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MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 63.4 (2002) 411-440



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Building Brand Byron:
Early-Nineteenth-Century Advertising and the Marketing of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

Nicholas Mason


In early-nineteenth-century Britain few literary rumors showed greater staying power or adaptability than the tale of how a leading manufacturer secretly employed one of the age's most famous poets to write his jingles. Originating soon after the turn of the century, when the first wave of brand-name products was filling the advertising columns of the nation's newspapers, this rumor took various forms, with the names of different manufacturers and poets inserted in the blanks of the basic narrative. One of the earliest published versions appears in Maria Edgeworth's Ennui (1809), whose narrator recounts that "a gentleman of my acquaintance lately went to buy some razors at Packwood's. Mrs. Packwood alone was visible. Upon the gentleman's complimenting her on the infinite variety of her husband's ingenious and poetical advertisements, she replied, 'La! sir, and do you think husband has time to write them there things his-self? Why, sir, we keeps a poet to do all that there work.'" 1

Other versions locate the action not at Packwood's but at 30 Strand, the legendary home of Warren's Blacking shoe polish. 2 In one [End Page 411] of the most widely circulated versions, Byron is Warren's poet of choice. As late as 1843 the Edinburgh Review linked Byron with Warren's: "The most attractive vehicle [for advertising in the early nineteenth century] was verse, and the praises of blacking were sung in strains which would have done no discredit to 'Childe Harold' himself, even in his own opinion—for when accused of receiving six hundred a-year for his services as Poet-Laureat to Mrs Warren,—of being, in short, the actual personage alluded to in her famous boast, 'We keeps a poet'—he showed no anxiety to repudiate the charge." 3 Another strain of the legend relates how Byron earned five hundred pounds by fulfilling the offices of "Poet-Laureat" for Warren's chief competitors, Day and Martin.

Not surprisingly, Byron's rival satirists pounced on this rumor. In the July 1822 episode of Blackwood's Magazine's "Noctes Ambrosianae," the fictional Morgan Odoherty, who has himself taken credit for Day and Martin's jingles in a previous installment, composes lines on the blacking verses attributed to Byron:

Is Byron surprised that his enemies say
He makes puffing verses for Martin and Day?
Why, what other task could his lordship take part in
More fit than the service of Day, and of Martin?
So shining, so dark—all his writing displays
A type of this liquid of Martin and Day's—
Gouvernantes—Kings—laurel-crown'd Poets attacking—
Oh! he's master complete of the science of Blacking! 4

Two years later Horace Smith advised the aspiring poets of Oxbridge to "Renounce Aristotle, and take to the bottle / That wears 'Patent Blacking,' [End Page 412] inscribed on its throttle." 5 Also in 1824 William Frederick Deacon published Warreniana, an entire volume of parodies based on the premise that Warren had commissioned the age's leading poets to write his advertisements. Among the more amusing poems in this volume is "The Childe's Pilgrimage," in which one Childe Higgins embarks on a holy quest to find 30 Strand. 6

Byron's only recorded response to the blacking rumors appears in the appendix to The Two Foscari (1821), where he deems "laughable" the accusation that he "received five hundred pounds for writing advertisements for Day and Martin's patent blacking." Affecting unconcern, he quips, "This is the highest compliment to my literary powers which I ever received." 7 Complimentary or not, the rumors linking Byron to the blacking industry colorfully capture the kinship between the poet and the major household brands of the early nineteenth century. Not only did his unmatched celebrity make Byron the natural candidate to be named in the blacking rumors, but as the great...

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