Genre:

Proceedings, Spoof

Subjects:

Technology, Commerce, Charlatanry

    Reports a meeting of 'this excellent Society', which is dominated by wives and daughters of City speculators and whose aim is to 'discourage speculation, and restrain papas and husbands from blindly running into it' and to use 'female influence' to dissuade 'gentlemen from venturing their money in insecure "securities"'. Various women support the association by relating woeful stories of their husband's imprudent financial dealings. For example, Mrs Seedie laments the fact that her husband lost money by investing in such schemes as the 'Sunbeams out of Snowballs Steam Extraction Company', which caused his money to melt 'as quickly as the snowballs would have done' and in the 'General Oceanic Highway Company, which was started for the purpose of lighting the sea, by means of gaslamps placed in it a hundred yards apart', a scheme that 'succeeded only in making light the purses of those who were investors in it'. Later Mrs Flashley tells of her husband's rash investments in the disastrous 'North and South Pole Junction Atmospheric Railway Company', the 'Popgun and Pegtop Foreign Manufacture Company', and the 'Submarine Anemone Steam Propagation Company'.