Brooke's Monkey Brand: ‘The World’s most marvellous Cleanser and Polisher’

The Durrell Collection of Victorian and Edwardian magazine inserts at HAT was acquired in 2019 thanks to a grant from the National Heritage Lottery Fund. One of the most extensive categories within the Durrell Collection concerns the marketing of soaps and cleaning products, a boom industry in the latter part of the 19th century. This section allows us to explore the evolution of the Brooke’s Monkey Brand soap-monkey via a panoply of weird and wonderful images used in the magazine insert advertising format.

In 1899 William Lever, founder of the Lever Bros. soap firm, purchased the Philadelphia business of Benjamin Brooke & Co, manufacturers of Monkey Brand, the most popular soap in America and transferred production to his Port Sunlight headquarters in Liverpool. The highly abrasive Brooke's Monkey Brand household scouring soap (‘The World’s most marvellous Cleanser and Polisher’) had already been sold in Great Britain from the 1880s and was publicised with advertising featuring a distinctive simian mascot.

The Monkey Brand soap-monkey appeared in a variety of guises over the years (e.g. gentleman, ragamuffin, jester, sailor) but settled mainly as a sort of simian/human hybrid servant decked out in immaculate white tie, waistcoat and tails. This butler-like character dutifully scoured the household pots and pans but still retained elements of an innate, untamed spirit e.g. as in the magazine insert where he is shown skidding along on his behind in the snow throwing the trademark polished frying pan up into the air. The brand swiftly found its way into contemporary culture with references in George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion (1913), when Professor Henry Higgins tells the housekeeper to scrub up his flower girl protégée Eliza Doolittle using ‘Monkey Brand, if it won’t come off any other way’ and in Beatrix Potter's story The Tale of Mr Tod (1912) where the fox protagonist refers to Monkey Brand as a soap needed for cleaning his bedding. James Joyce also included a section in Ulysses (1922) which parodied Brooke's Monkey Brand advertising in a surreal fantasy scene where his hero, advertising canvasser Leopold Bloom, is serenaded by a bar of singing lemon soap in Episode 15 'Circe'. 


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Advertising for Monkey Brand Soap has been described as a ‘semiotician’s dream’ and has been extensively probed by historians to analyse Victorian and Edwardian values and social attitudes: 'The gist of these socio-cultural analyses is that the monkey was used (consciously and unconsciously) as symbolic commentary on issues around race, gender and class: representing an idea of change in the Victorian mind that went beyond the obvious clean-dirty associations' (from Communicate Science blog: http://communicatescience.com/zoonomian/2012/02/01/monkey-brand-comes-clean/). For example, one author has observed that: ‘In Victorian culture, the monkey was an icon of metamorphosis, perfectly serving soap’s liminal role in mediating the transformation of nature (dirt, waste, and disorder) into culture (cleanliness, rationality, and industry). Like all fetishes, the monkey is a contradictory image, embodying the hope of imperial progress through commerce while at the same time rendering visible deepening Victorian fears of urban militancy and colonial misrule’ (A. McClintock, ‘Soap-soaping Empire: Commodity racism and imperial advertising’, chapter in Travellers’ Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement, 1994).

Monkey Brand, billed as the ‘Only Natural Cleanser’, was sold wrapped in distinctive orange paper packaging featuring the trademark simian studying its reflection in a hand-held mirror. The scouring soap was marketed with the arresting negative slogan 'Won't Wash Clothes' but closer examination of publicity reassured that the highly versatile product (which probably contained the abrasive mineral pumice) would clean just about any other inanimate object you could possibly think of including earthenware, white marble, stair-rods, glassware, woodwork, fire-irons, golf implements and meerschaum pipes.

According to a history of the Unilever company: ‘The Monkey’s success was great enough to produce two offspring – ‘Refined Toilet Monkey Brand’, of which the advertised uses were legion and included recommendation as a dentifrice (‘occasionally’ was cautiously added), and ‘Vim’, which was put on the market in 1904’ (C. Wilson, The History of Unilever, p.56).  Powder Monkey, a spin-off version (alias ‘Monkey Brand in Powder form’), was introduced in the early 20th century and came in a tin with a perforated lid for handy sprinkling - ‘Save the time, Doubles the shine’. The artist behind many Monkey Brand ads was G.E. Robertson who also produced designs for Lever’s Lifebuoy and Plantol soaps which are included in the Durrell Collection of magazine inserts.

The Durrell Collection has been fully catalogued and digitised. The images can be explored and enjoyed via HAT’s online catalogue: www.hatads.org.uk

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