The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press. The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, Volume 2: Expansion and Evolution, 1800-1900 9781474424905

Citation preview

THE EDINBURGH HISTORY OF THE BRITISH AND IRISH PRESS, VOLUME 2

T he E dinburgh H istory of the B ritish and I rish P ress , V olume 2 Expansion and Evolution, 1800–1900

e d i t e d b y d av i d f i n k e l s t e i n

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high ­editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation David Finkelstein, 2020 © the chapters their several authors, 2020 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f ) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13pt MillerText by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 2488 2 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 2490 5 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 2491 2 (epub) The right of the contributors to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Contributor Biographies Introduction David Finkelstein PART I: Press and Periodical Economics   1. The Economics of Press and Periodical Production Howard Cox and Simon Mowatt

Case Study 1: Newspapers and Advertising Peter Robinson

PART II: Production and Distribution   2. Production Helen S. Williams

Case Study 2: John Cossar & Son and the Govan Press Helen S. Williams

  3. The  Evolution of Image-Making Industries and the Mid- to Late Victorian Press Rose Roberto PART III: Readership and Distribution    4. Readership and Distribution Paul Raphael Rooney

x xix xxi 1

35 57

65 83

86

127

vi

contents

PART IV: Identities and Communities    5. Cultural Agents and Contexts: The Professionalisation of Journalism Joanne Shattock

153



Case Study 3: New Journalism Philip March

176



Case Study 4: Letters to the Editor Allison Cavanagh

180



Case Study 5: The Reporter Stephen Tate

185



Case Study 6: The Byline Steve Harrison

188

PART V: Legal Frameworks   6. Newspapers and the Law in the Nineteenth Century Tom O’Malley

197

PART VI: Themed Chapters   7. The English-Language Press in Continental Europe Diana Cooper-Richet

221

  8. Transnational Exchanges M. H. Beals

240

Case Study 7: The Fight in Piccadilly: How False News Went Viral in 1895  260 Colette Colligan Case Study 8: Transnational Exchange between British and Swedish Periodicals in the 1830s Cecilia Wadsö Lecaros

270

Case Study 9: An Imperial Ideology of News: News Values and Reporting about Japan in Colonial India Amelia Bonea

278

284



Case Study 10: The Steamship Press: An International Conduit of Information and Imperial Masculinity Paul Raphael Rooney



Case Study 11: The Russian Émigré Press Helen S. Williams



289

­

contents

  9. Literary and Review Journalism Joanne Wilkes 10. ‘One language is quite sufficient for the mass’: Metropolitan Journalism, the British State and the ‘Vernacular’ Periodical Press in Wales, 1840–1914 Aled Gruffydd Jones 11. The Scottish Gaelic Press  Sheila M. Kidd 12. The Irish-Language Press: ‘A tender plant at the best of times’? Regina Uí Chollatáin 13. The Nineteenth-Century Denominational Press Joan Allen

Case Study 12: The Irish Ecclesiastical Gazette Ian d’Alton

vii 294

313 337

357 377 395

14. Comics, Cartoons and the Illustrated Press Elizabeth Tilley

401

15. The Satirical Press  Michael de Nie

419

16. The Medical Press and Its Public  Sally Frampton

438

17. Science and the Press Alex Csiszar

457



Case Study 13: ‘Fellows that never knew each other’: Natural History Periodicals  Matthew Wale

18. The Business Press Melissa Score 19. The Press and Radical Expression: Structure and Dissemination  Martin Conboy 20. The Political Press James Thompson

Case Study 14: The Glasgow Herald James Thompson

477 485

507 526 545

viii

contents



Case Study 15: Parnell, Edmund Dwyer Gray and the Press in Ireland Felix M. Larkin



Case Study 16: The Nation  James Quinn



21. The Trade and Professional Press Andrew King

548 554 558



Case Study 17: The Book Trade Press  Rachel Calder

585



Case Study 18: The Armed Services Press  Margery Masterson

590

22. The Leisure and Hobby Press  Christopher A. Kent

Case Study 19: Galleries without Walls: Art and the Mechanical Mass Culture of the Press Michael Bromley and Karen Hasin-Bromley

23. The Sporting Press Joel H. Wiener

Case Study 20: Sport Reporting in the Times from 1800 to 1900 Jessie Wilkie

24. The Children’s Press  Frederick S. Milton

Case Study 21: Children and the News  Siân Pooley

596

616 622

644 655 680

25. The Women’s Press Kathryn Ledbetter

688

26. The Provincial, Local and Regional Press Andrew J. H. Jackson

709



Case Study 22: The Provincial Nature of the London Letter Andrew Hobbs

729

­

contents

ix

Case Study 23: William Saunders and the Industrial Supply of News in the Late Nineteenth Century Andrew Hobbs

735

Case Study 24: The Irish Times: ‘The Protestant and Conservative daily newspaper’ Mark O’Brien

742

Key Press and Periodical Events Timeline, 1800–1900 Bibliography  Index

746 766 829

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures   2.1 Hand feeding on the first cylinder press, 1812 (Courtesy of Edward Clark Collection, Edinburgh Napier University)   2.2 John Kelley & Co., Printers’ Engineers, wharfedale press advertisement, British Printer, 1902 (Courtesy of Edward Clark Collection, Edinburgh Napier University)   2.3 Foundry operations (Courtesy of Edward Clark Collection, Edinburgh Napier University)   2.4 Advertisement for Linotype, British Printer, 1902 (Courtesy of Edward Clark Collection, Edinburgh Napier University)   3.1 The Poor Man’s Guardian, the Penny Magazine and Chambers’s Information for the People (Creative Commons licence, courtesy of Hathi Trust and Internet Archive)   3.2 The Poor Man’s Guardian, No. 41, detail of masthead (Creative Commons licence, courtesy of Hathi Trust)   3.3 Burins used for incising woodblocks and cross section of box wood, before being cut into smaller blocks (Image created by Rose Roberto based on her photographs at Chris Daunt’s studio, Gateshead, and in the Department of Typography and Graphical Communications, University of Reading)   3.4 Difference in illustration quality shown between a woodcut and wood engraving (Creative Commons licence)   3.5 Illuminated Magazine, 1843. The influence of eighteenth- century artistic sensibilities can be seen in the page layout

69 71 74 79 88 93

94 95

­

  3.6

  3.7

  3.8

  3.9 3.10

3.11

3.12 3.13

3.14

list of illustrations for ‘Beaus of England’ and the illustration detail from ‘Anesquette: A Story of the Valley D’Aspe’ (Volume 1, pp. 6 and 201) (Creative Commons Licence, courtesy of Internet Archive) Woodblock (T.2011.56.240) and print (Wq1/6960) of monthly serial issue cover of Chambers’s Encyclopaedia, 1859 (Woodblock from W. & R. Chambers Collection, The National Museums Collection Care Centre, Edinburgh. Photograph of cover print from Chambers’s Encyclopaedia, British Museum, London) Punch, or the London Charivari, cover of Volume 3. The signature of the wood engraver ‘E. Landelles’ can be seen at the bottom right. (Courtesy of Sheffield University Library) Punch cartoon satirising Information for the People and other middle-class publisher initiatives promoting middle-class ‘improvement’ literature (Courtesy of Sheffield University Library) Masthead for Illustrated London News or ILN, compared with masthead for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (Creative Commons licence) Underside of woodblocks joined by bolts from the W. & R. Chambers collection (T. 2011) at National Museums Scotland (Photograph by Rob Banham, courtesy of National Museums Scotland) Pictorial syntaxes are marks used by artists, draughtsmen or printmakers to create a representation of a three-dimensional object or scene from real life in a two-dimensional space. Here, the Apollo Belvedere is presented in different wood-engraved pictorial syntaxes. Images are not to scale (Creative Commons licence) Examples of types of stroke used to create different effects when printed on wood (Images from Brett 2010: 45, courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing)  Different types of pigeons presented in different woodengraved pictorial syntax styles. The illustration in Chambers’s Encyclopaedia, second edition, uses a facsimile style that mimics a photograph. Images are not to scale (Creative Commons licence) Woodblock used in the production of Chambers’s Expressive Reader series. Note that a photograph taken of another text and its illustration has been exposed on to

xi

97

98

99

101 104

105

106 107

108

xii

3.15

3.16

3.17   4.1   4.2   4.3   7.1   7.2   7.3   7.4   7.5   7.6   8.1   8.2

list of illustrations this block. The illustration portion has been cleared away from the block. It is likely this block was intended to create a derivative, such as an electrotype (Photograph by Rose Roberto, by kind permission National Museums Scotland) Stereotype and electrotype of the same map showing the Baltic Sea. Note that the stereotype is slightly smaller due to metal shrinking as it cools. Stereotypes or electrotypes would be affixed to woodblocks and then could be printed in the same matrix as type made metal (Photograph by Rose Roberto, by kind permission National Museums Scotland) Composite of Punch cartoons: From 1851, Volume 21, p. 35: ‘Awful Occurrence at an evening Party’; From 23 December 1871, p. 262: ‘Served out for staying Home’; From 20 June 1891, Volume 21, p. 35: ‘Feline Amenities’ (Courtesy of Sheffield University Library) 1908 halftone print featuring Andrew Carnegie on the cover of the Illustrated London News (Courtesy of Sheffield University Library) W. H. Smith railway bookstall, 1893 (Courtesy of David Finkelstein) Newspaper packing for dispatch, late nineteenth century (Courtesy of Edward Clark Collection, Edinburgh Napier University Library) ‘A Coffee House’, from Leisure Hour, May 1863 (Courtesy of David Finkelstein) Galignani’s Messenger, 2 July 1814 (Courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France) Galignani’s Messenger, 8 May 1850 (Courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France) The Paris Mercury and Continental Chronicle (Creative Commons licence, courtesy of Études Epistémè) The Roman Advertiser, 27 November 1847 (Courtesy of Isabelle Richet) The Levant Herald (Creative Commons licence) The Gibraltar Chronicle, 26 February 1826 (Creative Commons licence, courtesy of Wikimedia) ‘Arrival of the Mail. Race for the Telegram’, Illustrated Melbourne Post, 11 October 1862 (Creative Commons licence, courtesy of National Library of Australia) A. C. Cooke and Frederick Grosse, Glenelg, ‘South Australia – Arrival of the Mail Steamer’, Australian News

118

119

120 121 135 136 143 223 224 230 234 236 238 254

­

  8.3

  8.4   8.5 10.1 10.2 10.3 11.1 11.2 13.1 14.1 14.2 14.3 15.1 15.2 15.3 15.4 15.5 15.6

list of illustrations for Home Readers, 24 December 1864 (Creative Commons licence, courtesy of National Library of Australia)  ‘Latest intelligence: Arrival of the Melbourne Mail at Sandhurst, with Five Days’ Later Intelligence from Melbourne’, Melbourne Punch 2 (1856), p. 199 (Creative Commons licence, courtesy of National Library of Australia) 23 Lördags-Magasinet, 23 April 1836, image of rhinoceros (Courtesy of Cecilia Wadsö Lecaros) Penny Magazine, 26 April 1834, image of rhinoceros (Courtesy of David Finkelstein) Opening verses, Anwiredd y “Times”, 1888 (By permission of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/National Library of Wales) Baner ac Amserau Cymru (By permission of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/National Library of Wales) Y Genedl Gymreig (By permission of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/National Library of Wales) Cover of An Teachdaire Gae’lach, 1829 (Courtesy of Donald E. Meek) Cover of Caraid nan Gael, 1844 (Courtesy of Edinburgh University Library) Irish Ecclesiastical Gazette, March 1856 (Courtesy of the Editor and Board of the Church of Ireland Gazette and the Representative Church Body Library, Dublin) ‘The Song of the Shirt’, Punch, 5 (December 1843), p. 260 (Courtesy of James Hardiman Library, National University of Ireland, Galway) Illustrated London News, 16 September 1843 (© British Library Board) Ally Sloper, Royal Academy notice, 1883 (Courtesy of the Library of Congress) Front page, Figaro in London, 10 December 1831 (© British Library Board) Punch Almanack, 1860 (Courtesy of Michael de Nie) Page 2, Fun, 30 October 1869 (© British Library Board) Judy, 1878 (Courtesy of David Finkelstein)  ‘The Irish Caliban’, Funny Folks, 4 September 1880 (© British Library Board) ‘Woman’s Work’, Moonshine, 23 December 1882 (© British Library Board)

xiii

255

256 275 276 314 325 326 338 344 396 409 410 417 425 428 430 431 432 433

xiv

list of illustrations

16.1 A cartoon from an 1883 issue of Punch where a man is admonished by his friend for reading the ‘depressing’ Lancet. The cartoon attests to the continued appeal the Lancet retained throughout the century among a public perennially curious about matters of medicine and health. Wood engraving by C. Keene (Courtesy of Wellcome Collection) 16.2 The ‘Queries and Answers’ section from the first volume of Health (1883). The popular journal, which sought to link the public to the latest medical news and knowledge, provided ample space for readers to write in for advice about their health (Courtesy of Wellcome Collection) 16.3 Front cover of First Aid from 1895. A popular read among St John Ambulance members and others with an interest in first aid, the journal recounted tales of lifesaving heroism from across the country, shared tips on health and hygiene, and pushed for better ambulance provision in London (Courtesy of Museum of the Order of St John) 17.1 Entomologist’s Weekly Intelligence, 21 August 1858 (Courtesy of The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London) 18.1 ‘The Rotunda at the Bank of England’, from the Illustrated London News, 30 December 1843, p. 428 (© British Library Board (General Reference Collection)) 18.2 ‘The Stock Exchange’, from the Illustrated London News, 13 April 1844, p. 225 (© British Library Board (General Reference Collection)) 18.3 Masthead of the Financial Times, Monday, 13 February 1888 (© British Library Board (Open Access News)) 20.1 ‘United Ireland’. Irish newspapers at the close of the century were often fiercely political. The 1890s saw an increased presence for political cartooning within the press (© British Library Board) 20.2 The Glasgow Herald’s self-image was as Glaswegian, and as Scottish, but also as an important force in UK journalism, hence the prominence here of its London office (© British Library Board) 20.3 Portrait of Edmund Dwyer Gray (Courtesy of Archives Office of Tasmania) 21.1 Adverts with endorsements from a chemist and from the professional and trade press. From the British

446

451

454 481

490 494 496

535

546 549

­

21.2 21.3 21.4 22.1 22.2 22.3 22.4 22.5 23.1 23.2 23.3 23.4 23.5 24.1 24.2 24.3 24.4 24.5

list of illustrations and Foreign Confectioner, 1 December 1883, p. viii (Courtesy of Andrew King) Hammond’s List of London and Provincial Newspapers, Periodicals, &c. London: Hammond, 1850, p. 4 (Courtesy of Andrew King)  Hammond’s List of London and Provincial Newspapers, Periodicals, &c. London: Hammond, 1850, p. 5 (Courtesy of Andrew King) C. & E. Layton’s Handy Newspaper List. London: Layton, 1895, p. 7 (Courtesy of Andrew King) Leisure Hour, 14 November 1863 (Courtesy of David Finkelstein) Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday, 1886 (Courtesy of David Finkelstein) The Day’s Doings (Courtesy of British Newspaper Archive) The Illustrated Police News (Courtesy of British Newspaper Archive) Opening of the Leeds City Art Gallery, Illustrated London News, October 1888 (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons) Charles J. Apperley (‘Nimrod’) of the Sporting Magazine (Courtesy of Joel H. Wiener) Tom Sayers v John C. Heenan, 1860 (Courtesy of Joel H. Wiener) Advertisements, Baily’s Monthly Magazine, 1881 (Courtesy of David Finkelstein) John Corlett of the Sporting Times (Courtesy of Joel H. Wiener) W. G. Grace, 1890s (Courtesy of the National Museum of Australia, Canberra) Dicky Bird Society Concert, Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, 31 July 1886 (Courtesy of Newcastle City Library, Local Studies Section, Newcastle upon Tyne)  Kind Hearted Brigade Picnic, Weekly Telegraph, 9 August 1890 (© British Library Board) Dicky Bird Society, Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, 15 October 1881 (Courtesy of Newcastle City Library, Local Studies Section, Newcastle upon Tyne)  Sunbeam Club, People’s Journal, 1 January 1887 (© British Library Board) Order of the Round Table, Cardiff Times, 6 December 1890 (© British Library Board)

xv 565 569 570 571 599 605 606 607 620 624 627 629 634 638 667 668 669 670 670

xvi

list of illustrations

24.6 Our Little Contributors, Hull Times, 7 September 1901 (Courtesy of the Hull History Centre, Hull)  24.7 Dicky Bird Society, Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, 19 May 1894 (Courtesy of the Newcastle City Library, Local Studies Section, Newcastle upon Tyne)   24.8 Dicky Bird Society, Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, 11 January 1896 (Courtesy of the Newcastle City Library, Local Studies Section, Newcastle upon Tyne)  24.9 Dicky Bird Society, Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, 14 March 1896 (Courtesy of the Newcastle City Library, Local Studies Section, Newcastle upon Tyne)  25.1 Title page of the weekly Domestic Journal and Home Miscellany of Instruction and Amusement, 30 June 1849 (Courtesy of Kathryn Ledbetter) 25.2 Illustration of violence at the ‘Massacre at Calabar’ from the front page of the Lady’s Newspaper, 6 February 1847 (Courtesy of Kathryn Ledbetter) 25.3 Advertising accompanying the ‘Work Table’ needlework section in the Queen, 1875 (Courtesy of Kathryn Ledbetter) 25.4 ‘The New Woman’, Punch, or the London Charivari, 15 June 1895 (Courtesy of Kathryn Ledbetter) 25.5 Front page of the first issue of the Woman’s Herald showing interview feature with the feminist Emmeline Pankhurst, 7 February 1891 (Courtesy of Kathryn Ledbetter) 25.6 Illustration of a handwritten letter by the feminist Sarah Grand published in the Lady’s Realm, 1897 (Courtesy of Kathryn Ledbetter) 26.1 Lincolnshire Chronicle, 12 March 1896, advertisement (Courtesy of the Lincolnshire Libraries Local Collection) 26.2 Lincolnshire Chronicle, 24 March 1896, advertisement (Courtesy of the Lincolnshire Libraries Local Collection) 26.3 Saunders caricature in Judy, 3 May 1893, p. 213 (© British Library Board)

Colour Plates   1 The Cossar Patent Flat Bed Web Newspaper Printing Machine (1907 example) (National Museums Scotland, Courtesy of Alison Taubman)

671 673 674 674 695 697 700 705

707 708 721 722 736

­

list of illustrations

xvii

  2 A schematic drawing showing how the copper interacts with the mould in a chemical bath, by Easchiff CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrotyping#/media/ File:Electrotyping.svg); Harper & Brother’s Battery Room where electrotypes are prepared by submerging copper and wax mould into a chemical bath. Note the batteries in this image, which supply positive and negative charges   3 Answers cover image, 11 June 1892 (Courtesy of Paul Raphael Rooney)   4 Answers advertisements, 1892 (Courtesy of Paul Raphael Rooney)   5 N. Chevalie, ‘English Mail Day at the Post Office, Melbourne’ [1862] (Creative Commons licence, courtesy of National Library of Australia)   6 London premises of Alexander Herzen and the Free Russian Press (Courtesy of Helen S. Williams)   7 An Gaidheal cover, 1873 (Courtesy of Department of Celtic and Gaelic, Glasgow University)   8 Cornhill Magazine cover, first issue, January 1860 (Courtesy of David Finkelstein)   9 Baily’s Monthly Magazine, 1881 (Courtesy of David Finkelstein) 10 Two-page display of hand-coloured fashion plates from the New Monthly Belle Assemblée, March 1841 (Courtesy of Kathryn Ledbetter) 11 Berlin wool work pattern for a footstool cushion from the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, 1863 (Courtesy of Kathryn Ledbetter) 12 Front page of Bright’s Intelligencer, 21 September 1860 (Courtesy of Ilfracombe Museum)

Tables   3.1 Breakdown  of types of unstamped papers from 1800 to 1860. Based on data and categories from Chalaby 1998: 13 and Hollis 1970: 318–28   3.2 Proportional correlation between daily papers and number of wood engravers. Patterns of rising and declining members were consistent in major UK   cities   3.3 Book production cost database (Weedon 2003: 75)

111

115 116

xviii

list of illustrations

  8.1 Press coverage of the Piccadilly Street Fight   8.2 The rise and fall of false news across the Atlantic   21.1 Trade and professional periodicals, 1846–1900, in press directories: Mitchell’s, Hammond’s, ‘An Old Advertiser’ and Layton’s 21.2 Commercial, financial and insurance periodicals in Mitchell’s, Hammond’s, ‘An Old Advertiser’ and Layton’s 23.1 Frequency of sports sections in the Times, 1800–1900 23.2 The Times ‘sport’ search, 1800–1850 23.3 The Times ‘sport’ search, 1850–1900

262 262 559 582 645 647 650

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This volume started from a casual conversation with Jackie Jones, commissioning editor at Edinburgh University Press. Musings over a coffee about the potential for a project on periodical press history turned into a multivolume proposal to survey the history of British and Irish press history from its inception in the seventeenth century through to the present, which I then pursued with my colleague Martin Conboy at the University of Sheffield. I agreed to take on editing the nineteenth-century volume of the proposed series we developed. Little did I know that it would take six years, multiple workshops, conferences and working group meetings, as well as multiple rounds of editorial shaping, to bring this volume to fruition. Much support from a number of colleagues also helped at key moments during my sojourn into the voluminous world of the nineteenth-century media, and I am grateful to the British Academy for providing funding for an early career researcher workshop on ‘Communication and Knowledge 1620–1900: The Atlantic and its Continents’, held in Dundee in March 2014, at which preliminary planning work was done for this initiative. Thanks also are due to former colleagues Bob Carr and Suzanne Spalding at the Centre for Open Learning, University of Edinburgh, who worked with me to organise ‘Communities of Communication II: Newspapers and Periodicals in Britain and Ireland from 1800 to 1900’, a two-day conference at the University of Edinburgh in September 2015 that featured many fine presentations subsequently expanded into chapters featured in this volume. I am grateful to the contributors who agreed to join me in mapping out the contours of media and press production over a key moment of British and Irish cultural expansion and evolution, and with whom I have had the pleasure of editing and seeing into print. It has been an exciting journey. Finally, xix

xx

acknowledgements

it behoves me to thank those who have provided permission to reproduce the images featured in this volume. Many items came from my own stock of journals and newspapers. Others were provided courtesy of the following: Archives Office of Tasmania; Bibliothèque nationale de France; the British Library; British Newspaper Archive; Editor and Board of the Church of Ireland Gazette; Representative Church Body Library, Dublin; Michael de Nie; Edinburgh University Library; Edward Clark Collection, Edinburgh Napier University; Études Epistémè; Department of Celtic and Gaelic, Glasgow University; James Hardiman Library, National University of Ireland, Galway National Library of Australia; Hathi Trust; Hull History Centre, Hull; Ifracombe Museum; Internet Archive; Andrew King; Kathryn Ledbetter; Library of Congress; National Library of Wales; Donald Meek; Museum of the Order of St John; The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London; National Museum of Australia, Canberra; National Museums Scotland; Newcastle City Library, Local Studies Section, Newcastle upon Tyne; Isabelle Richet; Paul Raphael Rooney, Sheffield University Library; Alison Taubman; Cecilia Wadsö-Lecaros; Wellcome Collection; Joel H. Wiener; Wikimedia; Helen S. Williams.

CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES

Joan Allen is a Senior Lecturer in Modern British History at Newcastle University. Her research interests coalesce around nineteenth-century radicalism, the Irish in Britain and the popular press. She is the author of a biography of Joseph Cowen MP, owner of the Newcastle Chronicle (2007), and (with Owen R. Ashton) co-edited Papers for the People: A Study of the Chartist Press (2005). More recent work includes studies of John Boyle O’Reilly, the editor of the Boston Pilot (2013), and George Julian Harney’s radical journal the Democratic Review (LHR, 2013). She is currently writing a study of Charles Diamond and the Irish Catholic press in Britain. M. H. Beals is a Lecturer in Digital History at Loughborough University, investigating the connections between migration and the media in the early modern anglophone world. She is the author of Coin, Kirk, Class and Kin: Emigration, Social Change and Identity in Southern Scotland (2011) and Digital History: An Introductory Guide (forthcoming). Her current research explores the use of digital methodologies in the identification and mapping of reprinted material in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century periodicals, particularly the distribution of colonial news within the United Kingdom. Amelia Bonea is a historian of colonial South Asia and the British Empire whose research is situated at the intersections of media, science, technology and medicine. She was educated at the Universities of Tokyo and Heidelberg and worked five years as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford, before returning to Heidelberg in 2018 to take up a position as a Research Fellow. Her first monograph, The News of Empire: Telegraphy, Journalism, and the Politics xxi

xxii

contributor biographies

of Reporting in Colonial India, c. 1830–1900 (2016), was awarded the 2017 AHA Eugenia M. Palmegiano Prize for the History of Journalism. Her second monograph, Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain (co-authored with M. Dickson, S. Shuttleworth and J. Wallis), was published with Pittsburgh University Press in 2019. Michael Bromley is an honorary member of the Centre for the Study of Journalism and History at Sheffield University. A former journalist, he has taught and researched at universities in the UK, Australia and the USA. He has published widely on journalism and the press in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He holds both undergraduate and Master’s degrees in history. Rachel Calder is completing a PhD at UCL. Her research is focused on the history and publications of J. Whitaker & Sons, particularly their trade publications, the Bookseller and the Reference Catalogue of Current Literature, to evaluate their function and efficacy in service to the Victorian book trade. She has a BA in English and American Studies and an MA in History, and has worked in the book trade for many years. Allison Cavanagh is a lecturer in Media and Communication in the School of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds. She has researched extensively in the history of media and reader commentary and is currently working on a large project looking at the development of letters to the editor as a forum in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Regina Uí Chollatáin is Professor and Head of the School of Irish, Celtic Studies and Folklore in University College Dublin. Her main areas of research are Irish-language media, print culture and language revival. She has published widely in academic journals nationally and internationally. Her monograph on the first Irish-language newspaper, An Claidheamh Soluis agus Fáinne an Lae 1899–1932 (2004), was awarded the Donnchadh Ó Súilleabháin Oireachtas award. Recent publications include the co-edited Litríocht na Gaeilge ar fud an domhain (2015), the first comprehensive study of Irish-language literature in a global context, Cnuasach Comhar 1982–2012 (2014), and An Greann sa Ghaeilge (2013). Colette Colligan is Professor of English at Simon Fraser University. She specialises in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature, print

­

contributor biographies

xxiii

and media culture, digital humanities, and the history of ­pornography. Recent essays appear, or are forthcoming, in Book History, Victorian Studies, Histoires littéraires and the Cambridge Companion to Erotic Literature. Her most recent book is A Publisher’s Paradise: Expatriate Literary Culture in Paris, 1890–1960 (2014). Her earlier work includes The Traffic in Obscenity from Byron to Beardsley: Sexuality and Exoticism in Nineteenth-Century Print Culture (2006) and a co-edited essay collection, Media, Technology and Literature in the Nineteenth Century: Image, Sound, Touch (2011). Martin Conboy is Professor of Journalism History and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Journalism Studies at the University of Sheffield. He is also the co-director of the Centre for the Study of Journalism and History based in Sheffield. He is the author of seven single-authored books on the language and history of journalism including How Journalism Uses History (2012), Journalism in Britain: A Historical Introduction (2011), The Language of Newspapers: Socio-Historical Perspectives (2010) and Journalism: A Critical History (2004). He has also produced four edited special editions of world-leading journals and forty chapters and journal articles, and is on the editorial boards of Journalism Studies: Media History, Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism and Memory Studies. He was the principal investigator on the AHRC Research Network ‘Exploring the Language of the Popular in Anglo-American Newspapers 1833–1988’ (2010–12) and joint lead investigator with Professor Marcel Broersma of the University of Groningen on a collaborative research grant exploring the conceptualisation of role perceptions of journalism in times of technological change (2012–14). Diana Cooper-Richet is a senior researcher at the Centre d’histoire culturelle des sociétés contemporaines, Université de Versailles SaintQuentin-en-Yvelines. Her research specialisations include the allophone press and the English-language press published in France during the nineteenth century. She is founder and coordinator of the European Transfopress network (http://transfopresschcsc.wix.com/ transfopress), engaged in the study of the foreign-language press across Europe. Her publications include articles and edited collections on the allophone and foreign-language press, among them Les Relations culturelles franco-britanniques revisitées (XIX°–XX° siècles) (2014) and Le Commerce transatlantique de librairie, un des fondements de la mondialisation culturelle France (France, Portugal,

xxiv

contributor biographies

Brésil XVIII°–XX° siècles) (2012). Her most recent book is La France anglaise (2018). Howard Cox is Emeritus Professor of International Business History at the University of Worcester, UK, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He has published in a wide range of academic journals including Media History, Business History, Business History Review, Industrial and Corporate Change, Technology Analysis and Strategic Management, Applied Economics, Management and Organizational History, the Indian Economic and Social History Review and the Asia Pacific Business Review. He published his sole-authored Oxford University Press monograph The Global Cigarette in 2000 and coauthored, with Simon Mowatt, Revolutions from Grub Street: A History of Magazine Publishing in Britain (2015). Alex Csiszar is Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. He researches the history of authorship, publishing and information management in the sciences in Britain and France during the nineteenth century. He is the author of The Scientific Journal: Authorship and the Politics of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century (2018). His second book is a history of the relationship between literature search practices and technologies of valuation in the sciences. Ian d’Alton is currently a Visiting Research Fellow in the Centre for Contemporary Irish History, Trinity College, Dublin. In 2014, in Cambridge, he was a Visiting Fellow at Sidney Sussex College and a Senior Research Associate at Peterhouse College. His interests lie in minority history, principally of southern Irish Protestantism, and he has written extensively on press history in that context. His latest publication is as co-editor (with Ida Milne) of Protestant and Irish: The Minority’s Search for Place in Independent Ireland (2019). Michael de Nie is Professor of History at the University of West Georgia. His first book, The Eternal Paddy: Irish Identity and the British Press, 1798–1882 (2004), was awarded the American Conference for Irish Studies Donnelly Prize. He is co-editor of several collected volumes, including (with Karen Steele) Ireland and the New Journalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and (with Tim McMahon and Paul Townend) Ireland in an Imperial World: Citizenship, Opportunism, and Subversion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). He has also published numerous journal articles and book chapters on the Victorian press, Ireland and empire.

­

contributor biographies

xxv

David Finkelstein is a cultural historian whose research interests include media history, print culture and book history studies. His most recent published work was Movable Types: Roving Creative Printers of the Victorian World (Oxford University Press, 2018). Other publications include An Introduction to Book History, the co-edited Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, vol. 3, 1880–2000 and the edited essay collection Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition, which was awarded the Robert Colby Scholarly Book Prize for its advancement of the understanding of the nineteenth-century periodical press. Sally Frampton is Humanities and Healthcare Fellow at the Division of Humanities, University of Oxford. She is currently working on two research projects: the history of the first aid movement and the development of medical and health journalism in the nineteenth century. She is also a historian of modern surgery. Her book Belly-Rippers: Surgical Innovation and the Ovariotomy Controversy was published in 2018. Steve Harrison is a Senior Lecturer in Journalism at Liverpool John Moores University. After obtaining an MA in English Language and Literature from Brasenose College, Oxford, Steve went on to gain a BSc in Mathematics from the Open University while working for the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo in various editorial roles. His research interests include the history of newspaper production and the role of numeracy in journalism education. Karen Hasin-Bromley is an independent scholar and was a regular contributor to Cassone, the international online magazine of art. She has worked in publishing, producing illustrated fine art books. She holds degrees in Art History and Museum Studies from the University of London. Andrew Hobbs is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Journalism, Language and Communication at the University of Central Lancashire. He is fascinated by provincial print culture and its sense of place, in particular Victorian local newspapers and twentieth-century county magazines. Recent publications include ‘How Local Newspapers Came to Dominate Victorian Poetry Publishing’ (Victorian Poetry, 2014, with Clare Janusczewski) and ‘The Deleterious Dominance of The Times in Nineteenth-Century Scholarship’ (Journal of Victorian Culture, 2013). He is a former journalist.

xxvi

contributor acknowledgements biographies

Andrew J. H. Jackson is Senior Lecturer in History and Head of Research at Bishop Grosseteste University in Lincoln, UK. Dr Jackson’s research background is in history and geography. Project and publication interests include: nineteenth- and twentieth-century rural and urban change; theory and practice in community, local and regional history; public history; history and heritage education; the significance of digitisation for archives, heritage and e-learning; newspaper and media history; the co-operative movement and education; the histories of Lincoln, Lincolnshire and Devon; and the Lincolnshire First World War home-front poet Bernard Samuel Gilbert. Aled Gruffydd Jones was the Sir John Williams Professor of Welsh History at Aberystwyth University, Wales, from 1994 to 2013, and Chief Executive and Librarian at the National Library of Wales from 2013 to 2015. His areas of research interest have ranged from the history of modern Britain’s engagement with empire to the history of the British and Welsh press from the late eighteenth century to the present. His publications include Press, Politics and Society: A History of Journalism in Wales (1993) and Powers of the Press: Newspapers, Power and the Public in Nineteenth-Century England (1996). He has been editor of the Welsh History Review and was Literary Director (Modern) of the Royal Historical Society (2000–4). Christopher A. Kent is Professor Emeritus of Modern British History at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. He was editor of the Canadian Journal of History / Annales canadiennnes d’histoire for some fifteen years, and served as president of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals and the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada. He is a member of the Victorian Studies and Victorian Periodicals Review advisory boards, and has published widely on Jane Austen, Wilkie Collins and Victorian bohemia, artists, journalists and intellectuals. He is currently writing a book on the life and times of Matt Morgan, the once-celebrated, now-forgotten Anglo-American popular artist. Sheila M. Kidd is Senior Lecturer in Celtic and Gaelic at the University of Glasgow. Her research to date has dealt with Gaelic literature from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries with a particular focus on Gaelic prose writings in periodicals and newspaper columns, on the social and historical dimensions of these texts and on the interface between orality and literacy. More recently, she has turned her attention to Gaels in the East and West Indies. Her edition of

­

contributor biographies

xxvii

nineteenth-century còmhraidhean (prose dialogues), drawing heavily on the Gaelic periodical press, was published by the Scottish Gaelic Texts Society in 2016. Andrew King is Professor of English at the University of Greenwich. He has published widely on nineteenth-century print media and popular reading. He has edited two award-winning volumes with Alexis Easley and John Morton: the Routledge Handbook to NineteenthCentury British Newspapers and Periodicals (2016) and Researching the Nineteenth-Century Press (2017). He is currently editor of Victorian Popular Fictions, the organ of the Victorian Popular Fiction Association, and is editing a collection of essays for Routledge on the Victorian trade and professional press due out in 2021. Felix M. Larkin was chairman of the Newspaper and Periodical History Forum of Ireland from 2010 to 2013. A retired public servant, he now works as a historian and freelance writer. He has written extensively on the press in Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and his publications include Terror and Discord: The Shemus Cartoons in the Freeman’s Journal, 1920–1924 (2009). He was an editorial advisor and external contributor to the Royal Irish Academy’s Dictionary of Irish Biography (2009), and he served as academic director of the Parnell Summer School from 2013 to 2015. Cecilia Wadsö Lecaros is a Reader in English Literature at the Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University. Her doctoral thesis, The Victorian Governess Novel (Lund University Press 2001), was a genre study based on a comprehensive set of nineteenth-century novels and the contemporary English debate on female education and paid employment. Her postdoctoral project focused on the presentation of nineteenth-century self-improvement issues such as ‘time management’ and ‘punctuality’ in different types of didactic literature. Currently, she is working on a project about the introduction and translation of British social-reform literature in mid-nineteenth-century Sweden. Kathryn Ledbetter is Professor of English at Texas State University. She is author of Victorian Needlework (2012), British Victorian Women’s Periodicals: Civilization, Beauty, and Poetry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals: Commodities in Context (Ashgate, 2007), ‘Colour’d Shadows’: Contexts in

xxviii

contributor biographies

Publishing, Printing, and Reading Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers (with Terence Hoagwood, 2005) and The Keepsake (1829), a facsimile edition, with introduction and notes (with Terence Hoagwood, 1999). Philip March took an MA in Victorian Studies at Birkbeck, London, after a thirty-year career in teaching. His recently completed PhD examines the influence of congregationalism on the New Journalism of W. T. Stead, the nineteenth-century sensationalist newspaper editor and socio-political reformer. Margery Masterson is a Research Associate at the University of Bristol specialising in nineteenth-century British and imperial history. Her current research concentrates on violence and masculinity, and she is completing a monograph on press relationships, state scandals and the ability of the media to effect social change. Frederick S. Milton was awarded his doctorate by Newcastle University and currently works at Teesside University Library. A historian interested in nineteenth-century social history, his research interests include childhood, education, children’s periodicals, the newspaper press, gender and environmental history. Published output includes articles and book contributions assessing the growth of newspaper children’s columns, collaborations with the BBC, and contributions to the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism. Current work in progress includes an assessment of epitaphs of children published in provincial newspapers and appraising the role of children’s periodicals in combating egg-collecting. Simon Mowatt is Head of International Business, Strategy and Entrepreneurship at Auckland University of Technology Business School, New Zealand, where he is Associate Professor of Management and Leader of the Business and Labour History Group. He has been a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for International Business History, Henley Business School, UK, and has held positions in business schools in the UK and Europe. He is an Associate Member of the Centre for Printing History and Culture. Simon has published widely in the areas of business history, strategy and innovation, in journals such as Business History, Media History, Industrial and Corporate Change and Industry and Innovation. He co-authored with Howard Cox Revolutions from Grub Street: A History of Magazine Publishing in Britain (Oxford University Press, 2015).

­

contributor biographies

xxix

Mark O’Brien is an Associate Professor in the School of Communications at Dublin City University and a former chair of the Newspaper and Periodical History Forum of Ireland. He is the author of The Fourth Estate: Journalism in Twentieth-Century Ireland (2017), The Irish Times: A History (2008) and De Valera, Fianna Fáil and the Irish Press: The Truth in the News (2001). His edited works include The Sunday Papers: A History of Ireland’s Weekly Press (2018), Periodicals and Journalism in Twentieth Century Ireland (2014), Political Communication in the Republic of Ireland (2014), Independent Newspapers: A History (2012) and Political Censorship and the Democratic State: The Irish Broadcasting Ban (2005). Tom O’Malley is Emeritus Professor of Media at Aberystwyth University. He is co-editor of the journal Media History. He has published on the history of the press from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries and on broadcasting. His publications include: Closedown? The BBC and Government Broadcasting Policy, 1979–1992 (1994); with Clive Soley, Regulating The Press (2000); and, with Siân Nicholas, the edited volume Moral Panics, Social Fears, and the Media (2013). He is currently working on a social history of the UK press during the Second World War with Siân Nicholas and Marc Wiggam. Siân Pooley teaches modern British history at Magdalen College, Oxford, and is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of History, University of Oxford. Her research explores the social and cultural history of Britain since 1800, especially through the experiences, relationships and inequalities that mattered to children, men and women. She is currently working on parental identities in Victorian and Edwardian England, children’s writing that was published in the popular press, and the life-long impact of childhood adversity in twentieth-century Britain. James Quinn, a graduate of University College Dublin, was co-editor of the Royal Irish Academy’s Dictionary of Irish Biography (2009) and is currently Managing Editor of the ongoing DIB project. He has written widely on various aspects of Irish nationalism, biography and historiography in historical journals and essay collections, and published book-length biographical studies of the United Irishman Thomas Russell (2001) and the Young Irelander John Mitchel (2008). His most recent research has been into nineteenth-century nationalist historiography, and his Young Ireland and the Writing of Irish History was published in 2015.

xxx

contributor biographies

Rose Roberto has recently completed an AHRC-funded PhD at the University of Reading in collaboration with National Museums Scotland and is currently teaching history courses at Bishop Grosseteste University in Lincoln. Her interdisciplinary research covers nineteenthand twentieth-century print and visual culture, history of science, global heritage studies and digital humanities. She has held a Short-Term Fellowship at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. Previous awards include the Barry Bloomfield Award by the Bibliographic Society, and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Joint Fellowship from the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. In 2018 and 2019 she was a Visiting Lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her upcoming monograph is entitled Illustrating Animals in the Nineteenth Century: Popular Taste from Bewick to Beardsley, to be published by Peter Lang in association with National Museums Scotland Enterprises. She is also serving as editor for Women in Print, Volume 1, also to be published by Peter Lang. Peter Robinson is Associate Professor at Japan Women’s University. He has written extensively on aspects of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century book publishing, focusing mainly on the concept of anonymity, book advertising and the activities of the radical publishers James Ridgway and Henry Delahay Symonds. His PhD thesis focused on the rhetorical postures adopted by the political philosopher David Williams (1734–1816) in his pamphlet Lessons to a Young Prince (1790). He is currently working on a project funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Sciences (JSPS) under the title Book Advertising Studies (BKAS) exploring cross-cultural aspects of book advertising from the eighteenth century to the present day. Paul Raphael Rooney is the author of Railway Reading and Late Victorian Literary Series (2018). He co-edited with Anna Gasperini the essay collection Media and Print Consumption in NineteenthCentury Britain: The Victorian Reading Experience (2016). Other publications include articles in the Victorian Periodicals Review, Journal of Victorian Culture and Women’s Writing. He has been an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, and has also worked as a research assistant on the Irish Research Council Nineteenth Century Trade Periodicals project at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Melissa Score has recently turned to researching the history of the press after twenty years in financial journalism as a commodities

­

contributor biographies

xxxi

reporter, subeditor and news editor for Reuters and Dow Jones Newswires. Her PhD from Birkbeck College concerned the development and impact of campaigning journalism in the mid-nineteenth century. She has contributed work to the recent volume on the News of the World: 1843–2011, edited by Laurel Brake, Chandrika Kaul and Mark W. Turner, and has written about printers, technology and gender for the Victorian Periodicals Review. She recently published profiles of John Browne Bell and Henry Lascelles Carr for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Joanne Shattock is Emeritus Professor of Victorian Literature at the University of Leicester. Her most recent books include Journalism and the Periodical Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2017) and a twenty-five volume edition of the Selected Works of Margaret Oliphant (Pickering & Chatto/Routledge 2011–16), of which she is General Editor with Elisabeth Jay. Her current project is a study of the professionalisation of journalism and the ways in which this mapped onto the professionalisation of authorship in the nineteenth century. She is editing a collection of Nineteenth Century Literary and Cultural Criticism for Routledge Historical Resources and is co-editor of their Nineteenth-Century series. She is a former President of the Research Society of Victorian Periodicals. Stephen Tate is a former daily newspaper journalist, who after gaining his PhD in 2007 moved into academic work. He currently lectures in Journalism Studies and History at Blackburn College’s University Centre. His research interests include the historical development of sports journalism and of the Victorian reporter. He has recently completed ‘The Mighty Atom’: James Catton, Sports Reporter. A History of the British Sporting Journalist, 1850–1939 (2019). James Thompson is Reader in Modern British History at the University of Bristol. He is the author of British Political Culture and the Idea of ‘Public Opinion’, 1867–1914 (2013) and the co-editor of Languages of Politics in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2013). He has published widely on nineteenth-century British political, intellectual and cultural history. He is currently writing a book on the visual culture of modern British politics, provisionally entitled Seeing Politics: Visual and Political Culture in Britain, 1867–1939. Elizabeth Tilley is Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the National University of Ireland, Galway. She has published extensively

xxxii

contributor biographies

on nineteenth-century Irish book culture and periodical history and was one of the Associate Editors of the Dictionary of NineteenthCentury Journalism (2009). Her new edition of J. S. Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly (2018) recovered the periodical versions of Le Fanu’s fiction, and her monograph, The Periodical Press in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, is forthcoming from Palgrave in 2019. Matthew Wale recently completed his PhD at the University of Leicester, working as part of the AHRC-funded project ‘Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the Nineteenth and Twentyfirst Centuries’. His research focuses on nineteenth-century natural history periodicals, examining the role such publications played in scientific practice. Joel H. Wiener is Emeritus Professor of History at the City University of New York. He has written widely on aspects of modern press history. His books include The War of the Unstamped (1969), Papers for the People (1988) and The Americanization of the British Press, 1830s–1914 (2011). He is a former President of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals. Joanne Wilkes is Professor of English at the University of Auckland (New Zealand). She has worked extensively on nineteenth-century literary criticism by women, notably in her Women Reviewing Women in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2010) and essays in The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Writing (2015) and NineteenthCentury Prose (2017). In the Selected Works of Margaret Oliphant, she has edited Oliphant’s literary criticism about English literature, 1870–6 (volume 2, 2011), and co-edited (with Joanne Shattock and Valerie Sanders) volume 5 (2012), covering 1887–98. She has also co-edited with Valerie Sanders volume 14 (2013), treating European literature. Jessie Wilkie is a subeditor and casual academic at Deakin University, Melbourne. Her doctorate research focused on media studies, sociology and journalism, with case studies in ethical sporting journalism in Australia and the USA. She currently works in an Australian broadcast newsroom as a subeditor and fact-checker, and also worked as an Australian Football League (AFL) statistician at Champion Data for eight years, which helped her develop different perspectives and understandings of Australian Rules football, which she strives to incorporate into her academic research, publications and writing.

­

contributor biographies

xxxiii

Helen S. Williams recently completed her PhD at Edinburgh Napier University on the print economy of nineteenth-century regional Scottish towns. She is the Secretary of the Scottish Printing Archival Trust and was the Programme Manager for the celebrations of ‘500 Years of Printing in Scotland’ in 2008. She holds a Master’s degree in Librarianship and has worked for the British Library and the National Library of Scotland. Her first degree was in Russian, and in 1998 she was awarded an MPhil for her research on the Russian émigré press.

INTRODUCTION David Finkelstein

I

n late 1825 , in a lavish drawing room on Albermarle Street, London, the Scots-born publisher John Murray II sat and listened avidly as a twenty-year-old family contact pitched an idea for a new Conservative daily newspaper. Murray had built up his family firm through astute management of literary property: he had been responsible for turning Lord Byron into a household commodity, selling his volumes of poetry as fast as they could be printed; he had championed Jane Austen, who brought her greatest works to him for publication; and he had instituted the Quarterly Review in 1809, which had become a leading Conservative voice in the periodical press world. Now he was being asked to invest in a new venture, a daily newspaper to be called the Representative, set to stand as a Conservative counterpoint to the more Whiggish London Times. The man pitching the idea was young firebrand Benjamin Disraeli, who promised to find half the start-up capital needed if Murray would front the other half. Disraeli sought but failed to get Walter Scott’s Scottish born-and-bred son-in-law, editor and writer John Gibson Lockhart, to take on the editorship role, though Lockhart did accede to playing a consultancy role while taking up editorship of Murray’s Quarterly Review instead. A number of less qualified individuals were called on to fill the gap, with the polymath Irishman William Maginn providing crucial interventions as an overseas correspondent, provider of copy, and then manager of the newspaper’s production. Money was lavishly poured into launching the new press entrant on 26 January 1826, but it soon became apparent that this Conservative voice was not of interest to the paying public, and that Disraeli was signally unable to manage the running of the paper. It did not help that it was launched in the face of opposition by two 1

2

david finkelstein

key players of the Conservative government then in power, the Foreign Secretary George Canning, and the First Secretary to the Admiralty John Wilson Croker. It also fought headwinds occasioned by the financial crash of 1825–6, where overburdened debt structures and risky investments in overseas shares, bonds and government loan schemes collapsed and brought down a great number of financiers, investors, printers, publishers and press outlets. In these circumstances, and haemorrhaging money, John Murray faced financial ruin. As recorded in an 1829 issue of the Spirit of the Age, John Murray was found wandering the streets one evening in great despair. Worse for wear from drink, he was asked if he wanted a coach to take him home. ‘No, damn me Sir,’ he is said to have shouted, ‘I want an Editor!’ Murray extricated himself from the situation by closing down the newspaper after six months of operation, absorbing financial losses of almost £26,000. His publishing business survived to thrive into the twenty-first century. Disraeli moved on to forge a career in politics, but not before penning the satirical roman à clef Vivian Grey (1826–7), in which the tale of this failed endeavour was replayed (to his favour), and Murray was mercilessly lampooned. Maginn carried on with journalistic work, interspersing occasional editing roles for provincial town newspapers with London-based press activity. The incident marks a side note to the careers of the key players in the rise and fall of this 1820s short-lived paper, and has been fully explored in recent studies of Disraeli and Maginn (Akel 2016; Latané 2013). But key points about this moment are relevant to the volume on nineteenth-century press history you are now reading. For a start, though based in London, the Representative was a product of trans­ regional cooperation, financed and lightly overseen by Scots, absentmindedly edited by an Englishman of varied religious upbringing, supported by an Irish ‘man of letters’ and press veteran, and opposed by a cabal of high-ranking Conservative players in the London political establishment. Though Murray was the proprietor/publisher, he was not its printer, an assignment reserved to the London-based firm of William Clowes, early adopters of the steam powered Applegarth presses developed by Englishmen Augustus Applegarth and Edward Cowper, and who, by 1840, had become owners of the largest printing works in the world, with over twenty-five mechanised steam presses in constant use (Clowes 1953: 37). The money used to underwrite the venture was drawn from profits generated by Murray’s publishing stable of periodical press publications, literary works, poetry books and other generic titles. In other words, it was a meshing of multi-regional interests, talents, experiences, industry, new technology and print

­

introduction

3

trade income, exemplifying in microcosm the fluid and interlinked nature of press and periodical interaction across nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland. At various points over the last 400 years, key political, economic and social processes have worked to hinder or promote the expansion and dissemination via newspapers and periodicals of information across Britain and Ireland. The nineteenth century provides an apposite frame from which to consider the economics of press and periodical production in Britain and Ireland. The nineteenth century was subject to significant development and innovation in a number of fields linked to the production, consumption, and social and political role of the media. The period also represents the large part of the political union of Britain and Ireland (1801–1922), supporting investigation of how far their presses can be considered similarly connected organisationally, commercially and economically. Past discussions of the nineteenth-century British and Irish press have focused mainly on the daily press as political spaces shaping cultural and social infrastructures (Curran and Seaton 1991; Koss 1981, 1984, 1990). It is only recently that the term ‘the press’ has broadened to include other forms of journalistic endeavours beyond daily or weekly newspaper journalism. Such broadening enables clearer understanding of the role played by the swathe of focused weeklies, monthlies and specialist press publications in fomenting and supporting other types of engagement across underrepresented readership over the course of the century. One of the key drivers behind this volume is a desire to extend the thinking about what constitutes the nineteenth-century press, and to move discussions beyond a general focus on metropolitan news and information circuits. There are currently no studies in the field offering a broad enquiry and critique of the nineteenth-century newspaper press and periodicals that links both Britain and Ireland. Some studies concentrate on discrete periods or themes, others on particular regions or nations, and others site the press within a broader range of media. Chris Morash’s A History of the Media in Ireland (2012), for example, is a wide-ranging study with a proper national focus, but with an entwining of nineteenth-century press work and twentiethcentury media forms. Focused studies on either Irish and English nineteenth-century press history do exist, including Marie Louise Legg’s Newspapers and Nationalism: The Irish Provincial Press, 1850– 1892 (1999), Victoria Gardner’s The Business of News in England, 1760–1820 (2016) and Andrew Hobbs’s A Fleet Street in Every Town: The Power of the Provincial Press, 1855–1900 (2018). One has to reach

4

david finkelstein

further back to find similar studies of Welsh- and Scottish-focused press history, including Aled Jones’s Press, Politics and Society: A History of Journalism in Wales (1993), William Donaldson’s Popular Literature in Victorian Scotland: Language, Fiction and the Press (1986) and Robert Cowan’s The Newspaper in Scotland: A Study of Its First Expansion, 1815–1860 (1946). Nevertheless, in terms of the longer-term continuities and impacts across national and regional borders proposed here, these surveys offer a restricted view of the evolution of the general nineteenth-century newspaper and periodical form that could embrace the entirety of Britain and Ireland. In response to this gap, this volume offers a fully comprehensive, research-led, interdisciplinary examination of nineteenth-century British and Irish newspaper and periodical history during a key period of change and development. It covers an important point of expansion in periodical and press history across the four nations of Great Britain (England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales), concentrating on how ­nineteenth-century print communication can be accessed via crossborder comparisons and contrasts. It is designed to provide readers with a clear understanding of the current state of research in the field, drawing on contemporary methodologies, demonstrating the interdisciplinary nature of work in this area, and offering an indication of themes ripe for further investigation. The impact on the field of digital media and new archival approaches also informs discussions, with examples by contributors such as M. H. Beals, Colette Colligan and Jessie Wilkie drawing on significant datasets to anchor their arguments about the scope and reach of press activity across international borders. This field of research has wider intellectual implications than is sometimes realised. Media and press history are interdisciplinary areas of enquiry, encompassing research into literacy and reading practices, relations among publisher-proprietors, editors, contributors and readers, and analysis of new technology and evolving communication networks. The interdisciplinary demands of such research widen its importance beyond the specialist historian and the general field of journalism studies, encompassing material of significance to other academic fields, such as social, political and cultural history, business and intellectual history, the history of international innovation in technology, literary culture, material culture and social history. This volume, and the multivolume series in which it is embedded, seeks to add to these conversations with insights into press trade connections between Scotland, Ireland, Wales and England, and their extensions to European and trans-oceanic and transnational counterparts. It also highlights matters related to national and transnational identities,

­

introduction

5

migration, skills and knowledge exchange, and the place of such texts in a globalised marketplace. The volume is organised so as to encourage contributions across regions, linking up findings and material thematically, and ensuring consistency in approach. To start, there are four themed sections focusing on key areas of press and periodical development, with keystone chapters covering the economics of the press and periodicals, insights into production, analysis of nineteenth-century readership and distribution networks, and in-depth examinations of legal frameworks under which the press operated. They offer close-grained examinations of the responses of the trade to social, political and cultural challenges over the centuries, including issues related to censorship, new organisational initiatives, and technological innovation. Particular attention is also paid to the rate, scope and nature of the adoption of new technologies in typesetting, printing and illustrations within print media contexts. Similarly, time is spent discussing the newspaper and periodical press as a physical artefact, and visual culture and the place of graphic design, illustration and technological developments in newspaper and periodical press production. Following these keystone chapters are thirty-eight chapters and case studies that explore a full range of press activity and press genres during this intense period of change. They include examinations of religious, literary, political, business, trade, satirical, illustrated, leisure, sporting, scientific and medical press genres, as well as analyses of provincial press activities, emerging developments in children’s and women’s press genres, and diasporic, overseas, ethnic-language and émigré press work. It is a truism to state that press history inevitably reflects the wider historical and social contexts within which such material was produced. The nineteenth century was exceptional in terms of English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh print communication expansion. It bore witness to great social change, a widening expansion of overseas linkages, and the move of print and the press to a central position in social, political and cultural terms. At the start of the century, press outputs and numbers were limited, labouring under severe legal restrictions and government censorship, high production costs, and low readership numbers confined to elites and literate citizens with expendable income. Matters began changing from the 1820s, with press and periodical publications flowing through into the marketplace in response to new political movements, technological innovation and audience expectations. The evolution of press and periodical publishing enterprises over the course of the century are explored in Howard Cox and Simon Mowatt’s chapter on the economics of the press. As they point

6

david finkelstein

out, the history of press business expansion during this period is a narrative demonstrating a move from small, family-owned enterprises at the start of the century to end-of-century domination by capital-­­ intensive, vertically integrated limited-liability companies. Early-century newspapers and periodicals were produced in the face of stringent legal regulations imposed by the British government following civil unrest, due to war conditions and economic hardship in the first two decades of the century, and the fallout from the Peterloo ‘massacre’ of 1819. There were, in addition, a range of legal changes in the nineteenth century which bore directly on the press, to do with subjects such as court reporting, censorship, obscenity, contract and copyright. But paradoxically, as Tom O’Malley explores in his chapter on the law, while the press became ostensibly freer from state control, it became progressively entangled with rights and constraints emanating from the state, at a time when communications were central to the way in which people experienced the state, and the state interacted with the daily lives of the population. Critics such as William Hazlitt, however, could not help noticing that, in spite of state-imposed restrictions and financial strictures during the first quarter of the century, by the 1820s press publications had begun moving towards more entrepreneurial and audience-focused means of disseminating news and ideas. In his well-known 1823 contribution to the Edinburgh Review, ‘The Periodical Press’, Hazlitt called on writers and editors to recognise this new state of affairs, commenting, We must look to the public for support. Instead of solemn testimonies from the learned, we require the smiles of the fair and the polite. If princes scowl upon us, the broad shining face of the people may turn to us with a favourable aspect. Is not this life (too) sweet? Would we change it for the former if we could? But the great point is, that we cannot! Therefore, let Reviews flourish  – let Magazines increase and multiply – let the Daily and Weekly Newspapers live forever! (Hazlitt 1823, repr. 1930–4: 220) Such expectations increased from the mid-century onwards, as a cornucopia of less expensive general and special-interest titles, catering to a greatly engaged and expanded reading public, began vying for space on crowded retail shelves, enabled by lower production costs, technological advances and societal embrace of print as a key communication tool. The gradual diminution of government taxes on paper, ink and press outputs in face of a changing political and social canvas also played a part in this surge. Surveying the possibilities opened up by press expansion in December 1844, the commentator John

­

introduction

7

Campbell spoke for many in foreseeing that such changes were unstoppable and linked to progress: ‘Cheap periodicals belong to the age of the railway!’ he declaimed, continuing, ‘Every man, then, to his taste; Gothic things for Gothic men; but light postage, quick transit, cheap Bibles and cheap Periodicals, for the Millions of England!’ (Campbell 1844: vii–viii). Mass changes of this sort were also aided by exponential rises in British and Irish print specialists trained and eager to support local and regional press and print needs. In Britain and Ireland, there was a shift from a concentration of press activity in a small number of urban centres to wider, diffuse networks of locally and regionally based jobbing print businesses. The labour historians Sidney and Beatrice Webb described the results in 1897 in their ground-breaking study Industrial Democracy: The printing trade, on the other hand, once concentrated in half a dozen towns, has to-day crept into every village, the vast majority of printing offices being tiny enterprises of small working masters. The compositor, moreover, has to deal with a variety of employers, from the London daily newspaper or the great publishers’ printer, down to the stationer’s shop in a country town or the fore man of a subsidiary department of a railway company, wholesale grocer or manufacturer of india rubber stamps. (Webb 1897: 465) Many press operators ventured overseas in answer to calls by new ­settlements for skilled artisans able to promote their towns to the wider world. As one contemporary memoirist recalled, such communities needed help in attracting residents and in supporting growth: ‘It was not at all uncommon,’ they noted, ‘where no printer appeared to start a newspaper for such a budding community, for the citizens or promoters of the prospective city to assume the financial obligations entailed in order to encourage some member of the craft to set up a press and to give the location publicity’ (quoted in Finkelstein 2018: 17). Likewise, expatriate and English-speaking communities based in continental Europe, Asia and South America sought outlets capable of keeping them abreast of news, culture and occurrences where feasible, as documented by M. H. Beals, Amelia Bonea, Diana Cooper-Richet and Paul Raphael Rooney within this volume. The mid-century onwards witnessed the full absorption of press and print into the British and Irish cultural mainstream. News and periodical production moved from early-century censorship, suppression and attempts to limit information in wake of French revolution, the rise of Bonaparte and social agitation linked to economic hardship,

8

david finkelstein

to mid-century endorsement of the press as a means of integrating and harnessing social movements within a burgeoning industrialised nation, to an end-of-century use of the press as a demotic, readershipfocused and financially based commodity. Andrew King’s chapter on the trade press offers details of the exponential rise in titles printed across the four kingdoms from the mid-century onwards in the wake of such advancement. Contemporary press directories, though not reliable, give a general idea of the sharp rise during this period in numbers of press titles, particularly after the abolishment of lingering ‘taxes on knowledge’ in the late 1850s. In the 1850 Hammond’s directory, for example, there were listed 547 newspaper titles that had been produced that year (Hammond’s 1850: 20). By 1900, numbers had more than quadrupled, with Mitchell’s Directory listing 1,947 newspapers and 2,328 periodicals in operation that year (Mitchell’s Directory 1900). On a more holistic note, John North, the general editor of one of the most comprehensive attempts to map out the number of newspapers and periodicals produced in Scotland, Ireland and England (Waterloo Directory of English, Irish and Scottish Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800–1900), has published evidence of over 3,900 Irish titles, 7,300 Scottish titles and over 100,000 English titles still extant in archival collections that were produced over the course of the century, many of them short lived (North Waterloo Directory). Many other titles undoubtedly remain unknown and unaccounted for, having perished in years of conflict, been discarded, or lost without trace. While this volume cannot reclaim all such material as part of press history, one of its remits is to challenge the artificial divide that in the past has governed the use of the terms ‘the press’ (seen primarily as relating to daily and weekly newspapers, geared to reporting on current events, politics and social mores) and the ‘periodical press’ (evoking print outputs of less immediate currency or frequency, such as monthlies and quarterlies, geared to chronicling cultural, literary, trade or niche genre interests). This hierarchy of values, as Joanne Shattock points out in her chapter on cultural agents, also reflected class and professional distinctions that came into play regarding editorial functions, authorial contributions and social distinctions between journalistic ‘hacks’ and men and women ‘of letters’. The move from a tightly controlled state to more open state governance, benefiting from a widened franchise and taxation base, and a society engaging with increasing industrialisation and urbanisation, stimulated the interests of increasing, politically engaged working and middle classes. Coupled with major improvements in literacy rates, the political, social and economic developments of the period linked into

­

introduction

9

a wider audience interested in more varied press outputs. Legislative and technical developments enabled the British and Irish press to meet this growing demand. The reduction and eventual repeal of the ‘taxes on knowledge’ (advertising duty, excise duty on paper, and stamp duty on newspapers) between the 1830s and late 1850s provided for the beginnings of an affordable popular press. The growth of national and international railway networks from the 1830s onwards, noted in Paul Raphael Rooney’s chapter for this volume, improved distribution and communications speeds and delivery. The introduction of the rotary press in the 1860s supported increased and cost-effective production. The 1869 Electric Telegraph Act nationalised the domestic communications infrastructure by which the press transmitted and gathered information, which, in association with the growth and development of news agencies such as the Press Association and Reuters, connected them to a burgeoning international cable network. These developments provided a cost-effective means of gathering and producing news that grew substantially after the government of Lord Palmerston repealed stamp duty in 1855. The increased production and consumption of British and Irish press and periodicals during the second half of the nineteenth century placed its owners, managers and editors in increasingly influential positions with regard to politics and economics of the United Kingdom. The growing market for their output also led to a diversification in the form of news. Political and commercial information was augmented with sports, leisure and literary material. Women became a focus as consumers of media through advertising and content, and as producers in their own right, though frequently at reduced wages compared to their male counterparts, a point brought out in Joanne Shattock’s chapter on cultural agents, and Kathryn Ledbetter’s chapter on the women’s press. A growth in advertising likewise ensured a diversity, range and independence in news reporting, especially in the nineteenth-century regional press, as Peter Robinson points out in his case study on newspapers and advertising. It allowed press outlets to move beyond a need for patronage to ensure financial stability, to a financial model driven by access to and promotion of local enterprise. The connection between newspapers and advertising became so strong in the nineteenth century that the term ‘Advertiser’ often formed one-half of a collocation involving frequency (most commonly ‘evening’, ‘daily’, ‘weekly’) and/or location (usually an industrial city). This accounted for titles such as the Manchester and Salford Advertiser and Chronicle, the Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser and the Plymouth and

10

david finkelstein

Cornwall Advertiser, to name some of the more important examples. Not only were many papers principally defined by their role in making the public aware of the availability of goods and services in their area, the revenue advertising generated was often instrumental to their birth, and fundamental to their survival. An increasing population, which was also becoming more literate, fed demand for a diversity of press outputs, and the nineteenth century saw changes in production techniques for both text and image, which improved the speed and efficiency of output to meet such demands. The course of the century witnessed larger capital investment in press production, and increased returns and profits as a result of this investment, as documented in Helen Williams’s chapter on press production. Williams outlines how speed and timeliness of production were always important, especially to the daily newspaper sector of the trade, and the introduction of iron steam presses, and other presses built on the rotary principle rather than sheet-fed machines, dramatically improved the output of the pressroom. Competition, divisions of labour within each press outlet to support new areas of discussion and reportage, and more complex managerial structures to oversee the results, fed into the need to further professionalise the industry. As a result, as Martin Conboy notes, ‘journalism moved from the margins of English society to a more economically lucrative and socially respectable position’ (Conboy 2004: 124–5).

Illustration and Visual Culture The nineteenth century also saw changes in available methods of reproducing illustrations, with the invention and development of lithographic printing processes and, in the second half of the century, new photographic processes such as halftone and photogravure. Illustrations in the press became more numerous, although colour printing remained too complex and expensive for most purposes in the periodical trade. In her chapter on illustration, Rose Roberto demonstrates the way in which images in the nineteenth-century press were shaped by the Victorian urban experience, by increasing knowledge and desire to define and control the world, and by wider design practices created to cater for burgeoning business needs in local, national and international markets. To meet newspaper deadlines, press images needed to be produced quickly and cheaply. They also had to be striking enough to sell newspapers and journals. In response to these needs, the industry adopted relief methods of illustration such as wood engraving, photomechanical

­

introduction

11

processes and eventually photography, which could more easily integrate with text. As photography developed as an art form over the second half of the century, it influenced other methods of design and illustration production, with photographic-like bordered illustrations becoming standard practice in news pages, and engravers increasingly focusing on images with linear and tonal codes in realist styles. The rise of illustrations in journals also provided visual spaces in which readers could imagine and contextualise their understanding of contemporary society. The Illustrated London News self-servingly trumpeted eight months after its launch in 1842 that the popularity of visually rich press publications such as its own was proof of the interlinked power of image and text: ‘We discovered and opened up the world of Illustration as connected with News,’ it boasted, ‘and the quick-sighted and sound-judging British public peopled it at once’ (Illustrated London News, 6 January 1842). Developments over the next half-century ensured further advances in the illustrative powers of the press.

Organisation, Transportation and Distribution Such technological changes fed into organisational change within the print trade. As processes improved, and especially as they were mechanised, workers in the print trade and their organisations were forced, to some extent at least, into adopting new work practices. National unions for the print trade (stutteringly launched in the first third of the century), became more fully established from the 1840s onwards, and were strongest in the largest firms and print centres, particularly where daily and weekly newspaper production was concentrated. By 1900 the technologies and work practices surrounding print production had settled into a pattern that would continue through to the mid-twentieth century, where, and as Helen Williams notes, workspaces were managed through worker-led associations and structures, wages and piecework rates were keenly watched and enforced through strong union involvement, and there were clear demarcations of jobs undertaken by specialised labour forces defined by artisanal skills differences. Efficiencies of scale, speed and print production aligned alongside a shift in readership, access and public interest. Nineteenth-century newspaper reading public numbers expanded and diversified as the century advanced, and new genres of publication emerged to match diverse cultural, social, thematic interests and demand. The Education Acts of 1870 and 1871 implemented across England, Scotland and

12

david finkelstein

Wales (and much later in Ireland in 1892), aimed at guaranteeing free educational opportunities for everyone under the age of sixteen, contributed to a social revolution that by the end of the century supported entrepreneurial circulation of a vast quantity of print and press material. Increased distribution of news and press products was facilitated by fee-paying circulating libraries, an expanded public library system, and railway-station news stalls established by W. H. Smith & Son in England and Wales, Eason & Son in Ireland and John Menzies in Scotland, as Paul Raphael Rooney covers in his chapter on readership and distribution. Alongside this came the development of a reliable postal and steam transport system to distribute print and press material across local and national borders. At the beginning of the century, although newsprint was taxed, news was allowed to be sent free by post, but the system of stamping newspapers was cumbersome and limited growth of press material. The great postal reform of 1840 greatly reduced the cost of personal correspondence. However, printed matter did not benefit from such reductions until a uniform ‘Book Post’ rates covering all print subscriptions was established in 1847, followed by further reductions in printed matter postal rates in 1870. Such reductions enabled publication subscriptions to become financially viable, supported wider distribution of press material, and stimulated the creation of the wide range of specialist magazines and journals documented in Andrew King’s chapter on the trade press.

The Professionalisation of Journalistic Practices Developments in press economies and technologies and an increased readership for new material called for the professionalisation of journalistic practices. Journalists and press commentators throughout the century, as Joanne Shattock, Andrew Hobbs and Stephen Tate note in their contributions for this volume, subjected their rapidly expanding industry and their emerging profession to great self-scrutiny and oversight. New reporting roles opened up for many seeking to rise in class and professional status, a point brought out in case study chapters by Stephen Tate on reporters and Steve Harrison on the development of the byline. Allison Cavanagh documents in her case study chapter on correspondence columns and Frederick Milton and Siân Pooley in their chapters on children’s press and correspondence columns respectively, how newspapers and press outlets began experimenting with ways of engaging with readers through the use of letters to the editor, a process that meshed with the socially responsive forms that marked

­

introduction

13

the rise of New Journalism in the 1880s, a rise documented by Philip March in his case study chapter for this volume. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, journalism had become acknowledged as a profession in its own right, with professional organisations, industry-related courses and training guides available to inspire and guide potential recruits on best practices and skills. The increased market for news and information required a comparatively expanded workforce, which, in line with wider political and social developments, contributed to organising professional bodies such as the National Association of Journalists (founded in 1884) and later the National Union of Journalists (established in 1907). Women entrants to the profession, few throughout the first half of the century, slowly rose in numbers, particularly helped after the 1860s by increased opportunities to publish in the expanding periodical press field, points raised in Kathryn Ledbetter’s chapter on the women’s press. Towards the end of the century, further professional support would emerge through establishment of organisations such as the Society of Women Journalists (1893), and through the issuing of a growing number of training guides aimed specifically at women journalists. More generally, the industry also benefited from moves to certify and support training for professional examination processes, with institutions such as the London School of Journalism (1887) becoming established for such purposes.

Transnational Exchanges and English-Language Communication Networks An important theme for this volume is the flow of press information across nineteenth-century international borders, with several chapters detailing how the English-language press operated in overseas spaces, how it influenced other national press discourses, and how it was conducted via communication networks supporting the flow of ideas and knowledge across space and time. In her survey chapter on English-language press activities across nineteenth-century continental Europe, Diana Cooper-Richet undertakes one of the first attempts to draw together general trends evident through studying the rise of such Continental print sources. The English-language newspapers published in continental Europe aimed to satisfy the needs of anglophone visitors and expatriate communities. Some, such as Galignani’s Messenger, a daily published in Paris from 1814 to 1895, were long lived and successful in retaining a strong readership base. The majority of such publications, however, tended to be short lived with modest circulation. At first mainly literary in content, or circulating information

14

david finkelstein

gathered from other sources as part of what has been termed ‘scissors and paste’ or exchange journalism, such press outlets progressively evolved towards a more modern approach and integration of original journalism by the end of the century. There’s also consideration in this volume of nineteenth-century émigré press operations in Britain. Many European radical activists who faced persecution, arrest, imprisonment or worse fled to Britain for safety, particularly after the revolutionary period of 1848, which saw national movements and political interventions surge across a number of European states. Helen Williams documents in her case study chapter that, by 1850, Britain was home to émigrés of a range of nationalities, including French, German, Italian and Polish communities, who used it as a base for launching foreign-language newspapers and journals aimed at émigré communities in Britain and at readers in home countries. Williams covers one such narrative of press interaction involving the nineteenth-century Russian émigré press. It is a story providing an intriguing side-light on political movements and British attitudes to ‘aliens’ in the nineteenth century. Though few in number, Russian émigré press operatives were active from the 1850s onwards, with the most prominent being Alexander Herzen, who operated in London from 1853 through to the mid-1860s producing Russian-language newspapers, pamphlets and journals. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, others would come forward to publish English-language titles for such communities, with titles such as Free Russia produced with the aim of garnering support in Britain for Russian oppositional movements. A key link for both émigré press and the English-language transnational press was its international readership, a mix of original language, anglophone and expatriate subscribers who purchased and consumed such material, whether based in the Continent, in the Middle East, in India or in South America. Other connections could be found between international press outlets, periodicals published in Britain and Ireland, and Continental press editors who borrowed and exchanged essential parts of their editorial material from each other. Such borrowings feature in Cecilia Wadsö Lecaros’s case study chapter documenting British influences on the Swedish periodical press of the 1830s. Wadsö Lecaros offers insight into how Swedish access to periodical publications, emanating from the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK), proved instrumental in establishing Swedish periodicals aimed at educating their readers in similar didactic form. Importantly enough, the transnational exchange was to some extent reciprocal, with the SDUK in turn commissioning a number of

­

introduction

15

articles about Sweden and Norway from its Swedish contacts for the Penny Cyclopaedia and for the Quarterly Journal of Education. These articles, focusing on Swedish and Norwegian geography and education, were published at a time when Scandinavia received little attention in the British press, and are suggestive of the two-way transactional flow of information that was common among press outlets of the period. M. H. Beals deepens our understanding of exchange agreements and transactional information sharing in her case study chapter on international communication networks. By the start of the twentieth century, communication networks connecting the local, regional, national and international presses of the world had become commonplace. But as Beals points out, its basis lay in the exchange agreements pioneered in the hundred years preceding, which allowed editors to reprint an unfathomable selection of news and literary content, chosen at their leisure from a vast number of possible sources. Access to such material increased immeasurably thanks to telegraphic communication innovations, and the copper wiring, stretched underwater and overland across continents and countries, that supported such international news transmission from mid-century onwards. As public demands rose for knowledge of news of foreign conquest and war, competition to supply it intensified, and press associations sprung up to provide their subscribers with the most up-to-date intelligence. By the end of the nineteenth century the fundamental landscape of transnational exchanges had shifted from a robust, decentralised network reliant on postal and courier transport to circulate information, to a highly centralised and telegraphic one, controlled by a small number of powerful commercial enterprises. Electronic connections spreading news instantaneously across multiple continents could shape news agendas, spread false information and shatter reputations. A case in point can be found in Colette Colligan’s case study chapter on the international coverage of Oscar Wilde’s trial for ‘gross Indecency’ in 1895, a sensational news story that was transmitted around the world and would feature in over seventy English- and foreign-language newspapers. The coverage, which at times spread and amplified misleading information in ways that crowded out accurate reportage, makes for interesting comparisons to twenty-first-century news systems and issues. How the story was seized upon and spread in the weeks following the trial is a salutary lesson on global press networks’ susceptibility to pressures of audience demands in an age of increasing connectivity. Steamships were vital conduits for moving print media internationally from port to port in the nineteenth century, and also functioned as

16

david finkelstein

connectors of British- and Irish-produced news to expatriate audiences in South Asia and the Antipodes. As Paul Raphael Rooney explores in his case study chapter on the steamship press, vivid examples such as the Home News for India, China, and the Colonies (1847–98), edited between 1867 and 1874 by Shirley Brooks, represented vital news sources within the nineteenth-century colonial press world, fostering an empire-wide exchange of ideas and ideologies in particular for colonial authorities based in such spaces, and linking centre and periphery in a two-way conversation. Not all British news circulation and communication networks involved uncontested movement between metropolitan centres and peripheral spaces. Amelia Bonea offers an important corrective to this formula, particularly in regard to British imperial forays into maritime Asia, identified here as the expanse of water stretching from the western coast of India through to China and Japan, via the Bay of Bengal and the China Seas. Colonial officials and mercantile communities based in such spaces required accurate knowledge of trade, commerce and political news specific to such regions. Before the advent of telegraphy in the mid-nineteenth century, such material was circulated from point to point via sailing ships and steamers plying these maritime spaces. However, the introduction of telegraphy to India in 1855, the establishment of the first telegraph routes between Britain and the Indian subcontinent a decade later, and the completion in 1871 of telegraphic communication routes with Japan via Siberia, Hong Kong and Shanghai, added new dimensions to the circulation of English-language information within Asia itself. An immense network of telegraph operators versed in transmission became woven into the newsgathering fabric of English-language press operators in the Asian and South-East Asian regions, with steamships then ensuring a wide circulation of the resulting printed outputs to regional subscribers.

Review and Literary Journalism Throughout the nineteenth century, a significant proportion of press content in British and Irish periodicals, magazines and newspapers was devoted to book reviews and literary journalism. This was especially true of literary periodicals and magazines, many of which called themselves reviews, and which included ground-breaking (and longlived) early quarterlies such as the Edinburgh Review (founded in 1802), the Quarterly Review (launched in 1809) and the Westminster Review (started in 1824). Over the century, with advances in printing technology, the lifting of various taxes on newspapers, and the rise in

­

introduction

17

a literate reading public, the number of publications devoted partly or wholly to reviewing grew exponentially. These included publications that appeared quarterly, monthly, weekly or daily. In tandem with these developments, needless to say, the number of editors and writers concerned with reviews and reviewing increased substantially as well. Joanne Wilkes demonstrates in her chapter on literary review journalism that a wide variety of genres ended up being discussed in such review spaces: although fiction was an important trend over the century, reviews also covered history, biography, art, poetry, religion, philosophy, politics, science, and (more so than in later centuries) classical and European literature. As a corollary, the generalist reviewer who could turn his or her hand to a wide variety of topics was an important participant in the reviewing field. As was common in general press work, reviews were largely published anonymously up to the 1860s, and in many outlets well beyond then. Often this practice was based on an intention by editors to present a general editorial ‘face’ to readers, whereby contributions would be seen as consonant with specific political, cultural or social stances espoused more generally across the journal itself. This would continue through to the 1860s, when the rise of the star author encouraged promotion of signed contributions to raise readership interest and journal sales. The focus on anonymity throughout the first half of the century, though, created paradoxical situations for female anonymous reviewers: anonymity enabled them to handle topics considered at the time beyond women’s competence, but it also hampered later recognition of their work when seeking to construct an authorial presence in the literary marketplace.

Welsh-, Irish- and Scots Gaelic-Language Press Production The nineteenth-century Welsh-, Irish- and Scots Gaelic-language press has been underrepresented in past studies of press history. This volume rectifies this gap with chapters by Aled Jones, Sheila M. Kidd and Regina Ui Chollatáin. They are unique in being the first attempts to link comparative, holistic surveys and analyses across the four kingdoms of the challenges in representing such cultural and linguistic identities within a dominant English-language press environment. Aled Jones points out in his chapter on Welsh-language press identity that over 500 titles were published in Wales over the course of the century, with a significant number appearing exclusively in the Welsh language, and the inclusion in virtually all Welsh-based Englishlanguage titles from 1811 onwards of reportage and material written

18

david finkelstein

in the Welsh language. Some were evenly divided into two-language sections that were rarely translations. In terms of print culture, then, Welsh was far from being a minority interest, but neither was it a mono-vocal one. Religious sectarian denominations dominated much of the press work produced early in the century, but from mid-century onwards new titles emerged linked to labour and trade union interests, music and literary criticism, and overseas titles catering to the wider international Welsh diaspora, such as Y Dravod in Patagonia, Y Drych in New York and Yr Awstralydd in Australia. Those publishing Welsh-language titles were often prominent promoters of Welsh cultural diversity within their communities, as for example the Welsh printer George Jenkin Jacobs, based in Rhymney from 1870 to his death in 1908. The publisher of papers such as the Tredegar Guardian, the Monmouth Guardian and the Bargoed and Caerphilly Observer, he was equally an able and active promoter of Welsh language and culture, not just through his work in printing Welsh-language material, but also through his keen support of the Eisteddfod, the annual celebration of Welsh language and culture that began in 1860, and his extensive contributions on Welsh subjects for other publications such as the South Wales Daily News (Finkelstein 2018: 49–50). In similar form, clergy-led education schemes in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland begun in the early decades of the century, and focused on promoting Gaelic literacy, underpinned subsequent moves to launch Scottish Gaelic–language press and periodical titles. Sheila M. Kidd notes in her chapter for this volume that many of these titles were produced by Protestant clergy with interests in Gaelic language and culture, led and inspired in particular by the efforts of the Rev.  Dr  Norman MacLeod (Caraid nan Gàidheal, ‘Friend of the Gaels’), editor of two of the most successful, albeit short-lived, periodicals of the first half of the century, An Teachdaire Gae’lach (1829–31) and Cuairtear nan Gleann (1840–3). Both these titles played a crucial role in shaping Gaelic literature for decades to come. Much like the Welsh diaspora chronicled by Aled Jones, energy and support for Scottish Gaelic–language press activity was strongly present in overseas diaspora groupings, such as those found in Ontario, Nova Scotia and Tasmania, among others. A good example in particular was the Nova Scotian Mac-Talla (1892–1904), the only Gaelic weekly newspaper to be published in the nineteenth century, which was circulated widely throughout Nova Scotia, Scotland and elsewhere. Kidd spends time outlining the transnational dialogue which emerged between Gaelic speakers across three continents through such press efforts, the sense of Gaelic identity projected by the Scottish

­

introduction

19

Lowland publications and their overseas counterparts, and the role of such pioneering periodicals projects in supporting the development of Gaelic literature and secular Gaelic prose writing, which bridged the oral–literary divide for an audience often more accustomed to oral tradition than the printed word. Regina Uí Chollatáin examines similar evolutions of Irish-language press work over the course of the nineteenth century in her chapter for this volume. Of particular note was the move of such outlets from being a space of protestation and cultural conservation in the early part of the century, to becoming a forum for language and cultural restoration and revival in the latter half of the century. In Chollatáin’s reading, the Irish-language journalist of the earlier period often took on the role of social commentator and public discursant, with an emphasis on scholarly approaches and the preservation of a language in danger of being banished and suppressed. Examples of press outlets taking such approaches included Philip Barron’s Ancient Ireland. A Weekly Magazine (begun in 1835), the Dublin Penny Journal under George Petrie’s editorship from 1833, and the Citizen with William Elliot Hudson as editor from 1842. When the Revival movement of the latter part of the century began making headway in Irish cultural spheres, such Irish-language press focus shifted towards shaping a cultural identity in opposition to dominant English discourses. These shifts were mirrored and supported in Irish-language newspaper columns and periodicals in the United States and Ireland, with strong examples including new journal launches such as Fáinne an Lae (1898) and the Belfast-based Shan Van Vocht (1896).

The Denominational Press A significant area of press activity in the nineteenth century was the denominational press, explored in this volume in a chapter produced by Joan Allen. In the age of print, all branches of British- and Irishbased Christianity as well as other denominations, including the Anglo-Jewish community, developed a range of press and periodical spaces through which they sought to connect their geographically scattered believers, to create linked communities of readers, and to encourage adherence to common doctrines and denominational values. Joan Allen draws attention to the fact that religious periodicals dominated the British press, with some 3,000 titles in circulation over the span of the nineteenth century (Altholz 1989: 10–11; Ellegard 1957: 10–30). Greater plurality of religious belief marked the environment in which such works were produced. Much of this expansion in titles

20

david finkelstein

privileged Nonconformist denominations, such as the Unitarians and the various branches of Methodism, whose respectable status had steadily increased as the century progressed. However, the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 also supported a revival in British Roman Catholic congregations, and the influx of Irish migrants into British towns and cities following the famine of the 1840s, accompanied by high levels of conversion through marriage, created an expanding twoway readership base linking British and Irish Catholic denominational press interests. Establishments of large Jewish communities in key urban centres such as Manchester and London also created a denominational readership base that responded to new publications aimed at Jewish interests. Flagship cross-regional papers catering to diverse religious groups developed substantial readership circulation, including publication such as the Catholic Herald, the Jewish Chronicle and the Church Times. Ian d’Alton looks at one Irish-based publication that did not fit the mould of such cross-regional conversation in his case study chapter on the Irish Ecclesiastical Gazette, a monthly journal launched in 1856 aimed almost exclusively at Irish Anglican clergy. It offered advice on the laws and customs with which the Church of Ireland sought to manage denominational needs, chronicled clerical births, marriages and deaths within local parishes, and served as a communication hub and noticeboard for those involved officially in Church activities. Following the disestablishment of the Irish Anglican Church from England in 1871, the journal became focused more on acting as an information exchange for the lay membership of the Church, and served as an important space for discussions of political, denominational and social issues from an Irish Anglican perspective.

The Comic, Satirical and the Illustrated Press Particular press genres that enjoyed remarkable success over the century were comic, satirical, and illustrated journals and magazines, subjects covered in Elizabeth Tilley’s and Michael de Nie’s chapters for this volume. Such journals, at times sharply etched, fond of puns, pastiche and satirical language, richly illustrated and highly reliant on comic cartoons and single-theme drawings, when read across the century, offer valuable reflections on the rapid social, political and cultural changes that swept across the four kingdoms during this period. Early nineteenth-century satirical periodicals, such as the Black Dwarf and Figaro in London, were notable for both their pugnacity and focus on political matters, while others tended to dally in excited commentary

­

introduction

21

on scandal and hypocrisy. On occasion, this led to legal action against publishers and journalists for sedition or libel, and successful prosecutions in the early part of the century played a part in influencing and inhibiting satirical press writing during this period. The loosening of libel laws later in the century enabled comic and satirical papers to be more creative in their approach to politics and social commentary. The illustrated satires of journals such as Punch (founded in 1841), and in particular John Tenniel’s ‘Big Cuts’, published in Punch in the 1850s, offered complicated interplays of text and image that relied on and often demanded a fairly sophisticated grasp of political and social issues on the part of its readers. Punch, though, would prove influential in shifting the tone and content of the satirical press in the decades that followed, espousing an increasingly domesticated and respectable approach to comic and satirical commentary. The genteel, detached, amused tone of Punch, greatly imitated by subsequent rival publications launched nationally and internationally, slowly replaced the blunt and bitter satire of the earlier part of the century, as the comic press transformed from proponents of political and social change to reassuring voices gently mocking but not challenging the opinions and tastes of their mainly middle-class readers. Having said that, comic papers that proliferated in particular from the mid-century onwards were avidly read, with a plethora of titles priced competitively enough to be aimed at all classes. Pre-eminent among these was, as noted, Punch, whose popularity spawned overseas ­imitators and inspired later examples such as Judy (1867–1910) and Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday (1884–1916). The latter journal, particularly popular among working-class readers, based its appeal on a formula that eschewed political or social commentary in favour of light humour and comic fun aimed at a wide audience. Such journals were designed for a textually aware audience with deeply ingrained daily newspaper reading habits, acting as synthesisers of cultural knowledge, as news gatherers, as commentators on social trends, and as influential reflectors and shapers of nineteenth-century social and political opinion.

Art, Culture and Leisure The emergence of leisure as a mass phenomenon was a distinctive feature of British and Irish society over the course of the nineteenth century, as Christopher A. Kent points out in his chapter on the leisure and hobby press. The expansion of leisure as a social activity would see with it an explosive proliferation of leisure-focused periodicals and press

22

david finkelstein

journals over the course of the century. The producers of such journals were fully aware that their commercial success depended on their ability to capture readers’ leisure time in an extremely competitive market. High circulations achieved by best-selling titles such as the Strand, the Belgravia, the London Journal, Reynold’s Miscellany and the News of the World were the result of a careful press formula that translated news into popular culture form. The narrative arc of leisure press development over the century shows a movement from a guarded earnestness and anxiety in the idea of giving licence to leisure activities, to a somewhat more relaxed optimism that suggested managed leisure could bring about improvements in social well-being and civil discourse. By the end of the century, the four kingdoms were awash with periodicals and journals catering to all possible leisure activity interests, including titles such as Chess World, Swimming, Cycling, the Racing Pigeon, the Rowing Almanack and Oarsman’s Companion, the Fishing Gazette, the Gymnast, the Alpine Journal, Golf  and the Amateur Photographer among many selfevident examples. Visiting and viewing art in public spaces also became a popular ­leisure activity that followed mid-century moves to open up art galleries and museums for such purposes. Michael Bromley and Karen Hasin-Bromley offer a case study chapter that examines this phenomenon, as well as the general representation of art in nineteenth-century press culture, creating links back to earlier discussions in this volume regarding the intertwining of text and visual culture in nineteenthcentury newspapers and journals. In addition to reviewing shows and exhibitions, newspapers and periodicals reproduced works of art, commissioned their own art works and appropriated art as part of their advertising strategies. These were often accompanied by text-based critiques, commentaries and reports, and signalled an attempt to note the position of art within the mainstream of public life. Its use by the press as both illustration and advertising material also placed art within a commercial, business context. Kathryn Ledbetter follows through on issues of cultural press activity with a focus on the women’s press. As she points out, the century witnessed a rise in potential women readers with disposable incomes, time and a desire for social mobility, which in turn created potential for an increasingly diverse marketplace for women’s reading and writing. Periodicals targeting women in particular did not fully emerge until after the 1830s, when publishers began to see commercial opportunities in launching journals and columns dedicated to perceived female interests. Basic offerings for women’s journals and periodicals initially

­

introduction

23

included fashion news, sentimental literature, needlework, court activities, and light feature essays and clippings about history, geography, nature and religion. Throughout the century, articles debating the political, social and economic problems of womanhood also appeared in the women’s press, and the discussion often filtered into more general newspapers and journals. Later in the century, as social conceptions of women’s roles were challenged and reshaped, avenues opened up for women to play significant roles in newspaper and magazine enterprises throughout England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, ranging from writing, editing and managing literary journals, penny papers for working-class women, and socially oriented titles focused on employment and trade issues, through to key roles in more general daily and weekly newspapers. This paralleled conscious efforts to professionalise and create support networks for women involved in the trade, as documented by Joanne Shattock elsewhere in this volume.

Sports Reportage Sports was an arena where clashing views of its purpose as a leisure pursuit, a social benefit, an economic opportunity or as a social detriment (as in the case of sports gambling and betting) were played out in the pages of the press, as well as in specialist journals launched to document news and activity in particular competitive sports arenas. As Joel H. Wiener argues in his chapter for this volume, the greatly increased interest in sports and leisure during the nineteenth century was paralleled and reinforced by the rise of sports journalism. In the early years, weekly journals such as Bell’s Life in London, launched in 1822, were published primarily to cater for horse racing and boxing aficionados. Shortly after mid-century more cheaply priced sporting journals began to appear, among them Sporting Life, the Sporting Times and the Sportsman. Among other things, the publication of these journals marked the beginnings of a more focused approach to writing about sports. Key sports that became the focus of journalistic reportage by the late century included professional football, with its roots in working-class culture, rugby, cricket and rowing. Until then, sports coverage was mostly confined to the pages of existing sporting journals and to popular Sunday newspapers such as Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper and Reynolds’s Newspaper. This changed decisively in the 1870s and 1880s, when periodicals such as the Manchester-based Sporting Chronicle and the Athletic News began publication, and penny daily newspapers such as the Daily Telegraph began to give over a significant portion of their space to sports. Even more important, the

24

david finkelstein

rise of evening newspapers, notably the Star and the Evening News, both published in London, and Edward Hulton’s Manchester Evening Chronicle, offered a crucial fillip to sports journalism. Wiener notes, much as have others in this volume, the effect that telegraph and cable transmissions had on late-century expectations of readers regarding timely news delivery of the latest sporting results. Speed became central to sports reporting, which relied increasingly upon the transmission of news by wire. Evening papers reported the scores of football and cricket matches, as well as round-by-round summaries of boxing matches, and it became the practice for multiple editions to be printed to accommodate shifting results. Also significant was the exportation of sports results and reports to overseas providers, as for example in such cases as the results of boxing matches relayed to US newspaper outlets. Wiener makes a persuasive argument for establishing that the roots of modern professional sports writing were to be found in the popular evening newspapers of the late nineteenth century, supplemented as they were by enormously successful halfpenny and penny newspapers such as the Daily Mail (founded in 1896) and the Daily Express (started in 1900). Wiener concludes that in the pages of this mass-circulation press – a precursor to the twentieth-century tabloid coverage of sports – sports writing developed a unique style and structure, some of it influenced by American journalism. The rise in sports coverage across the century is graphically captured in Jessie Wilkie’s case study chapter using data analysis of the sports content and reportage in the columns of the London Times between 1800 and 1900. As Wilkie demonstrates, at the beginning of the 1800s, sporting news columns contained little more than the results of major horse races, and sporting column reports were few in number (less than fifty in the first thirty years of the century). Sports coverage slowly grew after that, spurred on by the rising popularity of newly invented sports such as lawn tennis, and interest in reporting results from professional associations and clubs linked to football, rugby, cricket and rowing. Not only did more sports stories begin to appear, but their length and detail also increased. By the end of the century, sport reports filled entire pages with stories about sporting events, the participants, the spectators and the sporting venues, with over 760 reports filed in the pages of the Times in the peak year of 1896 alone. Wilkie’s data analysis offers informed insights into the notable shift in the Times sporting coverage, from early-century reporting on sports related to social interests (hunting, boxing) through to late-century commercialised, professional sports reporting conventions.

­

introduction

25

Science and Medicine Industrialisation was a defining factor in transforming British society over the course of the nineteenth century, and scientific and medical innovations that accompanied such transformations were recognised and documented in an increasing number of press outlets. Sally Frampton, Alex Csiszar and Matthew Wale explore the range of medical and scientific journals that flourished over the course of the century in their contributions to this volume. The nineteenth-century medical press has in the past been characterised as an insular form of journalism cultivated and consumed by those within the medical profession, and the study of medical journals has not strayed very far beyond analyses of two key titles of the century, the Lancet and the British Medical Journal. Sally Frampton’s study of the medical press suggests, however, that there is more to be found in wider perspectives taking in a fuller number of the medical journals that flourished over the century. Such titles, which ranged from weekly journals, non-orthodox titles, and ‘popular’ medical and health periodicals, were significant in actively engaging general readers with the latest medical knowledge. The ‘non-professional’ lay reader also entered the medical journal sphere as publishers and editors of periodicals campaigning against orthodox medical practices such as the Anti-Vaccinator and the Homoeopathic World, and as advice-seekers writing to self-proclaimed popular journals such as Health and the Hospital. Such engagements were resisted by many in the medical profession, whose views on the appropriate audiences for medical information was shaped by more general concerns about the extent to which citizens could and should be active, educated and informed about medical and health issues. Alex Csiszar draws our attention to the vast range of scientific press outputs and formats that circulated over the course of the century, which had its origins in publications established in the eighteenth century by key scientific societies. Scientific topics found their way not only into the publications of scientific societies, trade journals and other specialised journals, but also into weeklies such as the Athenaeum and the Literary Gazette, daily newspapers, and general-subject periodicals such as Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal. While science featured increasingly in press coverage of the latest findings and discoveries, paradoxically this developed alongside an increasingly pervasive idea that the specialised scientific journal was a more appropriate venue for ‘proper’ scientific exchange among experts in relevant fields. Often these took the form of compilations of papers largely dedicated to original claims,

26

david finkelstein

written and signed by active investigators who were expected to take responsibility for their contents, and issued by commercial publishers, or more usually a scientific society. Periodical authorship in this sense took on immense importance in defining a life in science. As Csiszar explains, while commercial journals dedicated largely to scientific news had begun appearing in Britain by the beginning of the nineteenth century, and learned societies published large collections of papers that they usually called transactions, this later conception of a scientific journal emerged as a hybrid of these and other formats, borrowing features from a wide range of periodical genres. One example of a community of readers shaped by particular scientific journal interactions is provided in Matthew Wale’s case study chapter on the natural history press. The nineteenth century saw a proliferation of natural history periodicals. Among the most prominent of these was the Entomologist’s Weekly Intelligencer, launched in April 1856. Its weekly columns kept Britain’s growing number of entomologists abreast of the latest developments and discoveries in the field, as well as providing space for contributions from natural history enthusiasts with something of interest to communicate. The bulk of the Intelligencer’s contents consisted of correspondence from readers, informing each other of their latest captures and discoveries, posing questions, sharing advice and offering specimens for exchange. As Wale concludes, outwardly facing journals such as the Intelligencer provided important social spaces through which scientific information could be communicated and shared across a wide, cross-regional and international community in accessible form.

Professional Specialisations Science and medicine were not the only professional groupings to establish press outlets to address their communication needs. Business, trade and professional needs of increasingly organised labour groups and commercially aware readers also required servicing. One strong example of a press genre emerging to serve capitalist and mercantile interests was the business press. In her chapter on the subject, Melissa Score notes the resulting growth of business journalism in Britain during the nineteenth century, placing it within the context of wider developments in periodical journalism between 1800 and 1900. Financial reporting that took shape as the century progressed moved from basic reprinting and summarising of printed commodities prices and shipping fixtures, often the results of exchange journalism or ‘scissor and paste’ borrowings from other sources, to more sophisticated

­

introduction

27

specialist reportage that made financial news and analysis an integral part of daily press output. As business ventures grew more dependent on public investors purchasing interests in company futures, new press publications began providing information on stocks, shares and commodities in areas as diverse as banking, insurance, mining, railway stocks, commodities and shipping. Space for financial news in metropolitan papers gradually increased to reflect this growing involvement of small investors in equities markets. The rise of the press baron and the funding of particular newspapers by financiers, rather than printers, also influenced how certain newspapers reported and favoured particular sectors. For example, the Daily News, launched in 1846 and backed by the railway investor Joseph Paxton, devoted considerable space to railway news in contrast to its Liberal rival the Times. South Wales–based newspapers, reliant on advertising from mining interests, devoted considerable space to iron and coal mining news and activities. Specialised titles also emerged from the 1840s onwards, such as the Economist, launched in 1843 to promote free trade, the Statist, the Criterion, the Financial News in 1884 and the Financial Times in 1888. Andrew King turns our attention to the rise of the trade press, defined as a subset of class journals that targeted specific identities and readership based on the production and distribution of particular classes of good or services, which were almost always accompanied by abundant advertising focused on those interests. Since the early eighteenth century, there had been a mercantile and shipping press, and variants of this general trade press continued into the nineteenth century, as exemplified by such titles as the daily Mercantile and Shipping Gazette and the weekly Journal of Commerce and Merchant. Periodicals that straddled trade and profession such as the Builder and later the Chemist and Druggist were a mid-nineteenth-century innovation. Often, as in the cases of architects, engineers and chemists, they sought to move the occupations they addressed away from trades status to more professionally organised standing. Publishing was, for understandable reasons, early in having its own trade press. The book trade press, as Rachel Calder outlines in her case study chapter, could point to three significant publications representing its interest in Bent’s Monthly Literary Advertiser (1802–60), The Publishers’ Circular (1837–1959) and the still-extant Bookseller (1858–present). King explores ways in which trade journals offered information on relevant developments in technology and the law, as well as tradespecific tips on how to increase profit, market prices, biographies of inspirational figures in the field, and frequently created sections for

28

david finkelstein

substantial correspondence from and to readers. Importantly, trade periodicals could be profitable enterprises for publishers through both subscription and advertising methods. As the century progressed, trade press publishers used newly available public data, such as census reports that detailed the number of people occupied in a particular trade, to identify and target new potential audiences. From the 1870s onwards, hundreds of titles were subsequently issued spanning the gamut of trade, encompassing a range of subjects such as British and  Foreign Confectioner, Cigar and Tobacco World, Grocer, Jeweller  and Metalworker, Warehousemen and Drapers’ Journal and Paper Trades News. In addressing specific readerships, trade periodicals became spaces for setting in stone certain mythologies and practices associated with particular trades, and for advancing trade agendas and business interests. The armed forces similarly produced journals aimed at ensuring its views were represented for both political and social ends. As Margery Masterson observes in her case study chapter on the armed services press, such journals serviced a highly fluid, highly mobile, global military population. They provided professional information for readers that civilian presses might not feature, acted as a local press, first in isolated military communities in the colonies and then in model military communities in the United Kingdom, and used their pages to lobby for military improvements and address the perceived needs of their far-flung readership.

Family and Children A press genre that saw much growth and evolution was the children’s press. Frederick Milton and Siân Pooley address this area in chapters dedicated to children’s press and periodical titles and to young readers’ responses and engagement with the press. Frederick Milton points out that, initially in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, just a handful of ‘children’s’ titles were circulating, dominated by didactic and evangelical material produced by organisations such as the Religious Tract Society. Importantly, these religious magazines pointed to an evolving and growing young reading public for whom publishers and press proprietors soon saw merit in creating specialist journals. As a result, children’s periodical publications and dedicated newspaper columns expanded in number over the period between 1866 and 1914, with over 500 children’s periodicals launched during that period, and over 80 newspaper ‘children’s columns’ featured in numerous regional newspapers.

­

introduction

29

Towards the end of the century, increasing competition in newspaper publication, and the advent of ‘New Journalism’, led to the ‘children’s column’ becoming a routine fixture in many weekly newspapers, as editors sought to broaden content to make their titles appealing to ‘family readers’. Siân Pooley’s case study chapter explores the uses made of children’s columns to provincial newspapers from the 1870s onwards, providing insights into what news came to mean to this first generation who had read newspapers from childhood. Pooley suggests that the popularity of several of these columns centred upon their responsiveness to, and direct engagement with, children’s interests, done through publishing children’s drawings, letters, stories and poems. In an increasingly competitive marketplace, these new efforts to attract the youngest – and thus most literate – generation of ­­working-class readers were an increasingly important commercial strategy used by publications across Britain and Ireland.

Local, Regional and Provincial Domains Pooley’s and Milton’s use of provincial, local and regional press sources taps into a recent rise in scholarly focus on the economic, social and cultural value and function of such community-based news and press outlets. As Andrew Jackson points out in his chapter for this volume, the local and regional press were key agents in the formation of local identity and sense of place. This agency included the marking out of geographical catchments, the shaping of political spheres of influence, the fostering of business networks, the reporting on institutions and organisations, and the cultivation of local cultural provision. Andrew Hobbs draws attention in his case study chapter on the ‘London Letter’ to the regional circulation of gossip news columns generated from London, which flourished in the early nineteenth century and were then reshaped by regional interests to become something more attuned to local interests. Such news columns from the capital, published in provincial newspapers, acknowledged the cultural and political power of the metropolis in a distinctively provincial way. They continued an early nineteenth-century writing style after it disappeared from London papers, developed it (for example through the invention of parliamentary lobby journalism), and saw it re-adopted by the metropolitan press as part of the New Journalism of the 1880s. The writers were sometimes obscure hacks working for press agencies and publishers such as Cassell, and sometimes established journalists such as Shirley Brooks, Edward Lucy or William Jerdan. Some London Letters were syndicated to smaller newspapers, but more prestigious papers

30

david finkelstein

boasted that theirs was written exclusively for them. The London Letter was rightly mocked by metropolitan commentators for its gossipy style and its writers’ exaggerated claims to have lounged in every club and dined with every earl and actress. Yet it prefigured many traits of the New Journalism, was an important source of income for many writers, and demonstrated how the relationship between metropolitan and provincial press was more than a simple one of core and periphery. Following up on the theme of centralised distribution of news to regional hubs, Andrew Hobbs contributes a case study chapter looking at the pioneering regional news supply network established by quarry owner William Saunders in the early 1860s. Having entered the newspaper industry in Plymouth through launching the Western Morning News in 1860, in 1863 he and his brother-in-law Edward Spender set up the London-based Central Press, one of the first UK news agencies with a specific aim of supplying news and other editorial matter to provincial papers. Saunders would go on to found or purchase regional newspapers to which he supplied such centrally sourced material, forming part of a ‘chain newspaper’ system that would become a model for subsequent press proprietors and owners. Saunders’s career highlights the dependence of many provincial papers on central sources of news and content, and challenges simple ideas of local, national and provincial content and news production.

The Political Press A study of the nineteenth-century British and Irish press would not be complete without some account of the place of the radical and political press in British and Irish culture and society. Martin Conboy offers a survey chapter on the history of the British and Irish radical press over the first two decades of the century, exploring the ways in which the radical press sought to create an understanding of social class and to address its readers as part of that emerging social experience. His piece also offers insight into the ways the radical press experimented with form and format as it attempted to draw in paying audiences without compromising at times strident and uncompromising political stances. Conboy argues that this period of press activity was significant in seeing the first concerted efforts across Britain and Ireland through such press spaces to engage with an emergent industrial working class and fully represent its interests. Among the ways the press did so was through publication of letters, political analysis, news, satire, and reports on public engagements, speeches and announcements central to radical concerns, with a good example of such mix found in the

­

introduction

31

development of the Black Dwarf (1817–24), a radical periodical publication whose seven-year publication history occupied a significant place within popular culture. James Thompson continues this discussion of politics and the press in his chapter on nineteenth-century British and Irish political press developments. His piece examines how the political press was perceived and discussed, as well as assesses the active role of ­­newspapers as political actors, which went far beyond newspapers themselves, extending to the publication of posters, and – by the start of the twentieth century – the production of political films. Thompson rightly points out that past studies of the political press, such as Stephen Koss’s monumental two-volume study, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press, were often hampered by a focus on London and metropolitan press centres, and the view that political reporting was modelled on material produced from London on the whole and issued outwards to peripheral regional spaces. Thompson argues, however, as have others in this volume, that regional and community-based papers were equally prominent in shaping political discourse, with regional and local papers helping preserve the politics of place, and with intense newspaper competition in Scotland and Wales reflecting distinctive local political preoccupations and rivalries, whether it be sparring between Glasgow and Edinburgh as Scottish centres of civic engagement, or the anti-tithe agitation in late Victorian Wales. By the close of the century, much of the Irish press was both highly regional and powerfully nationalist, often in reaction to perceived exclusions from the political sphere. Such regional variations and concerns are explored further in this volume through case study chapters on specific press titles. These include James Thompson’s contributions on the Glasgow Herald, James Quinn on the Dublin-based Nation and Mark O’Brien on the Irish Times. Felix M. Larkin also offers a close study of the complex relationship between the Irish nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell and the Irish press during his turbulent period as Member of Parliament between 1875 and his death in 1891.

