affair. Nobody's affair now. Chaps who did it didn't clearly know....
What I want to know is, in the Middle Ages, did they do anything for
Housemaid's Knee? What did they put in their hot baths after jousting,
and was the Black Prince--you know the Black Prince--was he enameled
or painted, or what? I think myself, black-leaded--very likely--like
pipe-clay--but DID they use blacking so early?"

So it came about that in designing and writing those Moggs' Soap
Advertisements, that wrought a revolution in that department of
literature, my uncle was brought to realise not only the lost history,
but also the enormous field for invention and enterprise that lurked
among the little articles, the dustpans and mincers, the mousetraps
and carpet-sweepers that fringe the shops of the oilman and domestic
ironmonger. He was recalled to one of the dreams of his youth, to his
conception of the Ponderevo Patent Flat that had been in his mind so
early as the days before I went to serve him at Wimblehurst. "The Home,
George," he said, "wants straightening up. Silly muddle! Things that get
in the way. Got to organise it."

For a time he displayed something like the zeal of a genuine social
reformer in relation to these matters.

"We've got to bring the Home Up to Date? That's my idee, George. We got
to make a civilised domestic machine out of these relics of barbarism.
I'm going to hunt up inventors, make a corner in d'mestic ideas.
Everything. Balls of string that won't dissolve into a tangle, and gum
that won't dry into horn. See? Then after conveniences--beauty. Beauty,
George! All these few things ought to be made fit to look at; it's your
aunt's idea, that. Beautiful jam-pots! Get one of those new art chaps
to design all the things they make ugly now. Patent carpet-sweepers by
these greenwood chaps, housemaid's boxes it'll be a pleasure to fall
over--rich coloured house-flannels. Zzzz. Pails, f'rinstance. Hang 'em
up on the walls like warming-pans. All the polishes and things in such
tins--you'll want to cuddle 'em, George! See the notion? 'Sted of all
the silly ugly things we got."...

We had some magnificent visions; they so affected me that when I passed
ironmongers and oil-shops they seemed to me as full of promise as
trees in late winter, flushed with the effort to burst into leaf and
flower.... And really we did do much towards that very brightness these
shops display. They were dingy things in the eighties compared to what