Bernard Shaw and Modern Advertising

by Christopher Wixson

  Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries

  Series Editors

  Nelson O’Ceallaigh RitschelMassachusetts Maritime Academy, Pocasset, MA, USA

  Peter GahanIndependent Scholar, Los Angeles, CA, USA

  The series Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries presents the best and most up-to-date research on Shaw and his contemporaries in a diverse range of cultural contexts. Volumes in the series will further the academic understanding of Bernard Shaw and those who worked with him, or in reaction against him, during his long career from the 1880s to 1950 as a leading writer in Britain and Ireland, and with a wide European and American following.

  Shaw defined the modern literary theatre in the wake of Ibsen as a vehicle for social change, while authoring a dramatic canon to rival Shakespeare’s. His careers as critic, essayist, playwright, journalist, lecturer, socialist, feminist, and pamphleteer, both helped to shape the modern world as well as pointed the way towards modernism. No one engaged with his contemporaries more than Shaw, whether as controversialist, or in his support of other, often younger writers. In many respects, therefore, the series as it develops will offer a survey of the rise of the modern at the beginning of the twentieth century and the subsequent varied cultural movements covered by the term modernism that arose in the wake of World War 1.

  More information about this series at http://​www.​palgrave.​com/​gp/​series/​14785

  Christopher Wixson

  Bernard Shaw and Modern Advertising

  Prophet Motives

  Christopher WixsonEastern Illinois University, Charleston, IL, USA

  Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries

  ISBN 978-3-319-78627-8e-ISBN 978-3-319-78628-5

  https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78628-5

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018941875

  © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

  This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.

  The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.

  The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

  Cover illustration: Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library/Alamy Stock Photo

  This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer International Publishing AG part of Springer Nature

  The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

  Acknowledgements

  Every monograph is fundamentally a collaborative venture, and I am humbled by the network of benevolent individuals that animated this one and sustained its author intellectually, emotionally, and creatively at various moments throughout the process.

  I am incredibly beholden to series editors Peter Gahan and Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, for their kindness, enthusiasm, and deep repository of Shavian knowledge. I am also sincerely appreciative of all of the fine editorial work done by Tomas René and Vicky Bates at Palgrave MacMillan on behalf of this project. Special thanks too to Debra Rae Cohen, R. Darren Gobert, and three anonymous reviewers whose critical feedback was perceptive and insightful. A section of Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 first appeared as “Looking After the Drainage: Health, Marketing, and the Turkish Bath in Bernard Shaw’s Misalliance ” in Modern Drama (60:1). That material is reprinted with permission from University of Toronto Press, with thanks to Meaghan Lloyd for her help securing it.

  I also wish to thank Dr. John Boneham, Jane McGuinness, and Sue Waterhouse (British Library), Eve Read (History of Advertising Trust), Joshua Rowley and Pete Moore (Hartman Center, Duke University), Sarah Johnson (Eastern Illinois University), the Council on Faculty Research (Eastern Illinois University), and the librarians at Eastern Illinois University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who all provided invaluable research assistance during the process.

  Warm gratitude is due to fellow members of the International Shaw Society, whose support and guidance have been exceptional along the way, especially Jennifer Buckley, Leonard Conolly, Richard Dietrich, Ellen Dolgin, Brad Kent, Gustavo A. Rodríguez Martín, Michael O’Hara, Michel Pharand, Sally Peters, Lawrence Switzky, Jay Tunney, and Matthew Yde, all of whom I admire as scholars and as people.

  I also want to recognize colleagues at Eastern Illinois University and its environs whose commitment to research and creative activity has been nourishing and inspirational: Melissa Ames, Melissa Caldwell, Kevin Doolen, Christopher Gadomski, Anne Thibault Geen, Frank Monier, Robin Murray, Linda Peete, Christina Peter, Dana Ringuette, Nick Shaw, Anita Shelton, Jad Smith, Leslie Sweet-Myrick, Tim Taylor, and Angela Vietto.

  A quarter-century ago, Austin Briggs introduced me to Shaw with Heartbreak House and modeled gracefully and passionately how to be a teacher-scholar. For decades, the Shaw Festival directors Tadeusz Bradecki, Jackie Maxwell, Neil Munro, and Christopher Newton, along with their superb design teams and companies of actors, profoundly deepened my understanding of the stage life of Shaw’s brilliant and complex plays.

  My mother, Donna Wixson, first cultivated in me the habit of theatergoing and thus engendered what have become lifelong personal and professional conversations with plays, playwrights, and theater practitioners. During the process of writing, advice and encouragement from my father, Neal Wixson, were thoughtful and impactful, as was the vitality drawn from a community of family members: Lindsey Wixson, Lois Worthington, Roland Worthington, and Valerie Worthington.

  I am ineffably indebted to Marjorie for her love and support; her commitment to the mission of the academy is remarkable and galvanizing.

  Finally, I wish to thank especially Maisie and Charlie Wixson who as toddlers reaffirmed for me the importance of sustained, undaunted curiosity and risk-taking in play and now in their middle childhood make me grateful, happy, and proud to be engaged in meaningful, lifelong conversations with them.