Conclusion The press in nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland occupied a central place in society. As this volume chronicles, this was the age that saw the introduction of a plethora of press publications dedicated to fostering professional, trade, communal and individual identities, to entertaining mass audiences, and to bearing witness to social, cultural and political change. It saw the launch of the illustrated newspaper,

32

david finkelstein

the development of journalism as a profession, and the creation of transnational press networks and systems that widened public access to world events and drew together far-flung communities. Newspapers and journals became central to the expansion of knowledge across all parts of nineteenth-century British, Irish and anglophone society. They were powerful tools in shaping, radicalising and motivating an intellectually engaged reading public to think, reflect and engage with their surroundings. Individuals were able to articulate a complex range of social identities within a rapidly evolving and industrialised world through the pages of the press. In so doing, they left behind a wealth of material that, as this volume demonstrates, is capable of yielding fresh insights into nineteenth-century social and cultural conditions.

Economics of Press Production

Chapter One

THE ECONOMICS OF PRESS AND PERIODICAL PRODUCTION Howard Cox and Simon Mowatt

Introduction The interplay of technological change and market forces provides the principal economic drivers of press and periodical publishing in ­­nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland. However, these forces have always functioned within a variety of institutional frameworks that have served to shape their effective operation and final form. As John and Silberstein-Loeb (2015: 2) point out in a recent survey of the political economy of journalism, ‘These institutional arrangements have taken many forms: advertising, sponsored content, cartels, administrative regulations, government monopoly.’ Of all these institutional factors, the policies towards publishing adopted by the British government before 1855 were of crucial significance. The decision of the British governments before this date to manage the dissemination of published news largely by recourse to fiscal measures had a major bearing on the operation and structure of the periodical publishing industry across the whole of the United Kingdom and Ireland. It would be impossible to provide an account of the economic development of periodicals in Britain and Ireland without an appreciation of the role played by the raft of government policies which were collectively known as the ‘taxes on knowledge’. The following review of the economic development of periodical publishing in nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland therefore begins with an analysis of the impact of government policies on the industry before the abolition of the newspaper stamp duties. It then goes on to consider the evolution of the industry during three broad sub-periods of the century: 1800–1840s; 1850s–1860s; and 1870s–1900. 35

36

howard cox and simon mowatt

The Political Context and the ‘ Taxes on Knowledge’ The role played by political activity in the economic development of Britain’s newspaper and periodical publishing industry during the nineteenth century can be conveniently subdivided around the year 1855. Up until this date, the evolution of the industry was shaped to an important degree by government policy. Legislative controls together with fiscal impositions which were levied on the publication of news, the placing of advertising matter and the cost of paper – popularly known as the ‘taxes on knowledge’ – played a decisive role in determining the conditions faced by firms active in newspaper and periodical publishing. Although the last of these taxes on knowledge – the duty on paper – was not abolished until 1861, the repeal of the newspaper stamp duty in 1855 effectively ended a period of state interference in the publishing of news and political comment, which had dated back to the licensing system of control introduced during the first half of the seventeenth century (Black 2001: 5). Certainly from the 1860s onwards the publishers of newspapers and periodicals in the United Kingdom were able to develop their businesses much more along the conventional lines of free market competition. Government policy continued to play a role, particularly in relation to the operation of postal and telegraph services, but after 1855 the way was clear for periodical publishing firms that were run as profit-generating concerns to develop their enterprises free of direct government control. The nineteenth century had opened amid the destabilising impact of the French Revolution and its aftermath. In an effort to control the spread of radical ideas, the Tory-led governments of William Pitt the Younger (1783–1801, 1804–6) and Henry Addington (1801–4) increased the existing duties on newspaper publishing. Thus, in 1789 the stamp duty on newspapers was raised from 1½d to 2d and the advertising tax increased from 2s 6d to 3s per advertisement. A further increase in the newspaper stamp was levied in 1797, raising it to 3½d, and higher duties were levied on paper in 1802. One impact of these increases in taxation was to encourage the growth of a radical, unstamped press as a key development in a period which saw a general upsurge in politically motivated publications, particularly after 1815. At the opposite extreme from the unstamped press, perhaps the most outstanding feature of this era of heightened political debate was the inauguration in 1802 of the elite six-shilling quarterly Edinburgh Review as the voice of Whig opposition; a move countered seven years later by the launch of its political adversary, the Tory-supporting Quarterly Review. The year 1802 also witnessed the first publication of

­

economics of press production

37

William Cobbett’s Political Register selling for 1s, which was designed to broaden the scope of political debate to embrace a wider readership by articulating its arguments in a more accessible style of writing (Barker 2000: 197; Black 2001: 164–8). The fiscal constraints on the publication of news were further extended in 1815, following the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the demobilization of large numbers of unemployed soldiers seeking alternative forms of employment. The newspaper stamp was increased to 4d, and advertising duty was raised to 3s 6d. Even before these additional financial burdens were imposed on them, individual publishers of radical newspapers had from time to time been subject to government-sponsored prosecutions. For example in 1809, as the war with France raged, Cobbett was convicted of seditious libel, imprisoned for two years and fined the exorbitant sum of £1,000 for an article published in his Political Register that drew attention to the horrific punishments inflicted on British troops sanctioned by their own commanders (Barker 2000: 74). Following the bloodshed at Peterloo in 1819, further measures were adopted to combat the growth of radical literature in the form of a Publications Act and a Blasphemous and Seditious Libels Act. Wickwar (1928: 315) has identified 115 prosecutions of publishers for seditious and blasphemous libel for the three years 1819 to 1821, but only another 41 between 1822 and 1833. The political measures introduced during the first two decades of the nineteenth century were taken against a backdrop not simply of prolonged warfare against Napoleonic France, and the concomitant increases in the level of state indebtedness, but also in a period when the population of Britain was growing at extremely rapid levels. The rate of growth of the population of England and Wales increased from roughly 10 per cent in the 1780s to around 16 per cent by the 1810s (Deane 1965: 32). This rapidly rising population gave rise to widespread concerns regarding the maintenance of political stability and the dangers of free speech leading to revolutionary activity. As Britain began its emergence as an industrial society, however, much of this growing and youthful population began to congregate in the country’s growing towns, offering new markets for the publishers of newspapers and magazines across the nation. By the beginning of the 1820s, thanks in part to the stimulus provided by the demand for radical, unstamped newspapers, the area of London around Fleet Street and the Strand had evolved into an embryonic printing and publishing industrial district. As the fiscal and legislative controls of 1819 began to undermine the economic viability of the radical underground press, so the existence of a wide variety of

38

howard cox and simon mowatt

technically skilled printers and engravers in this part of London allowed enterprising publishers the opportunity to develop popular periodicals for the capital’s rapidly expanding population. Non-political weekly reviews featuring material extracted from a range of published books and other sources were placed before the public. These included Henry Colburn’s Literary Gazette, initially launched in 1817 at the price of 1s., and lower-priced imitators such as John Limbird’s 1822 Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction. Making use of woodcuts and the recently developed technique of stereotypes to facilitate costeffective reprinting of previously set type, the first issue of Limbird’s twopenny periodical is credited with having ultimately sold 150,000 copies (Asquith 1978: 104; Topham 2005: 76–90). Outside of London, this period also saw the rise in the sales of provincial newspapers. Between the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 and the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, a number of successful newspapers evolved within many of Britain’s growing cities, advocating reforms designed to gain better political representation and cheaper food for their rapidly multiplying workforces. Between 1816 and 1837 sales of newspaper stamps to London and the provinces rose from 22 to 39 million (Barker 2000: 30). Newspapers such as the Leeds Mercury, the Manchester Guardian and the Sheffield Independent developed substantial circulations (Mercury 5,500 by 1833; Guardian 4,000 by 1834) by providing a voice in support of middle-class reformers (Cranfield 1978: 188–93). The violent suppression of the protest at Peterloo had led even the Times newspaper to adopt a more abrasive attitude towards the inequities of Britain’s system of political representation in Parliament. Between 1817 and 1841, under the editorship of Thomas Barnes, the Times emerged as Britain’s first truly national newspaper, advocating the cause of political reform that was to be realised in the Great Reform Act of 1832 and establishing the concept of the press operating as a fourth estate in the British political structure (Woods and Bishop 1985: 40–60). Agitation for reform in the period around the passing of the 1832 Act was also made manifest by a sharp rise in the number of unstamped newspapers that were launched. Using the British Union Catalogue of Periodicals, Hollis (1970: 318–27) was able to identify over 200 unstamped titles that came into existence between 1828 and the mid-1830s. These publications embrace a wide range of periodicals, including those such as Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal and Knight’s Penny Magazine that were designed to provide working-class readers with wholesome rather than radical printed material. Many more, however, such as those put out by the likes of Hetherington and Carlile,

­

economics of press production

39

were politically motivated and generated consternation among the ruling elite. Although for the most part these radical publications were extremely short lived, their number and geographical spread, including Ireland where the issue of Catholic emancipation had been a major cause in the 1820s, demanded a political response. This came in the form of sharp reductions in first the advertising duty from 3s 6d to 1s 6d in 1832 and then in the newspaper stamp duty from 4d to 1d in 1836. The reduction in stamp duty fundamentally altered the relative cost of producing stamped versus unstamped papers and effectively brought down the curtain on the latter, while the lowering of advertising duty led to an 82 per cent increase in the number of advertisements placed between 1832 and 1840 (Eliot 1994: Table F1). The reduction in stamp duty had the effect of liberating and consolidating the position of middle-class newspapers while initiating a shift in the principal form of working-class newspaper consumption towards the more sensational, but less politically inclined, Sunday newspapers from the 1840s (Berridge 1978: 247–64). However, neither the undermining of the unstamped press nor the Reform Act of 1832 had the effect of quelling the underlying issues that had been generating political unrest among the working classes across the United Kingdom. In Ireland, the general election of 1832 had returned a group of Irish MPs which, under the leadership of Daniel O’Connell whose Catholic Association had been the prime agitator for emancipation in the 1820s, pledged to seek the repeal of the Act of Union. Between 1837 and 1841 the O’Connell-led group of MPs allied themselves with the Whig party in Parliament, but were unable to achieve their political aims by means of this alliance. With the return of a Tory government in 1841, O’Connell began a campaign of extra-parliamentary protests which gained support from the popular press (Boyce 1985: 262). Both the Cork Examiner (founded in 1841) and particularly the Nation (founded by the Young Ireland movement in 1842) supported the objectives of O’Connell’s campaign (Boyce 2005: 88). The Nation subsequently gained a reputation as the leading voice of Irish radicalism through its active support of the Young Irelander Rebellion in 1848 which had followed in the wake of the Great Famine. By 1838 the movement for political change had focused on two issues: the demand for constitutional reform through the People’s Charter, first published in May 1838, and the campaign seeking repeal of the Corn Laws co-ordinated by the Anti-Corn Law League. The Chartist movement did serve to spawn another wave of radical newspapers, the most successful of which was the Northern Star established at Leeds in November 1837 under the editorship of the Irish barrister

40

howard cox and simon mowatt

Feargus O’Connor (Glasgow 1954: 65). By February 1838 it was selling over 10,000 copies a week – more than both the Manchester Guardian and the Leeds Mercury. Having been won over to the Chartist cause, the Northern Star appointed correspondents in every town and village where the movement had found support. By 1839 the weekly circulation of the paper, estimated in terms of the purchase of newspapers stamps, was in excess of 40,000. Despite O’Connor’s success in galvanising support for the Chartists’ cause, the failure of two petitions to Parliament in 1839 and 1842 to elicit the desired constitutional changes (the latter petition containing in the region of 3 million signatures) greatly undermined support for the campaign. By 1844 the circulation of the Northern Star had fallen to around 7,000 (Cranfield 1978: 194–8). From this point it was the middle-class newspapers, and their overriding concern with the Corn Law issue, that became the dominant focus of political debate. The growing clamour for abolition together with the failure of the Irish potato harvests from 1845 left the Prime Minister Robert Peel with little option other than to defy his own Tory landowners and abolish the duties on imported grain in 1846, bringing in its wake his own political downfall and splitting the fledgling Conservative Party into two hostile factions (Tombs 2014: 446–53). Peel’s Tory administration was succeeded by the Whig ministry of John Russell (1846–52), but, hamstrung by the lack of a working majority, Russell resisted the pressure for further fiscal reform of the press. Rather the next significant step in the repeal of the ‘taxes on knowledge’ – the abolition of advertising duty in 1853 – was passed by a coalition of Whigs and Peelite Tories under the leadership of the Earl of Aberdeen. This was a significant step forward not just for the newspaper press, but also for popular periodicals and magazines for which classified advertising revenues often comprised an important element in their financial stability. The Aberdeen administration fought shy of repealing the remaining 1d newspaper stamp, however, which continued to provide the government with a means of scrutinising and controlling the publication of news. It was left to Lord Palmerston’s first ministry (1855–8) to abolish the duty in 1855, declaring that he had ‘no fears that the anticipated evils from the existence of a cheap press would be realised’ (Black 2001: 184). Finally free of government supervision, the second half of the 1850s witnessed an upsurge in the number and frequency of publication of newspapers. According to the historians of the Times, 1856 saw the inauguration of 200 new newspapers in Britain as competition for readers intensified. Moreover, to the detriment of the Times, the stamp duty which hitherto had allowed

­

economics of press production

41

newspapers to be conveyed free by the Post Office was replaced by a postal charge based on weight. As the bulkiest paper, the Times now suffered a cost disadvantage which it is claimed was designed to undermine the paper’s hegemonic position (Woods and Bishop 1985: 86–91). Another six years were to pass before the last of the ‘taxes on knowledge’ was erased from the statute book. The abolition of the duty on paper was navigated through Parliament by William Gladstone, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, despite widespread objections including that of Prime Minister Lord Palmerston. Motivated by concerns regarding the intentions of Napoleon III and the contingent loss of around £1 million in tax revenue, Gladstone’s first attempt to push the measure through Parliament in the summer of 1860 was rebuffed by the Lords. Changing tack, Gladstone reintroduced the measure as part of his Finance Bill for the 1861 Budget and was able to force it through. The lifting of the duty on paper was of crucial importance to newspapers because, prior to its abolition, it had been necessary to cut the continuous web of paper into individual sheets in order to allow the amount of tax to be calculated (Black 2001: 177–88). Thus the repeal of the ‘taxes on knowledge’ not only served to create a more genuinely commercial publishing industry but also ushered in an era of progressive technological development and facilitated the emergence of a modern mass media during the second half of the nineteenth century.

The Business of Periodical Publishing The collection of businesses that made up the periodical publishing industry of Britain and Ireland thus staggered into the nineteenth century under the weight of multiple burdens. High and growing levels of taxation on both their raw materials and, in the case of newsbased periodicals, their products, were coupled with an antiquated and inefficient form of printing technology, an underdeveloped distribution infrastructure and a largely illiterate population. In contrast, by 1900 all of these obstacles had either been eliminated or substantially overcome, and the industry as a whole was in a state of rude health, featuring among its numerous firms some of the country’s most highly capitalised business enterprises. This review thus analyses the economic development of the periodical publishing industry over the period of 100 years by dividing the century into three broad phases: 1800–1840s, years during which changes in the ‘taxes on knowledge’ played a fundamental role in shaping the industry’s development; the 1850s to 1860s, a twenty-year period which saw the number of titles of periodicals produced by the industry expand considerably, aided

42

howard cox and simon mowatt

by improved physical distribution systems and the development of Britain’s telegraph network; and the 1870s to 1900, during which a process of modernisation, featuring a number of key technological breakthroughs, transformed the business of periodical publishing – especially that of popular magazines – into one of the country’s leading industries.

1800­­–1840s Four classes of newspaper were to be found circulating in Britain and Ireland at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Before 1812, when Carrick’s Morning Post was launched in Dublin (Fleming and O’Day 2005: 365), daily morning newspapers were printed only in London. The 3½d stamp levied on each copy meant that the cover price of the London dailies amounted to 6d and put it beyond the pockets of even most middle-class families. Sales at the beginning of the century were therefore correspondingly low, with the Morning Chronicle (c.3,000), the Morning Post (c.4,500) and the Times (c.4,800) leading the field (Altick 1998: 392; Woods and Bishop 1985: 12). Evening newspapers were published more widely across the United Kingdom as well as in Ireland during the early decades of the nineteenth century. These papers were often printed two or three times a week, and the first daily evening paper, the Star and Evening Advertiser, had been launched in London during 1788 (Lake 1984: 59), while the daily Dublin Evening Mail was founded in 1823 with the purpose of opposing Catholic emancipation (Fleming and O’Day 2005: 371). Provincial weekly papers were undergoing a period of expansion during the early nineteenth century, expanding in number from sixty to one hundred and twenty between 1790 and 1820. At the beginning of the 1820s such weekly papers were being published in sixty-two towns in England and Scotland, most notably in the major conurbations such as Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester, with the latter two cities each able to claim a total of five different papers (Adelman and Gardner 2015: 50). At the beginning of the century these weekly offerings tended to be produced in printing offices which combined newspaper printing with other jobbing work. However, particularly after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the provincial weeklies developed into more genuinely journalistic enterprises supporting local political and commercial interests. Finally, the late eighteenth century had witnessed the beginnings of Sunday newspapers, with the foundation of the British Gazette and Sunday Monitor by Samuel Johnson leading the way in 1779 (Lake 1984: 57) and the still-extant Observer following in 1791. The most

­

economics of press production

43

conspicuous success in these early days of the Sunday press was provided by Bell’s Weekly Messenger, which was credited with selling an astonishing 14,000 copies for its issue covering Nelson’s funeral in 1805 (Koss 1981: 51). The major development of the Sunday press, however, occurred in the mid-nineteenth century. These newspaper publishing enterprises of the early nineteenth century featured two principal forms of ownership structure; syndicates featuring multiple owners on the one hand, and individual or small partnerships on the other. By the early years of the century the previous reliance on syndicates had begun to wane in favour of individual ownership or partnerships, and many newspapers thrived in the form of a family business. The role of John Walter and his sons in the development of the Times from its foundation in 1785 provides a clear example of how astute individuals could develop the family-based model to build a successful periodical publishing business. Over time the capital requirements of the Times led to a widening of its shareholder base, but its success was closely tied to the visionary leadership provided by members of the Walter family (Clarke 2004: 225–6; Woods and Bishop 1985). Such family ownership was a particularly common feature of provincial newspapers, although the consistent profits many of them generated from the 1820s had the effect of making their shares popular with speculators. The London press, in particular, began by the mid-century to utilise independent capital resources to finance an increasingly large scale of operation, and the launch of the Daily News in 1846 involved the issue of 100 shares (Asquith 1978: 103). The prohibitive impact of the newspaper stamp duty, particularly before its reduction to a penny in 1836, led to a bifurcation between the businesses producing stamped and unstamped news-based period­ icals. Certainly, the sharp rise in unstamped publications agitating for political reform in the 1820s and 1830s created a significant informal group of enterprises, operating often cheek by jowl with the conventional periodical publishing houses. Much of this illicit publishing activity was produced by printing firms in London, with the capital accounting in value terms for just over 50 per cent of the entire gross output of the letterpress printing industry in Great Britain around 1830 (Alford 1964: 97). Hollis (1970: 124–36) has analysed how the unstamped publishing houses operated their businesses, featuring an informal agglomeration of editors, printers and publisher-proprietors. Henry Hetherington, whose well-known publications included the unstamped Poor Man’s Guardian, was a professional printer who had his two Stanhope presses working flat-out to meet the demand for his paper. William Carpenter, who launched his Political Letters opposing

44

howard cox and simon mowatt

the stamp from Richard Carlile’s premises, provides an example of a professional writer who served this radical market. Carlile himself was a bookseller and publisher who, like William Hone before him, put out unstamped papers. The significance of this sector of the periodical publishing industry is demonstrated by the estimation that, on average, sales of the unstamped press as a whole in 1836 still probably outstripped that of the stamped papers (Barker 2000: 33). The years after the reduction of the newspaper stamp in 1836 also saw the rise of a stamped radical newspaper press based on the demands of the Chartist movement, the origins of which lay outside of London. The newspaper that emerged as the vanguard of the Chartist movement – the Northern Star – had been launched during 1837 in Leeds under the guiding hand of an ex-Irish MP, Fergus O’Connor. Drawing on his family’s earlier tradition of radical journalism within Ireland, O’Connor persuaded a Leeds printer and prominent radical, Joshua Hobson, to become his publisher before proceeding to raise the required capital through the sale of one-pound shares. The bulk of the £690 capital subscribed was drawn from within Yorkshire and was used to purchase machinery from a firm in Southwark, London. Launched as a weekly paper – under the title of the Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser – at the relatively low price of 4½d per copy (including the 1d stamp) its circulation quickly surpassed that of the established weekly Leeds Times and Leeds Mercury as O’Connor gave his support to the six-point manifesto of the People’s Charter. Despite the Northern Star’s strong roots in the north of England, the paper moved its offices to London following a change of editorship in 1844; an example of the enduring pull on periodical publishing exerted by the metropolis. Along with the other Chartist newspapers, sales of the Northern Star gradually petered out as the movement lost influence following the failure of its three petitions to Parliament, in 1839, 1842 and 1848 (Glasgow 1954: 54–67; Koss 1981: 60). As well as the radical newspapers, the unstamped press of the 1830s included publications whose aim was to provide wholesome and improving reading material for the newly emerging group of urban industrial workers. In Edinburgh, the publisher and bookseller William Chambers launched a 1½d weekly publication called Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal in February 1832. By the thirteenth issue this magazine was also being printed in London by W. S. Orr and, despite its lack of illustrations, Chambers’s periodical quickly reached a circulation of 30,000 copies per week (Altick 1998: 332–3; Cooney 2004). At almost the same time a similar initiative in London had seen the launch of the Penny Magazine by Charles Knight as

­

economics of press production

45

one of a portfolio of publications sponsored by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) founded by the Whig MP Henry Brougham. Founded with the same objective as Chambers’s publication, Knight’s Penny Magazine utilised the services of engravers in order to incorporate into the magazine a number of woodcut illustrations which allowed even the semi-literate to derive enjoyment from it pages (Anderson 1991: 50–83). A penny magazine which featured pictures as well as text certainly brought Knight’s publication a huge readership, with early issues selling in excess of 200,000 copies and making it Britain’s first cheap, mass-circulation magazine. In producing his magazine, Knight had engaged the leading innovative printing works owned by William Clowes, giving his periodical access to the most up-to-date steam-driven cylinder printing presses. These cylindrical presses were able to use continuous reels of paper made using the Fourdrinier process (Reader 1981: 5), thereby increasing the volume of output per hour and reducing the unit cost of production. However, the high level of total costs involved in its production meant that by 1833 the break-even point for the Penny Magazine required sales of around 112,000 copies, compared with Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal which needed to sell only 23,000 copies to cover its costs (Bennett 1982). In terms of profits, for a level of sales 15 per cent above break-even, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal generated a return on capital of 6 per cent, while the Penny Magazine returned only 2 per cent. This structure of costs and revenues, and the consequential rate of profit, helps to explain why Chambers’s publication endured for many years while Knight’s ceased publication in 1846 as its circulation, and thus its profit margin, dwindled (Gray 2006: 165). Despite its demise in 1846, Knight’s publication had demonstrated the viability of a market for cheap weekly periodicals aimed at a mass audience, and also that a strong appetite existed for popular illustrated papers. More astute businessmen thus developed these categories of periodical publications from the early 1840s, and indeed their success was a significant factor in undermining sales of the Penny Magazine from which they had taken their inspiration. The launch of a new penny weekly in 1842 by the publisher George Biggs, the Family Herald, or Useful Information and Amusement for the Million, was an attempt to lure away readers of Knight’s magazine with an editorial formula that offered a higher quota of fiction-based entertainment over instruction. Like Knight, Biggs had understood that the publication of a mass-­­market periodical was viable only if the publishing costs could be effectively spread over large volumes of output. Thus on its launch the Family Herald became the first journal in which the process of

46

howard cox and simon mowatt

typesetting, printing and binding were all fully mechanised, and which were operated by a labour force that featured a large quota of female workers (Twyman 1998: 60). Despite experiencing severe labour disputes at the outset, Biggs turned the Family Herald into a huge success, and by 1855 it was able to claim a circulation of 300,000 (Altick 1998: 394; Brake and Demoor 2009: 213–14). A similar formula was developed by a number of periodical publishers over the next decade, notably George Stiff and George Vickers’s London Journal (King 2004: 74–5; Anderson 1991: 86), George Reynolds’s Reynolds’s Miscellany (King 2008: 62) and Charles Dickens’s twopenny Household Words (Altick 1998: 347). The year 1842 witnessed the launch of Herbert Ingram’s weekly Illustrated London News. Ingram, from Boston in Lincolnshire, had set up in the nearby industrial centre of Nottingham during 1834 as a printer, newsagent and bookseller in partnership with Nathaniel Cooke. Having become aware of the interest aroused among his customers by his sale of caricatures and other graphical printed matter, Ingram and Cooke determined to publish an illustrated newspaper and relocated their business to London. There they began publishing the Illustrated London News under the editorship of Frederick Bayley and employing the likes of John Timbs (who had earlier worked on John Limbird’s Mirror of Literature) and George Stiff as engravers. Seeking to attract a respectable audience, the journal featured numerous woodcuts of both topical news items and more general features including fashion notes and games. Printed on good-quality paper, the journal carried a cover price of 6d. This highly innovative periodical proved to be highly popular and by the end of the decade had a circulation in the region of 200,000. As a business enterprise, the journal’s success was consolidated by the formation of the London Illustrated News organisation which launched a variety of other journals and books. Ingram also pioneered the strategy of backward vertical integration when in 1848 he acquired his own paper mills in Rickmansworth, north-west of London (Bailey 2004; Brake and Demoor 2009: 301–3). The popularity of the Illustrated London News was seized upon by imitators, and one particularly enterprising publishing business that sought to capitalise on the success of Ingram and Cooke’s new periodical was that of Edward Lloyd. After undertaking a number of, mainly lurid, publishing initiatives since the mid-1830s, in 1842 Lloyd issued an unstamped weekly alternative version to the Illustrated London News, under the banner of Lloyd’s Illustrated London Newspaper, which he was briefly able to put on the market at the bargain price of 1d. The following year he set up offices in London’s Salisbury Square, from

­

economics of press production

47

which he published his notorious ‘penny blood’ titles in order to exploit a growing demand for sensationalist literature among London’s young and rapidly expanding population (Springhall 1994: 568). Brought to heel by the tax authorities, in January 1843 Lloyd merged his weekly newspaper with the Illustrated Sunday Herald, dropped the illustrations, and relaunched it as a Sunday newspaper under the title Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper. As a pioneer of a new breed of popular Sunday papers, Lloyd engaged in a range of innovative practices, including the introduction of a system of sale or return and undertaking embryonic attempts at market research by seeking feedback on his paper from members of the public (Berridge 1978: 253). His initiative was quickly emulated by other experienced publishers such as John Browne Bell’s News of the World (1843), George Stiff ’s Weekly Times (1847) and George Reynolds’s Reynolds’s Newspaper (1850) (Mussel 2016: 11–26; James 2004). As the circulation of Sunday newspapers boomed, particularly after the repeal of the newspaper tax in 1855, Edward Lloyd went on to become the first British publisher to install the high-speed rotary presses developed in the United States by Richard Hoe in 1856. Then, following the abolition of duty on paper in 1861, which allowed the cover price of the paper to be cut to 1d., he set up his own paper mill on the River Lea in Bow and thus followed the strategy of vertical integration adopted earlier by Herbert Ingram (McWilliam 2004). In business terms, therefore, the development of Britain’s popular Sunday papers in the 1840s laid the foundation for substantial periodical publishing enterprises based on the revenues generated by the small change of many thousands of readers with modest incomes, together with those of the advertisers who sought their custom.

1850s–1860s The opening two decades of the second half of the nineteenth century brought important changes in the economic environment for Britain’s periodical publishing firms. Abolition of the advertising tax (1853) and the newspaper stamp duty (1855) prompted a surge in the number of new newspapers issued, growing from 563 titles in 1851 to 1,250 in 1864 but then increasing only another 10 per cent in total between 1864 and 1869 (Eliot 1994: 82, Table E3; Law and Patten 2009: Table 3.1). These two decades also witnessed the creation of two monopolies that significantly affected the availability of periodicals on the one hand and the transmission of news as raw information on the other. The first of these was the result of the development of a distribution network, initially for London-based periodicals, by the firm of W.  H.  Smith &

48

howard cox and simon mowatt

Son (Wilson 1985). The second was the growth of Britain’s telegraph network, culminating in the decision to nationalise the service in 1868, together with the emergence of news agencies operated by firms such as Reuters and the Press Association (Foreman-Peck 1989; Read 1999; Silberstein-Loeb 2014). The establishment of an effective nationwide infrastructure of periodical distribution in Britain took a major step forward during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Up until the 1830s the conveyance of newspapers and periodicals from London to other parts of the British Isles was conducted by stage coach and ferry. During this period the carriage of stamped newspapers was undertaken by the General Post Office free of charge; a practice given legal force in 1825 by an Act of Parliament. The service was managed by the Post Office’s Clerks of the Road, using the mail coaches that left from various points in London around 8 p.m. each evening. Up until the mid-1820s these arrangements were able to deliver the London evening papers to customers in the Home Counties the following day, and to towns further afield, such as Birmingham and Manchester, the day after. While the Post Office Clerks were responsible for managing the bulk of this trade, private firms also provided a similar service to individual customers. One such enterprise was the bookseller and stationer W. H. Smith, based at 192 Strand, which by the 1820s was serving a network of clients in towns as far from London as Sterling, Ludlow and Dublin. (This aspect of press distribution is also covered in Paul Raphael Rooney’s contribution on readership and distribution in Chapter 4.) The latter part of the 1820s saw the emergence of new, faster morning stage coaches on Britain’s gradually improving network of main roads. William Henry Smith recognised the opportunity this gave his firm to serve its customers more efficiently by utilising these fast coaches to deliver newspapers in conjunction with his own fleet of carts. Smith’s carts collected the morning papers directly from the newspaper offices, transferred them to 192 Strand for parcelling up, and then delivered the packages to the various coaching inns for forward dispatch. The consumers who comprised the mainstay of this trade – the political and commercial classes outside of London – were actually far more interested in the contents of the daily morning papers, and particularly the authoritative Times, such that by the late 1820s these papers became increasingly influential in the provincial news markets. By 1828 Smith’s firm was able to boast that the Times could be dispatched by express coach to Birmingham and forwarded to towns including Manchester, Liverpool and Lancaster to be available a full 14 hours before the arrival of the London mail. Although Smith’s service faced

­

economics of press production

49

competition from other newsagents in London, the degree of natural monopoly that was inherent in the provision of such a delivery network, together with the owner’s seemingly boundless energy, enabled W. H. Smith to dominate the trade in the 1830s (Wilson 1985: 37–46). The delivery of newspapers and periodicals in mid-nineteenthcentury Britain was, of course, transformed by the construction of the railways, a point also raised in Paul Raphael Rooney’s chapter on readership and distributions. During the 1840s Smith’s business increasingly began to utilise the growing rail network to dispatch the London papers and later to consolidate the trade in England’s leading provincial cities with their own warehouses, initially in Birmingham (1857) and Manchester (1859). The 1850s represented the crucial period of development of the W. H. Smith organisation, providing another example of an enduring family firm operating in the publishing industry. In 1846 Smith’s son (also named William Henry) gave up his earlier desire to serve the Church and was taken into partnership. Two years later the younger W. H. Smith rented a bookstall at the London and North-Western Railway’s (LNWR) Euston station and, in return for providing the railway company with a secure source of rental income, gained permission to establish a chain of stalls across the LNWR’s line of stations running on from Euston to Birmingham and Manchester. Smith’s business model was then extended to other railway operators, and a bookstall network was established that grew in number from thirty-five in 1851 to two hundred and ninety in 1870. In 1851 the company took a five-year lease on a bookstall at Edinburgh station, which stocked the Times and other London papers, as well as the Scotsman, the Glasgow Herald, and local papers and magazines  from across Scotland. However, in 1857 Smith’s firm was outbid by the Scottish bookseller Thomas Murray, who in turn was usurped by John Menzies, whose firm thereafter dominated retail distribution  of periodicals in Scotland (Wilson 1985: 145). Earlier, in 1850, Smith had bought a bankrupt news agency in Dublin which he placed under the management of one of the company’s bookstall managers, Charles Eason. Under Eason’s management the business thrived, not simply distributing the London papers but also assuming responsibility for elements of the Irish press such as the Irish Times in 1862 (O’Brien 2008: 16). The Dublin branch continued to operate under Eason’s management for the next thirty years, but in 1886 William H. Smith’s opposition to the issue of Home Rule – as a Tory MP in Disraeli’s government – persuaded him to sell off the company’s Irish business to Eason (Bradley 2016: 124). Thus, despite emerging as the dominant force in periodical distribution and retailing in

50

howard cox and simon mowatt

England and Wales, W. H. Smith & Son was ultimately excluded from both Scotland and Ireland. The successful development of W. H. Smith & Son’s distribution system, allied with its bookstall chain, gave the London-based daily newspapers, especially the Times, access to a customer base that extended across the whole of Britain and Ireland by 1850. From the mid-1850s onwards, however, the pre-eminence that this physical distribution network had afforded to London’s daily newspapers was subject to the countervailing power of telegraphy. Britain’s first telegraph message transmitted for a newspaper is reputed to have been received in May 1845 by the Morning Chronicle along the line operated by the London and South West Railway Company (Lee 1976: 60). The following year, however, Britain’s telegraph system was taken over by the Electric Telegraph Company (ETC), which until 1850 operated as a monopoly. In 1846 the ETC began a service of news messages to increase throughput during lulls in its paid-for telegram traffic. This provision of telegraphic communications was particularly important in allowing provincial newspapers to receive news directly and the Manchester Guardian, for example, published its first telegraphic dispatches in 1847 (Nord 2015: 81). By 1854 the ETC was providing a news service to more than 120 provincial newspapers (SilbersteinLoeb 2009: 766). During the course of the 1850s the ETC was faced with both increasing competition and piecemeal regulation by the state. Its first rival was the British Electric Telegraph Company which was formed in 1850 (Foreman-Peck 1989: 82–5). The following year the English and Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company was founded. Later in 1851 Julius Reuter set up his international news agency in London to exploit the world’s first undersea cable between Dover and Calais. To begin with, the London papers were reluctant to avail themselves of Reuter’s service, but in 1853 some of the leading provincial papers in Manchester and Leeds began to report intelligence gathered from the Reuter news service (Read 1999: 12–19). The first attempt by the British government to legislate a measure of control over the telegraph companies came with the passing of the Electric Telegraph Act in 1855. From this point until the late 1860s the telegraph companies operated as a cartel in which both the price of their news services, and the quality of the reports they provided, varied markedly. Thus, although the coming of the telegraph offered the provincial press much greater credibility for their news provision – the benefits being particularly marked in the Scottish press according to Lee (1976: 60) – concerns regarding the quality of the service continued to trouble the owners

­

economics of press production

51

of the provincial press. Matters came to a head in 1868 when a group of provincial publishers led by the Manchester Guardian, but also including the Cork Examiner, the Dundee Advertiser, the Scotsman of Edinburgh and the two leading Glasgow papers, the Herald and the North British Daily Mail, jointly established the Press Association (PA) to serve their common need for a reliable service of telegraphic intelligence. The campaign mounted by the newspapers’ publishers to improve the quality of the British telegraph service also helped to prompt the government to nationalise the telegraph companies’ services between 1868 and 1869, placing them under the control of the Post Office (Silberstein-Loeb 2014: 88–124). The development of an efficient nationwide system of physical distribution together with the growth of the telegraph and news agencies provided a spur to newspaper and periodical publishing enterprises during the middle years of the nineteenth century. The final repeal of the ‘taxes on knowledge’, despite the opposition of the Provincial Newspaper Society whose members feared the emergence of a cheap press (Lee 1978: 117), stimulated the formation of a raft of new publishing companies. These, in turn, were facilitated by the various Company Acts of 1844, 1855–6 and 1862, which brought forth the creation of small-scale, joint-stock companies featuring limited shareholder liability. This legislation enabled a surge in newly formed newspaper companies which were able to establish their papers by utilising the services of existing printing firms. In addition, the ending of duty on advertising helped to stimulate a further source of revenue for newspapers. Lee gives the example of the Manchester City News and Salford Hundred Advertiser which was launched with a nominal capital of £5,000 in 1864 as Manchester’s seventh newspaper, and the forty-fifth newspaper company to be formed under the Companies Acts of 1856–62 (Lee 1973: 132). Despite its limited resources, the City News was able to flourish through the remainder of the nineteenth century. In London, competition for the Times emerged in the form of the Daily Telegraph, founded in 1855. Taken over and put out as a penny daily paper by the printer and publisher Joseph Moses Levy soon after its launch, its circulation had reached 27,000 copies a day by the beginning of 1856 (Hart-Davies 1990: 28–9). By this time in both Scotland and Ireland a total of seven daily newspapers were in circulation (Lee 1978: 121), and the first Welsh daily newspaper, the Cambrian Daily Leader, was launched following the repeal of the ‘taxes on knowledge’ (Jones 2000: 312). By the beginning of the 1870s a plethora of mainly small newspaper firms were providing the population of Britain and

52

howard cox and simon mowatt

Ireland with a wealth of reading material, at a cover price as low as one halfpenny in the case of many evening daily papers launched in the late 1860s (Law and Patten 2009: 155).

1870s–1900 Using figures derived from Mitchell’s Newspaper Directory, Law and Patten (2009: Table 3.1) show that between 1860 and the mid-1870s the number of newspaper titles available in the United Kingdom increased from just over 1,000 to around 1,600 while the number of magazines grew in like proportion from around 400 titles to about 650. Thereafter the total number of magazine titles grew much more rapidly than those of newspapers, such that by 1900 each category was responsible for providing the public with around 2,400 titles. Moreover, by the 1880s a range of popular penny magazines began to gain large circulations and thus became extremely effective platforms for the manufacturers of a variety of consumer products to seek space for display advertising for their wares. These cheap magazines provided the likes of George Newnes, Alfred Harmsworth and Arthur Pearson with the financial capacity they required to instigate a revolution in the publication of popular daily morning newspapers during the closing years of the nineteenth century. The emergence of the New Journalism in the closing years of the nineteenth century blurred the boundary between those periodicals that provided the public with information and news, and those that sought to instruct or entertain them. Given the important role played by fiction as one of the staple ingredients of magazines, it is not surprising to find that a strong link existed between book publishing companies and this form of periodical output. Making works of fiction, both newly penned and revived, as well as some non-fiction available in serial form gave book publishers such as Chapman & Hall and Macmillan’s the remunerative format of a monthly magazine through which to reach a wider audience for their novels. In addition, independent weekly illustrated magazines such as the Graphic relied on both instalments of fiction and other narrative accounts to fill their pages (Law and Patten 2009: 149–66). More humble penny weeklies that offered their readers a digest of news and lighter reading material also exploited the public’s desire for short stories. The Dundee-based newspaper publisher John Leng & Co., with its People’s Journal magazine launched in 1858, provides an example of the use of fiction to entertain its largely working class readership. Indeed, readers of the Journal were themselves encouraged to submit literary efforts for publication. John Leng emerged as a major figure in

­

economics of press production

53

Scottish publishing during the second half of the nineteenth century. As editor of the Dundee Advertiser from 1851, he pioneered illustration in daily newspapers and commissioned the popular Scottish novelist David Pae to write exclusively for his paper. In 1869 he launched the People’s Friend, a spin-off from the People’s Journal, which was aimed particularly at a female readership and incorporated abridged versions of contemporary novels (Healey 1993: 139; Porter 2004). The number of magazines seeking a purely female audience gathered pace during the second half of the nineteenth century. Although not claiming to be exhaustive in its coverage, White (1970: Appendix 1) has identified a total of eighty such magazines launched between 1850 and 1900, compared with less than twenty during the first half of the century, and this surge in publication will have been connected to the scrapping of paper duties in 1861. One of the publishers at the forefront of this process of growth was Samuel Beeton who, together with his wife Isabella and his business partner Frederick Greenwood, built up an impressive portfolio of magazines and partworks during the 1850s. Their initial success came with the launch of a cheap twopenny monthly magazine entitled the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine (EDM), a publication which is generally credited with heralding the start of the modern style of women’s magazine and extending the reach of such periodicals into the homes of middle-class Britain (Hughes 2005: 162–3; Jackson 2001: 210) Beeton’s firm also developed various partworks, including Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, which was brought out in 1859 as a series of forty-eight-page threepenny magazines. These partworks added to the earlier Boy’s Own Magazine (1855), before issuing his most successful creation, the weekly Queen magazine in 1861, seen as a female-targeted counterpart to more general magazines such as the Illustrated London News (Beetham 1996: 90). Notwithstanding the success of titles such as EDM and Queen, by the 1870s Beeton’s business had collapsed, along with that of his main creditor, the finance house of Overend Gurney. The copyright for the bulk of Beeton’s successful periodicals was purchased in 1866 by the publishing firm of Ward Lock, which thereafter combined the publication of magazines with a successful book publishing business (Liveing 1954: 40–4). Another periodical publisher who had been forced to sell his copyrights due to the demands of his creditors was John Cassell. Originally engaged in tea and coffee trading, in 1846 Cassell had put out a monthly magazine entitled the Teetotal Times, primarily to encourage greater consumption of his beverages. Spurred to expand his publishing activities, Cassell launched a series of family-friendly

54

howard cox and simon mowatt

magazines, most notably two penny magazines, the Working Man’s Friend (1850) and Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper (1853). The success of these periodicals, together with numerous partworks, led Cassell to purchase an existing printing facility at 335 Strand, and he later moved to larger premises at Belle Sauvage near the foot of Ludgate Hill. However, Cassell’s continuing hostility to the newspaper stamp duty led him into an ongoing dispute with Thomas Crompton, the proprietor of the Morning Post, whose paper manufacturing business had provided Cassell’s firm with substantial credit to cover its raw material requirements. In 1854 Crompton confronted Cassell with an impromptu demand for the immediate settlement of his outstanding debts. Unable to raise the capital required, Cassell was forced to sell his business to the printing firm of Petter & Galpin. Cassell’s trademark publications continued to be developed under the management of Petter & Galpin, making the firm one of the leading producers of high-quality publications during the late Victorian era, featuring a range of published output covering both periodicals and books in a similar way to that of the Ward Lock establishment (Nowell-Smith 1958: 52–62). For Cassell’s partwork publications, the use of a sales force of ­canvassers touting the company’s publications from door to door helped to provide the firm with substantial growth from the 1860s to the 1880s, as did the work of its syndicated press agency: Cassell’s General Press (Law and Patten 2009: 157, 165–6). Unlike the newspaper publishing industry, which saw a marked increase in the number and range of titles published outside of London in the second half of the nineteenth century, the metropolis continued to lead the way in the field of magazine publishing. In Scotland important centres of magazine publishing existed in both Edinburgh and Dundee, and, while Tilley (2009: 185–202) has argued that the picture in nineteenth-century Ireland is not as bleak as it has traditionally been painted, magazine publishing there does seem to have remained relatively underdeveloped during this period. In England, outside of the capital, Manchester certainly did produce a range of magazines, but not those of a literary nature. Rather, as Powell and Wyke (2009: 183) point out, ‘the archetypal Manchester periodical [was] a commercial or trade journal or even a sporting paper’. Certainly, the local demand in Manchester for sporting intelligence presented an opportunity for an employee of the Manchester Guardian, Edward Hulton, to create a substantial publishing enterprise in the 1870s. Hulton, who also acted as a tipster for the Daily Sporting Bell, and his partner Edward Bleakley took advantage of a decision by the main daily newspapers in Manchester to suspend their coverage of race meetings, under pressure

­

economics of press production

55

from the anti-gambling lobby, to launch the Manchester Sporting Chronicle and Prophetic Bell in 1871. Benefitting from the much lower telegraphic charges to press organisations following the nationalisation of the service, Hulton’s paper was able to provide punters with the racing results in a much more timely fashion than the existing papers. Building on this breakthrough, Hulton set up a modern printing works at Withy Grove in 1874. The following year he launched the highly innovative Athletic News as a weekly magazine that covered a range of sports, including that of increasingly popular association football, and which by 1900 had become England’s leading sports periodical (Tate 2009: 46­­–67). By the time he handed the business over to his son in 1890, Hulton had launched his own Sunday newspaper, the Sunday Chronicle, and the company’s huge printing facility was employing a total of around 600 hands in 1901 (Griffiths 1996: 196). It was in Manchester, also, that George Newnes first developed his idea for a popular weekly magazine. The good people of Manchester first became aware of Newnes’s new Tit-Bits magazine when in October 1881 a hundred-strong band from the local Boys’ Brigade announced its availability by marching up and down Market Street with the Tit-Bits legend emblazoned on their caps. Within two hours he had sold 5,000 copies of his penny offering (Morris 2004; Shaw 1985: 436). Newnes proved to be a marketing genius, and his new magazine quickly began to entice its readers with the use of competitions and prizes that had no precedent, including the giving away of a newly built villa in south London worth £400 to one lucky winner of a simple competition (Friedrichs 1911: 87). Three years after the launch Newnes moved his business to London, and by 1886 he was printing the magazine in-house. Having initially eschewed the inclusion of advertising in his periodical, in 1889 he was persuaded by the advertising agency T. B. Brown to add a four-page wrapper to Tit-Bits, and by 1890 his magazine was generating an income of just under £30,000 per year (Pound 1966: 25). With the publication of Tit-Bits, Newnes had created a periodical which demonstrated a latent demand for entertaining and easily digested material on behalf of workingclass people across Britain, most especially those whose daily activities included a period spent commuting to and from their place of employment. By the end of the 1880s the circulation of Tit-Bits was running at 350,000 copies per week (Reed 1997: 87). In 1891 his company was reconstructed into George Newnes Ltd, with a capital of £400,000 and now embarked on a period of rapid growth based upon the launch of a range of new titles, most notably his collaboration with W. T. Stead in the Review of Reviews in 1890 and the Strand magazine in 1891, the

56

howard cox and simon mowatt

latter being designed to compete with a surge in popularity of imported American magazines such as Harper’s (Cox and Mowatt 2015: 22–5; Jackson 2001: 26–8). Newnes’s success did not fail to alert the attention of other wouldbe magazine publishers who felt that they could emulate his publication.  Two men who rose to the challenge were Arthur Pearson and Alfred Harmsworth. Pearson had worked for Newnes on TitBits, having gained his appointment to the firm by virtue of winning one of the competitions run by the magazine. In 1890 Pearson chanced his arm again, this time by inaugurating his own Tit-Bits– style magazine, Pearson’s Weekly. After a faltering start, the breakthrough was achieved by means of a ‘Missing Words’ competition launched in December 1891. By this time Harmsworth had also muscled his way into the market for penny weekly magazines with his Answers to Correspondents title. Working in partnership with his financially astute brother Harold, Harmsworth developed a growth strategy for his business that was founded on the principle of reducing unit costs of production by maximising the volume of output. Dubbed his ‘Schemo  Magnifico’, the  success of Answers provided the financial  capacity to launch a range of magazines, targeting the broadest  possible market and focusing particularly on boys and young women. Supporting their publishing activities by creating their own printworks, by 1896 their company,  Harmsworth Brothers Ltd, had a nominal share capital of  £1 million (Cox and Mowatt 2015: 29–33). Between the launch of Tit-Bits in 1881 and the end of the nineteenth century Britain’s printing industry experienced a technological revolution. The changes included more efficient methods of paper manufacturing based on the use of wood pulp, rapid increases in the speed of letterpress printing using advanced rotary presses ultimately driven by electricity, the mechanisation and automation of the process of typesetting using the hot-metal process, and methods to reduce the cost of reproducing illustrative material by making the technology of photography compatible with the letterpress by through the use of halftones (Cox and Mowatt 2015: 25–7). This surge in technological innovation underpinned a rapid rise in the number of magazine titles that were brought on to the market during the closing two decades of the nineteenth century. Initially, these mainly took the form of mass-market weeklies, although by the 1890s a significant expansion in sixpenny monthly magazines had also served to substantially increase the range of periodicals that would be available to consumers in Edwardian Britain. However, the final and most decisive change wrought by this

­

case study 1 : newspapers and advertising

57

new mass-production technology made its impact felt in the area of daily morning newspapers. Having outgunned the likes of Ward Lock and Cassell & Co. in the market for popular magazines, Newnes, Harmsworth and Pearson all turned their attention in the 1890s to the market for daily newspapers. George Newnes was the first to test the water with his launch of the Westminster Gazette in 1893 as a competitor to that of his erstwhile partner W. T. Stead’s Pall Mall Gazette. The following year Alfred Harmsworth was persuaded by Kennedy Jones to purchase the ailing London Evening News. Having revived their evening paper by placing more emphasis on editorial matter that sought to entertain its ­readers, Jones was then handed the task of designing a morning paper that could be produced in London and sent by telegraph for local printing in the major provincial cities. With an estimated set-up cost of £40,000, the resulting Daily Mail was launched in May 1896 and promoted as ‘A penny newspaper for one halfpenny’. The new morning newspaper adopted the same approach as that developed in the Evening News and heralded the era of mass-circulation national dailies that became a central feature of the British media during the twentieth century. George Newnes’s attempt to jump on the Harmsworth’s bandwagon with the Daily Courier proved to be a resounding failure, but a more effective rival to the Daily Mail did emerge from Arthur Pearson’s stable with the launch in 1900 of the Daily Express (Cox and Mowatt 2015: 33–8). Thus by the end of the nineteenth century the age of the Fleet Street press barons had arrived.

Case Study 1: Newspapers and Advertising Peter Robinson To recognise the importance of advertising in the development of British newspapers, their transition from informers to formulators of public discourse, and the role they played as vital conduits through which the products of the Industrial Revolution were sold in local, national and foreign markets, we need look no further than titles. The term ‘Advertiser’ regularly formed one-half of a collocation involving frequency, most commonly ‘evening’, ‘daily’ and ‘weekly’, and/or a location, usually an industrial city (Barrès-Baker 2006: 22). Typical nineteenth-century titles included, the Manchester & Salford Advertiser (1831–48), and the famous Chartist paper the Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser (1837–52). In the eighteenth century a trade directory-like element and sporadic advertisements were already recognised features of monthly periodicals such as the Gentleman’s Magazine, and a

58

peter robinson

dedicated advertising newspaper, the Public Advertiser, appeared as early as 1726, followed closely by the Daily Advertiser in 1730. Work by E. S. Turner has shown how, despite punitive ‘taxes on knowledge’, newspaper advertising expanded significantly at the beginning of the nineteenth century, with advertisements in the Times increasing 50 per cent in the period 1800–10 (Turner 1965: 51). However, it was the admixture of the proliferation of frequent-issue newspapers, expansion of the provincial press as a result of industrialisation and greater literacy, and the abolition of advertising duty in 1853, duty on newspapers in 1855, and paper duty in 1861, that helped advertising to develop rapidly in terms of its visual and rhetorical sophistication. Newspapers were steadily dedicating more column inches to advertising, but, more importantly, a massive expansion in the number of titles being published allowed advertising volume to grow exponentially. In Greater London, the period 1800–60 saw 1,500 new newspaper and magazine titles appear, compared with just twenty-seven in the previous sixty years (Harris 1990: 105–7). As a direct result of these changes, newspapers became increasingly dependent on advertising revenue, which soon became of existential and identity-forming importance to many national, but particularly regional, newspapers. The oft-cited case of John Leigh Hunt’s Examiner, founded in 1808, which deliberately ‘took no advertising’, was one of the rare acts of resistance against this trend in a period of growing consumerisation and mass production. Advertising in newspapers was not, however, uncontroversial, and for some it threatened the very independence of the press, while for others it helped to ensure it. The precise nature of the symbiotic relationship between a newspaper and its advertisers varied widely, according to factors such as local economic activity, proprietorial aims and political support. This picture is further complicated by issues related to nomenclature. In the early nineteenth century the term ‘advertising’ was generally used in the sense of making an ‘announcement’, or, as Samuel Johnson defined it three decades earlier, ‘active in giving intelligence’ (Johnson 1775). Only in the latter half of the nineteenth century was advertising exclusively associated with the promotion and sale of goods and services, and its former meaning became arcane. The extraordinary richness and diversity of British newspapers in this period makes both general and specific statements about advertising hazardous. However, noticeable changes in the appearance and placement of advertisements for a wide range of products and services occurred, as newspapers responded to expanding readerships and improved print technologies. At the beginning of the century, particularly in papers serving relatively confined readerships, advertisements were mainly, but not exclusively, descriptive in nature, thus agreeing with Johnson’s definition of advertising as a form of notification. For local traders and retailers, who had relatively

­

case study 1 : newspapers and advertising

59

stable and loyal customer bases, with little direct competition, the main purpose of advertisements was as a territorial marker. In addition, for products and services that were necessarily local, such as food and other perishables, little advertising was required, as there was a small local market, and wider distribution networks were still limited. Thus, advertising was to some extent passive, and provided information which readers could obtain when they needed it. However, for goods and services suitable for regional or national markets, such as textiles, pottery and furniture, or in bigger towns where competition among tradesmen and retailers was more dynamic, newspaper advertisements were designed to be much more persuasive in tone, laden with adjectival superlatives, and in their most extreme form, full of ‘puffery’, which (over)emphasised quality, range of stock, price, authenticity, usually in direct contrast with their competitors, whose goods and services were correspondingly of inferior quality, limited in range and, in the case of quack medicines, harmful. Product advertising quickly became a staple of the crowded (and chaotic) multi-column front pages of nineteenth-century newspapers in which traders jostled cheek-by-jowl with various government announcements, social appeals and information titbits, relying principally upon typography and small lettering devices to stand out from the crowd. Capitalisation and centring, as well as the use of symbols such as the asterisk, and the ubiquitous pointing hand, further helped to visually break up the dense text. Advertisement for services, especially related to the insurance industry, commonly used bold company logos or motifs, which depicted powerful animals or natural forms which were designed to lend them gravitas and served as imprimaturs which helped consumer confidence and belief in the company’s integrity. The front page of the Derby Mercury of the 5 January 1825 is typical, featuring the eagle of the Eagle Insurance Company, the emblem of the Royal Exchange, touting its Royal Charter, and the blazing sun of Sun Fire-Office (fire insurance). For much of the period front pages lacked any hard-and-fast principles of organisation, with compositors apparently working on an order–receipt basis. Even the leading, and otherwise well-organised, Times newspaper offered an eclectic mix of information and advertisements on its title pages throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century. Its title page for 1 January 1805, for example, carried an advertisement for ‘India Shawls’ which found itself sandwiched between an advertisement for the sale of ‘Alderney Cows’ and a privately placed advertisement by a disgruntled author who, on account of his play The Land We Live In, not having ‘received a candid hearing on Saturday night’, had it privately printed for the public’s approbation (Times, 1 January 1805: 1). The crowded style of the pages, especially of daily newspapers, was largely the result of the newspaper tax which was levied on each page.

60

peter robinson

Towards the end of the century, with the memory of these taxes receding into the background, mixed title pages were replaced by less crowded, gridlike affairs, either exclusively filled with advertising and printed separately as front and back ‘wraps’, or with columnar distinction between advertisements and information content, such as in the case of the Liverpool Mercury. Perhaps strange to modern newspaper readers, the convention of the front page being dedicated to advertising and announcements became so ingrained in the industry that, as Adrian Bingham points out, not even the innovative founder of the Daily Mail (1896), Lord Harmsworth, dared to challenge the practice in 1896 (Bingham and Conboy 2015: 7–8). Clearly, the densely printed and chaotic mixed media title pages served nobody’s interests. Readers struggled to orient themselves on the page, while for advertisers keen to maximise the impact and effectiveness of their advertisements, not knowing what neighbouring advertisement or feature they might be placed next to was far from ideal. Interesting, humorous and, on occasions, downright bizarre juxtapositions were not infrequent. Newspaper proprietors were fully aware of the impact advertising had on reinforcing and, in some problematic cases, transgressing their paper’s broader editorial policies and market positioning. Advertisers were also conscious of the dangers of being associated with or seen to endorse the reporting and editorials of the papers in which they advertised. This very point was observed by Lord Northcliffe, owner of the Daily Mail and the Times, in 1912, when he wrote to the General Manager of Associated Newspapers complaining that, ‘by reason of the low tone of the advertising department’, the social standing of his papers was decreasing, which would have a knock-on effect on his other advertisers (Bingham and Conboy 2015: 168). Partly in response to increasing problems of ‘compatibility’ between a newspaper’s content and its advertising, a much clearer separation between advertising and other information evolved in the form of ‘classified advertising’, which placed text-based, single-column advertisements, paid for by the line, under various subheadings such as ‘For Sale’, ‘Domestic Positions’ and ‘Clerical Services’. The ‘Classifieds’, as they became known, steadily migrated towards the back of the paper as the century wore on, and, like other features of the newspaper, solidified. While, on the one hand, the grouping of goods and services aided the reader to make comparisons between traders, they pitted business rivals directly against each other. To avoid an ‘advertising arms race’ developing, certain stylistic ‘rules’ and conventions developed which operated on the principle of ‘schooling’, creating homogeneity which ensured that the commercial reward/risk of ‘standing out’ was mitigated and less attractive. The classified column formed an important marketplace in its own right. Used by smaller businesses and private individuals, it represented a significant second-hand marketplace for goods, while for employment, especially

­

case study 1 : newspapers and advertising

61

of domestic servants, it helped democratise hiring practices by breaking the stranglehold of appointments that were traditionally made by word of mouth and previous-employer recommendations. With the position of classified advertising firmly established, larger businesses sought to penetrate more distant markets and secure greater market share through custom-designed advertisements that were increasingly visual rather than textual. Known as ‘display ads’, they began appearing regularly in British newspapers and periodicals in the 1830s and by the 1860s were fairly commonplace. At first, such ads tended to use generic images associated only with the particular trade or service they related to, notably haberdasheries and purveyors of cosmetic products, but gradually advertisements featured company logos and brand names and eventually realistic images of the specific products being marketed. An advertisement for H. Bunting, ‘Upholsterer and Cabinet Maker’, placed in the Nottinghamshire Guardian on 12 August 1852, is fairly typical, combining two prominent images of a generic table and armchair, above a direct appeal to his target clients, ‘the Nobility, Clergy, and Persons Furnishing’, describing the goods and services that he and his staff can offer, finishing with a hand pointer to the retailer’s own address, ‘Long Row West, Nottingham’ (Nottinghamshire Guardian, 12 August 1852: [1]). According to Barrès-Baker, Warren’s Patent Shoe Blacking, advertised in the 1830s, was the first nationally marketed household product (Barrès-Baker 2006: 25). At the turn of the twentieth century newspaper advertising began to develop distinct narratives, and products were embedded into stories, or incorporated into portrayals of aspirational lifestyles. Although still relatively rare in the British press, instances of product endorsement by celebrities also date from this period. While the daily and weekly British newspaper market never managed to support the lavish full-page, full-colour lithographic advertisements which the monthly magazines hosted for companies like Pears Soap and Thornton’s Chocolates, advertising nevertheless continued to develop. It also marks the arrival of the concept of the advertising ‘campaign’, which skilfully utilised the regular periodicity of newspapers in order to construct linked multiple adverts that offered a consistent message. With the popularity of the newly coined ‘tabloid’ or ‘popular press’ represented by the Daily Mail (1896), the Daily Express (1900) – one of the first papers to place news on its front page instead of advertising – and the Daily Mirror (1903), in advertising terms British newspapers developed rapidly in the late nineteenth century, but lagged well behind their American counterparts, which had full-page colour and rotogravure advertising in newspapers as early as 1914. By contrast, the first full-page colour advertisement in a British newspaper did not appear until 1962 in the Daily Mail, and the Manchester Guardian continued to carry a front page of advertising up until the 1950s.

Chapter Two

PRODUCTION Helen S. Williams

I

t has often been said that, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Gutenberg would have been at home in any print shop. The common wooden press still operated, with minor changes, as his press had done, and the processes of setting type, making up the printing surface and applying the ink had not changed at all. By 1900, however, few printing businesses would have looked familiar. Although letterpress remained the primary process for the reproduction of large areas of text, many aspects of production had been speeded up and mechanised. New techniques were commonly in use both for setting type and the production of illustrations. In no print trade sector was this more the case than for the production of newspapers and other largecirculation periodicals. This chapter will explore the changes in print technologies and working practices that occurred in the production of daily newspapers and other periodicals during the nineteenth century, and the parallel changes in the production of type, ink and paper. John Southward (1897) wrote at the end of the nineteenth century that letterpress printing could conveniently be divided into three main branches – jobbing, book and newspapers. While this was the case in the larger centres, such as London, and the larger provincial towns such as Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow and Edinburgh, in smaller centres they were often combined within a single business. By 1900 daily newspapers were produced using large printing machines operating at high speeds, which were physically on too large a scale to be accommodated in smaller general offices. These small print shops produced local weekly newspapers alongside general jobbing work undertaken for the local community and relied on machines which could be used for a broad range of print production, making the best use of the existing equipment and skills available within the 65

66

helen s. williams

business. By this stage, too, the workers in these different branches of the print trade worked to different patterns, and their scales of pay reflected this. In 1902, for the same size of type (‘Emerald to Nonpareil’), Edinburgh compositors received 7¼d per 1,000 ens for book work, 6¾d for weeklies or bi-weeklies, 7d for tri-weeklies or evening papers, and 8d for morning dailies (Edinburgh Typographical Society 1902: 28). Technological changes were matched by organisational change within the print trade. As processes changed, and especially as they were mechanised, workers in the print trade and their organisations were forced to some extent at least into adapting their work practices. The letterpress compositors and pressmen, later known as machinemen, had a long-standing tradition of organising in the workplace, and the trades unions which came to dominate the industry by the end of the century were derived from this. National unions for the print trade were established in the middle of the century, and, although they never represented all workers in the industry, unionism was strongest in the largest firms, particularly in the urban print centres in which the production of the daily and weekly newspaper press was concentrated. The assistants and other workers in the trade such as foundrymen established separate representation., mainly in the last two decades of the century.

Printing Machines After 300 or so years of only limited changes in the technologies of print production, the first third of the nineteenth century saw a range of significant innovations. Isaacs (1931: [7]) described four stages of development through which newspaper printing machines had passed: • flat type bed with a flat platen providing the impression, which lasted from the origins of printing with movable type in the fifteenth century to around 1810–15 • flat type bed with an impression cylinder moving across it, which dominated the next thirty years • rotary presses with the type attached to a cylinder and the paper sheets passing between that and the impression cylinder, which were in use from around 1845 until the mid-1860s • rotary presses with cylinders carrying curved and stereotyped printing surfaces and paper fed from a reel (or web) between that and the impression cylinder, which dominated the rest of the century.

­

production

67

Although development was driven by the requirements of the daily press, the innovations spread beyond the newspaper sector though the pace of introduction varied, and the capital investment and space required for these large machines was often beyond the means of the printers of small-circulation journals and local newspapers published on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, which continued to rely on older and slower machines throughout the period. At the end of the eighteenth century the presses in use were constructed from wood, and differed only in detail from those in use in Gutenberg’s time, because over time some elements, such as the screw, came to be made of metal. The type bed was flat, the sheet of paper was held on a frame known as a tympan, and the areas of white space on the sheet were protected from ink marks by the frisket, which was folded over it, before the whole frame was folded over the printing surface, and the bed moved under the platen. The platen was forced down on to the type bed by means of pressure exerted on a bar, via a screw mechanism, thus producing the inked impression on the paper. Two men were needed to operate these presses: one to ink the type, and the other to lay on the sheet of paper, operate the lever, and then remove the sheet. Operating the wooden presses was laborious, and the speed of production slow: each sheet had to be printed on both sides, and each side required two pulls, because of the small size of the platen. Two wooden hand presses, working for four hours, could produce an issue of about 1,500 copies, printed by a night shift to be ready in the morning, and books were printed during the day. In 1794, to meet demand from an expanding readership, John Walter bought a third wooden press to speed production of the Times which at this point consisted of a single sheet nineteen by twenty-four inches, printed on both sides, and folded once, to form a newspaper of four pages. It was published daily in an edition size of around 1,500 copies (Times Past [1959]: 8). The development of presses with an iron frame was the first significant change, closely followed by the substitution of a system of levers rather than a screw mechanism to put pressure on the platen. Iron presses withstood greater pressure than the wooden framed hand presses and used larger platens. The system of levers reduced the effort needed from the pressman, so the larger sheets of paper could also be printed more quickly. Earl Stanhope’s press of 1800 was the first ironframed press, retaining the use of a screw to apply pressure to the platen. When the Manchester Guardian was launched in 1821, it was printed on a Stanhope press, at the rate of 200 impressions, or 100 ‘perfected’ copies (printed on both sides) per hour (Musson 1958:  413). Some printing offices claimed 350 pulls. Stanhope’s press was followed by the

68

helen s. williams

Columbian press, invented in Philadelphia by George Clymer in 1816, but much more popular in Britain. Clymer abandoned the screw principle and used linked levers to apply pressure to the platen, as did R. W. Cope’s Albion press of 1822. These hand-operated platen presses were soon superseded in the daily newspaper offices, but for smaller print runs and proofing they remained in use well into the twentieth century. Musson noted that, although these presses enabled the printing of a larger sheet, with less effort, at a single pull, they ‘did not appreciably increase the rate of output’ (Musson 1958: 413). Wooden presses still occasionally survived: in 1872 Adam Richardson, printer to the Royal Crichton Institution in Dumfries, complained of the ‘decayed state’ of the Institution’s wooden hand press, on which some of the issues of the Institution’s monthly literary magazine, New Moon, were published (Adam Richardson Archive DGH1/6/16/9/2, notebook dated 1872). As noted, while iron-framed presses allowed the printing of larger sheets at a single pull, and therefore more content, particularly more advertising revenue, in each day’s paper they did not make any significant difference to the speed of production. This was achieved by the application of steam power, initially in a platen press built by the German engineers Friedrich Koenig and Andreas Bauer for the London printer Thomas Bensley; it was used to print the Annual Register for 1810 (Isaacs 1931: 18). However, the real advances in the speed of production came with the introduction of cylinder printing machines (see Figure 2.1). In these machines, the impression was achieved by a cylinder which applied pressure as it rolled over the flat bed of type, rather than by the raising and lowering of a platen. Cylinder presses had been in existence for many years and were used particularly for the printing of copperplate engravings. Various attempts had been made to use an impression cylinder to print letterpress, notably that of William Nicholson, who took out a patent in 1790. In the early years of the nineteenth century others were working on the same principles, notably the team of Richard Bacon and Bryan Donkin, but it was the new and improved version built by Koenig and Bauer for the Times that is best known. For much of the first half of the nineteenth century the Times was at the forefront of printing machine development, and by 1812 Koenig and Bauer had patented and built their first cylinder press powered by steam, again for Bensley. It was installed at the Times by John Walter II, son of the founder, in secret in November 1814, and staffed by men brought in specially to avoid the risk of damage from the Times pressmen who (rightly) feared for their jobs, as Walter replaced them with newly trained operatives, though he avoided trouble by paying

­

production

69

Figure 2.1  Hand feeding on the first cylinder press, 1812 (Courtesy of Edward Clark Collection, Edinburgh Napier University)

the pressmen rendered unemployed until they found new situations (Clair  1965:  213). The cylinder press achieved speeds of over 1,000 impressions, or 500 perfected copies, an hour, more than four times the output of an iron hand press. The Times circulation rose to as much as 7,000 in part due to such abilities to print more for less. This first steam-powered cylinder press, in use at the Times until 1827, was operated by two feeders, who fed the sheets of paper on to the ‘blanket’ used to carry it through the press to the ‘takers off ’, who collected the printed sheet after it had passed through the press. There was also a system of ink ducts and rollers to eliminate the process of inking the forme by hand. Each side of the sheet still had to be printed separately, and the type that formed the printing surface was on a flat bed, which moved backwards and forwards (reciprocated) under the turning impression cylinder which carried the paper (Isaacs 1931: 21–3; Times Past [1959]: 11). Koenig and Bauer returned to Germany in 1817, and the next stage of development in printing machines in Britain was the work of their successors as engineers to the Times, Augustus Applegath and Edward Cowper. They modified the existing Koenig machines and introduced a ‘perfecting’ press which had two formes of type and two cylinders: the paper was carried between them by tapes, and both sides of the paper were printed in a single pass. Other innovations included an improved

70

helen s. williams

ink distribution system. In 1827 a new ‘four-feeder’ machine designed by Applegath and Cowper was installed at the Times: this machine remained in use for the next twenty years. It was not a perfecting machine but still achieved speeds of 4,000 to 5,000 impressions an hour. It had been found that there were advantages in printing each sheet in in two passes, as this allowed one side of the sheet, which might be composed of advertisements for example, to be set and printed early, while the second side, carrying more up-to-date matter, could be printed later. Experiments to increase the speed of production to meet the increased circulation continued, and other engineers devised improvements to existing newspaper printing machines. Among them was David Napier, a Scottish engineer working in London, who invented a system of grippers to hold the paper in place. Others attempted methods of fixing type to a cylinder to eliminate the movement of the type bed, which had a tendency to break down at higher speeds (Isaacs 1931: 24–9). In Britain, the engineers to the Times continued to lead in developing larger and faster printing machines, but from the early 1830s Richard Hoe of New York was working along similar lines: the company later became one of the most important suppliers of largescale printing machinery to the British newspaper production industry. The machines in use in the 1830s were all ‘stop-cylinder’ machines with a reciprocating flat bed holding the forme of type: the type bed moves under the revolving impression cylinder, which rose and stopped revolving as the bed returned to its starting position. Stop-cylinder machines were the mainstay of general print shops until well into the twentieth century and were also commonly used for book printing throughout the nineteenth. The best-known stop-cylinder machines were those of the ‘wharfedale’ type, so called because the first one was built in the 1850s by William Dawson and David Payne in the small town of Otley in Yorkshire’s Wharfedale area. The machines were straightforward to operate and maintain, and, because they remained unpatented, were made by many manufacturers in a range of sizes (Clair 1965: 216) (see Figure 2.2). In a widely used textbook for apprentices, Whetton commented that, of cylinder machines, the wharfedale was ‘the best known and most widely used. It has long been the “breadand-butter” machine of the commercial printer’ (Whetton 1946: 108). The bed was able to accommodate formes large enough to allow the printing of posters and local broadsheet newspapers, and ‘perfecting’ machines able to turn the sheet and print on both sides in a single operation were developed. Various other improvements were added throughout the century. The maximum speeds quoted for these

­

production

71

Figure 2.2  John Kelley & Co., Printers’ Engineers, wharfedale press advertisement, British Printer, 1902 (Courtesy of Edward Clark Collection, Edinburgh Napier University)

machines were between 1,500 to 2,000 impressions per hour, but they were rarely run at full speed, and much lower rates of output was usual (Gaskell 1972: 258; Whetton 1946: 110). As the century progressed, a large supply industry to the print trade developed, with manufacturers based throughout the country. A number of firms, for example, came into being in Otley in Yorkshire, and Edinburgh was home to wellknown firms such as Thomas Long, Patrick Ritchie and D. J. Greig, among others. Firms better known for typefounding such as Miller and Richard also supplied printing machines, and there were other, smaller manufacturers: J. Brown of Kirkcaldy supplied machines to the Scotsman in Edinburgh, as well as that installed in 1855 in the office of William Burgess, printer of the Dumfriesshire and Galloway Standard and Advertiser, which was a Cylinder Printing-Machine, of the most approved kind, which is capable of throwing off One Thousand Impressions in the Hour. … By means of the Machine, we are not only enabled to issue our Sheets more rapidly, but the Printing of the Paper is, as our Readers will observe, greatly improved. (25 April 1855: 4a)

72

helen s. williams

The application of steam to printing daily newspapers and other periodicals was not long confined to the Times nor, indeed, to London, as demand for print increased. The Manchester Guardian, for example, had been produced using iron hand presses, mainly Stanhope presses, since these had first appeared in 1821, but it installed steam-driven cylinder printing machine in 1828 to cope with increased circulation (Musson 1958: 418). In the early 1830s William and Robert Chambers commissioned a local man to build a machine on the same principle as the Applegath and Cowper machine already in use in an Edinburgh newspaper printing office (Fyfe 2012: 59–61). This was only the beginning of what became one of the largest printing works in the city: around fifteen years later the editors of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal noted that they write at present in a huge building of four storeys, flanked by a powerful steam-engine, and with the noise of ten printing machines continually sounding in our ears. … A hundred and twenty persons are required for all the duties which proceed in this large structure. (4 January 1845) Others elsewhere followed its lead, such as the Middlesbrough Daily Gazette, which in 1871 installed similar steam-powered printing machines, probably made by Marinoni, capable of printing 25,000 copies per hour, using the ‘new process of stereotype plates’ (cited in Dixon 2001b: 110). Although iron hand presses continued in use for some time, larger machines powered by steam became standard for most of the century, until electricity came into use in the largest printing works by the end of the century. Experiments in speeding up the machines continued, but the next significant advance came with the successful operation of rotary printing machines – that is, machines with a rotating cylindrical printing surface rather than a flat printing surface held in a bed with a reciprocating action. Again, these changes were driven by the needs of daily newspaper printing but later spread to other sectors where volume and speed of production were important. Initially, experiments had been made using individual pieces of type, either cast on a tapering body, so that they could be locked up into a true cylindrical shape, or conventionally cast type, set into individual columns, which were then fitted around a cylinder and locked up using tapering furniture to create a multi-sided printing surface. The rotary printing machine designed by Applegath and Cowper and installed at the Times in 1848, exploited the higher production speed achievable with a rotary motion for the type bed as opposed to the flat reciprocating

­

production

73

bed. It used ordinary type, set in single columns (not a true cylinder), and locked up with wedge-shaped furniture on to a large-diameter type cylinder. It had eight impression cylinders and was fed from eight feeding stations. The sheets of paper were fed horizontally and turned by a system of tapes to feed between the type-bearing cylinder and the impression cylinder, then turned back to horizontal to be removed by the ‘taker off ’. The machine achieved speeds of up to 8,000 impressions an hour, and the Times installed two eight-feeder machines, and one nine-feeder. The Hoe Company of New York was likewise looking for increased speeds and developed a rotary printing machine with a horizontal type cylinder, which was installed at the Ledger in Philadelphia in 1846. This machine used specially cast type on a wedge-shaped body, which could be locked up tight enough to prevent the effect of gravity pulling the type apart. The first of these machines to be used in Britain was installed at Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper in 1857, and as the benefits of horizontal working became clear, other businesses soon followed, including the Times. This machine had four feeding session and claimed speeds of up to 8,000 impressions per hour (Isaacs 1931: 30–7). Flat printing surfaces had for some time been created by the stereotype process, which had been developed in the eighteenth century. Once the type was set and the forme locked up ready for printing, a mould, known as a flong, was made. Originally plaster of Paris was used for this, but in the 1840s an improved method of creating stereotypes from a papier-mâché mould was developed. This mould was used to cast a metal plate, which was then fixed to a block to form the printing surface. Stereotyped plates were used to print publications where long print runs were expected, as they saved wear on the type, or when it was thought that a reprint would be needed. Once a stereotype plate had been created, there was no need to keep the type standing and it could be distributed back for reuse. Stereotype plates also came into use in newspaper printing, enabling multiple copies of the printing surface to be made from a single forme, which could then be printed by more than one machine at the same time. The process was widely used, and even fairly small printing offices operated their own foundry (see Figure 2.3). However, it was not until the 1860s that a successful method of casting curved plates was patented. In 1855 James Dellagana had developed the means of casting type-high stereotype surfaces in solid metal followed by an improved type-high stereotypes which were hollow: the metal shell formed round a core that was placed in the casting box. Dellagana continued to work on improvements to the process of producing stereotypes and in 1863 devised a casting box in which curved

74

helen s. williams

Figure 2.3  Foundry operations (Courtesy of Edward Clark Collection, Edinburgh Napier University)

stereotype plates that would fit on to the type cylinder of a rotary press were cast from the moulds prepared from a flat letterpress surface. This not only provided multiple copies of the set matter from which to print quite cheaply, but also simplified the handling of the printing surfaces by eliminating the difficulties of printing from individual pieces of type attached to a cylindrical printing surface (Southward 1897: 65–70). By this point, stereotype plates were in any case the printing surface of choice for publications expected to have a long print run, or that required multiple reprints. Following the successful development of rotary printing machines, the next major change in large-scale, high-speed machinery was the move from sheet-fed to reel- or web-fed. The production of paper had been mechanised from earlier in the century, and paper was produced as a continuous web that could be fed on to a reel (see the section on papermaking below). However, the paper was cut into sheets for printing, as the printing machines were still sheet-feed, with attendants to feed the paper on to the machine and others to remove it after the impression. Experiments with printing from a web began around 1850 in France and England, and Thomas Nelson, son of the founder of the

­

production

75

Edinburgh printing firm, devised a rotary machine that was shown at the Great Exhibition in 1851, though he did not patent the design. Around the same time, Hoe in New York was among the companies experimenting with the possibilities of using a web of paper to speed up the rotary presses, and by the end of the 1860s a number of manufacturers had designed printing machines which were fed from a reel of paper and delivered ‘perfected’ sheets – that is, sheets printed on both sides. Among the manufacturers supplying these machines were Hoe, Walter Bullock of Philadelphia, Marinoni of Paris and the Times, which commissioned its own ‘Walter’ press, used from 1868, and was capable of producing 12,000 perfected copies per hour (Isaacs 1931: 38­­–42). Although bigger and faster presses continued to be produced, the most significant advances in the technology of printing nineteenth-century daily newspapers had now been achieved. Other aspects of their operation which continued to improve were the inking mechanisms and the collation and delivery of the perfected sheets. Folding machines, initially separate from the printing machines, were built to handle the output, for example by Joseph Foster in Preston in the 1860s, and by the end of the century ‘folders’ performed that operation as an integral part of the printing machines themselves. Smaller circulation local weekly newspapers continued to be produced on flat-bed stop-cylinder machines, largely abandoned by the larger printing offices, or relatively small machines based on the rotary principle. Most printing offices remained relatively small concerns: as Musson noted, in the first half of the century, ‘The average printing office, housing such simple, traditional equipment, was a very small affair, especially in the provinces, where few employed more than three or four compositors and pressmen, and the master printer himself generally worked at the trade’ (Musson 1958: 413–14). The smaller businesses did not have the capital to invest in the large-scale machines developed for the metropolitan daily newspaper producers, or the premises capable of housing them and the additional staff. The machines they used were unlikely to be made by the pioneering engineers, who built machines for the largest businesses, nor were they always new. Multiple moves of machinery down a chain of firms was common. In 1860, for example, the local Victory Printing and Folding Machine Manufacturing Company, later Victory-Kidder of Laird Street, Birkenhead, made a rotary printing machine for use on the Liverpool Daily Post. When that paper required a bigger machine, the redundant machinery was moved to Wigan in 1884, where it was used to print the Wigan Observer for the next eighty years (https:// www.scienceandsociety.co.uk/results.asp?image=10323258).

76

helen s. williams

The Victory-produced machines were very popular. The Manchester Guardian, for example, installed machinery from the Victory company in their new building, which they occupied in 1886. The building was lit by electricity, but the presses were not powered by electricity until sometime later. In the next decade, however, the Guardian ordered new and faster machines from the Hoe company in the United States (Musson 1958: 419–20). For smaller machines, there were manufacturers spread throughout the United Kingdom, making machinery and all the items of a printing office, from furniture and quoins and chases, type, inking tables, proofing presses, foundry equipment, guillotines and all the other equipment required, up to and including the stop-cylinder printing machines. These manufacturers supplied the printing offices which were springing up in smaller towns, many involved in producing small periodicals and weekly newspapers of local interest. The Scottish firm of John Cossar & Son (highlighted in Case Study 2) was not untypical, printing books of local interest and local newspapers, alongside a general printing business producing advertising poster.

Typesetting The dominant technology for the production of text throughout the nineteenth century remained letterpress. Compositors set the type standing at the case, after which the set type was gathered together into galleys, imposed into the required layout in a chase, which was locked up to provide the flat printing surface known as a forme. Hand compositors working in daily newspaper offices have been estimated to reach speeds of between 1,500 and 2,000 ens per hour (Musson 1958: 85). Typesetting was one of the most labour-intensive elements of print production. Not only was every individual character, including all punctuation and spacing, set by hand but after use the type had to be cleaned and distributed, or replaced in the correct place in the correct case for reuse. Cleaning down the printing surface and distributing the type was a task usually reserved for apprentices: it was how they learned the layout, or ‘lay’ of the cases. For daily newspapers in the hand press period, to increase the circulation meant not only increasing the number of presses, but also replicating the printing surface so that it could be printed on more than one press concurrently. Doubling the output required the same text to be set again, by twice the number of compositors, thus also doubling the time-consuming task of distributing the type back into the cases for reuse. This reduced the financial viability of any attempt to increase circulation, and experiments aimed at increasing the speed of setting and at multiplying printing surfaces

­

production

77

had already begun by 1800, although it was many years before commercially viable solutions to the various issues were developed. Originally printers designed and cast their own type, but by this period most printing firms did not do so any longer and acquired their type from a specialist firm, such as the Caslon, Stephenson Blake or Miller & Richard foundries. Until the 1830s all type was cast by hand, using a mould made of iron or brass in two halves, and closed at one end by a matrix with adjustable side-pieces allowing for different widths. An image of the character, struck on a metal plate by a steel punch, formed the matrix. The basic mixture for type metal was an alloy of lead, tin and antimony which was fluid at a low enough temperature to not damage the matrix, and which also expanded slightly as it solidified, producing the necessary sharp impression. In 1838 a casting machine was invented by the American David Bruce and the Danish Laurids Brandt. Machines for casting type were continually improved and developed, and by the end of the nineteenth century the whole process had been mechanised. When the Times was launched in 1785, as the Daily Universal Register, it was ‘Printed Logographically’. An editorial in the first issue described this ‘expeditious’ method as the cementing of several letters together, so as that the type of a whole word might be taken up in as short a time as that of a single letter. … The fount consisting of types of words, and not of letters, was to be arranged, as that a compositor should be able to find the former with as much facility as he can the latter. … The whole English language is now methodically and systematically arranged at my fount: so that printing can now be performed with greater dispatch, and at less expense, than according to the mode hitherto in use. (‘To the public’, 1 January 1785: 1d) The ‘types of words’ were in fact groups of frequently occurring letters, including some full words, and the system had been patented originally by an employee of the Caslon type foundry, who had seen its potential in terms of jobbing printing rather than newspaper work. ‘Logographic printing’ proved unsuccessful in the newspaper context, as it was cumbersome, with the type needing to be distributed over four large cases. Also, the compositors were still paid on piece rates, defined by the standard of an ‘en’ rather than by the time taken to set the text, eliminating any financial advantage. It is not clear when logographic typesetting went out of use, but it ceased to be part of the newspaper’s masthead in 1792: it had changed its title to the Times in 1788 (Clair 1965: 260).

78

helen s. williams

For years to come, experiments in setting type mechanically failed to solve the problem of accurate distribution of type for reuse, and their introduction was met with resistance from compositors. In the early 1820s William Church from Vermont took out a British patent for a type-composing machine, but it was never used in a commercial setting. The first machine to be successfully used in commercial print production, from about 1840, is known by the names of its inventors, James Young and Adrien Delcambre. According to the print trade journal The Compositors’ Chronicle, their machine was not seen in positive light: Although exhibiting considerable ingenuity, its defects are too numerous to afford the least chance of its accomplishing the proposed object. It proves that composition simply considered may be accelerated by mechanical means, but when distribution, justification, &c are taken into account, we doubt whether the machine, however much it may be improved, will ever effect any considerable saving in the price of labour. (‘New composing machine’, 6 September 1841: 101) Numerous critical letters regarding this type-composing machine appeared in the pages of the Chronicle throughout the next couple of years. The claims of increased speed of composition using the machine were regarded as unrealistic, but an additional concern was that the machines would be operated by unapprenticed boy labour or, even worse, women, variously described as ‘factory girls’ and ‘elderly ladies’ (1 July 1842: 192). An editorial in the issue for 1 January 1843 noted that, despite establishing a journal, the Family Herald, to prove that the composing machine could be used for newspaper work, its inventor had ‘discovered that the newspaper proprietors of London are too wise to become his patron’. The Family Herald survived in various forms for a considerable number of years after the use of the composing machine had been abandoned. In the early 1860s a typesetting machine was invented by Robert Hattersley, which operated in a similar manner to the Young–Delcambre composing machine. It had limited success in some newspaper offices but was not widely adopted. The machine developed by Charles Kastenbein in 1869 was more successful: it included a mechanism for distributing the type after use, and these machines were installed at the Times. The next step came with the machine developed round 1878 by Frederick Wicks of Glasgow: this was the first typesetting machine which could also deal with justification. The Thorne machine, patented in the United States in 1880, was in use in the Manchester Guardian in

­

production

79

the 1890s, but none of these machines were reliable enough mechanically. There were also disputes over their operation with the increasingly powerful trades unions. Successful mechanical typesetting ultimately came from the United States, with the Linotype system of Ottmar Mergenthaler, first used in New York in 1886, and introduced to the United Kingdom in 1892 (see Figure 2.4). Within three years, there were around 250 machines in use and the Linotype became the dominant medium for typesetting

Figure 2.4  Advertisement for Linotype, British Printer, 1902 (Courtesy of Edward Clark Collection, Edinburgh Napier University)

80

helen s. williams

in  newspaper and periodical production in Britain. This system did away completely with the need to distribute the type, by casting each line afresh from the line of matrices and spaces which had been previously assembled and justified by the keyboard operator. Each line was then delivered into a galley: when no longer required, the type was melted down for reuse.

Illustrative Processes At the end of the eighteenth century the most commonly used technique for illustration was copperplate engraving, which required separate machinery from letterpress printing and was unsuitable for long print runs. Illustrations in newspapers and periodicals were mainly woodcut blocks, which could be printed alongside the letterpress. They were also used for cheap illustrated print such as chapbooks, and the technique had been in use before the advent of letterpress printing. Many newspapers used ‘stock blocks’ sold by type foundries, derived from wood blocks, and cast in type metal and mounted to type height, to highlight items such as coach timetables, ship sailings and advertisements for the local races. The dominant process for periodical ­illustration throughout the century was, however, the technique of wood engraving developed by Thomas Bewick. The use of graver’s tools on the cross grain of hard wood, usually boxwood, enabled the reproduction of fine detail similar to that achieved using copperplate engraving, but on a block that could be printed together with the letterpress printing surface. Although daily newspapers and most local weeklies were not illustrated, this technique was heavily used in periodicals such as the Penny Magazine, the Illustrated London News and Punch. Larger images were created by a team of engravers, each working on a small section of the picture. The small sections were then bolted together and the joins disguised, before the final printing surface was produced using the electrotype process. Electrotyping was discovered around 1830: a wax mould of the printing surface was made and treated with a fine graphite powder, before being deposited in a solution of copper sulphate. The chemical reaction caused a copper shell to be deposited on the mould, which formed the printing surface once it had been fixed to a backing metal plate (Clair 1965: 230ff.). From the 1860s photographic processes such as halftone and photogravure came into use for illustrated papers. An original image was photographed through a screen ruled with a mesh of very fine lines. The negative was then printed down on to a plate: lighter tones appeared as widely separated minute dots, with darker tones as larger

­

production

81

dots much closer together. A relief printing surface formed from the dots was created from this plate. Photogravure, developed by Karl Klicˇ, was also based on photographing an original through a screen. This was an intaglio process (the ink is held in the grooves etched into the printing surface), and the final printing surface, which could combine text and image, was printed by means of a rotary press using a cylindrical printing surface from which the excess ink had been removed by a ‘doctor blade’. Photogravure came into use in Britain in the 1880s but was not in generally used in periodical production until the early years of the twentieth century. The other significant new process in the nineteenth century was lithography, a planographic process depending on the differing properties of oil and water and the repulsion between them: the printing surface is smooth, and the area to be printed is treated with grease, to which oil-based inks are attracted, and the rest is treated with water. The image to be printed, including any text, is drawn directly on to the printing surface, in reverse. Although there were some attempts to use it for satirical and ‘comic’ periodicals because it was a flexible medium for the combination of text and image, it was suitable only for shortrun printing, and played no part in the production of newspapers and mass-market periodicals. The original hand-operated lithographic presses were superseded by cylinder presses in the middle of the century. Offset machines coming into use in the last quarter of the century: the original image was prepared on the stone or plate and transferred to a cylinder covered with rubber sheeting, known as a blanket, from which it was transferred to the surface to be printed on a second cylinder. Offset machines came into use for printing on paper only at the very end of the century.

Raw Materials: Paper and Ink The well-known print impresario Charles Knight noted that ‘The invention of the paper machine was concurrent with the invention of the printing-machine’ (Knight 1854: 256). In fact, the appearance of iron presses coincided with the industrialisation of the papermaking process, introduced to Great Britain by the Fourdrinier brothers when they escaped from revolutionary France. The British papermaking industry dated from the fifteenth century, and by 1800 there was a well-developed papermaking industry. Paper was made from cotton and linen rags, which were cut up and washed before being beaten to a pulp, which was then diluted with water. A square mould with a fine mesh base was dipped into the vat of diluted pulp, and a thin layer

82

helen s. williams

of fibres were deposited on this. The mould was shaken from side to side to distribute the fibres evenly before turning out the sheet on to a felt blanket. The stack of felted sheets of paper was then pressed and the sheets separated and hung up to dry. Some elements, such as the pounding of the rags, were mechanised, but paper remained a handmade commodity. The Fourdrinier process mechanised the whole process, which has not changed substantially since, enabling quicker and cheaper production of larger quantities to meet a growing demand. The machine had a wet end, where the raw material was pounded to create the pulp, which was then filtered and passed on to a continuously moving wire mesh. The mesh was agitated from side to side as it moved along, and at the ‘dry’ end of the machine the resultant continuous ‘web’ was wound on to reels, before being cut into sheets of the required size. Raw materials also changed during the period, as there were insufficient linen and cotton rags available to meet demand. Wood pulp and esparto grass, imported from southern Europe and North Africa, were commonly used as the basis for paper pulp, although for the best-quality paper rags remained the main source. In the early part of the nineteenth century many printers still made their own ink. Black ink was made from a mixture of boiled linseed oil, lamp black or soot and other pigments, to produce different intensities. As the speed and scale of print production, and therefore the demand for ink, increased, most ink came from specialist ink-makers. In addition, the faster machines, with ink ducts and rollers, demanded a different consistency to ensure an even spread, and perfecting machines required inks that dried quickly. The lithographic printing process likewise had its own particular requirements. The application of aniline dyes allowed a wider range of coloured inks from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, and there were numerous experiments with colour printing, although the higher costs and the need for an additional pass through the printing machine for each colour meant that periodical literature in general remained monochrome.

Summary The nineteenth century saw changes in production techniques for both text and image, which improved the speed and efficiency of output to meet the increased demand for reading matter. Improvements in printing technologies throughout the period were driven by the requirements of the daily newspapers in particular, with their emphasis on timeliness of production. The technological developments to increase

­

case study 2 : john cossar & son

83

the speed of production, and the concurrent increasing demand from a growing population that was also increasingly literate occurred in parallel. By 1900 the technologies and work practices surrounding print production had settled into the pattern that would continue for at least another half-century.

Case Study 2: John Cossar & Son and the Govan Press Helen S. Williams Local weekly newspapers in market towns, or serving localities in large urban centres, were usually produced alongside local-interest journals and a few books in general printing offices that served local businesses and community interests. John Cossar & Son of Govan in Glasgow was a typical example of this type of printing office. John Cossar was born in the village of Elsrickle in Lanarkshire in May 1841, son of Thomas, a master shoemaker from Dolphinton. John was the second of seven children. His older brother Thomas originally followed their father’s trade, but after his education at the Dolphinton Parish School John was apprenticed as a printer in the nearby town of Biggar. From there he went to Glasgow, where he worked for Sir James Lumsden’s stationery business (Century of Service [1978]: [1–2]). By the end of 1864 John Cossar was in the Lanarkshire town of Carluke, advertising his presence in the local weekly newspaper as follows: John Cossar (from Glasgow) respectfully announces that he has now opened those Premises in Mr Cassell’s New Buildings at the Cross, High Street, Carluke, as a Bookselling, Stationery, and Printing Establishment. (Hamilton Advertiser, 19 November 1864) He established a local newspaper, the Carluke Chronicle and Strathclyde Advertiser, of which only one issue, dated 5 March 1870, is known to have survived (Mackenzie 1994). In 1872 Cossar moved to Glasgow, setting up as a printer and ‘wholesale and manufacturing stationer’ near the River Clyde in Maxwell Street, then moving in 1874 to 21 Clarence Street, where the business was known as the ‘Clyde Printing and Stationery Works’. John’s younger brother James also worked for the firm as a ‘traveller’, or trade representative. In January 1876 Cossar entered into a partnership, Cossar, Fotheringham & Co., that lasted until October 1877. The first of Cossar’s local Glasgow weeklies, the Govan Chronicle, was issued in 1875, and the Partick Observer followed from July 1876. These titles merged at the end of March 1878 as the Govan Chronicle and Partick Observer, which only lasted a few months until 28 June 1878. Four days earlier, Marr, Downie & Co., wholesale stationers,

84

helen s. williams

petitioned for sequestration of Cossar’s assets over a debt of £131 0s 3d. The accounts do not show anything owing to a bank, but the creditors included John’s father, his two brothers and his father-in-law. The inventory produced as a result is interesting in showing what equipment a general printing office might have had in operation: it listed a Columbian press, a lithographic press, three letterpress printing machines, a ‘stereo apparatus’, a steam engine, and paper, ink, type, chases, galleys and other items required to sustain a printing business. The bankruptcy was discharged on 1 April 1880 (National Records of Scotland: CS318/25/92). Despite this, John Cossar continued in business, now based at 71 Morrison Street, south of the River Clyde. The company history makes no mention of the partnership or sequestration, and gives the primary reason for this change as the absorption of the previous business premises in the redevelopment of St  Enoch station in 1878. There was another move in 1881 to Portland Buildings in Govan, by which time Cossar employed five men and four boys. This ratio goes some way to explaining why the firm was ‘closed’ to union members from at least 1879 until the 1890s, as does the advertisement for a ‘Smart jobbing turnover’ in the Scotsman on 10 December 1888. The Scottish Typographical Association opposed apprentices moving between employers’ part way through their ‘time’ unless there were exceptional reasons (such as the failure of an employer’s business) to justify it. Doing so enabled employers to staff their offices with large numbers of apprentices above the agreed ratio, paid at lower rates than the local standard for journeymen. Cossar & Son was one of the many printing offices to have operated on this basis. By the end of the 1880s Cossar was publishing the local weekly Govan Press, started in 1878, and operating as a ‘printer, stationer, bill poster and advertising contractor’, with a branch office in Nithsdale Street, Strathbungo. Two new weeklies were established: the Partick and Maryhill Press in 1881 (absorbed into the Govan Press from September 1885) and the South Suburban Press in January 1887. In early 1890 the development of Number 3 Graving Dock absorbed the site of Cossar’s premises and forced another move. Being now financially sound, Cossar was able to commission a new printing works and adjacent office building on the corner of Govan Road and Burndyke Street, decorated with busts of Caxton, Guttenberg (using a contemporary spelling), Walter Scott, Robert Burns, and Mr and Mrs Cossar. Fifty-five people worked in the business, many of whom ‘were women folders and dispatchers who became known as the Cossar Beauties’ (Century of service 1978: [2]). The branch office also moved, to 179 Cathcart Road, Govanhill. John Cossar died months after the move, aged forty-nine, in September 1890, remembered as ‘a man of strong Christian principles [whose] politics were Liberal’, possessed of ‘a sharp, mechanical mind’, who had invented but did not patent an envelope folding and pasting machine (Century of service

­

case study 2 : john cossar & son

85

1978:  [2]). His widow, Jane, took control of the business, adding the Clydebank and Renfrew Press to the portfolio of weekly newspapers in 1891, and renaming the South Suburban Press as the Southern Press in October 1892. Their two sons both joined the company, the elder, Thomas, having already spent some time learning the engineering trade in the shipyards (Printing world 1978: 264). The younger, Andrew, finally took full control of the Govan printworks and the newspaper publishing business on Mrs Cossar’s death in 1926. The firm of John Cossar Ltd (also known as the Govan Press) finally closed in 1983. The office building remains, but the printing works was demolished in 1976. Throughout its existence in Govan, the firm of John Cossar & Son operated as a general or ‘jobbing’ printer for local businesses and the community, also producing weekly newspapers in the area. Advertising posters were a significant element of Cossar’s output. In common with other small general printing offices that also produced newspapers, the largest printing machines in use were sheet-fed, flat-bed, stop-cylinder presses of the ‘wharfedale’ type. These machines were reliable and straightforward to operate, but printing weekly newspapers on them was a laborious process. The two sides of the sheet were printed separately, and subsequently folded, trimmed and collated, using the same machines used for general jobbing. Cossar’s principal machine was a sheet-fed, flat-bed, stop-cylinder ‘wharfedale’ press, with two feeding stations, built by Dawson of Otley. From the mid-1890s Thomas Cossar began experimenting to convert this machine to reel-fed operation, while it remained in regular use for the production of newspapers. The first patent for his design was granted in 1899, and another Otley manufacturer, Payne & Sons (which after later mergers became Dawson, Payne & Elliott), invited Thomas to join them to work on the commercial production of the new machine (Printing world 1978: 264). The first Cossar Patent Flat Bed Web Newspaper Printing Machine was shipped to New Zealand and installed at the Wanganui Chronicle, operating for the first time in February 1904 (29 February 1904: [4]). Tom Cossar himself superintended the installation of machines in Britain, such as the one installed to print the Strathearn Herald in Crieff in 1907 (6 July 1907). Although most of the innovations in printing technology in the nineteenth century had been driven by the requirements of large-circulation periodical production, this is an example, from the very end of the period, of a smallerscale development from within the industry which improved the speed and efficiency of small periodical and press production. Cossar’s development relied on the existing skills and equipment available in general letterpress printing offices, enabling small circulation local papers to remain viable until letterpress itself became obsolete in the last quarter of the twentieth century (see Plate 1).

Image-Making Industries and the Press

Chapter Three

THE EVOLUTION OF IMAGEMAKING INDUSTRIES AND THE MID- TO LATE VICTORIAN PRESS Rose Roberto Introduction This chapter examines design history and the evolution of nineteenthcentury illustrations in the context of economic knowledge ecologies. Special attention will be paid to analysing why certain visual trends emerged in the mid- to late nineteenth century, along with trends in the growth and competitive nature of the press. The professionalisation and then de-professionalisation of the British wood-engraving trade will also be covered through three different eras in illustrated British periodicals, defined here as the decades of the publicists (1830s–1840s), the decades of the wood engravers (1840s–1850s) and the decades of market diversification and fragmentation (1860s–1900). These eras will be examined by groups of specific illustrated publications established during those years, including the Penny Magazine (1832–45) and Information for the People (1845), as well as in general trends in the first two decades of the Illustrated London News (1842–69) and the first three decades of Punch magazine (1841–2002). Other publications will also be referred to in order to corroborate or contrast styles and layouts, and to show the influence of British engravers on the printing industry. The historical circumstances that provided fertile ground for printed images to become abundant, particularly through the means of the illustrated press, were threefold. Firstly, there was the economic impetus provided by changes in British legislation, most prominently the removal of ‘taxes on knowledge’, which enabled more cost-effective publishing to flourish in the second half of the nineteenth century (and discussed more fully by Tom O’Malley in Chapter 6 of this volume). Secondly, there was the professional dimension, the manner in which 86

­

image-making industries and the press

87

journalism became a capitalistic enterprise, and a paralleling rise and fall of the wood-engraving profession within this enterprise. Nineteenth-century illustration technologies will be covered in more depth by Helen Williams in Chapter 2 of this volume, but it is worth acknowledging, as this chapter will attempt to do, the historical and commercial context of such technologies as they relate to design. Thirdly, given that wood engraving rose to prominence in the midcentury, then essentially declined when the periodical press adapted new technology to create images at the close of the century, this chapter will highlight the effects of more sophisticated visual communication technologies developed from the 1830s through to the 1890s, and the influence of other image-making processes such as photography on wood-engraved images. It will also show that many design decisions were shaped by economic factors, the discovery of emerging market niches, and the personal ambitions and drive of specific individuals or groups of individuals.

