Literary Advertising and the Shaping of British Romanticism

Conclusion: The Art of Advertising

The Art of Advertising բ conclusion Given the evidence ushered forth in the preceding chapters, there should be little question that British advertising was thoroughly transformed between 1750 and 1850. To be sure, promotional theories and methods have continued evolving, especially with the explosion of printed media, the rise of data-driven marketing, and the dawn of electronic and digital communications. But, as we have seen, many of the core techniques of modern marketing—branding, product placement, market saturation, bandwagoning, visual rhetoric, disguised advertisements, and so forth— were thoroughly understood and widely practiced prior to the Victorian era. If there is any lingering doubt about the scale of British advertising by the late Romantic age, one need only consider John Orlando Parry’s 1835 watercolor A London Street Scene (see Figure C.1). In Parry’s London, the eye is seized less by the dome of St. Paul’s than by ubiquitous street posters advertising politicians, opera halls, haberdasheries, and pubs.1 It is easy to understand why Caroline Alice White suggested in 1849 that advertisements had come to function as “the social history of the times” (42) and Fraser’s Magazine would maintain three years later that “Catholic Emancipation, Reform Bills, and a few trifles of that sort, will be thrust back into the second rank: but steam locomotion and the puff-advertisement system will stand forth as the grandest of world-phenomena—as the symbols of the strides which society has made during the past quarter of a century” (Francis, 90). Even more pointedly, the London Society magazine for August 1863 proclaimed: “Nothing is done now without advertising” has become an indisputable statement in relation to almost every trade where there is any possibility of competi- Figure C.1. John Orlando Parry, A London Street Scene (1835). (Courtesy of the Alfred Dunhill Museum and Archive.) conclusion: the art of advertising 145 tion; and even the quietest, sternest representatives of the quiet old steady-going men of business, who rejoiced in their scorn of a puff, and long held fast to the proverb, that “Good wine needs no bush”—have latterly been compelled to adopt the new method which has been introduced by the revolution effected through advertisements. (“The Modern Art,” 188) As this book has chronicled, British advertising and literature share a common genealogy, their family lines routinely intersecting and occasionally merging over the course of the Romantic Century. On the one hand, the rise of advertising had an enormous impact on Romantic-era literature in Britain. New advertising technologies and practices catalyzed such crucial components of the modern literary system as institutionalized criticism, the celebrity author figure, and the unprecedented hyping of new titles. At the same time, men and women of letters had a profound impact on late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century advertising , pioneering many of the age’s most groundbreaking marketing methods. At the turn of the nineteenth century, puffery, product placement, and special-offer schemes were largely associated with the book trade, and the decades that followed would see writers and publishers outpacing professionals in virtually every other field in their pioneering uses of group-think psychology, appeals to celebrity , and visual marketing. Perhaps nothing better illustrates just how tight the kinship of literature and advertising had become in this era than a phenomenon with which I’d like to close—namely, the “art of advertising” debates of the middle decades of the nineteenth century. While, in the midst of the eighteenth-century explosion of advertising, the occasional writer noted the artistry of particular advertisements,2 it wasn’t until the second quarter of the nineteenth century that the British press began recurrently asking a previously unthinkable question: could advertising legitimately be considered a branch of the literary arts? Among the earliest noteworthy treatments of the question is a July 1824 Westminster Review article in which the writer, since revealed as John Hamilton Reynolds, half-jestingly notes how, in the absence of first-rate living bards, the Warren’s blacking lyricist (see Chapter 3) had emerged as Britain’s most influential and popular poet (“Professor Wilson’s Danciad,” 213). Seven months later Reynolds’s satirical partner, Thomas Hood, linked advertising and art even more explicitly in his parodically titled London Magazine squib, “The Art of Advertizing Made Easy. With Specimens of the Most Approved Kinds. For the Use of Tradesmen and Others. By a Lover of the Fine Arts.” After opening by...