Bernard Shaw and Modern Advertising

by Christopher Wixson

  62.Shaw, “Preface” to Major Barbara, 32.

  63.R. J. Minney. The Bogus Image of Bernard Shaw. London: Leslie Frewin, 1969. 9.

  64.Shaw, Intelligent Woman’s, 232.

  65.Palmer, 769.

  66.Maurice Colbourne. The Real Bernard Shaw. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1940. 102, 103.

  67.G. K. Chesterton. George Bernard Shaw. London: John Lane, 1910. 233, 245–6.

  68.Augustus Hamon. Bernard Shaw: The Twentieth Century Molière. Trans. Eden and Cedar Paul. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company Publishers, 1916. 107.

  69.Ibid., 107–8.

  70.Robert Lynd. Old and New Masters. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1919. 143.

  71.Bertolt Brecht. “Ovation for Shaw.” Trans. Gerhard H. W. Zuther. Modern Drama 2.2 (Summer 1959): 184–7. 184.

  72.Michael Holroyd. Bernard Shaw, Volume One: 1856–1898, The Search for Love. New York: Vintage Books, 1988. 86.

  73.Sally Peters. “Shaw’s Life: A Feminist in Spite of Himself.” In The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw. Ed. Christopher Innes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 3–24. 12.

  74.Fintan O’Toole . Judging Shaw: The Radicalism of GBS. Dublin: Prism, 2017. 4, 22.

  75.Richard Toye. The Labour Party and the Planned Economy, 1931–1951. Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society, Boydell Press, 2003. 16.

  76.Bernard Shaw. “Preface” to Heartbreak House. In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 5. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 11–58. 23.

  77.Sidney Webb. “Introduction.” In Advertising: A Study of a Modern Business Power. G. W. Goodall. London: Constable & Co., 1914. ix–xvii. xvi–xvii.

  78.“The London Education Act 1903: How to Make the Best of It.” Fabian Tract No. 117. London: The Fabian Society, February 1904. 17.

  79.Bernard Shaw. “Preface” to Man and Superman. In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 2. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 493–532. 503.

  80.Frank Duba. “‘The Genuine Pulpit Article’: The Preface to Man and Superman.” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 25 (2005): 221–40. 235.

  81.Shaw, “Preface” to Three Plays for Puritans, 31, 32.

  82.Ibid., 30, 32. As such, he predicts a short shelf life for the plays, that, as thinking evolves, they will “lose [their] gloss” and be “exposed” as “threadbare popular melodrama.”

  83.George Burton Hotchkiss. Advertising Copy. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1924. 20.

  84.Ibid., 20.

  85.John A. Bertolini. The Playwrighting Self of Bernard Shaw. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991. 92.

  86.Stephen Spender. The Struggle of the Modern. Oakland: University of California Press, 1963. 72.

  87.Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw, 93.

  88.Allan Chappelow, ed. Shaw the Villager and Human Being: A Biographical Symposium. London: Charles Skilton Ltd., 1961. 238.

  89.Malcolm Mckenzie. “Jaeger: Health Gospel of 1884, Fashion Movement of 1937.” Commercial Art 23.134 (1 August 1937): 42–57. 45.

  90.L. Fritz Gruber. “Englische Schaufenster (English Shop Windows).” Gebrauchsgraphik: International Advertising Art 15.11 (1 November 1938): 57–63. 63.

  91.See note 81 of Alice McEwan’s “The ‘Plumber-Philosopher’: Shaw’s Discourse on Domestic Sanitation.” SHAW 34 (2014): 75–107. 105.

  92.Jackson Lears. “Uneasy Courtship: Modern Art and Modern Advertising.” American Quarterly 39.1 (Spring 1987): 133–54. 136.

  93.Rod Rosenquist. “Copywriting Gertrude Stein: Advertising, Anonymity, Autobiography.” Modernist Cultures 11.3 (2016): 331–50. 336.

  94.“British Trade Can Win Through—By Constructive Advertising.” Commercial Art 9.54 (1 December 1930): 8 and 10.56 (1 February 1931): 8.

  95.“Motor-Car Posters: Selections from Different Nations.” Commercial Art, vol. 1. London: The Studio Limited, 1926. 208–13. 213.

  96.“British Trade Can Win Through—By Constructive Advertising,” 8.

  97.Ibid., 8.

  98.Stanley Resor . “Personalities and the Public: Some Aspects of Testimonial Advertising.” New Bulletin 138 (April 1929): 1. J. Walter Thompson Information Center Records, Box 4, Testimonial Advertising, 1928–1977. John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History, Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library, Duke University. 1.

  99.Yde, 6. Unfortunately, Shaw’s success with “G.B.S .” and his impatience for social change would lead to his offensive support in the 1930s and 1940s of totalitarian figures, an egregious error for which Fintan O’Toole attributes some culpability to the brand itself: “Shaw, who had done much to invent modern literary celebrity, was also one of its more obvious victims. The isolating effects of extreme celebrity worked against both the humility and the connectedness that Shaw would have needed” (291).

  100.“British Trade Can Win Through—By Constructive Advertising,” 8.

