Drawing on linguistic data retrieved from early advertisements published in British newspapers between 1788 and 1900, the study seeks to map out a set of values and account for linguistic means used to codify them in the diachronic perspective. For the purposes of the study, the corpus of advertisements from random issues of British newspapers "?aledonian Mercury", "The Times", "The Morning Post", published between late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with a span over thirty years was compiled with a total of three hundred texts under scrutiny. The axiological-oriented analysis of the early British advertising discourse shows that advertisers based their appeals on a limited number of values, namely "economy", "quality" and "assortment" that are found throughout the period under investigation. This finding demonstrates that producer/seller-oriented consumption of that period forced potential buyers to rely on the producer/seller for prices quoted, quality and variety of goods with the advertisers intending to build credibility by employing values related to seeking uncertainty avoidance in the Hofstede dimensions of culture and construing a positive image of themselves. The analysis of the values in the diachronic perspective proves to deepen our understanding of persuasion and its evolution in advertising discourse.