Bernard Shaw and Modern Advertising

by Christopher Wixson

  There is always an agenda of course behind the manufactured succulence, and Shaw’s continued use of the word indicates that for him “advertising” denotes a staging of authority. The most vulgar example occurs in a set description for the public marketplace in The Devil’s Disciple :The gallows which hangs there permanently for the terror of evildoers, with such minor advertizers and examples of crime as the pillory, the whipping post, and the stocks, has a new rope attached, with the noose hitched up to one of the uprights, out of reach of the boys. 21

  The various punishment apparati are both symbols of state power as well as criminal in and of themselves, all threatening the individual’s autonomy. With that meaning, “advertising” provides Shaw with a vocabulary for various critiques. Vivie, in act four of Mrs. Warren’s Profession , uses it when she confronts her mother, designating the difference between them:I know very well that fashionable morality is all a pretence, and that if I took your money and devoted the rest of my life to spending it fashionably, I might be as worthless and vicious as the silliest woman could possibly be without having a word said to me about it. But I don’t want to be worthless. I shouldn’t enjoy trotting about the park to advertize my dressmaker and carriage builder, or being bored at the opera to shew off a shopwindowful of diamonds. 22

  Similarly, Shaw describes Hector Malone’s father in Man and Superman as “not having the stamp of the class which accepts as its life-mission the advertising and maintenance of first rate tailoring and millinery.” 23 Both instances loudly evoke Shaw’s famous critique of a theater corrupted by commercial forces, producing plays consisting of “a tailor’s advertisement making sentimental remarks to a milliner’s advertisement in the middle of an upholsterer’s and decorator’s advertisement.” 24 The enslavement of consumers to marketed taste to such an extent that they become advertisement pops up in Misalliance not only in Gunner’s refuge inside the Turkish bath but also extends into environment, as Mrs. Tarleton is embarrassed to discover that her punchbowl is deemed tacky since “the shopman [told her] it was in the best taste.” 25 Similarly, in Candida , the furniture of Morell House, “in its ornamental aspect, betrays the style of the advertised ‘drawing-room suite’ of the pushing suburban furniture dealer.” 26 Based upon this grouping of the word’s appearances, advertising poses a particular danger to the critical autonomy of the individual.

  For Shaw, the term grew to become shorthand for publicity for any dishonest enterprise in the service of unrepentant commercialism. He wrote to William Faversham in 1917 that he “always steadily set [his] face against the particular form of advertisement – for it is nothing else – which poses as philanthropy.” 27 When Adolphus Cusins reveals in Major Barbara that Undershaft gave his Salvation Army donation anonymously, Charles Lomax is surprised and impressed that he wouldn’t want the credit since “most chaps would have wanted the advertisement.” 28 In the same way, while he disapproves of his father’s “public work” because it “takes his mind off the main chance,” Johnny Tarleton admits in Misalliance “it has its value as an advertisement [that] makes useful acquaintances and leads to valuable business connections.” 29 Julius Sagamore, in The Millionairess , hastily rebuffs Epifania’s characterization of him as “the worthless nephew of the late solicitor Pontifex Sagamore,” retorting that, in taking over his uncle’s practice, he does not “advertise himself as worthless.” 30 Even Stegna, the pianist in “The Music-Cure,” is thrilled at the prospective publicity when the distraught Reginald threatens to commit suicide in her studio, saying “Do! What an advertisement! It will be really kind of you.” 31 In the marketplace, those who don’t excel at advertising perish by it. In the preface to Pygmalion , for instance, Shaw bemoans that a failure to effectively market dooms Henry Sweet’s superior system of Shorthand: “the triumph of [the popular Pitman system] was a triumph of business organization,” and Sweet “could not organize his market in that fashion [with] his four and six-penny manual, mostly in his lithographed handwriting, that was never vulgarly advertised.” 32

  The word also comes up frequently when Shaw writes about what he refers to as “propagandists of the Cross,” including those convinced the Christian apocalypse is at hand who produced “warning pamphlets … in constant circulation” and “advertisements … in the papers.” 33 When discussing the staging practices of the Salvation Army in the preface to Major Barbara , Shaw advises that, “when you advertise a converted burglar or reclaimed drunkard as one of the attractions at an experience meeting, your burglar can hardly have been too burglarious or your drunkard too drunken.” 34 Similarly, in the preface to Androcles and the Lion , he contrasts the altruistic miracles of Jesus with those vindictively and judgmentally wielded by the apostles, animated in his view by a “spirit of pure display and advertisement.” 35 He goes on to critique the absurd “notion that [Christ] was shedding his blood in order that every petty cheat and adulterator and libertine might wallow in it and come out whiter than snow: ‘I come as an infallible patent medicine for bad consciences’ is not one of the sayings in the gospels.” 36 The language of marketing enables Shaw to articulate how the commodification of the religion’s organizing figure is a self-serving misrepresentation.

