Bernard Shaw and Modern Advertising

by Christopher Wixson

  Glimpsed retrospectively through Misalliance , the first half of 1909 was a perfect storm in terms of thematic raw material about commercialization and health, and Shaw skillfully weaves his perspectives on everything from Secret Remedies to Selfridge into what would become a prototypical “play of ideas.” 69 Yet, as much as he uses Misalliance to articulate his skepticism about foolish proprietary cures and endorse the proper way to apply physic to an invalid civilization, three of its characters complicate his position, as images of their creator. Shaw’s statement in a letter to Matthew Edward McNulty that “Gunner is ME” 70 has invited comparisons between the character and the young playwright when he first arrived in London, frustrated by mundane clerking and murky parentage, practicing self-education, and engaged with socialism. The particular tableau of Gunner’s head atop the portable bath unit though has implications with regard to Shaw’s public persona (“G.B.S. ”), itself a hybrid creation of man and wellness advertisement. 71 In countless interviews, op-ed pieces, and reviews, “G.B.S.” so presented himself and his lifestyle as triumphantly salubrious that he became copy incarnate.

  Two characterizations of the playwright made by contemporary scholars already cited in this volume’s first chapter bear repeating, Michael Holroyd’s suggestion that “G.B.S. was not only a vegetarian but a living advertisement for vegetarianism” 72 and Sally Peters’s vision:Carrying his woolen bedsheets with him when he traveled, pulling on gloves to keep his hands clean in the streets, wearing digital socks, garbed in the yellowish red suit, the scrupulously clean Shaw was an immaculate walking mannequin, an elaborate advertisement for the hygienic way of life. 73

  In this sense, Lina also functions as a stand-in for the playwright’s public face, as she is consistently engaged in performing herself as the poster child of physical and spiritual health. Considering the playwright’s own proclivity for mouthing maxims, Tarleton too is a version of “G.B.S.” 74 As Gustavo Rodríguez Martín has argued, his plays “are filled with quotations from the most popular to the most obscure authors [that discursively] provide an authoritative argument, generally in a higher register than the vernacular.” 75 In fact, all of Shaw’s writing is shot through with the shrewd ideological deployment of what Martín calls “modified quotations,” suggesting a substantial debt owed on the part of his media persona to the mode of patent medicine advertising the Century Thermal Bath Company deploys so well in their booklet. Clearly, the playwright’s public persona is an amalgam of all three characters, a creation resulting from a determined trademarking campaign that profitably took cues from the health commodity culture he often denounced but always with an eye not simply for advertising himself but promoting a Shavian way of living. The portable Turkish bath unit and its packaging at the core of Misalliance is thus, for the playwright , both an object of critique and emulation. In a larger sense, its complex figuration in the play epitomizes Shaw’s larger ambivalence towards commodity culture as often fraudulent, “desultory and possibly detrimental to society’s progress; yet [also potentially] a means of achieving social change and autonomy.” 76 As he writes in The Revolutionist’s Handbook ,The Anarchist, the Fabian , the Salvationist, the Vegetarian, the doctor, the lawyer, the parson, the professor of ethics, the gymnast, the soldier, the sportsman, the inventor, the political program-maker, all have some prescription for bettering us; and almost all of their remedies are physically possible and aimed at admitted evils. 77

  Notes

  1.Bernard Shaw. Collected Letters 1898–1910. Ed. Dan H. Laurence. New York: Viking, 1985. 130.

  2.Bernard Shaw. “The Revolutionist’s Handbook.” In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 2. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 739–80. 768.

  3.Dan H. Laurence. Bernard Shaw: A Bibliography, vol. 2. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. 881–2.

  4.James C. Moffett. “Should Advertisements Be ‘Signed,’ Like Articles.” Printers’ Ink 76.1 (6 July 1911): 58, 60–1. 60–1.

  5. E. McKenna . “The Dramatization of Advertising Ideas.” Printers’ Ink 112.8 (19 August 1920): 93–6. 93.

  6.Bernard Shaw. Sixteen Self-Sketches. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1949. 66.

  7.Dan H. Laurence. Collected Letters, vol. 1. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1965. 97.

  8.Alice McEwan. “Commodities, Consumption, and Connoisseurship: Shaw’s Critique of Authenticity in Modernity.” SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies 35.1 (November 2015): 46–85. 73, 63.

  9.Bernard Shaw. “Preface” to The Doctor’s Dilemma. In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 3. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 225–320. 294.

  10. Fintan O’Toole . Judging Shaw: The Radicalism of GBS. Dublin: Prism, 2017. 250.

  11.T. R. Nevett. Advertising in Britain: A History. London: The History of Advertising Trust, 1982. 24.

  12.Raymond Williams. “Advertising: The Magic System.” In The Cultural Studies Reader, 2nd edition. Ed. Simon During. London: Routledge, 1999. 320–36. 329.

