There has been no major scholarly study of William Lever, the Sunlight “soap king,” since Charles Wilson's magisterial economic history of Unilever in 1954. Brian Lewis fills this gap in a readable and entertaining book that sheds considerable light on the man and his business, informed by the recent historiography of consumerism, labor history, and colonialism.

Eschewing a standard birth-to-death biographical format, Lewis provides an initial narrative of Lever's life, followed by thematic chapters on advertising, town planning, and colonial encounters. The basic story of Sunlight soap is well known. Lever, a grocer's son from Bolton, entered the family business. In 1885, he rented a Warrington factory and began to manufacture soap. His first brand, Sunlight (1884), was packed in one-pound bars in a distinctive parchment wrapper to prevent the soap from turning rancid. Grocers liked the convenience of precut soap. Customers liked the guaranteed quality as well as the assurance of a full one-pound bar. Sunlight was a huge success. It was followed by Lifebuoy (1894), Lux (1900), and Vim (1904). Lever emerged as the master of branding, promoted by the full arsenal of the consumer revolution, including virtually every form of mass advertising. He was among the first to attach his brand to a painting by a noted artist (W. P. Frith's New Frock, accompanied by Lever's most famous slogan, “so clean”), he offered prizes and trinkets in exchange for wrappers, and he distributed coupons that could be exchanged for paper dolls for children or a Sunlight encyclopedia. His “reason why” ads, borrowed from a Philadelphia soap maker, warned women that they would soon look old from vigorous scrubbing of laundry over a hot washtub, without the boon of a proper bar of soap. Booklets such as Sunlight Soap and How to Use It made clear that cleanliness was within the reach of all. His brand names became ubiquitous. Mergers and horizontal expansion made Unilever, the resultant conglomeration, the largest company in Britain by 1930. Lever became a millionaire, indeed the quintessential Victorian self-made man. He created the Lady Lever Art Gallery, a public gallery formed almost entirely from his own collection; he served briefly as a Liberal member of parliament for Wirral from 1906 to 1909; and, as mayor of Bolton in 1918, he was elevated to the peerage in 1917 and became Viscount Leverhulme in 1922.

Celebrated as a pioneering businessman, Lever also became a major figure in town planning. In contrast to Bolton, “an unlovely, lethal place” (93), the workers community of Port Sunlight was a “radiant, gleaming sun-blessed idyll,” “which ranks as probably the most impressive experiment in factory paternalism ever mounted in Britain” (92). Houses with sixteenth-century facades and thoroughly modern interiors were surrounded by every sort of amenity imaginable, including gardens, dining halls, a church, a library, a museum, an auditorium, a dance hall, and a gymnasium. Port Sunlight could look like an “ersatz version of Merrie England,” but it was also great advertising for Lever. Everything was clean, right down to the spotless streets and trim gardens. There was a bathroom in every house. The devotion to cleanliness, not surprisingly, surpassed those of contemporaneous model communities such as Cadbury's Bourneville. At Bourneville, only the better style of cottage had a bathroom; the rest had a bath sunk in the middle of the kitchen floor with a lid. Lever insisted that every house have a bathroom. As a consequence, he boasted that Sunlight had improved adult and infant mortality. Certainly, living at Port Sunlight was an asset for the 3,600 workers at the soap works, even as it ensured worker compliance; an employee who lost his job would lose his house.

In the colonies, especially in the Congo, with the minor exception of some parts of a prettied-up Leverville, laborers worked extraordinarily hard to collect the palm oil that was essential to Lever's product. Old women, pregnant women, and young girls carried baskets of palm fruit, weighing sixty pounds or more, often more than ten kilometers. While Lever wrote about his African laborers as children who, if treated well, would work hard, most of his workers lived in deplorable conditions in shanty huts. There was something egregious about the wealthy, self-made man floating down a Congolese river eating caviar, while his laborers worked in slave-like conditions. This book is no hagiography of the Victorian business leader; it considers Lever, warts and all. One of the strengths of Lewis's treatment is to put Lever in context. His work in the colonies and town planning are framed by carefully researched comparisons.

While all of the serious historical apparatus is here, Lewis also manages to bring to life Lever as a man. Lever has often been lionized for his energy and ambitions, but he was also deeply eccentric. He liked to sleep in an open air bedroom on the roof of Thornton Manor, near Port Sunlight, only partially protected by a glass roof. His morning preference was for a cold bath in a stone tub, also on the roof. Like other wealthy men of his era, he installed a small zoo at Lever Park, complete with zebra and wallabies. Lewis captures Lever's indomitable personality, his business acumen, and his more general contributions to Victorian society. So Clean is thoroughly enjoyable and should be essential reading for historians of consumerism.