Advertisements

Up to this point, we have focused on the physical spaces of consumerism. These were, of course, an essential forum for acting out the spatial practices of consumption, but they formed only part of the eighteenth-century leisure and shopping landscape. In this penultimate chapter, we wish to take the arguments further by re-examining some of the relationships between space, discourse, practice and subjectivity through the virtual spaces constructed in and through advertisements. These spaces existed on the pages of newspapers, trade directories and town guides, and in the minds of both publisher and consumer. They comprised images of goods, people and places, forming a mental landscape of consumption that reflected and shaped the built environment and spatial practices. These images were both a reflection and an important constituent of urban modernity, and their production and consumption were subject to the same pressures of politeness, sociability and competitive differentiation which shaped other spaces of consumption. Use of promotional advertising material in the eighteenth century was widespread and increasingly sophisticated. ¹ Many provincial towns sought to assert their identity through the images projected in town guides, trade directories and newspapers, and on coinage and banknotes, all of which acted as signs of urban success and modernity. ² Advertisements appeared for a wide range of leisure and consumption activities, from theatrical performances to theological discussions, and from horse races to house sales. Central to the construction of a newly urbane provincial culture, however, were the ways in which shops sought to identify themselves with the town as a commercial and cultural entity. Indeed, McKendrick has argued that the modernity and commercialisation of some eighteenth-century advertisements was both characteristic of the age and constitutive of new forms of consumption. ³ Fine and Leopold go further and argue that advertising was also concerned with the ideological reconstruction of use value: giving commodities new and different meanings, and changing the perceptions of consumers. ⁴ In this way, it shaped consumer tastes and choices, and thus demand especially for novel or fashionable items. ⁵ Drawing on Hall’s encoding/decoding model of communication, we might also interpret advertising as a structured activity in which the individuals and institutions producing messages 172have the power to define discourses of consumption and materiality. Advertisers set the agenda and provided the cultural categories and frameworks: the ‘cultural context’ within which leisure and consumption practices took place. Consumers might decode and interpret advertisers’ messages in different ways, but the range of their interpretation was constrained and structured by the advertiser. ⁶