| Description |
Many American advertising cards in the nineteenth century displayed a variety of visual and rhetorical themes to foster the attention of potential consumers. The appealing elements these cards displayed convinced the public that these easily disposable ephemera pieces were worthy of preservation. In this card for Dr. Jayne's Expectorant and Vermifuge, two advertising tropes which can be observed are the inclusion of children and the imagery medical advertisers used to make their remedial products seem more trustworthy.
Children were terrific advertising tools in American trade cards, with producers often using charming images of young people to increase consumer sentiments and facilitate a positive reputation for their brands. Also, these children were often depicted as engaging in consumer lifestyles, a trend that their peers found inspiring. Additionally, some advertisers used sympathy for children–often depicting them as downtrodden or impoverished–to advertise the negative issues of industrialized society. This card demonstrates this trend by presenting a boy and girl pauper, the intention being to facilitate public sentiment for child poverty while also presenting Dr. Jayne’s products as healing and beneficial for the less fortunate.
As many Americans practiced self-medication and distrusted medical professionals, patent medicine companies were the largest distributors of domestic trade cards. Public ignorance of healthy habits and a lack of advertising regulations on trade cards allowed medical advertisers to make exaggerated and untruthful claims on the beneficial qualities of their products. This marketing approach resulted in great profits for the sellers, but also fostered the prevalence of disease and other illnesses. This card is an example of this trend because it includes sad imagery of pauper children in need to convince consumers that the advertised remedy will supposedly be helpful for treating the helpless and addressing prevalent ailments.
|
| Bibliography |
“A Short History of Trade Cards,” Bulletin of the Business Historical Society 5, no. 3 (April
1931).
Berg, Maxine and Clifford, Helen, Selling Consumption in the Eighteenth Century: Advertising
and the Trade Card in Britain and France, The Journal of the Social History Society, (April 28,
2015).
Chase, Ernest D., The Romance of Greeting Cards, Rust Craft Publishers, 1956.
Jay, Robert, The Trade Card In Nineteenth-Century America, University of Missouri Press,
1987.
Lewis, John, Printed Ephemera: The Changing Uses of Type and Letterforms in English and
American Printing, W.S. Cowell Ltd., 1962.
Mehaffy, Marilyn Maness, Advertising Race/Raceing Advertising: The Feminine
Consumer(Nation), 1876-1900, Signs, 23, no. 1, The University of Chicago Press, 1997, 142-
143, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3175155.
Oatman-Stanford, Hunter, “Extreme Shipping: When Express Delivery to California Meant 100
Grueling Days at Sea,” Collectors Weekly, (June 2, 2016),
https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/when-express-delivery-meant-100-days-at-sea/.
Peterdi, Gabor, “Lithography” section of “Printmaking” article, Encyclopedia Britannica online,
2021, https://www.britannica.com/art/printmaking/Lithography. |
