Cure advertising, via periodical and pamphlet in particular, used to its retail advantage the country’s perceived health crisis. The 1904 report issued by the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration in England intensified concern over a specifically national decline and spurred public debate over the deterioration of the national body, leading to welfare reform and the formation of societies, organizations, and monthlies dedicated to physical and moral fitness. The physical culture movement had begun in the 1890s, “part of a wider international health and life reform movement which advocated not only exercise but also dietary reform such as vegetarianism, sun- and air-bathing, dress reform, personal cleanliness and temperance.” 23 Urban, working-class men had long been at the center of discussions of degeneration, but the sedentary lifestyles of men from other classes were equally targeted. The Health and Strength League was established in late 1906 and counted 30,000 members by the start of the war while the circulation of its weekly journal reached 75,000 in 1909, mirroring the upsurge in “physical culture clubs, institutes, and gyms.” 24 At the time, the larger implications of and solutions to this perceived loss of English vitality were fiercely discussed in the media by “national efficiency” proponents and eugenics advocates on both sides of the political spectrum.
By all accounts, at the time Misalliance was written, “London [was] a city flooded with remedies, where the threat of incurable disease hung over everyone and cure-alls promised the only relief possible.” 25 Shaw situates at the visual center of his set design one of the most notorious of such panaceas, a portable Turkish bath , that original audiences would have immediately associated with the crazed mass-marketing of home remedies as well as issues of personal and public hygiene. In critical commentary on Misalliance , the unit is often mentioned but almost always in terms of its plot utility during a bit of comic business, when Gunner eavesdrops on Hypatia Tarleton as she aggressively woos Joey Percival. For the few scholars who have approached the play through the lens of economics, however, the Turkish bath becomes symbolically crucial. J. Ellen Gainor feels the set piece’s prominent stage position acts as a conspicuous index to the imperial content of all Shaw’s plays, a topic she feels urgently requires further analysis. 26 Margery Morgan posits a dense web of connective tissue between Shaw’s play and Harley Granville Barker’s The Madras House (1910), the Turkish bath in the former taking up “the oriental theme” of the latter. 27 If both Morgan and Gainor emphasize the item’s “Turkishness” in their commentaries, this analysis seeks to explore how the object functions as a cynosure for matters of commercialized health in the play. Because Shaw is so specific that the bath unit is only “recently unpacked, with its crate beside it, and on the crate the drawn nails and the hammer used in unpacking,” 28 the quirky item’s thematic import also seems tied to its packaging and, by extension, its commercial image.
Yoking together the obsessive pursuit of wellness and the advent of mass marketing, the history of the Turkish bath in England is dramatic, beginning with “too good to be true” curative promises and ending with sordid impropriety. Introduced in the middle of the century, such establishments were appearing everywhere by the 1860s; according to Peter Kandela , English “Turkish Bath mania” was engendered not by aggressive entrepreneurism or even “vague Victorian interest in matters oriental” but rather by “the poor state of health and hygiene of the urban masses.” 29 The public baths purported to remedy the poor health and non-existent hygiene among the urban poor. Despite a lack of evidence for such a sweeping claim, public and private baths were opened in a number of factory towns around England, in addition to major cities, ostensibly to boost the productivity of the working men. Early advocates had a democratic vision that provided access to the baths for those lacking adequate health care as well as for the rich, and baths were additionally constructed in hospitals as well as mental institutions. By the 1880s, though, the popularity of the baths was abating rapidly, due to increased skepticism towards its cure-all claims, ongoing hostility from the medical community, their unflattering “reputation as a restorative for the debauched and as a cover for perversion,” 30 and the development of mass-produced portable units for the home.
