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Bull’s Eyes

Sweets and Toffee

Spherical mint-flavoured sugar sweets usually with a brown-and-white or black-and-white stripe (Carter 1851, etc)



Well-known from advertisments and news reports from the 1840’s when, it would seem, they were already thought of as old-fashioned, as this exerpts from ‘The Snob’s Progress‘ by Albert Smith (1846) suggests; “The children had long ago found out that the kites and shuttlecocks were failures; and popular rumour spoke in deprecating terms of the parliament and gingerbread in general, comparing it to petrified sponge, or slices of pumice stone. The bulls’-eyes, too, had been made in the dark ages of confectionery; their place in the juvenile affections had long been occupied by the more novel and flaunting sweetmeats of a neighbouring establishment, whereat the school of saccharine design had run mad from too much invention. For there were oyster-shells, candle-ends, and onions, all in sugar; radishes, rashers of bacon, and legs of mutton; courtly compounds of Albert rock and Victoria toffee, upon which the Queen and her Consort, without doubt lived entirely; and what chance could the peppermint buttons and dull bulls’-eyes stand against these? The brandy-balls had struggled long for custom during this transition from the middle age to the florid style of design, but, at last, the buyers ceased to believe in the presence of brandy, and they were forgotten accordingly.”


List of sweets
Sheffield Daily Telegraph – Saturday 01 July 1871





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