Imaginative Decoration: Peregrine Acland as Author, Adman, and Advisor

Abstract

This article traces the fate of Peregrine Acland (1891–1963), who wrote a critically acclaimed novel based partly on his personal experiences as a Canadian hero of the First World War. He was inspired by George Bernard Shaw, whom he sought out while on military service in England. Documents recently discovered in the advertising archives of Duke University and entries in the diaries of Canada’s longest-serving prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, reveal that Acland was later torn between his job as a successful advertising copywriter and his literary ambitions. The article finds that Acland’s work for J. Walter Thomson and other advertising agencies, as well as for King, displaced energies that he might otherwise have employed to build on the literary success he achieved in 1929 with his novel All Else Is Folly, for which Ford Madox Ford wrote an enthusiastic preface. Acland was more complex and interesting than cursory accounts of his life suggest.