  13.Jackson Lears. Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America. New York: Basic Books, 1994. 98.

  14.Takahiro Ueyama. Health in the Marketplace: Professionalism, Therapeutic Desires, and Medical Commodification in Late-Victorian London. Palo Alto, CA: The Society for the Promotion of Science and Scholarship, 2010. 25.

  15.“The Press, the Quacks, and the Public.” British Medical Journal 1726 (17 January 1894): 208.

  16.James Gregory. Of Victorians and Vegetarians: The Vegetarian Movement in Nineteenth-Century Britain. London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2007. 70.

  17.Thomas Richards. The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle 1851–1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. 173.

  18.Efforts to put forth bills on advertising in both houses of Parliament were not successful until the mid-1930s and early 1940s.

  19.Bernard Shaw. The Doctor’s Dilemma. In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 3. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 321–436. 344, 346.

  20.For biographer St. John Ervine , Tarleton also evokes two other “mercantile men” notorious for their virtuosic marketing, Andrew Carnegie and William Whiteley (428): Carnegie, the self-educated Scottish industrialist who, in addition to establishing a system of free libraries in the United States, compulsively integrated Shakespearean quotations throughout his late nineteenth-century essays on public policy, especially economic matters; Whiteley , the self-proclaimed “Universal Provider,” a prosperous department store entrepreneur and philanderer, shot dead by his illegitimate son in 1907. Shaw clearly drew upon both for plot and characterization in Misalliance. See St. John Ervine . Bernard Shaw: His Life, Work and Friends. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1956.

  21.Elizabeth Outka. Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 123.

  22.Nevett, 74.

  23.Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska. “Building a British Superman: Physical Culture in Interwar Britain.” Journal of Contemporary History 41.4 (October 2006): 595–610. 598.

  24.Ibid., 601.

  25.Richards, 173.

  26.J. Ellen Gainor. “Bernard Shaw and the Drama of Imperialism.” In The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics. Ed. Sue-Ellen Case and Janelle G. Reinelt. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991. 56–74. 57. Tracy Davis, also connects the play (albeit more broadly) to imperial discourse in “Shaw’s Interstices of Empire: Decolonizing at Home and Abroad.” In The Cambridge Companion to Bernard Shaw. Ed. Christopher Innes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 218–39.

  27.Margery M. Morgan. A Drama of Political Man: A Study in the Plays of Harley Granville Barker. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1961. 191.

  28.Bernard Shaw. Misalliance. In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 4. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 143–253. 143.

  29.Peter Kandela. “The Rise and Fall of
the Turkish Bath in Victorian England.” Journal of Dermatology 39 (2000): 70–4. 72.

  30.E. S. Turner. Taking the Cure. London: Michael Joseph, 1967. 231.

  31.Kandela, 74.

  32.“Turkish Baths at Home.” Supplement to Pall Mall Magazine 43.192 (April 1909): 14.

  33.“Trade Notes.” The Chemist and Druggist 60.2 (11 January 1902): 45.

  34.“The Power of Heat: Turkish Baths at Home.” Century Thermal Bath Cabinet Company Booklet, @1901. Special Collections, Cambridge University Library.

  35.Richards, 193.

  36.John Strachan and Claire Nally. Advertising, Literature and Print Culture in Ireland, 1891–1922. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 31–2.

  37.For example, the error turns up in an ad for the Quaker Hot Air and Vapor Bath Cabinet on page two of the St. John Daily Sun for 23 February 1897 and again on page 36 of the periodical Good Health 2.2 (July 1903) in a blurb entitled “Antiquity of the Bath” that charts Homer’s allusions to the baths. The spurious quotation is used, too, in less conspicuously promotional writing, such as Durham Dunlop’s The Philosophy of the Bath (1868) and an essay entitled “Baths and Bathing, in Their Historical and Hygienic Aspects” in Self Culture: A Magazine of Knowledge 6.2 (November 1897).

  38.Jennifer Wicke. Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement, and Social Reading. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. 81.

  39.Tony Stafford. “Postmodern Elements in Shaw’s Misalliance.” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 29 (2009): 176–88. 184.

  40.Shaw, Misalliance, 165.

  41.Ibid., 197.

  42.John A. Mills. Language and Laughter: Comic Diction in the Plays of Bernard Shaw. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1969. 130.

  43.J. L. Wisenthal. The Marriage of Contraries: Bernard Shaw’s Middle Plays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974. 131.

  44.Mills, 130.

  45.Eugène Ionesco and Jack Undank. “The Tragedy of Language: How an English Primer Became My First Play.” The Tulane Drama Review 4.3 (March 1960): 10–13. 13.

