In your Soap Box
Coal Tar Soap and a Domestic Museum
Half-page advert from the front cover of Country-Side, 161:7, 13 June 1908
Being made of fat and alkali, soap lends itself to the reuse of the waste products from other trades. There is no fixed recipe for soap. Although it was usually made with by-products and industrial wastes, it could also be made using entirely virgin substances.
Coal tar was a residue of gasification. In the Victorian period, William Valentine Wright combined the two, marketing ‘Sapo Carbonic Detergens’, a coal tar soap, advertised as a ‘skin soap’ which could protect the body from infectious diseases.[1] Wright himself died in his early-fifties in 1877, having ‘caught a cold in the face’, which developed into a streptococcal skin infection.[2] Perhaps he didn’t use his own soap? The company continued without him, and in the early twentieth century regularly put large adverts in Edward Kay Robinson’s journal Country-Side. For a year from late 1908 Country-Side also ran adverts for a contrivance designed to help the journal’s readers store their collections of ‘specimens, shells, coins, etc’: a strong wooden cabinet which could be obtained for a shilling (plus five pence postage), direct from the journal. In this early product/media tie-in, the cabinet was designed to accept boxes of Wright’s Coal Tar Soap as drawers. Once emptied of soap, a dozen boxes could be slid into place, ready to accept the curiosities. ‘Intending purchasers … would do well to send their orders now’, came the instruction on Boxing Day 1908, ‘even if they have not yet the requisite number of Wright’s Coal Tar Soap boxes’.
The promotion reused boxes, which were made using recycled substances, which had contained a product made from the by-products of various other trades. One suspects that the specimens housed in the drawers carried the distinctive odour of the soap for some time.
Sturdy cabinet, available from the Country-Side office, advertised in the edition from 11 September 1909 (227:8)