Book Club: Cocoa and Corsets

 Today we continue our book club with a riveting read called Cocoa & Corsets (Her Majesty's Stationery Office, London 1984) by Michael Jubb. It contains amusing and quite often disturbing advertisement posters from the Victorian and Edwardian eras.

This was a time when both hygiene and advertising were developing and branching out into previously unimaginable directions. Nobody used soap much before the 19th century - some people still don't!
 

Soap fit for a queen: Robert Brown's White Windsor Soap, 1885. "Purest for infants and persons with delicate skin, promoting a beautiful complexion."

Handwashing is not a recent obsession: Royd Chaffeur Soap, 1907

It took a while for London's water companies to get their hygiene right. One imagines one would be pretty pissed off if, after paying one's water bill, one ended up with cholera! East London Water Consumers' Defence Association, 1898