The ‘ Taxes on Knowledge’ and Their Impact on the Print Ecology The ‘taxes on knowledge’, as they are often referred to in studies of the period, were actually four separate taxes: the newspaper stamp duty, the pamphlet duty, the advertisement duty and the excise duty on paper. As discussed more fully in Chapter 6 of this volume, these taxes, imposed from the reign of Queen Anne in 1712 onwards, had a dampening effect on press activity for much of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The excise duty on paper was particularly problematic for Scottish printers, as they were charged both at the site of paper production and again if the printed paper was sold in England. These taxes were repealed over a period of decades in the first half of the nineteenth century as a result of intensive lobbying of government by various interest groups, with the last one, the duty on paper, quietly dropped in 1861. The effects of these taxes were twofold. Firstly, they retarded the development of the newspaper industry in England, given that the 7d tax added to the price of a daily paper made such items prohibitively expensive for most general readers. In the 1830s there were 11 daily newspapers servicing London’s 1.7 million residents (UK Census 1831). In contrast, during the same period New York City’s 25,000 residents had access to 15 papers selling at lower prices. Secondly, these regressive taxes led to the establishment of many ‘illegal presses’ seeking to evade tax payment, either through subterfuge, or by adhering to the

88

rose roberto

letter of the law by not printing ‘news’. Chalaby and Hollis refer to these as ‘unstamped papers’, part of what became known as the ‘unstamped press’ (Chalaby 1998: 16–17). Most of these unstamped papers had ties to working-class associations and readers, as for example the Poor Man’s Guardian, one of the first British working-class newspapers, established by Henry Hetherington (1792–1849), a Chartist and founding member of the London Working Men’s Society (Figure 3.1). This newspaper – whose motto was ‘knowledge is power’ – was part of the unstamped press, published between 1831 and 1835, and sold for 1d. With the reduction of the stamp duty in 1832 to 1d, other new weekly papers servicing such readers started to flourish. Weekly papers began outselling the unstamped press due to their well-edited and copiously illustrated pages, which also featured fiction, attracting readers willing to spend one penny a week on reading material (Weedon 2003: 114). Two publications, often compared to one another, that exemplified the cheap but quality reading material emerging during this time, were the Penny Magazine, which ran from 1832 to 1845, and the longerlasting Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, which ran from 1832 to 1956 (see Figure 3.1). Because of the longevity of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal and the fact that it was unillustrated in this period, another serial publication, Chambers’s Information for the People, first issued in the 1830s, and then updated and reissued as two volumes in 1842

Figure 3.1  The Poor Man’s Guardian, the Penny Magazine and Chambers’s Information for the People (Creative Commons licence, courtesy of Hathi Trust and Internet Archive)

­

image-making industries and the press

89

will be compared along with the Penny Magazine. It was initially sold in parts, and, like the Penny Magazine, it used illustrations to appeal to potential readers. Charles Knight (1791–1873), in association with the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK), produced the Penny Magazine. The SDUK was run by a committee of prominent upper-class men, many associated with the newly established University College London. As a committee, the SDUK commissioned authors to write and publish educational material intended for the working class and the middle class, as an antidote to the more radical output of the unstamped papers, previously mentioned. The aim of all SDUK publications was to provide articles and books on scientific, artistic and cultural knowledge, thereby ’improving’ their readers’ minds, as well as instilling middleclass values and a strong, Protestant work ethic. In contrast, the Scottish firm of W. & R. Chambers, founded in May 1832 by brothers William (1800–83) and Robert (1802–71) Chambers, was not a charity like the SDUK. The publications from the firm, however, did espouse similar educational aims. Over many decades, W. & R. Chambers evolved from a small-time bookselling and hand-press printing business to become a major publisher with an international reputation, producing educational books, periodicals, dictionaries and encyclopaedias. The firm operated as a family business until the 1980s. One of the major areas that William and Robert Chambers brothers shared with the founders of the SDUK, and Charles Knight, in particular, were the characteristics of being active as ’publicists’. Those qualities included representing and advocating on behalf of a social class and viewing the political process from a certain point of view. Publicists, at this time, felt an immense sense of duty towards changing society, not just the social class they represented, but all of society according to principles in which they believed. They experienced their convictions with great intensity and showed their commitment to their convictions in their writings or speeches, constructing a ‘correct’ perspective of the world. They were often directly involved in politics and were prominent members of society their paper represented (Chalaby 1998: 16–17). For instance, both William and Robert were well-known public figures in Edinburgh. William Chambers was elected Lord Provost of Edinburgh in 1865 and was responsible for the remodelling of the city’s Old Town, and renovation of the city’s St Giles’ Cathedral. Robert Chambers was a prolific writer who penned nearly forty major books on biography, history, geology, literature and the English language, in addition to hundreds of articles on general-interest subjects and

90

rose roberto

on science. His scientific work was recognised by the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Geological Society of London: he attained Fellow status in both societies. Through Chambers produced papers such as Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, as well as Information for the People and Penny Magazine, the working classes could access sophisticated literary and historical discussions on authors like Homer, Herodotus, Livy, Tacitus, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer and Defoe in serial form (Rose 2001: 187). It inspired reflection of the greater world by publishing first-hand accounts of travellers and expatriates, provided practical ways for readers to navigate unfamiliar situations, and could be seen as offering messages of optimism and encouragement (Hogg 1833: 68). Chambers stated that their publications contained non-professional information ‘embracing those points of the several subjects which every intelligent man or woman may have occasion to think or speak about’ (Findlater 1868: i). Bennett writes that among the most striking characteristics of the Penny Magazine was that about one-fifth of the content was illustrations. Initially, the first two years‘ issues surveyed suggested a lower percentage, with 10 per cent of the content comprising illustrations. However, during the next two years, when Knight’s system of production had become more efficient, illustrations in the Penny Magazine increased to 24 per cent. Over the next ten years, illustrations made up about 18 per cent of the magazine. The illustrations were not embellishments, but well-composed and well-executed drawings, ‘sensibly integrated’ with the four or five articles of each issue. Each article averaged about 2,000 words within its eight pages (Bennett 1984: 129–30). The size of the early Penny Magazine was a double, foolscap quarto (68.6 x 43.2 cm), the page area averaging 523.3 square centimetres. Only 25 per cent of the page was not filled. Later Penny Magazine issues had a slightly smaller page area of 440 square centimetres and left 29 per cent unfilled (Bennett 1984: 129–30). In contrast, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal was a double crown octavo (76.2 x 50.8 cm) paper size and had an average of 16 pages. When not printing the journal, the firm also used their machines to print, among many other books and journals, their first part-issue reference serial, Information for the People, beginning in 1833 (Fyfe 2012: 63). Information for the People, issued over the 1830s period, was divided into a three-column layout under the periodical’s simple masthead, and it was very text-heavy compared with the Penny Magazine. The total number of illustrations during its initial fortyeight issue print run was just over 100. Twenty-two of those issues

­

image-making industries and the press

91

did have large illustrations which took up one-third or nearly half of the title page, and they were mostly of large maps, as well as a handful of illustrations with scenes from foreign countries. However, in each issue, the articles and the text were dedicated to specific topics. In particular, eight issues, using small illustrations that fit neatly into each column, were used as a means of explaining scientific and engineering  subjects, such as mechanics, steam engines, electricity, printing and optics. Interestingly, while fine art was discussed in Information for the People, it was scientific and geographic subjects that were illustrated heavily illustrated when compared to Knight’s Penny Magazine. Throughout his long publishing career Knight’s work focused on the value of illustration as an essential means of conveying and enhancing knowledge. Of images, Knight wrote: ‘we cannot be surrounded too much with the beautiful in art; in civic halls, and wherever men congregate together for public business, or meet for social purposes …’ (Knight, 3 March 1843). Knight was eager to provide generous images to reach out to the ‘artistically unsophisticated semi-literate public’, and to offer previously unavailable access to beautiful art work (Gray 2006: 157). His publications had great impact, in part due to the strength of the illustrations he commissioned from expert engravers such as William Harvey (1796–1866) and John Jackson (1801–48) (well-known former apprentices of Thomas Bewick, famed for popularising wood engraving, discussed further down in this piece). Hetherington also fits into Chalaby’s definition of a publicist, although one of a more radical flavour. While Knight and the Chambers brothers laboured unobtrusively, avoiding the ‘taxes on knowledge’ by carefully ensuring their publications did not contain recent events that could be classified as news, and were written in a manner that was not prone to cause controversy or catch the notice of government censors, Hetherington tested the boundaries of the UK government’s enforcement of tax laws. After hiring hundreds of paper sellers who openly flouted the stamp tax, Hetherington was imprisoned for six months between 1831 and 1832, spent further time in gaol in 1833, and also for two months in 1836, for using the paper to openly criticise the government. However, he continued publishing, as he believed that his pamphlets were instrumental in the political education of the working classes (Hollis 1972: viii). Clearly, while the publicists of this period had similar inspirations and slogans,  their papers reflected different aims. Knight and Chambers seemed to want to integrate the ambitious working classes into the current economic hierarchical system, using images to appeal to them and draw them into the larger

92

rose roberto

world, whereas Hetherington’s advocacy called for a more dramatic system overhaul. Law and Patten have argued that there was a ‘serial revolution’ in the 1800s, with different marketing and publishing trends developing over  three time periods: the early years (1830–50), the middle years (1850–80), and the late years (1880–1914) (Law and Patten 2009: 148). During the early nineteenth-century period ‘serial’ seems to have had two different definitions – a periodical with miscellaneous content, such as newspapers and magazines, or ‘books issued in slices’ (Rota 1998: 183). Because of this grey area between slices found in ‘tracts’ and journals, especially when it came to non-fiction works, some examples presented here are drawn from works that, today, might not be fully classified as part of the periodical press. By the nineteenth century part issues were normally distributed in twenty parts, with parts 19 and 20 issued as one number. In practice, there was a great deal of overlap between both types of serial, and often publishers, especially in the early years, including Knight, Chambers and publishers less brazen than Hetherington, wanted to be intentionally confusing to avoid paying ‘taxes on knowledge’. There was a clear market for serials, and booksellers liked to carry them because of the great possibility that repeat customers would impulse buy further issues. Customers also liked the formats because it made the instalment plan formula spread the cost and made the works more affordable over time (Rota 1998: 184). Both Knight and Chambers used the serial format to their advantage in imparting information to their working-class readers. Information for the People began selling 18,000 issues on average when it was first published in the 1830s; however, the bound second edition in 1842 sold close to 45,000 copies (Fyfe 2012: 69). Distinctive and attractive layouts, especially when compared to other penny press works, made both Knight and Chambers publications appealing. As can be seen in Figure 3.2, The Poor Man’s Guardian only used a woodcut incorporated into its masthead in contrast to some larger illustrations found in Penny Magazine or Information for the People. It has been previously mentioned that the weekly periodical market created after 1836 outcompeted most of the unstamped press. For publishers, it was beneficial because money earned for selling the first part issue could then be reinvested into the next part, allowing publishers to avoid tying up too much capital in one project. By dividing a book into parts, it could be issued to the consumer at a seemingly enticing price and the project could be discontinued if sales on the initial parts were poor (Rota 1998: 185).

­

image-making industries and the press

93

Figure 3.2  The Poor Man’s Guardian, No. 41, detail of masthead (Creative Commons licence, courtesy of Hathi Trust)

The Appeal of Cheap Images Images in nineteenth-century Western European publications were produced by three methods of printing – intaglio, planographic and relief methods. In the intaglio method, the image to be printed was incised into the metal surface, which was then filled with ink. The ink was transferred on to paper with a tremendous amount of pressure from the printing press. Examples of intaglio methods include steel engraving and copper etching (Gaskell 1972: 156). The planographic method of printing relied on a chemical process to transfer ink to paper, and the principle that oil and water do not mix. For this process, a drawing could be made with a greasy crayon on either a stone or metal plate with different grades of abrasive surface (Gaskell 1972: 267). The surface of the stone was then treated with an acid and gum arabic mixture, allowing the ink to go into the pores of the stone. After the stone had been wetted down, ink was then applied to the wet surface, allowing the stone’s drawing lines to attract the ink but repel the water. Examples of planographic methods of printing were lithography and chromolithography. In contrast to planographic and intaglio forms, relief methods use an integrated process of printing – that is, wood blocks were integrated into the same matrix of metal-type letters and printed at the same time on the same page. Examples of relief methods of printing would have been woodcuts, line blocks or wood

94

rose roberto

engravings. For intaglio and planographic methods, the images created had to be printed on a separate sheet of paper and later bound with the rest of the book or periodical. Using separate paper and printing processes often meant extra time and cost of labour, so publishers such as Knight and Chambers, who favoured publications with images but wanted to keep costs down, found the integrated relief method system to be a good option. ‘Modified during the nineteenth century, wood engraving proved economical and efficient enough to meet the needs of book and magazine publications and paved the way for modern book production’ (Schrock 1976: 1). Producing a wood engraving requires three components: a hard type of wood, such as boxwood; the correct part of the tree used as the printing surface; and the type of instrument, known as a ‘burnin’ or ‘graver’, which incised an image into the wood. In wood engraving, images were carved into the end grain block of a piece of wood, usually boxwood because of its hard and durable surface, using a graver. (See Figure 3.3 for a sample of tools and a photograph of the end grain portion of the trunk, prior to it being cut and carved.) The portion of the wood that was carved away remained uninked, while the portion that was inked contained the print image. Wood engraving was used in eighteenth century, along with another relief method called ‘wood cutting’. However, unlike woodcuts, which could be crude, images from wood engraving showed fine, precise and skilled work because of the tools used. The end grain of hard wood also provided a better medium for cutting fine lines for shading or outline

Figure 3.3  Burins used for incising woodblocks and cross section of boxwood, before being cut into smaller blocks (Image created by Rose Roberto based on her photographs at Chris Daunt’s studio, Gateshead, and in the Department of Typography and Graphical Communications, University of Reading)

­

image-making industries and the press

95

Figure 3.4  Difference in illustration quality shown between a woodcut and wood engraving (Creative Commons licence)

(Beedham 1948: 14). In contrast, the wood-cutting method used the plank or side of a tree, rather than the ingrain, and the traditional tools for woodcuts tend to be knives. As a result, images made from woodcuts, rather than wood engravings, tended to be less refined and detailed (see Figure 3.4). Thomas Bewick (1753–1828), who was originally trained as a copper engraver, popularised wood engraving in the early nineteenth century. Two of Thomas Bewick’s most popular works, A General History of Quadrupeds and British Birds, depicted animals with fine details that highlighted the sharp and narrow lines fur or feathers. Bewick was influential because of his techniques, and because well-known former pupils such as William Harvey (1796–1866), John Jackson (1801–48) and Ebenezer Landells (1808–60) spread the use of this form across international borders, ranging from Newcastle to London, Paris, Berlin and North America. One of the key areas of illustrative advancement in the nineteenth century was the adoption of wood engraving in the publishing process. Wood engraving succeeded copper plates in the first decade of the nineteenth century  (Gaskell 1972: 266). Through Bewick’s works and the work of his apprentices, wood engraving became a dominant method of print making in the nineteenth century, particularly given the appeal to many viewers of the Romantic styles and very detailed interpretations animals and scenes favoured by engravers of the period (Uglow 2006: 400).

96

rose roberto

The Rise of Wood Engravers and Wood-Engraving firms When it came to the rise of the illustrated press, Brake and Demoor point out that there were two separate rhetorical arguments in favour of, and in opposition to, illustration for the masses. One camp connected illustration to high culture and fine art prints. Publicists and advocates for use of illustrations argued that cheap prints were being exported to the working classes in the name of their health and education and for the sake of altruism. In the camp opposed to use of illustration for mass markets, critics argued that illustration was frivolous, ornamental and anti-intellectual, because the pictures sought to appeal to the emotions of readers, rather than to their rational nature (Brake and Demoor 2009: 5). Nevertheless, as this section will show, illustrations were lucrative products and wood engravers influenced the establishment of illustrated press in the mid-century both in Britain and in the United States. Among influential wood engravers and artists one can count Ebenezer Landells (1808–60), who was instrumental in the founding of two noteworthy illustrated journals of the nineteenth century, Punch magazine (1841­­–1992) and the Illustrated London News (ILN). Born in Newcastle, Landells was an apprentice to both Thomas Bewick and Bewick’s former apprentice Isaac Nicholson (1789–1848). Landells moved to London in 1829, setting up his own wood-engraving business soon after arrival and playing a key role in setting up Punch and its inimitable illustrated style. Due to business difficulties, Landells was not long associated with Punch, and he was forced him to sell his one-third share in the magazine and see his role as chief wood engraver offered to Joseph Swain (1820–1909). However, his subsequent career as ILN’s first artist correspondent would flourish over a period of decades – from his first sketch of Queen Victoria visiting Scotland in 1842, until his death in 1860. Landells also was involved in the establishment of other illustrated periodicals between the 1830s and 1840s (Maidment 2009: 17–31). He served as a mentor and professional mediator for the Dalziel Brothers firm, which obtained commissions to make woodblocks for both Punch and the ILN, through him as well as for Charles Knight publications through their mutual association with William Harvey (Dalziel and Dalziel 1901: 22). The Dalziel family was originally from Northumberland, but the eldest brother and founder of the firm, George Dalziel (1815­­­­–1902), was trained in London. Maidment notes that there were two schools of wood engravers illustrating for ILN, Punch and several of Landells’s other papers such as the Illuminated Magazine that had learned their trade through the

­

image-making industries and the press

97

wood-engraving apprentice system. The first one was Newcastle-based and associated with Bewick; the other one was from the ‘London School’ and based on black-line wood-engraving tradition from John Thurston (1774–1822) and Allen Robert Branston (1778–1827). Like Bewick, both Thurston and Branston originally trained as cooper plate engravers, then shifted their businesses to wood engraving. William James Linton (1812–97), who became quite well known during this period for political activism as well as engraving skills, was trained by pupils of Branston in the London School. Linton, Landells and the Dalziel Brothers formed a direct line of descent from the first generation of masters of the trade, and their wood-engraving businesses created new visuals for an emerging printing industry virtually from scratch (Maidment 2009: 28). Many periodical mast heads and illustrations within mid-century periodical texts were direct translations of eighteenth-century copper engraved motifs, or were based on decorative tail-pieces and endpieces that eighteenth-century book conventions used to begin and end chapters. (See Figure 3.5, which shows the layout and visual details from Illuminated Magazine.)

Figure 3.5  Illuminated Magazine, 1843. The influence of eighteenth-century artistic sensibilities can be seen in page layout for ‘Beaus of England’ and illustration detail from ‘Anesquette: A Story of the Valley D’Aspe’ (Volume 1, pp. 6 and 201) (Creative Commons Licence, courtesy of Internet Archive)

98

rose roberto

Figure 3.6  Woodblock (T.2011.56.240, left) and print (Wq1/6960, right) of monthly serial issue cover of Chambers’s Encyclopaedia, 1859 (Woodblock from W. & R. Chambers Collection, The National Museums Collection Care Centre, Edinburgh. Photograph of cover print from Chambers’s Encyclopaedia, British Museum, London)

Maidment points out that Linton, Landells and Harvey unabashedly borrowed from different older genres, and by the 1840s numerous periodical titles had an illustration interconnectedness linking back to previous styles and configurations (Maidment 2009: 32). This was true not just in London, but elsewhere, as Figure 3.6 demonstrates with a print and large woodblock designed in Edinburgh. Figure 3.6 shows the cover of a part-issue serial of Chambers’s Encyclopaedia alongside the woodblock used to make it. The cover illustration is from the first edition of Chambers’s Encyclopaedia, sold in parts starting in 1859, which allowed subscribers to buy weekly parts, divided into 520 instalments at 1½d each. The green paper cover was an inexpensive and attractive way to bind and protect each part for sale and distribution. On the inside cover were advertisements of other Cham­ bers’s publications or sponsored advertisements from local businesses. What is most noticeable on this cover are the elaborate images. Near the top of the page is the head of Britannia, and on both sides

­

image-making industries and the press

99

Figure 3.7  Punch, or the London Charivari, cover of Volume 3. The signature of the wood engraver ‘E. Landelles’ can be seen at the bottom right (Courtesy of Sheffield University Library)

under her are eight rondelles, affixed to columns inspired by Classical architecture, that frame the entire title, Chambers’s Encyclopeadia: A Dictionary of Universal Knowledge for the People. Decorative foliage and banners highlighting subjects contained within the work seem to be borrowed from a combination of Renaissance and Baroque ornamentation. These were typical design motifs, common to other periodicals, not just Chambers’s, and can be seen in many serials and periodicals in the mid-century. Other visual influences from continental Europe can be seen in Figure 3.7, which shows an early front page of Punch magazine. The illustration includes motifs common in other eighteenth-century engraving, such as grapes and putti, although they are more cartoonish in form. The name ‘Punch’ comes from the traditional puppet show known as Punch and Judy, which was first recorded by Samuel Pepys in 1662 and was known for its topical humour. The main Punch figure is reminiscent of eighteenth-century caricature, and caricature as an art form was perfected by the British visual satirists William Hogarth (1697–1784) and James Gillray (1756–1815). Hogarth engraved many of his own paintings on copper to create prints for wider distribution, and Punch’s visual content nods to this tradition. Furthermore, the subtitle

100

rose roberto

‘The London Charivari’ made clear the influence of the French satirical humour magazine Le Charivari. Inspired by Le Charivari’s use of political satire and wood engravings, Landells, and later Swain, provided the characterising features of Punch, known not just for illustrations but also for its well-written and witty content (Young 2007: 17). Further commentary on Punch can be found in Chapters 14 and 15 of this volume. The term ‘cartoon’ was first coined by Punch, referring to a large illustration (made by wood engraving) addressing a political of social topic (Young 2007: 17). However, unlike eighteenth-century examples of political or social caricatures from Gillray or Hogarth, the caricatures, illustrations and cartoons found in Punch were never as crude, although their sensibility did change over time. In its early years, ‘Mr. Punch often took on the role of a radical St. George, bent on slaying the dragons of privilege, corruption, and humbug,’ writes Altick (1997: xix). However, as time went on, Punch became more conservative in tone in order to appeal to larger audiences in the middle and upper middle classes. Altick further explains that Punch ‘had ultra-liberal principles but sought its market in the generally conservative middle class’. In other words, Punch was ‘a comic paper with a sense of social conscience’ (Altick 1997: xix). Much satire that Punch included was characterised as ‘establishment’ and ‘gentle’ and could be ‘placed before females and children’, while at the same time it reflected the political and social topics of mainstream British papers visually (Young 2007: 29). Subjects depicted in Punch’s illustrations were immediately recognised by nineteenth-century audiences. For example, Figure 3.8 depicts a cartoon that ‘gently’ satirises W. & R. Chambers’s Information for the People, while the text below it pokes fun at educational pamphlets and their patronising tone produced by the SDUK and other like-minded charities. In the days of Bewick, Thurston and Branston, master engravers drew and engraved their own work. By the mid-1800s wood engravers became experts at ‘translating’ the work of artists or advising them on how to best draw for the new medium. Joseph Swain provides a good example of tasks engravers dealt with if they worked for their own firm, were directly employed by a specific publisher or were directly contracted by a magazine though set up in their own business, as in the case of Swain and his work for Punch (De Freitas 1986: 286). Many prints that appeared in Punch, Cornhill and Once a Week, for example, show Swain’s signature along with artists such as John Leech (1817–64), Charles Samuel Keene (1823–91), George du Maurier (1834–96) and John Tenniel (1820–1914). The work of wood engravers

­

image-making industries and the press

101

Figure 3.8  Punch cartoon satirising Information for the People and other middle-class publisher initiatives promoting middle-class ‘improvement’ literature (Courtesy of Sheffield University Library)

in collaboration with artists aimed to create images that were both sophisticated and simple at the same time (Maidment 2009: 29). Stevens suggests that the appropriate metaphor for wood engravers of the mid-nineteenth century is that of a modern-day ghost writer. Professional wood engravers ‘did not cut the line, but rather everything around it’, such that style and talent were obviously present but in a peculiar, double-voiced way (Stevens 2017: 6). Joseph Swain himself wrote that the highest compliment paid to him was made by artistillustrator Frederick Eltze (active 1864–70). Eltze asked him, ‘How is it you are able to preserve the character of each artist’s drawing in the way you do? When I look over my engravings I can generally tell who the engraver is, but when I look at your work I can see at once who the artist is’ (quoted in De Freitas 1986: 286). It seems that the trade of the wood engraver was not only adaptable to new avenues of employment as the business of periodicals expanded, but also an evolving set of skills. ‘Wood engravers looked at lines, shapes, textures and tones for their own sake, considering how to re-create them in wood, in print’ (Stevens 2017: 28). The skill set described by Swain as well as by Stevens was often difficult to appreciate by those who read periodicals and looked at periodical illustrations. Prints produced by wood engravings were made

102

rose roberto

to capture illustrations or works of art that had been transcribed on to wood. However, once the wood-engraving print had been made, Adamson writes that what was admired was the work of the original illustrator or artist, rather than the skill involved in transmitting that work via  a wood engraving: unless, of course, the person was both illustrator/artist and engraver. Adamson calls this indexicality, when the process of creation hides the creative skills used to make it. Adamson notes that ‘the more skilled an artisan, the more likely their skill will be taken as “merely” mechanical’ and overlooked (Adamson 2013: 151–2). When photography was combined with wood engraving, which started in the latter half of the century, Adamson suggests that a ‘double index’ was thus created, obscuring the skill of the wood engraver even further, and so proving problematic for aspiring wood engravers hoping to follow in the footsteps of Swain, Landells and Linton. To become an expert at wood engraving, apprentices had to become familiar with a set of illustration tools (‘pictorial syntaxes’) used to create images. Throughout the 1800s different pictorial syntaxes were fashionable. Yet, the last decades of the nineteenth century heralded a change in the visual aesthetics of images. While different styles of pictorial syntax have existed since the spread of printing, the spread of photography had the most impact on press illustration work. In many different fields of science, for example, photography became a de facto part of data collecting processes, replacing in-the-field drawings and hand-sketched illustrations. There was also a widespread perception that photographs could be more objective and accurate in capturing reality and the moment (Belknap 2016: 42). Many wood engravings in non-fiction works, as well as periodicals, claimed to present authoritative information by using the phrase ‘based on a photograph’ as part of the caption beneath the image, along with the name of the photographer from whom the image was derived. Belknap notes numerous instances of the Graphic (1869–1932) doing this in order to claim visual authenticity over its competitors (ibid.: 41). The age of the wood engraver would not be complete without noting the influence of British wood engravers who worked and trained in England, then emigrated to the United States. A good example was Frank Leslie (1821–80). He was born named Henry Carter, the son of Joseph Carter, the proprietor of a prosperous glove manufacturing firm in Ipswich. Hoping that young Henry Carter would take over his father’s business, his family discouraged him from pursuing art. However, from the age of thirteen, he bought the engraving tools he needed and practiced drawing and engraving in secret. At the age of seventeen, Carter submitted illustrations to the ILN, signing them ‘Frank Leslie’ to

­

image-making industries and the press

103

avoid the wrath of his father. However, his work was warmly received, and he was induced to give up his father’s business to join the staff of the ILN, where he became superintendent of the engraving department by the age of twenty. During his six years at ILN, he studied the various branches of the publication business, and became an expert in the operation of ‘overlaying’ wood engravings – the system of regulating light and shade effect’ (Huntzicker 1989: 209). While at the ILN, Leslie also ‘absorbed a strong sense of self-­­importance about pictorial journalism as an archive of contemporary culture and a conveyor of news’ (Huntzicker 1989: 210), and he brought this sensibility with him when he arrived in New York in 1848. In New York, Leslie set up a very successful wood-engraving business: among his first clients was the circus showman P. T. Barnum (1810–91) and Gleason’s Pictorial, published in Boston. In the 1850s Leslie began publishing the first of his illustrated journalistic ventures, some weekly, some monthly and some annually. He had few competitors in this market in the United States at the time (Brown 2002: 8). Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (1855­­–1922), later renamed Leslie’s Weekly, was the best-known and longest-running periodical of his publishing empire, though many of his other papers and periodicals flourished for decades, partially because he had created one of the largest establishments for producing wood engraving in the United States. Leslie introduced the overlaying system he learned at ILN to US productions. Many of his weekly papers were large quarto in size (24.2 x 30.5 cm), consisting of sixteen pages per issue, and combining between sixteen and thirty-two illustrations, with text on subjects ranging from literature, war stories, political commentary and arts, to science and travel narratives. Leslie maintained a well-paid staff of correspondents and sent them around the world to produce reports and send back pictures (Huntzicker 1989: 213). The masthead for many of his American periodicals share visual similarities with the ILN’s masthead (see Figure 3.9). Many of the illustrations printed in his papers, especially Leslie’s Weekly, were large, some taking up the entire page (Brown 2002: 39). As with ILN, Punch and later the Graphic, illustrations were drawn in reverse on the back side of a woodblock. As boxwood has a narrow trunk size, smaller woodblocks were joined together to create a larger printing surface. Many large front-page images, illustrating headlines and main stories, were drawn across several joined wood blocks. A master engraver would then engrave across the joins. Next, the blocks would be separated, and each block would be given to a different person, who was then responsible for engraving details on their piece

104

rose roberto

Figure 3.9  Masthead for the Illustrated London News (top), compared with masthead for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (bottom) (Creative Commons licence)

for the larger image. When each engraver finished his or her segment, the blocks would then be united and re-joined – sometimes with glue and sometimes with bolts, depending on the size of the overall image and the number of copies in the print run (Brown 2002: 237). Some of Leslie’s front-page illustrations could contain as many as thirty-two separate blocks (Huntzicker 1989: 213). A smaller example of bolted blocks can be seen in Figure 3.10. When looking at complete print runs of Leslie’s Weekly, the INL or Punch, one will notice a change in styles of illustrations from the middle to the late part of the nineteenth century. This was due to the changing nature of illustration production, with technology shifts, workflow changes and developments in the economy for printing contributing to new stylistic approaches (Gaskell 1972: 267). Besides schematic diagrams, there were two general types of illustration practices in the nineteenth century (facsimile and interpretive) (Beegan 2008: 186). Both styles were taught in the engraving practices set up by Thomas Bewick and his acolytes. To be a master

­

image-making industries and the press

105

Figure 3.10  Underside of woodblocks joined by bolts from the W. & R. Chambers collection (T. 2011) at National Museums Scotland (Photograph by Rob Banham, courtesy of National Museums Scotland)

wood engraver in the mid-century required knowing both facsimile and interpretive styles. Mastering the interpretive style meant learning to proficiently create different pictorial syntaxes. A pictorial syntax is a mark used by artists, draughtsman or printmakers to create a three-dimensional representation of an object or scene in a two-dimensional space. Figure 3.11 shows three different pictorial syntaxes utilised to depict the same object, the Apollo Belvedere, a well-known statue housed in the Vatican. Although viewers can see it is the same object, visually each representation is markedly different from the other. For a time, apprentices of the wood-engraving trade learned to draw on wood themselves as a way to further exercise image translation skills. However, learning to engrave in the facsimile style meant using a pictorial syntax that replicated an image created by a photographic method. Beegan states that this involved ‘abandoning the linear web of the existing code’ (referring to pictorial syntaxes), and gradually adopting a tonal code of ‘shorter strokes and scratches’, which often meant the wood engraver used one graving tool, rather than a range of them, as was the case with the interpretive method. As can be seen in Figure 3.12, there was a range of different types of mark that wood engravers could make. The style of Bewick’s carving with metal

106

rose roberto

Figure 3.11  Pictorial syntaxes are marks used by artists, draughtsmen or printmakers to create a representation of a three-dimensional object or scene from real life in a two-dimensional space. Here, the Apollo Belvedere is presented in different wood-engraved pictorial syntaxes. Images are not to scale (Creative Commons licence)

engraving tools, called burins, was characterised as Romantically interpretive (Conway 2016: 226). The multiple pigeon illustrations in Figure 3.13 highlight differences between illustration styles and use of pictorial syntax. In the rock dove print, illustrated and engraved by Bewick, it is possible to see his use of numerous pictorial syntaxes to create texture and light on individual bird feathers as well as tree branch and leaves. Although it is clear that this image is highly stylised, and the bird is in what might be characterised as a typical stuffed-specimens-at-a-museum pose, the other features of this illustration, such as its overall composition and use of light, are aesthetically pleasing. For example, the detail of the gradated feathers and the use of tonal variation to create shadow, especially under the bird’s neck, achieve a convincing illusion of a three-­­ dimensional bird. The pigeon in the second edition of Chambers’s Encyclopaedia later in the century looks similar to the Bewick bird, in the sense that the viewer can see it is the same species. However, despite trying to mimic the accuracy of a photograph, it looks flat in comparison to the Bewick illustration. Yet, by the late 1800, this style was typical of mass-produced publications. This flattened imagery and use of non-traditional pictorial syntaxes sparked controversy within the image-making industry, and most especially from outspoken wood engravers like Linton.

­

image-making industries and the press

107

Figure 3.12  Examples of types of strokes used to create different effects when printed on wood (Images from Brett 2010: 45, courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing)

Like Leslie, Linton emigrated to the United States, although he went later in his life, seemingly to retire from his political activity as well as his engraving work. He arrived in New York in 1867, and promptly found employment as the instructor of wood engraving at the Ladies School of Design attached to the Cooper Institute. After three years he was again engaged in illustrated magazine commissions, but also wrote and engraved the illustrations for several of his own books (Schrock 1976: 4). His reputation and illustrated work got him elected to the American National Academy of Design. By 1878, writes Schrock, he seemed to be living a quiet but satisfactory life. Then he took up the

108

rose roberto

Figure 3.13  Different types of pigeons presented in different wood-engraved pictorial syntax styles. The illustration in Chambers’s Encyclopaedia, second edition, uses a facsimile style that mimics a photograph. Images are not to scale (Creative Commons licence)

cause of upholding the traditions of wood engraving against a younger group of artists, trained in Paris and with the artists of the Barbizon school, in a new painterly technique that they wanted to be transmitted in reproductions with the help of photographic technology. In America, this reproductive style was called the New School, so called because it marked the appearance of a new wood-engraving style featuring short white lines and dots in a stipple effect that, combined with white-line cross-hatching, was used whenever the engraver chose. Linton, however, believed that only certain kinds of line should be used to represent landscape, another kind should be used to represent foliage, another to represent sky, another to represent flesh, and so on. Linton’s answer to the use of non-traditional pictorial syntax of the New School appeared in the June 1879 issue of Atlantic Monthly, where he attacked the practices of wood engravers’ reliance on photography and facsimile work. He emphatically stated that wood engravers were artists, not copyists, and that this use of photographic technology promoted bad design, visually unpleasant aesthetics, and cheapened the wood-engraving profession (Schrock 1976: 8). In hindsight, Linton was proved correct. By overly replicating the sensibilities of photographs within its pages, artists and the periodical press made the interpretive skills of wood engravers redundant.

­

image-making industries and the press

109

Wood-engraving firms that produced images for newspapers and periodicals required images at a much quicker pace to meet with publication deadlines, and facsimile styles became the favoured method expected from new entrants training to the profession. Although blocks in this style took longer to cut, facsimile was quicker to learn (Beegan 2008: 48). Speaking about his work for Punch, the engraver J. B. Groves reported that in the 1860s the wood-engraving trade split into two: one was mechanical, the other was pictorial. It was seldom that ‘any individual engraver [trained after 1860] became proficient in both styles’. ‘Mechanical’ here referred to the facsimile style; ­­pictorial referred to the ‘interpretive’. The fact that the popular press  began  embracing the facsimile style also affected the book trade, since daily and weekly publications shaped consumer expectations of what to expect in book publications (Drucker and McVarish 2009: 146).

Wood Engraving as a Factory System Due in no small part to the wholesale adoption in the early decades of the nineteenth century of wood engraving, it became an integral part of press production. Wood engraving was considered a respectable, stable profession for visual artists to flourish within. The price of illustrations was high, and a good living could be made. Parents paid for their sons to be apprentices for seven years, learning the methods of Thomas Bewick and his former pupils. After their apprenticeship was completed, they served for many years as a journeyman, with the expectation of eventually achieving master engraver status themselves. As Lindley has noted, such positions were highly sought after for their class distinction: ‘Master engravers occupied a place in society above humbler compositors, machine minders, and journeyman of the printing trade’ (Lindley 1970: 7). The successful Victorian master engravers wore ‘tall silk hats’, which symbolised their status as petits bourgeois (De Freitas 1986: 299). The prominent ones retired to comfortable homes after a long life in the business, settling into neighbourhoods populated by writers and artists (ibid.). The master engraver Edmund Evans (1826–1905), for instance, who specialised in full-colour printing and engraved for the illustrators Walter Crane (1845–1915), Randolph Caldecott (1846–86) and Kate Greenway (1846–1901), was able to retire to an extensive house in the Surrey countryside on the strength of his lifetime earnings. When he passed away, he left over £10,000 to members of his family, gained mainly through engraving. As Freitas notes,

110

rose roberto

For three or four decades from the 1830s wood engraving was an occupation that enabled men of ambition to move with relative ease through the stages of apprentice or improver to journeyman and on to becoming an independent master. Commercial engraving on wood was an occupation … where the ethos of self-help could mean some-thing in practice … to the ambitious man. (De Freitas 1986: 299) There was a contrast between early wood-engraving pioneers such as Bewick and his students and the wood engravers of the generation following them. While the students of the wood-engraving masters established businesses and influenced the direction of print as a visual media, dependency on the open market for survival forced newspaper and press proprietors to be fiercely competitive, ruthlessly costefficient, business minded and focused on creating a circulation that generated surplus income to invest in further production. While early wood engravers worked in press contexts that were fairly straightforward in terms of output, the wood engravers later in the century faced a different atmosphere, in the era of market diversification and fragmentation, where work produced had to straddle deadlines and cultural demands made by increasingly energetic and time-conscious journalists and newspaper managers who were now replacing publicists. Time became a major determinant in servicing visual demands of press production. As De Freitas comments, after the 1840s ‘this situation had changed for those men’ working for illustrated newspapers and magazines, with uncompromising publication dates allowing no delays (De Freitas 1986: 252). Such pressures of time filtered down into the training of new engraver apprentices. Such was the demand for wood engravers that accompanied the explosion in press production after the cessation of the ‘taxes on knowledge’, that apprenticeship lengths began to be cut, from seven years to five years by the 1830s, then down to three or two years by the 1850s (De Freitas 1986: 89, 306, 339). Some firms that required a steady stream of illustrators and wood engravers to keep up with the work they were getting from the press began establishing bespoke on-the-job training for new recruits. The Graphic, for example, established its own school specifically to train wood ­engravers (Beegan 2008: 89; De Freitas 1986: 254). These time frames were by no means consistent across the trade, and there were extensive periods when certain firms would poach each other’s staff instead of training in-house, as was the case of the rivalry between ILN and the Graphic (De Freitas 1986: 254). But practices such as outsourcing

­

image-making industries and the press

111

wood blocks to freelancers, and working through the night to meet deadlines, became common practice by the mid-1850s. Publishers relied on wood-engraving firms to act like ‘business men’, supplying engraved blocks at a more rapid pace than engravers of the past, and this ­­inevitably affected working conditions (ibid.: 302). While there are some exceptions, it seems that in London by the midcentury, the traditional stages of advancing from apprentice to master engraver had transformed into a process whereby contractors or ‘jobbers’ reported to a foreman (or what we might call a project manager). Many successful firms, such as the Dalziels or J. & R. M. Woods, established by master engravers and managed by master engravers, began styling themselves ‘wood-engraving offices’, no longer acting as places in which to learn the traditional mysteries of artisan craft skill, but as assembly-line locations for finishing tasks and bringing products to the market on time. Therefore, wood engravers who were trained later in the century were not necessarily able to advance traditionally through the ranks as Landells had. From 1825 wood-engraving firms or companies started to appear in London, and publishers such as Longman’s started to employ a cross section of them in their growing illustrated book process. According to Houston, in Scotland most engravers tended to operate as individuals rather than as firms, such as was generally the case in London (Houston 2000: 11). In analysing the number of ­engravers registered in Post Office Directories during various years over the course of the century, Houston concluded that, although actual numbers of engravers were smaller, there was a proportional correlation with demand for their engraved work that matched their counterparts in London and other major cities (see Table 3.1). Houston notes that by the 1880s wood engravers were outnumbering Table 3.1  Breakdown of types of unstamped papers from 1800 to 1860. Based on data and categories from Chalaby 1998: 13 and Hollis 1970: 318–28 Categories of 200 prevalent ‘unstamped’ papers 104–focused mainly on political topics 12–belonged to trades unions 3–cooperatives (e.g., Magazine for Useful Knowledge) 26–humorous (17 out of these were ‘radical’) 15–focused mainly on religious topics 32–had middle-class educational goals to divert masses from ‘seditious’ or  ‘blasphemous’ papers. e.g., Penny Weekly, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper.

112

rose roberto

other engravers in both Edinburgh and Glasgow. Data from De Freitas’s work in London at the time also confirms the growing trend in wood engraver numbers during the same decades. Citing J. B. Groves, whose career as a wood engraver spanned forty years, De Freitas notes him commenting: ‘After the close of the Crimean war, when the era of peace and prosperity had come, then the demand for wood blocks increased enormously; engraving establishments here opened in Edinburgh, Birmingham, Manchester and other provinces and towns … [and] this demand gave rise to shops full of draughtsmen’ (Groves 1915). Biographies and autobiographies by industry workers such as Groves, Evans, Linton and Jackson make the point that, as print businesses boomed, publishers no longer needed to search for a suitable engraver for individual artists. Many publishers and periodical editors simply sent their work to established engraving firms to be cut by a certain deadline. Many blocks dating from the middle of the nineteenth century are signed with the names of major engraving firms such as Dalziel or Swain (Conway 2017: 227). Through various means, these firms developed efficient systems of organising labour that enabled them to process more work at less cost, and so remain competitive and dominant in the field. Division of labour in the wood-engraving field at this time seemed to align in two different ways. An older specialisation, perhaps going back to the time of Bewick in the late eighteenth century, was specialisation based on the type of illustration produced. For example, some wood engravers specialised in botanical illustrations, others in engraving animals. Some engravers specialised in architecture or ornament or textiles, while others specialised in cutting images of machines into blocks. Curiously, those that specialised in botanical engravings were called ‘pruners’; those that specialised in animals or details of people’s faces were called ‘butchers’; those that specialised in clothing or drapery were referred to as ‘tailors’; while those that created machines were referred to as ‘mechanics’ (De Freitas 1986: 347). Wood engravers and wood-engraving firms that operated under this division accepted work as it came, so a journeyman employed in such firms might one day be working on book illustrations, the next moment working on posters or advertisements. The other type of division of work, as noted earlier, involved a publisher outsourcing large illustrations to either large firms such as the Dalziel or Swain, or to individuals with small offices. The offices or the individuals would then work overnight on separate blocks to be rejoined the next morning. The majority of illustrated work from the mid- to late nineteenth

­

image-making industries and the press

113

century can be found in catalogues, broadsheets, leaflets, magazines, product labels and advertisements. Wood engravers did not usually sign their work. The ones that did were usually famous illustrators or painters with established artistic reputations. Groves speculates that it is at this point that the divide between categories of wood engravers who were ‘mechanical’, as opposed to those who were ‘pictorial’, began. Although De Freitas finds evidence of earlier divisions along these lines, there is something to be said about this trend, even though its beginnings are not clear (De Freitas 1986: 355). Illustrators or engravers who produced scientific works, mathematics or technological depictions, areas that sometimes required some degree of understanding of the image’s subject, did not seem to gain as much public renown as wood engravers who illustrated novels, works of art and poetry books. For example, Edmund Evans, an apprentice of Landells, became well known as a colour illustrator of children’s books, while the wood engravers who laboured on the technical drawings for Chambers’s Information for the People remained anonymous. Although boxwood is a solid material and can withstand a great deal of use, Victorian machine presses did cause more wear than the older hand presses when they were pressed into service for as long as possible (Conway 2016: 227). For instance, the blocks used for the 1882 Christmas issue of the ILN, printed approximately 425,000 impressions and were still usable after the print run had concluded (Jackson 1885: 326). However, as the press and publishing business became even more and more commercial and competitive, methods were developed to duplicate blocks, such as through stereotyping and electrotyping (to be discussed in the next section). These duplication methods made more print runs possible, and allowed more than one machine to print simultaneously (Newell 1952). This was advantageous for publishers who wanted to print issues of journals and distribute them as quickly as possible to disparate local markets. For example, the W. & R. Chambers firm printed its Journal in London as well as in Edinburgh, where the firm was based, to accommodate English sales of the Journal, which accounted for over 70 per cent of the issue totals (Fyfe 2012: 117). Advances in image and print reproduction technology fed into this competitive cycle. The 1860s witnessed the widespread use of two technological breakthroughs that saved the newspaper industry time and money. First came the use of stereotyping, which enabled production of newspapers from plates. This allowed for multiple copies of works to be printed on several machines at the same time, making production faster and more cost effective. Second came the use of webfed rotary presses (Chalaby 1998: 42). By 1863 the Times had plates

114

rose roberto

that were cast to fit the curved cylinders of rotary presses (Newell 1952: 263). These two technologies worked in conjunction with one another: rotary presses were dependent on curved, stereotyped plates to ­­produce printed material efficiently and swiftly. Stereotypes were made by creating a mould or matrix in papier mâché of woodblock or composed-type metal letters, and then making a cast in metal for duplication. Stereotypes were first produced in 1725 in Glasgow by William Ged (1699–1749), who created copies by using a plaster mould. Another pair of Glaswegians, Andrew Foulis (1712–75) and Alexander Tillock (1759–1825), built on this work in 1784. Their patented methods involved using paper mâché to replace plaster, and was in common use in the printing trade by the 1830s. However, the use of stereotype plates for newspapers was of a different magnitude (Newell 1952: 263). As Michael Twyman points out: Up to this point in time all machines used in the newspaper industry had to be sheet-fed by hand, and most had printed only on one side … [In] 1862 John Walter III embarked upon a project to design a reel-fed rotary machine … In 1869, it produced about 10,000 perfected sheets of an eight-page paper in an hour [for the Times]. (Twyman 1970: 55) The fact that so many papers could be produced so quickly because technology provided an environment where papers could thrive. As Table 3.2 demonstrates, there was a sharp rise in newspaper and periodical production in London within a year of the full repeal of the newspaper stamp duty (as well as two years after the repeal of the advertisement duty) in the mid-1850s. This was followed by a sharp decrease and then eventual levelling out of the press corporations at the end of the nineteenth century, after the market forces consolidated the remaining commercial interests. The shifting market environments during the late nineteenth century meant that publishers were constantly searching for competitive advantages over their rivals. One of the incentives they could offer to potential and repeat customers was periodicals with attention-grabbing images, as Patricia Anderson notes: From early 1830s–1860s pictorial magazines were a major means of diffusing the printed image. For most of these magazines, illustrations, rivalled only by sensations fiction, was the main selling point, and several weekly journals achieved impressive regular sales, ranging from 80,000 to more than 400,000 copies per issue. (Anderson 1991: 2)

­

image-making industries and the press

115

Table 3.2  Proportional correlation between daily papers and number of wood engravers. Patterns of rising and declining members were consistent in major UK cities

With these figures, Anderson speculates that, while print-centred mass culture would have emerged without illustration in periodicals, she doubts that the growth would have been as rapid or as dramatic.

Late-Century Methods for Replicating Images Electrotyping is the art of copying printing type, woodcuts, seals, medals, engraved plates, ornaments, & c. by means of the galvanic current in metal, most especially copper … (Findlater 1888: vol. 4, 286) Fyfe writes that W. & R. Chambers was one of the first British publishers to embrace the latest innovations of the Industrial Revolution in printing processes and machinery, making great use of machine-made paper,

116

rose roberto

stereotyping and steam-powered printing machines (Fyfe 2012: 64). In the account books of the W. & R. Chambers firm, it is possible to see what was budgeted for different categories of expenses in certain years. In a typical 1859 ledger entry, for example, a line item for wood-engraving expenses for the first edition of the Chambers’s Encyclopaedia totals £218 out of a total budget of £1,854, or approximately 12 per cent of the total production costs. In contrast, the stereotype plate costs were only £1 12s, less than 1 per cent of the total (WRC Dep 341–415: 90). By the time the second edition was issued in 1891, however, ledger accounts indicate that wood engravings costs had dropped to approximately 8 per cent of the total production budget, coming in at £409 out of a total projected summary of £5,244. Interestingly, a line item also exists for electrotypes for £180, 3 per cent of the total budget (WRC Dep 341–416: 109). What this suggests, for the Chambers firm at least, was that, while the percentage a publisher could spend on artwork between the middle of the century and the end of the century was roughly the same, the focus of where the expenditure was made was changing in line with new technology demands. The records for this firm also indicate that electrotyping was being used to reproduce images, and this process began to replace stereotyping more and more as a method of producing copies of wood engraving as the years progressed. In an analysis of Macmillan publishing production data, Alexis Weedon concludes that the peak period of print industry use of stereotypes and electrotypes occurred between the 1870s and 1880s, where one in five impression were made from electrotypes, and one in three from stereos (Weedon 2003: 75). See also Table 3.3. Like stereotyping, electrotyping involved using a mould to make a copy of the wood-engraved image. Electrotypes shared the same principle of being made from a mould as stereotypes. However, the method of creating a plate from a mould was very different. Stereotyping was an entirely mechanical process, while electrotyping was an electrochemical process. The first part of the process involved wax being pressed against a woodblock or a page of type in order to create a wax mould. Table 3.3  Book production cost database (Weedon 1970: 75) % of titles listed in Macmillan Impression books using stereotypes/ electrotypes printed from stereotypes printed from electrotypes number of titles printed

1846 0 0 6

1856 1% 0 54

1866 15% 1% 144

1876 27% 21% 459

1886 35% 21% 459

1896 2% 6% 1003

Overall 15% 12% 1969

­

image-making industries and the press

117

The mould was then covered with graphite (graphite is a strong conductor of electricity). Next, the graphite-covered wax mould was attached to an anode, through which flowed an electrical current to a cathode attached to a sheet of copper. Both wax mould and copper sheet were submerged in a chemical bath of copper sulphate (CuSO4) and sulphuric acid (H2SO4), and an electrical charge was sent through both (see Plate 2). The electric current caused copper atoms to leave the plate of copper and ‘grow’ on the surface of the wax mould, making an exact copy of the original woodblock or page of type. The copper surface was then backed with type metal and affixed to woodblocks, which were then used for printing. After 1872, when mechanical electrical generators (dynamos) became available, dynamos were used as a power source to create such electrotypes. Plating dynamos sped up the electrotyping by twenty times, so that an electrotype printing plate could be deposited in less than two hours; thus electrotyping became a much cheaper alternative to stereotyping (Hatch and Stewart 1918: 4). It also had the advantage of being an exact copy of the wood engraved image, whereas the ­stereotype might be a little bit smaller then than the original. This was because stereotypes were made from hot metal poured into a papiermâché mould, with a resulting shrinking of the metal when it cooled (see Figure 3.14). By the late 1890s use of both stereotype and electrotypes declined significantly in British publishing houses. Newer technologies were competing with the skilled wood engraver. These, Michael Twyman argues, can be classified into two broad categories: those that reproduced an artist’s line drawing, and those that reproduced a photograph or tonal drawing (Twyman 1970: 30). Two of the more popular processes for creating line drawings at this late stage in the century were the albumen and bitumen processes, which involved direct etching on to zinc. The albumen process used albumen, found in egg whites, to bind the photographic chemicals to the paper or other material, while in the bitumen process bitumen of Judea, a naturally occurring asphalt, was used because of its light-sensitive properties. For both of these, a reversed photographic negative of a drawing was placed in contact with a plate prepared with albumen or bitumen. When the image was sufficiently exposed to light, the surface of the plate was rolled with thinned printing ink, and then carefully washed in cold water before it was submerged in a bath of nitric acid. The action of the light on the prepared surface had the effect of making it insoluble so that only the lines of the image remained (Twyman 1970: 31). Process engraving attracted artists who

118

rose roberto

Figure 3.14  Woodblock used in the production of Chambers’s Expressive Reader series. Note that a photograph taken of another text and its illustration has been exposed on to this block. The illustration portion has been cleared away from the block. It is likely this block was intended to create a derivative, such as an electrotype (Photograph by Rose Roberto, by kind permission National Museums Scotland)

had previously worked at wood-engraving firms, and who, when such work started decreasing, turned to process engraving to expand their earning and income, using transferable skills gained from working up process blocks with burins (Southward 1897: 22). As previously mentioned, in the second half of the nineteenth century draughtsmen were being encouraged to use photography to aid their image making, in addition to just mimicking qualities of photographs. In 1860 the engraver Thomas Bolton invented a process for exposing a photograph directly on to a woodblock. This allowed artists’ original drawings, which had up until then been made directly on the block, to be preserved by photographing it. The photograph could

­

image-making industries and the press

119

Figure 3.15  Stereotype (left) and electrotype (right) of the same map showing the Baltic Sea. Note that the stereotype is slightly smaller due to metal shrinking as it cools. Stereotypes or electrotypes would be affixed to woodblocks and then could be printed in the same matrix as type made metal (Photograph by Rose Roberto, by kind permission National Museums Scotland)

then be exposed on the block, and the wood engraver could make a direct translation of the tones of an actual photograph. To guide the engraver’s work, he or she could reference the original work of art itself (Twyman 1970: 29) (see Figure 3.15). One can trace the increasing influence of photography on engraving conventions over the latter half of the nineteenth century through such examples as Punch’s cartoons, as seen in Figure 3.16. Another image reproduction technology that developed in the late part of the century was the halftone process. George Meisenbach ­­(1841­­–1912) patented a halftone process using single-lined screens, which were turned during exposure to produce cross-lined effects. Founding a company in London in 1884 to market the new technology, he achieved commercial success with this process, which he called relief halftone, and by the 1890s numerous journals were carrying halftone images (Twyman 1970: 32). An example of a print made by this method can be seen in Figure 3.17, an ILN cover illustration featuring Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919), the Scottish-American industrialist turned philanthropist. The images produced by this technique began to replace wood engravings, which had increasingly turned to imitating the tonal qualities of photographs in their ­facsimile-style illustrations. In 1901 George and Edward Dalziel admitted that before the turn of the century the standard of commercial process

120

rose roberto

Figure 3.16  Composite of Punch cartoons: From 1851, Volume 21, p. 35: ‘Awful Occurrence at an evening Party’; From 23 December 1871, p. 262: ‘Served out for staying Home’; From 20 June 1891, Volume 21, p. 35: ‘Feline Amenities’ (Courtesy of Sheffield University Library)

­­ engraving  was  now high enough that the days of professional wood engravers  was finally over, a point brought home in the data on wood  engraver ­­numbers compiled by Houston in Table 3.2 noted earlier. Among the reasons for the success of process engraving was its cheapness, compared with the time and expense inherent in wood engraving. Process engraving could cost a fifth of a similar wood engraving: as Michael Twyman comments, At that time the cost of an average quality wood engraving worked out from 3s to 5s a square inch, while letterpress half tones cost between 8d and 1s 6d … and those produced by the albumen and bitumen process between 2½ and 6d (with hand touching extra). (Twyman 1970: 32) One of the key reasons why such production costs were lower was that they relied less and less on the skilled labour and expertise required for wood engraving, and more and more on automated processes that required a minimal, basic training. For instance, it cost a great deal less to pay someone to mind the chemical baths that electrotypes were stored in, and operate the turning the voltage of the batteries, than to pay many wood engravers a decent salary to hand-produce a finished block image.

­

image-making industries and the press

121

Figure 3.17  1908 halftone print featuring Andrew Carnegie on the cover of the Illustrated London News (Courtesy of Sheffield University Library)

Conclusion Making copies of text and images had been possible since the age of Gutenberg, though contained by the limits that hand-press technology imposed on reproduction time and outputs. In the age of mechanical reproduction, starting in the late eighteenth century, it became possible to duplicate exact copies of images at ever-increasing speed and accuracy, and to distribute it to wider numbers of audiences (Benjamin 2000: 62–70). The nineteenth century witnessed an explosion of

122

rose roberto

image reproduction as a result. The greatest change came with the introduction of illustrated papers (Drucker and McVarish 2009: 119). Illustrated periodicals had several advantages for publishers. First, they could attract both the interest of people who could read and appreciated visual accompaniments, and people who were illiterate or semi-literate but could ’read’ pictures. There are many examples of writers and individuals inspired by the visual imagery accompanying published texts. For example, both a young Robert Louis Stevenson and an illiterate working-class boy recorded how struck they had been by their first encounters with printed images – seeing periodicals displayed in shop windows, for instance (Léger-St-Jean 2016: 111). Second, illustrations could serve as mementos, perhaps as images torn from magazines and kept by readers (Drucker and McVarish 2009: 127). Third, images provided additional information that supplemented texts. For example, the Penny Magazine provided captioned illustrations of different species of birds, famous people and different works of art that extended readers’ understanding of features on such subjects. Chambers’s Information for the People often published very technical diagrams to accompany science-based reportage, and papers such as Punch and the Graphic conveyed cultural information through visual reproduction of key events, personages and commodities. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, when certain taxes were still in operation, the devotion of a publicist was crucial for producing journals, periodicals and other press outputs. Innovative publications by key players such as Charles Knight and W. & R. Chambers used attractive layouts, quality articles and illustrations to appeal to new audiences and remain financially viable. By the second half of the nineteenth century, more printed pages had been created than in any century before, and there was a greater market for printed material in the form of books, posters, advertising and periodicals, which scholars and social commentators have argued ensured that images themselves became democratised (Drucker and McVarish 2009: 119). Furthermore, with the spread of images across class and society, the knowledge embedded in images affected the daily lives of a greater number of people. The nineteenth-century press and its images were shaped by the Victorian urban experience, by increasing knowledge and desire to define and control the world, and by wider design practices created to cater for burgeoning business needs in local, national and international markets. To meet newspaper deadlines, press images needed to be produced quickly and cheaply, and had to be striking enough to sell papers. Therefore, the emerging journalism industry adopted relief

­

image-making industries and the press

123

methods of illustration such as wood engraving, photomechanical processes and, eventually, photography, which could be integrated alongside texts. Even before photography was commercially viable, its growing influence on other methods of design and illustration production became evident, as photographic-like borders tracing illustrations became standard. Engravers increasingly moved away from artistically stylised subject depiction towards images with linear and tonal codes, striving to achieve verisimilitude. The cultural historian William Mills Ivins commented that ‘pictorial statements convey complex information in a succinct way that description from words cannot’ (Ivins 1953: 60–1). He concluded that exactly repeatable pictorial statements have relevance not just to the fields of art and art history, but also to technical fields such as engineering, medicine, science and law (Ivins 1969: 3). Images encapsulate knowledge, whether they are illustrating detailed machinery, the internal organs of the human body or abstract concepts such as geographic maps and governmental infrastructure. With the proliferation of images, it became possible for people from different walks of society to gain information and educate themselves, to enter professional fields, and to use complex knowledge to make informed decisions affecting society (Drucker and McVarish 2009: 141). Of course, in order for this democratisation of knowledge to grow and flourish, the right environment had to be in place to enable images to circulate to diverse groups in British society. Eric de Maré writes that two key innovations that can be said to represent the nineteenth century were the steam train and the woodblock. Both innovations captured the fast pace of life that was possible, as never before, in the nineteenth century, and both represented major British industries that helped power the move to modernity (de Maré 1980: 7). They were also curiously related: technical drawings were needed by engineers to build trains and train lines, and printed railway timetables and engraved maps helped people navigate their journeys. Customers who travelled encountered posters advertising destinations and railway stalls that sold travel guides, periodicals and newspapers. When the ‘taxes on knowledge’ were removed, new print-based industries began to emerge in their wake. The field of journalism became a capitalistic enterprise, and, with the rise of this industry, an adjacent industry that provided illustrations in the form of wood engraving emerged. This chapter has outlined some of the freedoms in the nineteenth century that allowed ambitious people driven by a sense of purpose to create new visual industries, seemingly from scratch. While many of the wood engravers-turned-entrepreneurs

124

rose roberto

built on knowledge and skills handed down to them, the last decades of the nineteenth century heralded a change in the visual aesthetics of images. There was a growing desire for verisimilitude – the quality of appearing true or real, influenced by the development of photography in the second half of the century. Remaining commercial wood engravers persisted and survived such incursions through to the end of the century by imitating photographs, or retouching blocks that were initially produced by photographic methods. Knowledge was spread by images that could be easily reproduced, and this visual culture touched many people’s lives, allowing individuals from across the social spectrum to access and enjoy information, art and life in visual form. Wood engraving rose to prominence in the midcentury as a cheap form for making images, then essentially declined when the periodical press adapted new technology and found ways to make image production even cheaper.

Chapter Four

READERSHIP AND DISTRIBUTION Paul Raphael Rooney

T

he significant expansion in press readership that occurred throughout the nineteenth century was the product of a number of key societal and publishing transformations. Ready and habitual engagement with periodicals, especially titles attuned to the envisaged reading needs and priced in line with the discretionary incomes of their particular target audiences, became possible for greater numbers of readers. This was visible in the increasing diversity in the marketplace strata ranging from expensive quarterly journals like the Westminster Review (1824–1914), targeting a well-to-do erudite readership, through to cheap ephemeral titles, some trading in racy or sensationalist stories of crime, aimed primarily at working-class readers. The resulting reading experiences facilitated by this newly acquired immersion in a more diverse print media culture arguably played a major part in shaping the frames of reference, ideologies and interests of the consumers of these newspapers and magazines. Excavating and reconstructing these encounters has been a major part of research into the nineteenth-century press, with pioneering contributions from the likes of Laurel Brake, Margaret Beetham, Kate Jackson and Andrew King at the forefront of such recovery endeavours (Beetham 2000; Brake 2001; Jackson 2001; King 2004). The work of these scholars and others have illuminated how feeding a thirst for news, satisfying a desire for recreation and amusement, and taking advantage of the opportunity to acquire new knowledge, along with gaining a potential worldview or validation of one’s identity, were some of the leading motivations driving press readership. This chapter maps the ways in which several of the century’s major sociocultural changes, coupled with the rise of print culture producers and purveyors whose business models, were predicated on the distribution 127

128

paul raphael rooney

and dissemination of print media titles among the middle and working classes. Issues of accessibility are at the heart of this topic. First, beginning with the marked rise in literacy rates and reading abilities, engendered in part by enhanced educational provisions, I examine the kinds of cheap press titles specialising in the provision of accessible, engaging content that sprang from the growth in readership. These publications aimed to find particular favour with emerging reader demographics, and this tier of the press arguably reached its apotheosis with the newspapers and periodicals started by George Newnes and Alfred Harmsworth in the 1880s and 1890s, such as Tit-Bits (1881–1984) and Answers (1888–1955). In light of the high circulation this pair of penny-press titles enjoyed, which would have served to ensure they figured in the print culture experiences of millions of readers, Answers and Tit-Bits warrant examination as key examples of the sort of publications that achieved wide readership in this period. I therefore look at them as a case study in this chapter’s first section. Second, I consider where and how readers could acquire press publications. The development of a nationwide railway network across Britain and Ireland was obviously instrumental to the growth of the press in terms of the ability to transport printed matter swiftly using the country’s emerging rail networks. Equally important in this press expansion, however, was the establishment of a network of railway ­­station–based bookstalls selling reading matter to train passengers. Such bookstalls had begun operations in the 1850s and were administered by firms like W. H. Smith & Son in England and Wales, John Menzies in Scotland and Eason in Ireland. In the latter decades of the century another and eventually equally important consumer space where readers could purchase periodicals emerged with the spread of ‘CTNs’, or confectionery-tobacconist-newsagent shops. I aim to shed light on the role these outlets served. Third, the nature of the principal reading spaces that afforded audiences the opportunity to consume periodicals and newspapers is an equally important access consideration. Public transport was (and remains) an obvious theatre for reading newspapers and magazines, but equally significant were other venues, such as coffee houses and library reading rooms, which did not require the individual purchase of periodical titles and conceivably facilitated a wider and more voracious kind of reading. Finally, I consider the larger question of how scholars of the ­­nineteenth-century press can conceivably recover these kinds of reading experiences. I explore (and model) a number of possible approaches

­

readership and distribution

129

and concepts, with the potential to advance the study of historical readers’ encounters with such publications. In light of this methodological discussion, I then conclude by considering some future research directions that might be pursued in terms of press readership studies.

Literacy and the Late Nineteenth-Century Cheap Press Historians have long sought to confront the challenge of quantifying both the nineteenth-century progress of the expansion in people’s ability to read, and in turn gauging the standard of reading capabilities developed by those whose literacy was recently acquired. Research by scholars such as David Mitch and David Vincent and has shown how marriage registers and census returns can shed a certain degree of light on macro trends in literacy development (Mitch 1992; Vincent 1993). It would be short-sighted to interpret the growth in literacy through a Whiggish lens as one of mass-educational uplift culminating in near-universal literacy that saw the development of a reading public equipped to engage confidently with print media. Characterisation in these terms risks oversimplifying a diverse century-long phenomenon marked by geographical, socio-economic and institutional variances. Richard Altick in his seminal study of the rise of the nineteenth-century English mass reading public acknowledges the difficulties in gauging with any level of certainty the extent of literacy levels, given the limited and less than concrete evidence upon which historians are forced to rely (Altick 1957: 170). The decennial census returns data for England and Wales, spanning 1841–1900, that Altick includes track a gradual growth in male and female literacy of between 5 and 10 per cent each decade, with rates rising from 50 and 60 per cent in the 1840s to levels in the high nineties for both sexes by the century’s end (ibid.: 171). Altick also argues that the continuation of this upward trend was secured by increased governmental intervention in educational provision from the second half of the century onwards (ibid.: 171–2). The data that Vincent includes in his examination of literacy growth points to similar rates and trends, but also highlights the intergenerational divide in literacy levels between parents and children, which could be as high as 20 per cent, and which was the consequence of the relative improvement in educational opportunities over the course of later decades (Vincent 1993: 26). Akenson documents a comparable but generally slower evolution in Ireland, with illiteracy falling from 53 per cent in 1841 to 33 per cent in 1871, largely on the back of the developments in primary education (Akenson 1989: 537). Assessments of this kind are, needless to say, subject to the usual caveats about the potential

130

paul raphael rooney

gulf between the simple fact of not being classified as illiterate, as well as the varied nature of students’ reading skills upon leaving education, and the reality of readers’ abilities to engage. The diversity in the print culture consumption of the ‘common reader’ (to use Altick’s term), emerges very strikingly in Jonathan Rose’s landmark study of British working-class reading. Rose recovers an abundance of histories of real-life readers that illustrates the demographic’s rich, varied reading experiences that often originated in autodidacticism and were in no way limited to the sort of material that singled out newly literate readers as its target audience (Rose 2001). Opportunities for elementary school attendance for children from poorer backgrounds began to improve somewhat by the 1830s, with the implementation of an initial limited level of state support for voluntary day schools. The educational outcomes for students attending these institutions in this period, which were often run by religious bodies, or indeed through private ‘dame schools’ charging modest fees, were understandably uneven, and even decidedly lacklustre amid a climate of restricted funding and often ineffective oversight of teaching standards. Central government’s 1862–3 institution of a Payment by Results system for elementary schools receiving state subsidisation via the Revised Code was one approach to this problem of inadequate resources and uneven teaching standards. However, this kind of strategy risked engendering a climate of rote learning pilloried by Charles Dickens in Hard Times (1854), which was perhaps at odds with fostering the kind of well-developed, versatile and creative reading abilities conducive to confident press readership. State intervention arguably culminated with the Elementary Education Act of 1870, which made national education for children aged five to thirteen compulsory. Aligned with an overarching board school oversight systems, it was the prelude to farreaching reforms in primary education provision and management. While alumni of these new institutions had the opportunity to develop a capacity for reading not enjoyed by previous generations, there were nonetheless limits to the reading horizons potentially afforded by this education. This was reflected in the kind of periodicals that gained the greatest traction in the ensuing years. Nevertheless, this legislation, often referred to as the Forster Act after its sponsor, William Forster, marked something of a watershed for nineteenth-century press efforts to capitalise on emerging demographics via cheap journals. Expansion in the potential market for periodical literature that had taken root as the century advanced had seen enterprising publishers and literary entrepreneurs launch new titles aimed at satisfying new audiences’ appetite for reading.

­

readership and distribution

131

The kind of reading matter offered by the various publications ­­ targeting these audiences, and the value of this material, in turn reflected larger century-long debates surrounding the use, misuse or even perceived squandering of literacy by specific groups. Predictably, female readership of the press, and anxieties surrounding potentially corrupting reading matter, was a prominent current in this discourse, as Kate Flint and Jennifer Phegley have explored (Flint 1995; Phegley 2004). Throughout the early and mid-nineteenth centuries the diet of reading offered by cheap periodicals attuned to the appetites of new readers in search of print to occupy leisure time reflected the competing calls on audiences’ time, attention and discretionary income. Publishing houses such as Cassell and Chambers developed weekly miscellanies such as the Working Man’s Friend (1850–1), Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper (1853–67) and Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal (1832–1956), designed to appeal to more serious-minded or autodidactic readers in search of edifying material that promised to further advance their education. Fiction-driven penny publications such as the London Journal (1845–83) served audiences in search of recreational reading, offering amusement, escapism and excitement. Dickens’s weekly twopenny miscellanies, Household Words (1850–9) and All the Year Round (1859–95), offered a more catholic class of reading experience. These journals combined serial fiction often by major novelists with enlightening journalism that covered topics spanning political economy, travel writing, history and biography, with the potential to inform and broaden readers’ understanding of society. Along with the readership of mass-circulation titles of this sort, press-reading experiences in this period could also run to more niche areas, reflecting the particular interests and outlooks of diverse reading communities. The nineteenth century saw the circulation of a wide variety of newspapers and magazines that targeted rigidly defined and specialist interest demographics. Followers of particular political ideologies such as Chartism, Fenianism, socialism or feminism could consume titles produced from the standpoint of their discrete ideological perspectives. In addition, expatriate readers living overseas had their own special publications tailored to provide them with specially constructed digests of news from ‘home’, with these titles frequently consumed in communal locations such as social clubs, libraries and army common rooms. (See Chapters 7 and 8 of this volume for further commentary on this topic.) This diversity in the print media landscape grew richer still as the century advanced and the prospective press-reading public grew. Later decades saw a plethora of specialist-interest titles come

132

paul raphael rooney

into print aiming to appeal to the reading interests of groups such as cycling enthusiasts, gardeners, nurses and clerks. In light of the high circulation and resulting ubiquity that late nineteenth-century penny-press titles such as Tit-Bits and Answers enjoyed, they serve as strong case studies for examining the role that the press could serve for audiences of the period. Such papers were on one level the descendants of the cheap miscellanies of earlier decades, with their patchwork structure of writing on a variety of subjects. Rather than fusing multi-page or even multi-column articles, however, the Newnes and Harmsworth variants synthesised bite-sized items with multiple, succinct pieces, often featuring in a single column across the three-column page layout of such journals. Writing on the history of George Newnes’s Tit-Bits, the original of the species of this print media stream characterised by light and improving subject matter and audience-galvanising publicity campaigns, Kate Jackson highlighted the publication’s singling out of a target audience, consisting of ‘a lower-middle and aspiring middle class, largely commuting, often salary-earning, self-helping public’ (Jackson 2001: 202). Concise, readily digestible content, complete with an issue-wide use of subheadings and borders, afforded undemanding reading matter that was diverting, skimmable and scannable. This kind of accessible print media had an obvious appeal, particularly for alumni of the board schools, in search of wholesome leisure time amusement after the working week. New issues were published on a Saturday, coinciding with the beginning of the weekend recreation period for clerks, typists, shopworkers and others in the black-coated or white-blouse demographic. Publications of this sort additionally offered untaxing mental occupation for commuting during the week. Jackson’s work on the media empire that Newnes built offers considerable insight into the diet of media consumed by Tit-Bits readers, but this wider penny stratum of the press marketplace has yet to be the subject of sustained discussion. Cultural innovation that succeeds will inevitably attract imitators. However, the substantial average weekly circulation Answers attained, which reportedly reached one million copies by the early 1890s, suggests a publication worthy of examination in its own right (Humpherys 2009: 19). Although Harmsworth’s paper modified the purely reader ­­correspondence-based niche in which it positioned itself upon its launch, audience interaction remained a core part of the title’s brand – reprinted letters that followed a series of discussion threads figuring prominently in this publication. The different subtitles the periodical employed in its early years, first, A Weekly Journal of Instruction

­

readership and distribution

133

and Jokes and, subsequently, A Weekly Journal of Instruction and Amusement for Home and Train, further clarify the hybrid compositional remit charted by this paper. Both education and entertainment were promised to regular readers of this publication. Like many papers, there was a consistent structure to the way in which an individual issue of Answers was organised. Its distinctive orange wrappers, given over to advertisements, soon became a key material part of its brand. The character of advertisements that featured in the publication offer some insight into the editorial vision of the journal’s target audience (see Plate 3). The categories of products and services promoted in this peripheral zone during the late 1880s and early 1890s suggest an implied readership that included both genders, with much space given over to advertisements for both male and female clothing, cosmetics and/ or toiletries. Brand-named soap was an especially prominent presence here, suggesting a demographic for whom cleanliness was thought to be a priority, a concept by extension bound up with late Victorian socio-economic categorisations and ideologies such as respectability. Moreover, the blend of promotional notices presented in such popular journals during this period suggested a body of consumers with certain preferences. Minor luxuries such as tobacco and cocoa were promoted heavily. Reasonably priced leisure outlets that could be enjoyed in the home were also publicised, with both sheet music sellers and publishers of cheap reading matter among the businesses promoting their wares. Small-scale and investment-piece signifiers of status such as handkerchiefs, pocket watches, watch chains and costume jewellery were additionally advertised. The assortment of advertisers who elected to court prospective customers via the pages of Answers underscores the make-up of the primary intended readership demographic, consisting as it did of a group with a certain level of disposable income actively engaged in late nineteenth-century consumer culture (see Plate 4). Beneath the wrappers, the front pages of Answers proper were given over to lighter, often humorous, and crisper material, with the more informative and comparatively denser items in the body of the newspaper. This suggests a ‘sugar-coating’ of sorts, where readers were drawn in by the foregrounded amusing content and then offered a more edifying counterpoint to this amusement. The more obviously informational or semi-scholarly content was a definite weekly presence. In the early 1890s Answers even offered its readers the opportunity to attain certification in foundational subjects such as French and Mathematics by completing exams in these fields (Answers, 14 May 1892: 449).

134

paul raphael rooney

Although it is easy to question the actual academic or professional value of the credentials on offer here, the publication’s regular advertising of these assessment opportunities suggests a commitment to facilitating individual endeavours of self-improvement. There was also a discernible effort to refresh and sustain reader interest in one of the regular uplifting features that centred on the presentation of bite-sized nuggets of information by continually updating the catchy segment titles like ‘Scraps of Knowledge’, ‘Knowledge Nuts’ or ‘Facts in a Few Words’. The curriculum that Answers set forth for its audience also embraced more practical and functional areas. For instance, items such as the occasional series of pieces entitled ‘To Those About To Marry’, along with the extended discussion in the correspondence column debating the necessary level of income a couple should have before they married, represented a potentially valuable source of relevant life advice for Answers readers. In addition, there was a potential transnational or British world element to the Answers readership, given the prominently displayed notices attesting to the publication’s willingness to distribute copies of the newspaper to subscribers situated anywhere in the world. A reader writing to the publication in 1892, who described himself as ‘having [in recent times] visited every part of the globe’, detailed observing the journal being read in a number of locations throughout Asia and the Middle East (Answers, 6 August 1892: 193).

Purveyors of the Nineteenth-Century Press There were several key domestic distribution channels associated with the nineteenth-century press. Bookstalls situated on railway station platforms, specialising in the circulation of reading matter, were one of the key sites of print culture dissemination during the mid- and late Victorian periods. A key purveyor was W. H. Smith & Son (see Figure 4.1), which from its humble beginnings in 1848 rose to become the predominant bookstall operator in England and Wales and initially, Ireland, until an 1886 management buyout saw this Irish arm become an independent concern trading as Eason & Son (Wilson 1985). The firm of John Menzies developed an equivalent level of dominance in the Scottish railway bookstall trade across the 1860s and 1870s. They pursued a similar business model trading in reading matter, particularly newspapers and periodicals, to build up a network of stalls the majority of which were in the vicinity of the large urban centres of Edinburgh and Glasgow (Colclough 2007). The network of outlets that Smith constructed in England, numbering almost 600

­

readership and distribution

135

Figure 4.1  W. H. Smith railway bookstall, 1893 (Courtesy of David Finkelstein)

stalls by the 1880s, achieved near-nationwide geographical coverage, and these units became an important conduit of press publications during this era. Scholars such as Stephen Colclough have complicated the traditional account of the firm’s acquisition of a monopoly in the railway reading trade (Colclough 2004). Earlier, long-standing histories advanced a narrative characterising Smith as an agent of cultural purification that displaced independent inept vendors, who were in certain cases inaccurately framed as dealing exclusively in racy and insubstantial reading matter. Myth-making of this kind aside, what is clear, nonetheless, is that the Smith network of bookstalls played an important role in providing many commuters and leisure travellers with print media titles that satisfied their reading needs. These included, obviously, consumers’ immediate requirements during rail travel, but also titles for consumption in other reading spheres such as the home. An 1892 article profiling the internal workings of the firm, described the systems by which the newspaper department, situated in Smith’s London headquarters, supplied the units of the bookstall network

136

paul raphael rooney

with the daily and weekly press titles that were a key part of their trade (Ludgate Monthly, January 1892: 163–4). The centrepiece of this distribution system was a finely tuned, early-morning, sorting operation by a dedicated team of Smith employees. This centred on the daily assembly of packages at 4 a.m. (earlier still, at 3 a.m., on Fridays and Saturdays to manage the larger volume of weekly titles released then), containing the requisite quantities of the latest numbers of newspaper and magazine issues for dispatch to outlets both metropolitan and provincial (see Figure 4.2). Horse-drawn vans for road journeys, and/ or special newspaper rail carriages, were then used to transport these packages to their intended stalls at assorted locations in the network, for arrival in time for the units’ morning opening (ibid.: 163). At the point that these packages reached their relevant destinations, the responsibility for disseminating the publications Smith was circulating shifted to the managers and assistants charged with administering the bookstalls. While the managerial staff at the helm of the newspaper department decided centrally on the precise mix of titles on sale at the various Smith outlets, the choices that Smith consumers

Figure 4.2  Newspaper packing for dispatch, late nineteenth century (Courtesy of Edward Clark Collection, Edinburgh Napier University Library)

­

readership and distribution

137

potentially made were also influenced by more immediate local factors from the less high-ranking parts of the organisation. The effect on bookstall patrons’ print media selections of the interactions between stallworkers and customers could be considerable, especially when the latter sought recommendations from Smith employees for a suitable magazine or newspaper to while away a journey. ‘Newsboys’, the young men and women responsible for delivering publications to subscribers’ homes as well as for undertaking the more workaday bookstall tasks, were another important actor in customers’ interactions with the Smith operation (Pocklington 1921: 93–5). Their presence on railway platforms, selling the latest copies of the leading newspapers, offered a parallel dissemination channel for travellers who had not been inclined to call at the bookstall, or those too time-pressed to pay a visit there. The input of Smith workers on the ground could figure also through the particular arrangement of allocated stock that the more senior workers fashioned at individual outlets. These decisions could foreground or draw the eye towards certain publications over others. There were obviously varying degrees of potential for this sort of merchandising, depending on the kind of outlet it was disseminated through. Opportunities were likely most plentiful at the large units in London and in large urban stations with their wide array of titles, but somewhat more limited at smaller branches in more remote locations, which were stocked with a narrower range of reading matter. Strong, personalised customer service, coupled with the importance of an attractive, carefully considered presentation of one’s wares, emerge as key considerations within the limited amount of extant writing from bookstall employees discussing the internal workings of the trade (The Art of Bookselling 1907). The more general character of the stalls as retail sites is also important here, and extant images of nineteenth-century bookstalls offer a certain level of insight into the kind of consumer spaces visitors would have encountered. These official company photographs, as well as illustrations from the press, certainly suggest that the panorama of advertising that bedecked the units, which very often included posters for particular press titles, could potentially also influence the purchasing decisions of readers patronising the network. Smith’s Irish operation was slower to achieve an equivalent nationwide presence, given that the growth of a countrywide railway network in Ireland took longer to develop. Yet, as the number and coverage of lines stretching across Ireland expanded throughout the 1850s and 1860s in part on the strength of post-Famine labour initiatives, Smith

138

paul raphael rooney

began to register a more visible presence at stations beyond its initially Dublin-centric remit. Ireland’s nascent tourism sector, which had emerged during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and centred largely on famed scenic attractions such as the Lakes of Killarney and the Giant’s Causeway, coupled with the more general appeal of the beauty of the country’s landscape, was bolstered by the expansion of the country’s railway infrastructure. Passengers travelling for leisure were thus an important potential constituency of the Eason customer base. Charles Eason was the key force in overseeing Smith’s Irish expansion. William Henry Smith had dispatched Eason, formerly the manager of the firm’s Manchester Victoria bookstall, to Dublin in 1856 to administer the house’s Irish interests, which primarily centred on the capital at this time. Eason’s responsibilities augmented considerably over the course of the three subsequent decades, as an equivalent Irish distribution and dissemination operation headquartered in Dublin took shape. When indications suggested in 1886 that Smith’s burgeoning political career would precipitate a conflict of interest with the firm’s Irish dealings, Eason engineered an effective management buyout that saw an autonomous concern emerge, run in conjunction with his son, Charles, and trading under the name of Charles Eason & Son. Aside from Louis Cullen’s 1989 history of the Eason business, which, although published and produced in conjunction with the firm itself, transcends many of the inherent difficulties of the house history genre of print culture studies, and some incidental discussion in The Oxford History of the Irish Book, this important entity in the dissemination of nineteenth-century culture has yet to be subject of in-depth study. Although the status of the Irish venture shifted from offshoot of a centralised operation, administered primarily from London, to an autonomous concern, Eason’s origins, coupled with the predominantly dependent nature of the Irish print culture sector, served to ensure that a significant proportion of the press titles on sale came from English sources. In a 1936 address to staff on the occasion of the house’s golden jubilee, Charles Eason junior surveyed the state of the Irish domestic press landscape that confronted his father upon his arrival in Dublin in 1856 (Eason & Son Limited 1886–1936 1936: 30). There were three Dublin daily newspapers for distribution, the Freeman’s Journal, the Daily Express and Saunders’ Newsletter, while a fourth title, the Irish Times, began publishing in 1859. The weekly editions of the Irish Times and the Freeman were apparently strong sellers for the business, while the Weekly News (later the Irish Catholic), Young Ireland and The Nation also sold in significant quantities. Eason’s highest-selling

­

readership and distribution

139

English weekly was the Weekly Budget, which reached a circulation high of 10,000 copies during this trading window. Charles Eason junior also singled out for special mention the significant impact registered by titles of the Newnes and Harmsworth stable of publications. He notes that Tit-Bits was compositionally encoded to find favour with emerging reader demographics, while the strong visual dimension that characterised its Newnes stable mate, the Strand Magazine, as well as the rise of photographic content within the press more generally, were important developments in the trade. Interestingly, Eason also observed that ‘the total sales of Irish publications through us always exceeded that of English papers’ (Eason & Son Limited, 1886–1936 1936: 30). Details of this kind, from print culture sellers, have the potential to yield unrivalled insight into predominant trends in press readership. It is not surprising therefore that when Wilkie Collins was looking to map the state of cheap print culture consumption for ‘The Unknown Public’, his famed 1858 Household Words article, small shopkeepers who ran neighbourhood newsagent and tobacconist outlets were among the sources Collins consulted for this quasi-anthropological exploration of the cheap press. Collins’s ‘unearthing’ of a stream of penny journals that were a notable part of these sellers’ business underscored the role played by shops where print media was not the sole variety of consumer goods on offer in facilitating audiences’ engagement with papers and recreational reading matter. While the bookstalls often sold other travel-related items such as rugs, the trade in reading matter was essentially their raison d’être. Distributors of the press from the more ‘general store’ quarter of the market, however, assumed an increasing importance as the nineteenth century advanced. Confectionery, tobacconist and newsagent shops, or CTNs, notably those located in the expanding suburbs surrounding towns and cities, as well as their rural counterparts, became prominent agents in the circulation of newspapers and magazines. Given that many of these businesses operated as independent sole traders, the histories of individual outlets were not necessarily archived in a way that the records of a large entity like Smith were preserved. Their operations were, however, bound up with Smith, given that the firm was one of the leading wholesale suppliers of print media titles for shops of this kind. Parcels for delivery to these traders, filling a specific order of titles, much like the packages dispatched to individual bookstalls, would soon become part of Smith’s distribution operations (World’s Work, October 1903: 482). The Newsagents and Advertisers’ Record, the official trade journal of the retail Newsagents and Booksellers Union, a body that was founded

140

paul raphael rooney

in 1891 in a sign that the marketplace presence of these vendors was beginning to achieve critical mass, offers the most tangible insights into such distributors’ activities (King 2009e: 452). The kinds of topics addressed in this publication are indicative of the commercial and trade questions that exercised business people operating in this sector. This was a decade when the proliferation of the press gained momentum, and Sunday newspaper reading became an increasingly widespread practice, encompassing socio-economic groups whose immersion in print media was a relatively recent development that was not always viewed in certain quarters as a uniformly positive (Kamper 2004: 89). While Collins’s attempts to elicit insights from the shopkeepers of the late 1850s did not fully resolve the sorts of questions he aimed to address (particularly surrounding the distinguishing qualities of the assortment of cheap journals spotlighted), other writers looking to shed light on this area of the press marketplace also turned to these sellers as part of their examinations of audiences’ habits. J. H. Haslam’s influential, early twentieth-century examination of working-class reading in Manchester adopted a similar line of enquiry, canvassing the newsagents of various districts in the city regarding the preferences exhibited by their customers. There are a number of familiar currents to the perspectives that emerged from Haslam’s conversations; for example, a marked appetite for escapist light fiction circulating in penny editions was identified as a key characteristic of this demographic’s reading (Haslam 1906). Other sellers stressed the major demand for sporting papers, as well as fashion magazines, juxtaposing this with the low take-up of publications trading in out-and-out self-improvement (ibid.). This offers useful context regarding the success of hybridised titles, which interspersed engagingly presented edification alongside entertaining content, published by the Newnes­­–Harmsworth school. It also highlighted the role of the press as a provider of leisure. A surprising antipathy to political journals or left-wing publications among press consumers emerged from several of Haslam’s exchanges with Manchester vendors. Seasonal variances in audiences’ engagement with the press were also highlighted in his fieldwork, with traders citing a summertime fall-off in audiences’ purchasing of newspapers and periodicals, which contrasted with a marked escalation of demand for weekly titles like Tit-Bits and other light reading during weekends of inclement weather (Haslam 1906). It seems possible that opportunities to take an excursion train to the seaside, or an adjacent pleasure spot during the summer months, might well see consumers satisfy their need for reading matter at the railway bookstall.

­

readership and distribution

141

Reading Spaces and the Nineteenth-Century Press The experience of rail travel, whether habitual, as part of the working week’s commute, or periodic, with an occasional leisure trip, created opportunities for reading that did not go untapped by nineteenthcentury press editors, publishers and press entrepreneurs. The sort of reading environment that readers experienced while travelling by train, coupled with the recreational mindset in which holiday or daytrip journeys were undertaken, meant that the periodical and certain categories of publication in particular were especially well placed to find favour with this in-transit audience. Readers’ encounters with these publications played out against the backdrop of the noise of the moving train, as well the din of fellow passengers’ conversations, that came with travelling aboard crowded morning or evening trains and weekend excursion carriages. This meant that titles that did not necessarily demand deep or sustained mental engagement were an attractive prospect for such reading spaces. However, publications still needed to offer sufficiently transporting reading matter that would counteract the tedium and, for some passengers, the anxiety of railway travel. The miscellany, with its assortment of diverse pieces on an array of topics, offered a varied reading experience where each constituent part could be consumed piecemeal. The 1860s, which saw the rise of the shilling monthlies such as the Cornhill Magazine, as well as the 1880s–1890s that saw sixpenny monthly magazines in the vein of the Strand Magazine, and penny weekly papers of the Tit-Bits school coming to the fore, were the periods of greatest innovation and expansion in this domain of the print media market. The latter wave of publications in particular, singled out the railway traveller as key consumers for targeting. Papers that audiences could read for current intelligence, where information was packaged in an accessible succinct style, but also magazines and periodicals that offered amusement, entertainment or narrative escapism, had much that endeared them to audiences in search of reading matter suitable for commuting or travel. Moreover, the daily, weekly or monthly release of new issues, which was the hallmark of the periodical genre, was ideal for carving out an habitual space within the travel routines of rail passengers commuting on a regular basis. The sense that print media engagement engendered by railway travel represented an ‘unthinking’, or even detrimental, approach to reading, which dulled the senses and did little to uplift the intellects of audiences, was one of the more pessimistic appraisals of cultural consumption within this reading space (Temple Bar,

142

paul raphael rooney

September 1874: 254–5). The Newnes–Harmsworth school of New Journalism was cited as emblematic of this wasteful, unhealthy kind of press reading. One writer of the period painted the following unflattering picture: But pass down a corridor-train and watch the faces of them that read in it their magazines, newspapers, novels, Tit-Bits, Scraps, Answers, and threepennyworths of short stories; their paragraphs of varieties, and four-line American jokes; their cricket scores and sporting news, and columns of advertisements. Though money and place should be their object, and gambling their intention, yet is the narcotic influence plainly to be seen in their eyes and lips – their very expression is half asleep, and here is the stage far down on the path of Nirvana, whither they have arrived. (Speaker, 19 November 1898: 600) The discourse surrounding other key press-reading spaces did not necessarily elicit commentary this trenchant, as these areas could be enlisted as alternatives to less wholesome forms of recreation. Markman Ellis’s history of the coffee house as a social institution, underscores how the association between these recreational spaces and press readership had existed since the beginnings of these establishments in the late seventeenth century. Customers in search of hot beverages were also afforded the opportunity to consume communal copies of ‘newsbooks’, the forerunners of modern newspapers, which were laid on for patrons by the establishments’ proprietors (Ellis 2004: 65). While the coffee houses had lost much of their erstwhile vigour as social hubs of conversation and ideas by the nineteenth century, they remained a notable venue that afforded less advantaged ­­readers, ­­working-class men in particular, access to newspapers and ­­periodicals, in return for the one or two pence cost of a cup of coffee (see Figure 4.3). The obvious attraction of these spaces was that they provided the opportunity to sample a variety of publications, and to read widely, taking in an assortment of titles. This meant that patrons’ press encounters were not merely limited to a single title they themselves had purchased, or indeed titles within the immediate confines of their disposable income limits. A number of coffee houses apparently even functioned as repositories of the press, boasting extensive collections of back issues of individual titles that could facilitate the reader who was perhaps in search of information about a particular subject (Leisure Hour, 21 March 1853: 187). W. H. Smith’s Newspaper department also included a Back

­

readership and distribution

143

Figure 4.3  ‘A Coffee House’, from Leisure Hour, May 1863 (Courtesy of David Finkelstein)

Number section, with special responsibility for handling enquiries seeking copies of old issues of publications from the recent and the more distant past (Pocklington 1921: 33). The sense that the sustenance, both potable and mental, on offer at coffee houses represented a more wholesome counterpoint to public houses, trading in corrupting alcohol, was a key theme in contemporary commentary about these fixtures of the urban environment (Reach 1844: 293–4). Writing in 1844, Angus B. Reach observed of the London establishments’ clientele that

144

paul raphael rooney

the majority of the guests are working men; fustian jackets are plentiful … there are respectable men; hard-working and longheaded fellows, who think while they hammer, and read when the hammering is over; who have an opinion of their own, and can express it; who can feel deeply, as well as think clearly, and who can bring a homely philosophy to the forge and the loom. (ibid.: 247) Certain, more economically run establishments serving such clientele were given to sectioning off or subdividing the most current copy of individual issues of a paper, into segments in such a way that it enabled multiple patrons to consume a single copy of a publication at any given time (Leisure Hour, 21 March 1853: 187–8). This, presumably, engendered a somewhat diluted reading experience in certain cases, but also suggests an intriguing class of remediation of the intended periodical organisational fabric. Coffee houses circulating reading matter had become a fixture in Dublin not long after their emergence in London, and were an important eighteenth-century site of print culture dissemination that often had clear commercial and spatial links with publishing houses and print culture enterprises (Abbas 2014). However, the Dublin coffee houses’ pre-eminence as social spaces had declined somewhat by the nineteenth century, as public houses and clubs supplanted them as the city’s most popular recreational venues. While the coffee houses had contributed in part to the democratisation of access to print in this period, the growth of free public libraries represented an even more significant development for the press, given that many of these institutions had papers in their holdings, or even dedicated reading rooms where patrons could access current issues of periodicals. The passage of the first public library legislation in 1850 was an important event that with time saw many local authorities across England and Wales, particularly those in urban areas, develop publicly funded facilities offering readers complimentary access not just to books but to a host of print media material (Kelly 1973: 468–81). While libraries that held this sort of material had had a presence in the print culture landscape since the eighteenth century, the precursors of these free municipal libraries were subscription-based, thus limiting their clientele to more affluent socio-economic groups. Charles Mudie’s rise to become the dominant player in the circulating library market, which began contemporaneously with early public library initiatives, created a certain degree of democratisation in library access with his innovative annual subscription rate of one guinea. The fact remained that Mudie’s clientele was limited to the better-off middle and upper

­

readership and distribution

145

classes who could afford this kind of discretionary expenditure, which emphasises the significance of the free libraries for those of more modest backgrounds. It was only with the 1899 foundation of Boots Booklovers’ Library, as well as the ‘tuppenny’ libraries run from general shops and some CTNs, that patronage of commercial libraries became a reality among a wider variety of socio-economic groups (McAleer 1992: 49). Offering a detailed argument for the social utility of public libraries, W. Stanley Jevons stressed how ‘a cheerful, well-warmed, welllighted sitting-room, supplied with newspapers and magazine tables’, could serve as a tremendous advantage for readers whose circumstances might otherwise limit their capacity to engage with the press (Contemporary Review, March 1881: 387). A letter writer to the Academy objecting to an editorial the publication had featured, which had suggested the exclusion of newspapers from free libraries was a welcome development, particularly given that the emergence of cheap titles had all but universalised press readership, developed Jevons’s view further, by noting the important and necessary reading environment that libraries offered. He (or she) argued that: how many are there among the poorer classes whose homes consist of one or two small dark rooms shared by noisy children and others where reading a newspaper or anything else is a difficult, almost impossible task, and to whom a spacious, comfortable, well-lighted reading room, to whom they have free admission is a great boon. (Cotgreave, The Academy, 22 September 1906: 290) The correspondent also emphasised the vital service that libraries subscribing to a selection of papers provided to those seeking employment, as job seekers could cast a significantly wider net by searching the notices of a cross section of titles, and not just those of a single publication that those in such circumstances could likely afford. There was an unavoidable male slant to the class of implied library patron spotlighted in such discussions, which did not necessarily align with the experience of female readers. Demarcation by gender was often a feature of this reading space. The role of ladies’ press reading rooms in public libraries has been explored by Chris Baggs, who has traced the gendering of press readership these facilities inscribed and the enhancement of female opportunities for reading they cultivated, albeit within certain parameters (Baggs 2005). Baggs chronicles their development from the 1870s to the early years of the twentieth century, as the free municipal libraries grew more widespread. Drawing on extant records, Baggs illustrates the prevalence of women’s magazines,

146

paul raphael rooney

religious serials, fashion magazines, more general titles such as the Illustrated London News, the Cornhill and the Strand magazine in this space, but also underscores the conspicuous absence of more serious literary and cultural titles such as the Athenaeum or Blackwood’s and, significantly, the general daily newspapers (ibid.).

Recovering Nineteenth-Century Press Reading Experiences Discussions of reading spaces, where audiences could choose from a selection of periodicals and newspapers, even reading multiple different titles if their time permitted, underlines the fact that readers’ encounters with an issue of a periodical did not occur in a textual vacuum. These encounters were informed by an array of texts from within the zone of the particular paper or periodical in question, other titles read contemporaneously, and the wider print culture environment. Reconstructing this aspect of historical consumption presents something of a challenge for the press historian, and it is arguably necessary to look beyond a straightforwardly contextually approach to work towards uncovering this dimension of press readership history. Even where there are surviving sources that document historical ­readers’ reading histories, rarely do they illuminate such questions of intertextuality. Linda Hughes’s ‘sideways’ idea, which stresses the inherently cross-textual nature of nineteenth-century print media, offers a useful framework for understanding this nexus of reading (Hughes 2014). These historical press reading experiences were underpinned by the web of prospective convergences that could materialise within a single issue, across regular readership of a run of issues, and between the assorted publications that made up a reader’s diet, or indeed springing from the particular make-up of an individual’s personal reading history. The concept of lateral reading offers a useful model to visualise how press consumption functioned. It captures how the act of making sense of a periodical’s contents was essentially relayed, via the cognitive web of associated material that readers constructed as they worked through a particular stream of print that encompassed books, periodicals and/or newspaper material read previously and contemporaneously. The newspaper and periodical were inherently intertextual genres. Connections both subtle and overt were fashioned between adjacent articles, the content in previous issues of the specific title, other concurrent publications in the press or book marketplace (magazines like the Review of Reviews that signposted possible content readers might

­

readership and distribution

147

enjoy in other titles can yield much in this respect), and the era’s macro print culture landscape. On one level, the resources that modern scholars of the press have at their disposal offer much to empower efforts to illuminate the likely make-up of these connections. With digitised editions of complete runs of press titles, the accompanying metadata such projects furnish, and indeed the wider digital archive of the nineteenth-century press, much of the contemporary print context can today be mapped on a conceptual level. However, the fact remains that the precise configuration of these links, and, more significantly still, the actual extent of an individual reader’s mental mapping of such ties, can prove elusive. The kind of anecdotal sources that enable concrete historicised discussion on such questions are rarely extant, which requires a speculative approach. Studies that approach this topic from a particular standpoint or content strand illustrate worthwhile strategies that can be adopted in tackling this key question. Deborah Wynne’s work on serial fiction, and their thematic co-texts published in the pages of mid-Victorian family magazines such as Once a Week and All the Year Round, is a trailblazing example of this kind of examination (Wynne 2001). The literary studies background of a significant number of press scholars has meant that many enquiries tackling this particular readership question have focused on the nineteenth-century press’s role as a vehicle for the circulation of the novel. Such scholarship considers the cross-fertilisation across serial instalments as a vehicle for the circulation of the novel, focusing on how this alignment was likely to frame historical readers’ experiences of this literature. For example, Answers in its initial years featured Convict 99, a serial novel jointly authored by the wife-and-husband team of Marie Connor Leighton and Frederick Leighton that ran from February to August 1892. Surveying those issues that featured the serial reveals a marked thematic saturation, where the subjects treated in a significant proportion of the thumbnail pieces and longer articles that appeared alongside the instalments in the weekly numbers of Answers bore a definite affinity with the criminal and carceral plotlines of the Leightons’ story. Efforts of this kind to reconstruct nineteenth-century audiences’ engagement with the press highlight the fundamental question surrounding the particular permutation of readership that we as scholars elect to foreground in our discussion and, crucially, the degree of speculation each version requires. The target readership is perhaps the most easily recoverable version; it is possible to gain insight into this by examining the significance of a publication’s relative price in the contemporary print marketplace, as well as a title’s compositional and

148

paul raphael rooney

material emphases. However, this risks overlooking a potentially significant proportion of actual readers who stood outside this intended audience sphere. By drawing on Margaret Beetham’s idea of the historical reader, which she defines as the ‘dynamic, or set of negotiations, going on between the “target reader”, “the actual purchaser” and “the reader constructed in the text”’, there is greater scope to arrive at a more representative sense of a journal or newspaper’s de facto audience (Beetham 2000: 96). The first and third of this trio are perhaps more readily accessible, but the ‘actual purchaser’ is often a more elusive quantity. Those readers who registered a presence in a periodical or newspaper via submissions to correspondence columns or featured contributions potentially capture some sense of the nature of this group. Nevertheless, the editorially curated, mediated quality to the representation that chiefly figures in these sections means that the  readers encountered here are often simply a variant on the target or the implied readership. Scholars like Margaret Beetham have shown that, with the requisite critical analysis of these sources (with a view to isolating the more dubious or perhaps even fictitious examples), readers’ letters can shed light on the composition of a journal’s reading community, and the individuals who habitually engaged with the publication. The increasing prominence of audience contributions within the rising wave of publications of the late nineteenth century would also serve to blur somewhat the distinctions between press readership and production. With interweaving of this kind between the writings of journalists and editors and content created by audiences, Alvin Toffler’s concept of prosumption and the prosumer, which is often applied to the presentday media landscape, and particularly to digital texts, offers a useful analogy for understanding this fluidity and the resulting print media texts in circulation. As print media grew more plentiful and affordable, audiences had greater latitude in the particular use they made of newspapers and periodicals, in terms of reading strategies, the specific content that was read deeply, skimmed, or passed over entirely, as well as the decision to jettison or relocate purchased titles from one reading space to another. However, the increased potential to register their interaction with their media within the pages of the publication, or to partake in shaping the composition of the journal via solicited submissions, meant that the readers’ remits were less circumscribed, and the facility for two-way communication in this medium expanded. The competitions that publications such as Tit-Bits and Answers organised for prize

­

readership and distribution

149

contributions of readers’ essays or literary work were just one of the circulation-galvanising initiatives such journals pursued. This heightened participatory dimension, nevertheless, suggests recognition on the part of media entrepreneurs such as Newnes and Harmsworth that audiences appreciated a press culture where their role in the system was not merely limited to passive consumption of content. This was an endorsement of a philosophy that held that readers’ ideas, opinions and literary production could have sufficient value to warrant publication alongside the writings of the professional journalists and authors on the paper’s staff. For the historian of the press with an interest in readership, these fragments can reveal a great deal about the audiences’ investment in the cultural environment created by those publications in their regular diet of print media. Scholarship on nineteenth-century developments and trends in press readership, along with research on the period’s principal press distribution channels, has recovered much of the history of each area. This survey chapter has sought to capture the state of present understanding, and I want to conclude by signposting a number of issues that future scholarship might address in order to expand further our understanding of this field. Firstly, the nature of the link between educational experience and the print media choices that school leavers, particularly the board schools alumni, went on to register is an important consideration. I have explored how media entrepreneurs responded to the resulting shift in the configuration of the reading public with new kinds of journal; just how deeply did these textual connections run? Education in reading paved the way for press consumption by providing the necessary interpretive skills. Did the teaching methodologies and classroom resources like textbook readers (i.e., books comprising textual extracts) encountered in these formative years influence students’ future tastes in positive way? Did this material leave them with a desire to read more about particular topics? Alternatively, did the dull repetitious texts that were frequently used here in fact have much to answer for in driving readers towards the more interesting content offered by the Newnes and Harmsworth media empires, their precursors in the penny press, as well as the amusement of the Sunday papers? Secondly, on a related question, did those publications that traded on their accessibility, like Tit-Bits or Answers, ever serve as gateway content to more challenging reading matter? How frequently were they conduits that ultimately guided emerging readers towards more advanced material? Alternatively, were examples of such progress in fact rare? Did the majority of new lower-middle-class readers instead

150

paul raphael rooney

plateau at the more accessible levels of the print media landscape? Thirdly, a consequence of the difference in size between a behemoth like Smith’s bookstall empire and the small shopkeeper newsagent class was that the latter purveyors of print media could be of a broadly similar socio-economic status to their clientele. Granted, this may also have been true of bookstall workers, but their input into the wares they were selling was more limited, given their status as employees in the Smith operation. Did this affinity of social class between the newsagents and their consumers mean that they were better placed to satisfy the appetite of readers? Lastly, this chapter’s final section looked to chart possible approaches scholars might adopt in attempting to map audiences’ wider diet of print media. Research in this field frequently begins by examining bound volumes of a journal belonging to a library’s collections or indeed looking at digitisations of these texts in an electronic repository. When working with the digital archive, DH data visualisation methods could offer a gateway to identifying key currents and thematic concentrations in audiences’ reading histories. Models like Robert Darnton’s seminal communications circuit idea, or Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas Barker’s five-event concept that reworked Darnton, have illuminated the production and distribution of print culture artefacts. The future of press readership scholarship could be advanced significantly by developing similar models of consumption so as to gain yet greater insights into the varied print media experiences of nineteenth-century readers.

Chapter Five

CULTURAL AGENTS AND CONTEXTS: THE PROFESSIONALISATION OF JOURNALISM Joanne Shattock Your accepting of the editorship of a newspaper would be infra dig., and a losing of caste; but not so, as I think, the accepting of the editorship of the Quarterly Review … An editor of a Review like the Quarterly is the office of a scholar and a gentleman; but that of a newspaper is not, for a newspaper is merely stock-in-trade, to be used as it can be turned to most profit. And there is something in it … that is repugnant to the feelings of a gentleman … (Lang 1897: vol. 2, 365, 367) That advice, given in 1825 to John Gibson Lockhart, who was tossing up between two editorial posts he had been offered, summed up a commonly held view of the relative positions of the newspaper as ­­distinct from the periodical press in the first half of the nineteenth century. The publisher John Murray had plans to launch a newspaper, the Representative, while at the same time looking for a successor to John Taylor Coleridge, the current editor of his successful Quarterly Review (1809–1967). Lockhart’s credentials for both posts were strong. As one of two young writers who, along with the publisher William Blackwood, were primarily responsible for the success of the pugnacious and ­­high-spirited Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine ­­(1817–1980), he had had nearly a decade of experience as a journalist. He appeared to relish the controversies, both literary and political, into which he and his colleague John Wilson, better known as ‘Christopher North’, had plunged Blackwood’s, and he had ­­demonstrated an ability to turn out a prodigious amount of copy quickly. 153

154

joanne shattock

The advice given by Murray’s solicitor that the Quarterly Review was better suited to Lockhart’s social position was endorsed by his fatherin-law, Sir Walter Scott, who was adamant that the editorship of a newspaper was not a desirable position for a member of the family. In the end Lockhart accepted Murray’s invitation to edit the Quarterly, and the editorship of the ill-fated Representative went to the ambitious young Benjamin Disraeli. The episode was significant for number of reasons. The assumption that the early quarterly reviews were the preserve of gentlemen, for whom writing was a leisured pursuit uncompromised by the need for pay, was encouraged by Francis Jeffrey, the first editor of the Edinburgh Review (1802–1929), whose initial thought was that the new enterprise should be ‘all gentlemen and no pay’ (Cockburn 1852: vol. 1, 133). He quickly changed his mind and, backed by the review’s publisher, Archibald Constable, rewarded his contributors so liberally that they were able to earn significant sums from their reviewing while remaining confident that the Edinburgh was free from any taint of Grub Street. The same could not be said of the newspapers of the period, which were regarded as profit-making ventures, usually attached to a political faction or party. They also paid their writers significantly less than the reviews. Writing for ‘the press’ carried with it certain negative connotations, both social and financial, of which all writers were aware, hence Jeffrey’s emphasis on the gentility of the Edinburgh’s reviewers.

The ‘Profession’ of Literature This attitude was to change gradually as a new perception of authorship and the literary life emerged in the 1830s. Writing about Fraser’s Magazine (1830–82) between the years 1830 and 1847, Patrick Leary suggests that the magazine stood astride ‘a fault line in conceptions of what constitutes the literary life’ (Leary 1994: 106) linked to the emergence and rapid growth of new periodicals published monthly, weekly and quarterly, all of which offered opportunities to earn money but without loss of status. In an article entitled ‘The Condition of Authors in England, Germany and France’ published in Fraser’s in March 1847, the writer G. H. Lewes confirmed this change in attitude, declaring ‘literature has become a profession’, offering ‘a means of subsistence almost as certain as the bar or the church’. The real cause of this transformation of authorship into a viable career was owing to the periodical press. ‘It is by our reviews, magazines and journals that the vast majority of professional authors earn their bread,’ he went on.

­

professionalisation of journalism

155

‘Literature should be a profession, not a trade.’ Periodical literature was the only way of ‘rescuing authorship from the badge of servility’ ([Lewes] 1847: 285, 288). Lewes’s main point was that the profession of literature in England was not highly regarded, in contrast to the situation in France where authors became statesmen and two journalists had in fact become prime ministers. In Germany, university professorships were created to support distinguished literary men. On the other hand, the periodical press in England paid its contributors substantially more than Continental journals, making it possible for authors to earn an income equivalent to that of a lawyer or a clergyman. Authors could now support a family and maintain a respectable lifestyle on the fees paid for essays, reviews and articles, whereas in the past they had been at the mercy of avaricious publishers and an unpredictable market. Linda Peterson summarised the new view of authorship as marking a transition from an older Romantic emphasis on imagination, inspiration and inherent genius to a pragmatic and businesslike approach that focused on contracts and copyrights and required a market-savvy attitude (Peterson 2009: ch. 1). Lewes’s other point was that authors no longer need assume that poverty and public indifference were the likely rewards of talent. Writing for periodicals was a means to an end. It secured the industrious writer a regular income, making it possible to juggle short-term projects with longer, book-length ones. By ‘periodical literature’ he meant literary reviews and magazines, although the reference to ‘journals’ suggested that he did not rule out newspapers. But it was not until the end of the century that the emergent profession of literature recognised newspapers as possible outlets for literary work. In doing so, they joined lawyers, statesmen, politicians, members of the universities and others for whom the newspaper press had become an effective means of reaching a wider audience. The change in attitude towards the newspaper press came about initially through the repeal of the so-called ‘taxes on knowledge’ between 1853 and 1861, and in particular the removal of the remaining penny stamp on newspapers in 1855. The result was an immediate expansion of the potential reading public as the price of newspapers dropped. This was followed by the creation of new dailies, beginning with the Daily Telegraph, which was established within a fortnight of the repeal of the stamp duty. Others followed, both in London and in provincial cities. As Martin Conboy notes, larger capital investment led to increased profits, which in turn enabled the introduction of advanced technologies, all of which led to an improvement in the quality of newspapers.