  46.The title of Tarleton’s pamphlet “The Romance of Business” certainly invites comparison with Selfridge’s notorious book The Romance of Commerce, in which he articulates his philosophy and legitimates his work as valuable. Although Selfridge claimed he had written it before the war, Commerce was not published until 1918, almost a decade after Misalliance premiered. As such, the tantalizing possibility exists that Selfridge drew inspiration from a fictional character based partially on himself.

  47.Laura Ugolini. “Men, Masculinities, and Menswear Advertising, c.1890–1914.” In A Nation of Shopkeepers: Five Centuries of British Retailing. Ed. John Benson and Laura Ugolini. London: I.B. Tauris, 2003. 80–104. 96.

  48.Edward S. Prior. “Upon House-Building in the Twentieth Century.” In Modern British Domestic Architecture and Decoration. Ed. Charles Holme. London: Offices of the Studio, 1901. 9–14. 11–12.

  49.Helen C. Long. The Edwardian House: The Middle-Class Home in Britain 1880–1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993. 18.

  50.Ibid., 26.

  51.Jon Hegglund. “Defending the Realm: Domestic Space and Mass Cultural Contamination in Howards End and An Englishman’s Home.” English Literature in Transition 1880–1920 40.4 (1997): 398–423. 399.

  52.David J. Eveleigh. Bogs, Baths, and Basins: The Story of Domestic Sanitation. Thrupp: Sutton Publishing, 2002. 87.

  53.H. R. Jennings. Our Homes and How to Beautify Them. London: Harrison & Sons, 1902. 236.

  54.Hegglund, 399.

  55.J. H. Kellogg. “Are We a Dying Race?” Good Health: A Journal of Hygiene 33.1 (January 1898): 1–4. 2.

  56.Wisenthal, 134.

  57.Bernard Shaw. “Preface” to Misalliance. In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 4. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 13–142. 58.

  58.Kellogg, 2.

  59.Hegglund, 410.

  60.Alice McEwan. “‘The ‘Plumber-Philosopher’: Shaw’s Discourse on Domestic Sanitation.” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 34 (2014): 75–107. 93, 91.

  61.Richards, 188–9.

  62.McEwan, “Plumber-Philosopher,” 93.

  63.Richards, 195.

  64.Gainor, 68.

  65.Irene Vanbrugh. To Tell My Story. London: Hutchinson, 1950. 205–6.

  66.Matthew Yde. Bernard Shaw and Totalitarianism: Longing for Utopia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 6, 9.

  67.Coincidentally, Shaw’s neighbor and friend Arthur Conan Doyle made the Turkish bath an ongoing element in his Sherlock Holmes stories as the detective and Watson frequent public baths, and “The Illustrious Client” (1924) even begins with the pair “drying out” after a steam. Appearing in The Strand in December of 1911 (the year following the premiere of Misalliance), “The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax” begins with an exchange about the treatment’s benefits. Holmes queries why Watson prefers “the relaxing and expensive Turkish rather than the invigorating home-made article.” The doctor replies that he has been “feeling rheumatic and old” and that “a Turkish bath is what we call an alterative in medicine—a fresh starting-point, a cleanser of the system.” The Final Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. New York: Heritage Press, 1957. 1330.

  68.Alex C. Michalos and Deborah C. Poff, eds. Bernard Shaw and the Webbs. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. 104.

  69.Of course, still another recent event surely in the mix for Shaw was the appearance of H. G. Wells’s latest work, itself prominently concerned with the art and profession of advertising. First serialized in the English Review between December 1908 and March 1909 and appearing in book form in February 1909, Tono-Bungay was “the first major English novel to place promotion at its center” (Ross 32). Michael L. Ross. Designing Fictions: Literature Confronts Advertising. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015.

  70.Collected Letters, 233.

  71.It may be worth remembering that Shaw, in The Quintessence of Ibsenism , describes Shakespeare’s portrait as a “laundry advertisement of a huge starched collar with his head sticking out of it” (283). Bernard Shaw. The Quintessence of Ibsenism. In Selected Non-dramatic Writings of Bernard Shaw. Ed. Dan H. Laurence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965. 205–306.

  72.Michael Holroyd. Bernard Shaw, Volume One: 1856–1898: The Search for Love. New York: Vintage Books, 1988. 86.

  73.Sally Peters. “Shaw’s Life: A Feminist in Spite of Himself.” In The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw. Ed. Christopher Innes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 3–24. 12. For additional information on the psychological underpinnings of Shaw’s health regimens, vegetarians, and clothing idiosyncrasies, see Peters’s Bernard Shaw: The Ascent of the Superman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

  74.Margery Morgan nicely summarizes the way in which Tarleton and so many elements of the play he inhabits are parts of Shaw himself (179–83).

  75.Gustavo A. Rodríguez Martín. “‘I Often Quote Myself’ (and Others): Modified Quotations in the Play of Bernard Shaw.” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 31 (2011): 192–206. 194–5.