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THE ART OF ADVERTISEMENT 'THE SPECTATOR' OF STEELE

AND ADDISON

MODERN NEW YORK

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THE TASTE OF THE TOWN -OLD LONDON AND
SELF-ADVERTISEMENT- THE MASTERS OF
THE CRAFT-ADVERTISING AND POLITICS MR LLOYD GEORGE
-HIS UNEARNED INCREMENT-POLITICAL SATIRE- 'EPISTOLÆ
OBSCURORUM VIRORUM.'

IF we look at the records of the past, we are struck by nothing so forcibly as by the uniformity of human life. One age differs from another in style and costume, in wit and wisdom, in virtue and courage. Moral standards shift and sway. Genius comes and goes as it chooses. But life has been lived with the same purposes and in accordance with the same rules from the beginning of time. There has probably never been a century in which the art of advertisement has not flourished. He who has had something to sell has always desired to find a buyer. He has displayed his wares where best he might catch the public eye. He has used his friends as agents of distribution. He has implored his clients to spread abroad the excellent worth of his commodities. Those whom the voice of interested persons failed to reach were attracted, no doubt, by words inscribed upon walls and scaffoldings. With the introduction of periodical literature a new and a better way was discovered. If the journals made known to their readers the enterprises of

art and commerce, these enterprises, in exchange, did their best to support the journalists in affluence. At the outset of the eighteenth century, advertisement, as we know it to-day, was perfectly understood, and 'The Spectator' of Steele and Addison made its appeal to the public, and filled its coffers by precisely the same methods which our modern newspapers have made familiar. 'The Spectator' was, in the slang of these days, a good "medium." It might, we imagine, charge a high rate, because it fell into the proper hands. It was to be seen in the coffee-houses; it lay upon my lady's table; it was read by those who set the fashion and guided the taste of the town. As an arbiter of letters and the drama it was supreme, and it is hardly fanciful to suppose that its word of commendation might help to fill a theatre, or to sell an edition. If, then, we wish to reconstruct the social life of Queen Anne's reign, we cannot do better than study the advertisements of 'The Spectator,' which have served Mr Lawrence Lewis1 for an entertain

1 The Advertisements of 'The Spectator.' Being a Study of the Literature, History, and Manners of Queen Anne's England as they are reflected therein, as well as an illustration of the Origins of the Art of Advertising. By Lawrence Lewis. London: Constable & Co.

ing and wrong-headed little book.

The age of Anne resembled in not a few points our present age. It had the same wants; it knew the same weaknesses. It pursued by the like devious methods the same phantoms. Above all, it hoped to arrive at health and beauty by short cuts, and the purveyors of patent medicines and quack nostrums were as ready to humour it as these gentry are to deceive the sanguine sufferers of our own day. Here are a dozen practitioners eager to cure the small-pox, the king's evil, rheumatism, gout, or what you will. Here are experienced operators ready to "sweat, bathe, or cup" their patients. That eminent empirio, Sir William Read himself, whom the Queen had consulted and made a knight, did not disdain to make known his prowess in the columns of The Spectator.' Surely, if any understood the art he.

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of advertising it was Once a mountebank, he had doubtless proclaimed his skill from the front of a booth. Moreover, like many another eminent physician, he knew what might be accomplished by proper entertainment. "He makes admirable punch," said Swift, "and treats you in gold vessels." A long experience of country fairs had taught him to blow his own trumpet, and this he did to excellent purpose. "Sir William Read," thus runs the best contrived of his advertisements, "principal Oculist, having been lately sent for to

attend several patients in Norfolk and Suffolk, is, at their Request, for the Publick Good, obliged to publish the Success he met with in the following Cures perform'd by him there, viz., the Lady Yollop, aged 70, Couched of a Cataract, and restor'd to Sight; Mr Carter, an Attorney, aged 75, restor❜d to perfect Sight," and so on. With the utmost prudence, Read puts the necessity of proclaiming

