ADVERTISING AND

LIBERAL LITERATURE

NO DOUBT the advertising policies of periodicals have sins of their own to answer for, for the power of the advertiser is the power of patronage and can be easily abused. But those who complain of the bad reaction of advertising upon writers, especially upon radical writers, may get a certain consolation, whatever it amounts to, from remembering that advertising originally liberated the profession of writing and made it respectable and attractive. It took the writer off his patron’s staircase and invested him with a larger independence and self-respect, insured his maintenance and got him better wages for his work. It was the radical writer, too, who reaped the largest advantage; in fact, one might fairly say that advertising has been the most important single factor in the promotion of liberal literature.

The pursuit of this clew is interesting. As far as I know, the first advertisement ever printed was a book-ad that appeared in 1647. But the real history of advertising begins for our purposes eighteen years later with the establishment of the Oxford Gazette on November 7, 1665.

This was an official paper, the mouthpiece of the court of King Charles II. It was published twice a week on a single sheet about seven inches by ten, or approximately the size of a standard magazine page; printed on both sides in two columns, carrying about five hundred words to the column or two thousand words to the issue. Being published under royal auspices, it had, of course, the most pronounced editorial “slant” on all the news of those parlous times. It is doubtful whether anything in our day can match the industrious twisting and garbling and straightaway lying by which this newspaper bolstered the royalist cause.

Fox Bourne says that this was “almost the only newspaper allowed to King Charles’s subjects till near the end of his reign.” Hence, obviously, the publisher did not need to worry about circulation. He had all there was. Between the Licensing Act and the censorship, he had easy going. Furthermore, as he operated under patronage, he was independent of advertising; and, in fact, as long as he had the field to himself, he carried practically no advertising except court-notices. In early issues I saw only a few book-ads, some advertisements of runaway apprentices and one for a lost dog. When the court moved from Oxford to London, the paper took the name of the London Gazette with the issue of Feb. 4, 1669. A couple of years later a few more miscellaneous ads appear, and by 1680 they occasionally amount to as much as a column; but one may fairly say that this paper ran a dozen years without any general advertising business worth mentioning.

At this time the people of England were getting more or less uncertain and captious about the Stuart regime, and by 1682 some publisher seems to have thought that the insurgent spirit was strong enough to support a newspaper; so in that year, after the Gazette had enjoyed a clear field for seventeen years, a privately owned competitor called the Mercury appeared. Its policy was radical and progressive; its method a fine monochrome study in pure yellow. The editor—some earlier and nameless Hearst—did his work in a style that must remain the delight and the despair of imitators. In his earlier issues he set forth a declaration asserting his independence of court politics and influential persons. He laid down this challenge in the language of eighteen-carat insurgency, and seasoned it with urbane and salty innuendoes against the policy of the court paper. He closed his prospectus with the promise to stick by his insurgent programme and get out his paper as long as his undertaking was supported or “until stopt by Authority.”

Now what enabled him to do this? Advertising. There is no doubt of it, the analysis of his columns shows it. He ran more advertising in his first month than his subsidized contemporary ran in three years. His first issue carried long advertisements of two books that were a direct appeal to the insurgent spirit. One of these books was a work on religious philosophy, espousing the Puritan or Presbyterian doctrine and antagonizing the political alliance of church and State which was fostered by the Stuarts and Archbishop Laud. It does not seem any great piece of radicalism in these days, but it was tremendous for its time. The other book was a history of “the Adventures and Discoveries of several famous Men” (among others, Sir Walter Raleigh), chronicling and commending the achievements of independent adventure and the come-outer spirit. Several real-estate advertisements appear in the same issue, and one of James Maddox, or Madox, the name being spelled both ways, an undertaker who seems to have worked out a new embalming process. Maddox’s advertisements ran consistently through the whole life of the Mercury and he used large space; so the process doubtless gave satisfaction.

The second issue of the Mercury contained a whole column of advertising, as much as any single issue of the Gazette came to in twelve years, and it presents the first specimen, as far as I know, of classified ads. The real-estate ads increase in number; and in the third issue some enterprising broker is quick to take a preferred position immediately under the real-estate classification, informing people in so many words that if they have any real-estate to dispose of they might better let him attend to it personally than trust to hit-or-miss advertising in a newspaper. There is a certain irony about this. He promises privacy, uses a three-star run-around to attract attention, and altogether makes the impression of a good, lively business-getter.

There are some peculiar features to these real-estate ads. First, it is rather remarkable that there are so many of them and that the terms so often indicate a great sacrifice. One place, for instance, costing £ 10,000 to build the house alone, will be let go in a lump for £ 4,000. Rentals are relatively as low as sales prices. It would seem that the troubled state of politics was suggesting to people of quality that they should pull out of their real-estate holdings and get ready to jump. This view is somewhat supported by the fact that these ads are nearly always rather more than anonymous; that is, the advertiser not only suppresses his name, but usually he does not even disclose the location of his property. One is struck, too, by the very modern way these ads have of talking about the climate. One after another keeps saying, “as good air as will be found anywhere within five miles of London,” etc. Now as far as natural climate goes, there could be little choice in air at any place within five miles of the London of that day—or of this, for that matter. Hence it would seem that although the factory system did not come in until nearly one hundred years after, there might have been something of a smoke problem even then.

The Mercury’s advertising rate is not known; but from calculations based on a financial statement of the Spectator about 1712, at the time the newspapers were all taxed out of existence by the monstrous and crushing levy of is per ad of any length, it seems reasonable to believe that the advertisements in the second issue of the Mercury paid for its paper, printing, and distribution. If so, the twelfth issue, carrying one and an eighth columns, and the seventeenth, carrying one and a half, represent considerable “velvet.”

The truly miscellaneous character of the Mercury’s advertising, as compared with that of its subsidized competitor, may be inferred from a single specimen. On September 8, 1682, a barber named Robert Whiting offers for sale—

Many hundreds of Natural Rarities, as Alegators, Croca-diles, Goanes, Armadels, Dolphins, King-Crabs, Snakes, Pellecans, Bugalogs, and all manner of Shells, Fish and Sea-Eggs.

In the eighteenth issue appears our true friend, our faithful stand-by, the sheet-anchor of newspaper advertising—the patent-medicine man. He makes his initial bow modestly, with a gentle panegyric on the virtues of Spruce Beer, a medicinal drink. A few issues later, however, namely, on September 19, 1682, he comes forth in all his war-paint and feathers in praise of the True Spirit of Scurvygrass.

Many imagine that the psychology of advertising is a modern discovery and that all the tricks of the trade have been worked out of whole cloth in the last quarter of a century or some such matter. To such I earnestly recommend a careful analysis of the Mercury’s advertisement of the True Spirit of Scurvygrass. It will encourage them by showing that even if we are now no better than we ought to be, we are at all events no worse than them of old time.

First, the True Spirit of the Scurvygrass is offered to a suffering public because “all are troubled with the Scurvy more or less.” This is an interesting statement, and calculated to start the guileless prowling for symptoms. It has a good force of suggestion; we have all perused more modern advertisements similarly equipped—yea, and in our own flesh have felt each horrid exponent and token rise responsive to the roll-call! Next follows a trade-mark warning, and a plain hint of the prevalence of rebating, or giving dealers a rake-off for pushing one’s goods:

Many for Lucre’s sake make something which they call Spirit of Scurvygrass, etc., and to promote it both in Town and Country give threepence or a Groat in a Glass to such as will boast and cry it up and dispraise far better than what they sell.

Beware of imitations! Refuse substitutes! None other is genuine! There is nothing particularly new about this, either; we have heard of it before, even to the rebating.

Then follows a courteous and ingenious effort to break the news gently, for which everyone is properly grateful, of course, but yet in spite of it—in spite of the tender solicitude for the Meaner sort, in spite of the transparent purity of the designs upon the Rich in behalf of their Poor Neighbours—one can not help noticing that this remedy was sold at what appears, for those days, a rousing price:

In order that the Meaner sort may easily reach it and the Rich be induced to help their Poor Neighbours, it is ordered to be sold for Sixpence a Glass.

About 1706 the patent-medicine ads begin to crowd all others out of the newspapers—a sure indication that they could and did pay a higher rate. No wonder! No wonder, either, that they were the only ads to survive the imposition of the devastating tax on advertisements some six years later. The True Spirit of Scurvygrass at sixpence a throw in a country where all are troubled with the Scurvy more or less, must have been a moneymaker. Its extremely wide range of therapeutic virtue also no doubt helped its sale. It would cure anything—anything. When the advertiser gets really warmed up to his work he rises to the strain of Dr. Dulcamara in the Elisir d’Amore:

Upon trial you will perceive this Spirit to root out the Scurvy and all its Dependents; as also to help Pains in the Head, Stomach, Shortness of Breath, Dropsies, lost Appetite, Faintness, Vapours, Wind in any Part, Worms, Itching, Yellowness, Spots, etc. Loose Teeth and Decayed Gums are helped by rubbing them with a few drops, as also any Pain in the Limbs. . . .

And so forth and so on. A dose of the True Spirit was a potshot at the whole category of ills that flesh is heir to. If it didn’t get what it went after, it would bag something else. It never fired any blank cartridges.

The True Spirit of Scurvygrass was first advertised in the Mercury on September 19, 1682. In the next issue, September 22, under an ad for a lost gold watch, appears an ad of imposing length—a whole half column of it—proclaiming—

the Old and True Way of Practicing Physick, revived by Dr. Tho. Kirleus, His Majesty’s Sworn Physician in Ordinary, presented by the Rt. Hon., the Earl of Shaftesbury, and approved by the most competent judges of the Art, the College of Physicians, under their Hands and Seal.

Thus it appears that, like his latter-day brethren who advertise, Dr. Tho. Kirleus was “a graduate physician in regular standing.” But whatever his professional status may have been, Dr. Tho. was a master of the art of advertising. Within the space of forty-two words—only forty-two words—this remarkable man manages to crowd nearly every trick of the modern medicine-monger:

he gives his Opinion for nothing to any that writes or comes to him, and safe Medicines for little, but to the Poor for Thanks; and in all Diseases where the Cure may be discerned, he expects nothing until it be cured.

Analyze this prospectus. Consultation gratis; consultation by mail; “harmless vegetable remedy”; free treatment for those unable to pay; no cure, no pay. Only one thing is missing; and it is supplied in the very next sentence by the swift and masterly hand of Dr. Tho.:

Of the Gout he cured himself ten years since, when crippled with Knots in his Hands and Feet, but now able to go with any Man of his age ten or twenty Miles.

There we have it! That last touch rounds out the advertisement, makes it perfect, and establishes an open channel and communication with the enterprise of our modern age! “One who has suffered from rheumatism for seventeen years, etc., etc., will send by mail, etc., etc.” How pleasant and restful and thoroughly at home it makes one feel to be rewarded with finds like this among the dust and ashes of the lamented past, before the era of commercialism had set in!

Dr. Tho. Kirleus was a persistent and consistent advertiser, but subsequent indications show that while he became prosperous, he did not live long to enjoy his triumphs. His affairs went on, however, managed by competent hands and directed by heads that had thoroughly learned the value of advertising, as we shall shortly see.

The Mercury passed out of existence in 1686, whether from natural causes or “stopt by Authority” I do not know. The next insurgent paper that I examined for advertising was the Review, established by Daniel Defoe in 1700, fourteen years after the end of the Mercury. As a muckraker, the author of Robinson Crusoe was entitled to the red ribbon. He knew every political and social situation in England; he knew the strength and weakness of every element in its civilization; he had an unfailing instinct for the psychological moment in journalism; he knew just what to write about and when to play it up, and how to use the right word in the right place with a calm and deadly accuracy that never failed. Although the actors in those scenes have long since passed into infamous oblivion, it is yet a perennial pleasure to turn to Daniel’s pages and watch him kerosene some mongrel politician’s coat-tails and apply the match.

Naturally, these activities attracted unfavorable attention, so that Defoe seems occasionally to have stood from under. He speaks in one place of editing his paper sometimes at a distance of 400 miles from London. He had trouble also with the news companies; the “Hawkers or Shops,” he says, would not handle his goods—too much sedition in them, likely. He had, however, a London agent named Mathews who seems to have been a hustler, so between them they were able to get the paper pretty well distributed in spite of official opposition and the timidity of newsdealers. The people stood by Defoe, and in four years’ time he was able to get out a twenty-eight page monthly supplement, a real magazine, the precursor of our present monthly periodicals. This contained many modern magazine features; one of which, however—the write-up of some current event in excellent Latin verse—would probably not get very far in these times.

All this, again, was kept up by advertising. In 1710 Defoe speaks of financing a new project by subscription “until it shall be able to support itself,” but the estimated cost of paper and presswork leaves little doubt that at the outset it was rather more than covered by advertising. There is some reason for believing that the advertising rate was based upon circulation, for there is record of one paper published about this time that gave away a thousand copies of one issue as “padding.” This, however, is only conjecture. Either Defoe himself or his agent Mathews was what we should now call a crackerjack solicitor, for it is in Defoe’s paper that we particularly notice the tendency to crowd out the low-priced ads in favor of those that could and would bring up the rate, such as cosmetics, patent medicines, trusses, and goods in the luxury class, in which there was presumably a very large margin of profit. It appears from Defoe’s ads that many of these goods, especially patent medicines, were handled by booksellers.

