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Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women, by Lori Anne Loeb; pp. xii + 224. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, $32.00, L22.50.
Lori Anne Loeb's book provides an invaluable service to all those interested in the history of consumer culture, by making accessible reproductions of a wide sampling of advertisements from turn-of-the-century British magazines, drawn in particular from the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. As Loeb points out in her Preface, this collection, catalogued thematically according to the types of commodity being promoted, had not previously been examined in detail by advertising historians. Oxford University Press has not stinted in the quality or quantity of the reproductions from this and other sources, such as the Robarts Library at Toronto; the book will be an excellent resource for teaching. Much of the text involves detailed descriptions and interpretations of advertisements, all those that are reproduced and others that are not. (Oddly, though, there is no indication within the text as to whether the image described is one that appears in the book, despite careful numbering of the illustrations themselves.)
Around her readings, Loeb develops an argument which is in many ways as much of a curiosity as the images she brings to our attention. Her thesis, loosely derived from Colin Campbell's argument in The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism ( 1987), involves the rejection of what she regards as the "Veblenesque" emphasis of existing interpretations of the development of consumer culture. (Despite the "Victorian" of the title, the book addresses the period from 1880 to 1914.) Where other commentators, she says, have alleged that advertisements of this period indicate a preoccupation with social status, Loeb wants to claim instead that her evidence shows overwhelmingly that "this very material emphasis of the Victorians reflected the assimilation by the middle class of a hedonistic ethos" (3)....