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cures upon his patients, and hopes to win, at a blow, a discreet reputation for modesty and a wider field for the exercise of his talents. advertisers have not the mountebank's touch, but all acclaim their superiority over rivals and their skill in combating fashionable complaints. And nothing follows the fashion more obediently than disease. Where to day we read of anæmia and neuritis, we heard then of hypochondriack melancholy and the vapours, instantly cured by admirable confects, famous drops, or angelick snuffs. Quacks are not alone in the desire of publicity. To The Spectator' resorted also those who had lost watches or snuff-boxes, dogs or lace, jewels or lottery-tickets. you read, the whole panorama of life passes before you. To-day "Hamlet is to be performed at the desire of several Ladies of Quality"; to-morrow Mr Penkethman takes his benefit at Drury Lane in "The Amorous Widow, or ous Widow, or the Wanton Wife," with Mrs Oldfield, Doggett, Wilks, and Johnson in the cast. What would we not

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give to see him! On December 10th, 1714, subscribers are informed that the first volume of Pope's translation of Homer "shall be delivered Two Months sooner than the Time promised." The announcements of houses to let remind us how rapidly fashionable neighbourhoods fall into disgrace. "A new-built brick house" in Hoxton was then deemed suitable for a gentleman's family. A house in Soho Square, boasting "four rooms of a floor, with closets, coach-house, stables, laundry," was still highly esteemed. In brief, there is no corner of life which the advertisements of 'The Spectator' do not illumine, and those who are interested in the history of manners owe a debt of gratitude to Mr Lawrence Lewis.

Unhappily Mr Lewis has not been content to record the manners and customs of the age of Queen Anne. He has thought it his duty gravely to censure the morality of Steele and his colleagues. He values very lightly the publishers' ethics of the early eighteenth century. No foolish laudatio temporis acti for him! Give him modern New York and the Yellow Press for sound virtue and austere incorruptibility! As though patent medicines were unknown in the United States, he solemnly reprimands Steele for publishing advertisements of quacks and nostrums. And lest Steele's ghost might claim the benefit of the doubt he denounces him as inconsistent, because in his own text he inveighs against the charlatan doctors, whom he

calls "impostors" and "murderers." This, we would have thought, was the best proof of honesty. Not even the blameless Addison gets off scot-free. Mr Lewis thinks that there is "much to support an inference that Addison's papers on 'Paradise Lost' were printed with the ulterior motive of promoting the sale of Tomson's edition of Milton's epic, in which the public had taken but languid interest.". Even if this were the case, Addison's sin would not be unpardonable. Favourable reviews of books not uncommonly have the ulterior (and just) motive of promoting sales. There is nothing disgraceful, as far as we know, in Milton's epic that its sale should not be promoted. In truth, those who are not sensitive with the higher sensitiveness of modern America will not understand Mr Lewis's argument at all. His moral peroration, on the other hand, is easily intelligible. "We cannot but see, he writes, "that consciousness of a higher responsibility which most editors feel for matter, not only in the 'editorial' and

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news,' but also in the advertising columns, is something peculiar to a better age than that of Queen Anne." Instantly we recognise the tone and style of our own old friend Mr Pecksniff, discovering in The New York Journal' or in The Boston Herald' the "higher responsibility which Steele and Addison, poor wretched hacks of Queen Anne's reign, were never privileged to know.

If, then, we are to believe Mr Lewis, the "bright and brainy" editors of New York try upon their own vile bodies every patent medicine which they advertise. They test the cut of every reach-me-down coat, they examine the drains of every jerry-built house, they break their teeth upon every kind of candy, which they announce in their columns. It is not surprising that they who carry this enormous weight of responsibility upon their shoulders should die young or become prematurely old. And not merely do they guard the pockets of their readers, they protect their morals also, in a manner of which "poor Dick Steele"-that, we believe, is the proper note of patronageknew nothing. The Spectator' is, in Mr Lewis's opinion, a real sink of iniquity. The delicate morals of the United States could not be exposed to its contamination even for an hour. "Its advertisements," we are told," would probably render 'The Spectator,' if it were being published to-day, liable to criminal prosecution or exclusion from the United States Mail." Well, well, there is compensation in all things. If the United States Mail strains at a gnat, it swallows with perfect ease a whole caravan of camels. Those vast and truculent abortions known as Sunday Papers easily go into the maw which would reject the delicate and dainty fancies of Steele, were they offered it.

