Ep. 3 Absolute Purity: Confectionery adverts in late Victorian England

Hello and welcome all to Victorian Time Travel, the podcast where we get ready to travel back in time. We’ll pick a very, very, very specific Victorian time and place each episode, and try to learn everything we can about it so we don’t put our foot in it once we’re there. I’m Emi, your time travel researcher, and just to put you all at ease, there is some method to the madness, I do have an education in this historical period, but, of course, I’m not an expert on everything, so I’d be really grateful, if you have the time and energy, if you could let me know when there’s anything that you want to correct, especially when it comes to the sadly inescapable oppressive systems that permeated this period.

For every episode, check out the transcript for full citations, so you can find my sources and prepare even more thoroughly for your journey!

[Music]

So I was looking for inspiration for my next time jump, and I was scrolling down my Pinterest, as one does. And yes, I get the cute animals, and the tempting craft projects that I save to a folder and never look at again. But then in the midst of all this, there it was. Glorious, maximalist, so many elements you don’t know where to look, a late Nineteenth century advertisement for caramels. There’s a ship, there’s a globe, there’s a bunch of medals, there is so much writing, on each of the tiny sails, on the globe, next to the globe, above and below the globe. I want to go and have a chat with whoever’s responsible for this advert. So let’s prepare to do just that.

As always, when you look into anything, you end up uncovering how it’s all connected, and actually caramel adverts say a whole a lot about all sorts of public, social, economic and political issues. So before we analyse this 1897 advert, we need a bit of context!

So, sugar! First of all, if you’re interested in looking at history through the lens of sugar, you just have to read Sidney W. Mintz’s book, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History.[1] It’s from 1986 so it’s not the newest text but it has a whole overview of how sugar influenced all aspects of society, how it was used to do that, just go and have a read. By the way this is a classic, I haven’t discovered a hidden gem, I’m just recommending it.

So one thing that’s interesting about sugar, is that in England in the seventeenth century, it rose to prominence as a foodstuff for the wealthiest members of society first.[2] But then sure enough it changed from being a luxury to something that everyone of every class consumed, and by 1900 it constituted an estimated one sixth of the calorific intake of the average British person, according to some sources.[3]

Now, the way they got to that figure is probably different from how we’d calculate that now, but as a comparison, I looked up how much sugar there is in the, hope you don’t mind me saying, notoriously sugar-heavy contemporary US diet, and I hope no US listener takes this the wrong way, but one sixth in 1900? That’s more than in the US diet of today.[4] So it’s a lot, and it’s a big jump, from luxury to everybody, and we’ll talk a bit more about this later, about the health and social effects of this increase in sugar consumption.

But first there’s another very important role that sugar had in the early 19th century, and that’s in relation to the abolitionist movement. A lot of the sugar consumed in Britain was grown and produced by enslaved people in various colonies, so the abolitionists either boycotted sugar altogether, or encouraged people to use ethical alternatives. They sold beautiful glass bowls with golden lettering that read ‘East India Sugar, not made by slaves.’[5] Of course we wouldn’t consider indentured labourers in the East Indies an acceptable “ethical” alternative, but that was the messaging they used. There’s some fascinating reading to do about this early example of “consumer activism,” I’d really recommend an article by Smith and Johns from the Journal of Business Ethics titled ‘Historicizing Modern Slavery: Free-Grown Sugar as an Ethics-Driven Market Category in Nineteenth-Century Britain.’[6] Not the snappiest title, but really good. And another article I’d recommend is Richard Huzzey’s ‘Free Trade, Free Labour, and Slave Sugar in Victorian Britain’, from The Historical Journal.[7] I’m going to broadly follow Huzzey’s historical timeline here to provide an overview, it’ll be a bit simplified, I’m sorry, but please bear with me.

