgetting that this was a business matter and adds a couplet under the title: "OBSERVE."

"In figures plain we mark the prices paid,

And no abatement can of course be made."

I have not read or heard comely for a while.  The OED says the word  "as used of persons, implies a homelier style of beauty, which pleases without exciting admiration"

It is still the case that people in Exeter go to great pains to make their little children comely, engaging and gay but it is also apparent that, these days, parental influence soon wanes.