156

joanne shattock

Divisions of labour within each newspaper were established, and managerial structures became more complex. The result was a move to greater professionalisation. As Conboy again observes, ‘journalism moved from the margins of English society to a more economically lucrative and socially respectable position’ (Conboy 2004: 124–5). The gradual professionalisation of journalism mapped on to the movement to professionalise authorship, following in its wake. The periodical press continued to expand and diversify in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The birth of the ‘shilling monthlies’, socalled because of their competitive price of a shilling in contrast to the half-crown or more charged by older magazines such as Blackwood’s, Fraser’s and the New Monthly Magazine (1814–84), offered new outlets for writers of fiction and non-fiction. Macmillan’s Magazine (1859–1907), the house magazine of Macmillan publishers, was the first of the new monthlies. It introduced a policy of signature for its articles, many of which were written by eminent public figures. The Cornhill Magazine (1860–1975), established by the entrepreneurial publisher George Smith of Smith Elder, followed on its heels in 1860. Smith appointed Thackeray as the Cornhill’s first editor at a salary of a thousand pounds, hoping to use his celebrity status to attract major authors to the magazine. Other publishers followed suit, intent on replicating the success of these two. The shilling monthlies contained serial fiction by established and up-and-coming novelists, poems, articles on current, sometimes controversial issues, and reviews of new books. Often edited by well-known writers of both sexes, the new generation of magazines cemented and publicly celebrated the links between authorship and the periodical press. The fees they paid to authors were the subject of widespread gossip, even though the culture of anonymity still prevailed in some quarters. It was a rare writer in the 1850s and 1860s who did not have a clear sense of the pecking order of outlets for their work, based on the reputation of editors, the fees paid, readership and circulation. Moreover, in offering editorships to the fortunate few, posts that carried with them substantial stipends, the new magazines offered another source of income for writers. New monthly reviews founded in the 1860s, beginning with the Fortnightly (1865–1954), the Contemporary (1866–1988), and later the Nineteenth Century (1877–1901) and the National Review (1883–1960), gradually assumed the place once occupied by the quarterlies as a forum for sustained intellectual debate. Some like the Fortnightly adopted a policy of signature from the outset, while others introduced it gradually. Like the quarterlies, which continued to be published although with diminished circulations, the new reviews were open to politicians,

­

professionalisation of journalism

157

scholars, lawyers, scientists, theologians and historians as well as men and women of letters, an acknowledgement of the porous boundaries of the profession of literature. By the 1860s and 1870s Lewes’s vision of the new profession, encompassing a range of activities from editing, reviewing and writing articles to the more traditional roles of novelist, poet, dramatist and historian, had become a reality.

The Institutionalisation of Authorship What Lewes did not suggest was an agenda for collective action, either institutional or governmental, to formalise the new profession of literature. That was left to a group of writers in the 1880s, among them Walter Besant, a moderately successful novelist and dramatist who established the Society of Authors in 1884. Writing in 1899 as chairman of the Society, Besant looked back on its creation as a crucial stage in the history of the new profession, which, along with other new professions such as art, architecture, engineering and music, had taken their place beside law, medicine and the Church. Besant reiterated Lewes’s claim made over fifty years earlier that literature was equal in status to the more established professions. ‘It is now well known that a respectable man of letters may command an income and position quite equal to those of the average lawyer or doctor,’ he wrote in The Pen and the Book (1899). ‘It is also well known that one who rises to the top may enjoy as much social consideration as a Bishop and as good an income.’ The life of letters, if successful, conferred ‘more dignity and respect than any other line of work apart from the Church’ (Besant 1899: vi, 6). Much had changed between Lewes’s proclamation of a ‘profession’ of literature in 1847 and its institutionalisation in 1884. For one thing, the newspaper press had come into its own in the intervening years as an additional career path for writers, offering attractive financial rewards, defined management roles – editorships as well assistant and subeditorships ­­– and a range of opportunities for writers apart from traditional reporting. Papers now had designated leader writers and a variety of correspondents: foreign correspondents who were based abroad; London correspondents who supplied metropolitan news and  gossip to provincial papers; and ‘special correspondents’ who reported on wars, natural disasters and other scenes of action across the globe. Some papers had literary departments and accepted occasional papers on literary topics from writers not on the staff. In recognition of this, Besant incorporated a separate chapter on ‘Journalism as a branch of the Literary Life’, written by an anonymous journalist attached to a London daily, into The Pen and the Book, which he had

158

joanne shattock

devised as a practical handbook for authors. It was ‘impossible to overestimate the assistance which journalism has rendered to the profession of letters’, he emphasised. Journalism was the means by which a beginner in the life of letters ‘attempts to scale the fort’. A large number of living writers had begun their careers in a branch of journalism and few ever completely abandoned it (Besant 1899: 23).

Two New Professions The need for journalists to professionalise had become more pressing in the decades following the repeal of the newspaper stamp. John Dawson, author of Practical Journalism, How to enter thereon and Succeed (1885), one of several handbooks published in the 1880s, declared that a member of the press of the current generation was just as prosperous, and sometimes more so than the successful member of any other profession. Echoing Besant’s comments on authors, he argued that the press was now attracting ‘a better class of men’, owing to the fact that there were more rewards ‘of moderate worth’ than were to be found in the law, medicine, the Church, the arts or the stage. ‘No profession offers to a man of literary ability so speedy and ready a means of earning money as journalism,’ he insisted (Dawson 1885: 3). Both of these emergent professions, literature and journalism, struggled with the implications of professionalisation when measured against the older established institutions. Convinced that authors and journalists had attained equal status with other professions in terms of ability, respectability and earning power, it was more difficult to match the formal requirements of professionalisation with their own working conditions. Besant argued that there were three essentials for new professions. Firstly, they must be independent. Secondly, they must be able to share in national distinctions. He was critical of Dickens and Carlyle, for example, for refusing honours during their lifetime as they had in effect denied the profession of literature the public recognition that was its due. A third prerequisite was that any new profession must have its own prizes and rewards. What Besant did not mention, but what historians writing about the emergence of the professions in the nineteenth century signalled as essential to any profession, were entrance requirements and professional examinations, as well as a series of defined points on a career ladder by which members could progress, all of which had to be regulated by a professional body. In some professions, this body also set standard fees that members could charge. The Society of Authors was a professional body, but with only ­­limited powers. There were no entrance requirements or professional

­

professionalisation of journalism

159

examinations for writers and certainly no set fees. One of the points made by Besant was that authorship was a profession that frequently attracted those who had qualified in other professions, or who had had another career before they turned to writing. ‘The number of those who are literary men by profession is small compared with those who are literary men in fact,’ he reflected. He estimated that in 1899 the number of men and women who regarded themselves as writers was around 20,000, whereas the number of those who were exclusively authors, writers by profession, as identified in the census, was less than a quarter of that figure (Besant 1899: 3). Lewes had made the same point in 1847 when writing of the lack of public support for authors. ‘Literature is a profession in which the author has not only to struggle against his brother authors, but also against a host of interlopers,’ he complained. ‘Authors without engagements cannot step in and eke out their income with a little chancery practice or a bit of common law; but lawyers without clients can and do step into the field of literature.’ The professional author, he argued, was surrounded with rivals ‘not only as hungry as himself, but willing and able to work for lower wages, because they are not, as he is, solely dependent upon literature’ (Lewes [1847]: 294–5). For this reason, he suggested, authors more than other professions needed support, not in the form of pensions, but employment. He did not, however, suggest how such support was to be effected.

The ‘Profession’ of Journalism The non-exclusivity of journalism, its openness to all who wished to try their hand at it, would become a source of grievance as the pressure to professionalise mounted. But in the middle decades of the century, particularly the 1850s and 1860s, when the euphoria generated by the repeal of the newspaper stamp and the sense of a newspaper press poised on a period of expansion was palpable, many commentators thought that both the newspapers and the periodical press were enriched by the diversity of talent they attracted. To James Fitzjames Stephen, a barrister who devoted a large part of his early working life to writing for the weekly Saturday Review (1855–1938) and then the Pall Mall Gazette (1865–1923), the influx of professionals from other fields was one of the strengths of present-day journalism. Writing in the Cornhill in July 1862, he noted: our leading journalists are barristers waiting for business, or resigned to the want of it; clergymen unattached, who regret their

160

joanne shattock

choice of a profession which their conscience or inclination forbids them to practice, and which the law forbids them to resign; Government officials, whose duties are not connected with party politics, and who do not occupy the whole of their time and in a few cases men of independent means, who have a fancy for writing, and who wish to increase their incomes. ([Stephen] 1862: 56) The fact that some of these part-time journalists were disenchanted members of other professions or had so little work they could afford time to write was a net gain for the press, according to Stephen. W. R. Greg, a Lancashire mill owner whose writing on political and social questions for the major reviews took priority over his business interests, made the same point in an article in the Westminster Review in October 1855. Celebrating the ‘mighty influence’ which the newspaper press now exercised, a power which was likely to increase following the repeal of the newspaper stamp, Greg attributed its influence to the ‘remarkable talent’ with which it was conducted: The actual writers who now sustain the high character of journalism may be classed under three heads: – first barristers waiting for practice, or having ceased to expect it and perhaps not vividly desiring it … Secondly, young politicians of unusual promise, but of scanty means, who five and twenty years ago would have entered Parliament as members for some close borough, and found fame and power by their speeches instead of by their pen. Thirdly, men of trained and cultivated minds who have chosen literature as a profession, and politics as a favourite pursuit; who formerly would have written books or pamphlets, but who have been driven into journalism by accidental connexions, or who have been attracted to it by the readier income and the larger audience which it offered … ([Greg] 1855: 484) The average ability of the conductors of the newspaper press, Greg asserted, must be at least equal to that in the other ‘intellectual ­­professions’ – the Church, the Bar, the Senate or Literature – a view with which he thought readers of the Times, the Examiner, the Spectator, the Leeds Mercury, the Scotsman and other papers would readily concur. The point that both Greg and Stephen were keen to emphasise was that the high quality of journalism depended on the solid foundations that a rigorous training in the established professions could provide. The fact that there were no entrance examinations or qualifications needed for journalism was a decided strength. But what was thought

­

professionalisation of journalism

161

an advantage in the 1850s and 1860s was by the 1880s seen as a threat, and a spur to greater professionalisation. H. R. Fox Bourne, author of English Newspapers: Chapters in the History of Journalism, one of several histories of the newspaper press published in the second half of the nineteenth century, and himself a veteran newspaper man, reflected in 1887 that ‘journalism is, as it always has been, one of the freest of all trades’. There was no apprenticeship and no preliminaries required for participation in its ‘highest rewards’. Those rewards, however, often went to those who qualified by native wit or training in other ways, without undergoing the drudgery of working their way up through the hierarchy of a newspaper: A smart member of Parliament, a successful barrister, a versatile clergyman, a retired school master, a popular novelist or anyone else with enough influence or intellect, or with a name likely to prove useful, may slip into an editorship or be made a principal leader writer in preference to men of long standing in the office, who perhaps have to teach him his duties and correct his blunders. (Fox Bourne 1887: vol. 2, 371) Fox Bourne’s use of the word ‘trade’ rather than ‘profession’ no doubt harked back to his own career as editor of the Weekly Dispatch in the 1870s or his three difficult years as proprietor of the Examiner, before the move to professionalisation had gained momentum. But his point about the advantages and disadvantages of being able to embark upon a career in journalism from either the bottom or the top would have struck a chord with many of his contemporaries as the debate about what constituted the best training for a journalist, and what made a good journalist, gathered steam.

The Institute of Journalists One of the first initiatives of the Institute of Journalists, formerly the National Association of Journalists, which gained a Royal Charter in 1890, was to propose that a system of formal training for journalists be put in place, with a certificate of competence issued by the Institute. The proposal was instantly controversial. Writing to the editor of the National Review in October 1892, a self-styled ‘Old Journalist’ protested that the professional newspaper writer ‘never was, and never will be, the product of University or Technical Education’. Journalists, like poets, were ‘external to the processes of manufacture’. The only gift a journalist needed was the ability ‘to hear and to see what no other body sees and hears’. Experience would do the rest. A command

162

joanne shattock

of language, a good memory, the ability to write to a deadline, and ‘the mother wit to keep windward of the law of libel’ were all instinctive talents that could not be taught but could be honed with practice. The pseudonymous author had never known a journalist ‘who did not drift into the calling, nor known one who drifted out of it’ (‘An Old Journalist’ 1892: 274–5). The use of the word ‘drift’ when describing entry into a career in journalism was common among commentators and practitioners, suggesting the ease with which occasional work could be found. Depending upon who was making the point, this was either an advantage or the opposite. Besant’s journalist colleague observed that journalism was not a career that was deliberately planned but one that simply happened. ‘A man does not always enter journalism in the deliberate way in which another attaches himself to his life profession, he noted. He ‘drifts into the profession not so much by chance as in the natural process of finding one’s level’ (Besant 1899: 238). He had often pursued other callings. Journalism was sometimes a refuge for those who have failed elsewhere. To Arthur Shadwell, an experienced correspondent for the Times, men would always ‘drift into the business, led by inclination and fitness’. The process of drifting, he argued, was the best proof that ‘the work suits the man and he it’ (Shadwell 1898: 848). Many also worked their way up from printing and typographical backgrounds to become press readers and journalist-editors (Finkelstein 2018: 152–8). But along with these endorsements of a profession that welcomed allcomers provided they could write authoritatively and well on their chosen topic, there was a growing sense of resentment in some quarters that clergymen, lawyers and other professionals were allowed to poach on the journalists’ own territory, ‘taking the butter off the bread of the trained journalist’ as the correspondent of the National Review put it (‘An Old Journalist’ 1892: 276). An important role for the new Institute, according to this old newspaper hand, would be to protect the rights and privileges of experienced journalists so that ‘no brother in the ranks’ would remain idle as the result of the ‘advances of underpaid gentlemen learned in the law or in medicine or in theological forms’ (ibid.: 276–7). Vestiges of the prejudice that writing for a newspaper was not a suitable occupation for gentlemen obviously remained and still rankled in the era of professionalisation. The journalist T. H. S. Escott summarised it wittily in 1875: There can be no doubt in the present day the aristocratic prejudice against journalism so survives that if a gentleman with a title allows his irrepressible yearning after lettered distinction to find

­

professionalisation of journalism

163

its outlet in the daily or weekly newspapers, it is whispered by his friends that he has taken to journalism in much the same tone as it might be rumoured that he had taken to drink. (Escott 1875, quoted in Conboy 2004: 113) The end result of the extensive grumblings about interlopers and poaching was the establishment of the National Union of Journalists in 1907, a trades union that put in place criteria for membership and other measures to protect its members. Meanwhile, the debate about what training, if any, a journalist required, continued. Henri Blowitz, the much lauded and influential Paris correspondent of the Times, argued that whereas in the past it had been thought that journalism could not be taught, now in the present moment, when ‘this state within the State’, as he termed the press, thrived as never before, it was time to take the issue of training more seriously. In an article in the Contemporary Review in January 1893, he proposed a network of national schools of journalism in various European countries, which would take in candidates with degrees who could also speak two foreign languages and offer them a five-year training course. This would involve work experience in other countries. Such a scheme would create a ‘class of select journalists’, an elite corps that set a standard against which all others would be measured (Blowitz 1893: 38, 45). It was only by recruiting from among the competent and training them up that the level of the profession would be raised, and with it the dignity of journalists, according to Blowitz. Writing several years later, Arthur Shadwell also saw education as the key, but argued that rather than specialist training, the best schools of journalism were an Oxford degree and foreign travel. There was no better general training for the best kind of journalism according to Shadwell, himself an Oxford graduate. Oxford already dominated the London press to a large extent and its hold was increasing, due to the ‘wide culture, the savoir faire, and the intelligent interest in affairs’ imparted by the Oxford course. What newspapers printed on any subject was read by experts, and ‘therefore it should, if possible, be written by experts’ (Shadwell 1898: 847). The issue of training for journalists was destined to run and run. Besant’s colleague, writing in 1899, reiterated that, although there were no entrance requirements or examinations, journalism required specific skills as well as exceptional talents. A working knowledge of French and German was an advantage. So too was a classical education, although the latter was not a necessity. A young journalist with £500 to spare was advised to spend it on foreign travel. A knowledge

164

joanne shattock

of history, as with languages, was helpful, particularly the history of the United States which was destined ‘to go hand in hand with Great Britain, if not to lead it, in the future march’. The area in which training was needed was in the faculty of ‘exhaustive observation’ and in interpretation, both of which could be learned on the job (Besant 1899: 240–8). Another means of informal training was to become secretary to an eminent journalist, a form of apprenticeship. In the end, as no consensus could be reached, the Institute of Journalists shelved plans to introduce training courses and to issue certificates of competence. The issue, as many predicted, did not go away, and the London School of Journalism, the first institution of its kind, opened in 1919, admitting its first students in 1920. The need for regulation of other kinds was very much on the minds of practising journalists in the early years of the Institute. Shadwell argued that establishing a definite criterion for membership would add dignity to the profession and would be in the interests of the public and of ‘honest journalism’. An organization with the power of bringing those guilty of unprofessional conduct to account and of excluding those unfit to practice would elevate the character of the profession and increase public confidence. This would be most effective where confidential sources have been betrayed or where ‘false news’ has been fabricated by unscrupulous journalists. Only a selfgoverning organisation similar to those of the older professions could deal effectively with these issues. The question of regulation, like the issue of criteria for membership, in the end was left to the National Union of Journalists.

Women and Journalism Much of the discussion in the elite reviews about journalism as a profession and the training required gave the impression that journalism was an exclusively masculine profession. Nothing was further from the truth. Writing about women’s employment at the end of the century, the historian David Rubinstein pointed out that no female occupation was more frequently written about in women’s magazines than journalism (Rubinstein 1986: 85). By the 1890s the number and social range of women’s magazines had vastly increased. Although these were generally edited by men, they created employment opportunities for large numbers of women journalists. Arnold Bennett’s handbook Journalism for Women. A Practical Guide (1898) was an acknowledgement of a current need, most of the handbooks of the 1880s having addressed themselves to aspiring newspaper men.

­

professionalisation of journalism

165

Bennett did not mince his words in his assessment of women’s suitability and capacity for newspaper work. They lacked discipline; they were unreliable; they did not give sufficient attention to detail; their grammar and spelling could be slipshod. Moreover, they were uncomfortable in the aggressive atmosphere of a newspaper office. Much of this was owing to their education, some of it to their upbringing. Some of these disadvantages could be remedied by practice. While Bennett claimed that exceptional women in medicine were treated equally with male doctors, this was not true in journalism, where women would not be judged by the same standards. Consequently, he set a low bar for their likely achievements in the field. On the other hand, he gave sound advice on which current publications to approach, naming those that were likely to accept occasional papers from outside contributors. Surprisingly, he advised women not to confine their journalism to women’s magazines alone, suggesting ‘class magazines’, those representing interest groups and what he termed ‘high class general monthlies’ like Blackwood’s, the Pall Mall Magazine, Longman’s, the Cornhill and Macmillan’s, instead. Read without a corrective historical filter, Bennett’s guide appears insufferably patronising. Read against the other guides to journalism of the period, with their warnings of a shrinking market for literary journalism, much of his advice was hardheaded and based on extensive knowledge of the field. The tough conditions faced by women trying to establish a foothold in journalism in the 1890s were emphasised in an autobiographical article by Charlotte O’Connor Eccles, an Irish-born journalist and novelist, published in Blackwood’s in 1893. Lacking any contacts in the newspaper world, Eccles was patronised, ignored and exploited by a series of unscrupulous proprietors, editors and journalists. She hung on by sheer force of will until she was offered a job in the newly established London office of the New York Herald. Fortified by this experience, she went on to make the necessary contacts and to acquire a range of skills. Eccles’s story was intended to be cautionary and to prepare women for the uphill journey they faced in a profession which was theoretically open to them. An article by Emily Crawford, one of the few successful female foreign correspondents, presented a more optimistic view of women’s capacity for journalism. Published in the Contemporary Review in September 1893, the same year as Eccles’s article, Crawford stressed the physical toll that journalism exerted, the stress of writing to deadlines, working unsocial hours, often through the night, the pressures of having to respond immediately to breaking news. Women of strong constitutions were better placed than their male colleagues to survive these challenges, she argued, as they

166

joanne shattock

possessed an ‘elasticity’ that enabled them to recover quickly. But they also needed staying power. Women who were good at their work could earn high salaries; they could also combine the life with marriage and a family provided they employed domestic help.

The Society of Women Journalists It was not a coincidence that both of these articles were written in 1893, the year in which the Society of Women Journalists was established. A combination of a benevolent society and a superior ladies’ club, the Society was headed by a series of eminent women writers and journalists, beginning with Mrs Arthur Stannard, better known by her pen name of John Strange Winter. Successive presidents and members of the Society’s council included Pearl Craigie (John Oliver Hobbes), Alice Meynell, Lady Colin Campbell, Flora Annie Steele, and Marie Belloc Lowndes, together with Emily Crawford and Charlotte O’Connor Eccles. The Society’s annual report for 1897–8 stated its purpose: ‘we do not welcome the crowd or endeavour to encourage the amateur but seek to be of use to the actual professional woman journalist’ (Society of Women Journalists 1897–8: 1). Full members were required to have worked for a ‘recognised’ journal or magazine for two years as paid contributors. In return, they received a yellow card which identified them as bona fide journalists. They could also use the Society’s telegraph address of ‘Scribendo’, and its rooms on Bond Street for reading and writing. Probationers, those who had worked for a year, were eligible to apply for full membership after two years. Associates, who were beginning a career in journalism, could attend lectures, debates and meetings, but were not eligible for the services of a physician, surgeon or solicitor, or for aid from the benevolent fund. When read in conjunction with Bennett’s handbook and O’Connor Eccles’s and Crawford’s articles, the annual reports of the Society make it clear that, while women’s place in journalism was acknowledged, it was not an easy path to follow.

The Changing Periodical Field Entrants to the literary profession in the last decade of the nineteenth century faced a different prospect to that outlined by Lewes at midcentury. Many of the magazines of the 1860s, which had offered new opportunities for writers, particularly women writers, were no longer in existence or were soon to close. St Paul’s Magazine (1867–74), whose first editor was Anthony Trollope, ceased publication in 1874, having

­

professionalisation of journalism

167

found the competition too intense. Tinsley’s Magazine (1867–92), the house magazine of Tinsley Brothers, edited by the journalist Edmund Yates, stopped production in 1892. London Society (1862–98), edited for four years by the novelist Florence Marryat, closed in 1898 followed the next year by Belgravia (1867–99), once edited by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. The St James’s Magazine (1861–1900), Argosy (1865–1901), Temple Bar (1860–1906) and Macmillan’s all went out of production shortly after the turn of the century, leaving only Blackwood’s and the Cornhill to reinvent themselves as twentieth-century publications, continuing until 1980 and 1975, respectively. The writing was on the wall for these literary magazines in the 1890s, causing Besant to advise new authors that they could not expect to live by writing for magazines alone. Nor could they expect to have articles accepted by the major reviews, which were now, he argued, reserved for specialists: The ‘litterateur’ pure and simple does not often get the chance to write for the Nineteenth Century or the Contemporary … and then it is generally by means of a critical study, a biographical sketch … put in to fill up and with the editor’s full consciousness that the general public do not want this kind of paper at all. (Besant 1899: 58) The era of the generalist or amateur contributor to reviews and magazines aimed at a middle-class, educated public, publications that Lewes had regarded as open to all members of the profession of letters, had given way to an era of specialism. New reviews like the Academy, begun in 1869, were supported by a number of distinguished scholars, many of them with university posts. The English Historical Review, founded in 1886, was the first of many scholarly journals to be established as university curricula expanded. There was no longer a market for lengthy ‘critical literary papers’, Besant warned. His advice was clear: ‘Above all things, do not at first try to live by writing for the magazines and journals. Let them be a help, but not a means of livelihood, if you value your reputation, your independence, and your self-respect’ (Besant 1899: 226). Newspapers, on the other hand, had expanded the range of their contents and offered opportunities for literary and even scholarly articles. Most now had a literary department and published book reviews. Even more opportunities awaited the writer who was prepared to consider a wider career in journalism. Besant’s journalist colleague advised that an able writer could develop an instinct for topics that would interest the public over breakfast or their evening meal, and

168

joanne shattock

produce articles to that brief. Facts alone would not satisfy today’s reading public. The writer could stamp his individuality on events; he could enliven his account by ‘animated pictures’, as long as he did not write around his subject, a failing to which literary men were prone. As a journalist, a writer must also remember he was writing for the hour, not for posterity. Much of the advice offered by Besant and others to would-be journalists was practical. They were advised to sign their name to articles in magazines as the only way to become known and popular. If an editor refused, the writer should look for another publication that permitted signature. Articles should conform to the standard set by the publication as regards length. Copy should be clear if handwritten; typewritten was preferable. If a writer sent an article to a second journal, he or she should let the first editor know this. If successful, the going rate for such articles in ‘better class’ magazines was a guinea per page, or between eight and twelve guineas in total, hence the warning that a living could not be made by writing for magazines alone. The rates of pay for newspaper work, particularly as a staff member, were better. Leader writers were at the top of the hierarchy, requiring the greatest in-depth knowledge and skill. Leaders paid at the rate of three to five guineas a column, but a position on the staff of a paper was better than working as a freelance. Fitzjames Stephen estimated that there were probably only about a hundred good leader writers in existence across all newspapers in the country ([Stephen] 1862: 55). Correspondents, whether domestic or foreign were next in the hierarchy, often having worked their way up from reporting. Correspondents required the highest faculties of a journalist, according to Fox Bourne, and consequently commanded good salaries. Special correspondents, however, tended to be attracted to wars and had difficulty, as he put it, in turning their swords into ploughshares (Fox Bourne 1887: 379). Stephen ranked special correspondents below leader writers in talent, but acknowledged that, when they curbed their excesses of style, their eyewitness accounts of events, written on the spur of the moment, were deserving of the highest praise ([Stephen] 1862: 61). There was general agreement that the days of so-called ‘penny-a-­ liners’, those who were paid by length and who had a reputation for being easily corruptible and prone to dispense ‘false news’, had long gone. The creation of the Press Agency, whose reporters distributed domestic news to hundreds of papers, meant that the profession, according to Besant’s colleague, had ‘risen steadily in tone and ideals’ (Besant 1899: 243). Reporters, who were at the bottom of the career ladder, could earn between four and six pounds weekly. Some estimates

­

professionalisation of journalism

169

put it at between five and seven guineas. Several commentators were insistent that reporting was a job for a gentleman, and that lawyers were attracted to it for this reason. ‘Descriptive writers’, whose brief was wider, earned between eight and ten pounds. Subeditors were paid between four and eight guineas a week; editors between five hundred and eight hundred pounds a year, a few in excess of two thousand. The handbooks and guides to journalism at the end of the century without exception endorsed Besant’s view that writing for newspapers no longer had a stigma attached to it. If its professionalisation was still in progress at the end of the century, journalism had nevertheless become a viable and respectable career for writers.

The Discourse of Journalism The newspaper and periodical press was subjected to intense scrutiny by its practitioners throughout the nineteenth century. Hazlitt’s wellknown essay on ‘The Periodical Press’, published in the Edinburgh Review in 1823, celebrated the ubiquity of periodicals, and the fact that, as he asserted not without a little exaggeration, the only authors who were not starving were periodical essayists. Criticism, he alleged, had ‘never struck its roots so deep, nor spread its branches so widely and luxuriantly’ (Hazlitt 1823: 220). James Mill, in two searching essays on ‘Periodical Literature’ in the first two issues of the Westminster Review in 1824, analysed the competition for his new quarterly review, attacking the Edinburgh and the Quarterly in turn. But it was Gibbons Merle, one-time editor of the London evening paper the Courier, and latterly the Paris correspondent of the Globe, who is credited by the Oxford English Dictionary with the first use of the word ‘journalism’, in an article with that title in the Westminster Review in January 1833. Couched as a review of ‘Du journalisme’, an article in the Revue encyclopédique, Merle compared the reputation of the newspaper press in England unfavourably with that of France, where, he argued, ‘to be a journalist, is to be a person of note; to be an editor, is to be a person of accredited power’. In France, the title of journalist implied ‘education, character, and perhaps disinterested enthusiasm … a union of respectable qualities’ ­­– everything, in other words, that it did not convey in England (Merle [1833]: 195). Why, Merle asked rhetorically, did eminent politicians not write in newspapers, or, if they did, conceal the fact as shameful? How different the situation in France, he went on, anticipating Lewes’s point, where politicians made their reputations by writing in the press and where a policy of signature prevailed. The cause of the malaise of the newspaper press in England, he argued, was

170

joanne shattock

the stamp, which led to highly priced papers crammed with advertisements, and news written by penny-a-liners who lacked the education of ‘decent butlers’ (ibid.: 199). The repeal of the final stamp duty on newspapers, when it came in 1855, produced a flood of euphoric commentary, much of it channelled into speculation as to which areas of the press would see expansion. Almost without exception, the comments were published in reviews and magazines, rather than the newspapers themselves, a fact which Andrew King and John Plunkett interpret as an indication of the periodical press’s continued authority and value as a less transitory space than that provided by newspapers (King and Plunkett 2005: 4). W. R. Greg’s unsigned article ‘The Newspaper Press’, in the Edinburgh Review for October 1855, articulated what press historians Stephen Koss and Martin Conboy identify as one of the commonplaces of the history of the press, its role as a fourth estate. As Koss suggests, once the final tax was abolished and observers could foresee an ongoing expansion, this argument was invested with a new purpose (Koss 1981: 70). ‘Journalism is now truly an estate of the realm; more powerful than any of the other estates; more powerful than all of them combined if it could ever be brought to act as a united and concentrated whole,’ Greg began: Newspapers are just as truly representative of the people as legal senators, only they attain their rank by a different mode of choice: in the latter case, they are elected beforehand by the people; in the former they nominate themselves, but can retain their seat and exercise their functions only if their nomination be confirmed. If a member of the fourth estate differs with his constituents and incurs their displeasure, he must abdicate or recant as surely as a member of the Lower House, and far more promptly. He is not even allowed to wait until a dissolution. ([Greg] 1855: 477, 481) Greg’s lengthy, discursive and probing analysis contrasted with a more impressionistic but equally passionate response to the possibility of an infinitely expanding press by another anonymous commentator, himself a regular writer for the Times. In a two-part article ‘Popular Literature – The Periodical Press’, in Blackwood’s in 1859, E. S. Dallas focused on the explosion of print which reached out to all sectors of society: The newspaper is the elemental form of modern literature. Who is not interested in it? Who is not reached by it? The railway, the steamboat, and the telegraph, all add to its importance. Every

­

professionalisation of journalism

171

improvement that is made in the art of communication and travel contributes to its dignity and increases its utility. No class is beyond its influence. There is not a man, there is hardly a woman, who is not more or less dependent on it. ([Dallas] 1859b: 180–1) The popularity of the press and the vast increase in the number of titles published had not resulted in a deterioration in quality, according to Dallas. Rather, the press had become increasingly specialised. Every interest group had its own organ, every profession its own journal. Periodical literature was ‘essentially a classified literature’: there is the Builder for architects, there is the Art Journal for artists, there is the Mechanics’ Journal for artisans; there is the Economist for merchants. Lawyers have the Law Times; medical men have the Medical Times and the Lancet; chemists and druggists have the Pharmaceutical Journal … ([Dallas] 1859a: 101) The press was not the fourth estate, in his argument; it was a second representation of the third estate, the Commons, with ‘a constituency as real and an election as genuine as any that the House of Commons can boast’ ([Dallas] 1859b: 184). He suggested that local newspapers could be said to represent districts, towns, boroughs, with a far more extensive electorate than that which elected Members of Parliament. Warming to his point, he compared the nation’s newspaper readers to ‘the Roman tribunes, allowed to be present at the debates of the Senate … but not allowed to sit with the senators’ ([Dallas] 1859a: 107). Both Greg and Dallas argued vigorously in support of anonymous versus signed articles, the subject of a highly current debate in the 1850s as new publications like Macmillan’s Magazine adopted signature as a matter of principle. Both invoked what they saw as the weakness of the American press, where the editor’s name was blazoned on the masthead, and writers were credited with individual articles. Dallas also pointed to an aspect of the press that had been a subject for comment since the era of James Mill – its ephemerality: A periodical differs from a book in being calculated for rapid sale and for immediate effect. A book may at first fall dead upon the  market, and yet may endure for ages … A periodical, on the other hand – be it a daily paper, a weekly journal, a monthly magazine, or a quarterly review – is a creature of the day: if each successive number does not attain its object in the short span of  existence  allotted to it, then it fails for ever – it has no future … It  is necessary, therefore, to the success of a periodical, that it  should attain an instant popularity – in other words, that it

172

joanne shattock

should be calculated for the appreciation, not of a few, but of the many. ([Dallas] 1859a: 101) Fitzjames Stephen, writing in the Cornhill several years later, picked up several of the points made by Greg and Dallas. His was a more measured assessment of the new era of journalism. The newspaper press was essentially a commercial undertaking. Whatever its policies on various issues, it had ultimately to please the public. ‘A paper may guide, or bully, or flatter, or instruct, or amuse the public’, but ‘unless it does for the public something which the public likes it does nothing at all.’ Journalists, it followed, were ‘the servants of the public’ ([Stephen] 1862: 53). Like other commentators Stephen placed leader writers at the top of the hierarchy of newspaper writers. Their job was to serve up ‘intellectual mince-meat’, well-written, easily digestible morsels of news and comment written for readers too busy to read discursive articles. Like Greg and Dallas, he emphatically endorsed the existing policy of anonymity in newspapers. It protected the barristers, clergy, government officials and others who often wrote the leading articles, for whom the notoriety of a published signature would be intolerable. Stephen’s view of full-time journalists, a class who had no other occupation or position in life than that derived from newspapers, was not flattering. They began as clerks or reporters and in exceptional cases might rise to positions of eminence. But many lost their way and were doomed to a life of drudgery, cynically selling their columns of London-based gossip to multiple provincial papers as self-styled ‘London correspondents’. Greg, Dallas and Stephen serve as useful barometers of opinion in the first decade following the repeal of the newspaper stamp. Many of the points they made or the rhetorical questions they asked would be debated for the rest of the century. Did a newspaper form public opinion or follow it? Was the press, as Greg alleged, a fourth estate, more representative of ‘the people’ than the House of Commons, and more responsive to its will? Was it the case, as Stephen argued, that newspapers provided readers with digests of news on which they based their opinions? Or did they, as Greg alleged, taking the argument a step further, do the nation’s thinking for it: It furnishes not only the materials on which our conclusions must be founded, it furnishes the conclusions themselves, cut and dried – coined, stamped and polished. It inquires, reflects, decides for us. For five pence or a penny (as the case may be) it does all the thinking of the nation. ([Greg] 1855: 477)

­

professionalisation of journalism

173

The impermanence of the newspaper press, and to a lesser extent of the periodical press, in contrast to the permanence of books, was a recurring theme in a discourse about journalism versus literature which carried on into the twentieth century. The comparison of newspaper writing to oratory, a well-crafted speech which was heard only once rather than a lengthy article or a book that could be reread, was part of the same dichotomy. Stephen’s point that a career in newspaper writing, if it went wrong, could end in drudgery and cynicism was echoed by Fox Bourne, writing in 1887, after being ousted from the editorship of the Weekly Dispatch. Fox Bourne concluded that, although the Fleet Street of the present day was in many ways an improvement on the Grub Street of the eighteenth century, its ‘traditions and infirmities’ were not extinct (Fox Bourne 1887: vol. 2, 372). The question of anonymity versus signature was resolved in the periodical press from the 1860s onwards, with the new monthly magazines and reviews in the vanguard of signed contributions. By the 1890s only some of the quarterlies, together with a few long-running publications like Blackwood’s, held out against signature. The newspaper press, in contrast, was slow to embrace signed articles even at the turn of the century. Writing in 1899, Besant’s colleague acknowledged that one of the most remarkable and, by implication, most offputting aspects of the journalist’s career was the obscurity in which it was conducted. There was no other large body of workers about whom so little was known by the general public, although he sensed ‘a growing individualist movement’ among a few journalists recently (Besant 1899: 236).

Histories of the Press The published discourse on the newspaper and periodical press in the second half of the nineteenth century, of which Greg, Dallas and Stephen’s articles are examples, was vast. Its very extent bore witness to the self-reflexivity of those who wrote for the press, conscious as they no doubt were of participating in a modern publishing phenomenon. As early as 1862, Stephen predicted that journalism would occupy a primary position in any literary history of the period, so characteristic was it of the literary production of the present day. As if on cue, several histories of the press were published from the mid-century onwards, most of them written by experienced news­ paper men. Frederick Knight Hunt, editor of the Daily News, did not live to see the repeal of the final stamp on newspapers, but his quirky

174

joanne shattock

and impassioned history The Fourth Estate, published in 1850, traced the growth of press freedom to the midpoint of the century. The title of Alexander Andrews’s The History of British Journalism: From the Foundation of the Newspaper Press in England, to the Repeal of the Stamp Act in 1855 (1859) was indicative of his underlying agenda. Details of Andrews’s own career in journalism are hazy, but his twovolume history is detailed and comprehensive. One of its distinctive features is the space devoted to the colonial press in North America, India, the West Indies and Australia, the only press history to acknowledge its impact abroad. The chapter on ‘Our Colonial Press’ concludes with typical hyperbole: The British press has now its advanced posts planted out in almost every place where the British flag waved, or the British power ruled; so that, independently of the interest which attaches to these colonial papers for their own sake … they are tearing for themselves in deserts and rocky places channels along which shall flow a sea of information to enrich and nourish the parent stem – the noble trunk of that proud old tree, stretching out its arms for a shelter to the weary, and a protection to the oppressed of every land and country; that tree of knowledge from which none are forbidden, but all are invited to pick the fruit, that oak of our social and political life, the free press of England. (Andrews 1859: vol. 2, 164) James Grant’s The Newspaper Press: Its Origin, Progress and Present Position, published in 1871, defers to Andrews for much of its factual detail, but makes up for what it lacks in accuracy by the sheer brio of the narrative. Grant was a newspaper man turned historian. His engaging narrative is laced with personal anecdotes and his account of the press of his own time is reinforced by ‘information communicated to me personally’ and other supposedly privileged sources. The newspaper press  from the seventeenth century onwards is measured against the press of 1871, and not surprisingly found wanting. ‘It is by contrasting those [daily newspapers] of 1871 with the daily journals of the beginning of the nineteenth or even the eighteenth century that we can best appreciate the character of the journalism of this country in the days in which these volumes are brought before the public,’ he explains pompously (Grant 1871: vol. 1, 255). Despite his ill-concealed triumphalism, Grant offers some shrewd insights and also some sound judgements, among them his assessment of Harriet Martineau’s unique position as an outstanding political journalist of her day. Like other press historians he lists major literary figures in each century

­

professionalisation of journalism

175

who have contributed to the newspaper press, beginning with Dryden and Defoe, and concluding with Dickens, thereby dignifying the press and, although he himself does not make the point, reinforcing the links between literature and journalism. Grant is at pains to point out, however, that literary talent alone does not make a good newspaper man. Fox Bourne’s English Newspapers: Chapters in the History of Journalism (1887) was written after he resigned from a ten-year stint as editor of the radical newspaper the Weekly Dispatch, following a quarrel with the proprietor. His two-volume history focuses on the political dimension of the press, particularly in the nineteenth century. Its value to the student of journalism is its candid final chapter, ‘Nowadays 1887’, which explores aspects of present day practice, drawn from personal experience.

Conclusion One of the difficulties in discussing the professionalisation of journalism in the nineteenth century and of disentangling that process from the professionalisation of authorship in the same period is one of terminology. From today’s vantage point, figures like Douglas Jerrold, Harriet Martineau, Margaret Oliphant, George Augustus Sala and many more would be designated as journalists, such was the proportion of their output that was published in the newspaper and periodical press. The nineteenth century was less certain in its use of the term, as witnessed by the Dictionary of National Biography’s description of Jerrold as a ‘man of letters’, Martineau as a ‘miscellaneous writer’ and Oliphant as a ‘novelist and historical writer’, the last designation determined by the two genres in which to her contemporaries she appeared to publish most. Only Sala, the most celebrated special correspondent of his generation was described in the Dictionary of National Biography as a journalist. Both Gibbons Merle and Fitzjames Stephen in their articles of 1833 and 1862 are clear that ‘journalist’ and ‘journalism’ refer to the newspaper, as distinct from the wider periodical press. The definition of a journalist in the Oxford English Dictionary bears this out. From the examples of its usage in the nineteenth century, it is clear that a journalist and a contributor to the vast periodical literature of the time were not the same thing. The latter was more likely to be described as a critic, a reviewer or man or woman of letters, the last a term that by the 1870s, according to John Gross, meant a writer of secondary rank, ‘someone who aimed higher than journalism but made no pretence of being primarily an artist’ (Gross 1969: xiii).

176

philip march

It was not until the introduction of larger numbers of academic journals in the twentieth century that the terms ‘journalist’ and ‘journalism’ expanded to embrace those who wrote for a diversified periodical press as well as for newspapers, but one which was distinct  from  specialist scholarly publications. But then, as now, the terms ‘journalist’  and ‘journalism’ were contested. Then, as now, the title of  journalist implied a separate career to that of an author, and,  although some would dispute it, a career of less status and significance.

Case Study 3: New Journalism Philip March In May 1887 Matthew Arnold wrote in the respected monthly review Nineteenth Century that ‘We have had opportunities of observing a new journalism which a clever and energetic man has lately invented’ (Arnold 1887a:  638). The principal subject of his critique was W. T. Stead, the prominent late Victorian social campaigner, press innovator and editor of the London Pall Mall Gazette (PMG). According to Arnold, despite some fine qualities, this ‘new journalism’ possessed the major fault of being ‘feather-brained’, an observation which he also applied to the expanding new electorate recently augmented by the Third Reform Act of 1884. In so doing, he highlighted a connection of influence between culture, politics and society that he had already examined twenty years previously in a series of essays published collectively as Culture and Anarchy (Arnold 1869; Arnold 1887a: 638–9). Neither Arnold’s use of the formula ‘new journalism’ nor Stead’s press practices were innovatory. The expression ‘new journalism’ was already in circulation, while the Sunday newspapers, society journals and the provincial press habitually employed the strategies of which Arnold complained. Arnold and Stead did, however, make decisive contributions to the cultural and journalistic debates of the nineteenth century, at a time when the New Journalism emerged and then established itself as the result of the interweaving of editorial rivalries, journalistic discourses and wider cultural debates. In writing of a ‘new journalism’, Arnold was simply using the formula customarily employed in newspapers to announce or denounce a new press project. Moreover, Arnold did not write of ‘the New Journalism’ but of ‘a new journalism’, framing his discussions to signal a recent development in newspapers rather than establishing a new press genre. It was Stead who first capitalised the expression in the PMG (3 May 1887: 4), and he was quickly followed by other newspapers in giving the expression a prominence that it might otherwise have lacked.

­

case study 3 : new journalism

177

The expression ‘new journalism’ as phrase and concept had been in circulation since the late 1850s and early 1860s, describing many of the problematic elements that were highlighted in the later debates. Prominent markers of earlier usage of ‘new journalism’ included sensationalism, rigorous subediting, the privileging of emotive writing over analytical discourse, a drive to evaluate and shape public opinion, and a style of writing invested in the rhetoric of speech. The ‘new journalism’ of the late 1850s and early 1860s described, naturally enough, both the launch of new publications and the develop­ ment of newspaper innovations. Features of these early examples included condemnation of disparaging attacks upon public figures, distrust of a more personalised journalism, scorn for speculative observations, and disdain for articles written to sway readerships through clamour rather than rational persuasion. The Galway Vindicator (21 September 1859: 2), for instance, criticised the advent of badly written, one-cause newspapers, which ‘substitute declamation for logic, and sound and fury for eloquence’. The syndicated column ‘Outlines of the Week’, in the Athlone Sentinel (20 February 1861: 2), on the other hand, severely rebuked, firstly, The Times and then the  London Morning Star for publishing demeaning personal gossip about public figures, ­concluding that ‘such things are new in journalism, and we regret their introduction’ (Athlone Sentinel, 20 February 1861: 2). Elsewhere, the Dublin Daily Express (19 February 1862: 2) reported, in disbelief, that the innovative London Correspondent was to be ‘conducted on an entirely novel principle’, that of being ‘“written in the first person—in a terse, vigorous, and hearty style”’. Arnold had entered the debate in the 1860s when charging both provincial journalism and its powerful beneficiary and supporter, Protestant Dissent, with being narrow, aggressive and lacking in the refinement associated with the metropolis (Arnold 1865: 65–6; Arnold 1869: 29–30). He then disparaged the deployment by provincial newspapers of a forceful advocacy which aimed more ‘at an effect upon the blood and senses than upon the spirit and intellect; it loves hard-hitting rather than persuading’. Indeed, he went further and declared that the provincial press ‘does not persuade, it makes war’ (Arnold 1865: 65). In 1886, in his own scheme for what he also dubbed a ‘new journalism’, Stead argued that, without such inflammatory rhetorical strategies, no notice would be taken of the very issues that needed the most publicising (Stead 1886a: 671). It was difficult enough to rouse the public to action as ‘[e]ven when its object-lessons have been written in characters of blood and flame, it has too often ignored their significance’ (ibid.: 673). Such tactics proved particularly successful in the PMG 1883 campaign for improved housing and in the 1885 ‘Maiden Tribute’ crusade to end female sexual exploitation. While Arnold complained that ‘democracy is being plied with fierce stimulants, and

178

philip march

is agitated and chafing’, Stead promoted the fact that a journalist had available a powerful means of exciting or suppressing interest in an issue: ‘Every day he can administer either a stimulant or a narcotic to the minds of his readers’ (Arnold 1887a: 639; Stead 1886a: 662). By the 1870s the provincial press had made significant advances. The Liverpool Daily Post recognised the forward-thinking developments in the ‘­­country papers’ by declaring that they were now equal to the leading metropolitan titles (Supplement to the Daily Post, 25 April 1870: 1). By then, the provincial newspapers were profitably exploiting the availability of telegraphed news which through its ‘compact and easily comprehended forms’ of ­­presentation proved particularly suitable for the general reader with limited ­­ time to spare and little inclination to peruse lengthy articles. Moreover, the new provincial papers were judged to be well written and managed with a commercial acumen generally considered absent from London journalism. In the wake of the 1867 Reform Act, the PMG (12 November 1867: 10), under Frederick Greenwood, its founding editor, highlighted the capacity of the press to influence the expanded electorate through the publicity given to speeches in terms of their content, delivery and reception. It was not the logical argument of an address which necessarily captured the attention of the readership but the powerful rhetorical quality of the speeches themselves. As a result, the PMG continued, political success would go to those who could ‘most successfully talk over the whole people to their views’ and, most significantly, who were agitating on the populist side. In its readiness to adopt a more personal register, ‘new journalism’ was, therefore, proving to be particularly suited to the needs of an increasingly democratised society and would find in Stead a willing exponent of its strategies. By the late Victorian period, New Journalism had come to denote a commercially astute and technologically advanced press that was developing competitively priced daily newspapers for diversified and expanding readerships (Wiener 1988: 51, 55–6). Fresh editorial priorities for content and layout promoted an increasingly accessible print culture by providing a more attractive overall appearance and writing style (ibid.: 51–2). Consequently, the prevalence of densely packed columns of dull reporting gave way to more easily perused paragraphs, signed articles, interviews, cross-headings, entitled leaders and illustrations (Robertson Scott 1889: 55). Examples of ‘new journalism’ most often shared the defining characteristics of sensationalism and the personal (O’Connor 1889: 423; Stead 1886a: 670) and could be found in the predilection for gossip of the ‘Society Journalism’ of Edmund Yates of the World ( launched in 1874) and Henry Labouchère of Truth (1877). It was also in evidence in the determinedly moral campaigning  of the Salvation Army’s War Cry (1879), the deployment of short, informative articles in George Newnes’s popular one-penny weekly news digest, Tit-Bits

­

case study 3 : new journalism

179

(1881), the campaigning and crusading PMG, the religious advocacy of Hugh Price Hughes’s Methodist Times (1885), the democratic political campaigning journalism of T. P. O’Connor’s Star (1888), and the commercial populism of the Harmsworth brothers’ Daily Mail (1896) and Arthur Pearson’s Daily Express (1900) (Brake and Demoor 2009). It was Stead’s belief that, when used in the press, the sensational and the personal had the potential to confront vested interests in the pursuit of political and social improvement (Stead 1886a: 669–71). He further believed that a more personal journalism would be able to gauge increasingly accurately public opinion, which it could then promote or change (Stead 1886b: 664). In Arnold’s view, however, such changes registered the loss of nuanced thinking and promoted the triumph of the stump-orator over the reasoned eloquence of the cultured writer (Arnold 1887b: 323). Excesses, such as the descent of personal journalism into slander, scandal, personalised attacks, and the ‘cruel and vile’ accounts of divorce cases and sensational court trials, were, however, to be roundly condemned (March Phillipps 1895: 185; O’Connor 1889: 430). Criticism of the PMG as an influential carrier of disturbing innovation had already been made before Arnold’s essay ‘Up to Easter’ was published. In May 1880, after the Liberal Party’s general election victory, the paper changed political allegiance from high Liberalism, when run by Greenwood, to the more progressive Liberalism of William Gladstone. By the end of the month Greenwood had left the PMG, taking with him other disaffected staff members to start up the St James’s Gazette. As the reader learned in the paper’s introductory article (St James’s Gazette, May 1880: i–ii), the known reliability of the old PMG was now to be found in the new St James’s, but through sleight of epithetical attribution news vendors called the PMG ‘the new paper’ with all the disdain that the idea of novelty implied. These criticisms made of the PMG by a representative of the old guard were further exacerbated when an acrimonious dispute broke out in 1884 between Stead and Edmund Yates, the editor of the weekly World and leading exponent of ‘new journalism’, this time in its guise of ‘Society Journalism’. At the heart of this clash was a front-page article entitled ‘A Plea for TittleTattle’ (PMG, 3 April 1884: 1), in which the newspaper gleefully reported that Yates had been convicted of libel. As Stead declared, ‘The charm of society journalism lies in the supposed accuracy of the gossip which it retails,’ and inaccurate defamatory newspaper content was to be denounced and censured (ibid.). Three months later Yates published a retaliatory leader entitled ‘Political Tipstering’ (World, 18 June 1884: 5) contemptuously qualifying Stead’s newspaper practice in the PMG as the ‘new journalism’ and turning his assailant’s rallying cry for press truthfulness into an attack on Stead himself. Yates proclaimed that Stead’s treatment of the truth was itself deficiently based upon nothing more than unrefuted insinuation and personal dislikes:

180

allison cavanagh

‘Such are the tactics, such the spirited policy, of the new journalism’ (World, 18 June 1884: 5). This article may well have served as the inspiration for some of Arnold’s more famous 1887 observations, for Yates’s acknowledgement that the PMG and its editor possessed ‘ingenuity’, charm, versatility, impulsiveness, spiritedness, volubility and the allure of the new was echoed in Arnold’s recognition that Stead’s paper demonstrated ‘ability’, ‘sympathy’, ‘variety’, ‘generous instincts’ and ‘novelty’. Further, Yates’s characterisation of Stead as an ‘inspired idiot of the press’ evolved into Arnold’s qualification of Stead’s journalism as ‘feather-brained’, designed to satisfy, he emphasised, an equally ‘feather-brained’ new electorate. The message for readers was clear: ‘new journalism’, as exemplified by Stead and the PMG, was only interested in publishing unsubstantiated observations in a new and clamorous manner with the sole aim of making a profit. The debate over New Journalism that erupted in May 1887 proved to be part of an ongoing examination of cultural anxieties provoked by press innovation and push-back from more entrenched, traditional practices. Educational, electoral and fiscal changes fed into press growth and changes in press content and format. Stead realised that, for most of the new voters, the power of newspapers to harness affective engagement was also a crucial development for policymakers to understand and exploit. Arnold, on the other hand, was destabilised by the increasing democratisation of society that was becoming so powerfully evident in educational provision, accessibility of knowledge, the extended electoral franchise, and the type and numbers of newspapers available and read. Although Stead and Arnold disagreed over the best way in which to present ideas to the public for political and social betterment, they nonetheless shared the same profound desire to promote moral and spiritual improvement in society. The exponents of New Journalism, therefore, had to decide whether to concentrate on promoting a press dominated by commercial profit, peep-show sensationalism, and a tawdry personalised agenda, or to choose something more uplifting. This latter possibility could be realised in the development of a responsible campaigning journalism designed to promote a greater sense of personal involvement and collective well-being (Baylen: 385). Whether that turned out to be the case in the twentieth century is an issue covered by other historians of the press.

Case Study 4: Letters to the Editor Allison Cavanagh In April 1882 ‘A Sufferer’ was moved to write to the Times: ‘Sir– During this short grumbling season can you find room for a remonstrance against the

­

case study 3 : new journalism

181

stopping of thoroughfares while the making of new ones is under consideration?’ That the letters ‘pages’ of the Times were seen as an appropriate space for ‘grumbling’, and indeed that grumbling is a seasonal activity, is a good introduction to the idea that letters to the editor are primarily concerned with the expression of disenchantment, a space for the venting of private grievance, and good exercise for the stabled hobby horse. This view is also a fairly common one among contemporary newspaper editors and academics, as E. P. Thompson’s grouchy ‘Sir, Writing by Candlelight’ testifies. However, letters have had a significant role to play in both historical and normative accounts of the media. As Wahl-Jorgensen has noted, the ‘history of the press is also, in a sense, the history of letters to the editor’ (2007: 29). In her work, she traced the development of letters from their early history, wherein reader letters were undifferentiated from other content, to their relegation to ‘reader interaction’ once a more professionalised ethos of fact-based journalism had emerged. Letters, then, came to play a key role in the establishment of authenticity, intimacy and engagement. A similar pattern emerged with respect to periodicals in the United Kingdom. Records of letters to the editor of national newspapers exist going back at least as far as John Walter’s Daily Universal Register in 1785. The practice of correspondence with periodicals of specific interest, especially those associated with scientific and religious societies, was well established by the turn of the nineteenth century, and over the course of the century greater and greater volumes of correspondence were published. Thus, for example, the Times published 1978 letters in 1881, as against 130 in 1815. Likewise, John Bull published 575 letters between 1820 and 1829, and 3,328 for the period 1860–9. Of course, letter frequency fluctuates with readership and can be an index as much of circulation as of editorial policy, but the growth of letters points to the diversification of the practice over this period. We see a greater diversity in the range of publications in which letters take a role, and greater and more plural forms of letter writing. By the end of the nineteenth century, at the time of publications such as Newnes’s Tit-Bits, from 1881, and the rival Answers to Correspondents, the practice was well entrenched and formed a key element of most periodicals and newspapers. As a resource in scholarship, letters are ‘among the few remaining ­­accessible and unchanging records of public opinion’ (Thornton 2007: 63). This is true not only in respect of the kinds of issues which animated readers but also in how issues came to be defined for public consideration. As Robson’s (1995) work on Victorian letters to the Telegraph and the Times makes clear, the modes of discourse and patterns of discussion in letters give us an insight into the role of the press in shaping spontaneous expressions of specific concerns into a broader social agenda. For Curtis, they ‘constitute a form of “cultural power”‘ (Curtis 2001: 238) in so far as they

182

allison cavanagh

were for some the sole, for others a significant, channel for the expression of opinion. The fact of being able to call upon, at whatever degree of remove, the power of the press was for many their only scope for redress of grievance (see also Cavanagh 2013). Yet, at the same time, as Robson further argues, newspapers were ‘forwarding a revolution by this addition of “opinion” from … readers – moving authority from Leaders to Readers’, leading to a ‘tendency … to exalt opinion, valued as individual but judged more powerful the more widely shared’ (Robson 1995: 260). As Beetham (1990) and Brake, Bell and Finkelstein (2000) have argued, the nineteenth-century press played a key role in the construction of identities. For periodicals, ‘(m)aintaining a regular readership means offering readers a recognisable position … creating a consistent “reader” within the text’ (Beetham 1990: 28). This identity was validated by the inclusion of letters. As Warren argues, readers ‘constructed identities within the margins of the text’, but in engaging as correspondents deepened the process of identification with a publication, surpassing the ‘more abstract reader–text relationship’ (Warren 2000: 123). For others, ‘the appearance of the reader in the texts serves to specify and consolidate the readership’ (ibid.). Publication of letters confirmed the proffered identity of the reader. At the same time, the forum of letters itself ‘authenticates the views expressed’ (Robson 1995: 250), validating their legitimacy as interventions in a debate. Since the evidential base of readers’ assertions is often experiential (Robson 1995: 251; Wahl-Jorgensen 2001: 21), this deepens the sense of readers’ engagement with issues as both a public and a personal matter. It is in this sense that letters constitute a form of ‘mediated cultural citizenship’ (Chapman 2013), one which elevates and sanctions the slippage between the personal and the political. Letters, then, are not only a thermometer of opinion but a locus of identity formation. Moreover, as many have noted, letters played a key role in the construction of editorial identity (Wahl-Jorgensen 2007). Conboy notes the multiple ways in which editors used letters pages to create, and later destabilise and reconstitute, definitions of journalism throughout the nineteenth century, from the political rallying letters of Hetherington’s Poor Man’s Guardian, through the populist tone struck by the Telegraph in the mid-century, to the Daily Mirror’s use of letters as a key element in the affectation of populism through the appropriation of the language of the ‘man in the street’ in the twentieth century (Conboy 2010; see also Bingham and Conboy 2009). The use of letters to describe an aesthetic of editorial accessibility and populism was a core strategy for development of identity in the case of Tit-Bits, as Jackson (2000) notes. Jackson also notes the irony in nineteenth-century developments that ‘entailed an increase in the distance between the organisational hierarchy of the publishing company and the mass reading public that fed its progress’, but also spawned a personalised journalistic aesthetic, recreating ‘old community relations of

­

case study 3 : new journalism

183

eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain (Raymond Williams’s “knowable community”) within various “reading communities” with shared values and experiences’ (Jackson 2000: 24). For editors, then, letters were a key resource to signal direction and marshal a community of like-minded readers. However, whatever the affordances of letters pages for readers and editors, there is still the unknowable question of their meaning for letter writers. As Dauphin (1997) notes, by the nineteenth century the practice of letter writing was not a singular one, but covered a multitude of textual interactions and practices. Even when limited to letters expressly intended for mass publication, letter writing drew on complex and historically situated codes and practices. Brant (2006) has pointed out that ‘writing as a citizen’ in the eighteenth century involved the use of textual codes derived from satire, taking on a credulous voice (in the case of Swift’s Drapier’s Letters, for example), or an outraged one (as in the case of Cato’s Letters, written by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon). Brant further argues that letter writing by pseudonymous personae ‘developed letter writing as a tool of citizenry’ (ibid.: 193), drawing force from a vocabulary of the personal and the emotional. The form of the letter encoded opposition and demanded response. The ‘dialogical nature of correspondence matched the interrogatory nature of political exchange’ (ibid.: 171). Moreover, in publication ‘(p)lurally they created a spectrum of argument’ (ibid.: 173), delineating the variety of legitimate positions from which to read an issue. Letters thus existed at the intersection of the public, the mass and the personal, and played a key role in creating and sustaining emergent journalistic styles and different modes or aesthetics of engagement in the nineteenth century. In so far as they drew on multiple literary influences, letters exhibited distinctive manners of engagement and modes of discourse that intersected with those of journalism only to some extent. They show the particular ways in which people understood the practice of letter writing for publication. For some this was a credulous one, letters being seen as a direct appeal to the ‘public’ at large, or part of a search for a specific kind of information. Writers took on the role of public ‘champion’ or ‘gladiator’ (Buell 1975), extrapolating personal experience to a wider social ill. This affordance of letters occurred against the backdrop of increasing complexity and organisational development in UK consumer politics in the nineteenth century (Hilton 2012; Trentmann and Taylor 2006). The role of consumer watchdog as a category of citizen participation has a multifaceted relationship with other kinds of political and socially progressive movements (Hilton 2012), but takes the form of a conscious but distanced act of social responsibility (Hilton 2012; Stevenson 2003). In general, consumer identities in letters ‘pages’ were often invoked in respect of factors affecting consumption, tariffs, taxation and high prices for essential commodities, moving later to more sustained concerns with municipal provisions (Trentmann and Taylor 2006). In other cases, letters offered a forum

184

allison cavanagh

for providing specific information, as the frequency of the use of pseudonyms such as ‘Eye-Witness’ attests. In such cases the personal is raised to the level of the public, as indeed it is in another common use, letters used as a means of repairing a damaged reputation. Letters such as J. R. Herbert’s correction to the Times pointing out that a piece of work attributed to him in the Times was in fact a ‘very wretched copy’ were by no means uncommon in that paper. ‘I rely on your invariable disposition to do an act of justice to give insertion to my statement,’ concluded Herbert (Herbert 1972: 3). For others, letter writing constituted a wider engagement with a literary and cultural sphere. Periodicals offered cues to the readership on the modes of address and engagement accepted. Capital and Labour (1873–82) was not unique in positioning itself as a mere intermediary, featuring headers explaining that ‘[f]or the opinions expressed in this column of “Capital and Labour” the writers alone are to be held responsible’. Although some publications featured letters integrated within the text with little distinction given to subscriber correspondence and editorial content, others were at pains to differentiate them. Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle (1822–86) was, by 1826, experimenting with producing its ‘Original Correspondence’ section under a handsome header featuring London gentlemen queuing to post correspondence through the letter box of its premises. Over its publication history, the letters section of Bell’s moved within editions from front pages to main body, being, as was typical, more or less differentiated. A contrast can be drawn between letters sections as forums for amplification of opinion and as a space for genuine reader engagement, and this is often apparent in literary and artistic journals. Blair (2014) has shown the key role played by correspondence sections in the shaping of working-class literary culture in nineteenth-century Scotland, for example. Even general-interest publications used letters pages for a similar, though less specialised, purpose. The practice of prize giving for literary essays, stories and poems was prevalent in many periodicals, who also received and commented on unsolicited pieces. The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine (EDM) used its notices to correspondents columns to critique submissions of poetry. For example, ‘F.K.D. – Your verses, “To my Baby Asleep” are very feeling but from errors of construction we are compelled to decline them’ (Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, n.d.: vol. III, 30). Publications like the EDM were also forums for advice, and thus in this same edition, jostling among replies to would-be contributors, we see requests for recipes for razor paste, cures for earache and routine subscriber administration. Local newspapers, moreover, featured these kinds of personalised replies to specific queries in the notes for correspondents sections, publishing items that were likely meaningful only to the addressed recipient. Thus, the London News (16 May 1858) addresses ‘R.G.’ with ‘We know nothing of the party you name, except what we glean from his advertisement’ and ‘W.C.R.’

­

case study 3 : new journalism

185

with the enigmatic response ‘[w]e think it has’. For other publications, letter writing followed a more didactical model. Certainly this is the case in respect to the more ‘consumer advice’ mode adopted by periodicals aimed at women, which set in place an asymmetrical power relationship between reader and editor, inverting the model of letters to the editor as a space for redress of grievance, or one in which the press can be ‘called to account’. In such interactions it is possible to track, however one-sidedly, a conversation between readership and editors which shapes the identity and purpose of the publication and the cultural sphere it maintains. Letters to the editor give testimony to the ways in which readers saw relevance for news in their own lives. The bulk of correspondence concerned responses to news often reframed in personalised terms (Curtis 2001: 238). As Nord has pointed out, news items ‘do not have fixed meanings. Meaning occurs not in the text, but in the reading of it’ (1995: 67). Writers sought ways to link ongoing events of national significance to often more colloquial and idiosyncratic concerns and in so doing entrenched a logic of argument within the letters pages that privileged anecdotal, experiential and situated modes of argument. As a result, they cemented precisely those distinctions between the press and the mass which letters are seen to challenge and gestured to the more intimate and personalised narratives of journalism and of public engagement which emerged. This variety, then, as Wahl-Jorgensen (2007) notes, necessarily complicates a previously dominant Habermasian vision of letters as an element in the realisation of a singular public sphere, in which such pages provide a mere forum for the expression of opinion, here considered as spontaneously arising ‘rational debate’. Letters to the editor, then, show us complex and shifting patterns in the ways in which publics and professionals engaged with each other in the creation of cultural spheres in the nineteenth century centred on mass and niche publications. By the end of the nineteenth century, in part through the key role they had played in bringing private and public spheres into collision, letters had come to have a constitutive role in the generation of a new populist journalistic aesthetic. Moreover, they provided a space for the development of a more inclusive literary and artistic culture.

Case Study 5: The Reporter Stephen Tate A key trade expectation associated with the role of the reporter on a nineteenthcentury newspaper was the ability to take a verbatim note of a speech or a debate, and to transcribe it accurately, without comment or embellishment, against an approaching print deadline. This most basic of career necessities

186

stephen tate

came to define the image and status of the reporter throughout the century (Aspden 1929: 21–37; Brown 1985: 75–94; Lee 1976: 104–17; Mackie 1894: 34–9; Pendleton 1890: 154–6). But the practicalities associated with the recording of the spoken word sat alongside a less easily categorised quality of alertness that contemporaries variously described as ‘a nose for news’, of having ‘eyes and ears open’, of the ability to judge ‘the news value of an event’ – a presence of mind that might be categorised as instinct or be acquired through experience (‘London Editor’ 1909: 1; Hodgson 1884: 138; Hunt 1887: 210). Advancement might then depend upon the acquisition of further additional and complementary skills including a measure of conciseness as a ‘smart paragraphist’, the capacity to introduce order and context to an event and, in the late nineteenth century, tentative steps towards the framing of rudimentary interviews and the slow adoption of reporting specialisms. A flair for ‘descriptive’ work, a catch-all term suggesting an ability to produce a narrative or account going beyond a reliance upon the reported speech and the framework of order imposed by council, court and hustings, would become a prized attribute (Pendleton 1902: 123; Phillips 1895: 80–91). Without that flair the reporter was ‘like the painter who can copy but cannot paint direct from nature’ (Brown 1985: 103). On a personal level, sociability coupled with an air of respectability were deemed important elements in the make-up of the reporter, along with sobriety on account of access to drink in a variety of reporting scenarios, and a strong constitution to endure potentially long working hours in exacting conditions (Jeffries 1873: 12–13; Reade 1885: 132; Simonis 1917: 7–8). Reporters came to be condemned for their work at both ends of the news spectrum – for the often drab and invariably lengthy recounting of the mundane happenings of civic and community life, and then for any hint of sensationalism or prying associated with stories of a dramatic or tragic nature. An 1880 employment guide cautioned, ‘impersonality must be cultivated’, adding that the ‘endurance of this drudgery’ was a necessity (Oldcastle 1880: 21–2, 26). At the other extreme, the Pall Mall Gazette complained of the fevered writing style of the freelance or penny-a-line reporter seeking a market for stories of accidents and fatalities – ‘They cry over the body and sell their tears’ (cited in London, Provincial and Colonial Press News, 15 July 1869: 15). A dislike of the practice translated into an aversion to the practitioner. The Fleet Street editor T. P. O’Connor, recalling his time as a junior reporter in 1860s Dublin, suggested that he and his colleagues became a ‘class apart’, noting ‘it was still the rule that no sign of recognition passed between the reporter and anybody who was in the least entitled to regard himself as his social superior, and, practically, everybody was his superior’ (O’Connor 1894: 18–19). For much of the century the role of the reporter, on weekly newspapers in particular, appears often to have involved mixed duties. The editor of a weekly

­

case study 3 : new journalism

187

might well have to turn his hand to reporting on a regular basis (Bussey 1906: 11–12) or combine the role of subeditor and reporter (Frost 1888: 112; Higginbottom 1934: 13; Thomas 1904: 18). A reporter might also double as a canvasser for advertisements or as office manager, or proofreader (Aspden 1929: 15–16; Reid 1897: 55–6). Occasional reporting duties for a compositor, or work at case for a reporter, were commonly mentioned in job advertisements (London, Provincial and Colonial Press News, 20 April 1875: 37; 21 May 1875: 37–8; 18 June 1874: 30; 18 February 1874: 32; 18 April 1874: 32; 19 October 1874: 36; 20 January 1875: 35; 20 February 1875: 38; Journalist, 14 September 1888: 1; 7 December 1888: 1). This expectation of a willingness to take on combined duties generated a sense of exploitation among some in the print world (London, Provincial and Colonial Press News, 19 November 1874: 30). Relatively low pay rates were the norm throughout the industry. In a contemporary survey of wages and skilled workers, a lower-middle-class annual budget at century’s end was put at between £150 and £200, with county council clerks, senior telegraphists, bank clerks, ‘certain skilled mechanics’ and teachers in London board schools falling within the category. The author of the survey included junior reporters on the ‘best metropolitan papers’ and senior reporters on the ‘best local papers’ in the earnings bracket. A high number of reporters, though, were getting by on around £1 or 30s a week (Burnley Gazette 1867; Layard 1901: 656–66; Tate 2007: 96–111). One of the trade’s earliest specialisms and routes to higher pay was through parliamentary reporting. Most parliamentary reporters were said to be paid between five and six pounds a week in the 1870s and 1880s. A key skill required for such work was swift, verbatim note-taking, managed through a variety of shorthand systems, given that debates were reproduced at length. Its centrality to the trade overall serves to illustrate the narrow expectations of competency surrounding the business of reporting, and the limited scope for expressive writing that pertained for much of the century. Even this elite employment strand was notable for the tedium of the work and its ‘wearisome’ character, although the advent of ‘Lobby journalism’ freed some from the grind of the set-piece speech while imposing new demands of ‘deduction and speculation’ (Dawson 1885: 12; Grant 1871: 171–3; Gratton 1860; Higginbottom 1934: 147–62; Sparrow 2003). Beyond Westminster, one of the best-known reporting specialists in midcentury, and probably the first in his noteworthy field, was Charles Town Fowler, London’s unofficial fire reporter. The former compositor drifted into the penny-a-line trade – providing freelance reports at the rate of a 1½d per line of type used – and made fire reporting his fiefdom in the 1850s and 1860s. His enthusiasm for the work, the cultivation of both senior and junior contacts among London’s fire service providers, and his seeming ubiquity secured him

188

steve harrison

preferential status on the city’s morning papers when it came to the use of his reports. Later in the nineteenth century Jack While, son of a veteran Times reporter, assumed the role (London, Provincial and Colonial Press News 15 May 1866: 13–14; 15 July 1869: 17–19; 17 February 1873: 12–13; Tate 2016; While 1931). Access to information from officials facilitated Fowler’s fire reporting, and access to information, or the lack of it, would help dictate the development of other specialisms (Brown 1985: 144–69). In terms of crime reporting, contrast the experience of Thomas Catling of Lloyd’s Weekly News in 1876 with that of reporters in London at the height of the Ripper Murders in 1888. Catling recalled sharing a cigar with two detectives and a newly arrested suspected murderer in the early hours of the morning at Rochester Row police station, and the informal sharing of exclusive news relating to the crime, whereas reporters in the 1880s complained of alleged obfuscation, prevarication and ‘police reticence’ when covering the city’s crime beats. The release of police information about crime appears not to have been put on any formal footing in the period, with reporters unsure of the reception their enquiries would be met with. The issuing of official reporters’ passes offering some form of accreditation with police and allowing access to incidents where the public had been barred was not accorded to reporters until the twentieth century, and access to station charge sheets was uneven across the country (Catling 1911: 130–1; The Journalist 16 November 1888: 6–7; 4 December 1889: 3; Penny Illustrated Paper, 1 October 1910: 428–9). But crime was a staple of the press, and over time and into the twentieth century crime reporting would develop its own parameters and conventions, with a melding of factual reporting, informed speculation, intervention and melodrama (Tit-Bits 1904: 278­­­­–83; Curtis 2001: 83–108; Higginbottom 1934: 15–16; King 2007: 73–112; Morris 2006: 97–100; Rodrick 2017: 66–99).

Case Study 6: The Byline Steve Harrison Until the mid-nineteenth century journalism had been a largely anonymous affair.1 While noms de plume, aliases, initials and fictional persona were common, the case of a writer of journalism signing their own work was so rare that it was cause for comment. In his study of the eighteenth-century Tatler and Spectator founder Richard Steele, Charles Knight remarks that what gave Steele’s political writing its most striking characteristic was ‘his unusual willingness to sign his name to much that he wrote’ (Knight 2009: 38). It was 1

‘Journalist’ is used here as shorthand for writers of periodical non-fiction, those whom Swift characterises as the ‘muses of Grub Street’ (Harris 1983: 39).

­

case study 3 : new journalism

189

only in the 1860s that anonymity started to loosen its universal grip, at least with respect to literary and political journalism; news reports would continue to be uncredited well into the twentieth century. Anonymity came in different flavours, of course – the identities of journalists unknown to us would have been perfectly transparent to contemporaries (or a subset of them), despite the lack of a byline, as Dallas Liddle notes about Victorian journals: ‘[T]he cognoscenti … can tell or find out easily enough who an individual writer is’ (Liddle 1997: 60). An article on anonymous journalism in the Saturday Review of 1858 makes the same point: ‘Hundreds of people are well acquainted with the names of the principal contributors to the principal London papers, and could give a pretty good guess, from the nature of the subjects treated, as to the particular articles to be ascribed to any particular man’ (Saturday Review, 20 November 1858: 499–500). The ubiquity of the practice led one early and exasperated historian of the press to express the hope that ‘the peculiar difficulties of a subject, where a jealous reserve is necessarily maintained to support the anonymous character of the Press, which goes so far to ensure its independence, and even its influence, will be appreciated’ (Andrews [1859] 1968: 352). We can define a personal byline as the typographical device containing the name of the writer(s) of an article in a news publication. Generic bylines, of the form ‘Our Own Correspondent’ or ‘Special Correspondent’, appear from at least the late 1790s and reflect the growing importance attached to the sources and transmission of news – hence the Norwich Chronicle of 1796 bylines a parliamentary report ‘By Express from our own Correspondent’; in April 1884 the bylines ‘By Eastern Company’s Cables’ and ‘By in tha nineteenth century Indo-European Telegraph’ both appear on the same page of the Times. But in the nineteenth century individual news reporters or correspondents are still not named. Even William Howard Russell’s subsequently celebrated reports from the Crimea were published in the Times without a personal byline. His dispatch describing the cavalry action at Balaklava, which was to inspire Tennyson’s ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’, for instance, is simply bylined ‘From Our Special Correspondent’ (Times, 14 November 1854: 7). In one respect, the lack of bylines worked in Russell’s favour, as the reports which inspired Florence Nightingale to offer her services have since been erroneously attributed to him, the byline to these simply reading ‘From Our Own Correspondent’ (Times, 12 October 1854: 7 and 13 October 1854: 8). Their author was in fact Russell’s fellow Irishman Thomas Chenery (Knightley 1989: 13–14). Equally fêted on both sides of the Atlantic was H. M. Stanley of the New York Herald, whose African encounter with David Livingstone in 1872 was an international sensation. Yet, while he was credited by name with the initial report on 2 July (‘I announce the arrival this day of letters from Mr Stanley,’ wrote the Herald’s London correspondent), Stanley’s full report was credited only to ‘the

190

steve harrison

New York Herald correspondent … associated with [Livingstone]’ (New York Herald, 15 August 1872: 3). This reflected the general view articulated by the Times editor Thomas Barnes, who spoke for his peers when he defended ‘the power of dignified anonymity’ as a means of ensuring the Olympian unity of the newspaper’s authorial voice. Where anonymity featured in early nineteenth-century periodical and press production, its use could range from the playful, such as the device of the fictional letter to the editor (Goldgar 1994), sometimes protective (such as the letters of Junius, whose author’s true identity is still not certain), and sometimes as a matter of practicality (such as when news was copied from other news­ papers and hence the author was unknown to the publisher). The convention of anonymity was first challenged by the serious mid-century literary and political reviews, most vocally by the Fortnightly Review (Green 1930: 91),2 whose 1865 issue featured a strong condemnation of anonymity in journalism, penned by co-founder Anthony Trollope. Yet even this early advocate of signed journalism shied away from recommending that bylines should appear in newspapers as opposed to review journals: The newspaper is not a lamp lighted by a single hand, but a sun placed in the heaven by an invisible creator … we may acknowledge that the present anonymous system of writing for the daily press in England is useful and salutary. (Trollope 1865: 493) Hence bylines are to be reserved for those productions of literary merit appearing in the sober reviews (what Liddle (1997: 32) labels “the ‘higher journalism’ of magazines and reviews”), not ephemeral newspaper reports. This valorisation of the literary may explain the appearance of an anomalous personal sign-off byline (that is, one which appears at the end of an article) in the Times for 14 April 1884, as it was for a piece of literary criticism penned by the Edinburgh academic John Stuart Blackie.3 While the issue of bylined journalism was a frequent topic of debate in the second half of the nineteenth century (often linked to discussion of the secret ballot, where anonymity was routinely associated with accountability – see, for example, King and Plunkett (eds) 2004: 574–5), it was always in the context of political journalism, commentary or reviews rather than news reporting. Maurer (1948) concisely summarises the terms of that debate but only refers in passing to news reporting. Indeed, it takes us outside our timeframe, to the interwar years of the twentieth century, before bylined news reports Macmillan’s Magazine printed contributors’ names from 1859, but this was never made a matter of explicit editorial policy nor rigorously adhered to, unlike the Fortnightly. 3 The article controversially defended Goethe against charges of amorality, so the Times may have been distancing itself from Blackie’s views by using a byline. I am indebted to Dr Stuart Wallace for this suggestion (Wallace 2016). 2

­

case study 3 : new journalism

191

become common. However, a pioneering example was set by Northcliffe at the century’s turn, when he faced a challenge which had been addressed by Oscar Wilde fifteen years earlier. Northcliffe launched the Daily Mirror on 2 November 1903 as a ‘mirror of feminine life’ aimed at cultivated women – although, as he ruefully acknowledged the following year, ‘women don’t want a daily newspaper of their own’ (Daily Mirror, 27 February 1904: 1). Both men came up with the same solution. They wished to capitalise on the fact that much of their content was written by women, as part of efforts to market their publications to a predominantly female audience. In Wilde’s case, the publication was the Woman’s World in 1887; in Northcliffe’s, the Daily Mirror in 1903. The solution they adopted was to byline articles so that the gender of the writer was foregrounded. Wilde jettisoned the classical portraiture of the Lady’s World cover he inherited in 1887 in favour of a list of contributors’ names (placed underneath, and less prominent than, the words ‘edited by Oscar Wilde’, of course), which were mainly female. As Laurel Brake notes, this contrasts markedly with the articles in its former incarnation, the Lady’s World, which were anonymous, so that Wilde’s use of the byline functions as a means of gendering the contributors to his publication (Brake 1994: chapter 7). He wished to make it clear that his was a magazine concerned not merely with what women wore ‘but with what they think, and what they feel’ (Nowell-Smith 1958: 253). Northcliffe followed suit: on page eight of the Daily Mirror issues dated 6 November and 7 November 1903, for instance, there are six features articles bylined with female names (one article being written entirely in French!), compared with only one male byline. It is true that the issue of 5 November 1903 contains four male bylines, but one of them tartly reads: ‘By A Mere Man’. A comparison with Northcliffe’s flagship Daily Mail indicates that the Mirror’s use of bylines was a deliberate ploy – even by 1905 the Mail only used personal bylines sparingly, such as that of the motoring expert Major G. Matson. It would not be until the 1930s that bylines started to appear routinely in the Mail. Since key early Mirror staff were seconded from the Daily Mail, including launch editor Mary Howarth, it is clear that the Mirror’s practice of using bylines wasn’t imported from its elder sibling but purposely introduced to drive home the message that the Mirror was a newspaper written by and for ‘gentlewomen’. Within weeks, the experiment ended disastrously, with Northcliffe later virtually boasting how he ‘dropped £100,000 on the Mirror’, and soon after its launch the Mirror proclaimed itself ‘A Paper for Men and Women’4. Gone were the female bylines, and, tellingly, credit was liberally awarded to the artists (‘Sketched by a “Mirror” artist’ appears throughout), emphasising the These words appeared beneath the masthead for the first time on Thursday, 28 January 1904. Northcliffe’s ‘boast’ was the front-page lead story in the issue dated 27 February 1904.

4

192

steve harrison

transformation to the Daily Illustrated Mirror which took place from 25 January 1904 (evidently a rushed change, as the page tops didn’t change until the following day). Clearly, the Mirror’s use of bylines at its launch was not a utilitarian acknowledgement of authorship but a way of drawing attention to the gender of the writer. When illustrators rather than women writers became the Mirror’s unique selling point, illustrations rather than articles were bylined. And in a final reversal of the primacy given to women journalists at the Mirror, one history of the newspaper even erases its first editor, Mary Howarth, from the picture completely – its timeline of ‘Editors of the Daily Mirror’ begins with Hamilton Fyfe in 1904 (Edelman 1966: 208). The attitude of reporters themselves to bylines is mixed. Henri Blowitz, the Times’s leading foreign correspondent in the 1880s, was widely regarded as a self-publicist and was admonished by Foreign Assistant Editor Mackenzie Wallace: ‘Your great journalistic talent … does not easily accommodate itself to the requirements of that anonymous journalism of which The Times is the great representative’ (Times 1947: 139). Similarly, the reason for Clement Scott leaving the Daily Telegraph in 1898 was that its proprietor, Edward Lawson, would not agree to Scott’s signing his theatre notices – ‘a practice which was contrary to the style of the paper’ (Burnham 1955: 40). On the other hand, and in another century, Windsor Davies resigned from the Times’s political staff over the introduction of personal bylines in 1967 with the observation: ‘I knew Windsor Davies, and didn’t think much of him, but to be called Parliamentary correspondent of The Times – that was really something’ (Grigg 1993: 27). By the turn of the century developments across the Atlantic were making themselves felt throughout the industry, including techniques such as the interview (Schudson 1996: chapter 3; Schudson 2008: chapter 3) and the cult of the celebrity reporter. The furiously competitive nature of the popular press, exemplified in the battles between Pulitzer and Hearst, was predicated on the transformation of ‘news’ (its content, style and values) from an already-given, readily-available resource to a heterogeneous and agonistic field of production; the news was being created rather than gathered5 (of course, other factors – technological and educational among them – also played a part in this transformation). The highly sensationalised Yellow Journalism associated with the two media tycoons was nothing if not proactive: campaigns, stunts, exposés, advocacy and activism were its hallmark (Spencer 2007) and the news reporter its standard-bearer. When Nelly Bly tackled sham mediums in Pulitzer’s World on 25 March 1888, for instance, the article’s main heading was ‘Nellie Bly as a mesmerist’; this was in addition to her sign-off byline Shaw dismissed the notion of signed news writing precisely because it was ‘produced by “arrangers” … rather than creators who control their own language’ (DaRosa 1997: 830).

5

­

case study 3 : new journalism

193

(World, 25 March 1888: 19). Her fame was such – building on her celebrated report the previous year into conditions at Bellevue insane asylum – that Bly herself had become the story. But celebrity reporters were, by definition, the exception rather than the norm,6 and it was the 1920s before bylined news reports became common (Barnhurst and Nerone 2001) – although even here there is disagreement about methodological principles (Reich 2010). The ­history of the byline is a story which is still being written.

The classic study by Ogan et al. (1975) found no bylines on the front page of the New York Times between 1900 and 1905 or between 1910 and 1915, compared with bylines appearing on 16 per cent of front-page stories between 1930 and 1935.

6

Chapter Six

NEWSPAPERS AND THE LAW IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY1 Tom O’Malley

P

re-publication censorship ceased after 1694 with the failure of Parliament to renew the Licensing Act (Siebert 1965: 260–3). From the mid-nineteenth century British and Irish newspapers were also freed from economic controls which had been imposed by successive governments since the early eighteenth century. Thereafter the number of newspapers produced grew considerably. Newspapers became the communications phenomenon of the age, provoking as much discussion, praise and criticism as has the internet in recent years (Jones 1996). During the nineteenth century the industry and its apologists claimed that the press was a vehicle of enlightenment and education, and a watchdog, guarding the public interest against the misuse of power by the executive – it was characterised as the Fourth Estate of the realm (Boyce 1978; Hampton 2004b). Whereas these developments have been the focus of a considerable volume of scholarly work, the industry’s broader relationship with the law has been relatively neglected. Although this chapter focuses on newspapers, many of the issues raised related to press publications in general. The main focus of this chapter is on the law2 as it pertained to England, Scotland, 1

An earlier version of this chapter was delivered as the 2017 Annual Lecture to the Centre for Media History, at Aberystwyth University. I would also like to thank Laurel Brake, Michael Harris, Richard Ireland, Chandrika Kaul, Mark O’Brien and Mark Turner for assisting with valuable references. 2 The Act of Union (1707) allowed existing Scottish law to remain operative, though alterable by the Parliament at Westminster ‘with the proviso that laws concerning “publick Right, Policy and Civil government” be made the same throughout the United Kingdom’ (Cairns 2015: 121). This applied in the nineteenth century to laws relating to the press, though sometimes there was a delay in applying them to Scotland. For example, the Seditious and Blasphemous Libels Act 1819 was extended to Scotland only in 1825 (Pentland 2008: 127 n.10; Wickwar 1928: 124). After 1801 the laws relating to Ireland were made in London, as had long been the case for Wales.

197

198

tom o’malley

Wales and Ireland, and relates to arguments about regulation made in recent work of mine (O’Malley 2014). This chapter discusses the established narrative of the struggle for British and Irish press freedom but seeks to broaden the focus by situating the press in the context of a wider set of legal relationships and developments, which, it is argued, gives a fuller, more nuanced perspective on the relationship between newspapers and society in the nineteenth century. The first section outlines the framework of legal restraints governing newspapers, their gradual removal, and the debates about the causes and significance of these changes. The second section takes a broader view. It discusses the ways in which the press initiated and benefited from legal change, particularly in relation to the law of libel, while in other areas being restrained by new statutes. The third section explores the way the press represented the law to its readers, through the reporting of legal issues, in particular crime, and through campaigns to influence law making. This is followed by some concluding comments.

Changes in the Legal Framework Governing the Press The timeline at the end of this volume lists the main laws governing newspaper production throughout the nineteenth century. After the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1694, the press was no longer subject to pre-publication censorship. Thereafter, control was exercised through three main devices. The first was political subsidy. Politicians of all parties made use of subsidy and bribery, with mixed results (Aspinall 1949; Barker 2000: 80, 82–7; Harris 2005: 52; Wasson 2006). The succession of stamp, advertisement and pamphlet taxes, which started in 1712 and were extended and modified up to 1861, was the second tool. They were designed to curb the production of newspapers and pamphlets as well as provide income for the Exchequer (Barker 2000: 66; Hewitt, 2015). The level of duties was raised periodically, particularly sharply during the French Wars and immediately after. The third set of devices was punitive measures: the security system, the use of general warrants, and the use of seditious and criminal libel by governments attempting to silence opponents (Aspinall 1949; Hollis 1970; Weiner 1969; Wickwar 1928). Seditious libel could be interpreted by the government quite widely, and for most of the eighteenth century truth was not a defence; the role of the jury was to establish the fact of publication, not take a view on the content (Barker 2000: 67–8; Siebert 1965). Between 1713 and 1759 over seventy general warrants were issued by

  newspapers and the law in the nineteenth century 199 Secretaries of State to search premises and seize papers which might be useful in the prosecution for seditious libel.3 The traditional, and still widely held, view in the industry and among policymakers is that from 1694 onwards the newspaper press became progressively more independent the more it relied on advertising revenue, rather than subsidy (Leveson 2012: 58–61; O’Malley and Soley 2000). Never mind that this view downplays the extent to which from the 1640s onwards print played an increasingly important part in religious and political life (Peacey 2013), and that controlling the output of the press through pre-publication censorship, especially during periods of intense political upheaval, proved an uphill task in the face of illegal publishing, especially by Nonconformists (O’Malley 1982). The system became increasingly ineffective and collapsed in 1694 (Siebert 1965: 260–3). The imposition of stamp, advertisement and pamphlet duties on newspapers in the eighteenth century acted as a restraint on production. In England the stamp had to be purchased from recognised London suppliers, advertisement duty had to be paid regardless of whether the advertisements had been paid for by the advertisers, and the permission to publish which the stamp offered could be revoked easily if the authorities deemed it necessary (Gardner 2016: 73). In Scotland the duties, which rose significantly in the 1790s, acted as the main constraint on the growth of the industry (Harris 2005: 40).4 As well as providing a lucrative source of income for the government – Harris has characterised the duties as making ‘a significant contribution to … the fiscal-military state’ of the eighteenth century (ibid.) – the duties gave governments leverage they could use to bargain with the industry until the idea that they were useful as forms of political control lost currency in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. By this time the use of other legal instruments to suppress troublesome publications – criminal libel, seditious libel, general warrants – had declined (Wasson 2006: 84). Prosecutions for seditious and 3

General warrants were issued under the authority of the Principal Secretary of State or statute and could be particular or general in focus. They could be issued to arrest all persons connected with a particular event and to search for and seize papers. The power of the Principal Secretary of State to issue these warrants was successfully disputed in the eighteenth century (Siebert 1965: 253–4). 4 The Stamp Act 1712 required that all paper, including that for Scottish papers, be stamped at the London Stamp Office, although ready-stamped paper could be purchased from official distributors. An Edinburgh Stamp Office was, however, established, with the facility for stamping papers used by newspapers and by 1850 was issuing 7 million stamps. Stamp duties were not applied in Ireland before the Irish Stamp Act 1774, and in that year a Dublin Stamp Office was opened which became able to stamp paper used by Irish newspapers. In 1827 the Dublin Stamp Office came under the administration of the London Office (Dagnall 1994: 31, 38, 75, 111–12).

200

tom o’malley

blasphemous libels, and libels defaming the King, his ministers and other officials, numbered 26 in 1817, shot up to 63 in 1819, dropped to 12 in 1824, 6 in 1833 and fell to zero in 1834 (Wickwar 1928: 315). Political subsidies in the form of secret payments by governments and politicians to editors and journalists were common in the eighteenth century and continued into the first half of the nineteenth (Aspinall 1949: 134–47, 263–7, 373–9; Barker 2000). Other forms of support, such as direct ownership of newspapers by politicians or individuals affiliated to political parties, or carefully managed manipulation of newspapers, remained an important part of the system, even after repeal of the ‘taxes on knowledge’, well into the twentieth century (Brown 2010: 330–1; Gliddon 2003; Koss 1990; McEwen 1978). Whatever view is taken of the significance of these developments, it is clear that the press benefitted from changes in the legal environment. In 1695 publishing was a lucrative business. By the 1860s the  legal changes made it even more lucrative, and this found expression in a steady growth in the number of newspapers published in the first part of the nineteenth century, followed by an explosion in the years after the repeal (Eliot 1994: 88, 147–8). The period 1830–55 had seen 415 new newspapers established across Britain. The ‘six years from 1855–61 saw a further 492, including as many as 130 in the 12 months after repeal alone, and by 1861 137 papers in 123 towns where previously there had been no newspaper at all’ (Hewitt 2015: 98). As Richard Altick has pointed out, the ‘repeal of the paper duty in 1861 benefitted all periodicals alike’ (Altick 1957: 357). In 1860 the number of magazines published of all kinds, including monthlies and quarterlies, was 406; in 1870, 626; in 1880, 1,752; and in 1890, 1,752 (Law and Patten 2009: 156). Legal change went hand in hand with commercial expansion. The process was a complex mix of shifts in political thinking about the press, campaigning, the growth of publishing and increasing difficulties of enforcement. The statutes which imposed duties on the press from the early eighteenth century limited the growth of newspapers. As Arthur Aspinall argues, ‘taxation was the most important cause of restricted sales’; he points out that sales grew by 33 per cent in the twenty years before 1836, and by 70 per cent over the next six years (Aspinall 1949: 23). But the growth of the industry was also inhibited by backward communications, illiteracy and Sabbatarianism, with attempts made in 1799, 1820, 1833, 1834, 1835 and 1838 to pass bills outlawing the sale of Sunday newspapers (ibid.: 7, 15–16). Nonetheless a commercial, news-oriented press flourished in the eighteenth century, gaining economic strength from the growth of

  newspapers and the law in the nineteenth century 201 advertising (Aspinall 1949: 126; Gardner 2016). When it was thought necessary, governments used the general warrant, and the criminal law to prosecute publishers, and this they did at times of political crisis (Barker 2000: 69, 72–3, 75–6). Enforcement of the taxation laws could be haphazard (Barker 2000: 67), a situation exacerbated in the case of the libel laws by the passage of Fox’s Libel Act 1792, which transferred the determination of whether the words complained of were libellous from the judge to a jury, thereby making it harder to secure convictions. In addition, during the eighteenth century Parliament had to concede the right of newspapers to report its proceedings. The pressures unleashed by the wars with France from the 1790s to 1815, and the challenges posed by radical republican and working-class agitation up to the 1840s, produced a variety of responses. Government and Opposition both funded publications; spies were used; printers and journalists prosecuted; punitive laws were tightened (Aspinall 1949; Barker 2000; O’Malley 1975). For example, although after 1792 the majority of Scottish newspapers ‘furnished unwavering support’ (Harris 2005: 51) to the government in the face of criticisms from radicals, this did not rule out official intervention. The government prosecuted the publishers of the Caledonian Chronicle for publishing a radical pamphlet in 1792 (ibid.) and indicted the publishers of the Edinburgh Gazetteer for treason in 1794 (ibid.: 51–2). In 1819 Andrew Marshall and his wife were prosecuted for circulating seditious and blasphemous pamphlets, including Thomas Wooler’s Black Dwarf, and had all of their stock and private papers confiscated, as was the custom in Scottish libel proceedings (Wickwar 1928: 121). Repressive as these measures were, they also pointed to the fact that the press was becoming increasingly difficult to control by punitive measures (Wasson 2006: 69). Governments could only partially suppress unwanted publications and anyway used their discretionary powers of enforcement to prosecute critical journals and let unstamped pro-government publications publish unmolested (Weiner 1969: 5–6). The will to produce newspapers was too strong and the machinery of repression only intermittently effective. Not least of all, the duties were seen by the legal papers as imposing an unfair financial burden on their activities, and they encouraged evasion by the radical papers. William Cobbett evaded newspaper stamp duties by ‘omitting news and writing his Political Register in the form of Open Letters addressed to certain people, so claiming that his newspaper was really a “pamphlet”’ (Aspinall 1949: 57). He also manipulated the rules relating to free postal transmission from London to the rest of the country for

202

tom o’malley

stamped newspapers, to ensure stamped copies of the Register were circulated outside of the capital, while distributing unstamped, illegal copies, within it (Weiner 1969: 6). Something more radical had to be put in place to deal with the fact that the circulation of news by print could be restrained at times, and limited by the duties, but not stopped. The alleviation of the burden of duties from 1833 onwards was accompanied by an intensification of penalties for evasion. But even this was seen as inadequate. The legal situation was also unclear. The lack of clarity in the legislation as to what constituted news (Law and Patten 2009: 147–8), led, by the 1840s, to the publication of periodicals for specific classes of news, which were not deemed newspapers and so went unstamped. The situation was made worse by the authorities allowing these and other periodicals to register as newspapers so that they could stamp a part of their editions in order to take advantage of the cheap rate of 1d for newspapers (Hewitt 2015: 49). Dickens’s Household Words had part of its issue stamped so it could take advantage of this situation. In the 1850s the Association for the Repeal of the Taxes on Knowledge exploited this lack of clarity by demanding the enforcement of the law in terms which pointed up its absurdity. In 1854 it pointed out that 136 publications were registered as newspapers but were part unstamped, and in making a fraudulent declaration were therefore guilty of a criminal misdemeanour (ibid.: 47–8, 54). In a sense, the removal of stamp, paper and advertisement duties was a recognition that it was better, and easier, to encourage a cheaper commercial press that could spread sound ideas among the working population, as well as a response to the decline of radical, organised politics among the working class in the context of growing economic prosperity. Running parallel to this was the fact of a massive expansion in all kinds of publishing during the nineteenth century. It was anomalous to allow the growth of publications which, though not newspapers, carried news and opinion, often on politically related issues, but which were not registered as newspapers, while only taxing newspapers and pamphlets. The duties and the will to impose them were swept aside by a combination of the growing commitment to parliamentary reform and free trade among politicians, the fact that the publishing market was becoming too large to police, and some very sophisticated public campaigning and meticulous parliamentary lobbying by Radicals in the Commons and groups like the Association for the Promotion of the Repeal of the Taxes on Knowledge (Hewitt 2015; Koss 1990: 53­­–5). In addition, it is important to recognise that the reforms of the nineteenth century did not apply to overseas possessions. As Alan Lee

  newspapers and the law in the nineteenth century 203 has pointed out, Ireland, which was under British subjugation during these years, ‘made it sui generis as far as the press was concerned, as witnessed by the continuation of close government supervision there into the twentieth century’ (Andrews 2014: 232–5; Lee 1976: 19; Legg 1999; Morash 2010).. An editorial in the Irishman for 25 May 1861 referred to much discussion latterly … on the liberty of the press: and English writers have pleasantly boasted how free the press was in England compared with the press in France … the liberty of the press in Ireland is the liberty of the collared serf as compared with that of the newspapers in France. (Legg 1999: 112) Although rarely used before its repeal in 1875, the Peace Preservation Act 1870 gave the Lord Lieutenant extensive powers to seize the property of publications deemed to be publishing seditious material. The Criminal Law and Procedure Act 1887 enabled the authorities to proceed against papers that published the proceedings of the suppressed branches of the Irish National League. By March 1890 there had been nineteen prosecutions of thirteen provincial papers under the Act (Legg 1999: 114–17, 165–6, 168–9). In India: The freedom of the press, however, enshrined in British political culture, was … not for imperial export. Divide and rule was the first law of media control … the empire builders classified the Anglo-Indian press as ‘responsible’ while their Indian counterparts were ‘irresponsible’. Hence the former were cultivated as bulwarks against the rising tide of nationalism, whereas the Raj controlled the operation of the indigenous media through censorship, punitive legislation, extortionate fines, forcible closures and imprisonment. (Kaul 2013: 193–4) The Indian press was constrained by successive pieces of legislation and regulations throughout the century (ibid.: 195). Legislation, which included the Indian Press Act 1857 and the Vernacular Press Act of 1878, contained provisions such as ‘pre-publication censorship if necessary’, and embedded penalties comprising fines, imprisonment, confiscation and deportation (ibid.: 194). Although the attitude of successive administrations in India towards press freedom was ‘complex and multi-faceted’ (ibid.), it is clear that, as in Ireland, what was acceptable in the domestic context, was not by any means uniformly acceptable across the countries under colonial and military rule.

204

tom o’malley

Discussion of the complex process of change in the laws relating to the press within the United Kingdom has not tended to place those changes in the context of contemporary thinking about the treatment of press freedom in the subjugated territories, but has been characterised by two, here broadly outlined, interpretations, which although they can overlap, are presented as distinct positions. Both take an externalist view of legal change. That is, they see the changes to the law not as a consequence of developments within the legal system – in procedure, case law, shifts in judicial interpretation of statute and common law – but as a result of the pressure on the law of external forces – economic, social and political (Lobban 2014). The first tradition dates back to the view propagated in the nineteenth century by politicians, journalists and historians of the press, that the period from the 1690s to the 1860s marked the slow growth of a press, free and independent from government control. By the last decades of the nineteenth century the press was seen as an unofficial part of the constitution, the Fourth Estate of the realm. Its role was to educate the expanding electorate, providing electors with the information and interpretation needed to enable them to keep a watchful eye on the executive and on Parliament. As Karl Schweizer has written, together Parliament and the press became ‘agencies for a pluralism of opinion and critical debate that enhanced political awareness countrywide, transcended traditional class distinctions and alignments and so facilitated the progressive liberalisation of British political life’ (Schweizer 2006: 2; cf. Aspinall 1949; Barker 2000; Koss 1990). This tradition remains the most influential interpretation of the changes and continued to be assiduously cultivated by the media industries, politicians and many journalists into the twenty-first century (Leveson 2012; O’Malley and Soley 2000). The other perspective is most closely associated with the influential work of James Curran (Hewitt 2015: 2–3). Curran has written that: In the middle of the nineteenth century, the traditional control system over the press was replaced by a new and more effective control system based on remorseless economic forces which, unlike the law, could be neither evaded nor defied. The capitalist development of the press, with its accompanying rise in publishing costs, led to a progressive transfer of ownership and control of the popular press from the working class to capitalist entrepreneurs, while the advertising licensing system encouraged the absorption or elimination of the early radical press and effectively stifled its re-emergence. (Curran 1989: 226)

  newspapers and the law in the nineteenth century 205 Elsewhere he has argued that: In short, the respectable campaign for a free press independent of state economic control was never actuated primarily by a libertarian commitment to freedom and diversity of expression. On the contrary, the reasons that led people to support further economic restrictions on the press in 1819–20, and the crack-down on the radical press in 1836, were fundamentally no different from those that inspired the lifting of controls in the 1850s. Both the proponents and opponents of state control of the press were concerned to ensure that the press provided institutional support for the social order. All that had changed was a growing commitment to positive indoctrination of the lower orders through a cheap press, and growing conviction that free trade and normative controls were a morally preferable and more efficient control system than direct controls administered by the state. (Curran 1978: 61) So, in this account, repeal is a secondary factor, the main one being the recognition by respectable campaigners and politicians that lifting the taxes on knowledge would be more favourable to control over the newspaper press. In effect, changes in the law created an extra-legal form of control, an advertising licensing system which was instrumental in undermining radical working-class newspapers. Both interpretations, however, share the view that the lifting of legal constraints, particularly economic controls, was a key development. While not denying the importance of these changes in the legal framework, they need to be placed within a broader perspective, not least because the emphasis on them in the historiography tends to neglect other key legal developments and interactions with the law which influenced the way the press related to state and society.

Not Just Repeal: The Law and the Press As well as the changes discussed above, there were other legal developments which were of real importance because they formed part of a process whereby the press became more closely articulated with the legal system. In addition, although the press was not an institution of government, it was part of the everyday experience of millions of people, and its business practices, its support of the state, and its relation to and support of the law were arguably a practical, daily expression of the ­­routineness of established power relations in late Victorian society.5 5

This passage draws on ideas about the state and society developed in Joyce 2013.

206

tom o’malley

The 1832 Reform Act, which restructured the parliamentary franchise, was part of wider impulses in political circles for ‘reform’ which continued throughout the century. It was not just stamp duties that were relaxed in the 1830s; this decade also saw reforms to the Bank of England, the abolition of slavery, Irish Church reform and Scottish and English local government reform, to name but a few of the measures in a Parliament which addressed ‘in some fashion, many reform agendas’ (Innes and Burns 2007: 47; Wasson 2006: 86–7). This, in turn, has to be seen in the context of growing pressures for law reform from the early nineteenth century. It was a slow process, because it was often dominated by lawyers, responding to the interests of their clients. A growing commercial society produced an increasing volume of litigation, and special-interest groups emerged to press for reform, groups which became more important as the century progressed. In London, for example, a metropolitan committee of merchants and traders was established in the 1830s to press for reform in insolvency and bankruptcy laws and in the workings of the county court system. A Law Amendment Society was formed in 1844 by Lord Brougham, which over the next thirty years ‘proposed reforms ranging from the structure of the court system to … property law and the law of marriage and divorce’ (Lobban 2007: 134–5; Lobban 2008; McGregor 1981: 19). In 1857 the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science was established, involving lawyers, businessmen and intellectuals. At its first meeting it set up a section to study jurisprudence and the amendment of the law. An Association of British Chambers of Commerce was set up in 1860 and worked with the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science over the next twentyfive years; together, they helped influence changes to bankruptcy, debt, company, marine and international law, transfer of land, copyright, patents and trademarks (McGregor 1981: 36). As Michael Lobban has argued, ‘The link between law reformers and commercial interests from mid-century was a very close one, in which law reformers sought to use their commercial contacts to promote reform as much as commercial men sought to influence lawyers’ (Lobban 2007: 135). The newspaper industry was a business, and much of the reforming zeal it applied in the nineteenth century was expended pursuing legal changes which produced economic benefits. There were differences of opinion among owners, but they nonetheless created organisations to co-ordinate their activities. In pursuing reform across a number of fronts, the industry took for granted the legal and political structures it worked within, and its publications became instruments which ­naturalised the everyday practices of law in society.

  newspapers and the law in the nineteenth century 207 Some laws were directly relevant to the industry, others not so, but were nonetheless crucial to its success. In one sense the ‘taxes on knowledge’ benefited sections of the press. Observing these laws gave publishers the freedom to make money, so much so that, when their modification and removal became a political possibility, some papers saw it as a threat to their continuing success. The Provincial Newspaper Society was formed in 1836 and during the 1850s opposed the abolition of the stamp duty, which it saw as a threat to the prevalent business model of stamped newspapers, by promising to allow cheap competition (Hewitt 2015: 72; Nisbet-Smith 1992: 666). More indirectly, the growth of communications in the nineteenth century directly benefited the industry. The growth of the railways made it easier for London papers to circulate in the provinces. The railways were built using the legal device of individual Acts of Parliament, and the early history of that industry was ‘hopelessly entangled in legal conflicts, and thoroughly infiltrated, exploited and beset by lawyers’; so much so that ‘most of the score of railway newspapers devoted large amounts of column space to legal affairs’ (Kostal 1994: 2). As the railways grew, so did the telegraph system. Both metropolitan and provincial newspapers made extensive use of the telegraph. The patchwork of telegraph provision was placed under the control of the Post Office in 1868. This effectively nationalised the network, thereby making it simpler for newspapers to make use of the system (Lee 1976: 61; O’Malley and Soley 2000: 17). During the eighteenth century proprietors used the legal device of the partnership to establish businesses. In a sample of 273 proprietors in the eighteenth century Victoria Gardner found that 24 per cent owned their papers independently, while 71 per cent engaged in some sort of partnership, with large group ownership becoming a feature from the 1790s (Gardner 2016: 76–8, 82­­–3). Changes in company law supported developments in the press (Lee 1976: 79–82). The Joint Stock Companies Act of 1856 allowed registered companies to choose limited liability for owners (Lobban 2010: 627–8). Limited liability was reaffirmed in the Companies Act of 1862. The attraction of this model of business to newspaper proprietors is evident. A total of about 420 companies were formed between 1856 and 1885, 75 in the first decade, 125 in the second, and 225 in the third (Lee 1976: 80). Proprietors also used established legal means to set up trade associations, such as the Provincial Newspaper Society in 1836, and the trade association for ‘national newspapers’, the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association, in 1906 (Nisbet-Smith 1992: 666–7). This made it possible for them to act in concert in pursuit of common interests.

208

tom o’malley

Even journalists chose to make use of legal instruments. In 1884 a National Association of Journalists was established, which sought and received incorporation under a Royal Charter in 1890 (O’Malley and Soley 2000: 40; Underwood 1992: 646). Another group set up the  National Union of Journalists in 1907 (O’Malley and Soley 2000:  42), with the purpose of lawfully pursuing the interests of ­journalists by  industrial and political means. Journalists and proprietors lobbied hard to establish the right to report the proceedings of local government, a right established by the Local Authorities (Admission of Press to Meetings) Act 1908, which conferred special status on reporters attending meetings of local authorities and in courts of justice (Lee 1976: 99–100; O’Malley and Soley 2000: 48). Sometimes the absence or non-application of a law worked to the benefit of the press. During the nineteenth century, other than through the law of libel, ‘the law continued to exercise virtually no control over the activities of newspapers as newspapers, at election or any other time’ (Lee 1976: 192–3). Newspapers made money, in part, by inserting paragraphs which appeared as if they were news but which were paid for by ­­advertisers – these were known as ‘puffs’. This practice was heavily criticised at the time, but it was not thought serious enough to warrant changes to the  law. Nonetheless, ‘in a case at the Central Criminal Court in 1897  the Common Serjeant declared that the publication of undesignated puffs was reprehensible and ought to be abolished’ (Nevett 1986: 167). Laws might be in place but could be overlooked. Strictly speaking, the sale of papers on Sundays was illegal, but proprietors produced them anyway and the practice was tolerated (Lee 1976: 125). As pointed out above, Fox’s Libel Law 1792 made it harder for governments to secure convictions for seditious or criminal libel in the face of hostile juries, but the existence of the libel laws remained a thorn in the side of the industry.6 The use of seditious libel to prosecute political opponents declined in the early years of the nineteenth century, although nervous governments still resorted to it at times of crisis (Smith 2010: 334–6, 338; Wickwar 1928: 315). During the nineteenth century proprietors lobbied hard and successfully to win concessions from successive governments on the issue of libel. In the early 1840s the press lobbied for a change in the law to enable papers to offer an apology to someone who believed they 6

The discussion of the changes in the laws of libel in this and subsequent paragraphs draws on O’Malley 1975.

  newspapers and the law in the nineteenth century 209 had been libelled, prior to the commencement of court proceedings. Section 2 of Lord Campbell’s Libel Act, in 1843, granted this defence, not to all those accused of libel, but only to newspapers. The press had also lobbied for the inclusion of the right to plead justification, and this was included in Section 6 of the Act. This Act ‘reflected the official recognition of the bourgeois press as an independent and responsible body which had earned the right to participate in the formation of the laws affecting its activities’ (O’Malley 1975: 163, 167–9, 171). Respectability was further endorsed by the Newspapers, Printers and Reading Rooms Act 1869, which ‘repealed a large number of obsolete clauses in laws dating back to the Six Acts of 1819’, removing the ban on reading rooms acting as newspaper reading centres, and eliminating the requirement that all newspapers proprietors be registered with the state (ibid.: 200). Proprietors continued to argue that the law allowed opportunist suits by people out to make money, not least of all by extracting money from papers who were fearful of going to the expense of defending an action. A Select Committee was appointed to look into the libel laws in 1879, and of the nine witnesses called to give evidence, seven were directly associated with the newspaper industry, a mark of the standing of the industry in the eyes of Parliament. The lobbying bore fruit. The Newspaper Libel Registration Act of 1881 not only stipulated that a libel action against a newspaper could only go forward through the courts with the written agreement of the Director of Public Prosecutions, it gave magistrates the right to dismiss an application for criminal libel if it was considered trivial. In addition, newspapers were granted immunity from prosecution for libel when, in the words of the Act, reporting public meetings ‘lawfully convened for a lawful purpose, and if such a report was fair and accurate, and published without malice, and if publication of the matter complained of was for the public benefit’ (Lee 1976: 98–9; O’Malley 1975: 205, 210). Further lobbying by the industry produced the Law of Libel Amendment Act 1888, which gave proprietors some protection against criminal prosecution and ‘provided for the consolidation of actions for libel, so as to make it impossible for a plaintiff to obtain exorbitant damages merely by pursuing separate actions on different papers for the same libel’ (Lee 1976: 100). It also extended qualified protection to newspapers when reporting the proceedings of public bodies (Lee 1976: 100–1; Nichol, Millar and Sharland 2009: 146; Political and Economic Planning 1938: 222). As Alan Lee has pointed out,

210

tom o’malley

Despite their shortcomings there is little doubt that these Acts enhanced the legal status of the newspaper proprietor. Part at least of the claims to be allowed to act as a proper ‘fourth estate’ had been accepted in the 1888 Act and in legislation establishing certain public bodies. These were significant advances on the position as it stood in 1855. (Lee 1976: 101) Other, more restrictive laws existed during the nineteenth century. In 1727 Edmund Curll was successfully prosecuted at the King’s Bench for printing the obscene libel Venus in the Cloister, although the offence was more often framed, not around sexual representation, but ‘as part of a satirical or blasphemous attack on church, state and the King’s peace’ (Cocks 2012: 278). The Obscene Publications Act 1857 framed the issue largely in terms of sexual representation and was a reaction ‘to the promiscuous nature of a mid-Victorian print culture that flagrantly exhibited its wares in the nation’s capital’ (ibid.: 278). The Post Office Acts of 1885 and 1889 prevented the sending of obscene material through the post, and the Indecent Advertisement Acts of 1889 and 1911 outlawed the advertising of birth control and aids to abortion (ibid.: 282). By the early 1900s one impact of the legislation on obscenity was to encourage self-censorship among proprietors (Smith 2010a: 373). During the nineteenth century the government was confronted with a series of leaks to the press of documents it considered confidential. It made successive attempts to remedy this situation (Hooper 1988: 23–41). The Official Secrets Act 1889 related mainly to matters of defence and security and ‘hardly tackled the press’ (Lee 1976: 202). The Official Secrets Act 1911 made it an offence to wrongfully communicate or retain official documents, sketches and notes, and put any citizen in possession of such documents in breach of the Act (Hooper 1988: 41). By the start of the twentieth century proprietors were, in general, willing to co-operate with the government in witholding information which was considered relevant to national security, and this fed into their willingness to co-operate in measures which enabled the imposition of press censorship in the First World War (Hopkin 1970: 153; Lovelace 1978; Buitenhuis 1987). Newspapers chose to work within the law and lobby for change when it suited their commercial interest. The lifting of the taxes on knowledge was one, albeit important, adjustment to the legal framework within which the press operated. Its everyday practices depended on interacting with the state and negotiating over the boundaries within which it operated, not by being independent of it. The relationship

  newspapers and the law in the nineteenth century 211 became a reciprocal one, not one based on conflict. The press used and upheld the law, and in turn the state allowed it reasonable licence and was prepared to respond positively to pressure for reforms which the industry considered necessary. The relationship was mediated, in part, by organised lobbying on the part of the industry, lobbying which, as has been shown above, underlay many of the changes to the libel laws. It is worth reiterating that not only did newspapers normalise the everyday workings of law in society, proprietors used the law to act in concert. Collaboration between publishers was well established by the late eighteenth century (Gardner 2016: 42–3). In May 1836 the Provincial Newspaper Society was formed, not only to oppose reductions in the stamp duty out of fear it would reduce the cover price of their paper and expose them to lowerquality, cheap, competition, but also to promote the general interests of its members. It helped to secure the abolition of the disqualification of newspaper proprietors from election to local councils, and overcame strong opposition to proprietors sitting as justices of the peace. Its work on libel reform led to co-operation with the London newspapers, who became members of the Society in 1889, leading, in turn, to the word ‘Provincial’ being removed from its title (Nisbet-Smith 1992: 666). In 1906 the ‘national’ newspapers formed a similar organisation to promote their interests, the Newspaper Proprietors’Association7 (Nisbet-Smith 1992: 667; Porlock 1992: 663). Lobbying for favourable legal changes was a key purpose of each of these bodies, like so many other commercial organisations during the nineteenth century. This focus on gaining legal remedies or benefits was reinforced by the steady growth in the numbers of people involved in the industry who became MPs. In 1880 there were eleven journalists in the House of Commons; by 1900 this had risen to thirty-five (Lee 1976: 294). In 1888 all but one of the eight sponsors of the Law of Libel Amendment Act were men directly connected to the press. A conservative estimate of the number of MPs with direct affilliations to the press in that year has identified forty, of which twenty-one were proprietors (O’Malley 1975: 217, 233). Another estimate, for 1892, identified seventeen proprietors who were either MPs or peers. There were four printers and publishers in Parliament in 1892 and fifteen by 1896 (Lee 1976: 295). The role of newspaper men in Parliament was underpinned by the intimate web of personal and financial relations which bound together proprietors, journalists, politicians and political parties. By the late 7

The Newspapers’ Proprietors Association subsequently changed its name to the Newspaper Publishers’ Association (Nisbet-Smith 1992: 667).

212

tom o’malley

nineteenth century journalists ‘on respectable papers were … received as “Gentlemen”: their job had acquired the cachet of a profession’ (Lee 1976: 197). By the 1880s the press had become an accepted part of the political system, as exemplified by the fact that from the mid-century onwards there is ‘substantial evidence’ that ‘journalists were elected into membership’ of London’s elite men’s clubs, such as the Athenaeum and the Reform, ‘on equal terms with other candidates’ (Brown 1985: 127–8; see also Barker 2000: 226; Lee 1976: 197–211). Thus, by the end of the nineteenth century the newspaper press had not only benefited from the repeal of economic controls, it had also become a force for legal change in its own right – highly organised, effective and integrated into the structures of political power and law making at the centre of the Empire.

Representing the Law The representation of the law in the press reflected the reciprocal relationship between the two institutions. On the one hand the law provided the framework within which the press thrived; on the other the press normalised the workings of the law through its presentation of legal issues in its columns. During the nineteenth century a periodical press emerged devoted to reporting on the legal professions, court rulings and changes in the law – it took for granted the legal framework within which printing operated and offered a service to practitioners (Cosgrove 1994: 11–21). Newspapers, dependent on the practices of the law for copy, provided information on legal issues to a much wider public. This included reporting on pressures to change the law, the legislative process itself, and the practices of the courts. The issue of the Dublin-based Freeman’s Journal on the 4 June 1877, for example, contained news of legislative activity at Westminster and a column on ‘Legal Intelligence’ which reported on activity in the Courts of Queen’s Bench, Common Pleas, Rolls, Probate and Bankruptcy. The more popular papers made court reporting a selling point, continuing a long tradition of sensational publications focusing on crime and justice (Linebaugh 1993: xix, 88–91; Clark 2003). The sober reporting of crime and the courts was also common, naturalising the everyday operations of the state as expressed in people’s knowledge and experience of the law. Victorians gained information about criminal activity from statistics about crime issued by the government and reported by the press, which itself was responsible for reporting the crimes recorded in the statistics (Sindall 1990: 29). In 1866, for example, fifty per cent of the contents of Lloyd’s Weekly ‘dealt with murder,

  newspapers and the law in the nineteenth century 213 crime and other thrilling events, and its advertising emphasised its coverage of fire, robbery and murder’ (ibid.: 31). Newspapers were part of a process which identified breaches of the law and orchestrated public outrage calling for tougher legislation. Sindall argues that ‘preceding publicity raised the average length of sentence handed down’ in criminal cases, particularly in London, and that the passage of the Penal Servitude Acts 1857 and 1864, the Prisons Act 1865 and the Security from Violence Act 1863 (which reintroduced flogging for crimes of robbery with violence) were the result of press agitation in response to alleged increases in criminal activity (ibid.: 40–1, 159). Reporting crime was not the preserve of London papers. The Dundee Courier of 14 October 1845 reported ‘ a singular and interesting trial’ in which a fisherman, one William Grant, having lost new nets and fallen on difficult times in his occupation, was found guilty of inflicting ‘a deep gash’ with his pocket knife on the forehead of a woman whom he believed ‘possessed the power of witchcraft, and that her supernatural influence was directed against himself ’; he received three months’ imprisonment. The same issue also reported more soberly the list of cases dealt with by the Perth Court of Justiciary. The Cambrian News and Merionethshire Standard in Wales reported regularly on court proceedings in West Wales and beyond. On 9 April 1870 its summary of cases before the Petty Sessions at Pennal contained the following: Dirty Work at Abergynolwn. – David Davies was summoned for assaulting John Jones. The assault had its origin in some anonymous letters which had been sent to the defendant’s wife, in which her husband was charged with infidelity. Mrs Jones was regarded as the author of these letters, and at the first opportunity Davies wreaked his vengeance on her husband. For this he had to pay £1 15s., including costs. – Hugh and Evan Roberts were summoned for assaulting William Morgan. This was a similar case to the last. Anonymous letters were received by Hugh’s wife, who is sister to the defendant in the last case. The parties met in some public house row at Abergynolwn, and the brothers assaulted the complainant, whose wife was suspected of having had something to do with the forwarding of this anonymous literature. Fined £1 15s. each, incuding costs. Mr Davies, of Dolgelley, appeared for the defendants in both cases. On 16 July 1897 the Dublin-based Daily Express reported the trial of a Member of Parliament, Mr Gilhouly, for assault, and his not very measured claim that one member of the Bench ‘could be corrupted by half a pint of whiskey’; he received fourteen days in jail.

214

tom o’malley

These kinds of reports, by focusing on crime and judicial retribution, evoked a sense of the importance of the law for the maintenance of public order and safety. They naturalised the activities of local law enforcement agents, representing them as given, essentially unproblematic, aspects of everyday life. At the same time, newspapers could take a view that fundamental aspects of the contemporary legal framework needed reform. John Gibson, who owned and edited the Cambrian News and Merionethshire Standard from 1880 until his death in 1915, campaigned vigorously in the newspaper’s columns for changes in the legal status of women, and for improvements to their educational opportunities (Jones 1994; Evans 1992). Changes to the law could even happen when a journalist broke it. In July 1885 the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, W. T. Stead, came into conflict with the law. A bill to raise the age of consent, then only thirteen, looked like it might be killed in Parliament. So, in an attempt to influence the public debate, he procured a child prostitute in order to expose the scandal of child prostitution. There was an outcry, not least of all from other newspapers. He was charged with abduction and served three months in Holloway prison (Griffiths 1992). But his action ‘forced the government to raise the age of consent for young girls and restricted white slavery and juvenile prostitution by passing the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885’ (Baylen 2010). He both broke the law and changed it; but he was only doing, in a more extreme way, what others in his profession did regularly – putting pressure on the law makers to modify or change the law. For most newspapers, the law was part of the fabric of the society, there to be reported on and at times a focus of campaigning. But the fundamentals of the law and the society it sustained were taken for granted, in both the lobbying activities of proprietors and journalists, and in the pages of their journals. The reporting of divorce news was an ‘integral part of the British newspaper press, particularly after the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 which established the Divorce Court’ (Turner 2009: 172). Cases were reported widely in the daily and legal press, but it was the Times which reported the largest number of cases. Arguably, this reporting, as well as giving papers the opportunity to reveal domestic secrets of the rich by whom the expensive and restrictive divorce laws were used, had a tendency to make divorce appear more natural, and may have provided a context in which debates about equality in marriage could be more widely discussed (ibid.). Frances Power Cobbe in her essay on ‘WifeTorture in England’, published in 1878, made ‘extensive use of accounts from newspapers across the country to buttress her case’, and the daily reporting of these crimes was clearly important in familiarising

  newspapers and the law in the nineteenth century 215 readers with the problem (Carter and Thompson 1997: 32). In addition, ‘accounts in newspaper of violent crimes against women were frequently used by interested parties to underscore the seriousness of the problem and generate public support for legal reform’ (ibid.). The everday role of the press in reporting on the relationship between people and the law found its reflection in fiction – a true mark of just how taken for granted its references to the law were. In 1848 William Makepeace Thackeray made use of the convention of announcing marriages in newspapers in the early nineteenth century to make a point about the dissolute behaviour of one of his central characters, Captain Rawdon Crawley, while at the same time assuming that it was the place of newspapers to act as a conduit for information about the changing legal and social status of individuals: [T]hat inveterate rake, Rawdon Crawley, found himself converted into a very happy and submissive man. His former haunts knew him not … His secluded wife ever smiling and cheerful, his little comfortable lodgings, snug meals, and homely evenings, had all the charms of novelty and secrecy. The marriage was not yet declared to the world or published in the Morning Post. All his creditors would have come rushing on him, had they known he was … united to a woman without fortune. (Thackeray 2003: 191–2) The law then was an integral part of the content of newspapers, whether reporting crime or campaigning for changes. Newspapers were taken for granted as conduits for public representations and debates about the law and as such played an important role in spreading information about its practices and normalising its role in society.

Conclusion What then can be said about the relationship between the press and law in the nineteenth century? There were substantial changes in the legal framework within which the press operated between the first and second halves of the century. Direct political harrassment, using the security system, and the laws of seditious and criminal libel fell out of use. The economic controls, the ‘taxes on knowledge’, were abandoned in the face of pressures in support of tariff-free trade, and the idea that a responsible press could have a beneficial impact on the ideas of working people as well as in marginalising radical publications. The intimate links between newspapers and politicians, a feature well established by the mid- eighteenth century, were consolidated with

216

tom o’malley

the expansion of the press after the 1850s. By the latter part of the nineteenth century the press was a central part of a system of governance which had to cope with the growth of an expanding electorate, a change which the press was ideally placed to deal with. So those who claim that the lifting of legal controls helped establish a press freer than it had ever been from state control are right. So too are those who see the shifting legal framework as resulting in the consolidation of the position of the ‘respectable’, politically conformist press. It is arguably best to see it as a dual process: the changes marked a real enhancement of publishing freedoms while at the same time tying the press into a legal system which required active conformity to power as expressed through the operations of Parliament and the courts. The self-serving idea of the press as a ‘Fourth Estate’ has led historians to focus on the motives and significance of one set of legal changes, those which related directly to forms of state coercion or economic control. But, as has been argued here, the history of the press’s relationship with the law is far more extensive and equally as important. For most proprietors, the law was the unquestioned framework of their everyday activities. Their newspapers naturalised the operations of the law for their readers. Newspapers were at times critical of aspects of the law, but they operated on the assumption that the legal system, and by implication the social and economic system of which the law was an expression, was a given. As Curran has argued, the modern press ‘ritually affirms the rules under which the political system operates’ by giving prominence to ‘general elections, by-elections, parliamentary debates, and the representatives of accredited interest-groups’ and, it should be added, the workings of the law (Curran 1978: 74). Newspapers increasingly became part of the weekly, bi-weekly and, for many, daily lives of people in the nineteenth century. They laid claim to being independent because they were not subservient to pre-publication censorship or economic controls. But this independence depended on a number of things. Firstly, the acceptance by most proprietors of the economic and social status quo. Secondly, their willingness to engage with the system which created and implemented laws of all kinds, but in particular those laws which allowed them to conduct businesses. In addition, through lobbying for changes to the law which affected their commercial interests, and through supporting legal change of one kind or another in their pages, newspapers and their proprietors were participating in the creation of the legal framework for society as a whole. This made it unlikely that an institution so embedded in legal, commercial and social frameworks would become an instrument for challenging, fundamentally, the disposition

  newspapers and the law in the nineteenth century 217 of wealth and power in society. Through this evolving relationship with the law, the press became entangled in the political system in ways it had not been in the first thirty years of the century. It became at times a noisy, vociferous critic, and, most of the time, an active participant in the political and social system and the disposition of power underpinning it. Its reporting of the legal system was voluminous and varied, and arguably played an important role in normalising legal conventions, assumptions and practices about the law among its readership. The relationship between the law and the press in these years requires much more research, however, if we are to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the complex ways they interacted in the rapidly changing industrial, social and political environment of the nineteenth century.

Chapter Seven

THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE PRESS IN CONTINENTAL EUROPE Diana Cooper-Richet

D

uring the nineteenth century a wide variety of Englishlanguage newspapers and reviews were published. The English press thrived in continental Europe, in areas where virtually no English  was spoken. Until recently such cultural spaces have been ignored by academic researchers. Recent initiatives, such as the Transfopress research network (http://transfopresschcsc.wixsite.com/ transfopress) have begun recovering English-language press material, although the studies available do not yet by any means cover all the countries in which it is likely that such papers were published. The lack of interest hitherto shown by researchers in this large corpus of documents can be explained by the fact that periodicals, in general, and culturally rich periodicals in particular, have traditionally been the preferred source for the study of national political and literary history. The more ephemeral dailies, weeklies and specialised English-language newspaper press published abroad, as well as in British possessions, has either not been considered relevant or seen as having a narrow local value. Moreover, library holdings of such material are uneven, often difficult to access, undigitised or not clearly catalogued. At the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), for instance, Galignani’s Messenger is currently the only nineteenth-century French-based English-language press example to have been digitised, despite the presence of numerous other examples in their holdings. Except in relation to France, Italy and the Ottoman Empire, research on the European English press is sparse, though abundant exemplars exist. However, within this immense quantity of unexplored documents, the full extent of which is currently unknown, there can be found valuable insights into the history of the British abroad, their social and cultural habits, their sources of information, as well as the 221

222

diana cooper-richet

links they established with their new environment. While such periodicals may have in common the English language, they nevertheless offer very diverse snapshots of cultural history depending on where they were published and their target readership. In France and Italy, the press in English was primarily aimed at leisured visitors and those residents who wished to be kept informed of international politics and culture. In the Ottoman Empire, in Constantinople and Smyrna, and also in France and the Canaries, English-language business journals and newspapers were published for consumption by local business communities. In the British possessions of the Mediterranean (Cyprus, Gibraltar and Malta), many newspapers, conscious of the close official eye kept on overseas press activity, geared their material to support official policies and views of the British administration in such territories. Nevertheless, open to the world, the European English-language press was read by a ‘cosmopolitan, enlightened and geographically extensive readership’ (Macdonald 2013: 21). A dominant player in the nineteenth-century overseas marketplace of ideas was Galignani’s Messenger, read by many, copied by others. The latter’s commanding position, however, should not be allowed to conceal the existence of many other periodicals published in English.

Galignani’s Messenger (1814–1895): The Dominant Daily Galignani’s Messenger, subtitled The Spirit of the English Journals, began publication as a thrice weekly newspaper on 2 July 1814 (see Figures 7.1 and 7.2). It would convert to a daily newspaper in August 1815 and was published in Paris with virtually no interruption through to 1 January 1890. Galignani’s Messenger dominated Europe as the best-known and most widely read English-language daily for much of the nineteenth century (Awtrey 1932; Barber 1961; Pluvinage 1968). It was considered ‘world-renowned’ and ‘everybody [knew] it, even those who [had] never seen it’ (Claude Lorraine 1863: 230). Giovanni Antonio Galignani, an Anglo-Italian (Cooper-Richet 1999), originally put it on the Parisian market for the officers of Wellington’s army and their families, who were occupying Paris with Allied troops after the abdication of Napoleon. It also catered to those wealthy visitors curious to see France freed from the ‘Corsican Ogre’. Galignani’s newspaper was essentially political in tone, focused on reporting on such issues, including providing a record of British and French parliamentary debates. Although Pierre Larousse, the famous French lexicographer, considered it to be neutral in its political stance

­

english-language press in continental europe 223

Figure 7.1  Galignani’s Messenger, 2 July 1814 (Courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France)

(Larousse 1872: 953), such a position could be questioned, based on the fact that it survived successive French political regimes. Despite its linguistic difficulties, the Parisian police tried to monitor the Messenger’s positions concerning the French government in the years 1815–18. Its editors were also cautious concerning reporting on events taking place in England, for example playing down and minimising the repressive violence carried out by cavalry during the Peterloo demonstrations in favour of parliamentary voting reforms in August 1819 (Boyle 2013: 64).

224

diana cooper-richet

Figure 7.2  Galignani’s Messenger, 8 May 1850 (Courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France)

The Messenger also carried economic and financial information. It had sections devoted to the stock exchanges, the prices of raw materials and the state of international trade. There were also headings concerning general news and society gossip. At a time when French newspapers did not yet rely on advertising, the Messenger’s columns of advertisements, which gradually increased in size from 1814 onwards, contributed substantially to its financial stability. These advertisements (for hotels, shops, shipping companies, fine wines, etc.) were targeted to the needs of cosmopolitan travellers and British expatriates. In Paris, many of the readers of Galignani’s Messenger were resident English aristocrats, such as Lady Franklin, Lord Cowley

­

english-language press in continental europe 225

(ambassador to France), Lord Westmorland, Lord Francis Russel, Lord Brougham and the Duke of Northumberland. Of French readers, it is known that Lafayette and Stendhal were faithful subscribers to Galignani’s Messenger. In England, William Hazlitt, Lord Byron and Shelley are believed to have been regular subscribers of the Messenger. Subscribers could have the newspaper sent to Italy, Germany, Egypt, Hong Kong, India and Malta as well as to the United States. Evidence suggests it also found its way to Switzerland: the Messenger was regularly sent to the Hôtel de la Couronne and to the Pension et Hôtel du Singe in Bern (Anon. 1841: 41–2). French readers could purchase it from Galignani’s Librairie française et étrangère, located at 18 rue Vivienne until 1854, then at 224 rue de Rivoli, where it still stands today. In London, it was available at Barker’s on Fleet Street and  Dawson & Son on Cannon Street and, from 1880, in the newspaper’s office on the Strand. It could also be found in major Parisian hotels, in French railway station kiosks and at holiday resorts in France, Austria, Belgium, Holland, Scandinavia and Saint Petersburg. Although it had a small print run of between 2,000 to 2,500 copies, Galignani’s Messenger multiplied the number of its readers by four or more through being available in numerous reading rooms and libraries. In Paris, Bossange’s Musée encyclopédique (Cooper-Richet 2008a: 59–60), Renouard’s Librairie des étrangers (Cooper-Richet 2003) and Baudry’s Librairie européenne (Francou 1999), as well as many more modest establishments (Cooper-Richet 2002b), had subscriptions to the English-language daily. In the provinces, the Messenger was for sale in Cambrai, around 1816, in a reading room opened by the Galignanis for the city’s English garrison (Pluvinage 1968: 8). Reports in 1822 suggest that it was on display in Monselet’s bookshop in Nantes; in 1879 one could find it in the newspaper’s newly opened offices on quai Masséna in Nice; and a few years later one could take a stroll to Broad Street in New York to read the latest French news in its pages. In Florence, the Messenger could also be read in Gian Pietro Vieussieux’s Gabinetto Scientifico Letterario and at Molini’s on the banks of the Arno (Stendhal 1982: 512). A certain Mr Marx, a bookseller in Baden-Baden, most probably received it based on the number of letters he exchanged with the Galignanis. In Budapest, you could find the Messenger available at the Casino of the Nation (Paget 1839: 231), a club for gentlemen founded in 1827 by Count Istvan Széchneyi; in Valetta (Malta) it was kept at the Gabinetto di Lettura (Cassar 1992: 1–14). Although it concentrated on information from Britain and France, editorial understanding of its international audience shaped

226

diana cooper-richet

how they oversaw its material, ensuring the Messenger offered a truly international or globalised view of information. Because of its ability to innovate and adapt, the Messenger prospered for far longer than any of its competitors (Awtrey 1932: 30). In the last decades of the century, however, its adaptability showed its limits. For many years its editors had mainly relied on scissors-and-paste journalism, borrowing content from French, English, American and other foreign newspapers (Cooper-Richet 2010: 25–6). In the early days the Galignani family employed William Playfair (Jevons 1977: 9), as well as William Thackeray around 1838, who complained about being poorly paid for his work (Anon. n.d.: 22). Later, they employed more professional editors, such as Mr Schutter, whom Hector Berlioz came across one day in 1832 in Schlesinger’s famous music shop (Berlioz 1881: 286). By the end of the century the number of original articles had considerably increased. The Messenger’s journalism was, by then, much more professionally organised and drew on a pool of British and Irish expatriates to oversee its production. Dublin-born drama writer James Davis, for example, better known as Owen Hall, officiated as assistant editor from 1888 to 1890, while the Irish revolutionaries Patrick and Joseph Casey were also employed in the mid-1880s as typesetters for the Messenger (later on they worked for The New York Herald Tribune). Originally, the Messenger published information sent by ‘volunteer gentlemen’ from Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Spain (CooperRichet 2002a: 126). By the end of the nineteenth century the newspaper was hiring professional correspondents such as George Saunders, who also worked for The Pall Mall Gazette and The Morning Post. The search for modernity and efficiency in the dissemination of information was one of the Galignanis’ permanent concerns. On 25 January 1830 the editorial office announced that it intended to start using the services of the couriers of the Royal Post Office, as well as private expresses, in order to obtain the latest London newspapers more rapidly (Pluvinage 1968: 18–19). In 1815 it took five days for the London newspapers to reach Paris, three in the 1830s and only two by the middle of the century, if the weather conditions were good. From 25 January 1830 to 1885, following an English daily press model, two editions were published every day. The morning edition was delivered before breakfast to subscribers in Paris and its suburbs. The afternoon issue was sent to the provinces. It contained news from London, one day in advance of the other Paris daily newspapers. Long before their Parisian colleagues, the Galignanis were equally innovative in taking advantage of the communication speed of the telegraph, installing a receiver almost as soon as the undersea cable

­

english-language press in continental europe 227

was laid between Dover and Calais in 1851. In the 1880s they had a telephone line installed that allowed them to receive stock quotes transmitted by Reuters. Technological progress also featured in their reporting. The Messenger was probably the first newspaper in France, for example, to publish an article on the invention of the daguerreotype process – the ancestor of photography, featuring in the issue of 9 July 1839. British counterparts belatedly picked up on it, with The Globe, for example, reprinting the piece 14 days later. For the Messenger’s owners, innovation also lay in a regular increasing of the space available for information and advertising. From two columns per page in 1814, they moved on to three in 1817, then to four, and from four to six pages in 1837, at the same time increasing the paper size. They added a one-page supplement in 1815, expanded to four pages and then to six on Saturdays from 1850 (Cooper-Richet 2002a: 126). Praised by literary elites, including those in Russia (Simmonds 1841: 130), the Messenger enjoyed extraordinary success during its publishing lifetime. It was mentioned by many writers throughout the century, featured in contemporary correspondence, as for example Charles Dickens (Dickens 1977: 642–5), and in significant works of fiction. For Jos Sedley, one of the anti-heroes created by William Thackeray in Vanity Fair (1848), the paper was ‘the exile’s best friend’ (Thackeray 1849: 296). In Cranford (1853) (Gaskell 1994: 30), one of Elizabeth Gaskell’s characters is described reading it, as is one of Turgenev’s in Fathers and Sons (1862) (Turgenev 1950: 18). Henry James also mentioned the presence of the daily in ‘The Pension Beaurepas’ (1879) (James 1881: 100), where each guest tried to be the first to get hold of it. The art critic John Ruskin recommended it to one of his correspondents (Barber 1961: 283) in 1875. And in the 1880s, at a time when the newspaper had already started its decline, the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans noted it, as well as the eponymous bookstore, in À rebours (1884) (Huysmans 1977: 235–­­7). At the beginning of the 1830s the Galignanis had their own printing house where they employed English-speaking typesetters who, suggests the editor of one of the Messenger’s competitors – the Satirist – went on strike for better wages on 21 April 1839. Not only did they publish a daily, but also literary reviews and books in English. They ran one of the most luxurious reading rooms to be found in Paris, as well as a circulating library containing some 40,000 volumes, mainly in English. This truly English club, located in the heart of Paris, was a meeting place for wealthy cosmopolitan visitors. Having held sway over the English-speaking readers of Europe, the Messenger had to compete, from 18 July 1883 on, with newcomers such as The Morning

228

diana cooper-richet

News, the Latest Telegrams of the Day (from 1887) and The Paris Herald (the European edition of The New York Herald – ancestor of the International Herald Tribune), launched by James Gordon Bennett Jr. on 3 September 1887 (Robertson 1987). They were the first Englishlanguage newspapers published in Paris to use modern journalistic methods (Awtrey 1932: 45). These newcomers were often American. By the end of the 1860s American newspapers or newspapers for Americans – such as The Paris American (1867) and The Continental Gazette (1868–9) – were being issued in Paris. Their conception of journalism was more in step  with the expectations of a readership which had gradually evolved during the second half of the nineteenth century (Awtrey 1932: 45), as well as with the changes in the media. Negotiations with George Gordon Bennett Jr. having stumbled over the issue of the disappearance of the family name in the title of the newspaper, Galignani’s Messenger was sold to the International Newspaper Co. Ltd on 1 January 1890. It then became The Galignani Messenger. On 10 March 1890 the new management wrote that the newspaper would ‘be conducted on the lines of the leading London dailies’. However, by 1895, now managed by Ralph Lane – better known as Norman Angell, who later became chief editor of the Continental Daily Mail – and renamed The Daily Messenger, it had lost its historical identity. Despite its ‘special … ­­telegraphic services’, it ceased publication on 29 July 1904. During that period journalists, such as Gaston Hanet Archambault, went from the Messenger to James Gordon Bennett’s Herald Tribune, where Archambault was chief editor for nearly two decades (Péréon 2011: 54). For the better part of the nineteenth century Galignani’s Messenger was the dominant English-language newspaper in Europe. It frequently served as a model for other periodicals. For example, The Levant Herald, published in Constantinople, made explicit in its editorial for the first number of 2 February 1859 that it was not innovating but rather honouring Galignani’s Messenger as the most popular newspaper of the time by replicating its format, plan and editorial style (Çaglar 2017: 32). Similarly, in Florence, on 25 October 1865, the short-lived local Times made a call for subscribers to help launch ‘an Anglo-Florentine magazine comparable to Galignani’s Messenger, published successfully in Paris since 1814’ (Richet 2016: 140). However successful it may have been, though, the Messenger was far from being the first or only English-language paper published in continental Europe.

­

english-language press in continental europe 229

The Expanding Range of Continental English-Language Periodical Press Publications In contrast to the newspaper production totally written in English, some Continental-based periodicals only partially written in English can be found dating back to the mid-seventeenth century, such as A Gazette without a Title, three different editions of which were published in Florence between 1640 and 1656 (Richet 2014). Bilingual English–French gazettes like Papiers anglois (1760), Magazin anglois ou British magazine (mid-1760s), The Union or Journal of Liberty/ L’Union ou Journal de la Liberté (four numbers between November 1789 and 1790) and The Universal Patriot were issued in Paris (Simon Macdonald 2013: 23–4). In 1792 an Irish businessman, Robert Taylor, and an English Parislocated merchant, Thomas Marshall, endeavoured to take advantage of the new freedom of the press, as others did later on in Italy in 1847–8. They started The Paris Mercury and Continental Chronicle, a twiceweekly magazine from which they hoped to derive financial benefits (see Figure 7.3). The newspaper’s aim was to provide Londoners – the paper was, for example, on sale at Gillet’s bookshops in London and in Paris at Guéffier’s – and English-speaking expatriates with news of the extraordinary events taking place in France as soon as it was available. Despite their efforts, The Paris Mercury disappeared after a few months for lack of sufficient readers, who never numbered more than some 600 to 800 (Macdonald 2013: 27). If this particular case is well documented, it is probably because of its relevance to historians’ interest in charting British responses to the French Revolution. Nevertheless, this short-lived periodical, however interesting it may have been historically, should not distract attention from the immense and unexplored corpus formed by English-language press published in France during the nineteenth century.1 In April 1807 the already-mentioned Giovanni Antonio Galignani, who, since his arrival in Paris some seven years earlier, had limited him­ self to publishing books in English, most of them being unauthorised editions of works recently published on the other side of the Channel, decided to launch a literary magazine entitled The Monthly Repertory of English Literature (1807–18), modelled on The Edinburgh Review. Its almost a hundred issues were derived by reprinting selected articles 1

The librarians in charge of the Service de la presse of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) estimate that their institution holds in its collections 232 periodical titles published in English, in France, between 1800 and 1900.

230

diana cooper-richet

Figure 7.3  The Paris Mercury and Continental Chronicle (Creative Commons licence, courtesy of Études Epistémè)

taken from the best British periodicals. ‘I am but a gatherer and a disposer of other men’s stuff,’ wrote Giovanni Antonio Galignani in 1818 in The Monthly Repertory (Galignani 1818: 52), borrowing the quote from Henry Wotton’s 1624 ‘Preface’ to The Elements of Architecture. In the 120 pages of each monthly issue, Galignani sought to offer an impartial and universal view of knowledge. The Monthly Repertory was followed by several others of a similar type, designed along comparable reprint lines (Cooper-Richet 2014). They collectively aimed to provide readers with a monthly or a weekly panorama of British, European and even American book production. After 1848, at a time when British

­

english-language press in continental europe 231

magazines were circulating widely across Europe, the Galignanis – Giovanni Antonio’s two sons ­­– decided to stop publishing periodicals. By then, in just a few decades, they had introduced to the Continent three new editorial models: the ‘globalised’ daily, the critical literary review – which contained long, anonymous and reasoned essays on recent books and was a source of inspiration for the Revue britannique ou Choix d’articles traduits des meilleurs écrits périodiques de la Grande-Bretagne (1825), the Revue des Deux Mondes (1829) and the Revue de Paris (1829) and the weekly magazine, published on Sundays, a genre which was unknown in Paris until they launched The London and Paris Observer or Weekly Chronicle of News, Science, Literature and the Fine Arts (1825–48). In the last decades of the century a thriving English-language press was thus being published, not only in France but also elsewhere in Europe. Colette Colligan’s research on the reporting of the Oscar Wilde trials in the English-language press published in Paris and elsewhere at the end of the century (see Chapter 8.1) highlights this proliferation. These newspapers, for example The London Express and Paris Advertiser (May–June/August 1830) and The Paris Chronicle (May–July 1856) were generally short-lived: some of them existed only in the form of a sample number or a single issue. They were also very diverse in genre (Cooper-Richet 2008: 121). Parisian literary magazines such as The Paris Literary Gazette or Weekly Repertory of the Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences and Literature of Great Britain, America and France (October 1835–April 1836) featured alongside satirical bulletins such as The Parisian Review of Facetious Literature (1880) and gazettes specialising in real estate on the model of The Parisian Register, A List of Property for Sale, Houses and Apartments to Let (1875?). Religious bulletins, such as the Gallican Watchman (1831–2), Annals of the Propagation of the Faith (1838–9) or Zion’s Messenger from Paris, A Quarterly Paper for the Extension of the Kingdom of God (1900) circulated modestly, as did The Roman Post (1895–6) published in Italy (Richet 2014). Medical journals were also launched, as for example The Parisian Chirurgical Journal (1792–5) and The Paris Medical Record. A Bi-Monthly Review of the Progress of Medicine and Surgery in all Parts of the World (1874–92). In the second half of the century, following the democratisation of travel, there developed a press dedicated to entertainment and cultural events. The Parisian Bell or The Paris and London Advertiser (1842–51), for example, devoted most of its pages to excursions, theatrical performances and exhibitions. Papers of this type were available free in hotels. Englishlanguage versions of French periodicals, especially in the field of

232

diana cooper-richet

fashion, but not exclusively, were also put on the market at different times. The frequency of these periodicals in English went from twice a week for The Parisian. Parisian and Anglo-American Bi-Weekly News (1880–8), to three times a week for Galignani’s Messenger between July 1814 and July 1815, to every five days for Fashion as It Flies, or the Ladies’ Little Messenger of Parisian Fashion (October–December 1823), to six times a week for Galignani’s Messenger, to weekly for The Weekly Register (November 1823–May 1825), to bi-monthly for The Parisian Bell, or the Paris and London Advertiser (1842–51), to monthly for Galignani’s Monthly Review and Magazine (1822–5) and quarterly for The Parisian Hatter or the Hatmaker’s Journal (1850–3). Their published formats varied from quarto to octavo to folio and even stretched to grand folio. Several unsuccessful attempts were made, notably by The London and Paris Courier (January–September 1836) and The Paris Sun (1836–7), to compete with the Galignanis (Awtrey 1932: 27–34; Cooper-Richet 2014). On 21 April 1836, an article entitled ‘The AngloParisian Press’, published in The Paris Satirist. A Weekly Literary Journal, pointed out the monopolistic position occupied by the famous Paris English-language daily. In its sample copy dated 20 December 1835, the editor of The Paris Herald underlined that he had decided not to follow the example of those whose editorial work consisted only of using scissors and paste. He mentioned that he reserved for himself the privilege of offering his readers independent opinions on all matters of general interest. A Monsieur Acland, chief editor of The Paris Sun, who threatened the Messenger, was fined 200 francs for defamatory remarks printed in the issues dated 8 and 9 January 1837. In the French provinces, where English colonies were established, English-language periodicals were also issued. Starting as early as 1811, The Boulogne Telegraph, French and English Commercial, Political and Literary Continental Journal was launched for the British residents. Others followed, such as The Calais Messenger, which was started in 1820. In the second half of the century a large number of English visitors moved to the south in search of a better climate. Newspapers and magazines followed them. Titles such as The Nice Times. A Weekly Fashionable Newspaper (1870–27), The Algerian Advertiser (1888–1915), The Atlas (1892–1912) and The Bay of Biscay (1899–1905) were designed to serve as links between the small number of winter visitors and to provide them with a list of new arrivals, just as some of the English-language periodicals did at the same period in Italy (Richet 2018a: 107).

­

english-language press in continental europe 233

In the north of Europe, where the press in French was abundant as early as the middle of the seventeenth century, periodicals in English seem to have been very rare. The English Literary Journal of Moscow, a bilingual (English–French) literary monthly printed by A. Semen – official printer of the Imperial Academy of Medicine – from January to March 1823, was an exception. The chief editor, James Baxter, was a Scottish tutor to the Kireevsky family who intended to contribute to a better knowledge of the English language among Russians. The articles addressed a wide variety of subjects. By the end of the nineteenth century, in the south of Europe, notably in Italy, British residents were numerous: in Florence they numbered between 25,000 and 30,000, making up 10 per cent of the population. In this city, as in Rome and on the rivieras of Genoa, Bordighera and Naples, numerous periodicals, mostly short-lived, were published to accommodate such readers. Tuscan literary journals such as The Liberal (1822–3), The Literary Examiner (1823–5) and The Ausonian (1830–1) benefited from the collaboration of Shelley, Byron and Leigh Hunt. The Tuscan Athenaeum (1847–8) and The Roman Advertiser. Journal of Science, Literature and the Fine Arts (1846–9), both cultural journals, were a testimony to the admiration of British intellectuals for Italian culture and the Risorgimento. The Roman Advertiser was published every Saturday by the owner of the Monaldini Library, making it somewhat similar to Galignani’s Messenger (Richet 2018b: 465) (see Figure 7.4). Between 1860 and 1900 more than fifty titles in English were put on the Italian market (Richet 2014). The Fleur de Lys, an Anglo-Florentine Magazine (1868), for example, was modelled on Galignani’s Messenger (Richet 2016: 140). In Italy, there were also weeklies giving general information, such as The Venice Mail, A Weekly Register of News in Italy (1874–5) and The Italian Times (1881–5). In the Canary Islands, a small community founded by English coal merchants who supplied the big ocean liners, which included extended families, had its own English-language press. The Tenerife Times (1891), which disappeared after a few issues, the short-lived El Iriarte. English Supplement (1901) and The Canary Islands Review (1903–4) (Almeida Aguiar, 2002) provided English readers with a ‘List of Visitors’ as well as information on recreational activities. In The Canary Islands Review they could read ‘Spanish Notes’ in order to become more familiar with the archipelago, as well as keep abreast of the latest developments on the Liverpool market. Many of the British who settled in continental Europe were there to work or to do business. The information they needed was specific. To capitalise on such a readership, professional, industrial, commercial

234

diana cooper-richet

Figure 7.4  The Roman Advertiser, 27 November 1847 (Courtesy of Isabelle Richet)

and financial English newspapers and journals were started in France, and also in Smyrna, Constantinople and elsewhere. In France, most of the professional and economic journals in English began life during the second half of the century and addressed specific clientele. Thus,  the British engaged in the construction of the railway line between Paris and Rouen, and English hatters settled in Paris, had periodicals dedicated to their trade interests: The British and Continental Railway Reporter (1844–5), and The Parisian Hatter or the Hatmaker’s Journal (1850–3). In the French capital, several financial newspapers such as The Daily Exchange and Blue Post, The Only Afternoon Financial Journal appeared between 1890 and 1895, and the Franco-British Chamber of Commerce (founded in 1873) issued an Anglo-French Mercantile Review, Organ of the British Chamber of Commerce (1884–5).

­

english-language press in continental europe 235

Expatriate communities in the Ottoman region also benefited from publications catering to their interest. As one commentator has noted, ‘The foreign-language press in the Ottoman Empire (French, English, Spanish, Italian) was mainly addressed to the European communities, or Levantines, who were settled there for business purposes’ (Çaglar 2017: 5). Some members of the Levantine community were English-speaking and had British nationality. The first Englishlanguage newspaper published in Smyrna was The Star in the East or a Smyrna Seamen’s Monitor and Friend of  Youth (1834–7), issued by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. The Manzari Shark or Oriental Observer (1839–41), issued three time a week, was read by the Jewish community and in business circles. The editors, W. N. Churchill and, later, James Richardson, a missionary, traveller and former editor of The Malta Times, provided them with ‘foreign intelligence, beginning by China and approaching home to Salonika. Constantinople and Smyrna seem[ed] its domestic heads’ (Simmonds 1841: 133; The Spectator 1840: 826). The Manzari Shark, which ­followed the policies of the Sultan, was frequently quoted in the  German – in The Israelitischer Annalen in 1841 – Austrian and British – in The Monthly Review also in 1841 – press. Others came after, such as The Smyrna Mail (1862–4), a weekly also published by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and the Harpot News (1873–?) (Prévost 2014). In Constantinople, the press published for the benefit of the foreign community was mainly bilingual, written in both English and French. In August 1867, when Mark Twain arrived at Constantinople on board the Quaker City, he discovered the existence of The Levant Herald (Twain 1879: 45–7; Çaglar 2017). Bilingual despite its title, it was launched in 1859 by James Carlile McCoan, former war correspondent for The Daily News in Crimea (see Figure 7.5). The Levant Herald was later bought by Edgar Whitaker, former correspondent of The Times in Constantinople, and in 1903 by Lewis Mizzi, a Levantine lawyer from Malta. It would prove to be one of the longest-lasting newspapers of the Ottoman Empire. Due to government censorship, it was compelled to change its title on various occasions, from The Levant Herald (1856/59–78), to The Constantinople Messenger (1878–82), The Eastern Express (1882–6) and then The Levant Herald and Eastern Express (1886–1914). The Levant Herald was issued daily; a weekly edition, The Levant Herald Weekly Budget, was published in 1881–2. The Levant Herald’s only real competitor was John Laffan Hanly’s (a former Irish editor of The Levant Herald) Levant Times and Shipping Gazette (1868­­–74). The Levant Herald had correspondents

236

diana cooper-richet

Figure 7.5  The Levant Herald (Creative Commons licence)

in Damascus, Smyrna, Sofia, Thessaloniki and Trebizond, as well as ­readers who spontaneously sent information. It was widely read across the Mediterranean region (Marseille, Egypt), in the Danubian principalities, in Crete, in Adrianople, in Baghdad, Beirut and Aleppo (Çaglar 2017: 12, 38). It advertised in national British newspapers. Applying ‘the principles of British journalism’ (ibid.: 28), it included business information such as the fluctuations of the leading European stock exchanges in London and Paris (ibid.: 12) and sought to be a bridge between the Ottoman Empire, Europe and the rest of the world. The Levant Herald played ‘a role in the emergence and development of the Ottoman press’, and played a part in introducing modernity and European lifestyles into the Ottoman world (ibid.). In British European possessions, the situation of the press varied. Malta, which became part of the British Empire in 1800, abolished

­

english-language press in continental europe 237

censorship in 1839, sparking a rise in newspapers published in English, Italian and Maltese. Twelve periodicals in English were published there between 1839 and 1887 (Frendo 2004: 11–12). Many were short-lived, notably those published by the Bible Society. They were intended for the British merchant readership. The most enduring of such publications was The Malta Times (1840–1927), a British-owned weekly. After being purchased in 1856 by the Chief Secretary of the local British government, it closely hewed to official government policy (Çaglar 2017: 18). In Gibraltar, British since 1704, ‘a government paper of very diminutive size [was] published [from] 1801 [on]’ (Simmonds 1841: 132). The Gibraltar Chronicle, launched in 1821 in connection with the garrison, remains one of the oldest daily newspapers in English still extant (Figure 7.6). Its first editor was a Frenchman, Charles Bouisson (Levey 2008: 24). Until the end of the nineteenth century the information it gave was mainly military and naval. In Cyprus, a British protectorate from 1878 to 1960, ‘a tiny (weekly) news-sheet of Liberal opinions entitled Cyprus Time’, as it was characterised on 14 May 1880 in The Dundee Courier and Argus and Northern Ireland Warder, was founded in Larnaca, in 1880, by Edward Henry Vizetelly (Vizetelly 2012: 36). The editorial policy of this former war correspondent for The Daily News and The New York Times endorsed ‘government by civilians, and military men back to their regiments’ (ibid.: 38). Vizetelly, who worked as a school teacher, depended entirely on subscribers to fund his newspaper.

Conclusion Given the current state of research, mapping or trying to establish a timeline and a typology of the English-language press published in continental Europe during the nineteenth century remains an impossible task. Nevertheless, some of its main characteristics are identifiable. In the areas where English was not the native tongue, the readers of newspapers in English existed by definition in very limited numbers. Therefore, a small number of these publications could easily dominate the editorial landscape, provided they were commercially successful. The others – most of the time weeklies – whose numbers increased gradually during the century, were usually short lived and of very modest circulation. In the early decades of the nineteenth century most of the editors of the English-language newspapers published abroad resorted to scissors-and-paste journalism, as well as relying on an informal network of contributors. As time went on, they gradually recruited more

238

diana cooper-richet

Figure 7.6  The Gibraltar Chronicle, 26 February 1826 (Creative Commons licence, courtesy of Wikimedia)

professional journalists, many of them writers and correspondents also working for other newspapers. Such competent professionals could be hired only if the financial situation of the periodical was healthy. To survive, most such press vehicles undertook concerted efforts to build up advertising revenue, as was the case with the long-lived Galignani’s Messenger. Other ways of surviving financially was through sponsorship, as in the case of The Levant Herald, which received financial support from the Ottoman Empire in exchange for ensuring its articles did not offend the Sultan’s censors. Many unashamedly borrowed and reproduced content wholesale from British periodicals. As early as 1807 Giovanni Antonio Galignani

­

english-language press in continental europe 239

admitted that his publication model was based on the ‘great quarterlies’. But, as far as the Messenger was concerned, its editors, although they admired the British press for its globalised approach of information and took it as their example, were astute enough to adapt to the local French situation, particularly concerning the type and mode of advertising they chose to feature, and the French habit of selling papers by subscription (Cooper-Richet 2002a: 131). Galignani’s international press and periodical successes would inspire other European Englishlanguage newspapers that followed. Wherever such English-language press efforts were published, be it in Constantinople, Florence, Paris, Rome or Smyrna, their challenge was to try to satisfy the different needs of their readers, to help them master a totally new environment, to offer them information on leisure and culture, as well as to report on the global economic and financial situation. Some succeeded; many others did not. Their history deserves further study to provide a fuller picture of cultural contact and news readership interests in continental European contexts.

Chapter Eight

TRANSNATIONAL EXCHANGES M. H. Beals

The new owner of the newspaper asked who that man was in the corner. ‘The exchange editor,’ he was informed. ‘Well, fire him,’ said he. ‘All he seems to do is sit there and read all day.’ (Mosher 1932) In his 2001 study of global information networks, Yrkö Kaukiainen lamented that it ‘is commonly believed that not much happened in the transmission of information before the introduction of the electric telegraph, which has even been regarded as the start of a communications revolution’ (Kaukiainen 2001: 2). This contention has been reinforced by both popular and scholarly histories of nineteenth-century news: both Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet (1999) and Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought (2007) give titular prominence to the technology, while Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb’s The International Distribution of News centres around the device, noting its socioeconomic role in equalising access to overseas news (Silberstein-Loeb 2014: 111). Joel H. Wiener referred to the device as ‘one of the supreme milestones in press history’, claiming that it ‘broke down existing temporal barriers to news acquisition and transmission, nurtured wire agencies into existence, and accelerated stylistic and typographical changes in reporting’ (Wiener 2011: 65). Although he concedes that these changes were not immediate, he concludes that ‘no other breakthrough in technology has affected the press as profoundly, prior to the Internet revolution of our own age’ (ibid.: 66). For studies of the British periodical press, there is something very enticing about the confluence of the dawning of the Victorian age and the introduction of telegraphy in 1837 – a convenient turning point for journalistic method and style. Yet, another contemporaneous event, the beginning of regular transatlantic steamship conveyance in 240

­

transnational exchanges

241

1838, receives far less notice despite its critical importance in expanding access to overseas content (Cranfield 1978: 165). The evolution of the international post (Robinson 1964: 189) and the implementation of fast, global mail steamers (Shulman 2015: 218–19; Wiener 2011: 64) are rarely discussed in studies of the British press beyond noting editorial complaints that foreign newspapers were often delayed by an incompetent or uncooperative postal service (Williams 1959: 48). Conversely, discussions of colonial news systems, long detached from electronic networks, do weave narratives of electronic and postal communication together more tightly (Finch 1965: 99; Harvey 2002: 21; Joshi 2017: 8; Lampe and Ploeki 2014: 249–50; Lester 2005: 6). This disparity in the literature suggests that the British press was dominated by electronic communication, while the colonies remained trapped in a pre-telegraphic, steamship economy. This chapter contends that the increasing use of the electronic telegraphy after 1840 represents neither a fundamental nor immediate turning point in the process of transnational news exchange. Instead, the ways in which overseas news was acquired and presented by British newspapers evolved slowly over the course of the nineteenth century, aligned to similar but less public exchanges of commercial and financial information by merchants with overseas connections. Building directly upon early modern epistolary practices, nineteenth-century editors continued to rely upon personal relationships with international news gatherers, as well as on abstract connections within the community of editors and their readers, to collect and synthesise relevant overseas information. The introduction of electronic telegraphy gradually affected the practical and stylistic implementation of this system, but did not dismantle or supersede the underlying human network that sustained transnational exchange before, during and beyond the nineteenth century. What follows is therefore an examination of the underlying consistency of transnational news exchange across the century and the specific and limited ways in which electronic communication influenced this system.

Epistolary Networks Epistolary networks, as developed in the early modern period, served as the bedrock of transnational exchange in the printed newspaper of the nineteenth century. Earlier distribution methods and stylistic conventions remained visible and largely consistent throughout the period, not only in the printing of manuscript letters, but also in typographical and editorial decisions surrounding reportage. By the turn

242

m. h. beals

of the nineteenth century the paths by which overseas news came to Britain were well worn. In the seventeenth century private courier networks stretched across the continent, traversing the Holy Roman Empire from Sweden to Naples, wending along the central roads of France and the Netherlands, fanning through Britain, and bridging the Mediterranean to either the Ottoman Empire in the east or to Spain and the New World in the west (Schobesberger 2016: 62). These loosely defined pathways are difficult to map precisely – the most direct routes were often delayed by military movements, disease or unreliable couriers (Rolfe 2016: 569–70) – and experienced news gatherers might send or obtain information through routes that were geographically longer but reliably faster or more cost effective (Sheila Barker 2016: 718–20). Moreover, as Europe, and particularly Britain, expanded its military and economic reach, such pathways linked to new branches in North America, Africa, Asia and Australasia, each with their own overlapping political, trading and domestic communication networks. As with continental land routes, nineteenth-century shipping faced temporary blockades, natural disasters and seasonal weather in the quest to relay news to Britain through the most efficient hubs of existing correspondence networks. For example, despite regular direct shipping between Glasgow and Jamaica, and similar connections between Saint-Domingue and Nantes, news of Haiti’s revolutionary constitution came to the Glasgow Advertiser through neither of these channels. Instead, the document declaring Haitian independence was translated and printed in Washington’s National Intelligencer (14 August 1801), and reprinted, heavily edited, by Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser in Philadelphia (9 October 1801). A copy of the Advertiser was then carried aboard an American trading vessel to France, where it was retranslated for a September issue of the Echo de Bourdeaux. A copy of the Echo then made its way to the United Kingdom, where it was again translated, most likely by a London daily, before journeying northwards to feature in John and Thomas Mennons’s Advertiser, marred by grammatical infelicities but having made an efficient journey of just seven weeks. Thus, despite occasional detours, the major hubs and edges between European nations were well established by the turn of the nineteenth century, augmented rather than upended by expanding domestic postal networks and colonial shipping routes (Haffemayer 2016: 805; Segal 2014: 472–3). The layering of overlapping but discrete correspondence networks, catering to international commerce, interstate diplomacy, colonial governance and domestic communication, decentralised the dissemination

­

transnational exchanges

243

of news and allowed for multiple narratives of an event to develop and evolve as they travelled across and beyond Europe (Dillon 2016: 836). In Britain, this decentralisation and divergence was accompanied by a curatorial style that presented readers with ‘a composite, even contradictory picture of an event; it was [the reader’s] task – or their right – to interpret for themselves what they read’ (Brownlees 2016: 403). This tradition of intermixing manuscript correspondence, printed news-sheets, pamphlets and word of mouth was evident from the seventeenth through to the nineteenth century. Private correspondence between business partners, family members (Beals 2011: passim), or state officials (Sheila Barker 2016: 737–8; Peacey 2016: 420–1), frequently referenced newspaper material to confirm or dispel rumours. Likewise, newspapers throughout the anglophone world referenced and transcribed letters from abroad to provide another, arguably more authentic, perspective from which their readers could divine the true state of international events (Beals 2016: 152; Hamilton 2004: 303; Markovits 2008: 559; Potter 2007: 628). That nineteenth-century newspapers would use and build upon existing correspondence networks is unsurprising, given the fundamentally similar modes of transporting news, or rather the news bearers, via carriage and ship. However, maintaining the stylistic and typographical form of the letter in an increasingly institutionalised printed news industry was less certain. Over the century newspaper editors responded to changing costs, reader expectations and competition in a variety of ways, but most continued to include a broad mix of local gossip, editorial commentary, international reportage, literary prose and poetry, numerical tables, comic or horrifying illustrations and advertising notices. How they chose to order and present this hodgepodge demonstrates the continuing influence of the early modern newsletter format and its adaptation to technological and social change. Information derived from manuscript sources, namely letters directed or forwarded to the printer, appeared in newspapers in one of two ways. The contents of the letter could be summarised, intermixed with news gathered from other sources, and prefaced with indicator phrases such as ‘letters and papers have been received’, along with the dates of the correspondence, their routes, and the degree to which the accounts differed (Age, 16 April 1826). In the latter half of the century telegraphic dispatches continued to reference epistolary networks with comments such as ‘letters have been received from Pembian to the 10th inst’ (Western Mail, 11 January 1870). In some cases, editors simply listed up to a score of geographically related snippets, one or two sentences in length, with little or no acknowledgement of the different

244

m. h. beals

sources being presented, mirroring the cadence of quayside gossip, which was often the source of at least some of the material. Letters could also be transcribed directly, with varying degrees of truncation, under heading such as ‘Parisian Correspondence’. Within these letters, a range of sources might be referenced, such as the letter appearing in the 12 July 1830 issue of the Bull, which noted that I have before me a packet of letters which I have received from SidiFerruch. Some are three weeks old, and others as recent as the 26th of June. I will give you their substance, and incorporate with them the intelligence communicated in the Montieur of this day. In both transcription and summary, overseas news was headed not with date and location of the action described but with those of the correspondent, indicating when the information was conveyed rather than when the event occurred. It was also presented to readers in the order received by the printer, providing them with neither a chronology of the events nor of the discovery of those events by the original correspondents (Beals 2016: 161). This non-linear style mirrored that of a manuscript letter, where the newest information was appended to the end, the letter growing until the exhaustion of the paper or the requirement of dispatch terminated the narrative. Thus, overseas reportage within nineteenth-century newspapers resembled traditional newsletters not only in their dissemination pathways but also in their organisational style. Those who composed the text for the newspaper likewise retained the personal authority associated with early modern news gatherers. Although the curatorial role of the editor applied to all aspects of the newspaper, transnational exchanges required close attention to interpersonal connections – both abroad and within the local readership. Lengthy editorial commentaries on international news were relatively rare, appearing most prominently in discussion-laden newspapers such as the Examiner, and particularly about stately or diplomatic matters with domestic implications (Matheson 2000: 563). Even here, editors occasionally felt remiss in expressing themselves too boldly. ‘We are so little in the habit in this country on being taken into the confidence of the Government during negotiations with foreign Powers’, noted the Hampshire Advertiser, ‘that we feel some embarrassment in availing ourselves of the liberty of criticism which is thus offered’ (27 June 1863). Instead, most texts were left to speak for themselves through either the analysis provided by the correspondent or the purposeful omission or highlighting of facts within reprinted material.

­

transnational exchanges

245

In other cases, commentary was inserted later in the issue, physically detaching it from the direct reportage. The role of the editor in these circumstances was not to provide lengthy discussions of foreign occurrences, but to curate the most reliable assortment of information for their readers, just as their predecessors had done (Sara Barker 2016: 329; Heyd 2012: 35­­–8; Petitjean 2016: 185). To curate effectively, editors and printers also had to maintain personal relationships with the local community, making themselves available in person or by post to obtain a much wider selection of letters than their own contacts might have warranted. Alongside domestic ‘letters to the editor’, personal correspondence from colonial settlements and military engagements were occasionally forwarded to editors, and their publication prompted other readers to send in corroboratory or contradictory accounts of their own (Kelso Mail, 15 July 1830; McDonald 1999: 114). Editors rarely offered explicit critiques of the content, instead suggesting the authority and relevance of the letter via the relationship of the author or recipient to the community and the ‘respectability’ or trustworthiness of their character (Preston Guardian, 15 January 1848). Depending on the diversity of the readership, these irregular networks provided newspapers, particularly smaller provincial newspapers, with a dynamic range of overseas news that could rival or occasionally exceed competitors capable of employing regular or special foreign correspondents (Beals 2016: 152–4; Chalaby 1996: 307; Potter 2007: 628). Yet, even formalised relationships grew out of informal personal and business communication with advertisers, distributors and partners in overseas ventures. For example, as colonial settlements began to provide employment opportunities to Britain’s journeyman printers, transnational exchanges with former employees or partners became an inexpensive means of obtaining experienced and well-placed correspondents in the distant corners of the anglophone world (Hamilton 2004: 306; Potter 2003: 120–1). As the century progressed, foreign correspondents evolved from ad hoc reports by individual contacts to semi-professional or contracted writers: whereas letters describing foreign uprisings or military engagements were frequently included in the first decades of the century, true war correspondents, akin to modern reporters and local stringers parachuted into war zones, only came to prominence after mid-century, and only for a small number of wellcoined publications (Markovits 2008: 559, 562–3; Potter 2007: 635). Moreover, the individuals sent or recruited from a conflict were still supported by a ‘barrage of letters to the editor’, which Markovits refers to as ‘participatory journalism’, stemming from a national pride and sense of duty to contribute to a robust and free press (Markovits 2008:

246

m. h. beals

561). Institutional foreign bureaus and the permanent stationing of staff abroad are more accurately seen as developments of the twentieth century – which are now falling victim to reduced revenue streams and the return to citizen reporting through social media (Hamilton 2004: 303). Thus, overseas news coverage, in its dissemination, form and character, was built upon a series of densely interwoven personal connections, traditional correspondence networks, and epistolary and conversational, rather than encyclopaedic, modes of discourse.

Scissors-and-Paste Although the evolution from personal correspondent to foreign correspondent was largely straightforward, correspondence was never the exclusive form or means of overseas reportage; alongside transcriptions and summaries of letters, and direct reportage, were reprintings and retellings of material from overseas periodicals, ephemera and books. Scissors-and-paste journalism, also referred to as reprinting or textual reuse, described the process wherein one periodical printed, in part or in whole, the text of another one, with or without specific attribution and a without a formal syndication agreement. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries nearly all newspapers employed this method to obtain content, especially international content, for their publications. For smaller newspapers, especially where the editor and printer were one and the same, obtaining and curating texts from other publications was part of the daily work of the general editor. As staff sizes increased, newspapers employed specific exchange editors, at entry level, to sift through incoming subscriptions and prepare them for insertion (Garvey 2013: 213). As the number of newspapers and exchanges increased, the job of selecting the most relevant and interesting texts became more difficult. An American exchange editor, reflecting on his employment, noted that ‘He reads and mutilates newspapers from nine o-clock in the morning till six in the evening.  The Tribune and Herald have enormous exchange lists. It is as much as one can do to glance over a day’s mail in a day’ (McKivigan 2008: 6). Although the mechanics of obtaining, selecting and setting printed texts may appear wholly different to those of direct correspondence, especially in the crowded marketplace of the late nineteenth century, scissors-and-paste journalism reflected both a continuation and a gradual evolution of early modern correspondence networks, an adaption of traditional methods to modern communication technology.

­

transnational exchanges

247

This consistency is first seen in the way editors sent or obtained this material. In both Britain and the United States newspaper exchanges were considered a public good, allowing for the widest possible dissemination of information, and therefore worthy of governmental support; newspapers could be sent between editors, as courtesy subscriptions, through the public postal system either gratis or at a heavily subsidised rate, and copyright was not applied to newspaper material until the end of the century (Seville 2011: 249). Although this system was occasionally abused, with old newspapers being used to send correspondence, and papers such as the Thief  being derived wholly from reprinted material (Feeley 2014), it was remarkably robust. In 1800 an article printed in London could be dispatched, received, selected, set and printed in Aberdeen within a week, with most time-sensitive news being distributed across Britain and Ireland, regardless of the port of entry, within ten days (Beals 2017). Whether Britain exported this practice alongside its surplus printers, or it evolved from similar market pressures, it was present throughout the Empire, though the size of certain colonies could increase the acceptable shelf-life of a locally produced text to over a month (Clark and Wetherell 1989: 294–5; Green 1936: 95–6; Joshi 2017: 8). Overseas news was more complex. Whether letters to and from the colonies would enjoy the same rates as post within Britain was long debated, but the imperial rate for a newspaper, while not free, remained heavily subsidised at 1d., a fraction of the standard rate by weight and further evidence of the value placed on news dissemination. Extra-imperial postage, on the other hand, was contracted through private companies, with steamship rates to New York ranging between 2d and 4d per pound of newspapers by the second half of the century (Robinson 1964: 248–9, 253–4, 261). Private agreements, alongside variations in the frequencies of different postal routes, unevenly affected the speed and cost of obtaining transnational news for metropolitan, port and inland editors. Moreover, newspapers with a larger international circulation generally dispatched them in packets, rather than single issues, and a significant percentage chose to employ private freight services similar to the practice of private ‘ship letters’. In the second half of 1844, for example, Sydney received over 63,732 overseas newspaper issues, 9 per cent of which came by private conveyance (Robinson 1964, 189). An editor’s selection of publications was therefore heavily influenced by the same forces dictating the delivery of traditional correspondence: the routes and schedules of commercial shipping and terrestrial couriers, international postal agreements, inclement weather and piracy. (See Plate 5 for an 1850 representation

248

m. h. beals

of typical scenes occasioned by the arrival of the mail packet ship in Melbourne.) It was also constrained by the limited number of periodicals from certain parts of the anglophone world. Until the 1820s there was only one newspaper published in New South Wales; by mid-century Southern Africa remained primarily represented by the three main Cape newspapers (Potter 2004: 45–6), and South America saw a handful of anglophone titles published for the benefit of local English immigrants, although these included ‘a good deal of material translated from the local Spanish-language press’ (Desbordes 2008: 131). Within these options, newspapers tended to make use of material from others within their ideological network. Chris Holdridge (2010) has demonstrated how overseas exchange between Australian and African newspapers was shaped by a shared ideology concerning indigenous peoples, and how the critical inclusion of articles from select British newspapers helped justify feelings of abandonment and misunderstanding by the metropolis. Political networks were equally evident when the material was uncontroversial. In the first half of the century, as Australia’s newspaper press slowly expanded, the specific texts that appeared in Britain were often dictated not by the content of article but by the political affiliation of the first British publication to include it, with Whig and Tory newspapers typically circulating reprints within rather than between their political compatriots (Beals 2016: 153; Potter 2004: 57). Ethnic and national bonds also influenced the curation of overseas content. Provincial newspapers in Scotland, Wales and Ireland frequently reprinted articles that discussed emigrants from their respective nations (Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, 19 August 1840; Caledonian Mercury, 17 July 1843; Wrexham and Denbighshire Advertiser, and Cheshire, Shropshire and North Wales Register, 29 December 1860), while the Scotsman and Caledonian Mercury provided regular updates on Port Phillip because they (spuriously) considered it ‘essentially a Scotch Colony’ (7 November 1840). Once a packet of newspapers arrived, the editor determined which texts would be inserted and the extent to which they would be truncated or otherwise amended. Miscellaneous material, particularly humorous or sensationalised accounts, could be set aside and inserted as required – sometimes years after their arrival. Among news reports, editors had to select both the specific articles they would transcribe or summarise, and the order in which they would appear over several upcoming issues. Part of this decision was practical, a judicious balancing between providing the latest and most relevant news items within the physical space available.

­

transnational exchanges

249

To support scissors-and-paste exchange, and encourage use of their content over that of their competitors, overseas newspapers often summarised several weeks or months of news within the issue that immediately preceded the departure of a mail packet (Potter 2004: 47). After its debut in the British press, it might then be reprinted dozens of times, moving in waves across national print news outlets, and into Europe. Indeed, London’s role as a clearing house for international news was so prominent that by the end of the century journalists in Europe and the United States began to complain of France’s unseemly ‘plagiarism’ of the British press (Chalaby 1996: 307–8). Considering the nearuniversal engagement with scissors-and-paste throughout the century and across linguistic borders, this accusation may reflect a shifting perception of the practice by the twentieth century, further suggested by more restrictive interpretations of copyright law (Alexander 2010: 249; Bannerman 2016: 80–98). It may also simply suggest the scale at which the practice was being implemented by century’s end. Scissorsand-paste thus represented a kind of extended public correspondence, a significantly larger range of content from a much wider network of depersonalised correspondents arriving through well-worn dissemination pathways alongside rather than in place of epistolary content. Having been obtained, reprinted materials continued compositional traditions associated with letters, such as minimal analysis or commentary, and implicit connections between author and action locations. They also continued to act as independent accounts, of uncertain veracity, rather than as parts of an established institutional narrative. On 26 September 1800, for example, the Glasgow Advertiser printed a report that Thomas Jefferson had died from a malignant fever, then raging across New York and Philadelphia. His death was not remarked upon further, but, two months later, the Advertiser predicted that Mr Jefferson, presumably having risen from the grave, would win the upcoming election. Such errors in overseas reprints were rarely given explicit retraction or correction in subsequent issues and instead were simply overtaken by more recent or authoritative accounts. Despite similarities in the selection and presentation of manuscript and printed sources, attribution practices were distinct. The nature of placing personal correspondence in the public sphere, particularly if discussing sensitive or controversial topics, made explicit identification of authors extremely rare in the first half of the century, although a gradual rise in the number of domestic bylines was mirrored by an increasing number of named overseas correspondents. In most cases, a pseudonym or editorial designation such as ‘our correspondent’ or ‘a respectable gentleman’ from a specific location was used. In contrast,

250

m. h. beals

printed materials often received no introduction or attribution, with several articles appearing in rapid succession with neither text nor decoration to differentiate source materials. When they were attributed, it typically took one of three forms: a headline indicating the postal location from which the publication had arrived; an in-text attribution to the original source location of publication such as ‘New York papers’; or a lead-in or closing tag that indicated the specific publication from which the text was taken. Subsequent reprints often retained the latter two designations, suggesting that attributing the original source was preferable to acknowledging the intermediate publication from which they had obtained the material. However, the practice of geographical attribution, clearly connected with epistolary tradition, fell out of favour by the end of the century. Before 1850 headlines such as ‘Ireland’, ‘The West Indies’ and ‘Van Diemen’s Land’ informed readers of the source of reprinted material, with the discussion often having only a tangential connection to the location mentioned. This declaration of provenance allowed informed readers to infer accuracy and recency through personal correlations. Moreover, by comparing the headline location with in-text attributions to the original publication and the event location, readers were informed of the routes by which the news was obtained, adding further context regarding the reliability of the information. Whether this was consciously understood by contemporary readers, the consistency with which it was included by metropolitan and provincial newspapers, and the extent to which such clues were retained over multiple reprintings, indicates that they were an accepted typographical convention well into the Victorian era. After mid-century, technological changes, the expansion of steam shipping and the increasing reach of submarine telegraph lines, as well as wider trends in journalistic prose, began to change how reprinted material was presented (Chalaby 1996: 311). Topical headlines, previously omitted or placed below geographic ones, became more common, and references to the site of newsgathering and its route to Britain becoming increasingly obscure, regardless of the means of transmission. Contrast, for example, the following three articles on the West Indies: THE WEST INDIES. KINGSTON (JAMAICA), SEPT. 20.— We copy the following from the Barbadian of the 11th of June:— ‘We have called upon our own countrymen to make an effort to support the character of the island at this important crisis; we

­

transnational exchanges

251

would also appeal to the leading men in all the British West India Colonies to unite, with heart and hand, to counteract the mischievous tendency of writers in England, who are striving, with most persevering malignity, to make us appear infamous is in the eyes of Europe, and who will never rest without some speedy and decided exertion on our parts, until they have thrown us out of the pale of British protection … (Morning Chronicle, 2 December 1823) Here, the text is headed with an epistolary dateline, despite originating from a printed publication, and the conversational tone is retained, providing readers with a seemingly direct connection to the original writer. After 1850 rapid steamship conveyance of newspapers across the Atlantic, and around the Cape, gave port town editors a greater volume and variety of texts to choose from, a variety that rippled throughout the domestic exchange network as different transnational networks merged inland. Conglomerated single-paragraph summaries of multiple sources became more common, replacing the series of one-sentence paragraphs that had been characteristic in the first decades of the century. Indeed, both exporters and importers of overseas news began to package news into digestible, easily transmittable units (Finch 1965: 99–100). The lineage of postal transmission remained, though, with geographical headings and in-text route attributions continuing to appear in most publications. THE WEST INDIES. The West India and Pacific Steamship Company’s steamer Hayti arrived in the Mersey yesterday, with dates from Puerta Cabello to September 22. With the exception of some local disturbances, Venezuela was free from Civil War. On account of untimely heavy rains, the coffee crop will be anything but abundant next year … (Liverpool Mercury, 17 October 1865) By the 1890s references to dissemination pathways became increasingly rare, and the voice of overseas reporting shifted from local witnesses to disembodied and unmappable narrators. Moreover, as domestic competition reached its height, editors sought to repackage and sensationalise reprints, extending the shelf-life of cyclical and distant events that served ‘to remind us, however inadequately, of the existence of perennial themes’ (Mayer 1964: 93): AWFUL DISASTER IN THE WEST INDIES. A BRIDGE SWEPT AWAY. EIGHTY PERSONS DROWNED. A terrible calamity has occurred in Hayti through the collapse of a bridge over the St. Marc, whereby eighty persons who were crossing at the time lost their lives. The sad affair took place on Friday last. The

252

m. h. beals

recent storms had swelled the mountain streams considerably, and the River St. Marc overflowed its banks, thereby undermining the foundations of the bridge of St. Marc … (Northern Echo, 19 August 1891) Although epistolary datelines, topical headlines and summarised texts appeared throughout the century, these extracts illustrate general shifts in the way overseas reprints and summaries were formatted. They suggest that, despite newspapers building upon an existing correspondence network that presented manuscript and printed material in fundamentally similar ways, and despite their continued use of private correspondence and printed texts to fill pages and deepen narratives, an increasing supply of overseas content and the introduction of short, disembodied telegraphic dispatches pulled journalistic discourse in a new direction.

Telegraphic Transmissions Following the introduction of the Cooke and Wheatstone and Morse systems in the 1840s, telegraphic networks grew rapidly, spurred on by the need for up-to-the-minute military and financial intelligence. In Britain, the telegraph gained particular prominence in the last quarter of the century, after the nationalisation of the Electric and International Telegraph Company (Hobbs 2009b: 31), at which point it appears to have disturbed the flow of overseas news, and encouraged the use of telegraphese, compressed and comparatively plain text, in all forms of journalistic prose (Matheson 2000: 561). Yet, telegraphic news was only ever one component of a wider international system, with dispatches enriching and influencing but never fully displacing earlier systems of transnational exchange. Despite telegraphic news dispatches being a common sight in both metropolitan and provincial papers by the 1850s, in comparison with other forms of exchange, electronically transmitted news had a relatively small number of column inches. The Caledonian Mercury of 16 June 1859, for example, included only half a column from Reuters, compared to six columns of correspondence and reprinted material under the heading of ‘Foreign intelligence’ on the previous page. A contemporary issue of the Times (21 June 1859) offered a similarly paltry number of inches, though European dispatches were scattered throughout and North American telegrams were referenced in transatlantic correspondence. The practical reasons for this brevity were obvious: the cost of international dispatches was high, especially for those being transmitted

­

transnational exchanges

253

across the Atlantic. In 1866 use of the cable stood at a staggering $10 a word, compared to 4d to ship a packet of newspapers from New York, or 6d to send a letter from anywhere in the British Empire (Robinson 1964: 260), although the cost of maintaining writers abroad could also add up quickly (Chalaby 1996: 307). Even if material was obtained via an agency – for example Reuters (Desbordes 2008: 124) – telegraphic news could only ever supply a small portion of the text needed for a daily publication. Understanding the telegraph’s role in transnational exchange must therefore consider both its genuine ability to compress the news cycle, and its more nuanced effects on discourse and dissemination. Throughout the century epistolary and printed materials travelled at different rates between different nations, sped or delayed not only by Euclidean distance but also by the quality of roads, the support or hindrance of local governments, the frequency of mail packets and commercial shipping, and seasonal changes to travel times. Despite attempts by the Press Association to pool resources, the introduction of telegraphic communication did not serve as an effective equaliser even within Britain. Instead, the uneven spread of global telegraphic cables, and their varied ownership, reshaped news networks in new but also fundamentally conventional ways. Taking an anglocentric perspective, cables were laid in recognisable circles from the English metropolis, first within Britain, then across the Channel in 1851, and then across the Irish Sea the following year. Lines began to stretch across the Mediterranean in 1854, and across the Atlantic a decade later. This imperial network was enlarged in the 1870s with connections first between Britain and India and then with Australasia. This official network expansion, however, sat alongside dozens of other terrestrial and submarine cables laid across the world by private and public ventures. Each one allowed not only for direct communication between those locations, but also for rerouting or indirect recirculation of information between distant corners of the world, giving new prominence to locations that hosted telegraph stations and the physical transportation networks that fed and drew from them. Connections between Ceylon and India in 1857, or Havana and Key West in 1868, allowed for a consolidation and packaging of news before it was transmitted by postal networks, rerouting, however marginally, the flow of information. It also led to the economic development of these new communication hubs, as seen by the growth of Darwin, Australia after the laying of the Banjoewangie–Darwin cable in 1871 – and the subsequent discovery of gold nearby. In most cases, however, telegraphic communications were layered and intermixed with other

254

m. h. beals

Figure 8.1  ‘Arrival of the Mail. Race for the Telegram’, Illustrated Melbourne Post, 11 October 1862 (Creative Commons licence, courtesy of National Library of Australia)

forms of news, just as reprinted texts had been intermixed with ­private correspondence. For example, between 1870 and 1872 news from Britain could take ten to fourteen days to reach Australasia through purchasing printed copies of telegraphic dispatches sent to Bombay and then forwarding these to Australia by ship (see Figures 8.1–8.3). Practices such as this, along with the sheer size of the continent itself, made Australian papers a peculiar assortment of letters, newspaper reprints, telegraphic dispatches from within the continent, and printed telegrams arriving by mail packet or overland route. Nor was this problem specific to the colonies. Synchronism zones, offsets between the original date of a report and the date of its publication in Britain, had previously been defined by geography and access to major commercial or political centres. With the advent of telegraphy, these continued to be influenced by distance but were mediated by the number and connectivity of telegraph lines and, most importantly, the type of news being transmitted. At its start, the telegraph had been primarily a commercial tool, used for the smooth running of the railways and the transmission of commercial intelligence, pushing

­

transnational exchanges

255

Figure 8.2  A. C. Cooke and Frederick Grosse, Glenelg, ‘South Australia – Arrival of the Mail Steamer’, Australian News for Home Readers, 24 December 1864 (Creative Commons licence, courtesy of National Library of Australia)

financial news out of alignment with its political and environmental context. War reporting soon became an obvious genre to benefit from telegraphic speed, but military officials (unsuccessfully) protested the use of telegraph lines for informing the general public of the current position of British troops (Markovits 2008: 563), and the brevity of these reports often required supplementary correspondence in the days and weeks that followed, leading to the printing of posthumous reports and news items made obsolete by more recent telegraphic news (Potter 2004: 50–1). The telegraph also pushed some regions to the edges of the public consciousness. Correspondence from imperial settlement communities had long been a staple of the British press, a bilateral exchange between subjects at home and abroad, with Australian newspapers referring to British letters as ‘home correspondence’. Although less frequent than accounts from Europe, the United States and India, through the 1860s imperial settlement communities commanded a significant number of column inches when letters or printed accounts arrived by packet and, by extension, a considerable level of detail. By

256

m. h. beals

Figure 8.3  ‘Latest intelligence: Arrival of the Melbourne Mail at Sandhurst, with Five Days’ Later Intelligence from Melbourne’, Melbourne Punch, 2 (1856), p. 199 (Creative Commons licence, courtesy of National Library of Australia)

placing an increasing emphasis on immediacy, however, the telegraph devalued (even if it did not supplant) slower forms of communication, particularly discursive and time-insensitive accounts on the ­­socio-economic progress of the dominions and global regions not yet connected through electronic communication (Potter 2003: 111). With the arrival of printed news in the early modern period, many queried how newspapers could be ‘new’ if you had time to set and print the content. In the same way, a generation of rapid communication via the telegraph had made long-form reporting seem less like ‘news’ than other formats. Thus, by the 1890s peacetime news from Antipodean settlements were typically short, descriptive telegraphs of political appointments and market prices, with reflective accounts such as the two-column ‘Views of a Banffshire Man’ on ‘The Situation in Johannesburg’ (Aberdeen Weekly Journal, 25 July 1896) a rare echo of what had been a staple of imperial reportage. Journalistic discourse likewise evolved alongside the growth of instantaneous communication. The general formula of telegraphic news, with its staccato and highly formulaic style, was clearly a fundamental departure from the traditional, long-form presentation of

­

transnational exchanges

257

overseas news. Yet, in the first decades of its use, it largely retained the tropes of printed correspondence. With a growing domestic and European telegraph network at its disposal, but nearly a decade before the first transatlantic cable, the Morning Post of 7 June 1850 introduced a column of American news as follows: THE UNITED STATES. (THE OFFICES OF THE EUROPEAN AND AMERICAN TELEGRAPH COMPANY.) (FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT.) LIVERPOOL, Friday Morning. The American steam-ship Pacific has just arrived here with one day’s later intelligence from the United States than that received by way of Halifax and Niagara … Here we see an unwieldy blending of old and new styles: a header referring to the place of action rather than the source, an attribution to both the telegraph office and a company correspondent, and a narrative describing the physical route by which the content had come before being domestically wired to London. The provenance of news obtained entirely by telegraph was more directly stated. The aforementioned dispatches in the Times were presented as: The following telegrams were received at Mr. Reuter’s office, June 20:­­– ‘TRIESTE, MONDAY, JUNE 20. ‘According to reports current, the Austrian vessel Buona, of the class No. 2, which has been captured by the French, has been given up as free, because its proprietor and its captain are Venetians.’ … In its introduction and style, it is indistinguishable from manuscript correspondence, save its mentioning of Reuter, who is styled as a personal recipient rather than an institution. By the 1870s – ­­following the creation of the Press Association, the nationalisation of the telegraph, and the establishment of a flat domestic rate for telegraphic ­­messaging – news reports had gradually transformed from epistolary forms into brief summaries associated with news obtained from overseas periodicals, with geographical headings replaced with phrases such as ‘NEWS BY ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH’ or notes establishing the office of transmission (Rantanen 1997: 613; Rantanen 2003: 444). By century’s end transnational telegraphs bore little resemblance to long-standing forms of overseas news. They became integrated as short, encapsulated stories with topical headlines, padded with relatively generous whitespace and horizontal rules to signal discrete

258

m. h. beals

reports. Moreover, across a given page, there was little to distinguish telegraphic reports from those transcribed from manuscript or printed sources, beyond headline attributions and their relative brevity. Despite the many avenues by which news continued to reach editors, the widespread use of the telegraph coincided with a new discourse in British journalism. The now classic reverse-pyramid structure of news reporting, whereby the most important news is situated in the first lines, followed by background of decreasing importance and relevancy, is thought to have originated from the frequent faults in telegraph cables cutting off a correspondent mid-story. Information arriving by ship began to be reframed as background, memorial or corrective accounts of events that had already been reported by telegraph and that had largely faded from public consciousness; this is reminiscent of the earlier practice of typesetting information as it arrived, regardless of contradictory or anachronistic data, although efforts were now made to frame these as a qualitatively different type of content. Thus, by the end of the century, international news coverage had evolved to incorporate telegraphic communication into the existing epistolary system, providing British readers with information obtained in a variety of ways, but presented in an increasingly homogenised, modern form.

Conclusion Over the course of the nineteenth century the British public was offered a selection of printed documents of differing lengths, periodicities and styles, containing a medley of local, national and global news, commentary and literary content, formatted and framed by an evolving set of expectations and supported by a flexible, long-standing correspondence network that not only allowed but promoted transnational news exchange. This chapter has argued that three principal sources of overseas news content – correspondence, scissors-and-paste reportage and telegraphic dispatches – did not supersede each other but instead provided a layered, multifaceted and corroboratory image of the world in the same manner as manuscript and printed news had worked in tandem in the early modern world (Belo 2016: 377). Epistolary content formed the core of transnational news exchange. Drawing directly from the early modern precedent of the manuscript newsletter, nineteenth-century editors originally presented transcribed and summarised correspondence as the most up-to-date, detailed and authoritative accounts of overseas events. When printed, they retained the physical hallmarks of their manuscript origins: the correspondent’s location, the date of dispatch, and the route by which the letter was

­

transnational exchanges

259

obtained. Unlike manuscripts, specific authorship was often obscured, but the status associated with being a private correspondent, with a verified character and privileged access to information, was implicitly retained, providing a sense of direct access and personal connection to an otherwise depersonalised product for mass consumption. More real than illusory, an editor’s access to a broad range of overseas correspondents, whether directly or through interaction with readers, determined the extent to which their publication could provide a competitive selection of content. As the century progressed, ad hoc communications were supplemented through regular arrangements with individuals abroad, including fellow editors and paid special correspondents. The development of global transportation networks allowed not only frequent postal dispatches but also enabled press organisations to commission and send temporary correspondents to places of interest, knowing their communiques would be sent swiftly through relevant communication systems. Likewise, the growth of empires and a general increase in human migration provided anglophone newspapers an ever-shifting supply of enthusiastic if untrained amateur correspondents. In the end, although specific routes and means of transportation evolved over the course of the century, the core mechanisms by which early modern exchange took place continued in nineteenth-century practices, with letters playing a consistent role in the gathering and presenting of overseas news through to the twentieth century. Scissors-and-paste journalism, in its most accepted and praised form, enhanced and expanded these epistolary networks by providing editors with a much broader, if less personal, range of content. Political and economic competition in the nineteenth century spurred the development of ever more robust and sprawling postal networks (Kaukiainen 2001: 17; Segal 2014: 472). These increased the effectiveness of existing correspondence networks but, more importantly, privileged the dispersal of printed news content by subsidising the international exchange of newspapers. Yet, editors continued to attribute reprinted texts in the same way as they had correspondence, through spatio-temporal markers, and suggest their direct authority through limited editorial commentary. Curating news would become a significant part of editorial practice and activity. Reprints, like printed correspondence and manuscript newsletters before them, were part of the avalanche of news information packaged up into newspaper columns. Not all reprints were verifiable, but taken together they provided the reader with the ability to map his or her own view of the current state of world affairs. As perceptions of recentness shifted, so,

260

colette colligan

too, did Victorian journalistic discourse: manuscript correspondence would be redefined and altered from reflective commentary into a telegraphic ‘news’ style. Such subtle changes to the form in which newspapers summarised printed content demonstrate the growing influence that electronic communication had on the presentation of transnational news, even as the majority of column inches continued to be gathered through improved but fundamentally traditional manual exchange. That telegraphic communication helped shape the development of international news in the nineteenth century is undeniable. Nonetheless, as this discussion has shown, telegraphic news was likewise influenced by previous epistolary practices, framing staccato, geographically disembodied texts in traditional epistolary forms. ‘Our correspondent’, as they were often by-lined, retained a visible and implicitly personal role in the final years of the century, however linguistically detached they had become from the text. Stating the geographical location of the transmission station likewise echoed geographical headlines and datelines common to the first decades of the century. Most important of all was the layering effect of electronic communication on overseas news. By 1900 newspapers were filled with mixed content, not only via the different types of text they printed but also the extent to which such texts had themselves been created from multiple news sources – the letter containing telegraphic news, the reprint of a letter, the dispatch commenting on a newspaper report. At no stage did one system or technology supplant another entirely or evolve unidirectionally from an archaic to a modern form of journalism. Instead, in the practical dissemination of content as well as its presentation, direct correspondence, reprinting and telegraphic dispatches layered and worked collaboratively within previous systems, influenced by and influencing traditions in British overseas newsgathering.

Case Study 7: The Fight in Piccadilly: How False News Went Viral in 1895 Colette Colligan At 5 p.m., on 21 May 1895, a street fight broke out in London’s Piccadilly. The combatants were the Marquis of Queensberry and his son, both key players in the sensational sex trials involving the Anglo-Irish playwright Oscar Wilde that had been gripping news the world over for nearly two months (Bristow 2016; Cohen 1993; Erber 1996; Colligan 2016; Robinson 2015). They threw a few punches, accidentally hit a policeman in the face, and were

­

case study 7 : how false news went viral

261

hauled off to Vine Street police station to be charged with a breach of the peace. The incident was not that newsworthy, except for its connection to the Wilde case: Queensberry had sent the hateful calling card to Wilde that triggered the initial libel trial. But that very night the evening papers in America reported the incident with sensational headlines (‘His Pa Licked Him’) meant to grab readers’ attention (Topeka State Journal, 21 May 1895). The next day the story went viral (at least in late nineteenth-century terms), and for nearly a week newspapers from around the world carried the incident across borders and languages, catapulting a minor British news incident into a world-scale event. The only problem was that the newspapers initially got the story wrong. It was a classic case of mistaken identity. The mix-up was not intentional, nor was the spread of false news a coordinated campaign. False news, or what we refer to today as fake news, was a recognised nineteenth-century media problem (cf. Morning Post, 19 September 1894; New York Times, 25 September 1895), and, although usually sensational and prejudicial in nature, sometimes started with misinformation or a mistake. In the case of the Piccadilly fight, however, everything from the way the story was seized upon and spread to the way it was later adjusted, corrected and expanded revealed a global press network not only highly susceptible to, but also highly responsive to, its increasing connectivity. A survey of sixty-eight digitised newspapers from the United States, Britain and France, as well as a sample set of Continental and overseas papers, has unearthed a total of 137 news articles about the Piccadilly brawl that were published over a roughly one-week period (see Appendix A and Tables 8.1 and 8.2). The extensive digital remediation of the nineteenth-century news archive has not only enabled the discovery of these articles, but also their cross-border comparison. Newly pliable to quantitative and computational analysis, these articles reveal distinctive patterns of transnational reporting on  the fight. What follows is a day-by-day account of the rise and fall of the story’s news cycle in American, British and French newspapers, as they ­­competed to cover the unfolding story within the period’s big-data moment of international telecommunications. Fifty years of infrastructure development had girdled the globe with overland wires and undersea cables along commercial and colonial routes, enabling news from afar to circulate with increasing speed and replication. Part of this change included increasing reliance on subscriptions to international syndicated agencies (Associated Press, Reuters/ Press Association, Havas) that gathered and telegraphed such information through existing communication routes (Barth 2014: 35–6). The story of the Piccadilly fight shows how, in the midst of the powerful hunger for sensational news surrounding the Wilde trials, American, British and French news cultures propelled the core journalistic values of velocity, veracity and variety into intensive transatlantic rivalry within this international news network.

262

colette colligan

Table 8.1  Press coverage of the Piccadilly street fight. Each date shows total number of news articles that were printed about the fight. Grey tones show number of records per region

Table 8.2  The rise and fall of false news across the Atlantic. Circles show regional reports on the Picadilly street fight on a given day. Grey tones indicate the story’s veracity; size shows number of articles

Tuesday, 21 May The story of the Piccadilly fight began in America, first breaking on the front pages of three evening newspapers (see Appendix B). Although far from the centre of action, the evening papers got the jump on the London papers because of their six-hour time-zone advantage. Their reports stated that the Marquis of Queensberry had given his son ‘a severe chastisement’, and that both had been arrested. That was true; however, the papers named the wrong son. It was not Lord Alfred Douglas who had been caught up in the fight, but Lord Douglas of

­

case study 7 : how false news went viral

263

Hawick, his elder brother. Having Lord Alfred as one of the principal actors was, however, the better story: his name, his poetry and his letters were at the centre of the Wilde trials, and by the end of the trials the foreman for the jury even asked whether or not he too should be brought up on charges of ‘gross indecency’ (Bristol Mercury, 27 May 1895). In their rush to seize on a sensational story about a man around whom there was already an aura of depravity and obscenity, the American press got the story first, but they also got it wrong. By the end of the nineteenth century it was not uncommon for British news events to break first in the United States. Increased speed and connectivity, however, also made these papers vulnerable to the news networks to which they subscribed. Reporting of the Piccadilly fight was based on a faulty source, in this case an Associated Press news report, with little attempt to fact-check with their own correspondents on the ground. These vulnerabilities were also not easily manageable, particularly in the face of a compelling story fuelled by prejudice (against Wilde, aristocratic privilege, homosexuality). But as the American papers set the story in motion on its transatlantic trajectory, they also took journalistic advantage of their ability to print British news first –­­ even if that meant velocity trumped veracity (see Figure 2).

Wednesday, 22 May The following day, news of the Piccadilly fight spread rapidly across the world, featuring in almost forty newspapers sampled for this survey. Unsurprisingly, there was high interest in the British press, and readers across the country soon woke up to news of the ‘extraordinary scene’ the previous evening between the Marquis and his son. Over the course of the day sixteen articles were printed, making it the biggest news day for the story in Britain (see Appendix B). These papers did not exploit their local advantage and on-site proximity to determine the veracity of the story, however. Predominantly reprinting the same British Press Association reports, the morning papers admitted that the police had not confirmed the son’s identity, but nonetheless persisted in naming Lord Alfred as a key player in the fracas. Like the American Associated Press reports from the previous day, they repeated the canard that his father had thrashed him, with the ‘discolouration of one eye’ offered up as proof of Lord Alfred’s drubbing and implying some unnameable guilt (Cohen 1993: 144–5). It was not until the end of the day – after, to the surprise of many reporters, Lord Douglas, and not Lord Alfred, had appeared in the dock with his father at the Marlborough Street Police Court – that the correct version of the story came out in the evening papers. Given the presence of reporters on the ground in London available to gather news locally, the perpetuation of the fallacious news account indicates the extent to which national papers relied in general on syndicated news for information, and the degree to which competition to

264

colette colligan

supply readers promptly with late-day breaking stories drove many of them to risk printing unsubstantiated facts. Ironically, it was a Paris-based newspaper that was the first that day to print a correct version of the story and signal the journalistic value of ‘exact facts’. The New York Herald (European edition), an expatriate English-language morning newspaper commonly known as the Paris Herald, correctly reported that it was Lord Douglas of Hawick who had received ‘a scientifically discolored eye’ from his father. The paper’s London correspondent got the story by interviewing an eyewitness at the scene, as well as the Marquis of Queensberry at his club (Paris Herald, 22 May 1895). Owned by the media mogul James Gordon Bennett, the English-language daily had the capital to send foreign correspondents abroad and source its news independently (Cottrell 2010: 3–11; Crouthamel 1989: 43–55). Other French papers covering the story that day (see Appendix B) printed factually inaccurate agency reports. In contrast. the Paris Herald’s coverage circumvented the networked authority of the global news agencies to provide independently sourced news. If American papers got news of the Piccadilly fight first, the Paris Herald was the first to get it right. By the time American morning papers made it to print, veracity was finally catching up to velocity, and the story was beginning to change from that which had featured in newspapers the previous day. News that it was Lord Douglas – and not Lord Alfred – who had made his appearance in the police court spread through the Associated Press feed, so that most of the thirteen articles subsequently covering the story were now naming the right son (see Appendix B). New York City papers also got in front of the story by sourcing their news independently. The New York Herald, the parent paper of the Paris Herald, reprinted the scoop from the Paris paper which it gathered by private telegraph (New York Herald, 22 May 1895). Then, in seeking to compete with the New York Herald’s reporting, Jay Gould’s evening paper, the World, printed what it labelled an ‘exclusive copyrighted report’ on the fight (World, 22 May 1895). Correctly identifying Lord Douglas as the principal actor in the fight, it provided additional background on the troubled family, introducing Lord ­­ Douglas as the other son ‘hate[d] by his father’, while describing the Marquis as ‘a sort of hero with the masses’ for purportedly protecting his son. By the end of the second day of the news cycle two things were clear: the story of the Piccadilly fight was rapidly changing as it crossed borders, and it was continuing to develop transnationally in non-British papers.

Thursday, 23 May The next day saw papers on both sides of the Atlantic attempting to exert journalistic control over the falsely reported news story. Coverage reached its peak, with nearly forty-five articles exploring the topic further. In Britain,

­

case study 7 : how false news went viral

265

the mix-up between the two sons had the effect of stimulating more diverse newsgathering. Although the day’s coverage focused on the police court proceedings, there was far greater variety in the reporting and writing, with a noticeable shift from near-exclusive reliance on Press Association telegrams to longer original news narratives. Seven different types of news articles were printed across twelve reports, where the previous day only three different news wire summaries had featured across metropolitan and regional papers (see Appendix B). Many papers also included explicit correction notices, which functioned as a signal for journalistic integrity and factual reporting. The British press thus collectively worked to exert control over the runaway story by stamping it with the imprimatur of veracity and variety. The French press had far more difficulty gaining control over the story. There were similar levels of news reportage across the day, as seen in Britain and America: eleven articles covered the story, but less than half of these named the right son. Rampant confusion reigned, with conflicting news agency telegrams, day-old news reprinting (a prevailing practice), and direct copying from other papers. Yet the Paris Herald, the first paper to print the correct version of the story, persisted with its exclusive, on-the-ground reporting. It also began publicising itself as ‘the only paper which gave a correct version of the affray in Piccadilly’ (Paris Herald, 23 May 1895). In so doing, it positioned itself as a transnational newsmaker and fact-checker, whipping up its rivalry with other British, French and American papers. The leading French-language paper, Le Temps, translated passages from the Paris Herald’s interview with Queensberry, suggesting that its reputation matched its swagger (Le Temps, 23 May 1895). That Le Temps curiously continued to name  the  wrong  son, despite drawing from the Paris Herald article, was symptomatic of the continuing ­­ ­­confusion surrounding the story in French outlets, as well as an unstated desire to believe that Lord Alfred was the son involved in the story. If the third day of the news cycle saw British and French papers trying to  wrangle the truth from the story, the American papers did no such truth signalling. A similarly high level of news articles appeared that day, mostly sourced from Associated Press telegrams. Although all now got the factual background right, none alluded to previous errors in reporting, or published correction notices. False news was allowed to remain sidled to the truth as the story went to bed in America, the papers resoundingly silent about the spread of misinformation. It sufficed that the story – with its currents of sensation and prejudice – was repeated.

Friday, 24 May By Friday, the story appeared to be over in Britain and America, with morning papers not featuring it. In France, however, where there were even more

266

colette colligan

reports than the previous day, the story continued to develop and unfurl facts and misfacts. One group of papers printed the previous day’s telegrams which had got the name right, such as La Presse, which reprinted in uncredited form the Paris Herald’s Tuesday report which had got the name right. Other newspapers plagiarised the previous day’s report from Le Temps, which had got the name wrong, and thus continued to spread misinformation. Le Temps, meanwhile, tried to fix the error from the previous day’s report, but it did so by shifting the blame to its British rivals and, specifically, the London Times, which in fact had not misreported fight details (Le Temps, 24 May 1895). Amid this confusion, there was new coverage as Lord Alfred himself finally entered the story. From Rouen, where he was at a remove from the trials, Lord Alfred sent two telegrams, one to Le Figaro and the other to Le Temps, in which he pointed out, in anglicised French, the case of mistaken identity and inaccurate reporting (Le Figaro, 24 May 1895; Le Temps, 24 May 1895). He also defended his brother and exposed his father’s history of divorce, adultery and harassment in fiery language, fuelling enmity by adding that he wished it had been him, and not his brother, who had ‘corrected’ the Marquis, while also ironically blurring the line between what was real and what was false.1 As it had the previous day, the Paris Herald saw this chaotic coverage as another opportunity to position itself as transnational newsmaker. Going to print a little later in the day than the French dailies, the paper somehow got hold of advance copies of these telegrams and published them in English translation for its readers that very same day. At the same time, it reminded audiences that, unlike its competitors, it had correctly reported the story from the beginning: ‘With the exception of the HERALD, which was the only paper to give an accurate account of the fracas, the press in general, both English and French, stated that it was Lord Alfred Douglas, instead of Lord Douglas of Hawick, who was the other combatant’ (Paris Herald, 24 May 1895). The Paris Herald claimed victory for journalistic truth, and represented itself as an 1890s transatlantic version of Snopes, the fact-checking website taking a stand against false news.2 These reports in the French press had the effect of revitalising coverage of the fight in Britain and America. The evening papers translated Douglas’s telegrams to Le Temps and Le Figaro, circulated through news agency feeds, repeating Lord Alfred’s regret that it was not he who had ‘corrected’ their As Lord Alfred Douglas wrote: ‘Je suis en France depuis quinze jours et je regrette beaucoup que ce n’est pas moi, mais mon frère aîné lord Douglas of Hawick qui a corrigé le marquis de Queensberry’ (Le Figaro, 24 May 1895). 2 www.snopes.com, first launched in 1994, is an American fact-checking website. Neil Henry (2007) calls it ‘the most widely known resource for validating or debunking rumors, myths, hoaxes, and urban legends in popular American culture’ (285). It has become even more relevant in this new age of fake news. 1

­

case study 7 : how false news went viral

267

father. The story was not the spread of misinformation to Paris, however, but rather Lord Alfred’s passionate denunciation of his father.

Saturday, 25 May – Monday, 27 May By the weekend, the Piccadilly fight reached the end of its news cycle, the truth seemed re-established, and transatlantic rivalries settled. There was a small bump in British and American papers as they covered Douglas’s telegrams to Le Figaro and Le Temps, but attention now focused on Wilde’s second trial, which finally came to an end that Saturday, with yet more sensational news of his conviction and sentence to two years’ hard labour. In France, however, one Parisian journalist took advantage of Paris’s proximity to Rouen to bring resolution to the story that never was. Georges Docquois, a writer as well as a reporter for Le Journal, took the train to Rouen to interview Lord Alfred in person. There, in the garden of his hotel, Lord Alfred discussed his father, whom he called ‘entièrement abominable’, his brother, who detested his father as much as he, and Wilde, who was now linked to him through persecution (Le Journal, 25 May 1895). This interview was the flip-side to the Paris Herald’s exclusive interview with Queensberry, airing the grievances of the other combatant. But, of course, Lord Alfred was never the other combatant. He had been in France throughout. But this interview offered the perfect conclusion. When Lord Alfred became directly involved, maligning his hateful father from Rouen, he finally made real the false news that the press had wanted from the beginning – a face-off between Lord Alfred and the Marquis, albeit one with words rather than fists. And thus, while the rise and fall of the story’s news cycle revealed how transatlantic news rivalries intensified as papers told and then retold different versions of the fight, what it ultimately pointed to was a deeper virulent desire to hear and spread stories of sensational nature, regardless of the truth behind them. Capitalising on thriving technologies of repetition, it was human psychology (filtered through transatlantic journalistic rivalries and partisan prisms) that contributed to the spread of the Piccadilly story’s falsities – which is why, to this day, fake news continues to lie in wait for the next news cycle.

Coda: 15 June On 15 June, in Central America, an English-language paper published in Panama City, called the Daily Star and Herald, printed a belated report about the Piccadilly fight, apparently copied from a London newspaper (Daily Star and Herald, 15 June 1895).3 This report revealed an outlying member of this The Daily Star and Herald article shows significant copying from the 22 May editions of the London Standard and the Yorkshire Evening Post.

3

268

colette colligan

transnational news cycle, as well as the intense virulence of false news within this media system. For in this report Lord Alfred Douglas appeared once again as the principal combatant of the Piccadilly fight.

Appendix A: List of Newspapers Below is a breakdown by geographical area of newspapers included in this study. Titles were selected for regional representation, although French newspapers are concentrated in Paris. American newspapers (total: 15) L’Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orléans (New Orleans); Boston Daily Advertiser; Daily Picayune New Orleans; Daily Inter Ocean (Chicago); Evening Star (Washington); Herald (Los Angeles); Indianapolis Journal; New York Times; San Francisco Call; New York Herald; Omaha Daily Bee; St. Paul Daily Globe; Seattle Post-Intelligencer; Topeka State Journal; World (New York). British newspapers (total: 17) Belfast-News Letter; Bristol Mercury; Evening News (Portsmouth); Freeman’s  Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser (Dublin); Glasgow Herald; London Star; Leeds Mercury; Liverpool Mercury; Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser; Morning Post (London); Northern Echo (Darlington); Pall Mall Gazette (London); Reynolds’s Newspaper (London); Standard (London); Times (London); Yorkshire Evening Post (Leeds); Western Mail (Cardiff). French newspapers (total: 17) L’Écho de Paris; Le Figaro; Galignani Messenger; Le Gaulois; L’Intransigeant; Le Journal; Journal des débats politiques et littéraires; La Justice; La Lanterne; Le Matin; Paris Herald; Le Rappel; Le Siècle; Le Temps; Le XIX Siècle; La Presse; Le Radical. Continental newspapers (total: 11) La Iberia, El Heraldo de Madrid, El Día, La Época, El País, El Imparcial and El Liberal (Madrid); La Revue and L’Estafette (Lausanne); Journal de Genève (Geneva); L’Indépendence belge (Brussels); La Meuse (Liège); Journal d’Alsace et Courrier du Bas-Rhin (Strasbourg).

­

case study 7 : how false news went viral

269

Overseas newspapers (total: 6) Evening Journal (Adelaide); South Australian Register (Adelaide); Sydney Evening News; Sydney Morning Herald; Egyptian Gazette (Alexandria); Daily Star and Herald (Panama City).

Appendix B: Day-by-Day Newspaper Coverage of the Piccadilly Fight in America, Britain and France Tuesday, 21 May United States Britain France

Evening: Evening Star; Topeka State Journal; World. –­ – Wednesday, 22 May

United States Morning: Boston Daily Advertiser; Daily Picayune New Orleans; Daily Inter Ocean; Indianapolis Journal; Herald; New York Herald; New York Times; San Francisco Call; Seattle PostIntelligencer; St. Paul Daily Globe. Evening: Evening Star; Topeka State Journal; World. Britain Morning: Belfast-News Letter; Bristol Mercury; Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser; Glasgow Herald; Leeds Mercury; Liverpool Mercury; Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser; Morning Post; Northern Echo; Standard; Western Mail. Evening: Evening News; London Star; Pall Mall Gazette; Yorkshire Evening Post (2). France Morning: Galignani Messenger; Le Gaulois; Le Journal; Journal des débats politiques et littéraires; Le Matin; Paris Herald. Thursday, 23 May United States Morning: L’Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orléans; Boston Daily Advertiser; Daily Inter Ocean; Daily Picayune New Orleans; Herald; Indianapolis Journal; New York Herald; New York Times; Omaha Daily Bee; San Francisco Call; St. Paul Daily Globe. Britain Morning: Belfast-News Letter; Bristol Mercury; Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser; Glasgow Herald; Leeds Mercury; Liverpool Mercury; Manchester Courier and

270

France

cecilia wadsö lecaros Lancashire General Advertiser; Morning Post; Northern Echo; Standard; Times; Western Mail. Morning: L’Écho de Paris; Le Figaro; Galignani Messenger; Le  Journal; Journal des débats politiques et littéraires; Le Matin;  Paris Herald; Le Rappel; Le Siècle; Le Temps; Le XIX Siècle. Friday, 24 May

United States Britain France

Evening: Evening Star; Topeka State Journal; World. Evening: Evening News; Pall Mall Gazette. Morning: L’Écho de Paris; Le Figaro; L’Intransigeant; Journal des débats politiques et littéraires; La Justice; La Lanterne; Paris Herald; La Presse; Le Radical; Le Rappel; Le Temps; Le XIX Siècle. Saturday, 25 May – Monday, 27 May

United States Morning: L’Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orléans; Boston Daily Advertiser; Daily Picayune New Orleans; Indianapolis Journal; New York Herald; New York Times; Omaha Daily Bee; San Francisco Call; Seattle Post-Intellicencer. Britain Morning: Belfast-News Letter; Bristol Mercury (2); Glasgow Herald; Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser; Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser; Reynolds’s Newspaper; Times; Western Mail (2). Evening: Evening News; Yorkshire Evening Post. France Morning: L’Écho de Paris; Le Journal; Le Matin.

Case Study 8: Transnational Exchange between British and Swedish Periodicals in the 1830s Cecilia Wadsö Lecaros In the wake of political and social changes in early nineteenth-century Sweden, the 1830s saw several points of contact between British periodical publications and Swedish publishers and pioneers in popular education. This case study demonstrates how Swedish access to British periodicals published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) was instrumental in the development of Swedish popular adult education. Transnational press contacts in fact enabled a reciprocal exchange of knowledge between British and Swedish educationalists.

­

case study 8 : british and swedish periodicals

271

The SDUK, which had been founded in 1826, launched three periodical publications between 1831 and 1833, with the aim of using these to further spread Utilitarian ideas. The first of the press trio was the Quarterly Journal of Education (1831–5), which offered information about educational matters in Britain and abroad to a professional audience. In contrast, the SDUKsponsored illustrated weekly Penny Magazine (1832–45) aimed at a much wider working-class readership, with articles ranging from zoology to history and biographical sketches. Penny Magazine readers gained access to geographically and historically distant worlds through attractive illustrations, and the periodical’s secular tone provided a contrast to religious competitors, such as the Saturday Magazine (Taunton 2009: 486–7). It was followed by the Penny Cyclopaedia (1833–43), an ambitious SDUK project consisting of twenty-seven sequentially published collections of original encyclopaedic articles written by leading scholars and experts (Dawson 2012: 649). These SDUK periodical publications stimulated adult popular education periodical initiatives not just in Sweden but in other parts of Europe. The German Pfennig-Magazin as well as the French Magasin pittoresque, for example, both of which appeared in 1833, modelled themselves on the Penny Magazine, as well as liberally borrowing its illustrations (Ciarlo 2011: 70; Lauster 2007: 35). The initiators of a Swedish version of the SDUK were Frans Ewerlöf and Carl af Forsell, important social reformers and civic figures with an interest in British  social and technical development. Both of them were influenced by British educational endeavours and SDUK interventions, and viewed them as  suitable models on which to base similar projects in Sweden. Ewerlöf, who  served as Secretary for the Swedish Governor-General in Norway and from 1833 as Swedish Consul General in Denmark, had read and greatly admired SDUK originator Henry Brougham’s work Practical Observations upon the Education of the People: Addressed to the Working Classes and their Employers (1825), which he translated into Swedish in 1832. Forsell was a Liberal social reformer and an internationally acknowledged statistician, whose Statistik öfver Sverige [Statistics of Sweden] (1831) was cited in British journals, such as the Quarterly Journal of Agriculture (Stephens 1835–6: 92). During the early 1830s Ewerlöf corresponded with Thomas Coates, Secretary of the SDUK, who generously shared information and dispatched copies of SDUK periodical publications to his Swedish correspondent. The SDUK was not a missionising body, however. Unlike the contemporary Evangelical movement in Britain, upon whom Swedish Evangelical societies based their proselytising models, the SDUK did not seek to evangelise or export its brand of communication. Rather, it offered information and support that enabled the Swedish SDUK to develop as a fully independent Swedish initiative.

272

cecilia wadsö lecaros

Plans for a Swedish version of the SDUK centred on the publication of a periodical similar to the Penny Magazine. In 1832 Forsell noted that ‘[m]ost people I talk with about this seem to be in favour of the Society publishing a popular magazine consisting of one sheet per week … exactly in line with what is being done in England’ (6 December 1832).1 Ewerlöf similarly remarked on the value of producing Swedish periodicals in compressed form, noting that popular British counterparts such as the Penny Magazine targeted readers who ‘may well spend half an hour on a magazine but are less likely to open a book’ (1832: 95n.). Both Ewerlöf and Forsell travelled to Britain in the early 1830s to study social and educational developments. The state-of-the-art printing techniques used in William Clowes’s printing shop in London, where the Penny Magazine and the Penny Cyclopaedia were issued (Penny Magazine, 26 October 1833: 423), greatly impressed Forsell, who observed ‘no less than sixteen high-speed presses … at work’ there, occupying some 300 workers. During this visit, which took place in 1834, he also learned that the print run for the Penny Magazine was 140,000, and that it was offered at such a low price that 70,000 copies had to be sold before any profit was made (Forsell 1835: 110). Bennett’s investigation confirmed such sales numbers for the Penny Magazine in the first quarter of 1834, though suggested that the breakeven point of the Penny Magazine appeared to have been even higher than Forsell’s estimates (Bennett 1982: 236, 241). A Swedish society for the diffusion of useful knowledge was set up in 1833, and the following year the first issue of the quarterly Läsning för folket [Reading for the People] was published. This was not the first Swedish periodical based on the Penny Magazine, however: a contemporary, shortlived Skillings-magasin för spridande af allmänt nyttiga kunskaper [Penny Magazine for the Diffusion of Generally Useful Knowledge] was published in 1834–5 in Kristianstad by a Liberal group, most of whom were members of the Swedish SDUK (Sörbom 1972: 137–8). In that year, both Norway and Denmark also saw the launch of similarly titled penny magazines (Johannesson 1982: 131–2). Läsning för folket was an ambitious and long-lived periodical (it ran until 1924), but considering the close contacts with the SDUK and the documented intentions of basing the Swedish periodical on what had already been done in Britain, there are surprisingly few Swedish translations of British material in the early volumes. Most articles seem to have been written by Swedish ­­scientists, scholars and writers, and the focus was more domestic than was the case in the Penny Magazine. Key contributions of the early Swedish issues included essays on farming methods, health and moral issues 1

Translations from Swedish are the author’s own.

­

case study 8 : british and swedish periodicals

273

(Sörbom 1972: 107–28), although the first volumes also included pieces on ­­mechanics, geography and – unlike its British model – some literary work. It is safe to say that, although the Penny Magazine served as an initial model in terms of format, Swedish SDUK interests led to different content being featured in the Swedish versions. To some extent, the Swedish SDUK seems to have followed a piece of advice given by Coates to Ewerlöf in regard to what kind of publications to aim for: ‘the objects which [you] have in view must be those which the particular state of the population you wish to address will point out’ (Coates, 15 April 1831). Being at the frontline of a nation-building educational project, one reason for not duplicating the Penny Magazine may thus have been a wish to emphasise Swedish competence and conditions, but still observe a publication format that had proved so successful in Britain. Another reason for not translating Penny Magazine articles may have been the view that many of them were too sophisticated in language and content for intended Swedish readers. Many British SDUK representatives had expressed similar concerns about the advanced level of material featured in SDUK publications. Upon hearing about the Swedish publication plans, an SDUK representative visiting Forsell in Stockholm in 1832 urged him to ‘not repeat our mistake; all the popular treatises we have published have been too difficult’ (Forsell, 6 December 1832). Nevertheless, Forsell identified articles in early issues of the Penny Magazine that he hoped could be usefully translated for Swedish readers, and acknowledged that the periodical ‘offers quite good reading’ (Forsell, 4 March 1833). Although he felt ‘altogether certain that such a work, adapted to Swedish conditions, would sell well and be of excellent use’ (Forsell, 14 February 1833), his plans did not succeed for a Swedish translation of the Penny Cyclopaedia. However, as will be shown below, Forsell and Ewerlöf were invited to contribute with articles for the SDUK Penny Cyclopaedia. The main reason why Läsning för folket did not become the Penny Magazine type of periodical that the originators had hoped for, however, was that the Swedish SDUK failed to obtain the rights to use its woodcut illustrations. In 1834 Forsell learned from the Swedish ambassador to London, Magnus Björnstjerna, that Brougham had refused to negotiate about making the woodcuts available to the Swedish sister society (Sörbom 1972: 135). He also declined an invitation to become an honorary member of the Swedish Society, in spite of having shown enthusiasm regarding a Swedish version of the SDUK in correspondence with Ewerlöf some years before (Brougham, 26 August 1827). Björnstjerna appears to have tried to get access to the woodcuts for free (Johannesson 1982: 127; Sörbom 1972: 135–6), thereby disregarding one of Brougham’s central principles of popular education, that education always comes with a cost (Brougham 1825: 16). Not gaining access to the Penny Magazine illustrations was of course a severe setback for the Swedish SDUK, especially so, one might argue, as the society indeed seems to have

274

cecilia wadsö lecaros

intended to pay. Writing to Coates, Ewerlöf lamented that Brougham had ‘declined the proposition, made by our Minister in London Count B., to let us have (not gratuitously) some casts of your wood cut’ (Ewerlöf, July 1834). Not long after, the desirable Penny Magazine woodcuts nonetheless made their way to Sweden, when they were sold to the enterprising publisher and Liberal politician Lars Johan Hierta. As well as launching the successful evening paper Aftonbladet in 1830, he was a major publisher of serialised fiction in translation. Hierta was not affiliated with the Swedish SDUK. Forsell had suggested him for the editorial board of Läsning för folket, but Hierta had been regarded as too liberal by other members (Höjer 2007: 199). Nonetheless, in 1834 or early 1835 Hierta managed to strike a deal with the Penny Magazine editor Charles Knight concerning the woodcuts. Forsell learned that Knight at the time of signing the contract did not know that Hierta was in fact not representing the Swedish SDUK. Sharing this news with Ewerlöf, Forsell deplored the fact that the industrious Hierta was not their associate (Forsell, 17 March 1835). In the summer of 1835 Hierta travelled to Paris and London to buy printing equipment. He knew about Clowes’s printing shop, having published a review of Forsell’s travel account in Aftonbladet, in which Forsell’s meeting with Clowes is mentioned (Aftonbladet, 2 June 1835: 2). In August, Hierta himself visited Clowes in the company of Edward Cowper, the inventor of the printing machines Hierta purchased in London (Kihlberg 1968: 275). Having thus secured the sought-after Penny Magazine stereotypes, Hierta launched Lördags-magasinet [The Saturday Magazine] in 1836. As the title indicates, Lördags-magasinet was a weekly, and, like the Penny Magazine (which was also published on Saturdays), it featured articles about foreign cultures and exotic animals, as well as history and inventions. When Hierta first advertised Lördags-magasinet, the main selling point was the British illustrations from the SDUK and from the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (the journal of which was the Saturday Magazine): Through an agreement met with the publishers of the widely admired English Penny and Saturday Magazines, which are being published in London under the auspices of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, I, the undersigned, have already come into possession of, and will receive continuously, stereotypes for the beautiful illustrations in these works, most of which concern topics which are as interesting for readers of all countries; gradually, we hope to direct the collection also to topics of special interest to us Swedes. (Aftonbladet, 22 February 1836: 4) Lördags-magasinet largely consisted of translations from British periodicals. The  issue of 23 April 1836, for instance, featured four full articles, all ­­translations of Penny Magazine articles from 1833–4: ‘The Rhinoceros’

­

case study 8 : british and swedish periodicals

275

(26 April 1834), ‘On the History of Small-Pox’ (20 April 1833), ‘Charmers of Serpents’ (9 February 1833) and ‘The Camel’ (30 March 1833). Penny Magazine woodcuts illustrated the three animal articles (Figures 8.4 and 8.5). Hierta similarly used material from the Saturday Magazine. The issue of 23 July 1836, for instance, contained translations of two articles from that periodical: ‘Leaning Towers’ (30 March 1833) and ‘The Forbidden Fruit, or, Eve’s Apple Tree of Ceylon’ (6 September 1834). The accompanying woodcuts were displayed differently, however. Whereas the woodcuts precede the articles in the Saturday Magazine, they were placed by Hierta after the texts. Some of the Penny Magazine woodcuts were used again in Sweden around 1850 by Peter Lundström, who probably acquired them from Hierta.

Figure 8.4  Lördags-Magasinet, 23 April 1836, image of rhinoceros (Courtesy of Cecilia Wadsö Lecaros)

276

cecilia wadsö lecaros

Figure 8.5  Penny Magazine, 26 April 1834, image of rhinoceros (Courtesy of David Finkelstein) Lundström was a printer in Jönköping who specialised in republished reproductions of religious artwork for so-called chest prints (Bringéus 1998: 136), such as Lionello Spada’s ‘The Prodigal Son’ (Penny Magazine 1834: 224) and several of Raphael’s cartoons for the Sistine Chapel tapestries (Penny Magazine 1832: 172 and 1833: 348). Chest prints were highly popular coloured broadsheets with a didactic purpose, which were pasted inside the lid of storage chests. The Penny Magazine art reproductions demonstrate Knight’s didactic skills in making great works of art relevant through recontextualisation (Andersson 1987: 136), and the use of them for Swedish chest prints also

­

case study 8 : british and swedish periodicals

277

serves as a reminder that such works of art first reached Sweden in the form of popular reproductions (Bringéus 1998: 137). As suggested above, in some measure Swedish contacts with the SDUK were reciprocal. On behalf of the SDUK, Coates asked Ewerlöf to find suitable writers for a number of articles for the Penny Cyclopaedia (Coates, 14 January 1833). Both Ewerlöf and Forsell contributed to the Penny Cyclopaedia and the Quarterly Journal of Education. Sweden and Norway were in a personal union between 1814 and 1905, and such transcultural connections were reflected in submissions by Ewerlöf, who contributed articles on Norway, and Forsell, who in contrast supplied articles on Sweden. Correspondence reveal a great deal on how Coates and Ewerlöf negotiated deadlines and remuneration. After Coates had asked for an article on the Norwegian town of Bergen, for instance (Coates, 14 January 1833), the following year he discussed the text which Ewerlöf had submitted, and also commissioned new articles for the Penny Cyclopaedia and for the Quarterly Journal of Education on behalf of the editor George Long (Coates, 22 July 1834). Between 1832 and 1835, the Quarterly Journal of Education published a number of articles on Sweden and Norway, for instance one by Ewerlöf on the Norwegian educational system (1833: 234–44), and Forsell’s ‘A Short Account of the State of Education in Sweden’ (1835: 33–53). Quite possibly, Forsell’s contributions to the SDUK periodical publications were instrumental in his being made an honorary foreign member of the Royal Geographical Society in 1837, of which George Long was President. With an average print order of initially 2,000 copies, later dropping to only 1,250 copies (Bennett 1982: 236), the circulation of the Quarterly Journal of Education was limited compared to that of the Penny Magazine. Although a loss-maker for the SDUK (Bennett 1982: 240), the Penny Magazine was a pioneering international venture, featuring articles from various countries, as, for example, Germany (Phillips 2011: 41–4). Forsell and Ewerlöf undoubtedly were aware of their role within this transnational exchange of knowledge. When recruited as contributors they learned from Coates that the SDUK had received texts from Spain and Italy similar to the ones they were invited to submit (Coates, 16 April 1831). Focusing on periodical publications published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, this case study has highlighted some implications of transnational press exchanges. Personal contacts proved essential, and  ideological and business-oriented aspects were crucial for the way in which British periodical publications served as models on which to base Swedish periodicals. Importantly, the exchange of ideas and knowledge was reciprocal, with the SDUK drawing on their Swedish contacts to produce  ­­ publishable material on Scandinavian topics for their periodical publications.

278

amelia bonea

Case Study 9: An Imperial Ideology of News: News Values and Reporting about Japan in Colonial India1 Amelia Bonea The relationship between communication and British imperialism is well documented by historians, especially as contemporary developments have generated a spate of interest in technology as a conduit for the circulation of information and knowledge (e.g. Bayly 1996; Kaul 2003; Laidlaw 2005; Potter 2003; Wenzlhuemer 2012; Winseck and Pike 2007). Drawing on Harold Innis’s (1951) pioneering work about the temporal and spatial biases of communication media, but also engaging with more recent approaches from media studies and global history, such research has shown that communication was essential to British imperial forays in Asia and other parts of the world. Indeed, the expansion and preservation of empire depended on the regular and timely exchange of information, with ‘new’ technologies like steamers and electric telegraphs helping to establish routes of communication and transforming fields of activity as diverse as administration, business and trade, military operations, transport and journalism in the nineteenth century. Extant literature on the topic of communications and press in the British Empire tends to focus on the exchange of information between colonies and the imperial metropole (e.g. Kaul 2003; Potter 2005). Less attention has been devoted to the ways in which information circulated in an inter-colonial context (Frost 2004; Hofmeyr 2013) or, indeed, between colonised regions and those, like Japan, which became a playground for Western imperial ambitions in the nineteenth century but nevertheless managed to escape formal colonisation. Two recent studies on propaganda by O’Connor (2010) and Akami (2012) show how the Japanese government tapped into English-, Chinese- and Japanese-language press networks in East Asia in order to influence foreign reporting about the country during the first half of the twentieth century. In addition, Tsukahara (2013) provides a fascinating analysis of the meteorological information published in a handful of English-language newspapers based in Chinese coastal cities, such as the North China Herald, China Mail and Canton Register, but is less preoccupied to trace the circulation of this intelligence in an intra-Asian context. My aim in this piece is to reflect on the history of such communicative practices from a different angle, namely that of reporting about Japan in two major English-language newspapers published in Bombay in the nineteenth century, the Bombay Times and Standard (hereafter 1

I wish to thank Karin Wahl-Jorgensen and Judit Erika Magyar for her useful suggestions in writing this chapter. This research was funded by the European Research Council (Grant Agreement Number 340121).

­

case study 9 : imperial ideology of news

279

BTS, 1861), and its successor, the Times of India (hereafter TOI, 1861–90; some years missing). At first glance, news about Japan might appear of little interest to the press in colonial India. The readership of the so-called Anglo-Indian press – that is, newspapers published by British residents in the subcontinent, usually in the English language – consisted primarily of members of the European community, such as colonial officials, merchants and soldiers, and a handful, but growing, number of English-educated Indians. With the help of an international postal system, these newspapers also reached audiences in Britain and other parts of the world. Their readership further multiplied through the widespread practices of clipping and sharing content via the medium of personal letters and telegrams. Yet, information about Japan was published relatively regularly in the BTS and TOI, initially as part of a section containing ‘Latest News from China’ (also titled, simply, ‘China’ or ‘China News’), and then increasingly on its own as ‘Items of Japanese News’ or under similar geographical and topical headings. In fact, news about Japan increased as the century advanced, not only in terms of the number of items published, but also in terms of its length. This trend, which has been documented in the case of the United States as well, resulted from a combination of factors that pertained both to developments in technologies of communication and journalism more generally (Barnhurst and Nerone 2001: 68–106; Bonea 2016: 269–89, for the Indian case). The advent of steamers and electric telegraphs made possible increasingly regular and rapid communication between various parts of the world. With production costs dropping, literacy rates increasing (creating larger pools of potential readers), and journalism progressing towards professionalisation, newspapers, in India as elsewhere, expanded to accommodate a growing amount of information, opinion and interest. Nevertheless, the availability of routes of communication between two countries, while essential for the circulation of information and knowledge, did not necessarily translate into an interest in news about those countries. In fact, the example of the British Empire (see Bonea 2016: 42–80; Winseck and Pike 2007) suggests that the desire for better communication – and thus, an interest in news, especially of a political, military or commercial nature – often provided the impetus for the development of new routes of communication. What was it, then, that made Japanese news ‘meaningful’, in the sense used by Galtung and Ruge (1965), to an audience of Indo-British and Indian readers in Bombay? Published more than half a century ago, Galtung and Ruge’s much referenced essay has become the classic starting point for many analyses of newsworthiness in the field of foreign news reporting. Their study has been instrumental in drawing attention to the fact that the way in which countries are interconnected – through means of communication, politics and so on – has

280

amelia bonea

a direct bearing on the newsworthiness of events. They also flag up how the reporting of foreign news is characterised by a certain hierarchy, in which events pertaining to ‘elite nations’ and ‘elite people’ usually receive attention at the expense of other types of news (Galtung and Ruge 1965: 70–1).The list of news values they proposed, which also included criteria such as frequency, the threshold of an event, its meaningfulness, unexpectedness, continuity and negative nature, has undergone revisions, most recently by Harcup and O’Neill (2001). Their exclusive focus on the coverage of international crises and their gatekeeping approach to the study of news have also come under criticism. Stuart Hall, for example, rightly pointed out that ‘we need, also, to see formal news values as an ideological structure – to examine these rules as the formalisation and operationalisation of an ideology of news’ (Hall 1973: 182, original emphasis). What happens to news reporting when we insert another actor in the equation of power between coloniser and colonised, in the form of a country like Japan, which managed to escape formal colonisation but nevertheless came under Britain’s sphere of influence during the second half of the nineteenth century? A survey of three decades of press coverage of Japanese news (from the early 1860s until the end of the 1880s) might offer some answers. During this period Japan witnessed a gradual ‘opening’ as a result of the ‘unequal treaties’ signed with the United States, Britain and a number of other European countries, which enabled Western powers to trade in port cities like Shimoda, Hakodate, Nagasaki and Kanagawa. The 1860s, in particular, were characterised by considerable domestic turmoil, and saw the Tokugawa regime collapse under internal and external pressures, most notably from traditionally hostile feudal domains like Satsuma and Cho ¯ shu ¯ , and groups of young samurai loyal to the emperor. The Meiji Restoration (1868) ushered in an era of political and socio-economic reforms that eventually culminated in Japan’s transformation into an imperial power of its own: in the course of a decade its territory expanded to include the northern island of Hokkaido (1869) and Okinawa (1879). By the early 1870s plans for the invasion of Korea were already being mooted, while the end of the century saw Japan successfully take on its powerful neighbour, China, in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–5). Predictably, reporting about Japan in the two Indian-based newspapers examined reflects these momentous historical changes, but also demonstrates how British imperial interests shaped the coverage of Japanese news in its colonies. Although the interests of the journalists themselves did not always align perfectly with those of the Empire – and thus a newspaper’s agenda also shaped its foreign reporting, as pointed out by Harcup and O’Neill (2001: 279) in their revision of Galtung and Ruge’s thesis – overall their news values were inextricably intertwined with those of the colonial state within which they operated. Bombay journalists, in particular, were conspicuously vocal

­

case study 9 : imperial ideology of news

281

in advocating the interests of the self-styled ‘mercantile community’, a loosely defined entity of European and Indian merchants whose search for trade and business opportunities in Asia came hand in hand with their indefatigable support for improved means of communication, whether in the form of new steamer and telegraph routes, or the patronage of newspapers that mediated the exchange of relevant information, especially of commercial, political and meteorological news. As Sato (2012: 458–9) points out, Japan and British India were connected by ‘substantial economic exchanges’ in the second half of the nineteenth century, with cotton being at the forefront of a very lucrative trade. Cotton yarn from British India amounted to an impressive 12 per cent of Japan’s total imports by 1877, peaking in the early 1890s and then declining as the domestic industry caught up. Bombay mills were particularly hit by this reversal of fortunes, although India emerged as Japan’s biggest provider of raw cotton during the same period, at the expense of China (ibid.) In the 1860s and early 1870s reporting focused predominantly on the domestic turmoil that engulfed Japan as it inched its way towards the Meiji Restoration. Civil disturbances, shifting alliances between the daimyo ¯ s of Satsuma and ‘Nagato’ (Cho ¯ shu ¯ ), plots against the shogun and ‘quarrel[s] between the tycoon and the Prince of Nagato’ were high on the list of newsworthy events, as were attacks on foreigners, news about elite Britons (e.g. the arrival of the British envoy, Sir Harry Parkes, in Japan in 1865 and the Duke of Edinburgh’s visit in 1869) and reports about the state of Japan’s military. Such intelligence provided readers in India with an opportunity to peer behind the pervasive image of Japan as a reclusive country hostile to foreign presence and to assess the prospects of trade in the region and the potential impact of political unrest on it. Thus, while it is relatively easy to surmise that this type of news was calculated to serve Britain’s imperial interests in the region, the extent to which it was also shaped by the particular interests of the mercantile community in Bombay is perhaps less obvious. Their interests were not always contiguous with those of British officialdom, as reports of a Japanese hunting episode involving British participants, which resulted in the death of a Japanese officer, and a subsequently acrimonious debate on extraterritoriality demonstrated. News items chronicle the attempts of the Acting British Consul, Captain F. Howard Vyse, to prevent the conflict from escalating, with him circulating notices reminding the British community in Yokohama that ‘the right to disregard any Japanese laws – not especially suspended, is not a privilege conceded by the Treaty of Great Britain with Japan’ (BTS, 6 February 1861). But members of the said community were quick to express their indignation at such a suggestion: We cannot for a moment conceive that you are serious in stating that ‘the manifest law of Japan is, where exemption has not been especially

282

amelia bonea

stipulated by Treaty in the form of specified rights and privileges, as binding upon Foreigners as Japanese.’ Were this the case they could prevent us not only from shooting, but from riding, and could even enforce all their statuary laws as to dress and many other points, and even insist on our going on our knees to an official of the Tycoon. (BTS, 6 February 1861) By the mid-1870s incidents of ‘ill treatment’ of foreigners at the hands of the Japanese, while still occasionally reported, had clearly lost their former appeal, as newspapers now tended to focus on the changing geopolitical landscape, and the early signs of Japan’s meteoric rise to the status of an Asian power began to capture the attention of commentators. The prospect of a war between Japan and Korea (e.g. TOI, 22 May 1875, 17 November 1875), that of a conflict with China over the islands of Okinawa (the ‘Loochooan question’, e.g. TOI, 4 October 1879, 14 October 1879), Japan’s position vis-à-vis the British Empire and Russia (TOI, 11 February 1878, 23 January 1879, 30 January 1879), and the modernisation of the Japanese army and navy, were some of the main topics to make it into print, along with occasional reports of disasters caused by fire and earthquakes (TOI, 22 May 1872, 7 February 1880). Another important type of news was that of commercial and financial intelligence, usually clipped from the Calcutta Englishman’s Saturday Evening Journal and published regularly as ‘Commercial Notes’ (e.g. TOI, 21 June 1875), or sent from London by the TOI’s own commercial correspondent in the form of a ‘Commercial and Financial Letter’ (e.g. TOI, 3 September 1880). These reports included a detailed analysis of trade activities, together with numerical data about imports, exports, exchange quotations and so on. They testify to the fact that the late 1870s were seen as a prosperous period for the export of cotton yarn and cotton piece goods to Japan (e.g. TOI, 3 September 1880), but equally that there was increased apprehension about the manner in which the Japanese raw silk trade was ‘completely wrecking the Bengal spinnings’ (TOI, 20 August 1875). Anxieties about British India’s trade with Japan intensified in the 1880s, when the issue of Japan’s expanding cotton industry moved to the forefront of news reporting on the country. In the late 1880s the TOI began to publish regular information about ‘Bombay Yarns in Japan’, based on a circular prepared by ‘Messrs. Fearon, Low & Co. of Kobe, Japan’ (e.g. TOI, 18 October 1888, 4 February 1889, 5 February 1890). The overall narrative of decline emerging from such intelligence was punctuated by other related reports on ‘cotton manufacture in India and Japan’ (TOI, 6 October 1888), and the ‘progress’ of Japan (TOI, 4 January 1886). Predictably, political news about Japan’s relationships with its neighbours, especially China and Russia, retained its

­

case study 9 : imperial ideology of news

283

pre-eminence, along with news of natural disasters such as typhoons, floods, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and ‘tidal waves’ (TOI, 26 September 1883, 31 August 1889). The newsworthiness of such items derived not only from their negative nature but also from their potential and severe impact on communications and commerce. Another important development during this period was a visible increase in reporting about Japanese society and culture, reflected in accounts of Japanese fashion, art, religion, marriage and divorce, tea houses, etiquette, libraries and so on (TOI, 29 May 1885, 11 April 1887, 14 May 1887). As Lorraine Sterry (2009: 51) points out, information about Japan ‘increased dramatically’ after the 1860s, as more and more Europeans visited the country and the Japanese themselves travelled to Europe. In particular, a number of international exhibitions, such as the Paris Universal Exposition of 1878, ‘gave further impetus to the fashion for things Japanese’ (ibid.), a trend that was also reflected in reporting about this country in the TOI. A category of news that retained its newsworthiness throughout the period examined was that of intelligence connected to the development of routes of communication with East Asia. The value of such items derived not only from their political and economic significance, but also from the important role these modes of communication played in the transmission of the news itself. Before the advent of telegraphy, the exchange of information between Britain and various parts of South and East Asia was dependent primarily on sailing ships and steamers. Reports about Japan, often lumped together with other ‘China news’, arrived irregularly via steamers that plied between Yokohama, Nagasaki, Hong Kong, Singapore, Penang and Galle. The introduction of telegraphy to India in 1855, and the establishment of the first telegraph routes between Britain and the Indian subcontinent a decade later, marked the beginning of a new era in journalism, one in which newspapers were increasingly able to draw on new means of communication to ensure a timelier publication of intelligence. The early 1870s witnessed the completion of two routes of communication with Japan: one via Siberia, which connected Vladivostok with the port-city of Nagasaki, constructed by the Great Northern Telegraph Company, and another via Hong Kong and Shanghai, which effectively extended the cables of the Eastern Telegraph Company all the way to Nagasaki (Ishii 1994: 76–88). The change was uneven and gradual, as the price of communication remained high during the second half of the nineteenth century, but the analysis of reporting testifies to the resourcefulness of journalists in trying to overcome obstacles of a political, economic, technological and environmental nature in accessing information. In 1865 news from China sent by steamer to Galle was forwarded to Bombay by the Indian telegraph, a move that ensured a speedier transmission on the Indian leg of the journey (TOI, 31 October

284

paul raphael rooney

1865). On the occasion of Prince Alfred’s visit to Japan, Reuters operated a ‘China Express’ that covered the event not only for audiences ‘at Home’, but also for those spread across Britain’s vast empire (TOI, 10 November 1869). Despite the suggestion of speed implied by the name of the service, the news was actually a month old by the time it reached newspapers in the Indian subcontinent. As communication improved, newspapers based in China, such as the Shanghai Market Report, the Overland China Trade Report, the Daily Press and the North China Daily News, gradually lost their appeal as providers of news about Japan, with local newspapers like the Japan Gazette and the Japan Herald becoming the preferred choice on account of their proximity to the events reported. This was, then, an era of slow journalism, and lack of news was not an uncommon occurrence, especially in the 1860s. While frequency was not an important criterion for the transformation of an event into news – since the production cycle of news tended to vary according to the availability of ­information  – ­negativity was, as also demonstrated by the fact that editors tended to regard the absence of intelligence as a positive development, the ass­ umption being that negative news travelled faster (BTS, 21 December 1861). This is not to say, however, that any information was news or that all news was of an equal value. There were clear hierarchies of reporting at work, with editors occasionally proclaiming, on the arrival of Japanese intelligence, that there was ‘little or nothing of general interest’ (TOI, 2 August 1865, 31 October 1865). But the best indication of this state of affairs was the fact that the threshold of an event was not defined by how many people were affected – since the mass of the Indian population was unlikely to be very interested in the type of news about Japan published by the TOI or the BTS – but by who was affected by this news. News might have been aimed at British imperial interests more broadly, but it was more specifically British colonisers in India, and British and Indian merchants in Bombay, to whom such material was directed. In this respect, it can be argued, paraphrasing Stuart Hall (1973: 182), that the news values that characterised reporting about Japan in the two newspapers examined were part and parcel of the ideological structure of imperialism.

Case Study 10: The Steamship Press: An International Conduit of Information and Imperial Masculinity Paul Raphael Rooney The transoceanic steamship press is a comparatively overlooked media channel within nineteenth-century press scholarship. These newspapers, produced and printed in London for export to expatriate readers in Asia and the

­

case study 10 : steamship press and imperias

285

Antipodes, were a notable print stream in the British world that began in the early 1840s before fading in the late 1890s. Peter Putnis (2007) has charted both the origins and formative years of this branch of the press. This piece explores one of the earliest of such steamship press examples, the Home News for India, China, and the Colonies (1847–98), which was owned by Grindlay & Co. – a firm which specialised in the provision of financial services and travel assistance to Britons relocating to Asia. Throughout its history Home News counted high-profile Victorian journalistic figures such as Shirley Brooks and George Augustus Sala among its editors and contributors, as well as featuring serialised fiction under the editorship of Arthur Griffiths in the 1880s (Rooney 2014). The Home News offers a useful case study on how such colonial-focused press outlets addressed prospective audiences, and how they operated in gender-specific ways throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. Such journals arguably held significant potential to propagate and consolidate the ideology of empire within the colonial environment. There was a markedly male slant to the particular imperial vision Home News articulated. This was especially conspicuous in a series of biographical articles published in the late 1870s that collectively set forth a statement of optimal colonial masculinity by spotlighting the sorts of men said to be instrumental in progressing the colonial project. Self-consciously modelled on the design of the Spectator from the outset, each thirty-two-page issue of Home News consisted of an assortment of subcategories of news, or ‘intelligences’ as the publication termed it. It could be debated how useful such items were to readers, given the logistics of distributing Home News overseas: four weeks might elapse between an issue’s date of publication and its arrival with colonial readers. This represented a significant temporal lag, which ultimately saw the genre outpaced by more technologically advanced rivals like telegraphic cable news services, which were equipped to circulate information more swiftly. Yet the Home News served an important role as a conduit to audiences linked to the colonial expansion of British interests. A significant proportion of the publication’s readership was drawn from military and naval personnel, made clear by the prominent allocation of two full pages in every issue to army and navy gazettes and information. The extensive and in-depth nature of the current affairs coverage in Home News, which included political news reporting on developments in Britain, Europe and internationally, was also written in a form that required its readership to have a thorough acquaintance with goings-on in these areas, suggesting other audiences targeted included readers from the serving political establishment. Steamship press publications such as Home News catered in such ways to those working in the machinery of government in this era. An important and key part of career advancement for overseas colonial and military personnel was remaining well informed of

286

paul raphael rooney

political affairs, and Home News catered to such needs. Developments in other traditionally male zones such as the financial markets, the legal profession, the established Church and higher education were also chronicled through dedicated, habitual pages or columns. Home News, however, did not seek to alienate entirely prospective female readers: the publication had a dedicated ladies’ column during the 1860s and 1870s, together with female-oriented cultural and social material such as literary gossip and society news. However, the amount of space afforded to the ladies’ column in proportion to the total length of the publication was minimal. Its eventual discontinuation reflected a deliberate prioritisation of male elite-class interests in Home News material. Nevertheless, while it is clear that Home News envisaged men as the nucleus of its core readership, this does not necessarily mean that women did not subscribe to or read its contents. It is after all one of the core tenets of studying the history of reading that consumers rarely limit their reading matter solely to the material intended for their particular demographic. However, the character of the advertisements presented in the opening two, and closing three to four pages, of the newspaper make clear that Home News was envisaged as a predominantly male print zone. The publication’s courting of a military readership through its gazette material mirrored the prominent presence that army outfitters, saddlers, munitions dealers, purveyors of army periodicals, and military supply agents occupied in these promotional notices. Additionally, products that would appeal principally to civilian male consumers, such as cigarettes, alcoholic spirits and tailoring services, were well publicised in Home News. While goods with mixed-gender sales potential from the likes of booksellers, stationers and furniture sellers also featured, commercial entities that looked to engage specifically female markets had a very minimal presence within the advertising sections of Home News. This suggests that prospective advertisers recognised that they would be better served in using alternative publicity channels to reach greater numbers of potential colonial female consumers. This foregrounding of maleness and male interests emerged in very tangible terms through a new content strand featured by Thomas Hay Sweet Escott during his 1875–83 editorship of Home News. The newspaper published a series of biographical sketches across 1877–8 profiling forty-seven notable men whose professional careers had been closely associated with the project of British imperialism. By featuring a series of this kind in its pages, Home News was suggesting that an awareness of recent history as well as familiarity with current events should figure in the repositories of knowledge of men working on the imperial project. The articles were subsequently anthologised in volume form under the title Pillars of the Empire: Sketches of Living Indian and Colonial Statesmen, Celebrities, and Officials. The choice of the term ‘pillars’

­

case study 10 : steamship press and imperias

287

suggests a figurative conception of empire as an edifice, which the men profiled had apparently contributed much to construct and sustain. Escott was the venture’s leading contributor, producing twenty of the sketches. His principal collaborators were Major Arthur Griffiths, Escott’s successor at the helm of Home News, who had started his career in military service then shifted into prison administration, then diverged again to become a novelist and journalist. Griffiths contributed thirteen essays; John Macdonald, the war correspondent, wrote six; and John Sherer, formerly of the Bengal Civil Service and by this time a judge in Mirzapur, was responsible for five. In a number of instances, clear professional parallels existed between the writers and the personalities they profiled, suggesting Escott looked to take advantage of his contributors’ expertise on particular topics. The occupations of the forty-seven pillars who comprised the colonnade of Escott’s edifice tell us much about the core interest groups engaged with by Home News. Those working in a civil service capacity, particularly colonial administration, were viewed as the group whose professional achievement most merited the spotlight. Military men of various grades and specialities followed as the next most noteworthy occupational cluster. Politicians and members of government ran a very close third, while professional men of letters occupied a comparatively marginal presence in the figurative nexus over which Escott presided. Although the series did sketch high-profile figures such as Lord Northbrook, the one-time governor-general of India, selection was skewed to favour less prominent but equally distinguished men. Although the forty-seven essays emanated from multiple hands, it is possible to discern a clear thread running through the series that privileged a particular version of masculinity. Successful men were those who excelled in the spheres of influence spotlighted by the series, such as in governmental administration and military and political arenas. Given that individuals with careers in the martial arena figured so prominently within the body of the essays, it is unsurprising that bravery and physicality emerge as core constituents of maleness. Yet, the prevalence of men in Escott’s colonnade whose existences were spent living by the pen rather than the sword, also spoke to a desire to legitimise a non-manual or non-combative mode of masculinity. These essays’ focus upon male spheres and networks, where homosocial interaction was a prominent feature, also mirrored the masculinist tenor of the imagined community that Home News delineated for its habitual readers. In addition, women were relegated to peripheral or limited roles in such masculine spaces. The few women who were mentioned in the collection feature in non-speaking or offstage parts, where they are defined almost entirely by their status as wives or mothers to the men under consideration. One can ask whether the Home News use of these pieces as regular features was a serial venture created to strengthen existing readers’ commitment

288

paul raphael rooney

to the journal and to potentially encourage new or casual readers to become part of its regular audience. On the one hand, the individual sketches were technically instalments that collectively constituted a larger entity, and there potentially was a carry-over appeal with a body of material of this kind. On the other hand, neither was this venture one that resorted to typical serial reading strategies such as suspense; Home News would not experiment with serial fiction characterised by mystery and narrative twists and turns until the Griffiths editorship. Although this series treated factual material, it essentially set forth a narrative that validated the labour, ambitions and performance of gender of these particular imperial actors. In addition, while there was a definite informational bent to the Escott series, a clear polemical quality also ran through the venture. Quite a few of the sketches employed a discursive opening that briefly surveyed the wider sociocultural context within which a particular personality was situated, then reflected upon the current states of affairs in this domain. Furthermore, when Escott collected the essays into a 10s 6d volume published by Chapman & Hall, he also penned an extended reflective introduction for the book. This summary piece analysed the loss and gain of Britain’s continued participation in the imperial project, contending (unsurprisingly perhaps) that it was in the nation’s interests to proceed with the venture. Autodidacts in search of edifying reading matter that they could mine for information were likely to find a great deal of mental enrichment among this content strand. The relative simplicity of style that most of the essayists employed enhanced the series’ accessibility. Hence, these essays were well placed to function as improving literature that spun a narrative of male advancement to inspire aspirational readers. For men in search of guidance on strategies of self-betterment, the biographies sketched in these essays had the capacity to offer direction on possible ways to realise progress in their own careers. Their endeavours would in turn contribute to the larger national project of fortifying and advancing the Empire. That said, it should also be stressed that these articles were not exercises in hagiography. A number of the biographers were forthright in acknowledging the faults or imperfections that tempered the all-round excellence and standing of certain figures. For instance, pointedly lamented was the intolerance displayed by Grant Duff, the parliamentary under-secretary for India, towards his political opponents. This aside, also clear was the lack of questioning of the legitimacy of the colonial enterprise. No commentary was offered on what oppressive forms of colonial rule might have been imposed by featured military individuals. Nor were colonial administrators and politicians held accountable for any injustices or colonial dispossession that might have occurred under their watch. Through such means, nineteenth-century steamship press exemplars such as the Home News paved the way for the 1880s popular lionisation of figures of imperial masculinity such as General Gordon,

­

case study 11 : the russian émigré press

289

along with the fin de siècle endeavours in ideology formation spearheaded by the likes of Robert Baden-Powell.

Case Study 11: The Russian Émigré Press Helen S. Williams By 1850 Britain was home to a varied émigré community, including Poles who had settled after the rising of 1830, refugees from the Italian, German and French revolutions of 1848, and a small Russian political emigration. Together, they formed a transnational community, linked both to their fellow countrymen, and to a polyglot community of politically like-minded individuals originating from, and based in, various countries through Europe and North America. They took to print with the common aim of maintaining engagement with political life in their homeland. The Russian community in Britain were responsible for the publication of a huge number of pamphlets and books, and about thirty periodicals of varying formats in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Some of the most significant were the Bell, Forward! and The Spark.1 One Russian press pioneer was Alexander Herzen who arrived in London in 1852, five years after leaving Russia and having managed, unusually for political émigrés, to retain control of his money. Despite describing the impulse to publish in emigration as ‘an epidemic disease’ (Herzen 1968: 2, 692–3), he must have caught the infection, for in 1853 he announced his plan in a printed address entitled ‘To My Brothers in Russia’ for a Free Russian Press dedicated to pamphlet, newspaper and periodical publications (Herzen 1954–65: XII 62). Initially the press shared the premises of the Polish Press near St Pancras station, before moving to premises in Judd Street, where it was managed by Ludwig Cziernecki (see Plate 6). Cyrillic type was obtained from a Paris foundry, and the first publication, a pamphlet, opened with the words: ‘Let the first free Russian word from abroad be addressed to you’ (Herzen 1954–65: XII 80). Disappointingly, the first reaction from friends in Russia was to beg him to stop (Cziernecki 1863: [vii]). Altogether six periodicals were issued from this press, of which the first was an annual in the Russian tradition of ‘thick journals’,2 the Pole Star, published between 1855 and 1868. Smuggled copies were welcomed in Russia, ‘as once the shepherds of Bethlehem welcomed the bright star’ (Poliarnaia Unless stated otherwise the periodicals referred to are in Russian. All translations are my own, unless otherwise acknowledged in the bibliography. 2 A periodical format common in nineteenth-century Russia: a volume of several hundred pages comprising both literary works and journalism, including political and social commentary. 1

290

helen s. williams

zvezda 1856: 2 43). The success of the Pole Star encouraged Herzen, and in 1857 he established the newspaper the Bell, originally as a supplement, addressed to ‘all our fellow countrymen,’ who were invited ‘to ring it themselves’ (Kolokol, 1 July 1857: 1) Between 1857 and 1868, 245 monthly issues appeared. At its height, the first edition was 2,500 copies (many issues had a second edition), circulating throughout the Russian émigré community in Britain and Europe as well as in Russia, where it was said that the Tsar himself read it (Nikitenko 1975: 179). Publication became less regular after operations moved to Geneva in 1865. No other émigré (or clandestine) oppositional periodical came near the frequency, regularity or influence of the Bell. The centres of Russian emigration, especially Geneva and Paris, and to a lesser extent London, supported bookshops, libraries and cafés, through which émigré periodicals circulated. Russian travellers brought correspondence to the editors and carried legitimately purchased copies back to Russia hidden in their luggage. European routes for smuggling publications into Russia included Scandinavia and Poland; via the Mediterranean and Black Seas; and Hong Kong. Free Russian Press publications, for example, were smuggled aboard merchant ships sailing from Newcastle upon Tyne to the Baltic, with the assistance of Joseph Cowen, MP, a route used again in the 1890s. Where Herzen led, many others followed. Many titles were truly transnational, printed in one country, with the editorial team and nominal publisher (often a sympathetic bookseller) based in another. In the early 1860s Prince Peter Dolgorukov moved his journal, the Newsletter, from Brussels to London. In 1874 Peter Lavrov moved the ‘thick’ journal Forward! from Zurich to London, where he established a newspaper of the same title: 48 issues of the latter appeared in 1875–6. The final issues of Peter Tkachev’s journal the Tocsin were published around 1880 in London: it had begun in Geneva before moving to Brussels. Eleven issues of Russian Worker were published in the mid-1890s: its first editorial address was in London, but it was printed in Paris. From the third issue, editorial and production addresses were both in Geneva. Some titles consisted only of a few, irregularly produced issues, and many titles were ephemeral: the Commune, of which one issue appeared in London in 1870, was not untypical. Fewer periodicals were published in the 1880s, but there was a revival in the 1890s as Russian oppositional groups coalesced into political parties, and increasing numbers appeared, many short-lived, up to the revolutionary year of 1905. During its five-year run from 1888 to 1892, the Marxist title Social Democrat was partly published in London: its London address was that of the non-Marxist Sergei Stepniak-Kravchinskii, who had left Russia after assassinating the head of the Russian secret police in 1878, settled in London in the early 1880s, and had turned to non-violent political activity.

­

case study 11 : the russian émigré press

291

With Feliks Volkhovskii, Stepniak founded the Russian Free Press Fund, which ran a bookshop and published books, pamphlets and the periodical the Flying Newsletter (1893–1914), which claimed a circulation of 4,000 (10,000 for some issues). It was sold to Russian travellers who would smuggle copies into Russia, while some copies were sent unsolicited through the post. In 1890 Stepniak and Volkhovskii also founded the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom (SFRF), which arranged public lectures on Russian affairs and published the English-language monthly Free Russia until 1915. This journal was printed by Ward & Foxlow of London until the RFPF established its own press. Another English title, The Anglo-Russian, edited by the religious reformer Yakov Priluker (Jaakoff Prelooker), provided an alternative perspective between 1897 and 1914. The SFRF formed links with British political movements, including the Independent Labour Party, the Fabians and some trades unions. In 1902 such links enabled Lenin to edit the Spark from the offices of the Twentieth Century Press in Clerkenwell Green, founded to print material for the British Social Democratic Federation (Printers’ Collection [2009]: 51–3). Starting around 1900, the RFPF also printed the early issues of the Free Word Newsletter, focused on religious persecution rather than politics, and edited by an associate of Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Chertkov. Chertkov had arrived in London in 1897 and embarked on a publishing programme in English and Russian, in association with the Croydon Brotherhood Church, and the Tolstoyan ‘colony’ based near Purleigh in Essex, and later at Christchurch, Hampshire. Vladimir Burstev arrived in London in 1890, researching in the British Museum’s Department of Printed Books, and editing the journal Member of People’s Will. An article he wrote for its first issue (April 1897) advocated terror, and specifically assassination, as a revolutionary tactic. After the second issue appeared, the Russian Embassy lodged an official protest, and in December Burstev was arrested as he was leaving British Museum premises. British supporters of the SFRF lobbied on his behalf, despite disapproving of his views. He was convicted of seditious libel, serving a sentence of eighteen months’ hard labour, before moving to Switzerland, where he resumed his chronicle of the Russian opposition, and briefly revived Member of People’s Will. The Russian émigré community in Britain was a small one, centred in London,  although some individuals were based elsewhere: Peter Kropotkin, for example, lived for many years in Brighton, writing on geographical matters ­­ for the Times. In general, their hosts were indifferent to émigré Russian publications, but during the 1890s growing concerns about immigration, ‘anarchist’ outrages across Europe, and tension between the British and Russian Empires in the region of Afghanistan changed the mood, and although Russian publicists still operated in Britain, they became less welcome.

292

helen s. williams

Appendix: Russian-language Periodical Titles Published in Great Britain in the Nineteenth Century Pole Star (Poliarnaia zvezda – Поляpнaя звeздa), 8 issues, 1855–68 London, then Geneva, Free Russian Press Voices from Russia (Golosa iz Rossii – Гoлoca из Poccии), 9 issues, 1856–60 London, Free Russian Press Bell (Kolokol – Кoлoкoл), 245 issues, 1857–68 London, then Geneva, Free Russian Press Russian Foreign Collection (Russkii zagranichnyi sbornik – Pyccкий зaгpaничный cбopник), 5 issues, 1858–62 London, published Trubner & Co./Paris (Franck)/Berlin (Asher) Historical Collection from the Free Russian Press (Istoricheskii sbornik Vol’noi Russkii Tipograpfii – Иcтopичecкий cбopник Boльнoй Pyccкии Tипoгpaфии), 2 issues, 1859­­–61 London, Free Russian Press On Trial! (Pod sud! – Пoд cyд!), 9 issues, 1859–61 London, Free Russian Press Newsletter of Prince Peter Dolgorukov (Listok kn. Pertrom Dolgorukovym – Лиcтoк Кн. Пeтpoм Дoлгopyкoвым), 22 issues, 1862–4 Brussels, then London, edited by Prince Peter Dolgorukov General Assembly (Obshchee veche – Oбщee вeчe), 29 issues, 1862–4 London, Free Russian Press Commune (Obshchina – Oбщинa), 1 issue, 1870 London, edited by Sergei Nechaev and V. Serebrennikov Forward! Review (Vpered! neperiodicheskoe obozrenie – Bпepeд! Нeпepиoдичecкoe oбoзpeниe), 5 issues, 1873–7 Zurich, then London, edited by Peter Lavrov Forward! [newspaper] (Vpered! [gazeta] – Bпepeд! [гaзeтa]) 48 issues, 1875–6 London, edited by Peter Lavrov The Tocsin (Nabat – Haбaт), 35 issues, 1875–81 Geneva, then Brussels, then London, edited by Peter Tkachev and Kaspar Tursky Black Repartition (Chernyi peredel’ – Чepный пepeдeль), 5 issues, 1880–1 London (2 issues possibly published in Minsk), edited by Georgii Plekhanov, Pavel Akselrod and others In the Homeland (Na rodine – Ha poдинe), 3 issues, 1882–3 London then Geneva, Free Russian Press (II) The Truth (Pravda – Правда), 20 issues, 1882–3 Editorial address (I Klimov) Geneva, some issues printed in London The Social-Democrat (Sotsial’-demokrat’ – Coциaль-дeмoкpaть), 5 issues, 1888–92 Geneva, then London, first issue edited by Pavel Aksel’rod and Georgii Plekhanov Flying Newsletter (Letuchie listki – Лeтyчиe лиcтки), 46 issues, 1893–99 London, edited by Feliks Volkhovskii

­

case study 11 : the russian émigré press

293

Russian Worker (Russkii rabochii – Pyccкий paбoчий), 11 issues, 1894–9 London/Paris, then Geneva, edited by A. Teplov Our Times (Nashe vremiia – Haшe вpeмия), 3 issues, 1896–8 London, published by Obshchestvo Narodnogo Prava (Oбщecтвo Hapoднoгo пpaвa/ Society for the People’s Rights) Member of the People’s Will (Narodovolets – Hapoдoвoлeц), 4 issues, 1897–1903 London, then Geneva, edited by Vladimir Burtsev The Contemporary (Sovremennik – Coвpeмeнник), 3 issues, 1897 London, edited by P. A. Demen’tev Fraternal Newsletter (Bratskii listok – Бpaцкий лиcтoк), 1 issue, 1898 Mundon (Essex), edited by P. Boulanger Free Word Newsletter (Listki Svobodnogo slova – Лиcтки Cвoбoднoгo cлoва), 25 issues, 1898–1902 Purleigh (Essex), then Christchurch (Hampshire), edited by Vladimir Chertkov Workers’ Banner (Rabochee znamia – Paбoчee знaмя), 3 issues, 1898­­–1901 Belostok then London, published by Rossiskaia Sotsial’-Demokraticheskaia Rabochaia Partiia (Poccиcкaя Coциaль-дeмoкpaтичecкaя Paбoчaя Пapтия/Russian SocialDemocratic Workers’ Party) Free Word (Svobodnoe slovo – Cвoбoднoe cлoвo), 20 issues, 1898–1905 Purleigh (Essex), then Onex (near Geneva), then Christchurch (Hampshire), edited by P. Biriukov and Vladimir Chertkov On the Eve (Nakanune – Haкaнyнe), 37 issues, 1899–1902 London, edited by E. Serebriakov Past Times (Byloe – Былoe), 6 issues, 1900–4 London, then Geneva, edited by Vladimir Burstev and Leonid Shishko The Spark (Iskra – Иcкpa), 112 issues, 1900–5 Leipzig, then Munich, then London, then Geneva, published by Rossiskaia Sotsial’Demokraticheskaia Rabochaia Partiia (Poccиcкaя Coциaль-дeмoкpaтичecкaя Paбoчaя Пapтия/Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party) Revolutionary Russia (Revoliutsionnaia Rossiia – Peвoлюциoннaя Poccия), [77?] issues, 1900–5 + Supplement [Revolutionary Russia] (Prilozhenie [Revoliutsionnaia Rossiia] – Прилoжeниe [Peвoлюциoннaя Poccия]), [75?] issues, 1900–5 Koukkala, then Tomsk, then Geneva, then London, published by Partiia Sotsialistov-revoliutionerov (Пapтия Coциaлиcтoв-peвoлюциoнepoв/SocialistRevolutionary Party)

Chapter Nine

LITERARY AND REVIEW JOURNALISM Joanne Wilkes

The Quarterlies and Their Background The traditional history of nineteenth-century periodicals normally begins with the founding of the quarterly Edinburgh Review at the outset of the period, in 1802. Supported by the publisher Archibald Constable, the lawyer Francis Jeffrey and his colleagues, Francis Horner, Henry Brougham and clergyman Sydney Smith, set out to transform the practice of reviewing. They challenged the conventions evident in the organs prominent in the late eighteenth century, such as the Monthly Review, the Critical Review and the British Critic. The earlier periodicals aimed at a very broad coverage of publications as they appeared, and themselves came out monthly. The space devoted to each text might be brief, and the approach more summative than evaluative. But the preface to the first number of the Edinburgh Review claimed to concentrate on ‘works that either have achieved, or deserve, a certain portion of celebrity’ (Butler 2006: 137): evaluation thus figured in the very choice of works to be noticed. So this first issue contained twenty-nine articles, mostly covering a single book, whereas the three monthlies mentioned above featured at least fortyfour. The difference soon became more stark, with the average number of articles in the Edinburgh down to ten by 1810. This narrower scope involved, too, specialisation in certain areas linked with the Scottish ­­universities  – initially moral philosophy, political economy and the natural sciences, and then foreign relations and the geography and culture of overseas countries, notably those of the Empire (Butler 2006: 137–8). The periodical’s Scottishness was also important, as it drew on Scottish traditions of debate and ‘upholding the superiority of Scottish educational and legal systems’ (Finkelstein 2016: 187). 294

­

literary and review journalism

295

The Edinburgh became notorious for its sardonic, often combative variety of criticism. In his study of its early years, William Christie comments on its ‘consistently clever’ kind of severity which could become ‘especially wilful and especially skilful’ and ‘sometimes even vicious and inexcusable’: fifteen of those twenty-nine articles in the first number were critical in an adverse way (Christie 2009: 20). Targets included popular writing of various kinds, such as that of the radicals William Godwin and John Thelwall, plus the poets Thomas Moore, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey and Byron (Christie 2009: 21; Butler 2006: 140). The editor Francis Jeffrey’s hostility to Wordsworth’s poetry, expressed in several articles, has gone down in literary history as exemplifying his inability to understand the innovatory nature of what Wordsworth was attempting; Jeffrey championed instead more conventional poets such as Samuel Rogers and Thomas Campbell. But seeking out originality was not what the Edinburgh was about: its main aesthetic principle was taste, based on shared values and hence a shared understanding of what worthwhile literature was (Schoenfield 2009: 75). The Edinburgh Review supported the Whigs, thus positioning itself against political radicalism. But it was too Liberal for some, so a rival, Tory periodical began in 1809 – the Quarterly Review, published in London by John Murray. Its leading lights included Robert Southey, Walter Scott, the Tory politician John Wilson Croker, and the ­­clergymen Reginald Heber, Richard Whately and H. H. Milman; later Scott’s son-in-law J. G. Lockhart would edit the periodical from 1826 till shortly before his death in 1854. These writers’ campaign, as Marilyn Butler puts it, was ‘on behalf of conservative, Christian and family values’ (Butler 2006: 146), and their targets were, pre-­ eminently Byron – whose takes on sexuality and religion were considered ­scandalous – and the other young Romantics P. B. Shelley and John Keats, plus their ally Leigh Hunt. Croker famously lambasted Keats in 1818 for his radicalism, both political and literary, and would go on in the early 1830s to attack Keats’s alleged disciple, the future Poet Laureate Alfred Tennyson. Both the Edinburgh and the Quarterly represented a new development in periodical criticism, in that strong political orientations could affect their responses to texts. Moreover, the articles often did not focus on the content of the text(s) supposedly under review; rather, these were launching pads for discussions, sometimes polemical, of particular topics. Mark Schoenfield cites an anecdote where the Edinburgh Review stalwart Sydney Smith, encountering another contributor who is busily reading a book so as to review it, declares, ‘I never read a book before reviewing it: it prejudices a man so’ (Schoenfield 2009:

296

joanne wilkes

49). While obviously exemplifying Smith’s celebrated wit, the riposte derives part of its effect from its reflecting perceived practice in the early years of the most prominent quarterlies. In his notable article of 1855, ‘The First Edinburgh Reviewers’ (National Review 1 (October 1855): 253–82), Walter Bagehot would characterise the typical contribution to the two quarterlies as the ‘review-like essay’ and the ‘essaylike review’– that is, a kind of hybrid, rather than an article where the priority was to detail and evaluate closely any particular publication(s). The Edinburgh and Quarterly would continue to be published well into the twentieth century, and their influence would be longlasting. Christie persuasively argues that, although the characteristic Edinburgh contribution ‘rarely achieved the sort of detached, formal rumination characteristic of the Victorian higher journalism’, it still ‘made that higher journalism possible’ (Christie 2009: 26). But Bagehot in 1855 also identified such quarterlies as typifying a past age, and it is true that their actual nineteenth-century sales peaked early in their existence. The Edinburgh’s circulation was 12,000 a quarter  in 1818, but this had declined by half by 1828 and then slipped further to about 3,000 from 1845 onwards; the Quarterly went from 14,000 in 1818 to 10,500 in 1829 and then to about 9,000 by 1849 (Finkelstein 2016: 191). It is also important not to discount the value of these quarterlies’ predecessors, some of whom continued part way into the nineteenth century. Sometimes criticised for being summative, plus apparently padded by extensive quotations from the texts under review, they have been defended by Marilyn Butler, drawing on the comprehensive study by Derek Roper in his Reviewing before the ‘Edinburgh,’ 1788­­–1802 (1978). Earlier reviews valued summaries of content because they did not assume in readers prior knowledge of the field, and while in their handling of works of creative literature evaluation was more common, detailing content was still habitual too (Butler 2006: 133). In so far as the quarterlies might overlook a text’s particulars, or disparage it because of assumptions about its author, this change from earlier practice made reviews entertaining, but not necessarily just or even informative. Victorian literary periodical journalism, although it continued to feature long reviews of the essay-like form, generally gave more space to the actual subject matter of books being reviewed than had been habitual in the early years of the Edinburgh and the Quarterly. Also significant about the quarterlies’ predecessors was the prominent role of women as critics, as detailed in Mary A. Waters’s British Women Writers and the Profession of Literary Criticism, 1789–1832 (2004). The famous early feminist and novelist Mary Wollstonecraft

­

literary and review journalism

297

reviewed for the Analytical Review, while the established poet Anna Letitia Barbauld, author of substantial critical introductions to the multivolume British Novelists series she edited (1810), also wrote for the Analytical (which ceased publication in 1798) and from 1809 contributed many brief items to the Monthly Review. By contrast, the quarterlies’ narrower focus, privileging politics, and, in the case of the Edinburgh, emphasising subjects taught at the Scottish Universities, implied that their intended audience was primarily male. Given, too, that women were assumed to lack both interest and expertise in topics such as politics, political economy, moral philosophy and the sciences, it is not surprising that they were scarce among contributors to these quarterlies, even in the later nineteenth century. Despite the quarterlies’ notoriety for their reception of now-­­canonical poets, their main coverage was not of imaginative literature at all. In the early years of the Edinburgh, the belles-lettres discussed are either by authors the periodical is keen to attack, or Scottish and/or Utilitarian authors ripe for commendation for their ‘wholesomeness’, such as Scott, the dramatist Joanna Baillie and the novelist Maria Edgeworth (Butler 2006: 140). From a modern perspective, ­­nineteenth-century reviewing in general did not concentrate as much as reviewing does nowadays on imaginative literature. Other prominent fields included theology (a very significant area), philosophy, politics, economics, history, travel, biography and autobiography, art history and criticism, music and the sciences. Indeed, ‘literary’ qualities could be ascribed to genres outside imaginative literature. A reviewer might be expected to – and assume his or her own capacity to – review texts in a variety of areas. Moreover, a category of publication that was more strongly represented in nineteenth-century criticism than in present-day reviewing was works of all kinds by European writers, whether in the original or in translation – especially those by writers from France, Italy and Germany. Also more prominent than in later periods were reviews focused on classical Greek and Roman literature, whether history, critical studies or new editions. On the other hand, as the century progressed, fiction became more salient as a subject for reviews, as the publication of novels burgeoned. They were borrowed from libraries, then republished in cheap editions which became increasingly affordable from mid-century on; sometimes they were published in parts or, more frequently in the second half of the century, serialised in periodicals or magazines before appearing in volume form. Hence these outlets fostered fiction by publishing it as well as by reviewing it. Fiction as a genre, too, became increasingly respectable after the vogue of Scott’s historical novels (1814–32): the

298

joanne wilkes

stigma associating it with sentimental romances and Gothic sensation diminished, since more of it came to deal with social, political, religious and moral issues. The fiction of European, especially French, novelists also received much coverage. In addition, whereas attention to imaginative literature early in the century is mainly directed to poetry, by the end of the period novels are centre-stage and poetry more of a coterie interest. Even in the early nineteenth century the quarterlies, with their setting of standards – even contentious ones – contributed to the sense that writing for a living was respectable. According to Butler, both Scott’s and Edgeworth’s novels, praised by the quarterlies, were lauded partly because they ‘mirror the qualities and contents of the higher journalism’ in their deployment of ‘vivid, accurately observed scenes’ which invite excerpting, as well as echoing ‘the quarterlies’ commitment to social order and good government’ (Butler 2006: 143, 145). The same is possibly true of Jane Austen, whose novels found their first serious critical coverage in the Quarterly, where Scott reviewed Emma, and Richard Whately was prompted by the posthumous publication of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion to write a detailed and influential article (not, in this case, a ‘review-like essay’) about her fiction. The founding of quarterlies did not cease with that of the Quarterly Review in 1809. The Utilitarian and philosophical radical James Mill interpreted the established quarterlies as endorsing the political status quo despite their apparent differences, in that the politically dominant aristocracy relied on the professional classes running the reviews (mainly lawyers and the clergy) (ibid.: 142). So in 1824 Mill set up his own quarterly, the Westminster Review, notably erudite in its coverage of religious and philosophical issues. In the early 1850s a later editor, John Chapman, would recruit Marian Evans, who became de facto coeditor for a few years and contributed on a wide range of serious topics. She was therefore a notable figure in the history of women’s involvement in intellectually oriented periodicals, before emerging as the novelist ‘George Eliot’ in 1858. Other noteworthy quarterlies included the British Quarterly Review (1845–86), a Dissenting organ which covered a wide variety of subjects and was more open to women reviewers than the Edinburgh or Quarterly; the North British Review, another Scottish periodical that over its twenty-seven-year career (1844–71) had various orientations, but in the 1850s featured several significant contributors, including Charles Kingsley, Herbert Spencer and the literary critic David Masson (Finkelstein 2016: 192), and then in its final years the astute criticism of the Liberal Catholic Richard Simpson; the National Review (1855–64), in which Bagehot’s article on the

­

literary and review journalism

299

Edinburgh reviewers appeared; the Dublin Review (1836–­­present), a periodical begun by Nicholas, later Cardinal, Wiseman, and directed (despite the title) primarily at English Catholics.

The Magazines When publisher Richard Bentley set up Bentley’s Quarterly Review in 1859, however, it failed after four issues. The reviewing landscape had been transformed since the early 1800s, with many competitors already on the scene, and more to come. The flourishing of outlets for literary and review journalism had however started much earlier, with a new generation of monthlies emerging in the second and third decades of the century. There were indeed about 4,000 new periodicals launched in Britain over the period 1790–1832 (Klancher 1987: ix), and, although many were very ephemeral, their existence pointed to a growing appetite for this kind of reading. The interaction between this first new generation of publications and their readership has attracted much valuable scholarship which can be dealt with only briefly here. The study that most stimulated this research was Jon P. Klancher’s The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (1987): he investigated the discursive community that was implied by the new publications. Although the magazines generally targeted the middle classes, this discursive ­­community would vary according to the publication. The key magazines explored in recent scholarship, all monthlies, were the Tory Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, which began in 1817 and outlasted the century; the Londonbased and very commercially oriented New Monthly Magazine which was relaunched in 1821 and survived, sometimes precariously, till 1884; the London Magazine, which started out as a metropolitan rival to the (obviously Scottish) Blackwood’s at the beginning of 1820 and was absorbed into the New Monthly in 1829; and Fraser’s Magazine, which emerged in 1830 as a London-based Tory alternative to Blackwood’s and lasted till 1882. Fraser’s and the New Monthly enjoyed their heyday before mid-century, and while Blackwood’s was durable, it became more staid after the 1830s. Meanwhile, in 1833, the Dublin University Magazine was established as an Irish counterpart to Fraser’s and Blackwood’s (it lasted till 1880). It was oriented towards Toryism and the support of the Protestant ascendancy, but, perhaps paradoxically, promoted Irish writing to its readers in the other kingdoms, especially under the respective editorships of the novelists Charles Lever (1842–5) and Sheridan Le Fanu (1861–9) (Boyle 1983: 119–21; Clyde 2003: 94–7).

300

joanne wilkes

All of these magazines were miscellaneous in content and, apart from the Dublin University Magazine, lacked the consistent political lines of the established quarterlies. Moreover, as they experimented with creating and engaging with their readership, they tended to destabilise notions of a fixed subject – including the ‘transcendental lyric self ’ of much poetry, or the public intellectual (Camlot 2008: 14, 64). They undermined, too, any sense of reliable criteria for judgement. These features came together in the most famous magazine series of the period, the ‘Noctes Ambrosianae’ in Blackwood’s, which ran from 1822 to 1835. They were mostly written by John Wilson, the periodical’s de facto editor, and featured himself in the persona of ‘Christopher North’, in lively, sometimes rambunctious conversation with a variety of other figures, generally projections of real people. The title was a Latinising of ‘nights’ spent supposedly at St Ambrose’s Tavern in Edinburgh – hence the rambunctiousness. The ‘Noctes’, according to Jason Camlot, put the ‘poetic discourse’ of the conventionally solitary author under the ‘scrutinizing spotlight’ of an audience, and not the audience of posterity, but one ‘on an ephemeral magazine stage’ (Camlot 2008: 59). In addition, not only were the tavern denizens partly fictional, the opinions they expressed from one issue to the next were not uniform – there was no consistent critical stance towards a writer or a work. In general, claims David Stewart, the literary flair evident in the early years of Blackwood’s was ‘designed to reflect a bustling, uncertain, fragmented cultural world’ (Stewart 2011: 24). Another approach, perhaps less amusing but also less male-centred, was that of the more liberal counterpart to Blackwood’s among monthlies, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine. This was edited from 1834 to 1846 by the first woman editor of a significant periodical, Christian Isobel Johnstone. Although no friend to either royalty or Tories, Johnstone tended to avoid the partisan stridency common at the period. She was also responsible for the reviews, which covered a very great variety of genres and were generally balanced in their appraisals. Johnstone’s own numerous contributions dealt with travel and geography, politics, finance, religion, history, science, anatomy, mathematics, biography and autobiography, criticism and drama, plus a comprehensive range of poetry and fiction. She gave particular attention to women writers, covering (among others) Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett (later Barrett Browning) and Harriet Martineau. Meanwhile the London Magazine and the New Monthly sought out the star contributor. These included William Hazlitt, who produced his ‘Table Talk’ for the London and then the New Monthly, plus, for

­

literary and review journalism

301

the latter, the biographical sketches later collected into The Spirit of the Age. Charles Lamb’s brilliant quasi-personal ‘Essays of Elia’ and Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater both appeared in the London as well. This focus highlighted, claims Butler, ‘a new belief in being literary for its own sake’, which is also borne out by increased coverage in journals in general of the lives and personalities of writers (Butler 2006: 149–50). Readers were increasingly engaging with various projections of writers’ voices and personalities, as well as reading about actual writers, while writers were in turn ­­conveying in their articles a sense of the readers they were writing for. Yet one effect of the new monthlies was to emphasise the contingency of the writer’s enterprise: he or she was located in the present, writing for an incompletely known contemporary audience, and was part of a world where periodicals and magazines continued to proliferate and to subject writers to their critical gaze. Unsettlingly, such organs had by their nature an ephemeral dimension, even if as titles they could be long-lasting: each issue was in some sense superseded by the next. This state of affairs could engender in some writers a perception that reviews were omnipresent and overpowering. Thomas Carlyle’s wellknown comment in his 1831 essay ‘Characteristics’ conveys this idea in an especially forthright way, but his sentiments were not unusual: he declared that ‘Reviewing spreads with strange vigour; that such a man as Byron reckons the Reviewer and the Poet equal’, such that soon ‘all Literature [will have] become one boundless self-devouring Review’ (Edinburgh Review 54 (December 1831): 369–70, quoted in Christie 2009: 15). A related concern was that talents which had been previously devoted to books would increasingly be directed to periodical writing (Liddle 2009: 20ff.). But Carlyle also acknowledged: ‘[f ]ar be it from us to disparage our own craft, whereby we have our living!’ (quoted in Christie 2009: 15): his essay was actually published in the Edinburgh and brought him much-needed funds. It became frequent for writers of all kinds to earn some of their income from journalism, including reviewing, and this would continue to be the case throughout the century. As far as the New Monthly is concerned, for example, reviewers in its heyday included Edward Bulwer (later Bulwer-Lytton), who was to become one of the most prominent novelists of the century, and the popular poet Letitia Elizabeth Landon. Also prominent in the London press of the 1820s and 1830s was the protean and prolific figure of Irish immigrant William Maginn (1794–1842), a significant contributor to Blackwood’s and editor/contributor with Fraser’s, as well as a writer for newspapers.

302

joanne wilkes

Among subsequent generations George Eliot’s partner, George Henry Lewes, was a periodical contributor and frequent reviewer from the 1840s till the end of his life (1878) – while also publishing novels, the first English-language biography of Goethe, and works of science and philosophy. Margaret Oliphant would become, through the second half of the century, both a prolific writer of fiction, biographies and travel literature, and one of the most industrious and widely published periodical contributors of the period, predominantly as a reviewer. It was harder for women than for men to find remunerative work outside writing, but men in other fields might use periodical writing to pursue their interests and/or supplement their income. Such was the case, for example, of the barrister James Fitzjames Stephen, from the 1850s onwards. Meanwhile Matthew Arnold, for all his advocacy of the ‘higher criticism’, hardly scorned periodical publication. His famous essay ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’ first appeared in the quarterly National Review in November 1861, while the essays later collected into Culture and Anarchy (1869) and Literature and Dogma (1873) were first published in periodicals, principally in the monthly Cornhill Magazine. (Arnold’s day job was an inspector of schools.)

Anonymity and Signature Writers might appear in a variety of outlets, but one feature that characterised journalism until at least 1860 was the convention of anonymous publication. In some established organs in particular, such as the Edinburgh, the Quarterly and Blackwood’s, it persisted throughout the century. So, while magazines such as the London and the New Monthly might recruit star contributors like Hazlitt and Lamb, these writers weren’t publishing overtly as themselves, but projecting particular personae. And if some of the key figures writing for the various venues were well known, it was still difficult to attribute contributions with confidence: when in his elegy ‘Adonais’ P. B. Shelley defended its subject, John Keats, against the critical review of Endymion in the Quarterly, for example, he assumed its writer was the regular reviewer Robert Southey, rather than the actual culprit, J. W. Croker. The convention of anonymous reviewing had various ramifications. In Romantic-era publishing, as Nicholas Mason has shown, it tended to foster ‘puffing’: publishers’ habit of using the journals they owned to promote their own publications through commissioning favourable reviews, plus the efforts of writers themselves to garner positive notices via friends or relatives, or even to review their own works. Keats proves a good example: while there is a long history of seeing him as

­

literary and review journalism

303

a victim of hostile and politically motivated criticism in the Quarterly and Blackwood’s, he was – before he was actually attacked – among the poets habitually promoted by Leigh Hunt, and he himself welcomed the review of his first collection in the Liberal Champion, penned by his friend John Hamilton Reynolds (Mason 2005: 18ff.). The practice was pervasive, and the worst offender was the publisher Henry Colburn, who owned the New Monthly, and deployed the magazine relentlessly to promote his own publications. Not surprisingly, there was a backlash, with literature itself seen as at risk of degradation (Mason 2005: 24ff.). But ending the convention of anonymity was not always seen as the solution. In 1830 Charles Wentworth Dilke who took over the recently established weekly reviewing journal, the Athenaeum, was particularly opposed to Colburn’s practices. His conviction, however, was that anonymous reviewing protected critical independence, since it guarded against reviewers coming under personal pressure from authors and publishers, and for the next twenty years he made the weekly a bastion of disinterested criticism. The issue re-emerged in the late 1850s: periodicals often came to adopt signature for contributions, notably the monthlies Macmillan’s Magazine (1859–1907), the Fortnightly Review (1865–1954; monthly early on, despite the name), the Contemporary Review (1866–­­present), the Nineteenth Century (1877–1972, with title changes) and the Cornhill Magazine (1878–1975). If obliged to own their own work, writers could not hide behind anonymity to mount unjust attacks, or to produce lackadaisical copy, argued John Morley as editor of the Fortnightly Review in 1867 (Morley 1867: 287–92). Anthony Trollope, who regularly published in periodicals, claimed in his Autobiography that anonymity could give a factitious prestige to the views of a nonentity, when expressed in a respected organ of criticism: ‘an ordinary reader would not care to have his books recommended to him by Jones; but the recommendation of the great unknown comes to him with all the weight of The Times, the Spectator, or the Saturday [Review].’ But the counter-argument, advanced by critic E. S. Dallas, regular Times reviewer of fiction and biography, was that writing in a respected publication helped to divest the nonentity critic (here called ‘Smith’) of his egotism, such that he is ‘forced to regard only that part of his consciousness which identifies him with every other member of the ­community – Smith, no longer the individual unity, but the representative man’ (quoted Liddle 1997: 55). The periodical or newspaper had, via its editorial ‘we’, an identity different from that of any individual contributor, and that circumstance could be viewed positively or negatively (Liddle 1997: 31–58; Nash 2010: 57–82).

304

joanne wilkes

Projecting a particular kind of persona through anonymity was a practice that persisted for as long as anonymous journalism did. One corollary was that writers would adapt their styles to what they saw as the tone or orientation of the particular outlet they were writing for. As late as 1894, the prolific journalist Eliza Lynn Linton, offering an article to the publisher Richard Bentley, declared that, if he turned it down, she would ‘turn it into a different key’ for another periodical (Anderson 1987: 71–2). The effect of adopting diverse personae for various outlets is particularly salient when a reviewer treats the same book for different publications. Christopher C. Dahl provides a fascinating account of the reviewing career of James Fitzjames Stephen, who produced over 2,000 articles for various outlets from the 1850s to the 1880s, including the Edinburgh Review, Fraser’s, the Cornhill, Macmillan’s and the weekly Saturday Review. He was a mainstay of the latter in its first decade (1855–65), and later wrote almost daily for the Pall Mall Gazette. Dahl draws attention to four negatively critical articles Stephen produced in 1857, all anonymous, which dealt with Dickens, among others: one was in the Edinburgh, and the other three in the Saturday. The Edinburgh essay, ‘The License of Modern Novelists’, criticised Dickens (in Little Dorrit) and Charles Reade (in It’s Never Too Late to Mend) for overdoing artistic licence in distorting facts and maligning both individuals and institutions. The anonymity here possibly concealed a personal agenda, since in Little Dorrit’s Circumlocution Office and its staff, Stephen may have identified one target as his own father, former Under-Secretary for the Colonies, Sir James Stephen. Then, in the Saturday Review pieces, he calls his own Edinburgh article ‘powerful’, but claims that it lets Dickens off too lightly! This may be a rhetorical ploy, or it may reflect an intervention by the Edinburgh’s then-editor Henry Reeve to tone down what Stephen had originally written (Dahl 1981: 51–8). This last possibility points to another corollary of reviewing, especially when it was anonymous: the editor might intervene to make the review more consistent with what he or she saw as the periodical’s public persona. This may have been a common practice, although the full extent of it can never be known without more documentary evidence. But a letter from William Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy complains to her sisterin-law that their friend Charles Lamb’s favourable review of William’s Excursion (1814) in the Quarterly had been severely altered by the editor, William Gifford (Mason 2005: 16). The editor also had control over the ordering of articles published, so that an article’s prominent positioning might be aimed at implying its literary value (Patten and Finkelstein 2006: 162–3).

­

literary and review journalism

305

Women and Reviewing The implication behind Trollope’s ‘Jones’ and Dallas’s ‘Smith’ was that journalism was the province of males. Men did indeed predominate, yet in 1865 the proto-feminist activist Bessie Rayner Parkes ruefully observed that, ‘if editors were ever known to disclose the dread secrets of their dens, they would only give the public an idea of the authoresses whose unsigned names are legion; of their rolls of manuscripts, which are as the sands of the sea’ (quoted in Easley 2004: 2). Since a male voice generally carried more authority than a female one, women did sometimes write reviews using an overtly male persona. Margaret Oliphant, for example, adopted a suitably forthright writing image in her reviews for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, a periodical that had a quite masculine profile that was promoted in part by the ‘Noctes Ambrosianae’ and then continuing via the tendency of its articles to assume a masculine coterie in its readership. Oliphant’s overtly male persona was more evident in her earlier rather than her later contributions, but near the end of her career she ran a column of general reviews called ‘The Old Saloon’ (1887–92), which deliberately evoked, no longer a tavern, but the masculine-coterie domain of Blackwood’s publishing offices in Edinburgh. Adopting a male persona could also be a strategic way for a woman to comment on women’s condition from a supposedly sympathetic masculine perspective. Anne Mozley, for instance, reviewing Dinah Mulock Craik’s A Woman’s Thoughts about Women for the Anglican High Church Christian Remembrancer in June 1858, takes a generally conservative stance, emphasising women’s biblically-ordained social subordination. But she also observes that it can be male self-interest, rather than women’s incapacity, which makes men unwilling to sacrifice their wives’ or daughters’ attentions by allowing them paid work away from home (Wilkes 2010: 91–3). More generally, anonymity could offer women reviewers scope to deal with books on topics which, had their sex been revealed, they might have been considered insufficiently informed to treat – such as politics, philosophy, theology, Greek and Roman literature, and the sciences (Easley 2004: 1).

Newspapers and the Working Classes I have discussed so far reviewing in various kinds of publications that appeared weekly, monthly or quarterly. As today, reviews also appeared in newspapers, and as far as poetry and fiction are concerned, investigations into the critical reception of canonical authors have frequently

306

joanne wilkes

mined this material. But the resources are vast, and thorough research into nineteenth-century newspaper reviewing as a genre and practice is still to be done. It has fortunately been made more feasible recently, on account of digitisation and the development of searchable online databases, such as the ongoing British Library Newspapers series, although the convention of anonymity would still make identification of contributors often difficult. Among known newspaper reviewers, Harriet Martineau, who wrote in a variety of genres for both book and periodical publication, included reviews in the work she did for the wide-circulation London Daily News over 1852–66, her topics encompassing politics (British and American), foreign policy, novels, education, science, agriculture and history. Meanwhile E. S. Dallas produced over 150 reviews for the Times from 1857 to 1866, concentrating on history, biography and fiction (Flynn 2016: 50). Newspaper publication, national and provincial, grew exponentially during the nineteenth century as literacy increased and costs came down, so that newspapers became more accessible to the working classes. But in the first half of the century there was already a market for newspapers and periodicals among these groups, and the publications directed at them included critical writing on creative literature, current and past. For example, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal (later Chambers’s Journal, 1832–1956) featured discussions of canonical classical, European and British writers (Rose 2001: 187). Meanwhile Paul Thomas Murphy has examined the more politically inflected journalism between the turbulent post-war years from 1816, and the discontinuation of the People’s Paper in 1858. Especially prominent during this period was the Chartist organ, the Northern Star, which ran from 1838 to 1852. As the events surrounding the 1832 Reform Bill induced the working classes to recognise their own interests as separate from those of the newly enfranchised middle classes, their publications evaluated writers in terms of their treatment of working-class concerns, and refused to affirm the existence of a literary canon that was universal or class-transcendent. Fiction in the working-class press, as in the culture generally, was initially considered a trivial or dangerous distraction from more serious reading, but working-class publications turned to scrutinise novelists such as Scott, Dickens, Bulwer Lytton, Disraeli, W. H. Ainsworth and Captain Marryat. Initially, political concerns overrode aesthetic ones, so that George Harney’s review of Dickens’s The Chimes for the Northern Star in January 1845 declared that the story revealed the novelist as ‘the champion of the people’ (Murphy 1994: 87; Harney’s emphasis), while acknowledging that his earlier works had better constructed plots.

­

literary and review journalism

307

Criteria broadened, in that literature’s role in evoking pleasure was recognised, and thus the plays of Shakespeare and the poetry of Keats and Tennyson came to be valued. But class-related political standards remained important, such that the poets most often championed were Burns, Shelley and Byron, while Milton was celebrated more for his prose than his poetry – for grappling with conflict on earth rather than for representing war in heaven. Another kind of literary criticism of sorts has been highlighted by Kirstie Blair, in illustrating how Scottish newspapers directed at working-class readers not only published readers’ poetry, but discussed the literary standards that made for publishable poetry (Blair 2014: 188–207). From 1886 W. Robertson Nicoll would use the high-­ circulation British Weekly to review both classic and contemporary authors, while his popular paper Great Thoughts (1884–1937) covered writers such as Ruskin, Carlyle and Robert Browning (Rose 2001: 34).

Mid-Century and After Francis Jeffrey died in 1850, and when Henry Cockburn brought out his biography two years later, he called him ‘our greatest British critic’. But, as Joanne Shattock points out, Jeffrey’s own four-volume Contributions to the Edinburgh Review (1844) had met a muted response (Shattock 2002: 385). Moreover David Masson, reviewing Cockburn’s biography in 1852, declared that criticism had, since Jeffrey’s heyday, become ‘intrinsically deeper and more laborious’, rather than an expression of the critic’s own taste: now criticism was expected to relate the book under consideration to other texts and to wider currents of thought (North British Review, 17 August 1852, 283–326, quoted in Shattock 2002: 386; Masson’s emphasis). Shattock considers reviewing practices as they affected poetry over the century, and demonstrates that changes in tone and approach were less clear-cut than often thought, and, contrary to the rather self-satisfied evaluations on the part of mid-century critics, did not chart a straightforward narrative of critical progress. Although criticism from mid-century was less inflected by political bias, there were still instances of strident, combative reviews, notably some of those that greeted the so-called ‘Spasmodic’ School of poetry in the 1850s (P. J. Bailey, Alexander Smith and Sydney Dobell), Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads in 1866, and D. G. Rossetti’s 1870 volume (Shattock 2002: 392–4). The highly subjective ‘Spasmodic’ poetry was spoofed in Blackwood’s by W. E. Aytoun, reviewing the nonexistent poem Firmilian, while John Morley and Robert Buchanan launched attacks on Poems and Ballads in July 1866, Morley in the

308

joanne wilkes

Saturday Review and Buchanan in the Athenaeum. They were not alone in doing so. Robert Buchanan’s onslaught on Rossetti’s poetry appeared anonymously in the Contemporary Review for October 1871 and was then combatted by the poet himself in the Athenaeum on 16 December. On the other hand, Shattock argues – drawing on earlier work by John Jump and Isobel Armstrong – that some early and midcentury criticism of poetry, although it did not use technical vocabulary or deploy overt close reading, was astute in conveying the texture of the poetry and analysing its overall implications. And these implications were often social, moral, philosophical – such considerations were considered highly pertinent to the evaluation of poetry (Shattock 2002: 391, 396). These ramifications were also usually thought relevant to fiction. Fiction reviewing is of course a vast topic, and reviews from the mid-century on extended from brief, impressionistic notices, through clear if workmanlike summaries combined with brief evaluations, to thoughtful analyses that set the novels in some kind of social, moral, philosophical and/or literary context. These latter might be of varying lengths, depending on the publication. Lyn Pykett, after investigating some of the periodical coverage of fiction from 1850 to 1870, comments that it was ‘prodigious, complex, and rich, … concerned with the psychological, moral, and social function and possibilities of the novel’, as well as ‘teasing out the questions of the proper subject-matter of fiction and the appropriate mode of treating it’ (Pykett 1982: 72). Much criticism of later decades continued this kind of emphasis. In this context, the weekly reviews I have alluded to in passing – the Athenaeum and the Saturday Review – were important as critical outlets for the latter half of the century; another significant weekly was the Spectator. All three covered a wide range of fields, and, somewhat like the old late eighteenth-century monthlies, reviewed a substantial number of publications per issue. If Morley lambasted Poems and Ballads in the Saturday, his attack mode was not unusual in that magazine. It had come on the scene in 1855 and soon became known for its pungent and witty reviews, gaining the nickname the “Saturday Reviler”. Its reviewers, like some of those in the early quarterlies, could adopt an attitude of superiority to their subject matter – and they were protected by anonymity – but the articles were much more succinct. According to Robert H. Tener and Malcolm Woodfield, the Saturday’s approach was ‘at the same time serious and dismissive’ (Tener and Woodfield 1989: 7–8). The Spectator, meanwhile, had the long-term benefit of Richard Holt Hutton as joint editor and proprietor: he took up these roles in

­

literary and review journalism

309

1861 and still held them at the time of his death in 1897. In charge of book reviewing, he wrote a huge number of reviews himself. Hutton’s conviction was that the critic had to engage with life in the present, to get to grips with the tendencies of the age, and the role of the weekly reviewer facilitated this – especially by treating the most prominent literary form of his time, the novel. In this respect, he differed from another influential critic, Matthew Arnold (about whom Hutton often wrote), who valued literature he considered to have stood the test of time, and so eschewed critical treatment of living writers, many of whom were of course novelists. Although Hutton published on many subjects and wrote illuminatingly on poets such as Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning, his critical output on fiction, such as the works of Austen, Trollope, Dickens and Kingsley, was particularly valuable. He was an especially prolific and astute critic of George Eliot’s novels, and one much appreciated by the novelist herself. The Athenaeum, as noted earlier, had practised anonymity as an ethical stance, but it declined after Charles Wentworth Dilke’s death, with its editor, William Hepworth Dixon, willing to accept favours from publishers; Dixon was at the helm when the Saturday was launched in 1855. After Dilke’s grandson Sir Charles Dilke took over in the late 1860s, he dispensed with Dixon and strove to restore the quality of the journal. But the impact of the Saturday had been such that its rivals had needed to drop their prices in the late 1850s. The periodical field was becoming ever more crowded, even if, as earlier in the century, many were ephemeral: 1859 alone saw 115 periodicals founded in London alone (Tener and Woodfield 1989: 7). Considering some of the Athenaeum’s reviewing practices from midcentury on reveals instances of both change and continuity. One of its most prolific fiction reviewers over the 1850s and 1860s was Geraldine Jewsbury, and her priority was to indicate to the reader what kind of novel each text was. She was evaluative – recognising, for example, that the first novel by ‘George Eliot’, Adam Bede (1859), was outstanding, and that much fiction was commonplace and of fleeting interest. Yet she acknowledged that inferior fiction had its function: it might be entertaining, or safe for family reading. Jewsbury knew that one way of seeing novels was as a marketable commodity (she worked also as a publisher’s reader), and many novels would find some kind of market. Reviewers of a later generation would also be responsive to general readers – this was part of the still-anonymous reviewer’s sense of the weekly’s editorial ‘we’. One example was Katherine de Mattos, who produced about 1,300 contributions over the twenty years from 1886, and whose reviews of Henry James’s works, for example, would take

310

joanne wilkes

account of their level of accessibility (or otherwise) to readers. Another was the art critic Emilia Dilke (Sir Charles’s wife), who published as well in the more specialist Academy, where she became art editor, plus in the Magazine of Art. Her own aesthetic valued technical execution, as well as an awareness of social historical contexts. In writing for the Athenaeum, she recognised nonetheless that the general reader would be ‘interested in the narrative of paintings as well as in the artists’ technical excellencies’ (Demoor 2000: 72). The Academy had been established in 1869 and represented something of a new development among weeklies. It covered numerous fields, but its first editor, Oxford don Mark Pattison, signalled that in it ‘only permanent works of taste and real additions to knowledge should be taken into account’, while the practice of signature testified to ‘the honesty and competence’ of its reviewers (Academy 2 (1870): 2, quoted by Tener and Woodfield 1989: 11–12). Both these features implied a publication with a more specialist orientation than the other weeklies. The last three decades of the century would see specialisation grow among reviewers recruited to the literary ranks. New universities were established, while Oxford and Cambridge extended their curricula beyond the traditional areas of the classics and mathematics, to give greater emphasis to the sciences, history and, eventually, English literature. Knowledge of all kinds thus became more institutionalised, and although the generalist reviewer did not disappear, specific expertise was called on more often – especially as the practice of signature that might affirm it became the norm. On a wider ideological level, Ian Small has argued, it was a breakdown in the social consensus as to the bases for knowledge and authority which drove these developments (Small 1991: passim). So evidence for the reviewer’s competence to pronounce on his (or, less often, her) subject was expected. Fields of knowledge, including imaginative literature – now more often construed as a specific category of writing – were increasingly distinguished from one another as separate disciplines. The Athenaeum’s novel reviewing, as I have noted, continued through the century to allow for variable reader tastes and expectations. Marysa Demoor has shown, however, that its poetry reviewing changed from the 1880s onwards. Not only was it entrusted more often to female reviewers, but it also became more focused on the formal features of the genre, and thus closer to twentieth-century practical criticism – especially in the work of Augusta Webster (Demoor 2000: 103ff.). Yet Joanne Shattock has highlighted that this development occurred in tandem with – and possibly because of – the more marginal space that poetry had come to occupy in the literary culture of the late nineteenth

­

literary and review journalism

311

century. Rather than being seen in broader contexts, as addressing concerns of public or at least general human interest, poetry had become a specialist arena (Shattock 2002: 395–7). Another salient development over the second half of the century relates to colonies which had come to have a significant population of British origin: Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. These had all developed flourishing press cultures with periodicals and newspapers of their own. In addition, some writers who lived in the colonies, or who had spent time there, made contributions to periodicals and newspapers in Britain. For reasons of space, what follows focuses on Australia (a group of separate colonies until Federation in 1901) and New Zealand. Here newspapers and magazines featured literary material, such as serialised novels, short stories, poetry and essays. Creative writers very often published fiction and poetry in local outlets. Yet British periodicals were exported to the colonies, while local publications often modelled themselves on British ones (there was a Melbourne Punch founded in 1855, for example) (McEldowney 1991: 547–8, 552–5; Webby 2000: 50ff.). The situation was not, however, straightforward. The Sydney weekly Bulletin became in the 1890s a vehicle for expressing both political and literary nationalism, while in New Zealand the term ‘Maoriland’ for the country represented both colonialist appropriation of the indigenous culture, and an effort to create a culture somewhat distinct from that of Britain (Stafford and Williams 2006: passim). As regards contributions to British periodicals on the part of writers based in Australia and New Zealand, reviewing of new publications was not prominent, as transport between Britain and Australasia was slow until late in the century. Nevertheless James Anthony Froude’s Oceana: or England and Her Colonies (1886) garnered forcibly expressed reviews from both the distinguished New Zealand anthropologist Edward Tregear (1846–1931) and the Australian politician Bernhard Wise (1858–1916). (Tregear, writing for the Westminster Review, accused Froude of inadequate knowledge of New Zealand, while Wise in Macmillan’s Magazine praised the English writer’s take on Australian political life.) Not surprisingly, much journalism from Britain’s antipodes focused on alerting British readers to aspects of the Australian or New Zealand scene. The New Zealand politician Julius Vogel (1835–99) produced, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, over thirty articles on matters concerning New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific, mainly for the Nineteenth Century and the Fortnightly Review. The Melbourne

312

joanne wilkes

newspaper tycoon David Syme (1827–1908), founder of the (stillextant) Age newspaper, published articles also in the Edinburgh, Fortnightly and Westminster Reviews, while the Sydney feminist activist Louisa Lawson (1848–1920), who ran her own paper (the Dawn) for seventeen years, wrote about ‘The Australian Bush-woman’ for the Englishwoman’s Review in 1889 (Johnston and Anderson 2005: 157–62). As far as literary criticism was concerned, the Australian journalist Arthur Patchett Martin (1851–1902) relocated to London in 1883 and became an advocate for Australian literature in the British press, notably for the poetry of Adam Lindsay Gordon. In 1895 the Australia-based W. H. Oliphant Smeaton covered Australian and New Zealand poetry for the Westminster Review, although he lamented its derivativeness (Johnston and Anderson 2005: 66–9). Especially notable is the work of Francis Adams (1862–93), a prolific journalist in Australia who was unusually au fait with literary and cultural trends in Britain. On returning to England in the early 1890s, he wrote for the Fortnightly Review on a variety of subjects, Australian and otherwise, including the Australian labour movement, Kipling, Shelley and Tennyson (Tasker n.d.: Non-fictional Prose).1 By the end of the nineteenth century the quarterlies launched in its early years were still being published, but were long past their heyday. Publications featuring reviews mostly appeared more frequently – monthly, weekly or daily. They appeared, too, all over the four kingdoms, and wherever Britons had settled abroad. Reviewing continued to encompass a broad range of fields, but questions of form and style were becoming more salient in the coverage of imaginative literature. In this latter field, too, discussion of fiction had become ever more prominent. Signed reviews were more common, but anonymity persisted in some periodicals, and especially in newspapers. Overall, the increase in the literacy rate made for diversification in audiences – a development fostered also by the burgeoning availability of cheap publications of all kinds. Reviewing might be encountered in periodicals that presupposed an educated readership, but might also be found in daily newspapers. If a reader of the first issue of the Edinburgh Review back in 1802 had been able to experience the publishing and reviewing world of a century later, that reader would have been amazed at the transformation.

1

I am grateful to Dr Meg Tasker for directing me to material relating to Australian writers’ contributions to nineteenth-century British periodicals.

Chapter Ten

‘ONE LANGUAGE IS QUITE SUFFICIENT FOR THE MASS’: METROPOLITAN JOURNALISM, THE BRITISH STATE AND THE ‘VERNACULAR’ PERIODICAL PRESS IN WALES, 1840–1914 Aled Gruffydd Jones

Anwiredd y “ Times” Mae swn y Times yn y tir – yn felldith, Gyda’i falldod anwir; Trwy Walia’i antur welir I dyru gwawd ar y Gwir.   – Pedrog, Y Genedl Gymreig, 8 Chwefror 18881 During the winter months of 1887 the Times newspaper led a concerted campaign against the uses being made of Welsh in newspapers and periodicals. While there was little new in its disparagement of the language itself, having famously noted in 1866 that Welsh was a ‘dead’ tongue, the negative attention of 1887–8 specifically targeted the elision between radical conspiracies and their subversive forms of expression by means of a ‘secret’ language in the popular prints. Previous assaults had laid emphasis on integrating the Welsh into key areas of state control, including the judicial system, the Established Church and education, with lower-level concerns expressed around notions of ‘progress’, where monoglot Welsh-speakers were considered to have 1

Translation: ‘The Lies of the “Times” / The clamour of the Times is abroad in the land – a curse, / A blight of untruth; Through Wales its exploits are seen / Pouring scorn on the Truth’, ‘Pedrog’ (John Owen Williams, 1853–1932), Y Genedl Gymreig, 8 February 1888.

313

314

aled gruffydd jones

Figure 10.1  Opening verses, Anwiredd y “ Times”, 1888 (By permission of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/National Library of Wales)

excluded themselves from, for example, beneficial forms of labour market mobility. During the ‘Great Depression’ of the 1870s renewed political concerns emerged as a consequence of the growth of Irish and Indian separatism, trades union activism and incipient socialism. Metropolitan opinion-formers, and their ideological allies in the British state, once more looked with mounting unease at the rapidly expanding popular press, especially those titles published in languages they could not easily read. The use of the term ‘the vernacular press’ in relation to Welsh-language journalism was itself borrowed, most visibly after about 1879, from numerous British legislative efforts to suppress the ‘vernacular’ indigenous-language newspaper press in India. The notion of a dangerous ‘mass’, breaking free of mid-Victorian mechanisms of social control and operating effectively beyond the sphere of influence of the English language, was fundamental to the often fractious relationship between the ‘vernacular’ press and its Englishlanguage counterparts in both England and Wales. This tension was in part a manifestation of what Benedict Anderson termed ‘the explosive interaction between capitalism, technology and human linguistic diversity’ (Anderson 1983: 57) in the historical process of ‘assembling’ hegemonic national identities. By examining the tendency of ‘printcapitalism’, as he termed it, to create dominant ‘languages-of-power’

­

the ‘vernacular’ periodical press in wales

315

within the territories of the British imperial metropole, and the resistance to that process, it may be possible to understand better some of the political and cultural dynamics that shaped significant aspects of the newspaper and periodical press in Britain and Ireland during and after the nineteenth century. Far from being isolated, outlying examples of popular print, the nineteenth-century Welsh-language periodical and newspaper press had grown in parallel with the English-language dailies and weeklies of Britain and Ireland, inhabited the same cultural economy, and had strongly interwoven histories. As early as May 1835 the Chartist Hugh Williams in Carmarthen had described how the Poor Man’s Guardian had ‘silently’ made its way ‘into different parts of this country … I was one of the first, if not the first, to take in your papers in this country, and to circulate and encourage them’ (Poor Man’s Guardian, 16 May 1835). But while the influx of English-language prints were generally welcomed in parts of Wales, border regions were perhaps understandably more cautious about the coexistence of two languages in one polity. In Worcester, the local weekly urged ‘every Welshman [to] learn English’, while an aptly pseudonomised correspondent, Ευφωνοσ, argued that There is a very great anomaly in different languages being spoken by the people living under a home Government; and besides this, the Welsh language itself is of so barbarous a character that the sooner it is got rid of the better … it would be better to substitute our language. (Worcester Journal, 13 August 1840) Early warning that the ‘anomalous’ use of two languages might be deemed more significant, and socially dangerous, than if judged on the basis of aesthetics, appeared in the London press at the height of the Chartist agitation, when the Morning Chronicle of 7 September 1843 noted that Thomas Campbell Foster, the Times correspondent sent to cover the Rebecca Riots in Carmarthenshire, had drawn upon translations from a ‘Welsh periodical’ to lay the blame for the ‘Welsh Riots’ on Dissenting ministers who were ‘preaching sedition to their people’. Selective translations into English of this kind were to become far more common in the London newspapers of the 1880s and 1890s. The Welsh-language periodical prints to which the Times had attributed the intense spate of crowd violence in West Wales in 1843 had first appeared more than a century earlier, in 1735, but had developed a significant presence in the culture only after the establishment of Trysorfa Gwybodaeth neu Eurgrawn Gymraeg in March 1770, followed by Y Cylchgrawn Cynmraeg in 1793, both manifestations of a new form of political and religious Nonconformity. In

316

aled gruffydd jones

the early nineteenth century several Welsh titles became increasingly associated with sectarian divisions within the secession from Anglicanism, such as, among a number of others, Trysorfa (1809) and Y Drysorfa (1831) by the Calvinistic Methodists, the Baptist Seren Gomer (1818) and Y Dysgedydd, journal of the Independents (1821), and Yr Ymofynnydd (1847), run by the Unitarians. In 1835 Yr Haul appeared as the countervailing voice of the Anglican Church and Conservatism in Wales. These were principally monthly publications, distributed through denominational subscription networks, carrying few if any advertisements, but with a broad range of news items from across the globe. Weekly newspapers in Welsh began, experimentally, with Joseph Harris’s Seren Gomer in Swansea between January and August 1814, but did not become an established feature of print culture in Wales until the launching of Y Newyddiadur Hanesyddol/ Cronicl yr Oes in Mold in 1835, and Yr Amserau in Liverpool in 1843 as the first (barely) financially viable title, being briefly published in Douglas on the Isle of Man to avoid the stamp duty. After losing readers due to its opposition to the Crimean War, in 1859 the title was sold to the Denbigh printing entrepreneur, newspaper editor and Liberal spokesman Thomas Gee, to create what would become one of the most impactful Welsh-language newspapers of the nineteenth century, Baner ac Amserau Cymru. From the mid-1850s to the end of the century some twenty-three other broadly successful Welsh-language weekly newspaper titles were established, notably Yr Herald Cymraeg in 1854 and Y Genedl Gymreig in 1877 (Humphreys 1945: 13–16). In total, some one hundred newspaper titles were published in Welsh during the nineteenth century, many, though not by any means all, of short duration (Jones 2002: fig. 2, p. 3). Fears of hidden sedition, facilitated by non-English-language newspapers such as a number of those cited above, continued for several decades after the Rebecca Riots and underwent a further intensification after the Report of the Commissioners of Enquiry into the State of Education in Wales was released in 1847. The ‘Treason of the Blue Books’, as the report became popularly known in Wales, set into motion a series of well-intentioned reform movements, including a ‘Society for Improving the Condition of the Welsh’ established by Welsh émigrés in London, which took the view that educational and moral improvement would be accelerated by the provision in print of popular useful knowledge in Welsh. Prompted by the London-based Cymreigyddion Society, and the example set by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge’s ‘March of Progress’, a public meeting was held in Gray’s Inn Road in June 1850 that included the Earl

­

the ‘vernacular’ periodical press in wales

317

of Powis, the Dean of Bangor and Sir Thomas Phillips. There they estimated that half of Wales’s population of 1,045,753 recorded in the 1841 Census ‘either understood no other language than Welsh, or employed that tongue as the ordinary medium of familiar communication’. They noted that not only was public worship conducted in the language in a large number of the parishes … but periodical publications, printed in that language, had an aggregate circulation of 60,000 copies, and were probably read by 200,000 persons. It was further stated that religious and political controversies entered largely into the composition of these publications. (Morning Advertiser, 17 June 1850) Furthermore, they made the point that it was ignorance of English, rather than a knowledge of Welsh, that ‘was the great obstacle to the advancement of the native population’. Thus, they argued, ‘the acquisition of knowledge by the people in their own tongue’ would increase both the desire and the ability to acquire and employ the English language. In conclusion, the new Society declared its manifesto, which was to provide for Welshmen useful information by means of works printed in their own language, from which controversial divinity and party politics should be excluded, (as) an undertaking in which all who were connected with the Principality by birth, residence, property, or official duty, might fitly co-operate, whether they deemed the prevalence of the language an advantage to be cherished, or an inconvenience to be lamented. (Morning Advertiser, 17 June 1850) The immediate impetus behind the formation of this ­­metropolitan social reform society was a treatise addressed to Edward James Herbert, 3rd Earl of Powis, by the Welsh architect and poet John Jones, Talhaiarn, last President of the Cymreigyddion Society (1794–1855). It was first delivered orally at a public meeting at his birthplace in Llanfair Talhaiarn, Denbighshire, in the same month. Mounting a case for the effective ‘Diffusion of Secular Knowledge in Wales’, Jones insisted that ‘the only object is usefulness’, and to that end, useful knowledge was to be provided in the Welsh language specifically in order for monoglot speakers of Welsh to be thus encouraged, even obliged, to learn English. The crux of his argument revealed both the nature and the extent of the cultural tensions involved in the relationship, as understood at the time by the Cymreigyddion, between the two languages and their social uses.

318

aled gruffydd jones

Experience proves that to neglect the Welsh language is to abandon the interests of the people; and that whatever use has been made of that language for the instruction of the people, it has tended to raise their character, and to accelerate the progress of English. The hostility shown towards the Welsh language has induced our poorer countrymen to cling to it the more. The poorest class … have created for themselves a literature which, although highly creditable to them, is injuriously exclusive … the peasantry of Wales are completely cut off from their natural teachers and protectors by a language which the one class adores, and the other dislikes. (North Wales Chronicle, 22 June 1850) It would also be mistaken to assume that English mid-century attitudes to Welsh were uniformly hostile. At least two London-based periodicals shared the view that, in relation to the use of Welsh in the Welsh Church, ‘to plant prelates, or inferior priests, who know nothing more of the Welsh language than they do of the Chinese, is an insult as well as an injustice. It is putting the gravest conceivable affront upon the Welsh people. They have a living language, rich in the copiousness of its terms, and remarkable for the power of its expression,’ while adding darkly that ‘Wales is a hotbed of dissent. The principality swarms with Dissenters. How could it be otherwise?’ (Morning Advertiser, 4 September 1851; Freeman’s Journal, 5 September 1851). Other publications, such as the British Workman, translated their content into Welsh. A trial version, sold as Y Gweithiwr Prydeinig, neu’r British Workman yn Gymraeg, was to be issued monthly for one year from 1 January 1861, although it is evident that the first issue failed to reach the target of 20,000 subscribers required to justify its continuation (Y Gweithiwr Prydeinig, neu’r British Workman yn Gymraeg, 1 Awst 1860, prawf-rifyn). While sections of the Welsh press continued to express a wish to ‘bury the Welsh in the Atlantic’ (‘The Welsh Language and the Welsh People’, Pontypool Free Press, 14 July 1860, a reply to ‘John Bull’, writing in the Star of Gwent, 1 July 1860), the Reverend Newman Hall, a number of whose theological books had been translated into Welsh, vividly described to a ‘crowded hall’ at Surrey Chapel in November 1862 his experiences at the Caernarfon Eisteddfod earlier that year. There, 2000 persons were present, and several thousands were outside, unable to gain admission. They were persons, for the most part, belonging to the labouring class, who had given up their work and travelled a considerable distance in order to be present.

­

the ‘vernacular’ periodical press in wales

319

They were there, he emphasised, to listen to music and poetry ‘with no drinking and no smoking going on’, the hallmarks, he insisted, of a ‘moral people’ (South London Chronicle, 22 November 1862). Hall’s favourable impression of the Eisteddfod at Caernarfon in 1862 set the scene for what would become the most high-profile public controversy about the Welsh language in the English press in the midnineteenth century. Four years later, Matthew Arnold was invited to attend the 1866 Eisteddfod after having published a series of articles on Celtic Literature in the Cornhill Magazine between March and July of that year. Failing to attend, he responded instead by writing a letter that was both read out at the opening Gorsedd at Chester, and published simultaneously in the Times and the Pall Mall Gazette on 6 September 1866. It called for the establishment of a Chair of Celtic Literature at Oxford and, while advocating the spread of the English language in Wales, warned against the ‘philistinism’ of the English regarding the moral values embodied in the Welsh language and its ancient literature. The Pall Mall Gazette’s response was nuanced, noting with approval Arnold’s advocacy of bilingualism ‘among all classes’ in Wales, while decrying the ‘Philistinism of our middle-class’, and stressed, as Arnold had done, the importance of understanding ‘what the Celts can do for England’ by communicating their ‘good qualities’ (Pall Mall Gazette, 6 September 1866; see also Percy Ellen Smythe, Pall Mall Gazette, 19 March 1866, for an earlier, broadly sympathetic review of Arnold’s Cornhill series ‘On the Study of Celtic Literature’). The Times, however, adopted a far darker, more threatening tone, in an outright riposte to Arnold’s entire premise. ‘We are to be invaded by the Welsh language and literature’, it declared. ‘The Welsh language is the curse of Wales’, excluding the Welsh from the ‘civilization, the improvement and the material prosperity of their English neighbours’. Arnold appeared to be ‘more Welsh than the Welsh’, while ‘all that is valuable in the language belongs to the past’. ‘For all practical purposes’, it announced, ‘Welsh is a dead language’, and the Eisteddfod ‘a foolish interference with the natural progress of civilization and prosperity’. If Wales and the Welsh are ever thoroughly to share in the material prosperity, and, in spite of Mr Arnold, we will add the culture and the morality of England, they must forget their isolated language, and learn to speak English, and nothing else. ‘One language’, it insisted, ‘is quite sufficient for the mass’ (Times, 8 September 1866; repeated, for example, in Evening Mail, Friday, 7 September to Monday, 10 September 1866).

320

aled gruffydd jones

The Times’s non-bylined condemnation of Arnold’s ‘cultural treason’ (Dawson and Pfordresher 1979: 159) elicited a range of responses, not all of which were supportive. A correspondent to the Evening Mail stressed that I cannot admit that ignorance of the English language proves want of civilization. The use which the English and the Welsh make of their respective languages would be a fairer means of judging on this point. (Evening Mail, 17 September 1866) Furthermore, it pointed out that the ‘Eisteddfod has little or no influence in keeping the English language out of the Principality’, the festival being far more concerned with composition and music than ‘the honour of the Welsh language’. During the months that followed, writers such as H. L. Spring continued to echo the position adopted by the Times in 1866, claiming that it was ‘utterly impossible to save the Welsh language from oblivion’, given that ‘it is one of the unchangeable laws of Nature that the weak must give way to the strong’, and that ‘to learn a language that is doomed to die – that is in fact in the last stages of decline – would be exceedingly impolitic’ (Spring 1867: 26–7). Impolitic or not, the Welsh-language newspaper and periodical press continued to grow in numbers of titles and reach in Wales, England, North America and Australia in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, as did the English-language press, for similar reasons, elsewhere in Britain and Ireland and beyond. As the growth of the newspaper and periodical press grew in parallel with industrial expansion, tax reform, railway transport and the technological developments of mid-century printing, so criticism of Welsh-language titles shifted from an assault on the continued existence of the language itself to more specific, and often ad hominem, attacks on the quality of its journalism and the motives of its journalists. Citing a ‘free translation’ of an article written by John Griffith, London correspondent of the weekly Baner ac Amserau Cymru, as a ‘fair example of the quality of the literature of the Welsh press’, the London Evening Standard in August 1869 drew the following dire conclusions: The writer is evidently an ignorant, uneducated man … It abounds with the most crude and puerile notions on politics, and is largely interspersed with quotations from the Holy Scripture, which every right-minded man must regard as little short of blasphemy  … Such, sir, I assure your English readers is the abominable stuff that

­

the ‘vernacular’ periodical press in wales

321

weekly issues from the Welsh press – such the calibre of the men by whom it is conducted … It is to be feared their effect upon the unsophisticated Welshman, who speaks his own language only … and who is, therefore, dependent upon his weekly Welsh paper for all his information concerning the outer world … is very injurious. (London Evening Standard, 25 August 1869) Given the stream of invective that had flowed for some two decades since the publication of the Report of the Commissioners of Enquiry on the State of Education in Wales in 1847, it is hardly surprising that some Welsh voices were tempted to turn the tables on the London press and adopt the high moral ground, the intellectual basis for which Arnold had already provided in his essays of the mid-1860s. Thus, speaking at the Porthmadog Eisteddfod in August 1872, Osborne Morgan, Liberal MP since 1868 for Meirionnydd, noted that the ‘dearth of healthy, humanizing amusements in England was becoming not merely a reproach to our civilization, but positively a danger to the State’. The introduction of literary and musical festivals on the Eisteddfodic model into ‘some of the large English manufacturing towns, where now the sole resort of the working classes was the public-house, and his only amusement the “penny gaff ”’, he argued, might mitigate or even prevent outbreaks of social disorder in those urban areas. As a mechanism for the reform of dangerous social manners, Morgan proposed one Eisteddfod ‘to be worth twenty penal enactments’ (London Daily News, 30 August 1872). While the informal popular theatre of the ‘penny gaffs’ were being supplanted by the music hall, and had largely disappeared by the end of the century (Springhall 2006: 36), Morgan could still play on their capacity to incite public disorder and, combined with the consumption of alcohol, pose a ‘danger to the State’. While this was in all likelihood no more than a knowing nod towards decades of hostility, one which caused no little amusement among his Porthmadog audience, his association of cultural practice and an endangered state would prove to be a fateful one that would haunt the Welsh-language press, particularly in North Wales, for the remainder of the century and beyond. Earlier that same year Osborne Morgan had moved a motion on the floor of the House of Commons to the effect that ‘the judge of a county court district in which the Welsh language was generally spoken should be able to speak and understand that language’. In support of the motion, he explained that in Merioneth (Sir Feirionnydd) and parts of Cardigan (Sir Aberteifi), Carmarthen (Sir Gaerfyrddin) and Montgomery (Sir Drefaldwyn),

322

aled gruffydd jones

four-fifths of the people spoke Welsh and understood no other language and the consequence was that the Welsh juries and the English judges were often at cross-purposes. To the poor people of Wales the English language was no better than Chinese … like … sending out a judge to one of the Indian courts who did not understand Hindostani. (London Evening Standard, 3 March 1872) Morgan’s association of Welsh with the languages of India would also return to cast a dark shadow over journalism in Wales, as the public debate about its rationale and future prospects entered a different, more highly politicised form. W. E. Gladstone, addressing the Gorsedd of the Mold Eisteddfod in August 1873, had railed against attempts by the British State in the past to undermine public and private uses of the language, insisting that ‘they wanted to do you good against your will’ (Morning Post, 20 August 1873). More surprising, however, was the increasing interest taken by the Conservatives in building a presence in the rapidly developing public sphere of the Welsh-language newspaper and periodical press. Writing in the London Evening Standard of 16 March 1874 under the headline ‘The Radical and Conservative Press in Wales’, a correspondent took to task Y Dywysogaeth, a Tory and Church-supporting weekly established in 1870, noting that its management comprised gentlemen who, although they may know Wales outwardly, are but very superficially acquainted with the inner life of the Welsh people, quite ignorant of the Welsh language, and therefore themselves incapable of reading a single article in the newspaper by which they have gallantly undertaken to instruct the Welshreading people. With a circulation of no more than 3,500 in a Welsh-reading population which the author estimated to be in the region of 800,000, it was dwarfed by the ten main radical papers, which between them boasted a print run of some 40,000–50,000 copies. To engage Welsh readers with Conservative principles in their own language, the writer welcomed the establishment of a new Welsh Conservative organ, Llais y Wlad, to seek to resolve the ‘Welsh language difficulty of Conservatism in Wales’. The rationale behind this strategy was described as follows: The Conservative squires are too often unable to speak [Welsh], and so to reach the hearts and minds of the people. I am anxious to see the knowledge of English promoted as quickly as possible. Welsh will die, but not for many a long day. You cannot with impunity kill by violent means an old language before its time, though

­

the ‘vernacular’ periodical press in wales

323

it may appear to be in your way and to retard improvements, any more than you can murder an obstructive old man. As long as Welsh is the every-day language of 800,000 of the people of Wales, Conservatism must not neglect to influence them through it. The English Conservative press is influential in Wales among the 400,000 people who can read it, but how can English newspapers enlighten the masses, who cannot understand a sentence of that language? … In order to speak with authority upon the merits of the Welsh press, it is necessary to know the inner life of the Welsh people, and to understand the language. Significantly, the writer made this case for Conservative moral and financial support for Llais y Wlad in a London newspaper, no doubt aware of the historical difficulties faced by Tory-leaning titles of remaining financially viable without external largesse. Even the Englishlanguage Wrexham Guardian had failed in the 1870s to cover its costs, despite its role in countering ‘the influence of the local press  … as Newspapers are the chief instruments of political education’ (MSS D/ KT/22 1878). Following a long and difficult gestation period, Anglican Conservatism finally succeeded in launching its own weekly newspaper in Welsh, Y Llan, in 1881, thus enabling the Church, the Tory Party and the landowner interest to challenge the dominant journalism of Liberal Nonconformity on its own territory. While the view that ‘the desirability of preserving the Welsh language [was] something of a mistake’ remained a common refrain in much of the metropolitan press (for example, Globe and Traveller, 31 October 1878), in October 1878 the Liberal MP Watkin Williams observed that the periodical literature of Wales had ‘increased to an enormous extent of late years’, and that there were more people speaking Welsh at that point in history than there had been ‘in the days of Queen Elizabeth’ (Morning Post, 3 October 1878). The following month, no less a leading Establishment figure than the Bishop of St Asaph had also put forward a more balanced position, noting only that he ‘looked forward to the day when every inhabitant of the Principality would be able to speak English as well as Welsh’ (Morning Post, 1 November 1878). While the term may have been in use far earlier, the first discoverable reference to the Welsh language as a ‘vernacular’ press may be found in the Conservative Cardiff daily newspaper, the Western Mail, on 13 January 1879 (‘The Church and the Vernacular Press of Wales’). Here again the claim was made, specifically in relation to the relationship between the Welsh language and the Established Church, that ‘the

324

aled gruffydd jones

population of Wales is more than a million and a quarter; and about one half of that number are Welsh speaking, Welsh reading, Welsh thinking’. The Church could not survive ‘as a living body’, it continued, without adequate and powerful representation in the press. Her enemies know this fact … The good work of the clergy is more than ­­counter-acted by the Dissenting newspapers. The press of Saturday is more than a match for the pulpit of Sunday. Complaining that there was ‘not a chapel throughout the length and breadth of the land without its newspaper correspondent and distributor’, the article warned that the radical press used the most powerful artillery, and adopt the most approved tactics of modern warfare with the merciless cruelty of savages, without honour and without compunction. And we bring to meet them the most antiquated weapons entrusted to the feeblest hands, ungeneralled, unorganised, without the means or sinews of war. The Church, he emphasised, needed sympathetic Welsh-language newspapers, and Welsh-language versions of the Quarterly Magazine and the Nineteenth Century, and asked whether ‘Welshmen (cannot) produce something akin to this for their own monoglot countrymen?’ (See also Wrexham Guardian, 15 March 1879.) Sensing a new, Establishment threat, the Liberal Cardiff Times berated the ‘Degrading Influences of the Tory Press in Wales’ by publishing English translations from Llais y Wlad as grounds for dismissing it as ‘a disgrace to journalism’ because of its ‘appeals to ignorance’ (Cardiff Times, 12 April 1884). Thus, between about 1866 and 1884, advocates of Liberal journalism in the Welsh language had employed in their defence three methods and forms of analysis: English translations from the original Welsh to expose their content to wider audience; identifying the Welsh-language press with developments elsewhere in the British Empire, India in particular; and seeking to popularise the notion that cultural practices could pose a real and imminent danger to the state. In the course of the following decade, each tactic would be used against them in a muscular campaign, initiated in London, but with strong Conservative backing in Wales, often not against the language itself, but rather the concealed political objectives of its journalism. In the face of that renewed onslaught, the Cardiff Times of 25 April 1885 identified the critical weakness of Welsh as a public language, which was that it was ‘not the language of the Government’. If, ‘in adopting English, we do not become Englishmen’, the editor of

­

the ‘vernacular’ periodical press in wales

325

the Cardiff Times had realised, then the debate about the role of the language in public journalism had entered a different phase, one that would unavoidably embroil it in a struggle over national identity, and thus also of politics. The ‘lies of the “Times”’ to which Pedrog had objected in his verse in Y Genedl Gymreig of February 1888, specifically referred to a series of articles, principally in the Times but which also appeared in a number of other titles, and which had been printed with increasing regularity since the early months of the previous year (Figures 10.2 and 10.3). An early indication of a more aggressive approach to Welsh-language journalism could be discerned at a meeting of the landowner pressure

Figure 10.2  Baner ac Amserau Cymru (By permission of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/National Library of Wales)

326

aled gruffydd jones

Figure 10.3  Y Genedl Gymreig (By permission of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/National Library of Wales)

group, the North Wales Property Defence Association, held in December 1886. In his introduction, the chair, Lord Penrhyn, referred specifically to the danger posed to landowner interests by the Welsh-language press, which was, he noted, ‘often as revolutionary and disloyal as anything in the Irish press, and rather more communistic’, and viewed the growth of ‘class hatred and war against property’ among the tenantry as ‘the direct outcome of the language of the Welsh press’ (Anon. MSS, 1888). Those concerns were soon transferred into the public arena, both verbally and, most potently, in print. These began with a number of reports of a public lecture on the subject of ‘The vernacular press’, delivered by James Edmund Vincent (1857–1909) in Denbigh in mid-February 1887 (North Wales Chronicle,

­

the ‘vernacular’ periodical press in wales

327

20 February 1887). Vincent, the Eton- and Oxford-educated son of the vicar of Caernarfon, had returned to North Wales as a barrister and writer for the Law Times, before joining the staff of the Times as a descriptive reporter and special correspondent in 1886. In his lecture, Vincent had noted that ‘the spirit of the vernacular Press is the reverse of fine feeling. It breathes disloyalty and sedition.’ Drawing on English translations from Welsh weeklies including Y Gweithiwr, he exposed key elements of their content to a non-Welsh-speaking audience in following terms: ‘addressing her Majesty the Queen, the rabid rag says: “Mrs. Vic, you become more and more Tory every day. Remember the fate of your Uncle Charles, who had to leave his Throne with his head in his hands.”’ He went on to note that the ‘thin end of the Republican wedge had already been put in the Parliament by Mr Bradlaugh’ (North Wales Chronicle, 20 February 1887). The speech skilfully conflated the rise of agrarian dissent, social radicalism, republicanism and Nonconformity in Wales, while associating each of them with the subversive use of the Welsh language in weekly news journalism. The issue was simultaneously taken up by an essay on ‘The Welsh Vernacular Press and Its Teaching’ in the St James’s Gazette of 19 February 1887, which again quoted Vincent’s references to the Welsh press as ‘poisoning the minds’ of tenant farmers and quarrymen, ending with the comment that ‘since the above was written the virulence of the papers has increased, and they are positively preaching revolution and disloyalty’. By June of the same year a number of other London titles had joined the fray. The Spectator considered it ‘anything but pleasant to read of such resistance to the ordinary law within 300 miles of the capital’, while the Saturday Review announced that it was ‘time for the “whiff of grape-shot” in Wales [where] there need be not the slightest hesitation as to the employment of the military’. In similar vein, John Bull insisted ‘that the Welsh farmers must be dealt with before their campaign goes further … Taffy is not a bad fellow if we do not run away from him’ (‘The Government and Welsh Lawlessness’, St James’s Gazette, 4 June 1887). It was at the end of that summer, though, that the stakes were to be raised to an extent that alarmed observers within and outside Wales itself. Titles such as the Globe and Traveller, on 27 September 1887, warned of ‘A Danger in Wales’. Sensing that ‘many of the most striking features of the Irish difficulty are being reproduced in a threatening form’ there, it focused attention again on an article by James Edmund Vincent that intensified the fear of what was being communicated in a language they could not understand. ‘The vernacular Press of Wales,’ it stated, ‘which is read by the people but

328

aled gruffydd jones

is a sealed book to Englishmen, offers dangerous facilities for disseminating incitements to violence and for the propagation of subversive doctrines without check’ (Globe and Traveller, 27 September 1887). In consequence, it pressed for measures of newspaper surveillance and coercion to be instituted, in Wales as in Ireland, by the British government. But the most potent piece appeared on the same day, authored by James Edmund Vincent himself, in the first of his series of seventeen ‘Letters from Wales’, published in the Times between 27 September 1887 and 20 August 1888, and subsequently reissued in book form (Special Correspondent 1889: 4–20). Focusing attention on his home county of ‘Carnarvonshire’, and the growing challenge being mounted by Liberal Nonconformity to the political and legal powers of the great landed estates of Lords Penrhyn, Newborough and the Assheton Smith-owned Faenol (ibid.: 4–5), Vincent again turned his attention to the ‘evil’ work of the ‘vernacular press’ (ibid.: 11–12; Jones 1993: 168–76). While it formed only one paragraph in a seventeen-page essay, it again ignited a flurry of responses, not all of which were favourable. Some strong metropolitan voices of opposition, such as the Liberal London Daily News, which in 1887 noted how the Times had ‘diverted its staff of private detectives from Ireland to Wales’, and that the first of Vincent’s ‘Letters from Wales’ had hinted ‘in no obscure fashion at the possibilities of coercion for Wales’. ‘Our contemporary is scandalised by the demand for larger local liberties coming from so many parts of the United Kingdom, and it warns the offenders … that it will stand no nonsense …’, it stated. ‘The Times has its eye upon Wales, and it makes a great show of calling the policeman in order to frighten the Principality’ (London Daily News, 28 September 1887). Furthermore, blaming the Welsh-language press for the growing social unrest in Wales was in its view merely a convenient means of dispensing ‘with the necessity of characterizing … in detail’ the underlying social drivers of disaffection. Such an approach was most significant as an example of the fanaticism of political intolerance that is the most dangerous symptom of our times. It betrays the arbitrary feeling of the men now in power. This is what they are doing in Ireland, desire to do in Wales, and would do in England if only the people let them. (‘A Significant Hint’, London Daily News, 28 September 1887) Opposition to the coercion of the Welsh-language press could also be found in other metropolitan arenas. For example, at an open meeting

­

the ‘vernacular’ periodical press in wales

329

held in the Beehive Assembly Rooms to consider the opening of a Liberal Club in Streatham, the chair, W. J. Bell, made pointed reference to the tone adopted earlier in the week by the Times: The Times had said that it was time the Government looked after the Welsh papers, which meant that the vernacular Press of Wales, like that of India, should be forcibly suppressed or revised. (‘Shame’) … Such a thing ought to be resisted. The right of rebellion was as divine as the right of Government. Of course the responsibility of rebellion was enormous, but rebellion was justified when the laws were harsh and the Government tyrannous. (Applause). (Croydon Advertiser and East Surrey Reporter, 1 October 1887) In Wales, too, newspaper editors explicitly reacted to the hostility of the Times and other newspapers. Y Genedl Gymreig of 5 October 1887 clearly took seriously the implicit threat of coercion embedded in Vincent’s first ‘Letter from Wales’, and warned that, as the Tories were now in power, it was difficult to predict how soon they would show their determination to undermine civil rights and ignore the ‘voice of the people’ in Wales (Y Genedl Gymreig, 5 Hydref 1887). A more ­­defiant tone was struck by the English-language Liberal press of South Wales, who aptly summed up in one of a series of responses to J. E. Vincent in the South Wales Daily News that we have once more an illustration of the resolution of a certain class to put an end to all public expression of grievances by gagging the press. Do the natives of India find fault with British rule? ‘Gag the vernacular press.’ Do the Irish murmur? ‘Imprison their editors.’ Is there any agitation against tithes, against high rents, against threatened evictions, against an alien Church in Wales? ‘The vernacular press is at the root of the matter. Put that down, and Wales will be meek and submissive as a lamb.’ This is, in effect, the case which the Times is trying to make out, but it has come too late to the field. It may save itself the trouble. The time for such a stratagem to succeed is dead and gone. (South Wales Daily News, 5 November 1887) Yet, later the same week, the secretary of the Property Defence Association, George H. M. Owen, sent a confidential memo to his ­­members to warn them that the ‘Welsh Radical press … contained dangerous and insidious teachings’ that needed to be publicly refuted  (Owen 1887). Vincent, too, returned to the attack in his letters to the Times of 6 October 1887 and 8 October 1887, in which he

330

aled gruffydd jones

respectively savaged Thomas Gee’s Baner ac Amserau Cymru and Y Genedl Gymreig. The principal strategy for the refutation of radical writing in the Welsh-language press involved the copious use of translations. In his first ‘Letter’, of 26 December 1887, Vincent based his assault on ‘the growth of journalism, and of vernacular journalism in particular’ in Wales, on translated extracts from Baner ac Amserau Cymru, Y Werin and Y Genedl Gymreig, drawing the conclusion that ‘Wales supports more journals in proportion to its population than any other part of the civilized world’. Its ‘prosperity and … strength’, moreover, relied on the social status of Nonconformist ministers, many of whom it was claimed, walked ‘straight from the chapel to the editorial room’. Other English titles followed his example. The Essex Standard of 28 January 1888 published brief translations from Yr Herald Cymraeg, Y Genedl Gymreig, Baner ac Amserau Cymru and Y Werin, all in the service of demanding the imposition of coercion in Wales. Conversely, the Liberal South Wales Daily News of 28 December 1887 and the Cardiff Times of 31 December 1887 both reprinted in full the ninth of Vincent’s ‘Letters from Wales’, precisely in order to engage critically with its underlying arguments. This twenty-four-page essay on ‘The Welsh Press’, published in the Times on 26 December 1887, was intended to convey to ‘English readers … the strength of the influence exercised by the Welsh vernacular Press upon the people of Wales’ (Special Correspondent 1889: 116), noting that ‘journalism is the favourite field of the Welsh writer’ (ibid.: 118). The report gave a detailed description of the key Welsh-language titles across Wales, explained the difficulties of the translation of idioms, and proceeded to adumbrate a close textual analysis of content based on a selection of translated extracts, shaking out what he considered to be logical flaws, inconsistent narratives and fraudulent heuristic devices with the damning question, ‘Is it just or generous to attempt to convert an honourable pride of race into a petulant and hopeless nationalism?’ The answer, he conceded, depended wholly on whether ‘Home Rule for Wales is a possibility … [or] a chimerical absurdity’ (ibid.: 139). For Vincent, then, the danger posed by the Welsh ‘vernacular’ press lay not only in its disruptive social and cultural impacts, but in their larger political consequences. The increasingly fractious controversy over language in the Welsh press involved not only rival newspaper titles and their associated institutions and pressure groups, but also those far closer to government and the policies of the state. In particular, Conservative MPs openly engaged with it, often in highly polemical fashion. Arthur Forwood, Liverpool merchant shipping magnate and

­

the ‘vernacular’ periodical press in wales

331

Conservative MP for Ormskirk, pondered ‘the lingual difficulty’ at a Conservative Party meeting in Llanrwst in January 1888. ‘The bilingual difficulty was … the obstacle … the Separatist agitators traded upon,’ he argued, and they did so unchallenged since they were written in Welsh (Morning Post, 21 January 1888). The following month, E.  Swetenham, Conservative MP for the Caernarfon District, complained of ‘the licence of the Welsh vernacular press’, at a Conservative meeting in Gresford Bank, near Wrexham. These were, he announced, critical times … There was at the present time … a very powerful engine in the State, viz the Press … articles were written in the Welsh language because it was thought that they would not be so readily understood by the persons who would be able to show how wrong it was. He then read out translations of articles from Y Goleuad to demonstrate Calvinistic Methodist support for Gladstone and Home Rule (North Wales Chronicle, 18 February 1888). In similar vein, in April 1888 Sir John Puleston, MP for Plymouth Devonport, once himself a journalist working for Welsh newspapers in Scranton, Philadelphia, spoke at a Conservative Party meeting in Caernarfon of the need to take ‘firm steps to counteract the vernacular Welsh Radical Press’. The general view among Conservatives, then, was that ‘the vernacular Press in Wales [had] been lamentably ignored in relation to its importance’, and that significant lessons needed to be learned with regard to how printed media might to employed more effectively to win the political argument in a linguistically complex society. Thus, the Globe could argue that Conservatives needed to ‘utilise the machinery of the Welsh Press … to carry the war into the very heart of the enemy’s country’ (Globe, 8 February 1888). Little, however, was achieved in the months that followed, until Vincent restarted the debate in November 1888 with the publication of an essay on ‘The Vernacular Press of Wales’ in the National Review that further developed themes introduced in his ninth ‘Letter from Wales’ in the Times of 26 December the previous year. Again, his theme captured the headlines, as his anxieties were echoed in newspapers across England and Wales. In Birmingham, readers were told that Welsh-language newspapers were being ‘used to preach sedition, and lawlessness and cruelty’ (Birmingham Daily Post, 8 November 1888). In Dublin, Vincent was congratulated on his ‘remarkable paper … on the vernacular Press of Wales’, proposing that ‘our own United Ireland might take a lesson in violence from some of its Welsh contemporaries’, a claim seemingly supported by the copious use of quotations

332

aled gruffydd jones

translated from Y Werin (Dublin Daily Express, 6 November 1888; a view echoed in the Pall Mall Gazette, 16 August 1889: ‘The vigour of United Ireland is already tame beside the vernacular press of Wales.’ See also the Army and Navy Gazette, 10 November 1888). In this way, Vincent’s assault on Welsh ‘vernacular’ journalism brought it to the attention of readers across Britain and Ireland, and the Cardiff Times of 17 November 1888 sardonically thanked him for his ‘gratuitous advertisement’ for Y Werin in particular. The ‘primary duty’ of newspapers such as Y Werin, it argued, was ‘the rousing of the nation to take part in “the Armageddon of the ages”‘, and in that task Vincent had done ‘great if unintentional good to the national movement in the principality. Attacks like his spur on those who are inclined to drag at the wheels of our national progress’ (Cardiff Times, 17 November 1888). By eliding the use of the language in radical journalism with a nascent national identity, however, Vincent’s work further polarised attitudes. The Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser of 15 May 1889 favourably reported a speech made by the Conservative MP Henry Cecil Raikes in the House of Commons denying that ‘the Welsh were a nation’ or had a ‘separate existence from England … The  Welsh race were part of the British nation.’ While John Ruskin, writing in the Pall Mall Gazette of 6 July 1889, sought to instil a more benign characterisation of Welsh as ‘the language of music’, the aftereffects of the controversy were most keenly felt within Wales itself. A vigorous debate entitled ‘The Welsh Language. Is its retention desirable?’ appeared, for example, in the Cardiff Times of 23 August 1890, concluding that ‘the Welsh people were never in their history so intellectually awake as at the present time’. Quoting evidence presented by the Society for the Utilization of the Welsh Language to the Royal Commission on Education in 1886–7, the Rev. J. A. Jenkins noted that Notwithstanding that the language has not been taught in the schools, its periodical literature is very extensive. We have 17 weekly newspapers published in the vernacular in Wales, ranging in price from a half-penny to twopence each. The total weekly circulation of these exceeds 120,000; the lowest circulation of any single paper is 1500, and the highest weekly circulation for any single paper is 23,000, which has been the weekly issue for years of Y Genedl Gymreig (‘The Welsh Nation’), an eight-page 56-column penny Welsh newspaper published in Carnarvon. One magazine alone, published monthly, has attained a circulation of 37,760, and

­

the ‘vernacular’ periodical press in wales

333

there are altogether 150,000 copies of magazines published in the Welsh language circulated monthly in the Principality. (Cardiff Times, 23 August 1890) With the inclusion of book publishing, he calculated that the total annual value of Welsh printed literature exceeded £200,000, and, citing the evidence to the same Royal Commission led by the Archdeacon of Llandaff, John Griffiths, estimated the weekly newspaper circulation, in both languages, within Wales to be in the region of 100,000. In conclusion, Jenkins proposed that the ‘retention of the Welsh language together with a knowledge of English would benefit the people intellectually. A knowledge of more than one language must enrich every man. The acquiring of any foreign language must sharpen the intellect’ (Cardiff Times, 23 August 1890).2 In London, however, hostility ‘to the prevailing bi-lingualism’ of Wales continued unabated. The Morning Post of 9 September 1890 berated ‘Bi-lingual Wales’ for being ‘a most undesirable thing for the country, and a great drawback to its welfare’. If only one language was spoken in Wales, it observed, ‘and that one language was the English language, not one half of the articles published in many of the Welsh newspapers … would ever be published or penned’. In similar mode, the St James’ Gazette of 30 March 1891 reprinted a translation from Y Seren in order to highlight it as ‘A Disgrace to Welsh Journalism’ (see also the Nottingham Evening Post, 30 March 1891, and the Gloucester Citizen, 30 March 1891). At the same time, however, J. Young Evans, of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, had noticed a change in tone in the emergence of ‘the new Welsh journalism’. Not only had the older ‘vernacular press become more literary’, and the regular inclusion of a Welsh-language column in English-language titles had become ‘more essential’, but its strong and continued growth was ‘a phenomenon unique … in the whole empire of journalism’ by generating ‘a literary atmosphere’ in the country (South Wales Star, 3 July 1891). The London Globe and Traveller characteristically saw it differently, 2

For previous debates on the desirability or otherwise of Welsh as a living language, see also ‘Is the Welsh Language Worth Preserving?’ Cardiff Times, 25 April 1885; ‘Has the Welsh Language Any Claims to Preservation?’ Western Mail, 28 December 1877; and the Principality, 24 November 1877, where it had been argued that the survival of Welsh acted as a bulwark against ‘the strict ultilitarianism of the age’ and ‘a commerce-ridden world’. Beriah Gwynfe Evans, of the Liberal Cardiff Times, went further and urged delegates at an Institute of Journalists conference in Cardiff in 1889 to ‘secure the adhesion of representatives of the vernacular press in Wales (Hear, hear)’. While acknowledging that ‘there was undoubtedly an essential difference between the English and the Welsh press’, Evans insisted that ‘there was nothing at all antagonistic between them (Hear, hear)’ (Western Mail, 4 November 1889).

334

aled gruffydd jones

greeting the appearance of Papur Pawb in 1893, whose format was distantly modelled on George Newnes’s Tit-Bits, with the witheringly sarcastic observation that ‘hitherto the journalistic pabulum of which Taffy has nourished his native gallantry has been exclusively of the solid and substantial type’ (Globe and Traveller, 25 January 1893). The final eruption of hostilities occurred during the hearings of the Royal Commission on Land in Wales, an inquiry into the land agitation among farm tenants. Once again, reference was made to the ‘violence of language [that] United Ireland in its palmiest days could hardly have excelled’ in the Welsh vernacular press (Globe and Traveller, 25 February 1893), while Lord Penrhyn, representing the North Wales landlords, based his testimony to the Royal Commission on twenty-seven translated extracts from Welsh newspapers in a bid to demonstrate that the Welsh Land Question was ‘unreal in origin’, being ‘deliberately fomented by journalistic sensational writings’ (Jones 1993: 175). As the Victorian era drew to a close, a gentler tone entered the discourse. The Daily Chronicle published a ‘prolonged interview’ with the two authors of a recently published biography of the Liverpool journalist and Independent minister John Thomas, who had been most active between 1835 and 1892. Thomas, admiringly described as ‘a born journalist’, had contributed to Y Diwygiwr, established a new title Y Gwerinwr and had edited Y Dysgedydd and, for twenty-five years, Y Tyst a’r Dydd, the principal organ of the Congregational Church, which he did ‘while still engaged in the ministry, and taking active part in political life’. He was reported to have written articles and serials on a vast variety of subjects, novels depicting Welsh life and character … descriptive articles on Welsh preachers and Welsh Church life in the choicest Welsh style, besides supplying the usual leaders every week. His services to Welsh journalism and literature were immense. (Blackburn Standard, 5 July 1899) While ‘he never received a penny for his pains’ in the commercial sense, he nonetheless was awarded three public Testimonials, the last of which in 1892 raised ‘more than a thousand guineas’ for his work as an editor and correspondent. Thomas was not untypical of many editors of Welsh-language newspapers in the second half of the nineteenth century, yet his career in 1899 did not attract the mounting opprobrium that had been directed against him and his fellow editors since the 1840s. Reprinting the Daily Chronicle article on John Thomas in its entirety, the Blackburn Standard of 15 July 1899 entitled its report

­

the ‘vernacular’ periodical press in wales

335

‘A Welsh Renascence, Prospects of Cymric Literature’ (see also the Wrexham Advertiser, 15 July 1899). The notion of a renaissance of Welsh as a public language had become more firmly established by the outbreak of the First World War, even in the pages of the Conservative press in Wales. Whereas the Cardiff daily the Western Mail had in 1889 denigrated ‘The Welsh Language Fad’, following the Liberal Party’s demand for a Welsh translation of the 1888 Local Government Act (Western Mail, 10 January 1889), by the autumn of 1914 its tone had altered considerably. It roundly condemned an order forbidding the use of the Welsh language in the training ground of the Royal Welch Fusiliers while on parade ‘on the double ground that it served no useful purpose and that it conveyed a gratuitous insult to the Welsh people’. Nationalism, it reminded the War Office, was now a significant ‘factor in imperial patriotism’ (Western Mail, 29 October 1914), and by the end of the following year it was advocating the greater use of Welsh in schools and colleges as a means of strengthening ‘nationalism’ among the young (Western Mail, 20 December 1915). The tangled relationship between metropolitan English journalism, the British state, and the use of Welsh in newspapers and periodicals enables us to disinter a number of strands in the making of print and press culture in Britain and Ireland. For one thing, its study provides a useful chronology to a long-simmering anxiety over the linguistic basis of the state that continued from at least the troubled 1840s to the end of the century, accelerating from Arnold’s intervention in 1866, spilling over into the anxieties of landowners and the Conservative Party over the spreading of Irish social conflict and political violence to other areas in the 1880s, until reaching a semblance of equilibrium by the forced reformulation of a multi-ethnic and multilingual ‘British’ patriotism during the First World War. Furthermore, it kept alive a debate about language and power, and the benefits or otherwise of a disglossic, and later a bilingual, community within the British imperial metropole, and in particular the public sphere of its printed communications. It would be mistaken to conclude that this debate subsided after 1918, although it necessarily entered a different phase, particularly with the unprecedented expansion of English-language print and the emergence of broadcasting in the early decades of the twentieth century, and indeed beyond (see, for example, a distant echo of Vincent’s ‘Letters from Wales’ series in the editorial column ‘Language Lapse’, Times, 12 July 2017, and the response to a BBC Newsnight debate on the ‘value’ of Welsh, 9 August 2017).

336

aled gruffydd jones

Notwithstanding the efforts made by a ‘language-of-power’ to establish its dominance over nineteenth-century print and press culture (Anderson 1983: 56–8), the study of English-language press and state attitudes towards Welsh-language ‘vernacular’ journalism indicates that, for the latter at least, a single hegemonic language was never going to be ‘quite sufficient’.

Glossary of Welsh-Language Titles Cited in the Text Yr Amserau (The Times) Baner ac Amserau Cymru (Banner and Times of Wales) Y Cylchgrawn Cynmraeg (The Welsh Periodical) Y Diwygiwr (The Reformer) Y Drysorfa (The Treasury) Y Dysgedydd (The Instructor) Y Dywysogaeth (The Principality) Y Genedl Gymreig (The Welsh Nation) Y Gweithiwr (The Worker) Y Gweithiwr Prydeinig, neu’r British Workman yn Gymraeg (The British Workman, or the British Workman in Welsh) Y Gwerinwr (The Common Man [or The Democrat]) Yr Haul (The Sun) Yr Herald Cymraeg (The Welsh Herald) Llais y Wlad (The Voice of the Country) Y Llan: Trysorfa Gwybodaeth neu Eurgrawn Gymraeg (The [Parish] Church: Treasury of Knowledge or the Welsh Magazine) Y Newyddiadur Hanesyddol/Cronicl yr Oes (The Newspaper of Record/Chronicle of the Age) Y Seren (The Star) Seren Gomer (The Star of Gomer) Y Tyst a’r Dydd (The Witness and the Day) Y Werin (The People) Yr Ymofynnydd (The Enquirer)

Sheila Kidd

Chapter Eleven

THE SCOTTISH GAELIC PRESS Sheila M. Kidd

T

he first sustained attempt at a Scottish Gaelic periodical, An Teachdaire Gae’lach (The Highland Messenger; 1829−31), in its initial editorial, stressed the transnational nature of its endeavours as it looked for support to ‘gach fìor-Ghàidheil anns gach cearna don t-saoghal anns am faighear iad’ (every true Gael in each part of the world in which they are to be found) (May 1829: 3) (see Figure 11.1). The nineteenth-century Highland diaspora, the tens of thousands of Gaelic speakers who left the Highlands for the Lowlands and colonial destinations overseas due to economic and social factors, was a core readership base for the Gaelic press as it developed over the nineteenth century. Almost all nineteenth-century Gaelic periodicals were published in the Lowlands or abroad, and Highland-based production was limited, for the most part, to the Gaelic columns of a small number of newspapers in the later decades of the century. The entire corpus of publications, from home and abroad, is small, with twelve periodicals produced in the course of the century which were entirely, or mainly, in Gaelic, and a further four with a roughly equal balance of Gaelic and English content. Furthermore, their runs were generally short, with only three surviving beyond three years. This chapter will consider the Scottish Gaelic press within this international context, and the challenges which it faced. It examines three broadly defined categories that marked Gaelic press production over the course of the century, namely the educational, the religious and the cultural. And it offers insights into the readership of such press outputs. In the interests of contextualisation, it is worth noting that the Census of 1891, the first to produce reliable figures for Scottish Gaelic speakers, recorded 43,738 monoglot Gaelic speakers in Scotland and 210,677 individuals who spoke both Gaelic and English, numbers 337

338

sheila m. kidd

Figure 11.1  Cover of An Teachdaire Gae’lach, 1829 (Courtesy of Donald E. Meek)

which would have been higher earlier in the century before the language experienced increasingly rapid erosion (Census 1892: xxi). This figure, which by its nature, does not include the international audience for Gaelic periodicals, demonstrates the potentially sizeable readership for the periodical press which emerged in the course of the century. This must, however, be weighed against the fact that the number of Gaelic speakers who would have been sufficiently literate in their native language to read them would have been relatively small, as an ability to read the Bible, a familiar text which was the yardstick for measuring literacy before 1872, did not mean that readers could cope with entirely unfamiliar texts such as periodicals. This was in addition to the pressures incumbent on maintaining fluency in and access to Gaelic work in an increasingly bilingual environment that privileged one culture over another. The importance of the emerging nineteenth-century Gaelic press to Gaelic literature becomes apparent when considered within its

­

the scottish gaelic press

339

literary context. Although the first Gaelic book to appear in print was published in 1567 – John Carswell’s translation of the Book of Common Order − the first secular Gaelic book appeared in print only in 1741 in the form of Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair’s school vocabulary, Leabhar a Theagasc Ainminnin. The first collection of secular verse followed in 1751 with his Ais-eiridh na Sean Chánoin Albannaich. This was succeeded by a gradually expanding stream of secular verse publications, alongside an advanced and successful range of religious works, but with no parallel development in the issuing of secular Gaelic prose. The ground-breaking attempts to establish a Gaelic periodical press from the third decade of the nineteenth century onwards, noted below, represented a major step forward for Gaelic literature, creating opportunities for writers to experiment with new registers, genres and style. The origins of the Scottish Gaelic periodical press can be traced back to 1803 and the appearance of An Rosroine (The Rose of the Field), a publication of which no extant copies survive. Four issues, however, are known to have been published by Thomas Duncan in Glasgow’s Saltmarket (Reid 1832: 146−7). Over twenty-five years would pass before An Teachdaire Gae’lach was launched in 1829, not in the Gaelicspeaking heartland of the Scottish Highlands, but also in Glasgow, a city which was home to an estimated 25,000 Gaelic speakers at the time (MacLeod 1898: 115). The appearance of this monthly publication owed much to the development of education in the Highlands through the work of the Edinburgh Society of the Support for Gaelic Schools (from 1811) and the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland (from 1825), both of which foregrounded literacy in Gaelic, rather than in English as was the practice of other bodies involved in Highland education. The Rev. Dr Norman MacLeod (1783−1862), the Teachdaire’s editor, had been heavily involved in the General Assembly’s education scheme, and the idea of a periodical had been proposed to him by George Husband Baird, Principal of Edinburgh University, in 1826. Baird was to champion this proposition until it reached fruition three years later. Its prospectus outlined its purpose as being ‘to promote the moral and intellectual improvement of the Gaelic population’, an improving ethos which typified much of the Gaelic press in the period to 1850, and shows it as being in step with the contemporary Englishlanguage press (Scotsman, 15 January 1829: 5). This civilising ambition was welcomed by the contemporary Scottish press, with the Scotsman suggesting that the publication of a Gaelic journal would, in fact, hasten the demise of the language in the longer term (15 January 1829: 5). This educational and moral impetus is evident in the articles the Teachdaire featured on technological

340

sheila m. kidd

innovations, scientific discoveries and descriptions of other countries, alongside sermons and moral tales, all of which were ground-breaking for Gaelic writing. While very little fiction appears in any Gaelic periodical in the course of the century, the first published Gaelic historical tales began to appear in the Teachdaire, along with the very occasional original moral tale such as ‘Sgeul mu Mhàiri nighean Eoghainn bhàin’ (A Tale about Màiri, Daughter of Fair-Haired Ewan), echoing contemporary events in its focus on the experiences of a family evicted from their Highland croft and the trials which awaited them in Glasgow (September 1829: 97–102). A new and productive genre which was to become a staple of this, and later periodicals, and arguably the most creative part of the publication, was the còmhradh (prose dialogue) in which stereotypical Highland characters discussed a diverse range of topics from education and politics to, in later publications, emigration and land reform. This genre, which also featured more widely in the Scottish periodical press, was popularised in Gaelic by Norman MacLeod, and, in its imitation of everyday speech, may have been a conscious attempt by writers to reach out to emerging readers (Kidd 2016). The initial pool of contributors to the Teachdaire was very limited, with the majority of the material in the first twelve issues penned either by Norman MacLeod himself, or by Patrick MacFarlane, a schoolmaster and experienced translator of religious works who translated many short texts into Gaelic for the journal. Nonetheless, a network of ­writers gradually emerged, almost all writing under pen names, and not all of whom can now be identified. Among those who are identifiable, and who continued to contribute to later periodicals, was Lachlan MacLean, a Glasgow merchant, originally from Coll, writing under the pen names ‘MacTalla’ (Echo), ‘Eóghan Og’ (Young Ewan) and ‘An Gael anns a’ Bhaile’ (The Gael in the City). Norman MacLeod had originally anticipated that the clergy would be among the most prominent supporters and promoters of the publication, and indeed some were, including his own brother the Rev. John MacLeod, minister of Morven, and the Rev. Duncan MacLean of Salen, Mull. There were, however, those among the Gaelic-speaking clergy who were quick to criticise the Teachdaire for its overly secular focus. Despite an attempt to address these concerns by expanding the spiritual content, this proved insufficient to satisfy the Teachdaire’s detractors, a point noted by MacLeod in his final editorial when he alluded to those who had done their best to destroy the periodical, some ‘le gamhlas follaiseach agus cuid le tolladh fodhainn gu lùbach, cealgach, ‘nan dòigheannan sleamhainn féin, gu’m meal iad na choisinn iad’ (with

­

the scottish gaelic press

341

open animosity and some by undermining us deceitfully and hypocritically in their own slippery ways, may they reap what they sowed) (May 1831: 281). Although a break in MacLeod’s health was given as the principle reason for ceasing publication, the financial challenges must also have played their part, as they often would in the demise of later publications. Little information on circulation figures exists, apart from Baird’s mention of 4,000 copies circulating each month in its first year (Inverness Courier, 23 December 1829: 3), a figure which is very markedly different from the 1,440 copies printed each month of MacLeod’s second journal a little over a decade later (Returns 1841: 8). It may, of course, be that circulation figures dropped after the initial novelty of the periodical had worn off. It is interesting to note, however, that the Teachdaire’s publisher, W. R. MacPhun, was reported as having said that ‘the parcels of “Messengers” sent to the Highlands and Islands came back at the end of the year, after they had been read [original emphasis] without any accompanying payment’, signalling to both publisher and editor that the enterprise was no longer financially viable’ (MacNeill 1892: 334). There was a further short-lived attempt at a Gaelic periodical soon after MacLeod’s venture came to an end, An Teachdaire Ùr Gaidhealach (The New Highland Messenger; 1835−6), which, by its name alone, demonstrated its intention to pick up where MacLeod’s journal had stopped. Also published in Glasgow, it was established by Lachlan MacLean, a member of MacLeod’s informal network of literary Gaels, who formed the dynamic core of Glasgow’s contemporary Gaelic publishing scene. Also involved in editing the journal was Donald MacFarlane, son of Patrick MacFarlane, who had written for the first Teachdaire. The content of this Teachdaire was similar in miscellany form to that of its predecessor, and included sermons, essays, articles on Highland history, writing on popular Highland beliefs, news, song and poetry. As its predecessor had, the publication consciously aimed to cater for both a rural, Highland readership and an urban Lowland one, the latter reflected in contributions by Glasgow-based Dr Robert MacGregor detailing, for instance, the history of Glasgow Royal Infirmary, followed in later issues by updates on sickness in Glasgow (June 1836: 164–7). Brief accounts of news were similarly Glasgow-oriented, whether in their accounts of market prices, of new appointment to Gaelic churches in Glasgow or of new societies being established. Just as the còmhradh signalled a new direction in Gaelic writing, one particular piece stands out in this second Teachdaire as being stylistically innovative. The anonymous ‘Mo Chòta Ur’ (My New Coat),

342

sheila m. kidd

is a whimsical piece of first-person writing entirely lacking the moral agenda characterising other writing, and pre-dating the amusing and philosophical musings of Donald MacKechnie by half a century (February 1836: 91–4). In it, the writer details, self-mockingly, his day’s experiences out and about in Edinburgh in his handsome new coat, a coat which ends up soaked through and then burned by the end of his day. For all that this particular item demonstrates a willingness among writers to experiment with less formal styles and break further from the Bible-influenced styles which dominated Gaelic prose writing, it is not in fact until later in the century that this more informal type of prose without a strong moral agenda develops further. The fact that MacLean’s Teachdaire ceased publication in the autumn of 1836, as news of the failure of the potato crop in the Highlands reached the Lowlands, may well have been coincidental, and most likely due to the same financial challenges that faced all nineteenthcentury Gaelic periodical publications, but it is also unfortunate in that it left a void in terms of a Gaelic perspective on the crisis. The next periodical to appear, Norman MacLeod’s Cuairtear nan Gleann (Traveller of the Glens; 1840−3), was, in fact, an indirect response to this famine. Concerns of a recurrence of famine, and the potential for a humanitarian crisis, was to prompt much debate within the government and among Establishment circles as to the best means of avoiding it, with emigration seen as the most obvious solution. MacLeod had been heavily involved in charitable relief efforts for the famine-struck Highlands at the end of the 1830s, and was therefore particularly attuned to such discussions. It was with these in mind that he established his Cuairtear. In the same vein as his Teachdaire, his opening sentence addressed his international audience in following resonant tone: ‘le dealas gràidh agus deagh dhùrachd ar cridhe, chuireamaid fàilt air gach Gàidheal air feadh an t-saoghail mhòir a dh’fhosglas an leabhar beag so’ (let us, with sincere love and our heartfelt best wishes, welcome every Gael throughout the world who opens this small book), before outlining his aims for the publication, among which were providing Gaelic speakers with reliable information about emigrant destinations (March 1840: 1). The early issues of the journal were weighted heavily towards articles about North America, Australia and New Zealand, which were intended to provide Gaelic speakers with practical information about what to expect in these emigrant destinations, often underlining the existence of settled Gaelic communities (in the case of Canada), and the fertility of the land in New Zealand, the latter in deliberately stark contrast with the contemporary experiences of readers in the

­

the scottish gaelic press

343

Highlands. The emphasis on emigration, however, began to wane as the months progressed, although a strong international perspective continued with articles, for instance, on the East Indies, where many Gaels had spent (and would continue to spend) time, whether in the employ of the East India Company or as soldiers. The improving and educational ethos of earlier periodicals remains apparent in articles on astronomy and natural history, and dialogues which explained the workings of Parliament to readers, while not neglecting essays on Highland history and clan tales. What is also very much evident in Cuairtear nan Gleann is a widening network of contributors to, and distributors of, the periodical, helped in part by the development of steamship travel to the islands and the western seaboard of the Highlands. Identifying who were the anonymous contributors to the journal, beyond initials and/or location information, remains a challenge to the modern reader. One author who can, however, be identified, and who would be a stalwart contributor to this and later periodicals, was the Rev. Alexander MacGregor, minister of Kilmuir, Skye (and later of Edinburgh’s Gaelic Church and subsequently the West Church, Inverness), writing under the various pen names, ‘Sgiathanach’ (Skyeman), ‘S.’ and, in later journals, ‘Alasdair Ruadh’ (Red-haired Alasdair). One of the century’s most prolific writers, whose work spanned a range of themes, from emigration, slavery and natural philosophy, to moral and historical tales, MacGregor’s contributions to the Cuairtear amounted to no fewer than twenty-three identifiable essays and tales. Most notable among these was a fourpart essay on astronomy, ‘Air cruinn-chorpaibh soillseach nan speur’ (The Heavenly Bodies), which would pre-date the first Gaelic book on astronomy, the Rev. Duncan Connell’s Reul-Eolas (1856), by some fifteen years. Similarly, the articles on the history of the Highlands and of Scotland which appeared in most of the early periodicals pre-dated the first history of Scotland written in Gaelic, Angus MacKenzie’s Eachdraidh na h-Alba (1867), underlining the importance of the periodical press in breaking new ground for Gaelic writers and readers. The international dimension to Cuairtear nan Gleann was not limited to articles promoting emigration, but is evidenced in its expansion overseas. Its editors worked hard to establish distribution networks in North America, for example recruiting two Canadian sales agents by May 1841, one in Pictou, Nova Scotia, and one in Prince Edward Island. Canadian readers participated in a return transatlantic traffic, with no fewer than ten identifiable contributions emerging from Canadian Gaels, some on topics related to emigration and emigrant communities in Canada, others more religious in nature. It is evident

344

sheila m. kidd

that Canadian Gaels had come to form a significant part of the literary network of writers and readers who grew up familiar with the urban Lowland Gaelic periodical press. And to emigrant Gaels such as the poet Iain MacIlleathain (John MacLean) in Nova Scotia, the Cuairtear served as a welcome, tangible cultural connection with their homeland. In one of his eulogies, ‘Oran do’n Chuairtear’ (Song to the Traveller), MacIlleathain wrote warmly of the periodical, personifying it as a traditional Highland hero: ‘Le ’phearsa bhòidhich an còmhdach balla-bhreac / Mar chleachd a shinnsreabh gu dìreadh gharbhlach’ (With his fine shape and his chequered garb / As our ancestors wore to climb the rough ground) (MacLean Sinclair 1881: 163). Other short-term periodical launches from this period, all published in Glasgow, were Teachdaire nan Gaidheal (The Messenger of the Gaels; 1844), Caraid nan Gael (Friend of the Gaels; 1844) and A’ Bheithir Bheuma (The Satirist; 1845) (see Figure 11.2). As well as those publications which found their way into print, there were a number of

Figure 11.2  Cover of Caraid nan Gael, 1844 (Courtesy of Edinburgh University Library)

­

the scottish gaelic press

345

other schemes that failed to materialise. These included aborted plans in 1833 to establish a branch of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge among the Highland population, who would lead on publishing a Gaelic and English penny magazine (Perthshire Advertiser, 22 August 1833:2); a report of intentions to establish a Gaelic literary and scientific journal, the Seanachaidh Gaelach (The Highland Storyteller), from which there was no result (Inverness Courier, 27 November 1839:  3); a failed plan to publish a Gaelic newspaper in Glasgow (Inverness Courier, 18 May 1847: 3); and tentative plans by Aberdeen University’s Celtic Society to establish a Gaelic newspaper (Caledonian Mercury, 8 December 1858: 2). As MacLeod made clear in his initial editorials in both the Teachdaire and the Cuairtear, his periodicals were very much dependent on the Gaelic-speaking clergy for support. However, this failed to be as forthcoming as he had anticipated. By the seventh issue of the Cuairtear, he was complaining that only two ministers had provided written contributions, and hinting at the criticism of his publication from such quarters. As he noted, ‘Mur ’eil nithe ceart no freagarrach mata ’nar duilleagan, có is coireach ach iadsan nach gabh uiread do shaothair a’s peann a tharruing air a shon?’ (If things in our pages are not right or appropriate, who is to blame but those who have not so much as bothered to put pen to paper for it?) (September 1840: 168). These were years of particularly intense conflict between the moderate and evangelical factions in the Church of Scotland, culminating in the Disruption of 1843, which saw over a third of the clergy leave the Established Church to form the Free Church of Scotland. MacLeod, a moderate, was adamant that he did not want the Cuairtear to become embroiled in Church politics, and informed readers that, despite receiving many letters asking for the journal’s views on such matters, these would not be dealt with in its pages. MacLeod succeeded in sidestepping this controversy until the final two issues in May and June 1843, which coincided with the Disruption, and when the periodical openly addressed the contemporary ecclesiastical debate. It can be no coincidence that publication stopped immediately after this, as the attention of the two Churches, and their clergy, became focused on building and, in the case of the Established Church, rebuilding, themselves. The schism in the Church resulted in a brief phase in Gaelic periodical publishing expansion, dominated by religious journals such as the Free Church’s An Fhianuis (The Witness), published between 1845 and 1850, and the Established Church’s shorter-lived Fear-Tathaich nam Beann (The Mountain Visitor), issued from 1848 to 1850. The

346

sheila m. kidd

content of the former was entirely spiritual, with sermons, essays, còmhraidhean and, very occasionally, hymns, expounding the position and teachings of the new Church. Published in Glasgow, it was edited by the Rev. Mackintosh Mackay (1800−73), convener of the Free Church’s Highland Committee. He was a minister with a trackrecord of involvement in Gaelic literary projects through his work on the Highland Society of Scotland’s Dictionarium Scoto-Celticum: A Dictionary of the Gaelic Language (1828), and in his edition of the verse of Rob Donn Mackay (1829). Despite having the institutional backing of the Free Church – which allowed it to provide its first issue to readers free of charge – An Fhianuis was not without its financial challenges. An 1846 circular, in the form of a letter from the editor, channelled the complaints of the Church’s General Assembly that subscriptions were not coming in regularly and did not cover the annual production costs of £400−500. The editor resorted to cultural shaming, a common strategy among the editors of nineteenth-century Gaelic periodicals, attempting to embarrass Gaelic-speaking readers into subscribing by referring to unfavourable comparisons made between Gaels and Lowlanders, and outlining the positive impact that payment would have on the reputation of Gaels: ‘’s gu ’n dùinear am beul, agus cuid dhiubh ag aithris nach pàidh na Gàidheil mar phàidheas na Goill’ (and their mouths will be closed and some of them telling that the Gaels don’t pay like the Lowlanders do) (Mackay 1846). Even with the backing of the Free Church, An Fhianuis did not survive beyond 1850. Unlike An Fhianuis, the Established Church’s FearTathaich nam Beann, with a circulation in the region of 1,200 copies, did not exclude secular content, and was similar to the pre-Disruption periodicals in tone, although with slightly more emphasis on spiritual content (Caledonian Mercury, 1 June 1848: 2). The editor was the Rev. Archibald Clerk, a son-in-law of the Rev. Norman MacLeod. The journal’s tone was conciliatory from the outset, aiming to avoid the conflict which characterised church politics of the period. In reflecting on contemporary events – notably the famine which affected the Highlands between 1846 and 1848 and its impact beyond that − it set out to provide articles on agricultural practice so that Gaels might be equipped with information to help them make the most of their land. This appeared as a series of ‘letters’ from ‘Caraid a’ Chroiteir’ (The Friend of the Crofter), which were published in the first few issues. The fact that the driving force behind the early Gaelic periodicals in Scotland had been the clergy, a clergy which was to become severely divided by church politics, had a significant impact on the emerging periodical press. There was a hiatus of just over twenty years between

­

the scottish gaelic press

347

the two Church-sponsored publications ceasing publication and fresh attempts at launching Gaelic-language press publications in the 1870s. The one exception was the first Gaelic journal to be published in the Highlands, Caraid nan Gaidheal (Friend of the Gaels), published in Inverness in 1853, but of which only one number was ever issued, and of which there are no known extant copies. The editor is reported to have been a local shoemaker, James Ross, and its content to have been moral and religious in nature (Noble 1902: 191). It has also been noted that three-quarters of the material was in Gaelic and one-quarter in English, the inclusion of English being a new direction for these journals, which had been entirely Gaelic in content until that point (albeit with tables of contents in English which demonstrated the appropriate nature of the content to non-Gaelic speakers).

Gaelic Periodicals Abroad While Scotland’s Gaelic periodical press initially benefited from, and then fell victim to, the vagaries of church politics, this latter phase was to coincide with the tentative emergence of Gaelic periodicals in emigrant communities abroad, first in Canada and then in Australia. The earliest appearance of Gaelic in the Canadian press seems to have been a Gaelic column which appeared briefly in the Prince Edward Island Times during 1836. These columns consisted mainly of reprint material drawn from MacLeod’s Teachdaire (Nilsen 2002: 130–1). In 1840 the appearance of a Gaelic periodical, Cuairtear nan Coillte (The Tourist of the Woods), in Kingston, Ontario, was noted in Cuairtear nan Gleann, which commented: ‘Chunnaic sinn cuid de na nithe tha ann roimhe so, focal air fhocal mar tha iad ’ga chur a mach – ach coma có dhiùbh ’s e làn dìth am beatha’ (We have seen some of the items in it before, word for word as they are printed – but regardless they are very welcome to them) (Cuairtear nan Gleann, 8, 1840: 188). This presumably referred to articles from the Teachdaire or the Cuairtear and underlined the importance of the Glasgow-based Gaelic periodicals as a source of material for early attempts at a Gaelic press overseas. Ontario also seems to have seen the publication of a short-lived periodical entitled Am Fear-Teagaisg (The Teacher) in 1850, although there are no known extant copies (Dunbar 2019). The only extant copies of the Canadian Cuairtear, from 1842, towards the end of the journal’s run, reveal a bilingual weekly newspaper containing both old and new material. Among the latter is an article entitled ‘Cogadh Fiadhaich eadear na Tecsaich agus na Mecsacaich’ (A Fierce War between the Texans and Mexicans), reflecting a North American

348

sheila m. kidd

focus in topics dealt with by Gaelic writers in North America. What is also evident is the tension between English and Gaelic content in the periodical, a tension which would affect other Gaelic periodicals, both in Scotland and abroad, as the century progressed. The editor of the Canadian Cuairtear, Donald Urquhart, a native of Dingwall, voiced his frustration on a number of occasions, explaining to readers that the publication had had to make its content mostly English in order to retain any Gaelic content, and that the Gaels were far less zealous in their support of a newspaper in their native tongue than English speakers (Cuairtear nan Coillte, 17 January 1842: 7). Yet the irony was that the Cuairtear was regularly criticised by Gaels for its lack of Gaelic (Cuairtear nan Coillte, 20 March 1842: 6). The Cuairtear also referred to plans to establish a Gaelic periodical in Cape Breton, and although this does not seem to have come to fruition, it nonetheless speaks to the emerging literary aspirations of emigrant Gaelic communities seeking communication outlets in newly adopted homelands. It also anticipated the appearance of An Cuairtear Og Gaidhealach (The Young Highland Traveller), in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, nine years later in 1851. Established and edited by John Boyd, the appearance of this entirely Gaelic periodical spoke to the settled nature of the Gaelicspeaking community in Nova Scotia. The particular sense of pride engendered by this being a Canadian Gaelic periodical is voiced by an early correspondent who wrote: gu bheil sin uile air ’ur lionadh le bosd airson a leithid do dh’obair chliutich a bhi dol air adhart nar measg, ’s gu h-araidh nuair a chi sin gur e fear a rugadh ’s a thogadh san duthaich so fhein a tha togail a chinn gu cliu a chosnadh dha fhein ’s ga luchd-duthcha. (March 1851: 57) (that we are all filled with pride that such praiseworthy work is going on among us, and especially when we see that it is one which was born and raised in this country which is raising its head to enhance its own reputation and that of its countrymen.) Material from Glasgow periodicals appeared here, as they had in Cuairtear nan Coillte, one of them, interestingly, a dialogue penned by Norman MacLeod and first published in An Teachdaire Gae’lach in 1830. The relevance of this particular text to the emigrant context is clear, dealing as it does with language shift, with one character having returned from the Lowlands using English and wearing English fashions, and being criticised for this, a theme which would continue to be prominent in both Scottish and Canadian Gaelic periodicals over the

­

the scottish gaelic press

349

course of the nineteenth century – and, indeed, also alluding to the linguistic challenges faced by Gaelic periodicals in search of loyal readers. An Cuairtear Og Gaidhealach did not survive for long, with Boyd abandoning it to start publishing the Casket in 1852, initially half in English and half in Gaelic, but with the Gaelic content diminishing in size quite rapidly. While the 1850s may have been a barren period for Gaelic periodical publishing in Scotland, overseas others besides Canadian Gaels were getting started in establishing journals for the Gaelic diaspora communities. In Australia, plans for a periodical entitled Am Fior Ghaidheal (The True Gael) were drawn up in Melbourne in 1854, although no issues seem to have appeared (Banner, 20 June 1854: 13). It was a little under three years before Australian Gaels would see plans for a Gaelic periodical come to fruition, with ten issues of An Teachdaire Gaidhealach (The Gaelic Messenger), a primarily Gaelic-language publication, produced in Tasmania in 1857, catering to the estimated 20,000 Highlanders which the Teachdaire claimed were in Australia and New Zealand (February 1857: 8). The editor was John Cameron, originally transported from Scotland after his conviction for theft and forgery, but who had been pardoned and was employed by Hobart’s Daily Advertiser. It was from the offices of this newspaper that the Teachdaire was published (Kidd 2017: 7). Just as Norman MacLeod had envisaged his periodicals linking Gaels throughout the world, so too the Australian Teachdaire saw itself as a ‘slabhraidh leis am faod ar luchd-dùthcha an seo a’s ann an Albainn, a bhi an dlu cheangal inntinneil ri cheile ann an caidreamh taitneach agus feumail’ (a chain by which our countrymen here and in Scotland may be intellectually linked in pleasant and useful discourse) (February 1857: 1). Alongside agents in Australia were one in Inverness, and one in Glasgow, underlining this commitment to reaching back to the Scottish Gàidhealtachd. A significant proportion of the content of the Australian-produced Teachdaire was sourced from earlier Gaelic periodicals. Importantly, however, there was also a steady stream of new writing, particularly poetry, demonstrating that the periodical provided Gaelic poets with a valuable means of disseminating their work across both Australia and Scotland. Compositions included an elegy to a Gael who had died in Hobert (February 1857: 4), an anonymous song lamenting the state of the Gaelic language in Australia (‘Gearan na Gailig ris a’ Ghille Mhuileach’ [Gaelic’s Complaint to the Mull Lad]) (March 1857: 5), and a song by a Mull emigrant, Angus Beaton, about his voyage to, and arrival in, Australia (‘Oran an Eilthirich’ [Song of the Emigrant]) (September 1857: 5). As with the Canadian publications, less emphasis

350

sheila m. kidd

was placed on religious material in the Australian Teachdaire, with culture, history and literature featuring more prominently in the emigrant context. The importance of the links between Gaelic periodical publishing in the New and Old World was further underlined in 1871 with the appearance of An Gaidheal (The Gael; 1871−7) in Toronto, established and edited by Angus Nicholson (see Plate 7). Originally from Lewis, Nicholson had arrived in Canada in 1855 and, after training as a reporter and working on various newspapers, had gone on to establish and edit the Canada Scotsman in Montreal, a newspaper which contained several columns of Gaelic (Highland Echo, 8 December 1877: 1–2). In his opening words in An Gaidheal, Nicholson set out his agenda as being one of cultural rehabilitation, arguing that the lack of a Gaeliclanguage periodical provided its detractors with proof that the language and its literature were not worthy of publication (June 1871: 1). This journal was markedly different from its pre-1850 predecessors in being more literary focused. It also aligned with a growing interest among Gaels in studying and preserving the language and its traditions, building on activity sparked by John Francis Campbell’s landmark and influential four-volume Popular Tales of the West Highlands published between 1860 and 1862. The periodical was a bilingual one, with the longer Gaelic section, which ranged from between eighteen and twenty-four pages, appearing first, followed by an English ‘supplement’. This was a balance that was retained throughout its run. Among the more notable writings to appear in the pages of Nicholson’s journal were the first scholarly writings in Gaelic. This included two series of articles, one on Gaelic proverbs, and the other on Gaelic literature, in 1875 and 1876–7 respectively, by Donald MacKinnon, who would be appointed to the new Chair of Celtic at the University of Edinburgh in 1882. Although scholarly writing in Gaelic failed to develop much beyond this through to the late twentieth century, this series, nonetheless, offered evidence that the Gaelic press continued to afford writers a valuable opportunity to experiment with extending the register and subject matter of Gaelic writing. Reflecting its contemporary diasporic environment, An Gaidheal was to emigrate to Scotland shortly after it had been established, a result of Nicholson’s appointment as Dominion Emigration Agent for the North of Scotland. From the fourth issue it was re-established as a publication issued from Glasgow. Its network of contributors remained strongly international, aided by its nascent days in Toronto. Among contributors drawn from Canada were Patrick MacGregor, a Toronto solicitor, the Rev. Duncan Black Blair, a Nova Scotian minister, and

­

the scottish gaelic press

351

the Argyllshire poet Eoghan MacColla, who had settled in Kingston. Antipodean contributors included Donald Beaton in Australia and Farquhar MacDonell in New Zealand. Scottish contributors included established writers such as the Rev. Alexander MacGregor and emerging literary figures such as the brothers John and Henry Whyte, Dugald MacPhail, Mary MacKellar and Donald MacKechnie. Nicholson clearly found it difficult to balance his work for the Canadian government with that of editing a periodical. As a result, in 1876 he handed over management of all aspects of the periodical to the Edinburgh publisher MacLachlan and Stewart. The journal would continue for a further year before ceasing publication with no apparent explanation. Among those mentioned by Nicholson as having helped with editing on a number of occasions was Nigel (Niall) MacNeill, a native of Islay studying at Glasgow University and then the Free Church College during the 1870s. MacNeill was to turn his own hand to publishing during his student days, establishing and editing Bratach na Fìrinn (The Banner of Truth; 1872–4), a publication that might be described as a periodical in search of an audience. During its brief two-year run its attempt to find the right balance between religious and secular content, and between Gaelic and English writing, played out openly in its pages. It began as a religious journal with a twelve-page Gaelic section, followed by an eight-page English one, but by the third issue each language was allocated an equal eight pages. By the fourth issue it announced that the English pages would include writing ‘of Celtic interest thus making our Magazine a fitting medium for the expression of Highland rights and claims’ (March 1873: 64). Yet, in the following issue, the English section vanished altogether. In the sixth issue it was announced that less space would be given to English, with no further English content published. Such drastic shifts illustrated the challenges that Gaelic-language press editors faced in striking the right balance in content and language in order to make their publications viable (June 1873: 102). MacNeill would venture into periodical publishing again in 1877 with the Glasgow Highlander, which quickly changed its name to the Highland Echo / Guth nan Gaidheal to avoid confusion with the Inverness Highlander. This weekly newspaper, which ran for less than a year, was almost entirely in English, although it contained a regular Gaelic column, often consisting of material from Norman MacLeod’s earlier journals. A number of other periodicals dedicated to the Highlands and to Celtic matters appeared, but generally with little content in Gaelic, reflecting their increasingly bilingual audience and the necessity of taking a pragmatic approach to financial viability. It also reflected a

352

sheila m. kidd

growing late-century interest in the Highlands, its literature and traditions among non-Gaelic speaking readers. Inverness’s Celtic Magazine (1875–88), edited by the businessman, clan historian and land campaigner Alexander Mackenzie, had the subtitle ‘A monthly periodical devoted to the literature, history, antiquities, folklore, traditions, and the social and material interests of the Celt at home and abroad’. The Gaelic language is noticeably absent in this raft of interests, and Gaelic content was generally limited to the occasional song, apart from a brief foray into providing a Gaelic supplement in one issue. Another Inverness periodical, the Highland Monthly (1889–93), was edited by Duncan Campbell, the editor of the Northern Chronicle and the Gaelic scholar Alexander MacBain. Although referring to itself by its Gaelic title, Am Mìosaiche Gaidhealach, in its first issue, which also carried a Gaelic editorial after the English one, this was primarily an English-language literary journal that discussed Gaelic literature in English, published a small number of Gaelic songs and poems of antiquarian interest, and featured the occasional item of prose. John Mackay’s Glasgow Celtic Monthly (1892–1917), despite proclaiming a desire to be a magazine ‘giving prominence to the Gaelic language’ (January 1893: 56), in fact published very little Gaelic beyond the established pattern of a few songs and poems and the occasional story or letter. This resulted in intermittent letters of complaint about the lack of Gaelic from readers. The fact that the publication survived for longer than any other which included Gaelic suggests that the editor had found a balance of English and Gaelic content that worked for his primarily émigré, and probably often non-Gaelic-speaking, audience. It was in fact in Canada that the most successful Gaelic periodical in the nineteenth and early twentieth century was published, entitled Mac-Talla (Echo; 1892–1904). This weekly newspaper, established by Jonathon MacKinnon in Sydney, Cape Breton, was conducted entirely in Gaelic and included local, national and international news, alongside Gaelic songs and tales. It was also underpinned financially by a substantial number of Gaelic advertisements, a source of income that had not featured much in earlier publications. MacKinnon’s purpose was similar in vein to Angus Nicholson’s cultural mission twenty years earlier, and we find him engaging in cultural and literary benchmarking that concluded Gaelic literature was falling short: cia mheud paipeir a tha Frangaich Chanada a cumail suas ’nan canain fein? Cia mheud a th’aig Gearmailtich Chanada? Tha na ficheadan aca le cheile. Nach eil e ma ta na mhasladh do Ghaeil Chanada nach eil iad a cumail suas aon phaipear ’nan cainnt

­

the scottish gaelic press

353

fein  … cainnt air am bheil moran a deanamh dimeas do bhrigh nach eil eolas ac’ oirre. (4 June 1892: 2) (How many papers do French Canadians maintain in their own language? How many do German Canadians have? They both have scores. Is it not therefore a cause of shame for Canadian Gaels that they cannot support one paper in their own language … a language which many of them undervalue because they do not know it?) This was to be a recurrent theme in the journal. In one unattributed item, which seems likely to have been written by the editor himself, the focus is specifically Celtic, pointing out that the Irish in America had two newspapers, and the Welsh, who were not nearly as numerous, had five in their own language, whereas the Gaels of America had only one, and concluded with an appeal to Gaels’ cultural pride for support for Mac-Talla (17 June 1893: 4). The contributors were predominantly based in Canada, although there were some gathered from Scotland, including the prolific Rev. John MacRury, minister of Snizort on Skye (Laing 2013). MacKinnon faced the same financial problems as other editors and notably used the tactic of publishing the names of those who had paid their subscriptions as a means of encouraging others to follow suit. After a solid twelve-year run, however, he ceased publishing the journal due to unsustainable financial pressures.

Gaelic Columns in Newspapers It was not until the final three decades of the nineteenth century that a regular Gaelic column began to appear in a general newspaper, Scottish based or otherwise. Fleeting instances of Gaelic had appeared in the pages of English-language newspapers from the end of the eighteenth century, such as the Gaelic announcement on the raising of the Lovat Fencibles, published in the Caledonian Mercury in 1794 (4 December 1794: 3). In the early decades of the nineteenth century occasional Gaelic songs appeared in print, as for instance an electioneering song that was published in the Perthshire Advertiser and Strathmore Journal in 1832, aimed at newly enfranchised voters in the Gaelicspeaking areas of Perthshire (Kidd 2010). The Inverness Advertiser, established in 1849, had a dalliance with the idea of running a Gaelic column in 1850, aiming to publish at least a paragraph or two in Gaelic each week. This was launched with a competition to translate a poem into Gaelic but petered out after a few months.

354

sheila m. kidd

It was not until the 1870s that a regular Gaelic column began featuring in newspaper spaces. The Highlander, a weekly newspaper established in Inverness in 1873 by John Murdoch to provide a voice for Highland land reform, was the first newspaper to publish a regular Gaelic column which, initially at least, enjoyed a prominent position: it was the first text to follow the opening advertisements, and reflected Murdoch’s commitment to tìr is teanga (land and language), which he saw as being inextricably linked. Primarily a literary column, it featured a range of poems, songs, còmhraidhean and proverbs over the eight years of the Highlander’s existence, while also giving a platform to some of the main Gaelic voices of the crofters’ cause, such as Màiri nighean Iain Bhàin (Mary MacPherson). The Oban Times also published a Gaelic column, normally in the form of a song or poem, although with less regularity and without the relative diversity of content that had appeared in the Highlander. Two other Inverness newspapers followed suit: the Conservative Northern Chronicle, which was established in 1881 and whose editor, Duncan Campbell, was a Gaelic speaker from Perthshire; and the Scottish Highlander, established in 1885 by the Celtic Magazine’s editor, Alexander Mackenzie. Gaelic featured only rarely in other Highland publications such as the Inverness Courier and the Invergordon Times. The Ross-shire Journal embarked upon a regular Gaelic column in 1891, which lasted for a little under a year and which, rather than having a predominantly antiquarian or literary focus, often dealt with contemporary politics. It took a firm stance against Irish Home Rule and supported the Liberal Unionist candidate in the run-up to the General Election of 1892. The column came to an end as the election began, suggesting that its inclusion had been politically motivated.

Reception and Legacy The short-lived nature of many nineteenth-century Gaelic periodicals might suggest that they were not well received. Certainly, contemporary commentary on their existence is hard to locate, beyond the onesided responses of journal editors to unsourced external criticisms. The financial problems which beset these publications did not, however, necessarily reflect a lack of readership interest. Rather, it highlighted the lack of a robust business infrastructure to support production costs (as, for example, gaining revenue from advertising and local business support) and the lack of paying subscribers (it being common practice for a copy of a periodical or newspaper to be purchased for communal use, to be read aloud to a group of listeners and shared across a

­

the scottish gaelic press

355

community of readers). As a correspondent of the Inverness Courier, writing five months after An Teachdaire Gae’lach had first appeared, noted, it was common for copies to be ‘passed from hand to hand till they would no longer stick together and their contents related over many a mouldering peat fire, to those who could not read, or had not seen them’ (28 October 1829: 2). Songs in praise of Gaelic periodicals, and of newspapers with Gaelic columns – such as Iain MacIlleathain’s ‘Oran do’n Chuairtear’ − became commonplace, reflecting the way in which these publications became seen as patrons and supporters of Gaelic poets, and of Gaelic language and culture more generally, as clan chiefs ceased to fulfil this traditional role. The dissemination of Gaelic poets’ work nationally and internationally through the pages of these periodicals often served as a stepping stone to the publication of collections of their work, particularly in the second half of the century, with Mary MacPherson, Henry Whyte and Donald MacKechnie among those whose collections would appear after their work had first gained recognition in Gaelic periodicals. The literary networks which created, and were created by, the Gaelic press spanned the globe and allowed Gaels in the Highlands, the Scottish Lowlands and beyond, to engage with, and contribute to, their native language and culture, whether as writers or readers. The appearance of these periodicals, despite their lack of longevity, was a cause of pride and an expression of cultural and linguistic identity, helping to explain the relative vitality of this press outwith the Highlands. For editors and supporters of the publications they also represented a means of contributing to language maintenance in the face of increasing bilingualism and the decline of the language (e.g. Mac-Talla editorial, 18 June 1892: 2) Crucially, the importance of the Gaelic press in extending the written registers and forms of Gaelic, and in broadening the range of subject matter available to readers, cannot be overestimated given the lack of original secular prose writing before the advent of this press. The nineteenth-century Gaelic periodical press laid much of the groundwork for the twentieth century, which would see further developments, such as Gaelic fiction, in the first two decades of the century. Just as Norman MacLeod’s pioneering work created the embryonic Gaelic press in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, so the periodicals of the Scottish nationalist and pan-Celticist Roderick Erskine of Marr, including the bilingual Guth na Bliadhna (The Voice of the Year; 1904–25), Alba (Scotland; 1908–9) and An Sgeulaiche (The Storyteller; 1909–11), heralded a new phase in the Gaelic press, one which encouraged writers to experiment with new genres and to

356

sheila m. kidd

extend their reach to both fiction and political writing. The expansion of the literary competitions at An Comunn Gàidhealach’s annual cultural event, the Mòd, during the first decade of the century, also helped stimulate writing and provide material for the Gaelic press. The importance of Gaelic columns in English-language newspapers is underlined by the People’s Journal, which in 1910 serialised the first published Gaelic novel, John MacCormick’s Dùn-Àluinn (1912). And Gaelic columns have continued to be a feature of a number of English-language newspapers through to the present day, including the Scotsman and the West Highland Free Press.

Chapter Twelve

THE IRISH-LANGUAGE PRESS: ‘A TENDER PLANT AT THE BEST OF TIMES’? Regina Uí Chollatáin

T

he emergence of the nineteenth-century Gaelic column alongside pre-Revival and Revival periodicals ensured a new presence for the Irish language as part of an emerging popular culture.1 The inclusion of these forums for publishing the Irish language was mainly directed by prominent Revivalists and intellectuals, as a result of a combination of practical initiatives and the implementation of a new ideology. Book surveys and studies on periodicals are particularly insightful in demonstrating how print culture paved the way for the Irish language to feature in mainstream print media, providing a channel that helped to create a bridge between cultural change and media events within specific timeframes (Larkin and O’Brien 2014; Ó Ciosáin 2004­­–6; Sharpe 2016a). This approach was pivotal in the success of the implementation of the aims of the Language Revival to preserve and extend the use of the Irish language, to study existing Gaelic literature and to cultivate a modern literature. The periodical press supported the development of a specifically Irish literary culture, by becoming spaces in which ground-breaking Irish literature, whether short stories, prose or fiction, was serialised and read by emerging literary audiences (Mac Congáil 2011; Nic Pháidín 1998; Uí Chollatáin 2004). This essay will focus mainly on how press and periodical spaces became significant vehicles for Irish language and culture to flourish and develop. Much as in the case of Welsh and Scots Gaelic culture, such development took place in spaces that juxtaposed and juggled Irish- and English-language usage within 1

The Revival, interchangeably known as the Irish Literary Revival or the Celtic Twilight, were terms used to denote the late nineteenth-century rise of literary talent and work allied to a strong political nationalism and a revived interest in Ireland’s Gaelic language and literary heritage.

357

358

regina uí chollatáin

confined societal structures (Mac Mathúna 2007; Mac Mathúna and Uí Chollatáin 2016; Uí Chollatáin 2016a, 2012a). It is worth noting, however, that, although the main focus was of a literary and cultural nature, the Gaelic column in English language newspapers from the mid-nineteenth century onwards developed into a forum for the Irish Ireland movement in the local and national press (Uí Chollatáin 2004; Uí Fhaoláin 2014). In this regard this chapter will also offer insights into the significant role the press played in the formal structures that early in the century sought to banish the Irish language from the cultural sphere. Much Irish-language print material of the early nineteenth century was linked to religious organisations, and it is not until the latter half of the nineteenth century that Irish emerges in public discourse forums (Ó Ciosáin 2004–6: 73–106). Although there is scant evidence of early nineteenth-century journals with Irish- language material or content about the Irish language, the journals which covered this area clearly outline their aims as a ‘protest’ against the authorities, suggesting that support for the Irish language was linked to political and national identity formations set out against post-1800 union with England. Following Bolg an tSolair in 1795, periodicals which are categorised under Irish culture and language in nineteenth-century directories were dedicated mainly to the preservation of the Irish language as opposed to any effort to include public debate. Nonetheless they added to the discourse on political and national identity. Philip Barron’s Ancient Ireland was ‘launched at his own expense’ on 1 January 1835 with five issues being printed (Hawkins 2009). Richard d’Alton apparently deliberately avoided public discourse in the publication of An Fíor-Éirionach from 17 March to 17 May 1862, stating categorically, ‘My object being the restoration of the Irish language, therefore I wish to avoid all those political topics on which Irishmen differ so much’ (Breathnach and Ní Mhurchú 1999: 38). The second part of this chapter examines how a significant portion of the Irish press shifted in the latter half of the century to become supporters of the Irish Revival process, which assisted in the facilitation of a language shift from English to Irish in cultural contexts. The early journals paved the way for Revival journals in the latter half of the nineteenth century despite the apolitical and non-sectarian approach of the Gaelic League. A notable feature from the 1880s onwards is the use of journals such as the Irish Ecclesiastical Record and the Gaelic Journal by some members of the Catholic clergy, mainly Father Eoghan O’Growney, as a stepping stone for the foundation of the Gaelic League, the main organisation for the Irish-language Revival. This is

­

the irish-language press

359

insightful in examining the journalistic forum within the framework of cultural and political change. The first dual-language newspaper of the Revival period at the end of this period, An Claidheamh Soluis agus Fáinne an Lae, added new dimensions to the political space while maintaining the dominance of the cultural space. Towards the end of the nineteenth century a network developing links to the diaspora also became increasingly important, particularly in the context of Revival journals. Content in An Gaodhal in New York in 1881 and the Gaelic Journal/Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge in Dublin in 1882 indicated that the Revival was equally as dependent on the Irish diaspora as it was on the Irish at home. This approach was well reflected also in diaspora publications in Welsh in the United States. Rhiannon Heledd Williams has discussed this phenomenon in the context of the Welsh newspaper Y Drich (The Mirror), another immigrant newspaper which was in print around the same time and which started in New York some years before this: First published in New York city in 1851, the newspaper relocated to Utica in 1860, where it continued to be published for over a century. Y Drich was so pivotal to Welsh-American life for such a long period of time that the definitive study of the paper’s history is not just a ‘biography of a newspaper’ (Aled Jones and Bill Jones, Welsh Reflections: Y Drich and America, 1851–2001. Llandysul: Gomer Press, 2001, ix), but also an exploration of how the disparate Welsh-American communities evolved, saw themselves and communicated with one another. In addition to reflecting the culture of the Welsh in America, the newspaper sought to shape it: its pages reveal ‘a series of concerted efforts by its editors and main correspondents to define a Welsh identity, an ideology, if you like, for the Welsh in America’ (Jones Aled and Jones Bill (2001), ‘Y Drich and American Welsh Identities, ­­1851–1951.’ North American Journal of Welsh Studies 1 (1): 42–58). (Williams 2013) From the middle of the nineteenth century the headline for many Irish-language newspaper columns ‘thall agus abhus’ (there and here) was directed at the Irish at home and the diaspora, creating a notional transatlantic link to a new Irish identity and ideology. This acknowledged the importance of international links in creating an Irish identity. Despite the fact that Irish had been perceived by many as a dead language, these media forums further reinforced its usefulness for living communicative commentary creating an international dialogue as opposed to being categorised as part of a classical heritage. While

360

regina uí chollatáin

the role of newspapers and periodical culture in this ideological shift has still to be explored fully in a national and international context, this chapter will address some of the questions that this brings to light in the context of communities of communication in Britain and Ireland. Of value in considering Irish-language print media history is the role of the journalist as a popular successor to the ancient Irish file, or poet, functioning as social commentator and public discursant. The links between these roles have been acknowledged by Irish-language scholars and historians because the file was a commentarist and key advisor (or critic) to his patron in Irish society until the seventeenth century when the social structures changed. It has been documented that the emergence of a journalistic platform created a new cultural and political space which in some respects provided a progression path for journalists to replace the function of the file in public discourse and cultural preservation after the fall of the bardic system. While the initial approach adopted in Irish-language journals was that of protestation against the banishment of Irish from the social structures, key players subsequently enabled the Irish-language press to emerge from a mindset of protestation and cultural preservation in the early nineteenth century to become a forum for language and cultural restoration and revival in the latter half of the century. Nineteenth-century interventions created print forums that became instruments for intellectual debate, cultural preservation and literary creation and, as a catalyst for change laid the foundation for the development of the twentieth-century Revival journals. This nineteenthcentury Irish-language press, created and contributed to by many prominent Irish leaders and historical figures, formed what could be termed in present-day terminology an alternative virtual assembly for a new school of thought and set of linguistically versatile intellectuals. This scholarly elite recognised the need for the ‘Teanga eile’ (other language) in contemporary discourse, intellectual debate and modern literature, disseminated through periodical culture in order to develop and establish a vision of what an Irish state would entail. At one level this press functioned as a Revival or Irish-language forum created by elites for elites, but this was not always clearly defined, as will be examined later in the context of the diaspora press and international networks. However, circulation of Revival journals among Irish-language learners and enthusiasts as part of the work of the Gaelic League ensured a broader readership, with evidence of these periodicals and newspapers being read to groups of Irish speakers in branches of the Gaelic League in rural and urban areas of Ireland, and in city branches in the British Isles and the United States. This practice

­

the irish-language press

361

resulted in new communication communities that had a significant role in the framing of the new Irish state and its role as a single entity within the British Isles in a dual-language, dual-state milieu. The content in nineteenth-century Irish-language journals indicates that this arose initially from the need to create an alternative political space in the early 1800s, advancing to an alternative ideological commitment in the latter quarter of the century. Almost two hundred years after the foundation of the first Irish-language periodical, Bolg an tSolair, in Belfast (1795), the founding of Teilifís na Gaeilge in 1996 (rebranded as TG4 in 1999) mirrored this with its ‘Súil eile’ (another view/eye) logo, acknowledging the importance of the alternative intellectual approach in what is now termed minority-language media, a term which bears no relevance to the content or standard of this medium.

Protestation and Conservation: Writing Practices from File (Poet) to Journalist In contemporary social terms, studying journalism without studying the function of the journalist in society is akin to studying politics without studying the role of the politician. Using the interdisciplinary approach to examine the function of the file (poet), the scribe and the journalist provides a research tool allowing each one to be assessed as a member of Irish society, as opposed to a marginalised enthusiast within a minority group. The structures of Irish society are important in the assessment of any journalistic history and the role of the file was as central to the development of public discourse and societal structures before the seventeenth century as the journalist was after this period. The renowned Irish scholar Osborn Bergin’s analogy of the role of the Irish file in 1912 states that: He discharged, as O’Donovan pointed out many years ago, the functions of the modern journalist. He was not a song writer. He was often a public official, a chronicler, a political essayist, a keen and satirical observer of his fellow-countrymen. (Bergin [1970] 2003: 4) Proinsias Mac Cana claims the work of the poet is ‘socially rather than personally motivated’, and that it was inspired from a social standpoint rather than an individual one (Mac Cana 1969: 37–8). This correlates with the general view of historians who value the press in the context of the contribution it makes to politics, public opinion and society in general or ‘the first draft of history’ as attributed to Philip Graham,

362

regina uí chollatáin

the legendary publisher of the Washington Post. In light of Mac Cana’s understanding of the unifying and coordinating influence of the work of the poet, the public sphere may be viewed as a ‘national village’, as a precursor of the concept of the journalistic forum outlined in Marshall McLuhan’s pronouncements on the ‘global village’ (McLuhan 1964). Indeed, tracing the sources and scholars of Irish-language journalistic practice reveals more of a trend towards a global city, as an urban concept, than a global village, as a rural concept, due to the use of the urban environment as the background for Irish-language media to consolidate the implementation of the cultural Revival. The Dublin-based Ó Neachtain scribes Seán Ó Neachtain (born in Co. Roscommon c.1640), and his son Tadhg (born in Dublin 1671), for example, were central to the emerging intellectual debate in the public sphere of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Using a journalistic style and approach alongside newspaper sources for much of his writings, Tadhg in particular is a good example of how the political and cultural space previously occupied by poet and scribe, was transformed into a cultural space for journalistic use: He was also an enthusiastic recorder of his own private experiences and contemporary events in Ireland and abroad, making notes on what had come to his own attention and translating into Irish copious extracts from newspaper reports … His verse is of documentary rather than literary interest. It provides an insight into the society in which Ó Neachtain lived and his personal concerns. (Ó Háinle 2009: 732) This is also echoed by Breandán Ó Buachalla’s study of the Ó Neachtain writings, in which he comments, ‘Generally Ó Neachtain describes events and happenings that he is commenting on in an indifferent way, objective reporting, as a professional journalist would do’ (Ó Buachalla 1991–2: 38; translation by the author). It is possible therefore that, while preserving a literary culture, the Ó Neachtain manuscripts were at the same time the first seeds of Irish-language journalism. However, rarely are the words ‘scholar’, ‘scribe’ and ‘journalist’ used in the same sentence in the context of literary or popular culture. Before the integration of journalism into general social communication structures ensuring its viability as an accepted means of professional endeavour at the start of the twentieth century, literary and scholarly practices in Ireland created a continuum for the Irishlanguage urban community, bridging culture and time despite the relative lack of native speakers in this milieu. These writing practices subsequently incorporated new styles, concepts and material in the

­

the irish-language press

363

journalistic forum at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, creating a joint public space for the scholar, scribe and journalist. This early period of Irish-language journals and periodicals indicates a strong scholarly approach which initiated and developed intellectual debate on a new ideology for the Irish people rooted in the concept of Revivalism. Its distinguishing feature was the combination of academic, scholarship-based enquiry with social reportage, commentary and forms associated with journalistic reportage. The most obvious examples of this are found in Philip Barron’s Ancient Ireland (1835) and the articles by Eoin MacNeill and Eoghan O’Growney in the Irish Ecclesiastical Record in 1890 and 1891, and in the Gaelic Journal in 1893, which will be discussed later.

Cultural Restoration and Revival: Irish-Language Periodicals The first Irish-language periodical, Bolg an tSolair, founded in Belfast in 1795 by Samuel Neilson, who had already established the Northern Star in 1792, referred to the need for a ‘reply’ to the authorities due to the perception of their ancestors, the Irish speakers, as ‘an ignorant uncultivated people’. In response, the editors concluded in their preface, seeing that the Gaelic has been not only banished from the court, the college, and the bar, but that many tongues and pens have been employed to cry it down, and to persuade the ignorant that it was harsh and barbarous jargon, and that their ancestors, from whom they derived it, were an ignorant, uncultivated people – it becomes then necessary, to say something in reply. (Preface, Bolg an tSolair 1795: iii–iv) The ‘reply’, which was further developed through the nineteenthcentury journals and periodicals, would take its lead from learned and scholarly elites, who based their interventions within the context of a vibrant, sagacious storytelling culture, steeped in cross-cultural traditions of literary, manuscript and oral cultures. The social structures referred to in Bolg an tSolair from which the Irish language was banished have also been documented in contemporary research by Mary Daly and Tom Garvin, for example. Garvin contends that this language ‘banishment’, which took hold from the sixteenth century onwards, resulted in a linguistic transformation, and that it ensured the mental migration from the ‘medieval Gaelic world to the modern world of the English Language’ (Garvin 1987: 2). Basically, if use of Irish was prohibited in the most important social structures referred

364

regina uí chollatáin

to in the preface above, it had no role in modern society. The necessary reply would be implemented using the journalistic approach, and in this context Bolg an tSolair, published in 1795, was the cornerstone of Irish-language journalism. Its content was chiefly the work of Patrick Lynch, a well-known Irish scholar, scribe and teacher from County Down. This first example of the Irish-language journalistic forum supporting the ‘common’ non-literary culture was rooted in the ‘bosom of rationalist, Presbyterian Belfast, [where] the Renaissance of Irish music took place’ (McNeill 1960: 84). Mary McNeill states that this environment was ‘the precursor by a century of the Irish Gaelic Revival’ (ibid.). The periodical format was in line with a new ‘common’ media culture, demonstrated in the preface in Bolg an tSolair, and the content of the periodical was directed at a public with a specific interest in Irish language and culture. It consisted mainly of Irish-language glossaries and the work of the Irish scholar Charlotte Brooke. In addition to its approach to ‘say something in reply’, the main aim of Bolg an tSolair was described thus, for example: It is chiefly with a view to prevent in some measure the total neglect, and to diffuse the beauties of this ancient and onceadmired language, that the following compilation is offered to the public; hoping to afford a pleasing retrospect to every Irishman, who respects the traditions, or considers the language and compositions of our early ancestors, as a matter of curiosity or importance. (‘Preface’, Bolg an tSolair [1795]: ix) A closer study of Irish-language periodical culture and forums demon­­strates a strong tradition of journalistic practice, which provided a continuum of sorts which did ‘say something in reply’ but failed to provide an Irish-language forum for public discourse which was equally acknowledged by the mainstream English-speaking community, despite parallels in journalistic styles and content. The aim of the Irish-language periodical was not communication alone, but cultural preservation and affirmation – a sentiment which is echoed in many nineteenth-century journals as outlined below. These also functioned as a protest against the banishment of Irish language and culture from the public sphere. Following Bolg an tSolair, the journals of the nineteenth century were dedicated mainly to preservation of the Irish language and sowing the seeds for the Irish-language Revival, as opposed to any effort to include public debate. Walter Cox’s Irish Magazine (1808–10) is hailed as providing the ‘first mass-circulation printing of Irish’ (Sharpe

­

the irish-language press

365

2016b: 64). Donn Piatt’s study of old Dublin journals emphasises the Irish content of the Dublin Penny Journal. The first issue, on 13 June 1832, printed a full Irish poem in Gaelic font on the last page, and by the twentieth edition Irish was a central feature of the journal (Piatt 1985: 144–6). The Dublin Penny Journal under George Petrie’s editorship from 1833, and The Citizen with William Elliot Hudson as editor from 1842, continued with an approach that included material on the preservation of manuscripts with glossaries, simple grammar lessons, prayers and poetry, similar to general miscellany formats favoured by many journals of the time. The new series of the Dublin Penny Journal from April 1902 did not contain any Irish-language material. Following Philip Barron’s Ancient Ireland in 1835, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the advent of the Nation newspaper in 1842 was to have a profound effect on the development of the Gaelic column as a journalistic medium. In 1858 Canon Ulick J. Bourke began publishing his ‘Easy Lessons or Self-Instruction in Irish’ in the Nation, a series designed to impart a basic knowledge of Irish-language grammar and pronunciation (Andrews, http://dib.cambridge.org/view ReadPage.do?articleId=a0812). This series was significant for a number of reasons. Firstly, it represented possibly the first attempt to teach Irish through the popular press, a development which stands in stark contrast to, and may have been an indirect consequence of, the failure of the National School system introduced in 1831 to recognise Irish on its official curriculum. Secondly, the ‘Easy Lessons’ column symbolically associated the promotion of the Irish language with the nationalist political rhetoric of the Young Irelanders promoted elsewhere in the same newspaper. Morash claims that, ‘Like the Northern Star, The Nation was published not simply to inform, but to forge a national identity’ (Morash 2010: 80–1). The language legacy of these publications, coupled with the ideology of the Young Irelanders, paved the way for Revival journalism in the latter half of the nineteenth century creating a shared cultural and political space (Uí Chollatáin 2011: 160–73). This was to become a common feature of the Gaelic journalistic milieu in the decades that followed. Like many others, the Gaelic activist David Comyn (Dáithí Coimín), who went on to become editor of Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge/The Gaelic Journal, first honed his skills as a columnist with the Irishman, the Shamrock, Young Ireland and the Teachers’ Journal in the post-Famine period. Comyn appealed to these publications to print ‘cúinní Gaeilge’ (Irish-language corners), providing the bulk of the material himself (‘Coimín, Dáithí (1854–1907)’, Ainm.ie, http://www.ainm.ie/Bio.aspx?ID=131).