  101.Toye, 16.

  102.Roland Marchand. Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940. Berkley: University of California Press, 1985. 421.

  © The Author(s) 2018

  Christopher WixsonBernard Shaw and Modern AdvertisingBernard Shaw and His Contemporarieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78628-5_2

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

  Christopher Wixson1

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

  Christopher Wixson

  Email: cmwixson@eiu.edu

  It comes as no surprise that, when Elbert Hubbard rewrote one of Shaw’s articles and published it as a Roycroft book, the seething playwright knew exactly the precise insult to hurl back, characterizing its prose style as “feeble patent-medicine-advertisement English.” 1 The playwright often inveighed against the infusion of an entrepreneurial ethos into health care and expounded at length about the detrimental effects of the profit motive in medicine. His lifelong indictment of a flawed system of medical research and practice is well documented, particularly in The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906), its preface, and Doctors’ Delusions (1932), and has been much discussed by both scholars and biographers. Less attention has been given to Shaw’s annoyance with the proprietary-cure industry and its advertising practices; according to “The Revolutionist’s Handbook ,” “witchcraft, in the modern form of patent medicines and prophylactic inoculations, is rampant.” 2 He produced a “history of quack medicine” in the 1880s (now regrettably lost, according to Dan Laurence ) 3 and was sharply critical of the mass marketing phenomenon’s complicity in economic subjugation. It is a bit of a surprise then that, during his early London attempts at making a living as a freelance writer, Shaw supposedly received his greatest sum by producing copy for a patent medicine advertisement, although details about this stint are elusive.

  Biographers Hesketh Pearson , B. C. Rosset , Stephen Winsten , and Archibald Henderson (among others) all note that Shaw made £5 for such a writing when accounting for his earnings during his early years in London. This claim subsequently got recycled now and again in advertising trade journals. For instance, a 1911 Printers’ Ink piece about the advent of signed advertisements refers to Henderson’s biography George Bernard Shaw: His Life and Works:In a recently issued “authorized” biography of George Bernard Shaw, the writer declares that from 1876 to 1885 Shaw’s adventures in literature netted him the princely sum of exactly six pounds. Although he composed during these nine years half a dozen novels and a passion play in blank verse his biographer tells us he received his biggest fee – five pounds – for a patent medicine advertisement. Unfortunately, we are not given any further particulars about this stroke of luck, but if the manufacturers of that patent medicine are still selling their remedy, I believe it would prove a profitable piece of business on their part to reissue the advertisements under the full signature of the now celebrated creator of the “Superman.” 4

&nbs
p; Similarly, E. McKenna begins a 1920 Printers’ Ink article on the narrative continuity between drama and advertisements by positing thatit is perhaps not generally known that George Bernard Shaw earned his first money by writing patent medicine advertisements. These compositions are probably not to be found now, but if they could be, it is possible that it could be shown that young Mr. Shaw dramatized his appeal and did it successfully. 5

  Yet, when Shaw recounts the assignment in Sixteen Self-Sketches , he describes it as a “job … not from a publisher or editor, but from a friendly lawyer who wanted a medical essay, evidently for use in an agitation concerning patent medicines.” 6 This would suggest that the piece of writing may be closer to what Dan Laurence talks about as that lost “history of patent medicines ” solicited by George Radford , for which Shaw was paid but which may never have been ultimately published. 7 Shaw’s word choice—“agitation”—is potentially apt either to describe material for a lawsuit or a public appeal against a manufacturer or ad copy content intended to provoke consumer spending. Regardless, Shaw was profoundly indebted to the techniques through which these ersatz remedies were promoted, making his relationship with the industry symbiotic rather than antagonistic.

  Shaw’s marketing of the “G.B.S. ” persona, according to Alice McEwan , was “more than simply advocating a certain taste or a different kind of shopping [but] about promoting the image of a Shavian individual ‘lifestyle’.” 8 In this sense, the playwright emulated the marketing tactics of the wellness industry and in particular proprietary health remedies and devices that promised access to robust mental and physical health. Sounding like the copy of such advertisements, Shaw often railed against the toxicity of his environment, its draining effect and engendering of deleterious habits. Along with manufacturers and purveyors of health commodities, he also endowed his product with an imagined state of extreme fitness and productivity, a quintessence of vitality. In the preface to The Doctor’s Dilemma , Shaw writes that “to advertise any remedy or operation, you have only to pick out all the most reassuring advances made by civilization, and boldly present the two in the relation of cause and effect; the public will swallow the fallacy without a wry face.” 9 In marketing the Shavian “rational social programme” and “secular religion,” 10 the playwright clearly followed the field’s lead through traditional and emergent media. In fact, the influence of the promotional practices of the much-maligned industry has been far-reaching. As T. R. Nevett maintains, “sordid though this form of enterprise unquestionably was, the medicine vendors may well be regarded as the pioneers of modern marketing, branding their products, advertising them widely, and distributing them over large areas of the country.” 11 Raymond Williams is more direct, noting,an obvious continuity between the methods used to sell pills and washballs in the eighteenth century … and the methods used in the twentieth century to sell anything from a drink to a political party. In this sense, it is true to say that all commerce has followed the quack. 12

