Pears' Soap: "The first step towards lightening the White Man's Burden" (Cosmopolitan advertisement, 1899)
Full-page magazine advertisement in which a white-uniformed naval officer washes his hands at a shipboard basin, framed by warships and a quay stacked with Pears crates, while in one corner a kneeling, naked African figure receives a bar of soap from a robed missionary. The slogan takes the phrase from Kipling's 1899 poem about the Philippines and colonial rule and attaches it to a product, so imperial prestige and a civilising mission stand in for any claim about the soap.
- Date
- 1899
- Period
- Pre-1914
- Made by
- A. & F. Pears Ltd (soap manufacturer, London)
- Region
- Western and Central Europe
- Country
- United Kingdom
- Medium
- Advertisement
- Issuer type
- Corporation
- Regime
- Salisbury Government
- Leader
- Robert Gascoyne Cecil
- Audience
- Foreign public
- Purpose
- Persuade or win support
- Themes
- Empire and colonialism, Race and ethnicity, Economy and finance
- Techniques
- TransferGlittering generalities
- Source
- Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are
- Source
- Library of Congress, retrieved September 29, 2026
- Rights
- Public domain (published 1899 in the Cosmopolitan; LoC: No known restrictions on publication)
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-86352
Text on the object
THE COSMOPOLITAN. The first step towards lightening The White Man's Burden is through teaching the virtues of cleanliness. Pears' Soap is a potent factor in brightening the dark corners of the earth as civilization advances, while amongst the cultured of all nations it holds the highest place—it is the ideal toilet soap. [PEARS on the crates and soap boxes in the picture] All rights secured.
Ghost text from the reverse of the leaf shows through at the top (a piano advertisement) and is not part of this advertisement. The 'o' of 'of' is faint in 'virtues of cleanliness'.
