Bernard Shaw and Modern Advertising

187 Pages·2018·4.32 MB·English

by  Christopher Wixson

Bernard Shaw
and His
Contemporaries
BERNARD SHAW AND
MODERN ADVERTISING
PROPHET MOTIVES
Christopher Wixson
Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries
Series Editors
Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel
Massachusetts Maritime Academy
Pocasset, MA, USA
Peter Gahan
Independent Scholar
Los Angeles, CA, USA
The series Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries presents the best and
most up-to-date research on Shaw and his contemporaries in a diverse
range of cultural contexts. Volumes in the series will further the academic
understanding of Bernard Shaw and those who worked with him, or in
reaction against him, during his long career from the 1880s to 1950 as
a leading writer in Britain and Ireland, and with a wide European and
American following.
Shaw defined the modern literary theatre in the wake of Ibsen as a
vehicle for social change, while authoring a dramatic canon to rival
Shakespeare’s. His careers as critic, essayist, playwright, journalist, lec-
turer, socialist, feminist, and pamphleteer, both helped to shape the
modern world as well as pointed the way towards modernism. No one
engaged with his contemporaries more than Shaw, whether as contro-
versialist, or in his support of other, often younger writers. In many
respects, therefore, the series as it develops will offer a survey of the rise
of the modern at the beginning of the twentieth century and the subse-
quent varied cultural movements covered by the term modernism that
arose in the wake of World War 1.
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14785
Christopher Wixson
Bernard Shaw and
Modern Advertising
Prophet Motives
Christopher Wixson
Eastern Illinois University
Charleston, IL, USA
Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries
ISBN 978-3-319-78627-8 ISBN 978-3-319-78628-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78628-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018941875
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
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publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
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A
cknowledgements
Every monograph is fundamentally a collaborative venture, and I am
humbled by the network of benevolent individuals that animated this
one and sustained its author intellectually, emotionally, and creatively at
various moments throughout the process.
I am incredibly beholden to series editors Peter Gahan and Nelson
O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, for their kindness, enthusiasm, and deep reposi-
tory of Shavian knowledge. I am also sincerely appreciative of all of the
fine editorial work done by Tomas René and Vicky Bates at Palgrave
MacMillan on behalf of this project. Special thanks too to Debra Rae
Cohen, R. Darren Gobert, and three anonymous reviewers whose crit-
ical feedback was perceptive and insightful. A section of Chapter 1
and Chapter 2 first appeared as “Looking After the Drainage: Health,
Marketing, and the Turkish Bath in Bernard Shaw’s Misalliance” in
Modern Drama (60:1). That material is reprinted with permission from
University of Toronto Press, with thanks to Meaghan Lloyd for her help
securing it.
I also wish to thank Dr. John Boneham, Jane McGuinness, and Sue
Waterhouse (British Library), Eve Read (History of Advertising Trust),
Joshua Rowley and Pete Moore (Hartman Center, Duke University),
Sarah Johnson (Eastern Illinois University), the Council on Faculty
Research (Eastern Illinois University), and the librarians at Eastern
Illinois University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
who all provided invaluable research assistance during the process.
v
vi ACkNOWLEDGEMENTS
Warm gratitude is due to fellow members of the International Shaw
Society, whose support and guidance have been exceptional along the
way, especially Jennifer Buckley, Leonard Conolly, Richard Dietrich,
Ellen Dolgin, Brad kent, Gustavo A. Rodríguez Martín, Michael
O’Hara, Michel Pharand, Sally Peters, Lawrence Switzky, Jay Tunney,
and Matthew Yde, all of whom I admire as scholars and as people.
I also want to recognize colleagues at Eastern Illinois University and
