History of Science Society

I first came across this illustration whilst browsing through Leonard de Vries’s fascinating collection, Victorian Advertising, about twelve years ago. I was looking for something else at the time – examples of late Victorian electric belt advertisements as part of a project on nineteenth-century medical electricity. Instead, this one jumped out of the page at me. Electric belt advertisements have a certain charm all of their own and can be extremely informative, but this illustration fascinated me – and still does. It seemed to capture in one rather quirky scene the whole curiosity, complexity and contrariness of electricity’s place in late Victorian culture. The picture itself is an advertisement for Bovril – a thick, dark brown, gloopy beef extract, usually consumed either as a spread on toast or diluted to make beef tea – that appeared in the popular magazine The Graphic in 1891. The ad shows some remarkably complacent looking cattle about to be sacrificially electrocuted in order to manufacture that wonder-working product. The date is significant of itself of course, being only the year after the first electrical execution of a human being took place in New York on 6 August 1890.

The Graphic, in which the advertisement appeared, had been established in 1869 as competition for the relatively well-established Illustrated London News. Both publications took advantage of the Victorian proliferation of industrialized printing technologies, particularly those that made the mass-production of relatively cheap high-quality illustrations possible.

For researchers who spend much of their time delving into Victorian journals, magazines, and newspapers the visual transformation of print culture between the 1830s and the 1860s is remarkable. Illustrations in 1830 are crude and few and far between. By the end of the ‘60s they are both sophisticated and everywhere. The same goes for advertisements. New technologies, new markets and new audience expectations transformed them from being a few lines of closely packed text in columns during the 1830s to the sort of visually dense representation you can see here.

So why is this such a great picture? In the first place, it’s because it’s advertising Bovril, a substance that needs some introduction to a non-British audience. It was first manufactured in 1886 and was the sort of thing I was still being given as a child in the 1970s after being ill. The name has an interesting etymology that helps explain why this advert is so fascinating for a historian of electricity. In his 1871 novel, The Coming Race, the English pulp writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton introduced the “vril-ya,” a race of subterranean super-beings that did everything through the power of vril. Vril, as Bulwer Lytton’s description made quite clear, was electricity, and animal electricity at that. Manipulating it, the vril-ya “by operations, akin to those ascribed to mesmerism, electro-biology, odic force, &c., but applied scientifically, through vril conductors ... can exercise influence over minds, and bodies animal and vegetable, to an extent not surpassed in the romances of our mystics.” So, Bovril was meant to be understood as bovine vril, the concentrated animal electricity of beef. It was named in order to invite its consumers to draw the link between the life-enhancing and health-giving virtues of Bovril and the virtues of the mysterious electrical vril.

That’s what makes this picture so peculiar – and so clever. It shows Bovril, which the Victorian consumer is meant to imagine as being some sort of electrical essence of bovine life, being produced through electrocution. It elides together the life-giving and death-dealing connotations of electricity, a nice example of postmodern slipperiness a century before postmodernism. By the 1890s, the tradition of electricity as life was well-entrenched. From James Graham’s Celestial Bed in the 1780s, to Giovanni Aldini’s and Andrew Ure’s experiments on electrified corpses, to Andrew Crosse’s electrical insects, to medical electricity and the electropathic belt, the connection seemed secure. By the early 1890s, advertisements for electric belts and corsets manufactured by C. B. Harness and his Medical Battery Company were everywhere, though Harness was to find himself in court and at the beginning of the slippery slope to bankruptcy within the year. After all, if the connection weren’t so obvious to The Graphic’s readers, the Bovril advert would make no sense.

After 1890, though, electricity had acquired a quite different connotation as the latest technology for dealing scientifically administered death. The link between death and electricity wasn’t entirely novel; professional electricians, as part of their discipline’s folk tradition, had wild tales of intrepid natural philosophers experimenting on the Leyden Jar. From the 1880s, as towns and cities across Europe and North America electrified, there was a steady stream of newspaper reports of incautious workers killed by touching the electric wires. William Kemmler’s death, as the first victim of the electric chair – and the invention of the word electrocution to describe the process – made the link between electricity and death just as secure in late-Victorian minds as the connection between electricity and life. There were debates in electrical and medical journals about just how, in practice, electricity killed.

The advert shows us the multiplicity of ways in which electricity might make sense for the Victorians. It was life, it was death. It represented progress and humanitarianism. It was thoroughly embedded in consumer culture making it a wonderful illustration to use with students. If nothing else, it’s a great talking point and a way to start conversations about electricity’s place in Victorian culture and the importance of doing cultural history of science in general. What it suggests is that such cultural histories never stop. You can always dig a little deeper, see things from another angle, and follow another lead to come up with a new perspective. The transitions from science to technology and culture in this picture are seamless. You can’t tell exactly where they merge into one another. Most important of all, it’s funny, or at least I think it is. There’s an old truism that if you want to understand a culture you need to laugh at its jokes.

By Iwan Rhys Morus
Department of History & Welsh History
The University of Wales, Aberystwyth