The Rise of Mass Advertising: Law, Enchantment, and the Cultural Boundaries of British Modernity. By Anat Rosenberg

Abstract

In this work of dazzling scholarship, Anat Rosenberg provides not only a detailed and fascinating history of advertising in Britain between 1840 and 1914, but also a new way of conceptualizing the relationship between advertising, capitalism, and modernity. The book successfully recaptures what is easily overlooked or forgotten given our (over-)familiarity with it today: the tremendously disruptive impact of advertising, in particular the way in which it destabilized existing categories such as news, art, and science. Consequently, several of its chapters reconstruct the protracted boundary work which eventually established advertising as a legitimate but inferior form. Particularly insightful are chapters showing how useful advertising was in acting as a lightning rod for unease about the possibly corrupting influence of the profit motive in modern media (chapter 2) and medicine (chapter 4). In each case, advertising acted as the “dark alter ego”—“puffery” and “quackery” respectively—to the superior categories of trustworthy news and rational science (26). Advertising was something to be denigrated, but not into oblivion: its existence was essential to create and sustain the credibility of these other fields of activity. Law plays a marginal role in other histories of early advertising, the assumption being that these were advertising’s “wild west” years, when attempts at regulation were minimal and mostly ineffective. Rosenberg, a legal historian, takes a very different approach, marshalling evidence from a large set of court cases, many of them hitherto unstudied, to document the centrality of law to the boundary work she describes. In doing so, she makes the intriguing argument that common ideas we have about advertising—that it is biased, vulgar, exaggerated—are not axiomatic but “legally constructed” (32).