A Matter of Time

January 28, 2004

By Hilary Edmondson
SPARK Program

Advertisements and commercials are usually seen in a fleeting light, here today and gone tomorrow before the public grows weary of them. But it turns out they also shed light on our society, past and present. Prof. Donna Andrew, History, is using advertising to learn about the lifestyles and ways of thinking of the 18th century.

She's analysing advertisements in Britain's premier 18th-century newspaper, the Daily Advertiser, to support her theory that commercial ads (those directed at selling goods) have tended to replace communicative ads (ads that send a message to the audience) right through to today.

"Looking into the past can help give us cues for the future," says Andrew. "When we see an evolution of certain types of ads and how they affected people, we can possibly make sense of trends today."

Based in London, the Daily Advertiser was one of the most popular and long-lived newspapers of its day, publishing from 1731 until 1795. Although its main subject matter was advertising, it eventually began to evolve into a modern newspaper with more news items. Its audience consisted chiefly of lower- to middle-class people.

Andrew is taking a sample of the ads from the entire running time of the Daily Advertiser and grouping them into categories based on their purposes. She says many ads in the 18th century weren't what we consider ads today; they belonged more to the communicative or message category.

One common type of communicative ad she has found repeatedly is something she calls the "begging letter," in which poor people begged newspaper readers to send them money. By reading hundreds of these ads, Andrew gets a sense of what appealed to people's sympathies at the time. She is also collecting and studying ads in which someone apologizes for an offence and those where the advertiser is looking for marriage or companionship.

Andrew plans to publish her findings from this study in a book. This work is sponsored by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the College of Arts.