Advertisements for home Turkish baths were ubiquitous in British magazines for decades. While Kandela claims that home baths “were consigned to the attic or the cellar by the start of the 20th century,” 31 the surge of periodical advertisement for them persists through the early 1900s. For instance, a short piece entitled “Turkish Baths at Home” that appeared in The Pall Mall Magazine in April of 1909 still trumpets the “wonderful cleansing and invigorating action of this form of bathing” and targets those who “cannot tolerate breathing the heated air inseparable from public baths” and who wish instead to bathe “in perfect safety and comfort in the seclusion of the home.” 32 One of the most prominent Turkish bath manufacturers in the first decade of the twentieth century was the Century Thermal Bath Cabinet Company who advertised their portable bath units in, among other periodicals, The Windsor Magazine, Pearson’s Magazine, The Pall Mall Magazine, The Strand Magazine, The Railway News, and The Bystander. Within the medical community, the Century Thermal Bath Company was notorious for shady practices, and, beginning in the fall of 1899, The British Medical Journal received specific complaints about its improper marketing practices. In a two-pronged effort to both market directly to the public and to secure retailers, the American company attempted to broaden their territory and allegedly offered secret commissions to British doctors who sold their bath units as well as product discounts to those who agreed to recommend them to their patients. In 1901, the Company was again admonished by the Journal for allegedly using the names of British doctors in their advertising without first securing permission to do so. The BMA was not the only professional group who tracked the Century Company on its radar. The January 1902 “Trade Notes” section of Chemist and Druggist questions the retailer’s tactics in offering multiple chemists and ironmongers in Wisbech “entire control of sales in [the] district”: “Perhaps the company will explain the matter, especially [since] the circular invites every one to whom it is addressed to remit money for a cabinet of double the value. If all respond there will be no exclusiveness about the matter.” 33 Most pointedly, in its March 21, 1903 Journal, the BMA expressed their support for the Prevention of Corruption Bill, then moving from the House of Lords to the House of Commons, and specifically cited the tactics of the Century Thermal Bath Company as an egregious example of what the legislation intended to curb. The fate of the Century Thermal Bath Company is in microcosm that of the patent medicine industry as a whole.
The Century Thermal campaign with which late Victorian and Edwardian consumers would have surely been familiar (if for no other reason than the fact that it employed familiar techniques used to market a wide variety of products) offered readers a “highly valuable and beautiful illustrated book” free of charge, provided one wrote and inquired. In the booklet, entitled “The Power of Heat: Turkish Baths at Home,” the portable Bath unit is presented as a modern technological wonder that makes available a practice rooted in the wisdom of Greece and Rome as well as American Indian culture but without the “unwholesome atmosphere” of the public bathhouse and its lack of adequate drainage. 34 Reproducing an 1880 excerpt from The Lancet , the pamphlet decries “the air of a public Turkish Bath [as] laden with germs of disease thrown off from the lungs and body of a fever or consumptive patient [and lacking] currents to carry the particles away” (9–10). Resembling a moral tract, the booklet rails against the use of alcohol, tobacco, meat, and drugs, all viewed as poisons that unnaturally sap physical and mental vitality. The copy advocates for its product as an “incomparable artificial preservative” of hygiene that counters the “manifold evils” that “arise from exhausting mental labour” and “perseverance in sedentary habits” and can take “the place of out-door exercise” in such a way that “[n]o home is complete without one” (8, 14). Wildly formatted, usi
ng capitalization and boldface for emphasis, the pamphlet seeks to stoke its audience’s anxieties over social status as well as health, proclaiming that “the wealthy have embraced [vapor cures] by visiting Baden-Baden, Weis-Baden, Carlsbad, and other places; but our Cabinet brings it within the reach of … Business Men and Working Men [who] cannot afford to be ill” (35, 44).