  For Shaw, the term gradually accrued an association with dishonesty, and advertising was just part of a larger system rife with hypocrisy and deception, an outrage to which he would return countless times throughout his career. For instance, in an 1889 lecture, he condemns commercial demagoguery as another by-product of capitalism:In the matter of advertizing, [Private Enterprise] is exempt from all moral obligations: the most respectable newspapers give up the greater part of their space every day to statements which every well-instructed person knows to be false, and dangerously false, since they lead people to trust to imaginary cures in serious illnesses, and to ride bicycles through greasy mud in heavy traffic on tires advertized as “non-slipping”: in short, to purchase all sorts of articles and invest in all sorts of enterprises on the strength of shameless lies. 37

  Similarly, The Revolutionist’s Handbook (1903) notes that “straightforward public lying has reached gigantic developments, there being nothing to choose in this respect between the pickpocket at the police station and the minister on the treasury bench, the editor in the newspaper office, the city magnate advertising bicycle tires that do not side-slip, the clergyman subscribing the 39 articles, and the vivisector who pledges his knightly honor that no animal operated on in the physiological laboratory suffers the slightest pain.” 38

  In Everybody’s Political What’s What (1944), Shaw charges that “advertising enjoys impunity also for lying on matters of fact, with the object of obtaining money on false pretenses. This, the most obviously outrageous of such claims, is the one that is completely conceded; for though prosecutions for seditious, blasphemous, and obscene libel occur often enough to keep their possibility alive and dreaded, prosecutions for obtaining money by lying advertisements are unheard of today.” 39

  Of course, advertising is not only a deceitful business in and of itself but is insinuated into the larger system of capitalist exploitation. The playwright was quite right that the practice was deeply rooted within the economy. In Britain, “estimates of expenditure in the interwar years vary considerably, but the lowest figure, for direct advertising in a single year, is £85,000,000 and the highest £200,000,000. Newspapers derived half their income from advertising, and almost every industry and service, outside the old professions, advertised extensively.” 40 For Raymond Williams , advertising is “the official art of modern capitalist society.” 41 Corporate entities routinely unleash a marketing tidal wave against the gullible consumer, an act which for Shaw connects to his vision of how capitalism poisons the collective. In an extended example from The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928), Shaw discusses the final phase of a distillery established by private capitalists:They will spend enormous sums of money in advertisements to persuade the public that their whiskey is bette
r and healthier and older and more famous than the whiskey made in other distilleries, and that everybody ought to drink whiskey every day as a matter of course. As none of these statements is true, the printing of them is, from the point of view of the nation, a waste of wealth, a perversion of labor, and a propaganda of pernicious humbug. 42

  In the postscript to How He Lied to Her Husband , Shaw reports with some glee that “a leading New York newspaper, which was among the most abusively clamorous for the suppression of Mrs Warren’s Profession, has just been fined heavily for deriving part of its revenue from advertisements of Mrs Warren’s houses,” illustrating for him the tentacles of the prostitution industry:the profits of Mrs Warren’s profession are shared not only by Mrs Warren and Sir George Crofts but by the landlords of their houses, the newspapers which advertise them … in short all the trades to which they are good customers, not to mention the public officials and representatives whom they silence by complicity, corruption, or blackmail. 43

  Shaw expands his vision to conceptualize everyone living under capitalism as forced into prostitution, with advertising indicted as part of its mechanics; in The Intelligent Woman’s Guide, Shaw provides a “few examples of the male prostitutions … which are daily imposed on men by Capitalism”:the writer and publisher of lying advertisements which pretend to prove the worse the better article, the shopman who sells it by assuring the customer that it is the best, the agents of drugging and drink, the clerk making out dishonest accounts, the adulterator and giver of short weight, the journalist writing for Socialist papers when he is a convinced Liberal, or for Tory papers when he is an Anarchist, the professional politician working for his party right or wrong, the doctor paying useless visits and prescribing bogus medicines to hypochondriacs[,] … the solicitor using the law as an instrument for the oppression of the poor by the rich, the mercenary soldier fighting for a country which he regards as the worst enemy of his own, and the citizens of all classes who have to be obsequious to the rich and insolent to the poor. 44

  In similar terms, Shaw pitched his battle with the censor over Mrs. Warren’s Profession as one between “the author, the managers, and the performers, who depend for their livelihood on their personal reputations” and the “prohibitionists” who live on “rents, advertisements, or dividends.” 45 He refused to make his play “a standing advertisement of the attractive side of Mrs. Warren’s business,” bowing to pressure from the “White Slave traffickers” that “are in complete control of our picture theatres [and] reserve them for advertisements of their own trade.” 46

  Nowhere was the insidiousness and dangerous collusion of marketing and industry more pronounced for Shaw than in the field of proprietary medicine. He repeatedly lamented that one tragic effect of income inequality is that “beauty and health become the dreams of artists and the advertisements of quacks instead of the normal conditions of life,” 47 and there is no shortage of material by Shaw about this particular mode of advertising within his writings on the patent cure phenomenon. Medical practitioners in The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906), for instance, bemoan the profusion of product promotion. Blenkinsop wonders, “what are [the medical papers] after all but trade papers, full of advertisements?” while B. B. exclaims, “Look at the papers! full of scandalous advertisements of patent medicines !” 48 Perhaps reminiscent of Tarleton’s underwear promotion in Misalliance , Knox the shopkeeper, in Fanny’s First Play (1911), disapproves of “those hygienic corset advertisements that Vines & Jackson want us to put in the window” because they “werent decent and we couldnt shew them in our shop.” 49

