Definition of "commercial"

I have more than once had to lend a commercial money to pay his fare home; as he had played shell-out and lost the lot.

1875, George Worsley, Advice to the Young!, page 32

Tom said that homosexuals hate “commercials,” male prostitutes, and if the homosexual was drunk and angry, he might have committed murder.

1972, Alfred Eustace Parker, The Berkeley Police Story, page 133

With the commercials there is no intensity of feeling and no later animosity; there is emotional and sexual fakery, but no prolonged post-sexual bargaining. […] Paradoxically these boys dissociate themselves from the commercials, yet engage in prostitution only when they require the money.

1987, Paul William Mathews, Male Prostitution: Two Monographs, page 39

A two minutes' walk brought Warwick--the name he had registered under, and as we shall call him--to the market-house, the central feature of Patesville, from both the commercial and the picturesque points of view.

1900, Charles W[addell] Chesnutt, chapter I, in The House Behind the Cedars, Boston, Mass., New York, N.Y.: Houghton, Mifflin and Company […]