The British potters were the main suppliers of the Canadian market, providing wares to Canadian homes through Canadian sellers. By the 1830s, these sellers included specialist china merchants, but the specialists were normally found only in the cities or larger towns, and even there numbered but a small proportion of those who dealt in china. Pottery and porcelain, often lumped together in the trade under the general heading "crockery", had become a staple and, as such, were found in every general store in the land, even on the frontier. This advertisement from Hibben's Guide to the Province of British Columbia for is a good illustration of the setting for the sale of crockery in Victorian Canada: in company with such disparate items as groceries, patent medicines, mining implements, and "Furs, raw and manufactured."