What immediately reverberates from Century Thermal’s booklet in relation to Misalliance is its rhetorical style. Employing a range of state-of-the-art sales tactics, the Century pamphlet features a chorus of disparate voices (customer and professional testimonials, celebrity and authority endorsements, literary quotations and trite clichés, medical and social theory), all centered (like the stage picture of Misalliance) on the portable thermal bath cabinet. Acting upon the consumer’s fears and often class prejudice, the wide-ranging lists of ailments, symptoms, and conditions are supported by overblown claims of certainty and unanimity among researchers. The parade of scientific experts, their credibility buoyed by their acronymed institutional affiliations, is quickly followed by detailed testimonials from practitioners, customers, and even celebrities. (Lily Langtry famously endorsed Turkish bathing for the complexion.) Most interesting is the seemingly random use of quotation marks to give statements the impression of authority without the annoyance of attribution. However, as Richards describes, “far and away the favorite form of authority among quacks was the faceless authority of literary convention,” and “the quack columns teem with literary quotations taken out of context,” possessing “all the weighty pretentiousness of authority without the inconvenience of an actual author.” 35 The desired effect of such source material, ersatz and otherwise, was “a form of literary aspiration where advertising, a cultural form fairly low down the ladder of artistic esteem, elevates itself by utilizing poetry, a highly prestigious art form.” 36
In the Century booklet, highbrow literary quotations sit side by side on the page with clichéd homespun aphorism (e.g. “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”) and the occasional stray unattributed quoted statement (e.g. “Man is dragged into the world and drugged out of it”) (11, 14).
For all of its insistence upon independent thought and authenticity, Century marketing was quite committed to recycling copy. For instance, the booklet follows an excerpted statement from pioneer hydropathist James Manby Gully with a quote from Goethe:
Thus with our hellish drugs, death’s ceaseless fountains
In these bright vales, or these green mountains,
Worse than the very plague we raged.
I have myself to thousands poison given,
And hear their murderer praised as blest by Heaven,
Because with nature’s strife he waged.
By the early 1900s, this particular passage from Faust is an old chestnut within the discourse. Among other places, the quotation appears in Hydropathy; or the Cold Water Cure (1842), Homoeopathy and Its Principles Explained (1801), Hydropathy For the People: With Plain Observations on Drugs, Diet, Water, Air, and Exercise (1855), Caloric: Its Mechanical, Chemical and Vital Agencies in the Phenomena of Nature (1859), and on the title page of Yellow Fever: Its Origins, Improper Treatment, Prevention and Cure (1860). The literary thus becomes commodity, and this appropriation reaches absurdity when the source is corrupted, as when the Century Company buttresses their claim by quoting from Alexander Pope’s translation of Homer’s The Odyssey: “reviving sweats repair the mind’s decay, and take the painful sense of toil away” (11). Pope is misquoted (“sweets” becomes “sweats”), and, intentional or not, the error itself had an extended shelf life, appearing frequently in other periodicals and even books. 37 As Jennifer Wicke points out, “ads rendered literary work into fragments of raw material, trading on an author or a character’s auratic prestige, sometimes without evoking any of the surrounding text,” 38 and the Century Thermal booklet is itself, like its many counterparts, a deliberate pastiche.
Misalliance’s style of course is similar. In assessing its postmodern elements, Tony Stafford argues that “the sheer bulk of quotations, appropriations, and allusions [constitute] the fabric of the work” such that the “very composition of Misalliance is pastiche.” 39 This quality is largely the result of Tarleton himself who seems to take a cue from his own pamphlet, his manner of speech frequently sounding like ad copy: “Why should a woman allow Nature to put a false mask of age on her when she knows that she’s as young as ever? Why should she look in the glass and see a wrinkled lie when a touch of fine art will shew her a glorious truth?” 40 Even the Charles Swain poem he unexpectedly recites late in the play—“Theres magic in the night / When the heart is young” 41 —was frequently reproduced in periodical advertising. What is most noteworthy about Tarleton is his encyclopedic retrieval of literary allusion. Indeed, he is a charmingly prototypical Wikicharacter, a “computerized Digest of Western Literature, delivering up the desired data on demand, every item uniformly encapsulated in preformed syntactical structures.” 