In her study of nineteenth-century British advertising, Anat Rosenberg deliberately places her analysis of emerging advertising practices within a network of other social worlds: the law, journalism, art, science, and medicine. Lavishly illustrated, with over one hundred images, and drawing on extensive primary sources—including civil and criminal legal cases, legislation, contemporaneous periodicals, government documents, and contemporaneous commentary—Rosenberg's book paints a detailed picture of how people in that time and place responded to the emergence of mass advertising and debated its boundaries.
Rosenberg describes how law, defined as “a dynamic part of cultural negotiation” and a “normative enterprise” designed to disseminate “the view of modernity-as-disenchantment,” helped create boundaries between advertising and other fields (pp. 10, 11). But the very necessity of such legal efforts to distinguish news, art, and medicine from advertising also suggests just how much in common advertising has had with those fields. Like Eugene McCarraher's The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity (2019), Rosenberg's overall agenda is to critique the Weberian notion that capitalism replaced people's dependence on “enchantment” (religion, superstition, and irrational beliefs) with rationality, or “disenchantment.” According to Rosenberg, advertising in nineteenth-century Britain, then primarily experienced in newspapers and on walls covered with posters (bills), straddled enchantment and disenchantment. On the one hand, she notes, “Advertising enlivened capitalist life with some experiences that supernatural entities had once supplied” (p. 92). But on the other hand, advertising was attacked and defended for its adherence to facts and reason, to the claims of science and medicine. It was thus both rational and irrational.
In the 1840s, for example, the Stamp Act of 1712, which taxed every newspaper advertisement, was attacked as an undue penalty on the essential information that merchants sought to communicate to the public. Once the tax was rescinded, the number of newspapers in Britain grew from 563 in 1851 to 2,421 in 1916; ad revenue clearly made this enormous expansion of newspapers possible (p. 106). But these claims came also with a cost: if ads were information, they could not be easily and clearly distinguished from news. Some newspaper publishers, advancing what Rosenberg calls the “pecuniary view,” argued that the information in ads was more biased than news because the advertiser was motivated only by the hope of profits (p. 110). But newspapers, obviously, were profit-motivated businesses too. So, in order to distinguish themselves from their advertisers, some newspaper publishers adopted what Rosenberg calls “the professionalist view,” in accordance with which they created divisions and hierarchies of labor separating news from advertising and, eventually, outsourced many advertising functions (sales, copywriting, collections) to advertising agencies (p. 110). Meanwhile, however, the distinction between news and advertising could be problematic. A news account of a drowning might turn out to be “an invention of the advertisers of the watch allegedly found on the body,” or an altercation at a theater over a lady wearing a too-tall hat and blocking the view might turn out to be a “put-up job” to draw media attention to the theater (pp. 121, 123). While newspaper publishers sought to increase sales and profit margins through sensational stories, they often worked to distinguish this “news” from paid placements by refusing to accept ads that resembled news stories. But publishers could not go too far in delegitimatizing advertising, notes Rosenberg, “without undermining their own financial viability” (p. 132).
Advertising also threatened the autonomy and prestige of art and science. In her discussion of the boundaries between advertising and art, Rosenberg focuses on laws and regulations that created new property rights for billposting. Who had the right to post bills (posters) and where? Debates over hoardings covered with multiple bills often revolved around aesthetics; thus, as the billposting industry expanded, trade organizations developed standards and boundaries, drawing distinctions between the city and the country, or between places of commerce and natural landscapes. As for science, legal cases concerning “quackery” in advertising arose from the rapidly professionalizing field of medicine. Rosenberg considers several patent-medicine fraud and libel cases in which courts viewed the ads as “an epistemologically doubtful but not illegal field of exaggeration” (p. 236). Advertisers defended themselves by claiming that their puffery, or unconvincing hyperbolic speech, wasn't meant to be taken seriously; it was “inherently ineffective, rather than dangerous” (p. 243). Rosenberg concludes with a discussion of the “market enchanters,” the professional ad makers who “self-branded as modern magicians” (p. 321). Ad makers turned to psychological theories in order to promote themselves to their clients as manipulators of consumer desires. She argues that the logic of law, intended as a force of disenchantment, had the ironic effect of unleashing its opposite in advertising.
This reviewer, unfamiliar with nineteenth-century British history, law, or advertising, finds many of the richly detailed narratives fascinating and the illustrations illuminating. However, as a historian of American advertising, I have some questions. Is the Weberian thesis of disenchantment so generally accepted as to require debunking? Does framing the study as a critique of Weber risk overlooking other useful perspectives on how and why advertising developed in this period? Would there not be factors other than the use of law that could help explain ad practitioners’ interest at the turn of the century in psychological theories and irrational appeals? Stephen Fox argues in The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and Its Creators (1984) that the ad industry has swung back and forth between claiming to appeal to consumers through rationality, focusing on product information (this soap will clean your clothes), and irrationality, emphasizing the consumer's emotions (this soap will make you feel loved). Is advertising the only cultural form that produces the mix of the rational and irrational that Rosenberg documents here? Advertising's interactions with and roots in a myriad of forms—theater, literature, visual art—might indicate that there are still rich veins to mine here.
