Introducing you to a world of clothes pegs !!

I can talk forever about clothes pegs, but I am not the first to discuss them in a serious manner!

The following is an article that appeared on May 17, 1884 in the Charles Dickens wonderful magazine "All the Year Round":

Curiosities of Trade

by Charles Dickens.

I have had occasion just lately to look through a large number of the London and Liverpool Bills of Entry, and in trying to find what I wanted, I could not help noticing the many queer articles that are brought into this country.Who would expect to find in the cargo of one of the magnificent New York liners, three thousand boxes of clothes pegs? Yet such an entry is common enough. "Bless my soul!" somebody will say, just as I did when I noticed it, "are we dependent on the States for such things?" Pursuing my investigations further, I found that this was only one out of many of the same kind. It is evident, therefore, that it pays to cut down timber, convert it into the manufactured article, pay carriage to a port, shipping charges, freight, landing charges, carriage to inland towns anywhere in England, commissions to several intermediaries, in order that the British family may buy a dozen clothes-pegs for three-halfpence (less than 2cents), which is what my wife tells me she paid last.Does not this give us an idea of the enormous quantity that must be turned out every year in the States?. I presume even there the washerwoman is not yet emancipated from the tyranny of the clothes-peg, and this being so, just fancy what a lot must be consumed by fifty millions of people. Yet they are able to supply, not only their internal demand, but to send them to England by the million. Likely enough they will send them as well to some other European countries, though the demand there will not be so great as here, if only from the fact that the weekly wash is not such a national institution.And yet the native clothes-peg maker has to live; it must be a serious question with him whether the trade is being driven out of the country by foreign imports, or whether it still defies competition. Perhaps the demand has out-stripped his powers of supply, or perhaps he holds his head up proudly, and asserts boldly that if you want a really first-rate article you must still come to him.If my recollection is to be trusted, the present clothes-peg did not make its appearance here till some 20 or 25 years ago (1860). Everybody who can look back so far will remember that the clothes-peg to which he was accustomed was evidently a piece of a branch peeled, shaped, cut in two, and then bound together with two or three inches of tin, which were fastened by a bit of wire driven in. Such was what I may term the pre- American, or the antique clothes-peg.