cheapjack (plural cheapjacks)

1. A peddler, a travelling#Adjective|travelling hawker.
   • 1871, George Eliot [pseudonym; Mary Ann Evans], chapter VI, in Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, volume I, Edinburgh; London: William Blackwood and Sons, OCLC 948783829 ↗, book I (Miss Brooke), page 93 ↗:

     "Why," rejoined Mrs Cadwallader, with a sharper note, "you don't mean to say that you would like him to turn public man in that way—making a sort of political Cheap Jack of himself?"

   • 1974, GB Edwards, The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, New York 2007, page 43:

     My mother and father was standing against the railings by the market, looking over at the fire-swallower and the cheap-jack and the Salvation Army down below; and the German Band was playing round the corner of the Commercial Arcade.

   • 1999, Mike Mitchell, translating HJC von Grimmelshausen, Simplicissimus, IV.8, Dedalus 2016, p. 303:

     I was much too timid and didn't have the cheap-jack’s boasting patter.

cheapjack

1. shabby
   • 1988, Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming Pool Library, Penguin Books (1988), page 276

     It was a drab, cheapjack little area, unambiguously removed from the public, and yet I had come to love it in a way I never could the rest of the monstruous edifice.