One of the favorite pastimes of the Victorian era was collecting the small, colorfully illustrated advertising cards that we now call trade cards. They were a popular way of advertising products and services, and a trip to the store usually brought home some of these attractive, brightly colored cards, which could be pasted into a scrapbook.
Other cards could be included in packs of cigarettes or other packaged products. They could be entertaining or educational. Daguerre was a very important inventor and inventors were a common and popular series that held interest for the general public. Today these cards are highly collectible.
This illustration was included in the lecture "The many faces of Daguerre" presented by Matt Isenburg at the Daguerreian Society Symposium (2009).