  Contents

  1 Introduction:​ “Press as Corrected, G.​B.​S.​”

  2 Prescription and Petrifaction: Proprietary Medicine, Health Marketing, and Misalliance

  3 “The Shadow of Disrepute”:​ G.​B.​S.​ and Testimonial Marketing

  4 “The Biggest Scoop in Advertising History”:​ Personality Marketing, G.​B.​S.​, and the Near-Testimonial

  5 “Those Magic Initials, G.​B.​S.​”:​ Copywriting for the Irish Clipper

  Bibliography

  Index

  List of Figures

  Fig. 1.1 Turkish bath advertisement, The Windsor Magazine 35:204 (December 1911), p. xviii

  Fig. 3.1 Formamint advertisement, from Collier’s Magazine (5 December 1914), p. 26

  Fig. 3.2 Formamint advertisement, digital collections at the New York Public Library

  Fig. 4.1 Cartoon, Adv
ertiser’s Weekly (March 15, 1929), p. 441

  Fig. 4.2 Simmons advertisement, Time 13:18 (May 6, 1929), p. 29

  Fig. 5.1 Irish Clipper advertisement, The New Yorker (July 17, 1948)

  Fig. 5.2 Irish Clipper advertisement, The Saturday Review (July 17, 1948), p. 6

  Fig. 5.3 Irish Clipper travel poster, ca. 1940s

  © The Author(s) 2018

  Christopher WixsonBernard Shaw and Modern AdvertisingBernard Shaw and His Contemporarieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78628-5_1

  1. Introduction: “Press as Corrected, G.B.S.”

  Christopher Wixson1

  (1)Eastern Illinois University, Charleston, IL, USA

  Christopher Wixson

  Email: cmwixson@eiu.edu

  Should you set out to extol or to advertise Bernard Shaw, you know that this has already been done with incomparable energy and talent, and that it has been done by one who knows. 1

  —John Palmer

  In its November 18, 1950 issue, The New Yorker reported that Scribner’s bookstore, the day after Bernard Shaw’s death, “threw together a window display made up of a number of his works and a sign reading, ‘G.B.S. 1846–1950.’” The short article went on to recount how “Scribner’s Shaw remained a hundred and four years old until the next day, when the year of his birth was moved up to 1856. It was Scribner’s that was born in 1846.” 2 The bookseller’s mistake actually produced an ideal piece of marketing in which the writer (Shaw) is obscured by the client (Scribner’s) and the brand (“G.B.S.”). It also creates two competing pictures of Shaw—an author transfigured into a commodity by marketing over which he had little control and a copywriter who expertly deployed self-advertising to market his work and a larger political, ethical, and aesthetic vision.

  Raymond Williams maintains that “the half-century between 1880 and 1930 [saw] the full development of an organized system of commercial information and persuasion, as part of the modern distributive system in conditions of large-scale capitalism.” 3 For Roy Church , this apogee had its roots in “the late seventeenth century when, to strengthen sales appeal, rhetoric was added to information in the form of announcement concerning the availability of goods,” coextensive “with the appearance of newspapers which proliferated during the eighteenth-century in London and also in the provinces.” 4 Most accounts of the advent of modern British advertising identify the abolition of the advertisement tax (1853) and the newspaper stamp (1855) as the impetus for its proliferate growth, contemporaneous to the swell of commodity culture. In Advertising in Britain: A History, T. R. Nevett additionally attributes the expanding circulation growth of magazines and newspapers (hence advertising) to a decrease in prices, an increase in wages, and advancements in transportation and mass production. 5 Indeed, “the publishing trade was one of the most highly industrialized sectors of British manufacturing [and,] using modern systems of production, communication, and distribution, publishers created a mass public for their products” and a showcase for those of their advertisers. 6 If this network initially sought to promote goods and services, it evolved quickly to focus on the registering of brands on the public consciousness in order “to build long-term reputation … [and] guarantees [of] the consistent quality of the branded product.” 7 An enormous uptick in the amount and visibility of press advertising and agencies occurred in Britain in the middle of the nineteenth century, and Shaw was born into “a widespread culture of brand advertising in Ireland”: “From the period of the Famine onwards … the Irish press, from north to south, and from supposedly non-partisan and widely distributed freesheets to paid-for newspapers of various political hues, was inextricably wedded to advertising.” 8 He would observe in the 1890s that, “in the present century of universal progress, no art, perhaps, has attained to such subtly-varied developments, as that of advertising.” 9

  Concurrent with the rise of modern advertising, Shaw’s prolific campaign to create and sustain his “G.B.S. ” persona in the public consciousness endured for more than seventy years. As Brad Kent has argued, the “self-fashioning and creation of a public personality was an integral element of literary culture in the modern period,” 10 and, beginning in the 1880s, Shaw skillfully brokered print appearances by “G.B.S.” in newspapers and periodicals to enhance the visibility of his literary writing and dovetail with his Fabian interests in getting important ideas into public discourse for debate. Although he wrote to Otto Kyllman in 1903 of an intention to “give [his] mind to the whole business of advertising one of these days,” Shaw indeed was already and always a consummate salesman. 11 As shrewdly as he could imitate professional marketing strategies, though, Scribner’s shop window is indicative of how “G.B.S.” could be a marketing tool for other hands besides his own. Alice McEwan has observed that the brand he created “was so successful that it was co-opted by the marketplace, assuming its role within a myriad of advertising gimmicks and promotional strategies in mass culture,” eventually surpassing its creator. 12

