Literary Advertising and the Shaping of British Romanticism by Nicholas Mason (review)

In today’s media-saturated world, it is salutary to be reminded that advertising culture has a documented history stretching back well before the 1950s, despite what recent current popular culture shows such as Mad Men would have us believe. As Nicholas Mason notes in his well-rounded study of eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century advertising history and literary culture, today’s promotional culture owes a great deal to methods pioneered by key figures of the Georgian and Romantic period.

Advertising grew exponentially as it moved from the periphery to the center of British retail economy throughout the Georgian era, as Mason demonstrates in tracking advertising duties over the century. In 1713, the year when advertising duties were first imposed in Britain, registers indicated that a total of 18,200 advertisements were in print per annum. In 1750, this number had risen to 125,000 per annum. By 1800, over 500,000 advertisements were in circulation per year. In contextualizing this rapid growth, Mason questions established views that modern advertising practices were invented by U.S. practitioners in the early twentieth century or by British promoters of the Victorian era. As he points out, key elements of advertising used today—celebrity endorsements, the careful placement of positive “puffing” reviews and profiles in magazines and journals, the establishment of individuals as “brands” and as iconic figures through which their works were promoted, and the use of carefully choreographed launch events and campaigns to generate public involvement and interest in products—have their origins in strategies developed in Britain in the eighteenth century. Early pioneers included the publisher John Newberry. Better known today through the prestigious children’s book prize that bears his name, between the 1740s and 1760s he experimented successfully with methods designed to sell a range of children’s and educational works, such as the “bonus gift” promotion (which offered purchasers of a book a free gift to accompany it), and product placement in published works (with plot narratives including passages in which key characters extolled the pleasures of other works published by Newberry).

Mason’s key thrust is to embed such contexts within a study of Romantic celebrity culture. Nowhere was celebrity culture better exemplified than in the establishment of the poets Lord Byron and Letitia Elizabeth Landon as celebrity brands. Mason offers valuable chapters that shed light on how strategies drawn from the eighteenth-century advertising trade were used to shape the public personae of both literary celebrities. Mason is particularly strong in his clear-sighted discussion of how gender stereotypes shaped strategic promotion of each author, and in what form they converged or diverged.

Byron and Landon’s ascendancy to stardom owed a great deal to strategies that exploited both visual and textual networks. A striking aspect of their prominence was the dissemination of visual material to exploit popularity. Agents for Byron and Landon disseminated reproductions of carefully commissioned portraits through multiple channels, using them to accompany literary profiles, book publications, flyers, and ads preceding public lectures and events. Such portraits were carefully designed to offer managed constructions of authorial identity, emphasizing romantic sensibilities and individual genius.

Equally astute was the use of literary reviews and print culture outlets to boost individual profiles. As Mason points out, Byron and his chief literary promoter, the publisher John Murray, drew on traditions established in the 1740s and 1750s, when the literary review took root in Britain. The pages of journals such as the Monthly Review (founded in 1749) and the Critical Review (founded in 1755) featured critical reviews as a means of apprising readers of new works, and also as vehicles for boosting sales of titles issued by relevant journal owners. Murray ensured that, as Mason points out, such types of review criticism played a significant role in shaping Byron’s authorial reputations, with deliberate “puffing” (or self-interested promotion) supporting the buildup to the publication of Byron’s epic poem...