Victorian-Era Card Collection: Advertising Cards

• Post Date: 10/18/2024
• Author: Chris Gimbel, Registration Assistant, BA, ‘24, history
• Reading Time: 13 minute read

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• In-Depth tag

In The Trade Card in Nineteenth-Century America, Robert Jay claims that advertisement cards—referred to as trade cards—were unique in that they were the only messaging medium that “could reach so many households” while also being “saved and cherished by the consumers themselves.” During the 1880s, trade cards became “the most ubiquitous form of advertising in America,” outperforming the then-novel art of periodical advertising. These cards presented delightful imagery which convinced consumers to preserve them as keepsakes. Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford state in Selling Consumption in the Eighteenth Century that the act of collecting trade cards, beginning in both Europe and US during the 17th and 18th centuries, grew and expanded throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The lasting usefulness for this type of ephemera “lifted trade cards out of their contemporary consumer contexts into quite different contexts where they became objects to be ordered and displayed.” Understanding the broad appeal of these printed home artifacts requires an analysis of their evolution and symbolic usefulness.

Printing Advancements

According to the Business Historical Society’s article “A Short History of Trade Cards,” early versions were used by merchants and other professionals that attended to the needs of the educated classes. Printing methods shifted from wood cuts to copper plate engravings to produce finer lines and image details. The more intricate designs were intended “to prolong the name of the business in the mind of the consumer” and facilitated “the dissemination of knowledge about a business from existing to potential customers.” The original European trade cards were unique compared to other forms of advertising since they were handed out “after a sale had taken place, not before” and subsequently encouraged returning customers. These marketing strategies were instrumental to the trade card becoming associated with brand recognition.

Lithography, the process of printing on the surface of a porous stone or grained plate, developed in the early 19th century along with chromolithography, which offered color-printed ephemera. The standard lithographic process began by drawing the desired image on a stone or metal plate using a greasy utensil. A mixture of gum Arabic and nitric acid is then added to the surface, protecting the drawing from the layer of water added while repelling printing ink from the undrawn areas. The ink is deposited on the drawn area but not the wet stone, resulting in the printing press creating an exact duplicate of the image on paper. Jay observes that the lithographic process “was relatively lower in cost and could provide an almost limitless number of prints from a single prepared stone.” Printers also had more flexibility in their work given the larger dimensions of the stone plates and the resultingly simplified preparation process.

While trade cards had originally been a secondary seller, the 1860s oversaw a growth in their popularity, convincing American and British lithographers to increase their card production. One of the practitioners and experts of the lithographic process was Louis Prang, the inventor of chromolithography who introduced and mass-produced both the stock advertisement card and the holiday greeting card. Prang was revolutionary for his introduction of the “Prang method” of design which enabled printing in up to twenty colors. Prang would be among the many innovators of the printing market who strived to make advertising cards more accessible while perfecting their aesthetic appeal.

Racism and American Pride

Recognizing the marketing value of the trade card, advertisers increasingly printed ephemera with their own agendas in mind. One use for the cards’ iconic imagery was to cement the preexisting social expectations of the time. As instruments of mass culture, trade cards normalized acceptable perceptions of consumer society. Consumer culture of the 19th-century US corroborated advertised products with racialized scenes of domesticity to propagate racist white perceptions of civilization.

Marilyn Maness Mehaffy’s Advertising Race/Raceing Advertising: The Feminine Consumer(-Nation), 1876-1900 observes a subset of this trend in the comparison of Black and white women as domestic laborers. Images which presented a dichotomy between female and docile Black servants and the white middle-class woman “mythologiz[ed] antebellum slavery as a more coherent, tranquil era ‘lost’ to the uncertainties and upheavals of postwar urbanism, industrialism, and commercialization.” In the context of national self-identity, white woman card characters like Miss Columbia became recognizable symbols of the United States’ capability to enforce domestic civility, legitimizing the Americanization of cultures deemed comparably uncivilized.

American pride was another frequent theme of trade card business. The War of 1812 and the Civil War reinforced patriotic sentiments among Americans, and the increased use of nationalistic symbology reflected these emotions. Patriotic personifications such as Uncle Sam and the Statue of Liberty frequently appeared as trademarks in the latter half of the 19th century. Among the most common patriotic references made in trade cards were the ships of the Great White Fleet with the then-intact Battleship Maine among them.

Business and Capitalism

Some trade cards indicated the excitement and optimism that came with the technological innovations of the Industrial Revolution. An iconic advertisement of this era was the Clipper Card, a paper invitation for travelers enamored by the California Gold Rush to ship their goods around South America’s Cape Horn to reach San Francisco from the East Coast. These cards were precursors to the Victorian trade card, being popularized during the 1840s and 1850s, yet shipping advertisers incorporated their own creative “nautical imagery,” capturing the romantic adventurism with “vibrant illustrations of historical figures, mythological scenes, beautiful women, fearless Indigenous Americans, and other symbolic warriors.”

In the prevalent capitalist society of the US, the imagery of the trade card was also used to further business interests. The largest distributor of the trade card was the medicine business. Many Americans practiced self-medication and distrusted medical professionals, so patent medicine companies were especially likely to distribute trade cards. The trade also had potentially great profits given the general ignorance of healthy habits and resultant prevalence of disease. As opposed to periodicals, trade cards were not regulated for their claims, allowing medical advertisers to make outlandish claims about their products’ supposedly beneficial qualities. Card images demonstrated curatives in action while the backs of cards often included endorsements from social and political celebrities, valuable community figures such as clergy, and ordinary consumers. No matter the efficacy or success of an advertised item, the trade card innovated how efficiently product information could be distributed to a wider audience.

The display and messaging of the showcased products can offer insight into the perceptions and ambitions many Americans shared. Greeting cards of the 19th century also demonstrate earlier messaging approaches but with an emphasis on the design-based intricacies that were particular to artifacts dedicated to emotional expression.