Edited by Chris Jenks - carlosmoreno.info

ADVERTISING: THE RHETORICAL IMPERATIVE
of the methods that some advertisers were using, ‘by today’s standards
most ads were straightforward and informative’ 5 . Williams makes much
the same case, in reverse order, saying that, ‘while the majority of
advertisements remained straightforward’, mountebanks and hustlers
were giving the word ‘advertising’ a ‘more specialised meaning’. 6 Joseph
Addison, co-founder of the Tatler, was an early student of advertising. In
the Tatler for 14 September 1710, for example, he enumerates some of
the devices used by advertisers to ‘catch the Reader’s Eye’. These
devices include ‘Asterisks and Hands’, although ‘the N.B.’ was more in
fashion at this time, as well as ‘little Cuts and Figures’ and ‘the blind
Italian Character, which…gives the curious Reader fomething like the
Satisfaction of prying into a Secret’. 7
As Addison says, all these devices are to catch the reader’s eye, they are
intended as ways of drawing attention to a thing which otherwise may
‘pass over unobserved’; as such, they conform to the sense of advertising
as informing. Indeed, Addison explicitly says in this article that the third
and last function that advertisments perform is to ‘inform the World’ where
they may be furnished with almost every necessity. ‘If a Man has Pains in
his Head, Cholicks in his Bowels, or Spots in his Clothes, he may here
meet with proper Cures and Remedies’ he explains. 8 It may also be worth
noting that Addison’s example follows the form of the siquis, ‘If
anyone…then …’, mentioned above.
This is not, of course, to say that all advertisements were innocently
informative at this time. Dr Johnson had some cause to be critical; as
well as the advertisement for the anodyne necklace, which ‘warned every
mother that she would never forgive herself if her infant should perish
without a necklace’, 9 and which, as Dyer points out, employs a tactic not
unknown today, 10 there was an ad for Packer’s Royal Furniture Gloss that
is an early version of the sort of advertisement known today as ‘two C…s
in a Kitchen’. 11 This ad is probably worth explaining in more detail. The
ad is in fact a shopbill and it appeared in 1793. It depicts two women
sitting opposite one another over a table in a drawing room. The carpeted
room contains a bureau, and there are paintings on the walls including
one over a fireplace in which there is a lit fire. The woman on the right,
who has a muffler to keep her hands warm, says to the woman on the
left:
Your Furniture’s exceeding Nice
Pray, Madam, tell to me
What makes it so and what’s the Price
That mine the same may be.
The woman on the left, who has no muffler and sits with her back to the
fire, replies:
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