John Strachan. Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-521-88214-9. Price: $99.00

Puffs, puffery, puffing, quacks, hacks, empirics, “anas,” jingles, handbills, sandwich men, wall-chalking, blacking, morocco men, little goes, perfumers, razor strops; Robert Warren, Henry Hunt, Thomas Bish, J.R.D. Huggins, Henry Colburn: these terms and names parade through John Strachan’s Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period, leading the reader into the vibrant world of Romantic period “commercial culture” (4). One comes away from Strachan’s investigation of the interactions and dialogue between advertising and satire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries firmly appreciating the ingenuity of that commercial culture, as if sitting before a window opened onto the noisy streets of its brand proprietors, advertising campaigns, and literary and political debates. Strachan finds the “spirit of the age” (6) alive in its “more quotidian cultural forms” (4), arguing that a study of “advertising … between 1780 and 1830” (9) will tell us much about “the leading cultural brand of the period, Romanticism” (11), and prove “sociohistorically revealing” (13). He is right on both counts. More specifically, he demonstrates convincingly how advertising and satire participated in –– and critiqued –– the “wider literary scene” (6) of the time, and shows how a focus on advertising brings a fuller awareness of “quotidian” life in the Romantic period. In this respect, Strachan’s book makes an important contribution to the growing scholarship on what we might call popular Romanticism, such as in William St. Clair’s The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge UP, 2004) and more recently in Andrew Franta’s Romanticism and the Rise of the Mass Public (Cambridge UP, 2007) or Richard Marggraf Turley’s work on Barry Cornwall (see European Romantic Review 19 [2008]: 253-273). Its great success resides in providing us a lexicon not just for talking about Romantic period advertising, but for reading it as an art in its own right and as a prevalent form of engagement with its socio-cultural context. The first two chapters comprise a “survey of Romantic period advertising and of the satirical responses to it” (9). Chapter 1 lays the foundation of puffery’s terminology and conventions. Strachan carefully builds an impression of a London (and England) “saturated” (20) with advertising, from newspapers to street processions to graffiti on walls to national campaigns. Here, we learn of various advertising forms, such as handbills, posters, jingles, and whitewashed walls; the techniques of advertisements, such as the patent, brand names inspired by Greek and Latin, testimonials, and typography; and how these forms and techniques relied on imitative or associational strategies to elevate the advertisements and advertisers. These strategies, in fact, justify approaching advertising as “‘an independent department of literature’” (9), a phrase from an 1843 essay on advertising by Thomas Hood that Strachan makes central to his treatment of Romantic puffery. As Strachan writes, “Borrowing from high culture … is part of what is, in my mind, the most significant device within the advertising literature of the age, literary associationism, whereby advertising gestures toward more prestigious discourses and is thereby dignified by association” (27; emphasis added). “Literary associationism” is a flexible interpretive tool and the key to Strachan’s reading of Romantic period advertising throughout, in which advertisers’ employment of “prestigious discourses” (especially poetry) for economic gain casts advertising as a distinctively Romantic art –– characterized by originality, genius, imagination, and the individual product and advertiser. Chapter 2 turns to contemporary satirical and parodic responses to advertising’s pretensions and the commercial culture more generally. Here, we see how satirists used “advertisements as formal models” (84), especially the “mock-advertisement” (73), to expose advertising’s “corrupting, staining influence” (108). Moreover, we see how advertising’s “models” and techniques become weapons …