  According to historian Jackson Lears , “patent medicines represented the most profitable investment opportunity among all consumer goods: costs of production were low and an efficient distribution system in place; all that was needed was a lavish expenditure on advertising.” 13 In the last decades of the nineteenth century, coextensive with the explosion of over-the-counter cures and devices, “an estimated two million pounds in Britain annually … was spent on inserting advertisements for patent medicines in newspapers and periodicals and on pushing promotional pamphlets, diaries, and almanacs under people’s front doors.” 14

  Besides significant shifts in how adverts reached target demographics, modern patent medicine promotion, which accounted for more than a quarter of all advertisements, moved away from more traditional unadorned and terse column blurbs towards layout styles replete with lavish fonts, pictorial enhancement, and copy that promised direct access to a state of increased potency and well-being. Starting in the 1880s, the British Medical Association (BMA) launched a counter-offensive against this foray by what they characterized as “palpable quacks and vendors of either dangerous or insidious wares.” 15 Orthodox medical journals such as The Lancet were filled with articles that attacked these products as both ineffectual and potentially virulent, their purveyors as roguish charlatans and bounders in the field. As James Gregory maintains,labeling [them all] as “quackeries,” “heresies,” or “fads” [was] part of the wider efforts to reform medicine by removing questionable practices, [but also] stemmed from the competing claims for customers in the health market, and the assertion of status and authority by a nascent profession which could not yet claim to be more successful than alternatives. 16

  In 1909, the BMA collected pieces that had appeared previously in its journal into Secret Remedies : What They Cost and What They Contain, a meticulous record of both the chemical formulae for and the therapeutic claims made by various patent medicines . Concerned that the BMA’s activities might gain legislative traction, drug corporation representatives produced a rejoinder entitled A Sequel to “ Secret Remedies ” in 1910. It charged the BMA with self-serving gatekeeping and hypocrisy, denouncing government intervention in the pharmaceutical market by claiming Secret Remedies to be rife with factual inaccuracies about formulae and charging that trained doctors and chemists were behind most patent medicines. Seizing upon the doctors’ pretense of acting in the public interest, the opposition waged a media war through newspapers and further booklets, arguing that free market capitalism was the only way to ensure consumer satisfaction, protection, and innovation.

  Nonetheless, the original Secret Remedies sold so well (despite the major newspapers’ refusal to advertise or print any mention of it) that a BMA follow-up, More Secret Remedies , appeared three years later. That same year, in the spring of 1912, a committee of inquiry was convened in the House of Commons to investigate patent medicines ; the press extensively covered the two years of hearings that culminated in a thousand-page report exposing unethical deception on the part of patent drug companies. As Thomas Richards points out, the investigation became itself a media spectacle:The Select Committee held thirty-three public sittings and directed 14,000 questions at forty-two witnesses[, all of which] came close to arousing the kind of ongoing public interest the French displayed for the Dreyfus trials and the Americans for the trial of President McKinley’s anarchist assassin, Czolgosz. 17

  Unfortunately, by the time it was published on August 4, 1914, the summary was obscured by more pressing current events, and legislation to protect the public from fraudulent cures would have to wait a couple of more decades. 18

  The committee report’s characterization of the network of patent medicines as a “system of quackery” is an unconscious echo not only of the phrasing of Shaw’s frequent characterization of the medical-industrial complex but also of his character B.B.’s indictment in the 1906 play The Doctor’s Dilemma of the “huge commercial system of quackery and poison.” 19 For Shaw, the booming late Victorian and Edwardian fitness industry was a particularly irksome capitalist entity, its wares relentlessly marketed with virtually no oversight or regulation. Created on the heels of the appearance of Secret Remedies , his comedy Misalliance dovetails its critique of middle-class pretension with an assault against the commodification of health. Critics and scholars have tended mainly to follow its preface’s lead in pinpointing Misalliance’s thematic interests, analyzing it in terms of familial relationships, gender roles and marriage, and theories of evolution and education. However, the play’s investment in marketing and commodity transaction is undeniable, particularly its characterization of patriarch John Tarleton. Tarleton is modeled, according to scholar Margery Morgan , on Gordon Selfridge , the self-made American entrepreneur known not only for lavish expenditures on mammoth retailing campaigns but also for his aggressive promotional style. 20 Elizabeth Outka identifies a major shift in department store advertisement practices occurring in the spring of 1909, right before the grand opening of Selfridge’s and the
celebration of Harrods Diamond Jubilee, 21 and, supposedly, Selfridge “spent £36,000 on promoting his Oxford Street shop even before it had opened.” 22 Misalliance was written in the autumn of 1909, six months after Selfridge’s initial publicity blitzkrieg produced immediate counter-campaigns among his competitors (including Harrods ), and periodicals were saturated with hyperbolic ad copy and ostentatious fashion show notices. In the play, Shaw clearly wishes to address this frenzy of merchandising, particularly as it connects to the Edwardian anxiety over national fitness.