  Advertising’s double-edge for Shaw is pointedly displayed in his 1910 play Misalliance by the characters of Gunner and Lina Szczepanowska. Arriving in the play to exact revenge on Tarleton, Gunner musters no resistance to the lure of commodity upon entering the Tarleton household when he is suddenly and mysteriously arrested by the sight of the unwrapped Turkish bath unit, one of the most widely recognized and advertised home-cure contraptions: “his attention is caught by the Turkish bath . He looks down the lunette, and opens the panels.” 13 His preoccupation is disrupted by the arrival of Hypatia and Joey, and he quickly takes refuge inside the bath. As the lovers banter, Shaw writes that “the head of the scandalized man in the Turkish bath has repeatedly risen from the lunette, with a strong expression of moral shock.” 14 The humor of Gunner’s head popping up through the bath is not derived solely from the farce of unexpected and undesired eavesdropping. E. S. Turner reminds that “hardly any magazine or store’s catalogue of the ’eighties and ’nineties was without an illustration of one of these domestic sweat-boxes, with the patient’s head protruding from the top.” 15 Original audiences would surely and immediately have recalled the ubiquitous image of the disembodied head atop the Turkish bath contraption from decades of periodical advertisements (see Fig. 1.1). The man depicted is wholly absorbed by commerce, his individual agency fully co-opted by the marketplace.

  Fig. 1.1 Turkish bath advertisement, The Windsor Magazine 35:204 (December 1911), p. xviii

  A more empowering relationship to advertising is illustrated by another unexpected visitor to the Tarleton home, Polish acrobat Lina Szczepanowska who, with her speeches and demonstrations, proves to be a master copywriter, styling herself like a patent medicine that sells an entire lifestyle, a vision of robust health and well-being. As such, Lina is an incarnation of the figure Shaw promoted throughout his life, animated solely by individual will but operating under the auspices of “a dynamic ever-moving biological Life Force.” 16 Like Lina, Shaw was his own copywriter marketing salubrious Shavian physical, mental, and spiritual fitness via “G.B.S. ” Throughout his life, Shaw endeavored to harness marketing successfully as a vehicle towards individual and collective advancement and to fend off as much as possible being harnessed like Gunner into a mere hoarding, complicit with oppressive economic forces. His eventual forays into commercial campaigns were always fraught with anxious negotiation to retain integrity apart from client and product.

  Advertising’s double-edged potential informs Shaw’s understanding of the word itself and governs his usage of it in his literary work. Actually, the meanings gathered during the etymological journey of the word “advertising” seem themselves very Shavian indeed, beginning with a provocative amalgam of promulgation and admonishment. Derived from Old French, “advertising” initially meant to “give notice of (something)” or “to make generally known,” often as a formal and sincere warning. It referred to the action of both taking and giving note, announcing information for consideration and the heeding of counsel. This sense c
ertainly endured, as newspapers even into the modern period retained the title of “advertiser.” Surprisingly, it is another great playwright (William Shakespeare in Much Ado About Nothing) who provides the earliest recorded usage of the word to mean “calling public attention to.” By the early eighteenth century and the advent of print media, “advertisement” gains further texture as publicity transfigures to promotion, announcement to a means of selling services or commodities, arriving closer to our contemporary definition. At that point, in practice, the word thus embarked upon what Shaw calls its “adventures in Capitalism in pursuit of profits.” 17

  The word “advertising” and its variants appear more than forty times in Shaw’s plays and prefaces, and, while its usage threads his entire playwriting career, there is a clear concentration during its first half, up to the First World War . The word’s journey through his writing follows an evolution in which connotative and denotative meanings accrue, and his choices of when to use it provide a clue as to Shaw’s developing understandings of the concept. Among the novels, the word only appears in Cashel Byron’s Profession , Love among the Artists , and The Irrational Knot , all written in the early 1880s. In four of six instances, the word is used to denote benign newspaper publicity for artistic endeavors (theater productions, novel publication). The other two refer to solicitation notices, in one case for a “comfortable husband [that] need not be handsome, as the lady is short sighted.” When he turns to playwriting in the 1890s, “advertising” begins to appear more frequently and with an edge. The meaning of the word expands beyond simply informational notices to include rhetorical craft on the part of their creators. In act three of Widowers’ Houses , for instance, Lickcheese reveals that Cokane helps him by infusing a “literary style” into the former’s “letters and draft prospectuses and advertisements.” 18 In Getting Married , Mrs. George indicates to Hotchkiss that “Mr. Collins was looking out for a clever young man [like him] to write advertisements.” 19 That cleverness in turn intends to exert an effect on readers, as, at the beginning of act two of You Never Can Tell , Finch McComas is described as having “exhausted all the news in his papers and is at present reduced to the advertisements, which are not sufficiently succulent to induce him to persevere with them.” 20