"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?"1871, George Eliot [pseudonym; Mary Ann Evans], chapter VI, in Middlemarch […], volume I, Edinburgh; London: William Blackwood and Sons, →OCLC, book I, page 93:
On the day after the riot he came upon a score of people collected round a Cheap Jack in the market.1919, Stanley J. Weyman, “XXXVI The Riddsley Election”, in The Great House:
4 more examples
Ten minutes after the rise of the curtain on the fourth act I was in the dressing-room, presenting the maid with a gold locket which I had bought from a cheapjack’s barrow for five and twenty francs—almost the last of the fifty which I had received from M. Duval on account.1921, Baroness Orczy [i.e., Emma Orczy], “(please specify the page)”, in Castles in the Air: Being the Adventures of M. Hector Ratichon, New York, N.Y.: George H[enry] Doran Company, published 1922, →OCLC:
Relieving office here. Good biz for cheapjacks, organs. What do ye lack?1922 February, James Joyce, Ulysses, Paris: Shakespeare and Company, […], →OCLC:
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.1974, GB Edwards, The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, New York, published 2007, page 43:
I was much too timid and didn't have the cheap-jack’s boasting patter.1999, “IV.8”, in Mike Mitchell, transl., Simplicissimus, Dedalus, translation of original by HJC von Grimmelshausen, published 2016, page 303:
cheapjack
adj
Etymology From cheap + Jack.
1
shabby
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.1988, Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library, paperback edition, London: Penguin Books, →ISBN, page 276: