The Yankee Rubber Baby

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I’ve been studying Victorian advertising for about five years now and the products that bring astonishment and chuckles from others usually appear very bog-standard to me. This, however, remains the strangest ad I have seen in all that time. It often crops up in the Illustrated Police News, but imagine how delighted I was to stumble on it in the new collection of more than 1 million pictures posted to Flickr and released into the public domain by the British Library this week. I can’t wait to discover what other treasures are lurking in this vast resource.

I know this ad is not health-related, but I just couldn’t leave it out. Startling indeed!

Yankee Rubber Baby from 'The White Cat' by Hal Ludlow 1882

From The White Cat by Hal Ludlow, 1882

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