So, before 1833, the year that slavery was abolished in Britain, a lot of the sugar imported and consumed in Britain was grown and produced by enslaved people. Then, after the abolition, there was a period from 1833 to 1846, so about 13 years, where the government introduced protectionist measures, which basically ensured that only sugar produced in the British colonies was consumed in Britain, they made it very hard to import sugar from anywhere else, and that avoided the ethics issue, because labour in the British colonies was no longer enslaved. I’m over simplifying here, of course conditions for previously enslaved people didn’t just get better overnight. In 1846, after these 13 years of protectionism, the duties on foreign sugar were lifted, meaning that 1) the price of sugar dropped, hence that huge growth in consumption that we mentioned earlier, and 2) the British market was flooded by sugar grown by enslaved people, from non-British colonies where slavery had not yet been abolished.

People weren’t quite as outraged when the enslaved people who produced the sugar were from non-British colonies. There are many things that contributed to that, those two articles I mentioned go into some of the reasons, and unfortunately partially this was because of an increase in racist attitudes throughout the century.[8] But what this means is that we enter a period of contradictions. Britain was officially anti-slavery and its navy blockaded the slave trade in the seas—at the same time, they imported and consumed the products of enslaved labour at home.[9]

If the general public wasn’t as concerned about labour practices anymore in this period, following the abolition of slavery, they had moved on to a new concern, and that was adulteration.[10] They were really worried about sugar not being pure, being contaminated—and for good reason: there were some high-profile scandals, including surrounding contaminated sugar, that lead for example to the Adulteration of Foods Act.[11] Laws had to be introduced!

On to the advert! If you’re watching, here it is on screen, and if you’re listening, I’ll post a picture with the transcript and also describe it now. So it’s a whole-page advert in the February 1897 issue of the trade publication “The British and Foreign Confectioner, Baker and Restaurateur”. This is a monthly trade publication and it’s targeted at “bakers, pastry-cooks, and sugar confectioners everywhere.”[12] At the top it has “Clarnico Caramels” in a very fancy, elaborate font, then it has a dotted line and then the central picture is a ship with many sails, each of which has writing on it, and the ship is resting on a globe. The globe is covered in medals and has a band with writing on it. On either side of the globe the text reads “Absolute Purity” and “Standard Quality”, and at the bottom the text is “Sole makers - Clarke Nickolls and Coombs Ltd, Hackney Wicks Works, London, N.E.” The reason that I want to have a little trip in my time machine and have a chat with anyone involved in the making of this advert is that, as you can see, there’s a lot going on, lots of symbols and medals… and also, it looks a bit different from other adverts from the period, at least to me. So the first port of call is the British Library to look at this British and Foreign Confectioner and look at the other adverts on there. I looked at every issue from 1897, because I’m thorough, to try and find any patterns. Did I find any? Did I just waste a lot of time?

I did not waste my time. For one, as already mentioned, in this latter half of the nineteenth century, people were concerned about adulteration. So this “Absolute Purity” writing on the side, it’s part of a trend. I mean, this advert has three instances of the word “purity”, the other two are on the ship. But about half of the advertisements in the February issue of the British and Foreign Confectioner include variations of the word “pure”. So this is something people are very aware of. But while it’s part of a trend, comparing all these adverts also confirmed that this is an interesting advert. Clarnico, the company running it, seem to understand that visual elements will attract the eye—it looks admittedly a bit busy to our modern eyes, but if you compare it to some of the other adverts, where sometimes you can’t even tell what the brand is called, it’s just a wall of text… I mean Clarnico are the only ones who changed up their adverts in the November 1897 issue to make them seasonal and festive. It seems obvious to have Christmassy adverts if you’re selling sweets, but they’re the only ones to do it here. Now granted, this is a trade publication, I’m not making claims about all adverts in all media.[13]

So if we’re going to take this trip, we’re going to bump into someone working at Clarnico, so let’s make sure we know something about it. So, Clarnico, is short for Clarke, Nickolls and Coombs. They were stablished in 1872, and went on to become the country’s largest confectioners in the 1940s, although don’t let that slip when we travel back in time, we don’t want them to get too cocky.[14] That’s all in the future for them. They were one of the first companies to introduce profit-sharing for their workers in the 1890s, and they had a bunch of worker schemes, like seven weeks of paid sick leave, a “dowry” of £5 to female workers who married,[15] and various clubs and charitable groups.[16] So a quite interesting way of running a company for that period. And these schemes were introduced by the managing directors of Clarke, Nickolls and Coombs, I’m sorry, not a Mr Clarke or Nickolls or Coombs, but instead Alexander Horn and George Mathieson, who were both former labourers.[17]

So, for our time travel trip, I think we should focus on Mathieson because he wrote a lot about sugar and business, he wrote in trade publications, newspapers, for political science associations, and so on. So we can find out a lot about his thinking from all this writing that he did, and so when we meet him we can hopefully have an intelligent conversation about what his aims were with the company and with this advert in particular.

