The Persuasive Voice
Voice of Civilisation An Enquiry into Advertising. By Denys Thompson. (Muller. 7s. 6d.) THE editor of English_in Schools has given us an extremely able and well-balanced account of the effect of advertising upon civilisa- tion. Although his title is ironic, Mr. Thompson has taken care not to give the case against advertising before reminding us of the claimi advanced on its behalf by advertising experts; indeed, his method is largely one of deflating such claims by fair and con- vincing comments upon carefully chosen (and sometimes amusing) quotations. He plunges into the past, too, as far back as Alexander the Paphlagonian who " sold the world's first patent. medicine, Cytmis, which according to his biographer, Lucian, was mere goat's fat. . . ." As an epigraph to his section on the Past, Mr. Thomp- son quotes a nineteenth-century advertisement for port-wine: " Pure_ as the tears which fall upon a sister's grave."
.. It is a timely book, because, as Mr. Thompson observes on p. 163, " we find in war time that we are living reasonably well on mainly rationed and unadvertised foods . . . we have seen advertising of the persuasive kind greatly decrease in our newspapers; and it is not easy to see why any advertising should return, except the genuinely informative and desirable kind. If the present healthy
• clearing is to continue, there will be a much better chance for informative advertising; and the medium as a whole may recover some of the credit that it has lost through abuse."
If the abuse does return, Mr. Thompson implies, one antidote is surely to teach our children, as a regular part of school training, to recognise instantly the difference between the kind of advertising which seeks only to give information and the kind which seeks to persuade people, by an impressive and often Orally irrelevant state- ment, to buy things they don't really need and sometimes can't afford. Such training is being done in a few schools ; at its simplest, it can hardly be done too early; and such books as Mr. Tliompson's (there aren't very many of them) should meanwhile find a way into every Sixth Form library. The non-scholastic part of the country can be grateful to Mr. Thompson for giving them a well- documented and extremely amusing account of an " industry " which the public as a whole knows too little about. We can be grateful, too, that Britain has not reached such " heights " of advertising as the United States, and that the B.B.C. has not suc- cumbed to the appeal of this glorified racket.
. R. C. CHURCHILL.
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