MOBPA – Part 1

(Let me begin by stating upfront that I have a ridiculous number of photos in MOBPA. Something like, 60. And these are the photos I have left to show after vetting. It was just that addictive. So there will be many, many photos coming. Joy! Low bandwidths, beware…)

The museum was mainly structured in a time-tunnel-esque fashion, taking the visitor through myriad fascinating branding and packaging samples from Victorian days to the present.

Rowland’s Macassar Oil caught my eye because there’s a reference to it in one of the poems in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and I always wondered exactly what it was, mostly because the phrase “macassar oil” rolls so smoothly and wonderfully off the tongue. It’s clearly some kind of medication, but I still don’t know what. Time to stop being lazy and read the Penguin footnotes in detail, clearly.

I think that butterscotch tin of young, shiny Queen Victoria juxtaposed with old, frowny Queen Victoria (produced for one of her Jubilees – either Golden or Diamond, the tin doesn’t say) is really, really funny. Almost like the tinmakers were trying to take a subtle dig at her, except I’m sure they didn’t go in for such things back then (did they? I’m a Victorianist, I should know this, but I don’t).

Apparently, owning a Baby Daisy vacuum cleaner makes your domestic servants redundant, as you will then be able to tell your housekeeper “No thanks, I can manage myself now” while competently hoovering the floor, impeccably well dressed. Why it never occurred to the Edwardians to simply shove the vacuum cleaner at their housekeepers and do other things while being impeccably well dressed, I don’t know.

Filed under: photos , mobpa, museum of brands