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The King of Sunlight: How William Lever Cleaned Up the World

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There have been plenty of rich eccentrics, but to my mind none match the ones who thrived in Victorian Britain. Take William Lever. In each of his houses, his bedroom was left open to the elements. The only roof, if any, was partial, and if he and his wife spent the night in rain or snow, it was just the timely clime for a good night's sleep. Sleep well he did, every night, even if he had to brush off a layer of snow upon arising. He rose very early and took a cold bath. He dined well and chewed each mouthful 32 times; like his open air sleeping, it was a health practice he recommended to others. He planned grand schemes, and never backed down on them, never changing his mind. He didn't like discussing such plans: "We won't argue: you're wrong," he would say often to his employees. An interviewer in 1905 summed him up: "Mr. Lever seldom does anything like other people." This irascible, ridiculous, and yet enlightened man died in 1925, and his company, Lever Brothers', employed 85,000 people around the world and had formed global trade and benevolent employee relations in novel ways. He deserved a biography before now, but Adam Macqueen has written a jovial and well-researched one in _The King of Sunlight: How William Lever Cleaned Up the World_ (Bantam), a welcome rescue from obscurity of an odd and influential mercantile prince.

He was not born to commercial royalty, but to a mere grocer in north England in 1851, one of ten children. He went into his father's trade, but was a natural salesman and transformed the simple grocery into first a wholesaler and then a soap manufactory. Sunlight Soap appeared in 1886, cut into one pound blocks ready for sale, in the innovation of a brightly-colored box bearing the firm's colors and Sunlight logo. Lever advertised in innovative ways. He liked paintings, and he liked to buy a picture, say of a girl and her dogs, and change it for advertising purposes, inserting a soap bar and bath in the corner, as if the purpose of the artist was to illustrate washday. Lever felt that if he bought the painting, he need not tell the artist of his intentions to use it as advertising, nor to pay extra for it for that purpose. His great social experiment was Port Sunlight, a pastoral suburb and soap factory near Liverpool, a planned village for his workers. "It was his village, his creation, paid for by his cash, and here he could indulge his control-freakery to the full." It must be said that he was an essentially benign dictator, and that his community system worked for decades. He was far in advance of laws requiring factories to have fresh air, fire alarms, or sprinklers; he was genuinely concerned that employees get well treated, even in the mills which he established in the Congo, with schools and hospitals for the workers, an example of care that was unprecedented in that continent.

There are many funny episodes in his life detailed here, including the preposterously blown-up incident of his cutting his head from a portrait of himself which he had commissioned from Augustus John but which he did not like. He had feuds with the newspapers, most famously with the _Daily Mail_ which turned on him after cancellation of an advertising contract; he won the suit against the paper and gave the damages to Liverpool University. His world was completely changed by the First World War, and he had a bizarre and expensive scheme for development of Hebridean islands that was a failure late in his life. Macqueen's account has to include the sad later years, when Lever could not adjust to his inability to control in detail his enormous empire, but his was overall a vastly successful entrepreneurial life, and one that remains influential today. Macqueen has drawn analogies with British contemporaries that may not be immediately recognizable by Americans, but his book is full of humorous detail that is easily appreciated. Lever was obsessive and dictatorial, but he was also humane and funny, and both sides are here in full.