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Pride, Prejudice and Soapy Pigeons

Some surprising links bubble up between author Jane Austen's creations and commercial soap-making in late Victorian England.

Back in late Victorian Britain, the crinkling sound of unwrapping a Lever’s Sunlight soap could not only mean clean hands but also a glowing chance to improve your life’s lot through “The Sunlight Soap Monthly Competition”. Anyone under the age of seventeen who saved up a minimum of twenty-four wrappings was in chance of a winning. During the competition's existence, between 1890 to 1897, prizes included cash, ‘premier’ bicycles, gold watches, and cloth bound books. Whoever returned the most wrappings within each of seven or eight national districts, selected according to population size, was in with a chance.

Photo credit: Thanks to Elaine Howlin via Unsplash.

Not only making soap, the manufacturer Lever published many cloth bound Lever editions including Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice as giveaways in the country’s first mass campaign. At the time, Sense and Sensibility had been out of copyright and the addition of it to the Lever library, increased visibility to broader social classes, other than solely the rich. Perhaps not unsurprisingly, many adverts for soap and other cleaning products have been found in the back pages of these novels. In amongst such advertising ventures, there was even a yearly Sunlight Year Book produced. Each annual complete with slogans splashed on each page like ‘Don’t worry, use Sunlight Soap’ and even ‘The best soap for washing pigeons’.

Here at SoapJourney, we hope you enjoyed this small trip into the social history of soap. We guess Jane Austen may have been rather surprised by the story of her book’s rise in amongst the advertising context of some rather soapy pigeons.

Source:

Barchas, J., (2013) Sense, Sensibility and Soap: An Unexpected Case Study in Digital Resources for Book History. The John Hopkins University Press, 185 – 214.