Port Sunlight Article

In Port Sunlight. A pithy article by Peter Campbell of The London Review of Books which succinctly covers much the same ground as five documentary of a few months ago, although with more emphasis on Leverhulme’s motivations: “The professional instincts of a brilliant marketer of soap are more likely to colour his interest in art than those of, say, a steel tycoon. Lever had a sense of what people want, and our wants are rarely as practical as a bald description suggests. We want clean clothes, but within that simple desire lie images of crisp starching, of linen whiter than white. Advertising suggests imagined outcomes. Lever’s description of a rose-wreathed cottage stands to the housing he had built as the little girl in her white frock does to the daily wash.”