its environs whose commitment to research and creative activity has been
nourishing and inspirational: Melissa Ames, Melissa Caldwell, kevin
Doolen, Christopher Gadomski, Anne Thibault Geen, Frank Monier,
Robin Murray, Linda Peete, Christina Peter, Dana Ringuette, Nick Shaw,
Anita Shelton, Jad Smith, Leslie Sweet-Myrick, Tim Taylor, and Angela
Vietto.
A quarter-century ago, Austin Briggs introduced me to Shaw with
Heartbreak House and modeled gracefully and passionately how to be
a teacher-scholar. For decades, the Shaw Festival directors Tadeusz
Bradecki, Jackie Maxwell, Neil Munro, and Christopher Newton, along
with their superb design teams and companies of actors, profoundly
deepened my understanding of the stage life of Shaw’s brilliant and com-
plex plays.
My mother, Donna Wixson, first cultivated in me the habit of theat-
ergoing and thus engendered what have become lifelong personal and
professional conversations with plays, playwrights, and theater practi-
tioners. During the process of writing, advice and encouragement from
my father, Neal Wixson, were thoughtful and impactful, as was the vital-
ity drawn from a community of family members: Lindsey Wixson, Lois
Worthington, Roland Worthington, and Valerie Worthington.
I am ineffably indebted to Marjorie for her love and support; her com-
mitment to the mission of the academy is remarkable and galvanizing.
Finally, I wish to thank especially Maisie and Charlie Wixson who as
toddlers reaffirmed for me the importance of sustained, undaunted curi-
osity and risk-taking in play and now in their middle childhood make me
grateful, happy, and proud to be engaged in meaningful, lifelong conver-
sations with them.
c
ontents
1 Introduction: “Press as Corrected, G.B.S.” 1
2 Prescription and Petrifaction: Proprietary Medicine,
Health Marketing, and Misalliance 31
3 “The Shadow of Disrepute”: G.B.S. and Testimonial
Marketing 59
4 “The Biggest Scoop in Advertising History”: Personality
Marketing, G.B.S., and the Near-Testimonial 93
5 “Those Magic Initials, G.B.S.”: Copywriting for the
Irish Clipper 133
Bibliography 163
Index 177
vii
l f
ist of igures
Fig. 1.1 Turkish bath advertisement, The Windsor Magazine 35:204
(December 1911), p. xviii 4
Fig. 3.1 Formamint advertisement, from Collier’s Magazine
(5 December 1914), p. 26 74
Fig. 3.2 Formamint advertisement, digital collections at the New York
Public Library 75
Fig. 4.1 Cartoon, Advertiser’s Weekly (March 15, 1929), p. 441 104
Fig. 4.2 Simmons advertisement, Time 13:18 (May 6, 1929), p. 29 120
Fig. 5.1 Irish Clipper advertisement, The New Yorker (July 17, 1948) 140
Fig. 5.2 Irish Clipper advertisement, The Saturday Review (July 17,
1948), p. 6 141
Fig. 5.3 Irish Clipper travel poster, ca. 1940s 151
ix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction:
“Press as Corrected, G.B.S.”
Should you set out to extol or to advertise Bernard Shaw,
you know that this has already been done with incomparable
energy and talent, and that it has been done by one who knows.1
—John Palmer
In its November 18, 1950 issue, The New Yorker reported that Scribner’s
bookstore, the day after Bernard Shaw’s death, “threw together a win-
dow display made up of a number of his works and a sign reading, ‘G.B.S.
1846–1950.’” The short article went on to recount how “Scribner’s Shaw
remained a hundred and four years old until the next day, when the year
of his birth was moved up to 1856. It was Scribner’s that was born in
1846.”2 The bookseller’s mistake actually produced an ideal piece of mar-
keting in which the writer (Shaw) is obscured by the client (Scribner’s) and
the brand (“G.B.S.”). It also creates two competing pictures of Shaw—an
author transfigured into a commodity by marketing over which he had lit-
tle control and a copywriter who expertly deployed self-a dvertising to mar-
ket his work and a larger political, ethical, and aesthetic vision.
Raymond Williams maintains that “the half-century between 1880
and 1930 [saw] the full development of an organized system of com-
mercial information and persuasion, as part of the modern distribu-
tive system in conditions of large-scale capitalism.”3 For Roy Church,
this apogee had its roots in “the late seventeenth century when, to
© The Author(s) 2018 1
C. Wixson, Bernard Shaw and Modern Advertising,
Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78628-5_1