Mathieson wrote a paper in 1898 titled “Should Sugar be Shackled”, and it was published by the Confectioners’ Union, and I’m going to focus on this text, ‘cause otherwise there’s just too much. And here he argues against proposed “countervailing duties”, which are import taxes, on non-British sugar.[18]

“Should Sugar be Shackled”, apart from being quite fun to say, shows that Mathieson has an awareness of the trends in consumer behaviour and expectations. He criticises the West Indies “colonists”, the “colonists” are the British business owners, and he accuses them of mismanaging labour, cutting salaries recklessly, failing to diversify their industry, he says they use outdated extraction methods, they don’t contribute to the local economy, they waste money on foreign labour and imported food.[19] And this is all very bad, but perhaps worst of all, these West Indies sugar producers, have no business acumen. Mathieson says they don’t care about the quality of the product, and they continue to ship their sugar in what he calls “dirty casks”. He suggests they should deliver their product in attractive packaging, displaying their brand names.[20]

This is very interesting, especially if we read this alongside the advert, with its, shall we say, abundance of branding. I mean, there’s even a tiny flag on top of the ship that reads “tomatonic”, and that’s a registered trademark for a gelling agent they have.[21] These are the early days of stuff like “brand identity” and “brand recognition”. Mathieson recognises there’s a link between advertising and consumption, and he says cane sugar, which has reputational problems, should be inspired by the cocoa industry, who managed to make themselves very popular through what he calls “bold advertising.”[22] There are some advertising handbooks from the period that call the late 19th century “the golden age of trademarks,”[23] and, Mathieson argues, (cane) sugar has not kept up.

Now, something to keep in mind is that, as mentioned, this is an advert in a trade publication. I went onto some online newspaper archives and checked out Clarnico’s adverts there, and they do tend to be smaller, and text-only, in more mainstream publications.[24] So this advert is very much aimed at industry people, rather than the general public perhaps, and that’s just something to keep in mind.

We’ve talked about Clarnico, we’ve talked about Mathieson, let’s address the globe-plus-ship-shaped elephant in the room. Sure, the obvious connotation is that it’s about international trade, but it also looks a bit “international domination-y”.[25] Is that what Mathieson wants? Is that a direction that our conversation with him might end up going in?

Well, I’m a researcher, not a mind reader, so I’m not sure, but my hunch is that, for Mathieson at least, it really is more about trade than it is about political power. Of course everything is interconnected, but his writing really is about free trade. And call me naïve, but he seems to truly believe in it. He uses very emotional language, he uses religious expressions—he refers to the “economic faith that is in us”,[26] as if free trade were some sort of inevitability that society always moves towards, he uses scientific terminology, he applies the famous evolutionary concept of “survival of the fittest” to commerce, for example.[27]

His point is that re-introducing import taxes on sugar from non-British sources is a form of protectionism, which is against everything that free trade is about. To note that by the 1890s, when he’s writing, virtually none of the sugar was grown by what was understood at the time to be enslaved labour, so he’s more concerned about the economic impact. He sprinkled in rousing statements like “it is not bounties that confectioners value, as the charter and cause of their expansion. It is freedom.”[28]

So, as you can see, he is basically a freedom fighter. And his fight is import tax. Now, I’m sorry George, can I call you George?, I’m making fun but, I do get a sense that you are genuine in your emphasis on the “free” part of “free trade”. Mathieson seems to honestly believe that it’s the way forward to reach freedom in every aspect of society, not just for the economy. And as we’ve seen before as well, with all those worker schemes, and the profit-sharing at his company, he is really pro-worker, he's not that stereotype of the heartless capitalist. In this paper specifically, he suggests that labourers in the West Indies should be granted land—the land that they work on—that sugar production should be set up as cooperative enterprises and the local workforce should have more independence.[29]

Despite all this, it’s hard to ignore the imperialistic, colonial connotations of the massive ship on a stylised globe, especially given the history of sugar. If you want to read more about this, and perhaps engage in a lively discussion with Mathieson when you meet him in your time travels, Anandi Ramamurthy has a great book called Imperial Persuaders: Images of Africa and Asia in British Advertising.[30] And that book actually has analysis of a tobacco advert from a similar period, featuring a globe, it’s very interesting but we’ve already been talking for a long time, so something for a future episode.

Despite Mathieson’s quite anti-racist and pro-worker views, especially for the time, something that he, and others, bring up a lot, is that introducing these taxes will increase the price of sugar, and that will have a negative effect on the British working class. The British workers are closer to home, and people are very worried about that. What happened is that, as we mentioned at the start, people ate a lot of sugar, and it had become a nutritional necessity.[31] People would go hungry if they couldn’t afford sugar.

Some have called the increase in average sugar consumption in Britain the “single most important dietary change” of the nineteenth century, increasing five times from 1800 to 1900.[32] Mathieson himself says that “sugar is one of the most important and nutritious articles of food”, and he quotes an average per capita consumption of eighty pounds a year.[33] For reference, the 2020 figures in the UK are around 45 pounds per year—it is possible, like we said before, that this number was reached in a different way, but it’s a big difference. According to the British Nutrition Foundation, the recommended amount for adults is 24 pounds per year.[34] So we’re talking 24 pounds recommended for good health, 45 average right now, and *80* in the late 1890s.

Mathieson doesn’t quote this number as a health concern, at least not in the sense that he thinks it’s too much. His concern, as touched on earlier, is that it would hurt people’s health if they couldn’t afford sugar anymore, because they relied so much on it for energy and calories. And we can look at trends in sugar consumption to confirm that it was those who couldn’t afford the higher prices who consumed the most sugar.[35] It’s bad for your health to go hungry. In fact, politicians could make themselves quite popular by campaigning to keep sugar prices low. Of course, people who couldn’t afford expensive sugar liked that, but here we can also glimpse a less generous way in which sugar may have been seen by those in power. There was a sense among upper classes that sugar encouraged the working classes to engage in less disruptive past-times. They were having sugar with their teas and their coffees, and that kept them away from drinking alcohol.[36] If we want to get even more cynical about it, sugar could be considered a kind of sticking plaster on the terrible diets of the working class, which obviously lacked a lot of nutrients, and in this view sugar is a deliberately low-quality source of calories and energy to keep the working classes in their place.[37] Quite dark. There’s more on this, including the claim that sugar provided the calories that fuelled the Industrial Revolution, in an article by Austen and Smith titled Private Tooth Decay as Public Economic Virtue, which is just a great title.[38]

Going back to the advert, there are more conventional references to good health, what WE would consider good health, as well. For example the globe is inscribed with “Whole Fruit Jams”. and jam, by the way, acted as a substitute for unaffordable butter, so one of those key sources of energy.[39] So we have the suggestion, which resonates today, I think, that “whole fruit” is better than the alternative, whatever that it. This writing is surrounded above and below by commemorative medals. Clarnico was present at various health exhibitions, including the International Health Exhibition of 1884, top left. I very nearly lost my mind trying to identify these medals, I didn’t want to embarrass myself in front of Mathieson when I meet him, but you can’t really read the writing on them, so what I did is that I scrolled down Google images for several hours looking at 19th century commemorative coins until I found one that looked like that. And luckily I could confirm this because Clarnico is listed in the digitised catalogue for that Health Exhibition in 1884, which you can find on Archive.org. There, they exhibited jams, candied and drained peels, and confectionery.[40] Now some of these things we might consider healthy today, but some not so much. So we have to consider that “healthy” at this time could refer to a range of characteristics. We’ve touched on healthy just being a way of saying “it has energy, it keeps you alive”. That’s healthy! There also were claims especially in the 18th century and early 19th that sugar had restorative properties for various illnesses.[41] Some even recommended it in toothpaste recipes, not sure what the logic is there.[42] But, throughout sugar’s history, even when sugar was attributed miraculous healing abilities, people knew it could be bad for you, to some extent. In the seventeenth century, they already knew sugar could hurt your teeth.[43] They connected too much sugar to diabetes, excessive weight (especially in women for some reason), and with low mood.[44] Now, an advert for caramels isn’t going to advertise these health concerns, but this may not even be what they meant by “healthy”. What people were worried about was this big “purity” issue.

“Healthy” could mean “unadulterated” since you could be very sick from contaminated foodstuff. For example, there were claims that cane sugar was “healthier” than beet sugar. But scientists at this time already knew that the chemical composition of cane and beet sugar is the same.[45] So when they say “healthier”, what they mean is, beet sugar was at the centre of a public health scandal. People ate food, including sugar, that had been maliciously contaminated and died from it.[46] Cane sugar was involved in no such scandal. So, “healthy”! And appealing to the consumers’ very real fears and anxieties in these ways, I mean we see that in marketing today all the time, and it could be considered quite insidious. We’re almost at the end of the episode but I’m just going to drop one more great book title, Consuming Angels, which is about advertising and Victorian women, by Lori Ann Loeb. Because Loeb makes a very cool point about how these adverts, yes they’re appealing to your fears around contamination and health, fair enough, but by using words like “Absolute Purity”, they are almost, in Loeb’s words, evoking “the evangelical wariness of the taint of sin”.[47] Which is a lovely, poetic way of saying that these adverts were using those manipulative tactics we see in adverts today, suggesting that if you consume our product, you too can be “pure.”

So what have we learned today in preparation for our trip back to the late 1800s to meet the co-director of Clarnico confectioners? It’s what always happens when you think you’re looking at one little specific thing. What you actually find is that you look at sugar and sugar products in advertisements, and at debates surrounding sugar-related issues in the papers, and you get a picture of a Britain that’s undergoing a lot of changes, it’s coming up against so many contradictions. On one hand, sugar is a key commodity in an increasingly capitalistic society. On the other, it’s tied with colonialism and outdated economic systems, and that’s keeping it from modernising. On another hand, just go with me on this one, there’ll be a lot of hands, it was at the centre of free-trade debates, and on the other, it continued to be produced inefficiently. It was, yes it’s another hand, why not, it was hailed as the success story of free trade, which promoted progress and greater freedom, while also exacerbating issues around labour, exploitation, and class divide. It used to be a main concern of ethical consumption activists, and later in the century it becomes another product in the greedy and cruel market of free trade, to be kept as cheap as possible to allow—and, more cynically, perhaps to encourage—the working classes to consume lots of it. It was one of the first “luxuries” that transformed into working-class everyday necessities,[48] it’s a vital part of the diets of the poorest in society and at the same time a harmful substance. Sugar permeated every aspect of British society in the late nineteenth century, and by looking at how it is portrayed in advertisements, we get an incredible glimpse at all the contradictions that characterised that period.

Thank you for all listening to Victorian Time Travel, dress up in period-appropriate warm clothes and have a good trip and stay safe!

[1] Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin Books, 1986).

[2] Mintz, p. 6.

[3] Rosemary Tate, ‘The Aesthetics of Sugar: Concepts of Sweetness in the Nineteenth Century’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Oxford, 2010), p. 15.

[4] Seung Hee Lee and others, ‘High Added Sugars Intake among US Adults: Characteristics, Eating Occasions, and Top Sources, 2015–2018’, Nutrients, 15.2 (2023), 265 (p. 265) <https://doi.org/10.3390/nu15020265>.

[5] ‘Sugar-Bowl; Box | British Museum’ <https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_2002-0904-1>.

[6] Andrew Smith and Jennifer Johns, ‘Historicizing Modern Slavery: Free-Grown Sugar as an Ethics-Driven Market Category in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Journal of Business Ethics, 166.2 (2020), 271–92 <https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-019-04318-1>.

[7] Richard Huzzey, ‘Free Trade, Free Labour, and Slave Sugar in Victorian Britain’, The Historical Journal, 53.2 (2010), 359–79 <https://doi.org/io.ioi7/Sooi8246Xiooooo5i>.

[8] Smith and Johns, p. 285; Huzzey, p. 366.

[9] Huzzey, p. 375.

[10] Tate, p. 34.

[11] Tate, p. 136.

[12] The British and Foreign Confectioner, Baker and Restaurateur (London, 1897).

[13] The British and Foreign Confectioner, Baker and Restaurateur (London, November 1897).

[14] ‘Hackney: Economic History’, in A History of the Country of Middlesex: Volume 10, Hackney, ed. by T F T Baker, British History Online (London: Victoria County History, 1995), pp. 92–101 <http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/middx/vol10/pp92-101> [accessed 6 January 2023].

[15] George Mathieson, ‘Some Aspects of Profit-Sharing’, The Economic Review, 1891-1914, 12.1 (1902), 35–42 (p. 39).

[16] ‘Clarnico Limited [Clarke, Nickolls and Coombs Limited]’, London Metropolitan Archives Collections Catalogue <https://search.lma.gov.uk/scripts/mwimain.dll/144/LMA_OPAC/web_detail?SESSIONSEARCH&exp=refd%20LMA/4591> [accessed 7 January 2022].

[17] Jihang Park, Profit-Sharing and Industrial Co-Partnership in British Industry, 1880-1920: Class Conflict or Class Collaboration? (Routledge, 2017), Chapter 2.

[18] George Mathieson, Should Sugar Be Shackled? (London: Confectioner’s Union, 1898).

[19] Mathieson, Should Sugar Be Shackled?, pp. 4–10.

[20] Ibid., p. 8.

[21] ‘Multiple Classified Advertisements’, Moonshine, 14 June 1890, Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals <https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/DX1901715111/NCUK?sid=bookmark-NCUK&xid=bfb5661c> [accessed 7 January 2023].

[22] Ibid., p. 9.

[23] Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 253.

[24] ‘Multiple Classified Ads’, Morning Post, 3 April 1889, p. [1], British Library Newspapers.

[25] Richards, p. 5.

[26] Mathieson, Should Sugar Be Shackled?, p. 28.

[27] Ibid., p. 7.

[28] Mathieson, Should Sugar Be Shackled?, p. 16.

[29] Mathieson, Should Sugar Be Shackled?, p. 25.

[30] Anandi Ramamurthy, Imperial Persuaders: Images of Africa and Asia in British Advertising (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 140.

[31] Huzzey, p. 364.

[32] Tate, p. 15.

[33] Mathieson, Should Sugar Be Shackled?, p. 27.

[34] Both figures from: ‘The Science of Sugar’, British Nutrition Foundation, 2021 <https://www.nutrition.org.uk/healthy-sustainable-diets/starchy-foods-sugar-and-fibre/sugar/?level=Health%20professional> [accessed 7 January 2022].

[35] Huzzey, p. 364.

[36] Huzzey, p. 364.

[37] Ralph A. Austen and Woodruff D. Smith, ‘Private Tooth Decay as Public Economic Virtue: The Slave-Sugar Triangle, Consumerism, and European Industrialization’, Social Science History, 14.1 (1990), 95–115 (p. 97) <https://doi.org/10.2307/1171366>.

[38] Austen and Smith, p. 96.

[39] Mintz, p. 130.

[40] International Health Exhibition, 1884: Official Catalogue, 2nd edn (London: William Clowes & Sons Limited, 1884), p. 10 <http://archive.org/details/gri_33125008618163> [accessed 7 January 2023].

[41] Tate, p. 119.

[42] Mintz, p. 107.

[43] Austen and Smith, p. 108.

[44] Mintz, p. 106.

[45] ‘Analytical Records from the Lancet Laboratory’, ed. by Thomas H. Wakley and Thomas Wakley Jun., The Lancet. A Journal of British and Foreign Medicine, Surgery, Obstetrics, Physiology, Chemistry, Pharmacology, Publick Health, and News., I (1898), p. 653 <http://archive.org/details/thelancet18981.1janapr> [accessed 7 January 2023].

[46] Tate, p. 135f.

[47] Lori Anne Loeb, Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 111.

[48] Mintz, p. 180.