42 What J. L. Wisenthal deems a “foolish … display of undigested reading” 43 resonates within Shaw’s savvy exposure of the intersection between culture and consumerism, of the strategy of literary citation to provide a moral and philosophical foundation for consumer spending. Tarleton’s reason, for example, to read Shakespeare is for its use-value, because “he has a word for every occasion” (210). As John Mills observes, Tarleton performs on one level what Shaw accused doctors of doing, “needlessly [chattering] away, automatically repeating and administering their own or a colleague’s favorite nostrums, with never a thought about the degree of their applicability to the phenomena at hand.” 44 In essence, the character is an automaton of empty talk, trading in literature and language itself as commodity. Tarleton’s distinctive verbosity operates for Shaw as a class critique, one that anticipates that of Eugène Ionesco who described the bourgeois individual as “the personification of accepted ideas and slogans, the ubiquitous conformist” given away by “his automatic use of language … composed of ready-made expressions and the most tired clichés.” 45
Nonetheless, Tarleton’s adeptness in creating copy is key to his success as a commercial underwear distributor; as he says, “Anybody can make underwear. Anybody can sell underwear. Tarleton’s Ideas: thats whats done it” (167). The title page copy of his own advertising pamphlet—“The Romance of Business, or The Story of Tarleton’s Underwear. Please Take One!” (148)—takes up the language of melodrama, and its content undoubtedly spins Tarleton’s self-made social ascension and entrepreneurial prosperity into an opportunity for direct marketing. 46 The degree to which Tarleton’s consciousness has been saturated thoroughly by consumerism is also evident by his spending choices. When Mrs. Tarleton reveals that “Turkish baths are [Tarleton’s] latest” (174), original audiences might have deemed Tarleton’s new interest in what was by 1910 a dated gadget an indication of his lack of sophistication in relation to consumer trends, akin to his wife’s purchase of unstylish pottery and a betrayal of their humbler origins and bounding pretensions. More importantly, it suggests that Tarleton has bought into the claims of mass marketing directed towards men of all classes that emphasized the connection between commodity acquisition and lifestyles of “success, ease and leisure, as well as the chance to escape the confines of home, workplace and the urban environment.” 47 Tarleton’s faith in marketing discourse is also shared by his wife and informs their choices with regard to their country home in which Misalliance is set.
When the curtain rises, the bath unit is just one object within a larger stage picture rife with commodities, since from the start the Tarleton home is figured as a site of indulgent leisure and mass cultural consumption. Lacking any “solid furniture” (109), with the exception of a fully furnished sideboard, the set is conspicuously dominated by the accouterments of drinking, smoking, and garden sport, and it of course frames, at the play’s start, the somnambulant Johnny consuming a cheap paperback. As Shaw describes it, the décor of the Tarleton house bet
rays the fact that “the proprietor’s notion of domestic luxury is founded on the lounges of week-end hotels” (143). In 1901, architect Edward S. Prior railed against suburban house-building practices that preferred “the cheap substitute in place of the genuine article”:We have to take not only what does not suit us, but what is not the real thing at all – fatty compounds for butter, glucose for sugar, chemicals for beer: and just as certainly the sham house for the real building, its style a counterfeit, its construction a salable make-believe, … everything charmingly commercial and charmingly cheap. 48
Indeed, the style of the Tarleton house is awash in mass-produced homogeneity and style dictated by marketing. Helen C. Long notes that “contemporary photographs show middle-class houses far more cluttered with objects and furniture than wealthy homes or their mid-nineteenth-century equivalents.” 49 The idealized English house was itself a commodity sought after by aspirant and rising middle-class families, their furnishings deliberately staged. Newly available periodicals, pamphlets, and books on home furnishing provided essential guidance for newly upper middle-class families like the Tarletons: “If their recommendations were followed, a tasteful home was guaranteed; such assurance was crucial to those without previous experience in matters of taste but for whom nuances of class were all-important.” 50
Epitomizing the numbingly uniform style of pottery that decorates the Tarleton house, the eventually shattered punchbowl is denigrated as tacky by Bentley much to the shock of Mrs. Tarleton who says she was told by “the shopman … it was in the best taste” (156). Typifying how the rising middle class cultivated style by imitating what they read and saw in shop windows, she is mortified that the vendor has apparently misled her and at the ramifications of the breach in taste. Shaw’s original audiences would surely have perceived more at stake at this moment than simply the perception of style since “books linking ideas of nation and domesticity became something of a craze during the Edwardian period,” and “circulated through the machinery of consumer culture, Edwardian representations of the English house symbolized desires of national inclusion for many upwardly mobile middle-class consumers.” 51
Bernard Shaw and Modern Advertising Page 6