Neither Mr Lewis nor the United States Mail need be distressed. Nothing resembling

'The Spectator' is likely to come their way, and they may well congratulate each other on their "superior ethical standard."

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And for what offence is it that 'The Spectator' would "be liable to prosecution or exclusion"? Here is one of the offending and offensive paragraphs: "If the gentleman that sent a letter to Aldersgate Coffee House on Friday, the 2nd instant, will come to the person it was directed to, 'twill be taken very kindly." Shame! Breathes there a single ward politician, police captain, or Tammany Boss whose rugged cheek does not blush at the mere sound of these vile words! It is, indeed, an infamy to ask the pure - minded American citizen, whose morals are closely guarded by the United States Mail, to contemplate even for a moment the villainous age of Anne. We are astonished that Mr Lewis should be so recklessly imprudent as to have mentioned 'The Spectator' in print. But he did it, he pleads, with a good motive. He writes to unmask the imposture of the past. He complains that in the soft candlelight the gentleman in the great powdered wig looks better than he is. than he is. At this distance, "we do not know," says he, "he paid for his stars perhaps by the sale of places in Church and State, by treachery to friends, by cruelty, by betrayal of public trusts. We do not

guess that physically, mentally, and morally he and morally he is corrupt. So, if only to make us content with our own age, which for all its faults is on the average

ever so much a better one in which to live, it is well occasionally to see this place and yonder people near at hand, in the merciless sunlight of contemporary evidence." How brave an aspect wears the Pharisee when he makes broad his phylacteries! And as for the poor, silly, little age of Queen Anne, that has nothing to say in defence. It knew nothing concerning the higher morality of the United States Mail. It came into existence and died, and never heard that there was such a thing as graft or boodle!

The advertisement of to-day is the same in character as the advertisement of the eighteenth century. That is to say, the same merchants are clamouring to sell the same wares. Take up any newspaper you like and you will discover quacks, publishers, and theatrical managers insisting upon the same recognition in the same voice as in the age of Anne. The diseases to be cured have changed with the years. The taste in literature and the drama is not the same as it was when Steele and Addison pleased the town. But it is evident that medicine and amusement, health and beauty, are sought with no less energy now than then. And now, as then, the people is marvellously credulous. It It still believes every word that stands in print. It will waste its money on any nostrum, merely because it is asked, with as light a heart as ever it did. The problem, then, is unaltered. Only a hundred solutions are

offered to-day where of old one was thought sufficient. In two centuries advertisers and advertisements have increased more rapidly than any class or any industry. The ingenuity and capital that are wasted upon them pass belief. In the foolish project of making Mr Jones and Mrs Smith buy what they do not want, thousands of busy and quick-witted persons are engaged. Never in the world's history has there been so vast a squandering of energy. The mind of the man who has no need of anything is beguiled by anecdotes; his eye is flattered by blurred images called pictures. Eloquence is poured out upon him; he is given conundrums to guess; he is invited to arrive at a box of cigarettes through a lotteryoffice. The old habit of buying and selling is absurdly and wastefully complicated. That a man should buy what he wants appears a paradox to the modern advertiser, whose only object is to sell the man that which he does not want. And so well has the artifice succeeded that the journals of London are perishing, because the most highly gifted of their staff are led away to the more lucrative profession of writing advertisements, a profession so lucrative indeed that all who are engaged in it wear fur coats and drive in broughams. And it assumed its present shape no more than two centuries ago in Sam Buckley's office in Warwick Lane!

But though the sum of advertisements has increased immeasurably, in style and dignity

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