The first illustrated ad appears in 1706—a rude wood cut of some trusses that a manufacturer was putting on the market. Defoe himself had little use for drugs or doctors; in one place he says editorially that “what the ancients fabulously reported of Pandora’s box is strictly true of the doctor’s packet; and that it contains in it the seeds and principles of all diseases.” Defoe evidently had no qualms about offending his best advertisers. Nor yet had Steele. Steele, in the Spectator, curses quacks as impostors and murderers, while tranquilly advertising probably the very worst of them; and from 1708 on Defoe’s paper carried hardly anything but a line of patent-medicine advertising like this:

All Melancholy and Hypochondriacal Distempers of Mind with strange Fears, Dismal Apprehensions, great Oppression and Sinking of Spirit (little understood and seldom Cured by any common Means). Also Sick-Fits, Faintings, Tremblings and other Disorders arising from Vapours, etc., are successfully Cured (with God’s blessing) by a Physician well experienced and of more than 20 Years’ Practice in these deplorable Cases.

“With God’s blessing” is certainly a very handsome proviso, and does the writer credit. A similar pious concession appears in another advertisement of the same issue, which I quote for the sake of another familiar trick of the trade, namely, the “sealed package,” which I believe makes its first appearance here:

Most excellent strengthening Pills, which give certain Help in all Pains or Weakness of the Back (either in Man or Woman) occasioned by a Strain or Wrench or any other cause; being a sure Remedy (under God) in such cases for Cure. At 3s a Box containing 8 Doses (sealed up) with printed Directions.

We see also from Defoe’s paper that by 1707 a good deal of the charitable bread cast on the waters by our fine old friend Dr. Tho. Kirleus had begun to float back. Dr. Tho. had meanwhile been gathered to his fathers, but the business was carried on by his son’s widow, who, for consistency and explicitness of advertising, might be regarded as the Lydia E. Pinkham of that bygone day. She recommends his medicines for a variety of disorders not contemplated by the good old man’s original advertisement which we found running in the Mercury, and she specifies some of them with a Hogarthian directness which we must not quote. We find that—

Mary Kirleus, the Widow of John Kirleus, son of Dr. Tho. Kirleus, a sworn Physician in Ordinary to King Charles II., sells (rightly prepared) his famous Drink and Pills; experienced above 50 years to cure all Ulcers, Sores, Scabs, Itch, Scurf, Scurvies, Leprosies ... These incomparable Medicines need no Words to express their Virtues ... In Compassion to the distressed, she will deal according to the Patient’s Ability. The Drink is 3 s the Quart, the Pill is the Box with Directions and Advice Gratis.

“Above 50 years”—truly a long time in the little life of men! John, too, we perceive, has gone—gone to rejoin Dr. Tho. But Mary is still with us, very much alive and on the job!

Yes, whatever our impatience with the control of periodicals by force of advertising patronage, it is well to remember the immense emancipating power exercised upon writers of the past by this same force. Advertising enabled the London Mercury to come out as a red-hot insurgent paper and do an enormous service to liberal thought, when nothing else in the world could have held it up over one issue. It emancipated writers from the more personal and irresponsible sort of patronage that controlled the Gazette, for instance. It encouraged them to say what they pleased, even to the extent of abusing their best advertisers, as Steele did, and Defoe. It was advertising that unchained Defoe and galvanized his elbow and pointed his quill, and enabled him to do tremendous service to the cause of liberalism at a time when it most needed service.

And even to-day perhaps things are not as bad as they might be. I am not able to discuss the plight of the professional writer or the propagandist, but there is another class of writers who seem to me still under a very considerable obligation to advertising. I refer to the large number of what one might call marginal minds, who have no idea of writing for a living, but who write a good deal, merely to express themselves, merely to say what they think, while getting their living some other way. Advertising, by maintaining a great body of periodical literature, furnishes these the opportunity to get into print; and thus, out of this mass of more or less mediocre and unprofessional self-expression there occasionally emerges one who finds he has a gift for it. Then, as advertising has enabled him to discover himself, so it is advertising that enables him to develop himself, that gives him the encouraging and almost necessary practice in seeing himself in print. So while its bearing may have changed somewhat, one may still say that advertising is performing its historic public service in liberating and stimulating the potential writer.