  In 1932, Shaw wrote that “the [obtrusive and ubiquitous] advertisements of quacks and their remedies, and of proprietary medicines, are flaunting everywhere, and must achieve a considerable amount of manslaughter every year: indeed, some public restraint on these is probably inevitable in the near future.” 50 Fifteen years later, his views still had not changed or conditions improved so, in the preface to Farfetched Fables , he advocates the creation of a Ministry of Statistics, to correct the “statistical pretensions [of] lying advertisements of panaceas, prophylactics, elixirs, immunizers, vaccines, antitoxins, vitamins, and professedly hygienic foods.” 51 He had sounded the alarm four decades earlier in the preface to The Doctor’s Dilemma against this practice in whicheven trained statisticians often fail to appreciate the extent to which statistics are vitiated by the unrecorded assumptions of their interpreters. Their attention is too much occupied with the cruder tricks of those who make a corrupt use of statistics for advertising purposes. 52

  The Ministry, according to Shaw, would need to belavishly financed … as there is an enormous trade in such wares at present [because] popular demand for miracles and deities has been transferred to “marvels of science” and doctors, by dupes who think they are emancipating themselves from what in their abysmal ignorance they call medieval barbarism when they are in fact exalting every laboratory vivisector and quack immunizer.

  He calls for this “public department [to be] manned not be chemists analyzing the advertised wares and determining their therapeutical value, but by mathematicians.”

  His most sustained overview of the industry appears in Everybody’s Political What’s What :In dealing with public health as with diplomacy the statesman must never forget that, as Ferdinand Lassalle declared, “the lie is a European power.” In sanitary matters it is a world power. Lying is privileged in commercial advertisements because commerce is rich and powerful, just as it was privileged for princes, as Machiavelli pointed out. Vaccination produced a lucrative trade in vaccines. Later on, the word vaccine was applied to prophylactics that had nothing to do with cowpox; and now we have a whole industry producing vaccines, pseudo-vaccines, therapeutic serums, gland extracts called hormones, antigens, antitoxins, in addition to the old-fashioned pills, purges, tonics, electric belts, and the like, all professing to avert or cure every known or imagined sort of illness, and some of them promising to rejuvenate their purchasers and prolong life by fifty years or so. Scraps of Greek or Latin, with “ose” or “in” or “on” or “ax” tacked on to them, replace the old names or provide new ones, impressing the public just as the big word Mesopotamia is said to impress simple people as religious. We read the advertisements of these products, buy them, use them, cure ourselves by our vis medicatrix naturœ, and, attributing the cure to medicine, send the manufacturers glowing testimonials which are duly published and sometimes duly paid for. A lady of my acquaintance received £800 for a letter ascribing the beauty of her complexion, which was entirely and thickly artificial, to a well advertized face cream. I have myself been offered a considerable sum to attribute my mental powers to an equally well advertized educational correspondence course. No doubt the cures are sometimes genuine, the testimonials disinterested, and the advertisers sincere enough to take their own medicines; but the residue of downright impudent venal lying is enormous. 53

  Considering the playwright’s antipathy towards the field of professional advertising, how then can we explain his direct participation in various commercial campaigns for clients such as Harrods and Pan-American Airways and on behalf of products such as Formamint and Simmons mattresses? In the preface to Farfetched Fables , Shaw, calling himself an “old journalist and agitator,” complained that, in England,platform and press are gagged by such an irresponsible tyranny of partisan newspaper proprietors and shamelessly mendacious advertizers, and by the law against seditious and blasphemous libel, that my speeches were never reported, and my letters and articles inserted only when I could combine what I believed and wanted to say with something that the paper wanted to have said. 54

  His motive and method for his contributions to product advertising seem to be identical, suggesting that advertising is for him not an irrevocably unilateral enterprise. Rather, as it does for Lina in Misalliance , it extends an opportunity to negotiate the relationship between the individual and overreaching authority, even becoming a space of resistance. For example, in the pref
ace to On the Rocks , Shaw refers to a recent court sentence of flogging and penal servitude in which “the victim escaped his punishment and gave a sensational advertisement to its savagery by committing suicide.” 55 In the same way, in Pygmalion , a “defiantly non-resistant” Liza threatens to use her newfound knowledge and inherent skill to ruin Higgins. To counter his “bullying and big talk,” she intends to “advertise it in the papers that your duchess is only a flower girl that you taught, and that she’ll teach anybody to be a duchess just the same in six months for a thousand guineas”: “Oh, when I think of myself crawling under your feet and being trampled on and called names, when all the time I had only to lift up my finger to be as good as you, I could just kick myself.” 56 The latent power in advertising can be wielded against systems of “bullying and big talk,” especially by superhuman individuals.