366

regina uí chollatáin

It has been suggested that the serialisation of Canon Ulick Bourke’s Easy Lessons or Self-Instruction in Irish in the Nation (1858–62), and Richard d’Alton’s Fior-Eirionnach in Tipperary in 1862, was the first move to the restoration of the Irish language, a demonstrable shift in focus in Irish-language press production. As referred to earlier, Richard d’Alton apparently deliberately avoided public discourse in the publication of An Fíor-Eirionnach from 17 March to 17 May 1862. This was a distinct move to provide modern reading material in the Irish language. Possibly as a result of the aforementioned series of ‘Easy Lessons’ in the Nation Canon Ulick J. Bourke was also hailed as a pioneer of Irish journalism, which is borne out further by his attempts to create public forums in the media in Ireland and in the United Kingdom, most of which were short lived. The Keltic Journal and Educator, for example, which he produced with James Ronayne in 1868 in Manchester, ran to only seven numbers. In 1870 Bourke was appointed president of St Jarlath’s College in Tuam, Co. Galway, and from this vantage point he set about establishing a Catholic, independent newspaper that would be ‘a popular exponent of national and local opinion’ and feature Irish-language material (Legg 1999: 96). The Tuam News and Western Advertiser was launched in 1870, with Bourke himself contributing regular articles in Irish and about Irish history. This appears to be the first instance of a regional newspaper printing such material on a regular basis (Legg 1999: 99), and this weekly column, or ‘Gaelic Department’, a title by which many of these columns came to be known, was edited by John Glynn, an Irish and Maths teacher at St Jarlath’s. Father Eoghan O’Growney, who later served as editor of the Gaelic Journal, and another leading figure in the Gaelic Revival movement, was a regular contributor (Uí Chollatáin 2014: 22–45). The relationship between Bourke and O’Growney, both prominent members of the Catholic clergy, is one of the most pertinent examples of the support from the Catholic Church for the Revival movement in the Irish-language press. O’Growney’s lament for Canon Bourke on his death in 1887, which was published in the Tuam News, is a strong endorsement of his work and influence on the Revival. It is noteworthy that this was published in the Tuam News as a newspaper with a wider circulation than the Revival periodicals of the late nineteenth century. O’Growney continued to publish translations of songs and prose, including ‘An tAm fadó’ (Auld lang syne) (Ní Mhunghaile http://dib. cambridge.org/viewReadPage.do?articleId=a6774). O’Growney also continued to draw on his contacts at the Tuam News to encourage its manager, Bourke’s nephew John MacPhilpin,

­

the irish-language press

367

to reprint his article ‘The National Language’ (previously published in the Irish Ecclesiastical Record) on 14 November 1890, in which he called on the Catholic clergy to support the Irish-language movement (McMahon 2008: 37–9; Uí Chollatáin 2014: 39–40). Some months later, the Chair of Irish was reinstated at the Catholic seminary in Maynooth University. As O’Growney himself was appointed to the professorship in late 1891, it is important to acknowledge the power of the regional press in promoting views on the preservation of the Irish language and the Catholic hierarchy, and the role this journalistic forum played in influencing subsequent strategic appointments and dismissals (Uí Chollatáin 2004: 51–5, 99–102). For most of the nineteenth century the Gaelic column as a regular feature in the mainstream Irish press and diasporic aimed press outlets overseas ensured the Irish language a place in modern print culture in Ireland, Britain, Europe and America. The shift from cultural cultivation to language restoration is mirrored and supported in Irishlanguage newspaper columns and periodicals in the United States and Ireland, with current research indicating that the first Gaelic column was in the Irish American in New York in 1857 (Uí Chollatáin 2016b). However, in Ireland the aforementioned Tuam News and Western Advertiser (Galway, 1870–1904), the Celt (Waterford, October 1876– July 1877) and The Cashel Gazette (Tipperary, 1864–93), seem to be the main provincial Irish newspapers to have had an Irish column in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In the context of the ‘global city’ referred to earlier, the impetus for journalistic publishing in Irish sprang not from the heartland of the Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking district) itself, but rather from an urban milieu which was sometimes supported by the endeavours of the Catholic hierarchy, despite their general apathy towards the Irish-language Revival movement. In May 1864 County Tipperary’s Cashel Gazette and Weekly Advertiser was founded by John Davis White, a strong advocate of antiquities who served for a time as diocesan librarian in Cashel. The Gazette’s first editorial set out the principles the paper adhered to for almost thirty years – to serve all classes of society, not to engage in controversial religious or political topics, to report local news, and to promote local history and literature (Hayes 1989: 4). The Gazette was among the first regional papers to publish regular material in Irish, and it would do so throughout its thirty-odd-year history, driven by White’s editorial energy. It folded shortly after White died in June 1893, just before the foundation of the Gaelic League in Dublin, unable to survive without him at the helm (Legg 1999: 99; Williams, Carson http://dib. cambridge.org/viewReadPage.do?articleId=a9004; Marnane 1994:

368

regina uí chollatáin

97–104). Another nationalist newspaper from the same area, Thomas Walsh’s Cashel Sentinel (1885–1914), supported Home Rule and the Gaelic League, indicating that there was a substantial reading public for this material in the Cashel region (Hayes 1989: 4). In nearby Clonmel, the Nationalist and Tipperary Advertiser also published an Irish-language column. Hayes’s register of Tipperary newspapers traces the Nationalist’s origins back to T. P. Gill’s Tipperary Nationalist, established in Thurles in 1881 as an organ of the Irish Parliamentary Party. In the 1890s the Nationalist was the leading weekly publication in South Tipperary according to Hayes, with a circulation of 10,000 within a radius of seventy miles (Hayes 1989: 7). The inclusion of Irish-language material in the Clonmel Nationalist, Cashel Gazette and Cashel Sentinel reflects the rise of the language movement in Munster, outside of the traditional Irish-speaking districts. John Horgan refers to Irish-language journalism as ‘a tender plant at the best of times’ (Horgan 2001: 37), and clearly the approach adopted after the publication of Bolg an tSolair, to make the necessary ‘reply’, did not so much flourish as slowly, through careful cultivation, produce shoots in the often thorny and marginalised garden of Irish-language Revival. It has been presented as a forum for literary revival primarily, and, as such, the poor and indeed rural cousin of mainstream Englishlanguage journalism in Ireland and Britain. Even within its own public domain, the Irish-language community, Irish-language journalism was often perceived as a necessary burden on the great wealth of Irish-language manuscript, oral and literary material, as is evidenced from the debate on the foundation of an Irish-language newspaper by T. W. Rolleston referring to the case put forward by Douglas Hyde in 1886. Irish was clearly perceived to be a ‘classic’ language which had no role in contemporary society or in its communication networks. As Rolleston commented: But we should need to see more definiteness or more commonsense in the aims of An Chraoibhín Aoibhinn and his friends. Do they wish to make Irish the language of our conversation and our newspapers? Impossible, and wholly undesirable. Do they wish to make us a bi-lingual people in the sense that everybody should know two languages? But peasantry and artisans cannot be expected to know two languages except at the expense of both … What is there left except to treat Irish as a classic, and leave it to the Universities? (Irish University Review, June 1886) By the end of the century the Irish-language press focus had changed from protestation and cultural preservation to cultural and language

­

the irish-language press

369

revival, and such periodicals and newspapers played a role in arguing for a need for a broader international cultural approach. As other contributions in this volume regarding Welsh- and Scots Gaelic-language press suggest, towards the end of the nineteenth century there was much momentum in establishing common cultural heritage platforms to give space to the Celtic voice. The Gaelic Journal/Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge (1882–1909), for example, provides ample references to publications in Wales, Scotland and beyond engaged in this mission. As an article on the new Irish-language literary festival ‘An tOireachtas’, founded in 1897, argued, the need for a common platform and festival to strengthen the bond between the ‘Celtic peoples’ was being recognised both at home and abroad: Your Oireachtas was I think, taken up better by the press in America than anything that has happened on this side of the Atlantic for some time past. The novelty appealed to them. The very idea of the Irish people having a literary competition in their own language in Dublin was so extraordinary that they eagerly took notice of it. They in America … were happy that such a very large measure of success had attended the efforts of the Gaelic League in establishing an institution having for its objects the literary cultivation of the tongue of our fathers. He considered that there were two great reasons which should induce every Irishman to join the movement for the preservation of the Irish language – first it offered a common platform to those of different shades of political and religious thought; and secondly, that it formed a strong bond of union between the Celtic peoples of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. (Gaelic Journal, October 1897: 95)

From the First ‘Revival’ Periodical to the First ‘Revival’ Newspaper Despite this collective effort, it is not until the latter half of the nineteenth century that Irish language takes a central role in redefining and reclaiming Irish identity. A general overview of newspaper lists and other literary sources demonstrates a predominance of periodical culture in the east or urban pockets in Ireland, although the aforementioned John Glynn’s columns in the Tuam News and the Tuam Herald in the West were the most consistent source of a substantial Gaelic column before the Irish Independent in 1905. The Revival mindset in the final quarter of the nineteenth century brought transnational journals such as An Gaodhal (1881–1904, edited

370

regina uí chollatáin

from New York) and Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge/The Gaelic Journal (Dublin based) to the fore. The Shan Van Vocht in Belfast (1896–9) and Fáinne an Lae (1898–1900) brought this century of Irish-language journalism to a close in Ireland and Britain. Douglas Hyde attributes the beginning of the fin de siècle revival of the Irish language to the foundation of the Gaelic Journal/Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge, noting ‘that it was the first number of Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge in November 1882 that ‘started the revival and cultivation of the new language’ (Ní Mhuiríosa 1978: 24; translation by author). The concept of a ‘Gaelic Journal’ was a topic for much debate in the prominent Revival Society for the Preservation of Irish Language, which was founded in Dublin in 1876 and noted for its work as a precursor to the foundation of the Gaelic League. The journal was a priority so that the society could: achieve a high level of respect and belief in the Irish language among the community of speakers who, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century, had completely lost faith in it. The founders of the society understood that this requirement could be served by founding supportive societies all over the country, through attaining a secure place for Irish at every level of the education system, and through publishing a substantial journal for the public. (Ó Murchú 2001: 130; translation by the author) In 1882 the journal An Gaodhal, founded by Micheál Ó Locháin in Brooklyn, New York, in 1881, was highlighted as an example of such an approach. Marcus J. Ward outlined clearly that a journal of this kind would bridge a gap and create a bond between students, men of learning and public opinion, thereby playing a practical, realistic role in the implementation of the Revivalist ideals: But suppose now our teacher can get through the post weekly a small readable Irish journal emanating from our Society, in which things grave and gay encourage his efforts and stimulate his interest, he will feel that he and the man on the other side of the mountain, who, too, is working at Irish, are engaged in a common task: that he is helping a movement throughout the country; and that in the metropolis there is a band of workers willing to second his efforts. But your journal will do more than create a bond of union among students, it will gain a recognition in time among men of learning, and through such leaders of opinion create a public opinion in favour of the preservation of our language. The want of this sentiment is precisely what paralyses the efforts of our Council. A

­

the irish-language press

371

deputation may wait on a public board or government official, but unless the memorial is backed by the demand of the public, the members of the deputation merely stand as good-natured enthusiasts or cranky crotchet-mongers. (Ó Murchú 2001: 380–1) The An Gaodhal network needs to be assessed within the context both of Irish-American journalism in general – including the emergence of Gaelic Departments – and of Irish-language publication in Ireland. Not surprisingly in a movement that valorised Irish-speaking communities, there is not always clear elite/non-elite or Irish-based/non-Irishbased cleavage. Contributors such as the Rev. Euseby Cleaver (who was living in Dolgelly, Wales, until his death in 1894), Professor Eoghan O’Growney (who moved to America in 1894) and the poet Pádraig Ó Beirn (who emigrated to America in 1879, returning to Ireland in 1897) were also closely associated with Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge/The Gaelic Journal, while O’Growney, J. J. Lyons and P. J. Crean were regular contributors to the Tuam News ‘Gaelic Department’ under the editorship of Seán Mag Fhloinn. Ó Lócháin encouraged and publicised the work of Gaelic Departments in Irish-American newspapers, republished material from the Tuam News and the Gaelic Journal and (by regularly alluding to these publications and listing Irish-language books available for order or sale to readers) promoted Irish-language literacy and literature at every opportunity. Using An Gaodhal as the international flagship for the creation of an Irish-language journal, the need for scholarly support and public backing became evident in such discussions. The first edition of the Gaelic Journal/Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge was eventually published by the Gaelic Union, an offshoot of the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language in November 1882, embedding it within the scholarly Revivalist ideology flourishing at the time. The Gaelic League took over the publishing of the Gaelic Journal from 1894 until it ceased publication in 1909. Many of its editors were noteworthy and prominent figures in the Revivalist movement. The first editor was David Comyn (Daithí Ó Coimín; 1882–3) from Kilrush in Co. Clare, followed by John Fleming (Seán Pléimeann; 1884–91) from Baile Uí Néill, Co. Tipperary; Eoghan O’Growney (1891–94) from Athboy in Co. Meath; Eoin Mac Néill (1894–9) from Gleann Arma, Co. Antrim; J. J. Lloyd (1899–1902) from Ranelagh, Dublin; and Tadhg Ó Donnchadha (‘Torna’; 1902–9) from An Gleann, Co. Cork. Clearly, it was not confined to one profession or one geographical area. As the first Revival journal associated with a specific organisation within a wide geographical hinterland, it increased its cultural currency, spreading

372

regina uí chollatáin

and enhancing the value of the Irish language to a wider and betterinformed public. The journal’s editors were an eclectic mix, ranging from scholars, priests, civil servants and bank clerks to university professors, but all identifying with the era’s intellectual elite. While the Gaelic Journal had a scholarly focus and was founded mainly to report on Revival events and developments, the concept of the ‘living tongue’ and ‘living literature’ was central to fulfilling its aims of protestation. As it announced in a late-century issue: The GAELIC JOURNAL will be at once the organ of the Irish language movement, the willing medium of interchange of knowledge among the students of Irish, the record of much of our literature and traditional lore, and the clear and indubitable witness that our language is still a living tongue, a great instrument of thought, with a living literature, and with its powers of creating a living national literature still unimpaired. The existence of the GAELIC JOURNAL will in this way be a protest and a testimony against the national crime, by whomsoever perpetrated, whether by design or neglect perpetrated, of ignoring our national language and literature, and abandoning them to disuse and oblivion. (Gaelic Journal, 1 May 1895) The content demonstrates a new direction for the language Revival, but the element of ‘protest’ in earlier nineteenth-century journals was still very prevalent. This echoes the sentiments in almost all previous periodicals with an Irish-language focus, declaring a note of protest and ‘uprising’ against the neglect of the language (Uí Chollatáin 2012: 134–52). The content was more international and language focused, however, signalling a move towards becoming a more general publication with a wider readership, reaching out to Irish communities at home and abroad. Many articles entitled ‘Scottish Gaelic’ appeared in the early issues (Gaelic Journal / Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge, May 1893: 206; July 1993; November 1993: 236). The journal’s international focus was evident in articles targeting transnational audiences, such as ‘Comhthéacs na Gaeilge mar theanga Dhomhanda – Laidin agus Béarla’: Latin and English Translation of the Glosses in Windisch’s ‘Compendium of Irish Grammar’. II. James P Mc Swiney; ‘Stáid na Gaedhilge agus Teangthadh Eile ins na Stáidibh Aontuighthe (agus i gCanada)’. I. (The State of Irish and Other Languages in the United States and Canada) G01 November 1882 by T. Ó Néill Russell, IG01 February 1883, and ‘A Voice From Australia’, from the Rev. J. M. O’Reilly, IG04, May 1893.

­

the irish-language press

373

The journal’s transnational communication signifies the first steps in the creation of an international dialogue in Irish-language journalism; the journal published letters and contributions from international readers that demonstrated keen engagement with its contents and Irish-language themes. An example of such engagement was a letter from Eoghan Ó Neachtain in Johannesburg, published in 1897, sparked by a reaction to the contents of the journal from the year previous. Eoghan Ó Neachtain was a prominent journalist in the Revival period being the first salaried editor of An Claidheamh Soluis agus Fáinne an Lae (1901–3) and the first Irish-language editor of the Gaelic column in the Irish Independent from 1905 to 1915. When Ó Neachtain’s subsequent role in Irish-language journalism is considered, this letter is an important example of reader interaction but also demonstrates the effect that the lag of space and time could have on transnational reading and reception of its contents: Letter from South Africa (1897) This letter came some time ago from an old friend of the Journal and the Irish language cause, from the person who is most knowledgeable about the Irish language and is most interested in it in Connacht while he was there .i. Eoghan Ó Neachtain (Iohannesburg, 18/7/97). (Translation by the author) Building on the foundation laid by societies such as the Ossianic Society, the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language, and the Gaelic Union in supporting language and culture preservation, the Irish-language Revival entered a new phase in July 1893 with the establishment of the Gaelic League. Unsurprisingly, print featured prominently as a platform for the promotion of the Gaelic League’s language classes, events and campaigns. In a similar vein to Canon Bourke’s use of the Nation newspaper, O’Growney circulated a series of ‘Easy Lessons in Irish’ in the Weekly Freeman and the Gaelic Journal in 1893, which were published in book form in 1894 under the title Simple Lessons in Irish. These had a widespread appeal among Gaelic enthusiasts, with League records showing significant sales among Irish-language readers: in 1897 alone, 32,000 copies were sold of the Simple Lessons; by 1901, this had risen to 135,000 copies per year (Ó Fearaíl 1975: 7, 17). This practice of using the English-medium, mainstream press as a springboard to teach Irish to readers reflects the key role that ­­Irish-language columns and designated periodicals had in ­­promoting the Revival in a pragmatic, rather than purely ideological, manner.

374

regina uí chollatáin

Irish-language print media was moving from a scholarly approach to more practical and active modes of nurturing and engaging an Irish-reading public. There was increasing interest in establishing an Irish-language specific newspaper to serve such an audience, and on 6 October 1897 Eoin MacNeill raised the question of a newspaper at the executive committee of the Gaelic League, presenting a plan from the Dublin printer Bernard Doyle. It was accepted, and after the announcement in November 1897 the first edition of the news periodical Fáinne an Lae (subsequently known as An Claidheamh Soluis agus Fáinne an Lae) became available on 8 January 1898. This new press source became a forum through which sponsors and contributors sought to engage with the national ideology prevalent in the Revival movement of the turn of the century. It marked a turning point, when Irish-language press publications moved from ‘protesting’ to the authorities to ‘testing’ the Irish public. As the editors declared in the opening pages: We gladly give our readers this month the tidings that a great step forward is about to be taken in the interests of the National language. A weekly newspaper in the Irish language is announced. For the past year or two, since the movement in favour of our native tongue began to take firm root in the nation, the uprise of a newspaper in Irish has been eagerly hoped and looked forward to … A correspondent of the GAELIC JOURNAL put the case in plain words a few months ago, when he said if this movement is a reality, it should by this time be able to stand the test of supporting a weekly paper … The test is about to be made and we are confident of a successful result … The new journal will be a bona fide newspaper, intended to supply in Irish a summary of news and miscellaneous interesting matter as weekly reading for the ordinary household. In fulfilling this purpose it will attain the great end of creating an Irish-reading public … It will thus be seen that there will be hardly any overlapping between ‘Fáinne an Lae’ and this Journal. The GAELIC JOURNAL will remain the indispensable periodical for the student and for all who desire to increase their knowledge of Irish literature and of the structure, scope, and idiom of the Irish language. Its value in these directions will increase as time goes on. (‘Fáinne an Lae’, Gaelic Journal/ Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge, November 1897) There were many pitfalls, however, and this ‘test’ had its share of failures, one of the greatest being the absence of the core Irish-language community in this forum. As a result of the banishment of Irish in

­

the irish-language press

375

societal structures over a prolonged period the lack of economic value on the Irish language decimated the Irish-speaking districts, leaving much work to be done for the Revivalists on both sides of the linguistic borders. Although its success was also hindered by political unrest and revolutionary sentiment, its ultimate achievement lay in the living commentary it provided for a reading public (albeit a mainly elite public), creating a significant forum for political and economic debate, alongside the creation of a modern literature and language. To be clear, though, the public An Claidheamh Soluis agus Fáinne an Lae served was not primarily the traditional Irish-speaking community, but rather the Gaelic League itself, an organisation catering mainly for a middleclass urban community. The aim of the paper was linked with literacy and the aims of the organisation instead of basic journalistic principles: ‘One of the chief objects in view in establishing a weekly paper in Irish was this – the creation of an Irish reading public, which is an absolute necessity if the League is to be maintained’ (‘Strengthen the Weak Points’, Editorial, An Claidheamh Soluis agus Fáinne an Lae, 11 August 1900). In the final decade of the nineteenth century the main Irish dailies sympathetic to Irish nationalism, the Irish Daily Independent (later relaunched as the Irish Independent) and the Freeman’s Journal, carried regular features in Irish and openly declared their support for the native language (Mac Congáil 2011: 112–91; Whelan 2012: 67–80). By 1897 Donnchadh Pléimionn had become the first paid Irish-language columnist (that we know of ), providing a regular Gaelic column for the Cork Weekly Examiner, ‘Pléimionn, Donnchadh (1867–1900)’, (Ainm.ie, http://www.ainm.ie/Bio.aspx?ID=39). The role of the Irishlanguage journalist was finally being recognised as worthy of patronage in a modern sense, which broadened its scope beyond the marginalised Irish-language enthusiast.

Conclusion A review of nineteenth-century Irish-language journalism shows that its social, linguistic and journalistic structures supported each other and coexisted to allow for literate and non-literate avenues of communication at a time when the Irish-language community was simultaneously at the heart of coming to terms with a dual-language communication challenge. This also resulted in a cultural challenge, which played a part in the development of new elements in literary and intellectual styles in Irish journalism and to some extent addressed the need for communities of communication. Instead of being a burden to

376

regina uí chollatáin

the manuscript material mentioned earlier, journalistic material complemented sources already available. Irish-language journalism alone was not the cornerstone for an Irish-language Revival, but it was a cultural element in an evolving new social and intellectual structure, embracing new writing and communication styles and formats. The potential for Irish-language journalism, particularly in the formation of the concept and image of Irish community and identity, ‘which has been downplayed and even ignored’ (Horgan 2001: 37), has possibly yet to be fully recognised, creating a new communication challenge. This is important, not only in understanding the relevance of the creation of an Irish-language reading and writing public, but also in the context of an Irish social structural heritage where file and scribe were potential journalists in another era, and in a ‘redactional society of ‘writing publics’, today where everyone is potentially a journalist’ (Mc Nair 2006: 206). The formats and styles may change, but the journalistic platform that the Irish language occupied would prove an important element in linking local, national and global Irish-language communities over the course of the nineteenth century. This is particularly evident in the samples discussed in the context of the networks and transnational dialogue which these periodicals and newspapers created with South Africa, the United States, Australia, Canada and the British Isles in particular. These links moulded the foundation and dictated the direction that Irish-language journalism took in the twentieth century when it would be formally recognised in the Irish state. The creation of an international authorship in nineteenth-century Irish-language journalism in turn nurtured the creation of a modern Irish literature and the extension of the use of the Irish language in national and transnational dialogues. The success of this was to be realised through the implementation of the Revival process in the twentieth century.

The Denominational Press

Chapter Thirteen

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY DENOMINATIONAL PRESS Joan Allen

I

n the nineteenth century the enormous appetite for religious press titles was a significant force, not just in serving the spiritual needs of the increasingly diverse religious communities of Britain and Ireland but also in driving forward innovative developments in the periodical press. The century’s trademark oscillation between ‘crisis and confidence, faith and doubt’ created a demand that at times seemed unquenchable, and this questioning evangelical impulse sought expression beyond the usual rituals of religious services, missionary activity and the pulpit. In the age of print, major and minor branches of Christianity as well as other denominations, including the Anglo-Jewish community, all invested in their own religious tracts and periodicals in order to connect their geographically scattered believers and prevent lapsation (Hoppen 1998: 427; Parsons 1988: 5–7). The vibrancy of the religious press also owed much to the progressive activism of key individuals who embraced new ways of communicating their faith and were quick to capitalise on the potential of the popular press, in periodical and newspaper form, to recruit and sustain their religious constituencies. An enormous raft of titles circulated at the national, provincial and local level, with cover prices that bridged the social divide, all helping to secure converts, raise funds and give its readers a shared identity based on their faith. In addition, the faithful were supplied with an abundance of suitable literature for the Sabbath and other designated holy days. This radical approach to the sustenance of religious life dovetailed with the printing revolution that was an intrinsic feature of ­nineteenth-century industrial and technological innovation (James 1976: 17–27; Jones 1996). Josef Altholz calculated that ‘religious periodicals dominated the British press’ in the nineteenth century with some 377

378

joan allen

3,000 titles in circulation (Altholz 1989: 10–11; Ellegard 1957: 10–30). While many titles did not outlast the century, others such as Charles Diamond’s flagship Irish paper the Catholic Herald (1888–present), the Jewish Chronicle (1841–) and the Church Times (1863–present) still survive. English Catholic papers such as the Tablet (1840–present) and the popular penny weekly Universe (1860–present) also proved to be remarkably resilient as they jockeyed for position and influence in this crowded market. Other periodicals such as Edward Miall’s campaigning Nonconformist (1841–1900) or the Wesleyan Methodist Magazine (1778–1969) gained a significant second readership among temperance groups which were closely aligned to their trademark self-improving, temperate ethos. This chapter will track the way that major and minor faith groups all engaged with print journalism. It will highlight the important pioneering work of the various religious tract societies whose commitment to the publication of Christian literature energised the emergence of many religious periodicals in this period. In some respects, too, it will argue that this remarkable turn to print can be seen as a defence mechanism, a means of maintaining orthodoxy and resisting the reforms that some groups, such as Nonconformists and Anglicans, feared might threaten their legitimacy or even their very survival. For others, such as English Catholics and Anglo-Jews, there was an urgent need to accommodate migrants who brought with them conflicting religious and cultural practices, and political imperatives. For these newly expanded communities of believers, the readership of dedicated journals and newspapers constituted an important mechanism for building a shared religious identity. Finally, it will demonstrate the way that the religious press changed and developed in response to external pressures, not least the rise of secular society. Nineteenth-century religious periodicals were all indebted, to a lesser or greater extent, to the pioneering work of the religious publication societies. The most important of these, the Church of England Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK, founded 1698) and the Religious Tract Society (RTS, founded 1799) (which was a Congregationalist venture), published, distributed and financed vast quantities of religious and moralising material (Rivers 2007: 1–22). In the 1830s lower production costs and taxation, combined with the greater efficiencies associated with new communication technologies, were all conducive to the expansion of their educational objectives. Indeed, the competition between the two societies, and determined opposition to the secularist Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK), created a further, helpful, dynamic. The

­

the denominational press

379

SPCK’s official periodical, Saturday Magazine (1832–44), had ambitions to spread education and literacy to the masses – although only through the medium of informative and moral material. It thus acted as a direct rival to the SDUK’s populist Penny Magazine (1832–45), published by its renowned director and radical publisher, Charles Knight. He harnessed new print technologies to his mass-education project, notably by investing in more illustrative material, and applied his considerable influence to the campaign to remove the last vestiges of the ‘taxes on knowledge’ (Gray 2006; Rauch 2001). Knight bragged that the commercial success of the Penny Magazine, which was selling upwards of 200,000 copies by the time its first volume went to press in December 1832, was an unarguable testimony of the appetite for knowledge (Penny Magazine, 18 December 1832). One of the more innovative features of the religious press was the extent to which it targeted younger readers, either by including a dedicated children’s column or by publishing separate titles such as the Child’s Companion or Sunday Scholar’s Reward (1824–32), the Boy’s Own Paper (1867–1967) and its companion magazine, the Girl’s Own Paper (1880–1956), as regular offerings and leather-bound annuals (Drotner 1988); all were published under the auspices of the Religious Tract Society. This rich corpus of newspapers and periodicals not only affords a unique insight into the religious landscape of Britain and Ireland, but also helps to capture the socio-economic and political zeitgeist of the nineteenth century. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, as religious revivalism took hold, ‘splits were the order of the day’ (Hoppen 1998: 427), and not just among different branches of new Dissent or Protestant nonconformity. Divergent strands of thought surfaced within all the major Christian traditions across Britain and Ireland, each eager to strengthen its own position and authority and to assert this combatively from the pulpit and, increasingly, in print. In Scotland, the Established Church was riven by a bitter dispute between Presbyterians and the Episcopalians, culminating in the Great Disruption of 1843 (Parsons 1988: 108–16). In Ireland, 80 per cent of the population was Roman Catholic in 1834, and the remainder divided between the Presbyterians and Church of Ireland (Hoppen 1998: 562). In Wales, the evangelical revival fractured the hold which the Established Church had enjoyed for centuries, and by 1811 Calvinistic Methodism had emerged as a serious contender for the hearts and minds of the Welsh people (McCord and Purdue 2007: 134; Allen and Jones 2014: 5). Many historians have linked the development of the Welsh press to the rapid transformation of the Welsh economy, the rise of urbanisation and the forging of new

380

joan allen

social relationships (Evans 1988: 7–39; Jones 1993: 2). The press not merely reflected on those socio-economic changes, but sought to be an agent of change. Religion and politics were both deeply implicated in the battle for this contested space (Jones 1993: 3). The patterns of belief in Wales, Ireland and Scotland were each quite distinctive, and inevitably this was reflected in their respective print cultures (Hoppen 1998: 428). For the purposes here, Wales can be considered a unique case study. The development of the Welsh religious press was largely dominated by Nonconformist initiatives and energised by the language question. Both English and Welsh were in widespread use across Wales in the early decades, and Welshbased religious denominations had to take account of this if they were to minister to these scattered communities. In essence, this meant factoring in the need to publish periodicals in the Welsh language (https://journals.library.wales/home; Humphreys 1945; Jones 2000: 81–92). The origins of Welsh periodicals can be dated from the very end of the eighteenth century when, in February 1793, Y Cylchgrawn Cymraeg (The Welsh Magazine) appeared. Although it lasted for a mere five issues, it articulated the progressive ideas of its editor, John Morgan Rhys, by advocating social reform, particularly an end to the slave trade, disestablishment, the missionary movement, and a system of Sunday and day schools (Bassett 1977: 109–13; Davies 1981: 42–3). In 1799, in response to a religious revival, Thomas Charles of Bala and Thomas Jones of Denbigh, both Independent ministers, blazed a trail by publishing Trysorfa Ysprydol (The Spiritual Treasury), the first Welsh denominational publication. Published in Caerleon by W. C. Jones, it became the principal requirement for many chapels and Sunday schools, but it too had a short shelf life. It was greatly hampered by the weak infrastructure supporting the production, distribution and marketing of religious works, and circulated only in five parts (320 pages in total) between April 1799 and January 1800 before folding. Nonetheless, it provided a model which other Nonconformist groups sought to emulate (Walters 1998: 197–207). In 1809 a Wesleyan Methodist publication, Yr Eurgrawn Wesleyaidd, proved more resilient. This was in fact the Welsh-language version of the highly successful Wesleyan Magazine which appeared as a monthly until 1962. The success of Yr Eurgrawn Wesleyaidd led to the publication of other periodicals and journals, including Seren Gomer (The Star of Gomer). Founded in Swansea and initially edited by the Baptist minister Joseph Harris (Gomer, 1773–1825) from 1 January 1814, Seren Gomer was the first Welsh-language weekly newspaper offering

­

the denominational press

381

national, foreign, political and religious news, alongside literary materials (Davies 2002: 26). Patchy circulation rates throughout Wales, unstable advertising revenues and the burden of stamp duty rendered the title unsustainable: after just eighty-five editions it closed in August 1815. Undaunted, Harris managed to revive the title as a fortnightly magazine in 1818 until, in 1820, he was forced once again to scale back his ambitions and issue it as a monthly. When Harris died in 1825, Seren Gomer was purchased by a Carmarthen publisher and was generally regarded as a Baptist publication, even though it had no official ties with the Baptists until 1880. In the post-Napoleonic period the Welsh religious press relaunched with new vigour, beginning with Goleuad Cymru (The Light of Wales), which was published in 1818 and attained a national circulation, and, in 1821, the Independents’ publication, Y Dysgedydd (The Instructor). Between 1822 and 1837 the Established Church sponsored Y Gwyliedydd (The Sentinel), a periodical that offered a blend of ­religious/moral commentary together with sections on Welsh literature and antiquities designed to appeal to a more cultured and conservative readership. Several religious titles followed in swift succession, including the Calvinistic Methodist-sponsored publication Y Drysorfa (The Treasury) in 1831 and the Independents’ periodical Y Gwladgarwr (The Patriot), edited by Evan Evans (Ieuan Glan Geirionydd) from 1833 to 1841. Evans had written (c.1830) to the Welsh bishops in advance to solicit their support in publishing a periodical similar to the SPCK’s Saturday Magazine. In the event, lively copy and influential backing enabled Y Gwladgarwr to achieve a healthy circulation. In this dynamic period, too, David Owen (‘Brutus’), a former minister with both the Baptists and Independents, edited two Nonconformist periodicals. With this journalistic experience in hand, and following his acceptance into the Established Church in 1835, he was appointed as editor of Yr Haul (The Sun), a Tory-leaning, Anglican publication. That same year, the monthly Y Diwygiwr (The Reformer) was founded to serve the expanding Independent communities of South Wales. It was edited by David Rees, an Independent minister from Llanelli, who advocated a strident blend of radicalism and Nonconformity, and deployed Daniel O’Connell’s clarion call, ‘Agitate! Agitate! Agitate!’ (Cynhyrfer! Cynhyrfer! Cynhyrfer!), to engage dissenting voices in the region with the cause of democratic reform (Jones 2004: 176–7). Unsurprisingly, both Owen and Rees used their editorial privileges to argue for and against the politicisation of religious communities. As with other Nonconformist initiatives, Welsh religious groups also helped to sponsor temperance movement periodicals,

382

joan allen

including, in 1836, Y Dirwestydd (The Abstainer), Y Seren Ddirwestol (The Temperance Star) a year later, and, in 1838, Y Dirwestwr Deheuol (The Southern Abstainer). Not all religious communities subscribed to total abstinence, and there were publications in contrast, such as Yr Adolygydd (The Reviewer), that promoted moderation rather than teetotalism. In 1846 Dan Jones of Wrexham, a paddle steamer captain who had converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) while working on the Mississippi river, returned to Wales as a missionary, and published the monthly periodical, Prophwyd y Jubili (The Prophet of the Jubilee) between 1846 and 1848. It circulated under a new title, Udgorn Seion (The Trumpet of Zion) after January 1849 and remained in circulation until 1862 (Dennis 2001; Dennis 2014: 167–9). The Anglicans, Unitarians and Calvinistic Methodists were just as busy harvesting souls and using the press as a recruitment tool. From 1847 until 1853 Anglicans published the monthly Yr Eglwysydd (The Churches), while during the same period the Unitarians published their own monthly, Yr Ymofynydd (The Inquirer). The paper’s circulation rates nevertheless did not achieve anything approaching the same reach as Y Goleuad (The Light), a weekly Welsh national newspaper launched by the Calvinistic Methodists in 1869, which also circulated among the Welsh diasporic communities in Bristol, Liverpool, London and Manchester. Two of Y Goleuad’s editors, John Davies (Gwyneddon, 1832–1904) and John Roberts (Ieuan Gwyllt, 1822–77), actively supported Liberal politics and passionately advocated temperance. A further interdenominational periodical was Baner Cymru (The Banner of Wales), published from 1857 by Thomas Gee, a Calvinist Methodist preacher, which again promoted Liberal Nonconformist values. It was during the second half of the century that Wales witnessed considerable growth in its publications with all denominations producing a variety of journals, especially for children. For example, the Methodist publication Trysorfa y Plant (The Children’s Treasury) was published from 1862 by Thomas Levi and had a monthly circulation rate of 44,000, while the estimated expenditure on all of the periodicals was £200,000 a year (DWB; Davies 1981: 43; Jones 1996: 157–69). Indeed, as Eryn White has noted, ‘a certain element of interdenominational competition probably fuelled this drive to provide literature for the members’, while the periodicals also assisted in shaping ‘a sense of separate identity within each denomination, as well as establishing valuable networks for communication and exchange of information’ (Pope 2001; White 2016: 129).

­

the denominational press

383

Scotland had an equally vibrant and precocious print culture from the early decades of the eighteenth century, and this had a positive impact on educational standards. Religious groups enthusiastically seized on publishing opportunities to support didactic incursions into Scottish press territory. In doing so, they could draw upon a preexisting pool of journalistic talent. The evangelical George Troup was a case in point, He was an ardent abolitionist and temperance advocate as well as an accomplished journalist and, later, editor of Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine (1832–61). Between 1840 and 1842 Troup not only worked on the Liverpool Weekly Telegraph but also simultaneously edited the Aberdeen Banner and the Scottish Temperance Herald. In 1860 Troup became involved in the ‘Free Church’ weekly, Witness, an exceptionally important bi-weekly publication, which first circulated at the height of the ‘Great Disruption’ controversy. After the mid-century, above all else, the Scottish religious press reflected the country’s diverse confessional composition, especially the enormous west coast expansion of the Irish immigrant community resulting from mass migration after the mid-century Irish famine. Internal conflict within the Presbyterian Church, and the deep divisions between Irish Protestants and Roman Catholics, were played out in the newspapers as much as in the workplace. The Glasgow Sentinel, for example, was regarded as the voice of anti-Catholicism as well as that of the drink trade, in contrast to the Catholic Observer, which advocated temperance and Catholic orthodoxy. In England, too, the religious press flourished most particularly when the liberal and evangelical wings of Anglicanism were at odds over the thorny questions of dogma and strategy. But it was the emergent Tractarian or Oxford Movement that gained most purchase in securing greater acceptance of an ‘Anglo-Catholic’ position which successfully reinstated some of the earlier Christian ritual and traditions (Morgan-Guy 2013: 137–56). What carried the day was a remarkable initiative to conduct a debate in print, led by John Henry Newman, who authored the first and the last of a series of ninety tracts, Tracts for the Times (1833–41), and who was ably supported by some of the finest scholars in the Church, most notably E. B. Pusey (Parsons 1988a: 30–2). Naturally, publication of the Tracts provoked a counter-challenge from evangelicals such as William Goode, who circulated their refutations in tract form as well. This war of words soon engaged the attention of Alexander Haldane, the arch-Conservative editor of the weekly Record (1828–1948), the Church’s evangelical broadsheet newspaper. It could be argued that the controversies surrounding these critical and often personalised exchanges raised the profile of the Record

384

joan allen

and helped to expand its readership. Certainly, Haldane epitomised the combative militancy of Victorian Christianity in that he never flinched from criticising any new initiatives of which he disapproved. In his hands, the Record repeatedly insisted upon the centrality of Bible reading and sabbatarianism to the vitality of the Anglican faith. Here at least were precepts to which both evangelicals and Tractarians could subscribe (Larsen 2011). Crucially, both were aggressively promoted in the religious press. While the Tracts secured rather more than a niche readership, they never squeezed out the appetite for other periodicals. On the contrary, the mid-1830s saw the emergence of a number of religious titles aimed at the Anglican communion. The informative Ecclesiastical Gazette (1838–1900), for instance, remained a vital source of diocesan and ecclesiastical information for the clergy, who all received their copies free, while successive versions of the Church of England Quarterly Review (1837–58) offered a balance of ‘intelligence’ and analysis, treading a careful line between opposing factions that helped it to retain a healthy circulation, until the abolition of the newspaper taxes opened the market to greater competition (Hampton 2004a: 74). Both titles secured official endorsement, thereby enabling them to be marketed as ‘required reading’. Of all the titles that served the Anglican Church, none was perhaps as significant as the popular weekly Church Times (1863–present), launched by George Josiah Palmer, who used the paper as a platform for promoting the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England. Palmer’s investment paid off handsomely, as the paper’s circulation trebled in less than five years (Brake and Demoor 2009: 118; Palmer 1991), largely at the expense of the highly regarded Guardian (1846–1951), which had emerged in the troubled days following Newman’s conversion to Catholicism. After his retirement in 1887, Palmer’s sons worked hard to ensure that the Church Times continued to be recognised as the voice of orthodox Anglicanism (Brake and Demoor 2009: 118). One of the most distinctive features of the religious landscape of nineteenth-century Britain was the expansion of Nonconformity, detectable in the closing decade of the eighteenth century when chapel going became the preferred choice of Protestant Dissenters (Hempton 1985: 11). Partly this reflected the extent to which the Established Church had fallen out of favour among those who found its hierarchical and conservative ethos increasingly anachronistic in an age when democratic ideas were beginning to take greater hold. The Church’s ministry had also struggled to keep pace with the rising population, especially in urban areas and the burgeoning mining villages which

­

the denominational press

385

made up the great coalfields of northern England, Lowland Scotland and the Welsh valleys. Many parishioners in these precociously industrial regions had neither church nor curate to minister to their needs (Hempton 1985: 11; Lee 2007: 18). Nonconformist ministers and, after the Catholic Relief Act of 1829, an increasingly evangelical Roman Catholic clergy, seized the opportunity this presented and stepped into the breach. The evangelical revival had by then revitalised religious practices through the unifying effects of hymn singing and lay preaching. Such initiatives powerfully articulated a familycentred, community-oriented approach to devotional practice, which appeared to be more in tune with the needs of working people (Inglis 1963: 1–20). To support the Nonconformist agenda, its practitioners borrowed from the journalistic techniques of the mainstream popular press to expand the production of related religious periodicals. One of their chief objectives was to lure working people away from the ‘pleasure press’ into more temperate, self-improving diversions (Mountjoy 1978: 267–70). It is no accident that English industrial cities such as Leeds, Birmingham and Manchester, where the provincial press had been so actively nurtured under the auspices of bodies such as the powerful Provincial Newspaper Society, would emerge as major strongholds of the Nonconformist press. Edward Miall’s weekly Nonconformist (1841–1900), for example, provides useful insight into the overlapping interests and priorities of those involved in Nonconformist religious press publications. Miall, who had been a founder of the Anti-State Church Association in 1844 when this was a highly contentious position (rebranded as the Liberation Society after 1853), was committed to the disestablishment of the Church, and used the Nonconformist to make the case for this. Miall became closely linked to Liberal politics and eventually gained the Liberal seat of Rochdale and, subsequently, Bradford. As Alan Lee has established, it was not unusual for newspaper proprietors, as men of business and enterprise, to back what they regarded as a modernising, reforming party (Lee: 137–8). This was also true of William Robertson Nicoll, a committed Liberal who edited another important Nonconformist paper, the penny British Weekly (1886–1970). His robust work on the journal helped raise its circulation to an impressive 100,000 copies a week by 1900 (Ives 2011). In the face of such competition, even though the Nonconformist could boast eminent contributors such as W. E. Gladstone, it struggled to hold on to its readership. A series of price changes and revised publication schedules did little to improve its fortunes. Nor did several mergers materially improve its market share, though it is clear that its

386

joan allen

succession of editors tried valiantly to reinvent the vitality of its earlier print run (DCNJ: 79–80). One of the key features of the nineteenth century was the extent to which old radical Dissenting sects came to be accepted as respectable denominations. This particularly applied to the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), who previously had been persecuted for their beliefs, but were increasingly recognised as the century progressed as progressive humanitarians with a commitment to pacifism and social reform. The print culture of Quakers articulated some of the internal divisions they faced over the question of their evangelical work. Theological differences arose between members (evangelical and conservative) on both sides of the Atlantic and were articulated in Britain in various schisms: the Beaconite controversy occurred between 1835 and 1837, led by the Manchester Quaker minister Isaac Crewdson. He was censured by the London Yearly Meeting, the central UK Quaker organisational body after he published A Beacon to the Society of Friends in 1835. His subsequent resignation was followed by that of nearly 300 fellow Quakers between 1836 and 1837. The rise of Gurneyite Quakerism centred on the evangelical views of Joseph John Gurney, and those who rejected his beliefs became known as the Conservative Friends. Schism was most notably seen in the Fritchley General Meeting in Derbyshire. This meeting, led by John Grant Sargent and the Fritchley Friends, operated independently of the London Yearly Meeting for a hundred years from 1869 (Kennedy 2000; Lowndes 1980). But, most of all, their print culture was an important means of publicising their humanitarian ideals and agenda. Moving away from the tracts and reprints of significant Quaker Friend texts that had characterised their publishing output in earlier centuries, in the nineteenth century British and Irish Quakers began publishing their own periodicals. William Allen (1770–1843), an English scientist, philanthropist and stalwart abolitionist, published the broad-based Philanthropist from 1811 to 1819. The subtitle of the periodical gives a clearer insight into its remit: Repository for Hints and Suggestions Calculated to Promote the Comfort and Happiness of Man, which flagged up the commitment of Allen and other Quakers to the promotion of peace. The Peace Society, in which Allen played a significant role, subsequently sponsored the journal Herald of Peace, which was established in 1819 (Allen 2018; Cadeal 1996: 222–355; Nicolle 2001). The Irish Friend (1837–42) was favoured by those Quakers who opposed the evangelical positioning of the Religious Society of Friends, and who thereby felt estranged from the London Yearly Meeting (Hagglund 2013: 489; Morton 1993: 7). The British

­

the denominational press

387

Friend, which was established in Glasgow in February 1843, openly supported the conservative attitude of its Irish counterpart, while the Friend, a London-based publication, advocated the evangelical outlook. Both periodicals recorded the daily activities of Friends and their missionary work, and used their pages to raise the profile of Quaker social reform programmes, including temperance, peace, education and anti-slavery (Barber 1993: 71). A quarter of a century later the Society of Friends was still committed to its publishing activities and were confident enough to publish the Friends’ Quarterly Examiner in 1867. The title remains in circulation to this day. Although representing a comparatively smaller community of believers, like the Quakers, the Jewish press in Britain emerged roughly in line with the initiatives taken by the Christian denominations. The numbers of Jewish migrants into Britain had been fairly insignificant until after 1815, when they began to settle in much greater numbers in London and northern English towns. These settlement patterns largely shaped the emergence and distribution of the Jewish press, most ­notably the shortlived monthly Hebrew Intelligencer in 1823. Like Roman Catholics and other Dissenting groups, their civic rights were circumscribed under the exacting provisions of the Test and Corporations Acts. In 1828 Protestant Dissenters managed to convince Parliament that such disabilities were anachronistic in a modern society, and the Acts were repealed. The following year, the Catholic Relief Act lifted many, though not all, of the constraints which had been imposed. However, this new legislation imposed specific conditions which called upon citizens to take a specifically Christian oath of allegiance to the Crown, and this effectively deprived Jews and Quakers of those newfound civic rights. In the early 1840s the Jewish population was estimated to be 30–40,000 souls, with the greatest concentration in London and its immediate hinterland (Cesarani 1994: 5). The remainder were to be found mostly in the northern provinces, in Leeds, Manchester and Birmingham, for example, where consumerism was beginning to take hold and there were good opportunities for artisans, entrepreneurs and financiers. At a time when municipal corporations were increasingly the powerhouses of the new urban governance, and business networks were largely based on the closed patronage of Chambers of Commerce, the denial of political rights was a significant disadvantage to Jews who wished to engage in trade and enterprise. In the 1830s they mounted a sustained campaign to establish their respectability and loyalty to the Crown in the hope that this would secure the necessary amendment, but to no avail. The determination to found a dedicated newspaper that might modify and challenge

388

joan allen

anti-Semitic preconceptions became a central plank of their strategy but, given the failure of earlier titles, this was no easy feat. By then, however, the climate for publishing newspapers and periodicals was far more conducive. Technological advancements and the reduction of taxes suggested that a new publishing venture might be more commercially and culturally viable. In autumn 1841 not one but two Jewish titles appeared in short succession. Joseph Franklin’s brainchild, the London fortnightly periodical Voice of Jacob (1841–8), made its way into print in September, closely followed by the paper that would come to define Jewish journalism in Britain thereafter, the Jewish Chronicle (1841–present), edited by Isaac Vallentine (Cesarani 1994: 9–10). Initially, Vallentine struggled to secure consistent investment for the Jewish Chronicle. It had several false starts in the 1840s before it eventually gained a stable circulation. In contrast, Franklin was highly regarded among the Anglo-Jewish community and had influential backers from the outset, including Lionel and Anthony de Rothschild. This meant a secure start for the Voice of Jacob. It would become a stridently traditionalist and proactively supportive voice for the international Jewish community. At heart, Vallentine was an educationalist who had helped to establish the Jewish Association for the Diffusion of Religious Knowledge in 1828, an organisation that seems to be broadly in line with the ethos of both the SPCK and RTS. He exhibited considerable enterprise and resilience in persisting with his Chronicle venture, finding ways to improve distribution and advertising revenues, and was careful to ensure that his cautiously progressive editorial line kept his more traditionalist readers on side. Ultimately, however, the market was not big enough to sustain both papers, and for a time the Chronicle ceased publication. It is altogether remarkable that the paper was revived in 1844, under a new title, the Jewish Chronicle and Working Man’s Friend, and with a dynamic new editor, Joseph Mitchell. The choice of title gestured to the growing clamour for social democracy and spoke for those like Mitchell who held an ‘outsider status’ within Anglo-Jewry. Nevertheless, the question of whether Anglo-Jewry should embrace a more relaxed approach to orthodoxy and ritual as part of their bid to secure Jewish emancipation was a source of conflict and division. Mitchell’s willingness to ventilate all shades of opinion on this thorny issue suggested a greater openness than was actually the case. As David Cesarani notes, Mitchell was committed to empowering the ‘virtuous’ middle classes who could help him to protect Judaism by encouraging only a strictly limited measure of Reform Judaism (Cesarani: 7, 15–17).

­

the denominational press

389

Following the appearance of competition in the form of the Jewish Record (founded in 1868) and the Jewish World (started in 1873), the Chronicle was forced to modernise and make changes to its pricing and format. A cheap penny edition helped stave off the competition, and thereafter the Chronicle proved to be a remarkably resilient title even into the late 1880s when the Jewish Standard was launched. The first edition, published on 16 March 1888, firmly established the paper’s traditionalist credentials with long reports on the meetings of the Jewish Board of Guardians and a robust editorial deploring the failure of some to observe the sabbath by attending synagogue only on ‘festival days’ (Jewish Standard, 16 March 1888). Nonetheless, the Chronicle continued to innovate, adding new columns on work and sport, directed at working readers, as well as the high-society columns which celebrated the social elevation of Rothschild, Montefiore and others. At a time when many religious titles were being squeezed by the expansion of the leisure and entertainment press, the Chronicle invested in photography and high-quality illustrations, helping to maintain its self-appointed role as the organ of modern British Jewry (Cesarani: 68–9). In the early decades of the nineteenth century the Catholic press in Britain was fairly small in scale and circulated most strongly in areas where there was a sufficiently large Irish Catholic readership to make the titles commercially viable. The Protestant Irish looked to the established British newspapers, and on occasion, as at the time of the Parnell affair in 1887, sought to apply pressure over editorial policy (Edwards and Storey 1985: 159). Unlike other sections of the religious press, the politicisation of the Catholic papers was a very marked feature throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, as the campaign for Irish nationalism was such an essential ingredient of their coverage. Inevitably, English Catholic papers deliberately highlighted their strong Irish connections to maintain circulation among such readers (Edwards and Storey 1985: 159; Samuel 1985: 267–99). A good example of that strategy can be seen in the management of the English Catholic monthly Dublin Review (1836–1968), which was set up by a triumvirate of significant civic and political players, namely the ‘Great Emancipator’, Daniel O’Connell, Michael Quinn, a leading Irish barrister, and the first Archbishop of Westminster, Nicholas Wiseman. The paper targeted a London readership, but at 6s a copy it was expensive and struggled to maintain its publication schedule. The subsequent decision to adopt green covers and a distinctly Irish nationalist motto (‘Eire Go Brath’), testified to Irish Catholic confidence following the Catholic Relief Act (1829) and, undoubtedly, O’Connell’s own political agenda.

390

joan allen

The same was true in Scotland, where the Irish immigrant population exerted an unusual degree of influence over Scottish titles, such as James Smith’s Edinburgh Catholic Magazine, which circulated intermittently between 1832 and 1838 before being moved to London and casting aside its Scottish title and credentials. The English perspective that dominated Glasgow papers, such as the Scottish Vindicator or the Northern Times, prompted strident rebuttals and an assertion of Irish control over Catholic Scottish journalism. Owen Dudley Edwards has argued that this imbalance hindered the development of Scottish journalism and undermined both the quality and the quantity of the Scottish Catholic press, compared to the vibrancy of Catholic papers elsewhere (Edwards 1979: 156–60). For some years, the Dublin Review had served both communities of Irish Roman Catholics, but subsequently the English Catholic press was identified with several important titles distributed throughout Ireland, one of the most important being the weekly Tablet, established in London in May 1840 by Frederick Lucas, who had converted from the Society of Friends. At 6d per copy, the Tablet was beyond the pockets of poorer Catholics, and cheaper periodicals such as the Lamp and the Rambler were published to meet their needs (Altholz 1985: 154–5; Walsh 1999: 356). Lucas’s pro-Irish stance did not go down well with the Catholic Establishment at that time and consequently he moved the paper to Dublin in 1849 where it circulated successfully until his death in 1855 (Brake and Demoor 2009: 613). When the new editor, John Wallis, returned the paper to London, he sought support from Cardinal Wiseman, and under his astute management the paper was soon regarded as the voice of English Catholicism and of papal authority. It was Wallis’s editorial stance that gave the paper the Tory credentials that appealed to some Catholics but not to the large Irish Catholic communities settled across England and Scotland (Walsh 1990: 35–4). As 1860 drew to a close, Roman Catholics finally acquired their own penny newspaper, the Universe (1860–present), a pro-nationalist weekly which was endorsed by the populist Cardinal Manning. The provision of churches and Catholic schools was undoubtedly improving but had yet to keep pace with the spiritual and social needs of the greatly enlarged Catholic community. The church hierarchy hoped that in the interim the Universe would act as the voice of moral authority, a counterpoint to what they perceived to be the laxity of the popular press. It was launched in London on 8 October 1860 with a provocative commitment to challenge the circulation of anti-Catholic newspapers among the faithful in the capital, as well as voicing widespread concerns about the dangers of lapsation.

­

the denominational press

391

In the early years Catholic newspaper proprietors and journalists were mostly drawn from the ranks of an exiled Irish nationalist intelligentsia, who seized every opportunity to promote the cause of religious and political liberty. This changed after Daniel O’Connell’s death in May 1847, and the controlling influence of Irish journalism in Britain began to wane. After the Irish Famine, the percentage of Roman Catholics in Britain rose dramatically from a mere 4 per cent of worshippers at the time of the Religious Census in 1851, to a sizeable and growing minority by the third quarter of the nineteenth century. By 1866 the Catholic population of Britain was an estimated 6 million, a period which Bernard Aspinwall has referred to as the ‘social evolutionary phase’ of Irish migration, and which coincided with a press revolution (Aspinwall 1996: 146; Clais-Girard 2004: 178). Irish Catholics constituted a substantial and loyal reading public, and an increasingly literate population could choose from any one of a large number of national and provincial newspaper titles targeted at specific interests and communities (Jones 1996; Barker 2000). While many newspapers in Britain aimed specifically at the Irish community, such as the Glasgow Free Press (1852–68) and the Fenian Irish Liberator (1863–4), battled to sustain break-even circulation rates, newspapers published in Ireland, most notably James Stephens’s short-lived Fenian paper the Irish People, which was suppressed by the British government in 1865, and the Nation (1842–1900), exercised a far greater hold on the affections of the people. For the Nation this was especially so in the 1880s, when it became more moderate and favoured the Home Rule movement (McBride 2006: 53–4). These papers gained much from the regular subscriptions of Irish nationalist organisations such as the National Brotherhood of St Patrick, whose reading rooms operated as centres for the dissemination of nationalist ideas. It is notable, therefore, that the Nation fell out of favour with many Brotherhood members in 1862, following A. M. Sullivan’s controversial libel action against Dennis Holland of the Irishman. Sullivan sought £1,000 damages when Holland published a letter from the renowned Fenian, Jeremiah O Donovan Rossa, identifying him as a government informant. The ensuing controversy seriously damaged the Nation’s circulation among the Irish migrant community, when most of the Brotherhood’s reading rooms withdrew their subscriptions in protest (Moran 1999: 216–17). In the 1860s and 1870s a greatly enlarged Irish Catholic population in Britain turned instead to their mother country as the most reliable source of news from home (Edwards and Storey 1985: 178). It is important to remember that for much of the period when migration was at

392

joan allen

a peak, the Catholic press operated in a hostile climate of anti-Irish prejudice and discrimination. This was greatly exacerbated during the years of the ‘Fenian panic’, a period when newspapers (and even comic journals such as Punch and Judy) routinely mocked the Irish through provocative, racist text and images. The continuing controversies over denominational education in the 1880s, which affected both the Anglican communion and the Roman Catholic Church in Britain, acted as a spur to the emergence of several new papers at this time (Allen 2015: 35–54). In addition, heightened tensions over Home Rule in the early 1880s gave greater momentum to journalistic initiatives. In 1884 several new Irish journals emerged, including the Glasgow weekly journal the Exile, which was first published by Patrick Shiels to serve Scottish-based, Irish Catholic migrant communities. Unfortunately, Shiels struggled to make the paper pay, and by May 1885 he was forced to cease printing. Dudley Edwards suggests that the Exile was too narrow in its appeal, and that, by privileging Irish interests at the expense of a more inclusive Catholicism, Shiels failed to establish the mass readership and advertising base he needed to make the journal profitable (Edwards 1993: 164–5). The press baron and Irish nationalist Charles Diamond proved far more successful when he launched one of the premier Catholic titles of the day, the Catholic Herald. Diamond’s impact on the Catholic press was extensive, as was his constant pressure on the Tablet and the Universe in terms of competition and circulation. The Herald, which still circulates today, was a keystone title in Charles Diamond’s press stable, which by his death in 1934 included forty-two syndicated titles. Diamond’s career in publishing began in 1884 with the launch of the Irish Tribune in Newcastle upon Tyne, aimed at the large Irish Catholic community in which he had settled in 1878 (Allen 2008: 41). The paper was a great success, to the extent that in April 1885 he was invited to Glasgow to rescue the ailing Glasgow Observer (later titled Scottish Catholic Herald), which served the same nationalist constituency. Diamond’s Observer campaigned tirelessly and successfully for the cause of Catholic education. In April 1885, for example, pressure from the paper helped to secure Catholic representation on School Boards, supporting the successful election of three candidates from the Catholic community. Diamond kept his papers cheap and within reach of all sections of the Catholic community. He was also a progressive investor in new technology, enabling him to rapidly expand production to meet increased circulation of his stable of newspapers and periodicals, and done in order, as the masthead of the Tribune proclaimed, to be An Irish Journal for England and Scotland.

­

the denominational press

393

As Diamond’s press activities grew, he set up a supportive network of limited-liability companies, including the Catholic Press Association Limited, which launched a share issue of 5,000 in July 1887. Only 2,000 shares were taken up, many of them in half shares (10s) and the company’s affairs were soon wound up. However, the flotation attracted some high-profile investors, including the Marquis of Ripon and a sizeable contingent of Catholic clergymen, thus underscoring Diamond’s influence among the Catholic hierarchy. The endorsement of the Church was a crucial support in the long-term sustainability of Diamond’s newspaper and periodical empire (Allen 2008: 47). By 1887 the Irish Tribune had a readership of 4 million, and, together with the profits of the Observer, Diamond’s ambitious press project could be fully realised. First of all, Diamond launched the short-lived Catholic Household and, in 1888, having secured prestigious offices at 280 Strand, he began an assault on the London market. The annual St Patrick’s Day celebrations in 1888 were chosen as the perfect time to launch a new penny weekly, the Weekly Herald: The Catholic Organ for the Metropolis, an eight-page broadsheet with an uncompromising flagship motto: ‘For Faith and Country, Catholic and Irish’ (Allen 2008: 48–9). Diamond was a fierce critic of the Tablet, and to a large extent the Weekly Herald was intended to counter that paper’s anti-Home Rule stance. Readers were urged to be independent in politics, and ‘labour for the Catholic Party in the States, as a barrier against foes from all quarters’. His mission he said was ‘to build the church’ (Weekly Herald, 16 March 1888). The Weekly Herald, with its rich blend of nationalist politics, Irish home news and ecclesiastical content, as well as sporting fixtures and literary entertainment, was a resounding success, and eventually its national circulation dictated a change of title to the Catholic Herald. Clever syndication of the paper, by which special editions were produced in London, Newcastle, Glasgow, Manchester and Dublin for particular cities and towns, proved effective marketing strategies, enabling Diamond to cheaply replicate a large percentage of the contents. However, it is notable that it was not until 1894, when the Catholic population had grown sufficiently large enough to accommodate further expansion, that the Welsh Catholic Herald was published. Diamond’s Catholic Herald offered readers the authoritative voice of a national journal, while at the same time satisfying their appetite for local and regional news (Allen 2008: 41). This brief survey has only been able to profile an indicative sample of the vast output that constituted the denominational press in this period. Collectively, they demonstrate that schism and debate served to

394

joan allen

stimulate rather than inhibit the publication of religious titles. Indeed, as Charles Taylor has argued, the press was the ‘optimum forum where these seismic cultural shifts were debated, argued and worked through’ (Taylor 2007: 3). Some titles owed their very existence to the desire to engage passionately in argument and polemic. The exile status of Jewish and Irish migrants invoked a desire to remain connected to their countries of origin through the circulation of news and information, as well as be supported in their host society. It is interesting that both groups were primarily served by the English-language press (albeit in the Jewish case with the inclusion of some material in Yiddish). In Wales it might be argued that the dominance of Welsh Calvinistic Methodism would never have been achieved without dissemination of its values through a number of Welsh-language titles. The political dimension of the denominational press was quite marked, not just in terms of the close interaction between Gladstonian Liberalism, Dissent and the provincial press, but in the protracted struggle of English Jews, Roman Catholics and Nonconformists to gain religious emancipation. Religious groups all used their newspapers and periodicals tactically to establish their respectability and their claim to be recognised as equal citizens in British society, albeit some with greater success than others. This can be captured most visibly in the long and controversial fight for Irish Home Rule as the century drew to a close. The Irish Catholic Press was a primary vehicle for promoting the cause of Irish Nationalism up to and beyond the First World War. Ultimately, the denominational press operated in the same highly competitive marketplace as other producers. To survive, proprietors had to embrace the modern by installing cost-saving technologies and sensitive pricing structures and striking a careful balance between instruction and entertainment. Religious bodies not only had to contend with the exactions of the commercial sector, including securing vital advertising revenue, but with the major ideological shifts of the age: the evolution debate, several evangelical revivals, the challenge of socialism and the seemingly unstoppable rise of secularism. As John Seed has argued the ‘religious and the secular are, in important ways, not separate spheres’ (Seed 2014: 9). They were in constant renegotiation, nowhere more so than in print culture and its practices. While it is true that the denominational press was under greater pressure by the end of the century, the longevity of several major titles through to the next century, representing all major denominations, suggests that by then the secular and the religious had reached an accommodation whereby such spaces offered a valuable forum for a range of differing positions and understandings.

­

case study 12 : the irish ecclesiastical gazette

395

Case Study 12: The Irish Ecclesiastical Gazette Ian d’Alton In the decades after the trauma of the Great Famine (1845–7), Ireland was quiescent – in the words of an Irish landlord, the ‘country quiet, prices good, farmers prospering, rents well paid’ (Hoppen 1984: 164–5). For the first and last time – in 1859 – the island returned a majority of Conservative MPs to the Imperial Parliament at Westminster. It seemed a propitious time to launch publications for the governing Protestant classes – the Irish Times, a daily newspaper, was established in 1859. Three years previously, though, aimed at the Anglican established United Church of England and Ireland, in March 1856, the Irish Ecclesiastical Gazette; or, Monthly Repertory of Miscellaneous Church News (IEG) had appeared, filling ‘the want of some Paper devoted to the communication of Ecclesiastical Intelligence’ (IEG, 1 March 1856: 5). The journal was modelled on the Ecclesiastical Gazette, or Monthly Register of the Affairs of the Church of England, and of its Religious Societies and Institutions, founded in 1839 (EG, 1839). The IEG predated the Church Times (1863) and post-dated the Church of England Newspaper (1828). It was a private venture by Samuel B. Oldham, printers and publishers, at 8 Suffolk Street, Dublin (Sayle 1916/2014: 865). Oldham was a prominent Dublin freemason, sometime Master and Secretary of Victoria Lodge No. IV (Irish Masonic History 2017). The paper’s first issue was on 25 March 1856. The price was 3d, half that of the Ecclesiastical Gazette. While not an officially sanctioned church journal, with no domestic competition it sometimes seemed to act as such. Its unofficial subtitle in the 1870s – ‘The Organ of the Church of Ireland’ – attracted unfavourable comment, and in 1880 the Gazette had formally to disavow the designation which, it said, had been forced on it by others (IEG, 3 January 1880: 5). The prospectus set out its objectives and purposes. It would report the proceedings of religious and charitable societies; church matters; ecclesiastical appointments, ordinations and vacancies; reports of relevant Acts of Parliament and proceedings in ecclesiastical courts; university news; and notices – but not contentious reviews – of new books. In this latter, it reflected the Ecclesiastical Gazette, which was not ‘a vehicle for theological discussions or opinions’, but purportedly purely a recorder of facts (EG, 10 July 1838: 1). The publishers saw the venture primarily as a clearing house for information. So, for instance, they felt that the Gazette would appeal to religious societies, which would save printing and postage costs on circulars, and to persons looking for employment in the Church, such as schoolmasters, schoolmistresses, parish clerks and organists (IEG, 1 March 1856: 5). ‘Though it is not our intention to give in each number of our periodical anything which

396

ian d’alton

Figure 13.1  Irish Ecclesiastical Gazette, March 1856 (Courtesy of the Editor and Board of the Church of Ireland Gazette and the Representative Church Body Library, Dublin) could properly be called a leading article’ (IEG, 1 March 1856: 11), there was one in the first edition of the Gazette. It made the case for a journal that dealt more with news and intelligence on broad church matters than long treatises and theological expositions. The publisher looked to its supporters for news and information: they need not ‘dread an appeal being made on their purses’. Some considerable pre-publication effort had gone into the paper. The first edition contained a substantial twenty pages, of which nine consisted of advertisements and society notices for which no responsibility was claimed, other than their ‘moral character’ (IEG, 1 March 1857: 223). There were two pages dedicated to a

­

case study 12 : the irish ecclesiastical gazette

397

substantial report of the Irish Ecclesiastical Commissioners, and nearly two of ‘Legal Intelligence’, provided by ‘a gentleman of distinguished legal and literary attainments’. The section ‘Miscellaneous church news’ got off to a juicy start, with reports of a large libel award to a cleric against a Tipperary newspaper and, to balance, one against the rector of St Werburgh’s (Dublin) for alleging that a Catholic priest had broken the confessional seal (IEG, 1 March 1856: 12). The somewhat scandalous tone continued, with a report that the Bishop of Cork was seeking to remove a rector who had been convicted of felony and sentenced to transportation for life (IEG, 1 March 1856: 13). Two book review pages were followed by news from Trinity College, Dublin, and church news: appointments, vacancies, resignations and so on. In 1857 the journal started a paid-for births, marriages and deaths column (IEG, 1 March 1857: 233). The Gazette was a mirror to the activities and inactivities of the Irish Church in this period, not only from formal comment and editorials, but also from advertisements. Thus, in the issue of January 1859, the Rev. H. T. Townsend of Skibbereen, Co. Cork, sought an Irish-speaking curate (a rara avis, one imagines), while ‘a rectory, where there is no work, and where residence is not required, of the yearly value of more than £120 gross, would be exchanged for one having work and greater income’ (IEG, January 1859: 645). To build up circulation, it was proposed to forward the Gazette gratis to all clerics in Ireland, and to bishops, deans and archdeacons in Great Britain, and to all ‘free clerical reading rooms’ in the United Kingdom. Information on the details of circulation is unavailable – but we might note that the Ecclesiastical Gazette, in its first year (1838/39) stated that some 82 per cent of its issues were circulated free to the clergy (EG, 1839: ii). In its initial decades, the Gazette was aimed almost exclusively at the clergy, symbolised by a biblical quotation in Greek (1 Thess. 5:21) on its masthead. The advertisements and content reflected this. The January 1867 edition consisted of twenty-four pages, of which five were of advertisements primarily aimed at a clerical readership. ‘Proceedings of societies’ took up another three, with seven pages of letters. Eleven letters sought advice on church legal and personnel matters, with answers from the Gazette’s in-house lawyer, ‘LLD’. It was a popular feature and remained a constant in the Gazette’s pages throughout the period. Four pages contained reviews of religious books and recent periodicals, and there were five of clergy news – family notices, appointments, resignations and vacancies, and paid-for notices of presentations and addresses to clerics (IEG, 21 January 1867). The format and content remained largely unchanged until 1868. Ownership changed in mid-1859, precipitated by a financial crisis. Oldham had resolved to publish an annual clerical directory, an edition of which appeared in 1858. It seems to have been error-strewn and was a financial failure, which

398

ian d’alton

resulted in the decision not to publish another edition, as ‘he [Oldham] is not prepared to expend the amount of capital required with only a probability of its being again realized’ (IEG, October 1858: 616). A hiatus in publication of the Gazette occurred, with the November 1858 edition not appearing. The December issue announced that it would henceforth be published by James Charles (later ‘& Son’), printers, of 61 Middle Abbey Street, Dublin, although Oldham was still described as proprietor. That issue also contained a circular appealing for support from the clergy. In January 1859 Oldham reported that, although only 2s 6d was sought as an individual subscription, the amount received to date could only cover four months’ postage (IEG, November/ December 1858; January 1859: 652). The crisis was not quickly resolved, and on 7 July 1859 Oldham announced his severance from the Gazette, with Charles the new proprietor (IEG, July 1859: 2). Little was affected by the change of ownership – the cover price, advertising rates and format continued as heretofore. Charles brought experience to the venture, given he was already printer to a large number of Protestant societies in and around Dublin (IEG, July 1859: 716; 24 January 1879). He was financially savvy, too. By 1860 the Gazette had increased in size to a hefty thirty-two pages from the sixteen or so issued under its former proprietor; in the edition of 15 May 1860, Charles announced that the increased size, consequent upon a large number of letters relating to education, required him to charge correspondents (IEG, 15 May 1860: 281)! Even in 1856, when the Gazette had been founded, the ascendancy heyday of Irish Protestantism was well over. The religious breakdown of the 1861 Census demonstrated what everyone knew – that Anglicans had only the adherence of a small minority of the Irish population, about 12 per cent (Macourt 2008: 55, 57). This put the Church’s position under severe scrutiny: its Erastianism, minority status and perceived privileges sat uneasily within an age of increasing democratisation and pluralism. The prospect of church disestablishment became a live political issue in the late 1860s, provoking Charles to announce, in January 1868, that henceforth the paper would publish a leader ‘to promote the fusion of discordant elements, and to stimulate to united action in the general interests of the Church …’, supplemented by a compendium of news, ‘Notes by the way’. This structure, which was a divergence from that of the Ecclesiastical Gazette, was to endure for nearly a century. The first leader was on ‘The present aspect of the Irish Church Question’, focusing on what the Gazette saw as key issues facing Ireland, the ‘determined crusade’ against the Church, and the evil of Fenianism. In a notice to readers, Charles wrote that it was expected that this would lead to an enlarged paper, leading to additional expenditure. He suggested that this could be resourced from the laity, and he solicited support from parishioners (IEG, 18 January 1868: 2, 5, 7).

­

case study 12 : the irish ecclesiastical gazette

399

The voluntarism consequent upon Irish church disestablishment in 1871 was dutifully taken up by a journal never enthusiastic about either. In 1857 it had ‘no reason to regret the absence of Convocation’ (IEG, 1 March 1857: 234). Disestablishment encouraged Charles to announce that henceforth the Gazette would be ‘enlarged in size to its English contemporary’, the Ecclesiastical Gazette, which had some thirty-two pages or so around this time (IEG, 22 December 1873: 525; EG, 13 July 1869). The annual subscription was increased to 5s 0d, or 5d per issue (from 3s 6d, or 3d an issue). This was a hefty increase of over 40 per cent, but it was still below the cost of its English equivalent. The paper continued to provide lively commentary on Irish Anglican affairs, although formal leaders were published only sporadically. ‘Notes by the way’ (later ‘Notes of the week’) became the principal editorial vehicle and were extended to cover general secular topics, responding to a more agitated political and uncivil Ireland, and a desire and necessity to keep the minority well informed. This was facilitated by a radical change from January 1880, when the Gazette became a penny weekly (IEG, 1 December 1879: 739–40; 3 January 1880: 5), bringing the Church of Ireland paper into line with its English and Scottish analogues. Still, with between twenty and twenty-eight pages per issue, it effectively quadrupled in size. Its new subtitle, ‘A church paper for church people’, reflected its transformation from an intelligence sheet primarily for the clergy towards a church newspaper for the laity. It was well patronised by advertisers: an edition in early January 1886, for example, had ten and a half pages of advertisements in a total of twenty-eight (IEG, 2 January 1886). Land agitation and Home Rule politics, usually laid at the door of a scheming and manipulative Roman Catholic priesthood, dominated the Gazette’s secular commentary from the 1880s onwards, as for example its December 1880 issue, which featured a long diatribe about the lawlessness of the Land League and how it was driving Protestants out of Ireland (IEG, 25 December 1880: 949–50). On Home Rule, the Gazette was unequivocal: ‘Thoughtful men’, its editor declared, ‘must reflect that Ireland, of all the nations of the earth, shows herself least-qualified for that self-government for which she so obstinately clamours.’ The Gazette’s hostility towards Roman Catholicism, especially its clericalism, was quite open at this time, although it trumpeted what it saw as its moderate language compared to other Protestant papers – ‘We don’t generally call the Pope “the Man of Sin”’, it noted (IEG 2 January 1886: 6). The Parnell divorce controversy exposed the Gazette’s somewhat dichotomous attitudes to religion and politics. Parnell had to be explained away: he was, after all, of the tribe. Thus, commenting on his death, the Gazette wrote of ‘talents of a high order’ and noted that at his burial at Glasnevin cemetery

400

ian d’alton

many Protestants paid their respects, and that some bands ‘played Protestant hymn tunes’. But Parnell’s politics had, somehow, to be contextualised within an anti-Roman Catholic narrative. The Gazette squared this circle by decrying his desertion by his party, ‘at the bidding of the Roman hierarchy’, and in what it saw as Parnell’s vision for a ‘Home Rule’ that was not ‘Rome Rule’ (IEG, 9 October 1891: 827). Parnell’s legacy would be a fight between ‘clericalism and political independence’ at the next general election, in the expectation ‘that in the interval the Roman Catholic priesthood will leave nothing undone that will rivet the yoke of spiritual slavery more tightly around the necks of their abject flocks’ (IEG, 16 October 1891: 846). The paper had no domestic rivals. A small market, coupled with a relatively doctrinally homogeneous Church, saw off any potential threat. Rather bizarrely, Charles himself started a somewhat similar journal, the Church of Ireland Magazine, in January 1878, but it had folded by February 1879 (IEG, 1 December 1878: 343; 1 February 1879: 432). In the midst of the high/low church ritualist controversies current in the 1890s (Yates 1999: 277–332), the Gazette reported a plan by evangelicals to start a new paper in Ireland. In its defence, the paper emphasised that it was always ‘temperate and careful’, and that it gave an airing in its correspondence columns to all shades of opinion (IEG, 26 July 1895: 526). In the event, no opposition appeared. Until 1871 the Gazette appears not to have had a formal editor. From 1871 to 1893 the editor was the high churchman the Rev. James Anderson Carr, vicar of Whitechurch, Dublin, author of a life of Archbishop Ussher (Carr 1895). He was succeeded between 1893 and 1897 by the Rev. Courtenay Moore, rector of Brigown, Cloyne. The Rev. Charles Irvine Graham, rector of Celbridge, Dublin, was editor at the time the journal changed its title, 1897–1905 (CoIG 2017b; IEG, 1 December 1878: 343; Graham 2017c). James Charles & Son continued to publish the Irish Ecclesiastical Gazette – ‘no unimportant factor in Irish Church work’, as it described itself (IEG, 2 January 1886: 6), until February 1896, when the task was taken up by a new company, Church of Ireland Printing and Publishing Ltd. The paper was then printed by Walter Baillie in Dublin. The transition appears to have been seamless, with style and format remaining the same. In 1900 its name was changed to the Church of Ireland Gazette (CoIG, 5 January 1900). Still (2019) in publication, it is independent of the institutional Church of Ireland and managed from, and printed in, Northern Ireland (CoIG 2017a). In January 2019 it once again became a monthly journal.

Chapter Fourteen

COMICS, CARTOONS AND THE ILLUSTRATED PRESS Elizabeth Tilley

T

he trade in single-sheet caricatures and illustrated texts dates from the advent of printing itself in the fifteenth century: from elaborately decorated indulgences to almanacs, from political sketches to love songs, pictures and text have always offered both visual and mental stimulation. Literacy was not absolutely essential in the buyer, as illustrations were an integral part of the meaning presented by the whole page as a single unit. By the eighteenth century the illustrated satire saw a much more complicated interplay of text and image, and often demanded a fairly sophisticated grasp of political or social issues on the part of viewers. Ultimately, though, there is not too much space between the savage political cartoons of Thomas Rowlandson and the ‘Big Cuts’ drawn by John Tenniel for Punch (1841–2001) in the 1850s. In both, cultural references abound, opinions are strong, and exaggeration is assumed. What does distinguish the work of Tenniel and others like him is the environment in which their work appeared. The mass readership enjoyed by nineteenth-century illustrated periodicals enabled a highly complex approach to satire and spawned a plethora of titles aimed at all classes, with price points to match. The many imitators of Punch (such as Judy [1867–1910] or Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday [1884–1916]) used – with rather less finesse – the same format as the original. Characters from one satirical paper might show up in another, or grow so large as to require their own venue, as in the case of Ally Sloper, whose main character originated in Judy, a magazine produced by the same editors. This transference was unique to illustrated periodicals and resulted in an often uneasy balance of text and image towards the end of the century, as in both comic and more serious ‘news’ periodicals illustrations could easily overwhelm text. For instance, the spectacular success 401

402

elizabeth tilley

of the Illustrated London News (1842–1989, cited elsewhere in this chapter as ILN) ushered in an acceptance of the world as mediated, and therefore controlled, by the imaginative renderings of some of the finest artists of the day. The ILN also contributed towards the reversal of the importance of text and image near the end of the century in such magazines as the Graphic (1869–1932), which offered enormous lithographs or wood engravings that physically dominated the page and forced text into an ever smaller area. It is no accident that this sort of periodical had its greatest success during times of turmoil – ­­domestic or foreign. Wars, insurrections and domestic scandals have always been the mainstay of the newspaper as an entity; these papers frequently presented their illustrations as ‘drawn on the spot’, as immediate as it was possible to be. But whether or not the artist was actually present during whatever altercation was taking place was ultimately irrelevant: the reading public accepted and trusted the world made visible to them. Politically radical or conservative, artistically fine or crude, the comic periodicals and illustrated newspapers available in this time period often enjoyed enormous circulation figures and were responsible for a fundamental alteration in the culture of consumption. It is not to be assumed that single-plate caricature suddenly disappeared with the appearance of cheap periodicals in the 1830s; Brian Maidment has suggested 1841 (the year of the launch of Punch) as a convenient end point for the dominance of such material. By this time, ‘comic and satiric graphic images had begun to be assimilated into what were essentially verbal texts. These texts themselves represented new literary forms’ (Maidment 2000: 105). Between the 1820s and the 1840s a profound transfer of meaning took place, from the single-sheet engraved caricature or cartoon to the enveloping of images into textual units as part of the heyday of popular periodicals, and the advent of what Maidment calls ‘the verbalness of Victorian print culture’ (Maidment 2000: 113). Similarly, 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition, could be seen as a convenient starting point for the dominance of image and advertising in Victorian culture in general, reflecting Britain’s new ‘image economy’ (Beegan 2008: 57). Looking back in 1861 at forty years of illustrated periodicals, The Bookseller acknowledged the importance of the form in a (suitably illustrated) article: If the historian of nineteenth-century literature would present to the world a true picture of the sort of reading most in vogue – real evidence of the popular taste –undoubted proofs of the state of education in this year of grace eighteen hundred and sixty-one – fair

­

comics, cartoons and the illustrated press

403

digests of the methods employed by the purveyors of literary food for the million, in order to satisfy the universal craving for what is wonderful, new, true, political, historical, or exciting – he must needs study the broadside-covered walls, and the picture-filled windows, of our great centre of population. (‘Illustrated Periodical Literature’, Bookseller, 30 November 1861: 681) The writer of the article assumed that the primary purpose of cheap illustrated periodical literature was to act as ‘a means of popular education’, and that, for the ‘half-educated or uneducated’, pictures were vital to this process. Having said that, he acknowledged that such periodicals were pervasive, found at all levels of society and in all formats. Significantly, the writer’s listing of the best of the current titles was based on the quality of printing, and on the aesthetic success of the wood engravings contained within each title, rather than on their perceived moral or educational value; only when the artistic integrity of the periodicals was established did he begin to discuss subject matter. After what the Bookseller perceived to be the lost decade of the 1840s, when Reynolds’s Mysteries of London and other such ‘abominations’ lowered the tone of the nation’s literary stock, the 1850s and 1860s seemed to restore truth-to-life and family values to importance. In 1861 the Leisure Hour and Sunday at Home (both issued by the Religious Tract Society), the Home Magazine, Good Words, Once a Week and the Popular Educator came in for special mention in the Bookseller’s estimation, along with Cassell’s weekly part issue of a new illustrated Bible, apparently eagerly sought by rich and poor alike. The point of the article was that, as the educational and cultural standards of Britain’s readers were raised, the standard of the periodical literature produced for them would naturally follow: ‘The demand for filth having ceased, the supply has therefore fallen off by natural consequence’ (‘Illustrated Periodical Literature’, Bookseller, 30 November 1861: 685). Religious societies were singled out as particularly adept at the process of ­­‘picture-teaching’, often making use of sophisticated and difficult printing techniques in order to enhance the impact of the familiar stories they told. For instance, the Bookseller praised Pictorial Sunday Readings. By the Rev. William Owen. These are published by Messrs. Sangster and Co., in shilling numbers monthly, and consist of essays on the geography, zoology, and natural history, the persons and nations, the antiquities and narratives of scripture history. But the distinguishing feature of the publication is contained in its pictorial embellishment. In each number there are four full page illustrations in colours, executed

404

elizabeth tilley

with great taste, and often produced from as many as seven separate wood-blocks, so carefully printed that the colours blend into one harmonious and pleasing picture. (‘Illustrated Periodical Literature’, Bookseller, 30 November 1861: 690) The Bookseller was also particularly impressed by the cost of illustrations in such publications as Good Words; as much as £30 per picture appropriately compensated the highly skilled artists employed, ‘a sum which appears marvellous when we look at the low price of the publication’ (Bookseller, 30 November 1861: 687).1 The function of the illustrations in the periodicals surveyed was clearly as added value, particularly if individual issues could be gathered into volume form. In other words, the cultural worth of an illustrated periodical lay in the extent to which its illustrations, together with the quality of the writing they accompanied, could be extracted to form a separate book. There was, therefore, a natural progression from the eighteenth-century portfolio of engraved pictures and caricatures to the nineteenth-century periodical volume; in both cases, material permanence conferred meaning.2 What the Bookseller failed to add was that the method of reprodu­ cing material that a periodical chose to use tended to signal either class aspirations or defiant identification. Beegan says that wood engraving, because of its ‘aesthetic links to fine art prints and books seemed thoroughly respectable’ (Beegan 2008: 55). By contrast, weeklies like Lloyd’s Illustrated London Newspaper, aimed at the lower middle class, continued to employ woodcuts as opposed to wood engravings, preferring the bold, strong lines that woodcuts produced, together with their historical connection to street literature. As Beegan notes, ‘The Sunday papers promoted social meaning over realism, and the nonnaturalistic iconography in their illustrations was at the service of their political agendas’ (ibid.: 55). The heyday of the cheap magazine format really began in the 1830s. Papers depended on high circulation to keep down costs, but in order to avoid stamp duty news could not be provided directly, although ‘digests’ were common. The employment of the steam press, the reprinting of articles provided by readers or copied from other periodicals, stereotyping, and the reuse of illustrations meant that a host of 1

Good Words (1860–1911) sold for 3½d for sixteen pages during its first year of publication. From 1861 on its price was 6d for sixty-four pages monthly. 2 Michael de Nie notes that some satirical periodicals like Punch assumed that readers would extract illustrations for separate collection; as such, the pictures were often printed with a blank verso page. See Chapter 15 of this volume.

­

comics, cartoons and the illustrated press

405

cheap periodicals flooded the market in that decade. Some disappeared quickly; others, like Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal (1832–1956), had lasting appeal. Mason Jackson, in his 1885 book on the progress of the pictorial press, noted that the illustrations in the first six months of Charles Knight’s Penny Magazine (March–August 1832) were mostly borrowed from other works of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge already in print. The implication was that the technology required to provide illustration at a low cost (the steam press) was the draw, rather than the originality of the illustrations themselves. By the end of 1832 the Penny Magazine was selling 200,000 copies in weekly numbers and monthly parts. As Jackson says: it soon produced a revolution in popular art throughout the world. Stereotype casts of its best cuts were supplied for the illustration of publications of a similar character which appeared in Germany, France, Holland … the entire work was also reprinted in the United States from plates sent from this country. (Jackson 1885: 279) The worthy nature of the penny magazine enterprise inspired numerous imitators around the Empire. Aimed at a working-class audience (although whether or not that audience formed the bulk of readers is still unclear), such papers were intended to supplant the cheap penny dreadfuls that had previously dominated the market. Cecilia Wadsö Lecaros documents Swedish examples of such crossover imitators in Case Study 8 in this volume. Religious organisations such as the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge offered similar fare, always with a high proportion of illustrations to text, though often with little sense of coherence or relevance to the target audience. In Ireland, the Catholic Penny Magazine, launched in 1834, engaged in furious debate with the Protestant Penny Magazine, which appeared soon after; both periodicals used illustration as a way of institutionalising sectarian and political division. The penny magazine format was also uniquely suited to nationalist enterprises. George Petrie’s Dublin Penny Magazine, although he edited it for only one year (1832), was exceptionally well produced. Its subject matter was strictly confined to the archaeology, antiquities, language and folklore of Ireland, and Petrie’s own drawings provided an overarching dignity and importance to what was a fast-disappearing pre-Famine landscape. The substantial success of the Dublin Penny Magazine under Petrie proved that a cheap, popular format combined with the liberal use of wood-engraved images could have universal appeal (Tilley 2011).

406

elizabeth tilley

Periodicals, by their very nature, feed off one another. Punch, or The London Charivari was itself based on Charles Philipon’s Paris magazine Le Charivari (1832–1937). As Richard Altick has said, Punch in turn ‘served as a weekly illustrated comic supplement to The Times, reflecting as in a distorting mirror a selection of the week’s news and jauntily editorializing on its significance’ (Altick 1997: xix). Punch started out as left-leaning, but its main audience soon proved to be the middle class, and a conservatism peculiar to that class quickly began to permeate its pronouncements on topics and personalities of the day. At least part of the success of Punch was due to its canny filling of an empty niche. Its immediate predecessor, Figaro in London (1831–9), had folded, the market for single-sheet prints and scurrilous illustrated pamphlets was dead, and, as noted above, the cheap press that remained was either too earnest or too scandalous for the majority of readers. Punch’s founders – Douglas Jerrold, Henry Mayhew and Gilbert à Beckett – were all seasoned journalists. All had worked intermittently on Figaro and understood their readers. The first appearance of Punch was carefully prepared for; copious and varied advertisements announcing the paper’s initial number included a variety of illustrations and caricatures that hinted at the wonders to be revealed. Self-promotion through visual tags (Thackeray’s spectacles, for example) helped the editors establish and maintain a ‘personal’ relationship with their audience, as well as an assumption of shared values and appreciation for wittily expressed moral outrage. The traditional double-column page employed by both Punch and highly coloured periodicals like the Illuminated Magazine (1843–5) was well suited to the insertion of wood-engraved vignettes, but the physical arrangement of such a page demanded a rather complicated reading strategy (Maidment, Brake and Demoor 2009). The simplicity of the half- or quarter-page illustration heading each issue of an early title like the Mirror of Literature (1822–47), for example, set up a dynamic through which illustration introduced text, but then faded in favour of a monolithic text block. By contrast, the frequency of interruptions posed by vignettes and larger illustrations in Punch and others (like those found in the Illuminated Magazine) meant that a rapid alteration in the dynamics of reading was necessary; that is, readers were required to negotiate the space between text and illustration as well as the interplay between text and illustration. Towards the end of the century the practice of inserting advertising within text blocks rather than in a separate ‘advertiser’ section was the logical outcome of reader acceptance of such visual interruptions. And, ultimately, such interrupted

­

comics, cartoons and the illustrated press

407

reading laid the foundation for the increased production of periodicals composed mainly of ‘snippets’, preparing readers to expect the short article rather than long essay as the standard. Brian Maidment suggests that this combination of vignette or small illustration, complementing  short bursts of information, resulted in the ‘formation of  a concept of knowledge based on random information rather than understanding’ (Maidment 2010: 360). Clearly, our own acceptance of the digital news digest is related to this nineteenth-century practice. David Anderson in 1891 called Punch ‘the most serious comic paper in the world’ (Anderson 1891: 155); the comment took for granted that the business of entertainment was as important as the business of news. Anderson had been apprenticed to Bradbury and Evans as a wood engraver, and he explained that the early drawings in Punch were rougher than later efforts due to the necessity of engraving on a single piece of boxwood. The later method, whereby a number of pieces of wood were engraved by different hands and then fitted together to form a whole, yielded superior results, though the process required a breaking up of artistic endeavour; some engravers dealt with faces, some with background, and so on.3 (Rose Roberto discusses this in further detail in Chapter 3 of this volume.) The enduring popularity of Punch, according to Anderson, lay in its ability to be witty without offending sensibilities: ‘Jerrold and Leech never penned a sentence or drew a line which might not be advertised from the house-tops’ (ibid.: 157). Patrick Leary’s study of the diary of Punch regular Henry Silver examines in close detail the weekly dinner conversation in which the periodical’s writers and artists engaged, during which they discussed the subject to be portrayed for each issue’s ‘large cut’ illustration. Leary contends that these dinners acted as a safety valve, the ribald, occasionally juvenile dinner table jokes preparing the way for the more sober, adult fare that eventually appeared in the pages of Punch. Consequently, any deconstruction of the illustration, and therefore of any individual issue of Punch, would demand an understanding of the various contexts in which it was placed: conversational, textual, topical, visual and analogical matters, all of which created ‘a framework of allusion in which the cut achieve[d] its commentary’ (Leary 2010: 45). 3

John Ruskin’s 1876 series of lectures on engraving descried the similarities between the new engraving workshops of masters like Dalziel and the Victorian factory system, noting the ­dehumanising effects of both on the operatives.

408

elizabeth tilley

The format of Punch, combined with the sort of reader expectation that had been so carefully nurtured over the years, could sometimes result in a jarring disconnect between illustration and textual matter. For example, in December of 1843 Punch published Thomas Hood’s ‘The Song of the Shirt’. The poem was based on a police report from October of that same year: a young seamstress had pawned the piecework she was doing in order to feed herself and her child, and was subsequently arrested for theft. The subject – slave wages in Britain – formed the basis of a number of articles in the Times and elsewhere, and Hood’s poem was subsequently set to music and reflected in paintings by George Frederick Watts and Richard Redgrave, taking on a life of its own far beyond the significance of its original publication (Peterson 2009; Shattock 2017: 140). Hood’s sentiments were exactly right in terms of their commentary on the serious social problems England was experiencing during the 1840s, but the visual presentation of the poem in Punch was decidedly odd. ‘The Song of the Shirt’ was placed on the second page of a four-page section entitled ‘Punch’s Triumphant Procession!’ (Punch, v.5 1843: 260) (see Figure 14.1). Though ‘The Song of the Shirt’ was the sole offering on the second page, its impact was compromised by a series of fanciful figures progressing around the margins. The page as a whole resembled a cross between Phiz’s renderings of Dickens’s serial covers and a Bruegel painting; the result was a severe lack of continuity between the highly emotive subject matter of ‘The Song of the Shirt’ and the frivolous, holiday fare to which it was conjoined. It could be argued that the impact of the poem depended on this very  disjunction between its portrayal of misery and the merry ­­atmosphere displayed by the figures dancing round its border. However, none of the offerings on the other pages of the ‘Procession’ attempted a similar social commentary, and these original conditions of presentation have been lost in the subsequent use of the poem as a rallying cry for social change. It was an odd moment of wrong-footed placement, illustrating the potential of such middle-class productions to elide the reality behind their interpretation of Victorian life and culture. Periodicals that focused on news reporting rather than on the satirical presentation of news (like Punch) depended on their ability to provide visual interpretations of events quickly; the availability of wood engraving workshops specialising in rapid production enabled the development of universal knowledge-based titles, such as the Illustrated London News (see Figure 14.2). Like the earlier Illuminated Magazine, the ILN was concerned with the metaphorical ‘illumination’

­

comics, cartoons and the illustrated press

409

Figure 14.1  ‘The Song of the Shirt’, Punch, 5 (December 1843), p. 260 (Courtesy of James Hardiman Library, National University of Ireland, Galway)

of its audience’s sensibilities (see Maidment 2000: 18).4 The first issue of the ILN was published in 1842, a neat ten years after the first publication of the Penny Magazine, and the editor’s ‘Address’ to readers made specific mention of the intervening years as remarkable in terms of the progress of illustrative art, and the vast revolution which it has wrought in the world of publication … To the wonderful 4

Maidment notes that the IM was ‘more formally experimental than the ILN, more complex and confrontational than Punch, without the didactic or sectarian purposefulness of the Penny or the Saturday [Magazine]’ (Maidment 2000: 38).

410

elizabeth tilley

Figure 14.2  Illustrated London News, 16 September 1843 (© British Library Board)

march of periodical literature it has given an impetus and rapidity almost coequal with the gigantic power of steam. (‘Our Address’, Illustrated London News, 14 May 1842: 1) The particular appeal of the ILN lay in its harnessing of a huge number of wood engravings to topics of the day in order to make available, at the reasonable price of 6d weekly, ‘the very form and presence of events as they transpire, in all their substantial reality, and with evidence visible as well as circumstantial’ (‘Our Address’, Illustrated London News, 14 May 1842: 1). The promise was a bold one that proved impossible to fulfil, as the pace of news always outstripped the capacity

­

comics, cartoons and the illustrated press

411

of the ILN to record events as they happened. So the ‘news’ part of the title had to be understood in terms of a digest and reappraisal of events, rather than as a daily announcement of the latest news. Decisions regarding which news or events should be illustrated necessarily imposed a hierarchy of importance after the fact. When fresh wood engravings, exclusive to the paper, were used, the ILN saw itself not just as the recorder of current events, but also as a participant in the creation of the historical record (McKendry 1994). For instance, as befit its aim to dominate the market for middle-class illustrated periodicals, the ILN paid particular attention to celebrity matters. The ‘ordinary’ lives of Queen Victoria and her family were chronicled in close detail, at the same time as they were declared unique and set apart from their subjects. Thus the ILN was instrumental in the creation of Victoria as both female domestic icon (all those children!), and as representative of the imperial power of Britain. It is clear that such a transformation of the monarchy could not have occurred without the assistance of the visual iconography that the illustrators of the ILN and similar newspapers provided. The fiction-reading public was catered for in the frequent reviews of both serial and single-volume literature, and the ILN did try to make things easier on itself by borrowing illustrations from its original sources. Its purpose was not to instruct but to illuminate, and this emphasis, as Toni Weller has said, ‘was based upon the principle of entertainment and profit in a developing capitalist and consumer market’ (Weller 2008: 201). The ILN took seriously its role as a form of cultural warehouse: the necessity for the collection and preservation of individual issues of the magazine was cleverly turned to commercial use, as in the distribution of coloured-card monthly wrappers, and such added value items as ‘a protective “beautiful Tartan wrapper”’ to commemorate the Queen’s visit to the Highlands in 1842 (ibid.: 203). The weekly publishing schedule of the ILN meant readers understood that news, if occurring early in the week, would be old before the periodical could produce a pictorial rendition of it. The result was an increasingly serious time lag that militated against the ambition of the editors to be instrumental in the development of a historical record of events in the life of the country, as noted above. It was much safer to offer occasional series, often by named artists whose work would continue the branding of the ILN, coupled as they were with its format and ethos. Tom Gretton has pointed to Richard Caton Woodville (1856–1927) as one of these artists whose series and fiction illustrations in the ILN were instantly recognisable (Gretton 2015). The ILN’s series entitled ‘Battles of the British Army’ (running between 1893

412

elizabeth tilley

and 1899) was, claims Gretton, one in which the pictorial had clear precedence over the text subsequently written to explicate the scenes portrayed. The instability of text versus picture was something that editors exploited, making any particular issue of the magazine both text and context and rewarding its reader-viewers for skimming and studying, for gazing and glancing, for thinking of the magazine as cumulative and thinking of it as ephemeral, and for understanding it as an arena both of integration and dispersal. (Gretton 2015: 535) The seven years that it took to complete the series gave the ILN exclusive rights during that time period over both the visual and textual interpretation of the battles portrayed, and the ephemerality that Gretton speaks of was negated by those readers who elected to preserve their copies of the magazine. By the 1880s the vast majority of the illustrations in the ILN were photomechanical halftone screen relief prints rather than wood engravings. It was a seamless repurposing of these pictures as part of the ILN’s fine art reprints series that confirmed the separate lives of picture and text, and contributed to the reorganisation of the fine art hierarchy that had previously placed magazine illustration as low in status (Sinnema 1998). Almost as early as the first appearance of illustrations in periodicals came comment by other periodicals on the subjects and methods of presentation, and the ILN in particular was subject to sharp criticism. The view of London – both visual and textual – that it offered was grand, overwhelmingly public and comparatively unproblematic. Charles Knight noted that the ‘sanitized’ London the ILN offered was repeated at every turn, but always without ‘if possible, any exhibition of vulgar poverty’ (Wolff and Fox 1973: 562). The comment revealed the extent to which the city mirrored in the ILN was intended as its contribution to the creation of a reality, rather than as a reflection of reality. The ubiquitousness of the ILN made it ripe for censure, especially from near-rivals like the Tomahawk, one of whose editors was the artist Matt Morgan. Soon after the appearance of its first issue (11 May 1867), the Tomahawk attacked the ILN, not for its departure from photographic realism but for its failure of artistic integrity. The attack took the form of a comment on the ILN’s choice of the French artist Jules Pelcoq as illustrator of the visit of the Prince of Wales to the Paris Exposition:

­

comics, cartoons and the illustrated press

413

Now, we are not going to quarrel with the proprietors for employing a cheap foreigner in preference to native talent, but if they prefer a French artist, why choose M. Jules Pelcoq? who, at best, is perhaps the worst of the designers for the Charivari, and who is evidently completely unfit for illustrating a periodical which, up to the present time, has some right to its reputation. (Tomahawk, 1 June 1867: 40) The combination of cultural nationalism and concern for quality were certainly tied up here with a rivalry between periodicals, but it is significant that the Tomahawk assumed its readers would be as familiar with and concerned about such matters as they were themselves. In any case, its goal of verisimilitude was impossible to fulfil, given the adherence of its artists to established methods of what Michael Wolff and Celina Fox have called ‘old modes of organization’ (Wolff and Fox 1973: 561). That is, the urban wilderness that was London by the 1840s was unsuited to the studio techniques of the ILN’s artists, and the periodical’s claim to objective truth could not be upheld. Knight’s observation revealed serious shortcomings inherent in both the ILN and in other papers like the Graphic that attempted to cover fast-moving news and military events, such as the Franco-Prussian War (Kooistra 2017: 109). The success of the ILN meant that similar titles would inevitably crowd the market. The most influential and long-lived of these was begun by W. L. Thomas, who with his brother George had originally worked for the ILN. When George died in 1868, Thomas asked for the loan of woodblocks George had produced for the ILN, with a view towards the creation of a memorial for his brother. The blocks were refused, and the refusal acted as the impetus for the founding of a new illustrated paper, the Graphic, which was first published on 4 December 1869. Like the ILN, it cost 6d. In a retrospective article on the Graphic, W. L. Thomas noted the relative paucity of illustrated papers in America, where he and his brother had gone in 1847 as wood engravers: ‘Illustrated papers in those far-off days were still struggling against many material difficulties, and were naturally at an even greater disadvantage in a country where there were as yet few picturesque buildings, no court, no army (to be seen), and no pageants’ (Thomas 1888: 80). The implication was that subjects to be illustrated were to be grand, special events, spectacles that could be experienced multiple times through repeated viewings of their representation. Thomas understood illustration in the light of narrative or historical painting, rather than as a chronicle of events whose social interest might well be in the delineation

414

elizabeth tilley

of background rather than foreground. His willingness to entertain artists of all kinds, rather than just wood engravers, meant that the ­­illustrations  produced for the Graphic were varied and highly accomplished. By the 1880s the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites, and the increasingly common use of photographic processes in periodical illustration, created a new respect for the ‘natural’ subject. Harry Quilter, writing about the artists employed by Thomas, noted that the real change which the Graphic artists effected in illustrated journalism lay in this fact, that they introduced the idea of making their weekly records into pictures, not by the old conventional methods, but by treating their subjects truly according to natural fact. (Quilter 1888: 102) The iconographic conventions established by artists for these papers drew on existing texts like Mayhew’s reports for the Morning Chronicle between 1849 and 1850, establishing a continuity between social reportage and visual exposition. In addition, the conventions of history and narrative painting were employed by on-the-spot artists covering European wars, and, as Lorraine Janzen Kooistra has remarked, literary conventions from the gothic and fantastic also informed the creation of urban scenes (Kooistra 2017: 110). All of these clearly understood textual and visual codes helped readers make sense of a new sort of interface largely controlled by the artists’ decisions about subject matter, and the necessary textual annotation that accompanied their choices. Word and image shared meaning on the page, allied through juxtaposition and the arrangement of white space. The aesthetic movement ushered in a new acceptance of periodical illustration as almost completely divorced from its original role as adjunct to surrounding textual matter. This is where the identification of artists on title pages and in indices was crucial; the detachment of image from text was complete when images were indexed by artist rather than by the texts they had illustrated. Dickens’s early use of the separate sheet for textual illustrations in his serial fiction ensured that no rivalry between text and image was possible in the reading process. Phiz was given space to announce himself on each part-issue cover, but the bulk (in every sense of the word) of the matter readers engaged with was clearly that of Dickens’s text, rather than Phiz’s visual interpretation of it. However, it should be noted that editions of Dickens’s work after his death, such as the cheap Household Edition brought out in parts by Chapman & Hall, explicitly patterned its format and style

­

comics, cartoons and the illustrated press

415

after successful illustrated periodicals of the day such as the Graphic, and often employed the same artists (Louttit 2014; Patten 2017). The effect was a collapse of the artistic hierarchy between periodical and book illustration as well as an underlining of the importance of artistic input to the final product. By the 1870s, in periodicals like Dark Blue (1871­­–3, monthly) and the Yellow Book (1894–7, quarterly), the identification of artists’ names was as important as the texts they illustrated. For example, the three illustrations that accompanied Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’, published in Dark Blue over four months from December 1871 to March 1872, were produced by two artists5 with very different styles and outlooks. Consequently, there was no possibility of establishing a seamless visual understanding of Le Fanu’s text through reference to the appended graphic representations of it. The stand-alone reproductions of Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings in the Yellow Book at the end of the century performed a similar forcible reorganisation of visual and semantic codes. The full commercial and cultural potential of the illustrated periodical form was reached in the comic phenomenon that was Ally Sloper, along with his various manifestations (discussed at greater length in Chapter 15 of this volume). The character first appeared in the 14 August 1867 issue of Judy, that magazine itself being a spinoff of Punch. Ally was created by Charles H. Ross (a writer of penny dreadfuls) and his wife, Isabelle Émilie de Tessier. Tessier inked the character under the pen name of Marie Duval, and Ally appeared for years in Judy. In the 1880s Ross and Duval sold the character for a flat fee to Judy’s publisher, Gilbert Dalziel, and Dalziel in turn created a new vehicle for Ally: Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday, which ran from 1884 to 1916. Ally went through various refinements, but his original ­appearance – larger than life, exaggerated nose and feet – remained more or less constant for most of his thirty-year history. Scott Banville has used Bolter and Grusin’s points about remediation in his study of Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday, noting that ‘all media forms and genres make use of preexisting content, delivery methods, and audience expectations of genres and forms in order to create meaningful texts and to engender cultural legitimacy for themselves’ (Banville 2008: 151). In this sense it is clear that Ally Sloper used a number of elements drawn from popular culture (music halls, broadsides, other cheap periodicals) to both repeat and 5

David Henry Friston and M. Fitzgerald. Friston was the more famous of the two; he illustrated Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘A Study in Scarlet’ in Beeton’s Christmas Annual, 1887.

416

elizabeth tilley

make fresh the connections readers associated with working-class entertainment and Victorian society as a whole. Part of the charm of reading Ally Sloper was the extent to which reader participation was encouraged: competitions and branded merchandise (watches, buttons, etc.) invited the consumer to enter an alternative reality in which the exploits of Ally and his companions made manifest a world where triumph (sometimes violent triumph) over class boundaries revealed the system itself to be inherently ridiculous. Ally Sloper appeared at a critical juncture in Victorian cultural history; the working and lower middle classes enjoyed enormous freedom to travel, to experience landscapes beyond their immediate surroundings, and to access information and commodities that had never before been available to them. Their reading material reflected this freedom and helped push against existing linguistic and behavioural boundaries. Ally Sloper also represented a radical departure in the commercial exploitation of reader loyalty in ways that acknowledged the power and cultural influence of its readers. For instance, between 1890 and 1897 there were almost 100 fatalities on Britain’s railways, with twice that number injured. In a rather fascinating, fatalistic acceptance of such statistics, readers of Ally Sloper were invited to bring the magazine along with them on future train journeys; a prominent notice announced that £150 would be paid to the next-of-kin of any Man, Woman, Boy, or Girl (Railway Servants on duty excepted), who shall happen to meet with his or her death in a Railway Accident to the train in which they are travelling, in any part of the United Kingdom, PROVIDED a copy of the current issue of ‘ALLY SLOPER’S HALF-HOLIDAY’ be found upon the Deceased at the time of the Accident. (Ally Sloper’s HalfHoliday, 11 September 1897: 290) Ominously, ten claims for that amount had already been paid; needless to say, the advertisement was not illustrated. Ally Sloper specialised in visual continuity between issues of the magazine, not only through the frequent appearance of Ally and his friends in each, but also through the breaking up of images between one issue and the next. In 1883 an International Fisheries Exhibition was held in London at which giant octopus and cuttlefish were the main attractions. Ally Sloper responded by using an image of a sea serpent, running across the bottom of pages in two issues from 3 and 10 May 1884, clearly inviting readers to complete the image of the serpent through purchase of the next week’s number. As such, the individual

­

comics, cartoons and the illustrated press

417

Figure 14.3  Ally Sloper, Royal Academy notice, 1883 (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

issue formed part of a visual puzzle which required multiple purchases in order to complete (see Figure 14.3). Ally Sloper succeeded for a number of reasons, not least of which was the dynamism of its main character. In similar fashion, the longevity of the figure of Punch, and the ideal image of London that formed the masthead of the ILN acted as touchstones for reader identification and gratification. Information, illumination and amusement were the triumvirate that helped ensure the longevity of many of the titles discussed here, and that helped reflect back to Victorians their own complex selves.

Appendix Considerations of space limit the number of titles that can be discussed in this essay. The list below is provided as a means of charting the main players and lines of influence in illustrated periodicals during the period 1820–90: The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction (1822–47) The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (1832–45) Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper (1853–67) Punch; or, the London Charivari (1841–1992) – and a number of its competitors: Fun (1860–1901) The Tomahawk; a Saturday journal of satire (1867–70) Judy; or the London serio-comic journal (1867–1907) Will-o’-the-Wisp; a high-class political and satirical paper, an occasionally fortnightly journal of no party, no politics, no sect, no creed (1867?–71) Moonshine (1879–1902) The Illustrated London News (1842–1989) ­– and a number of its imitators and competitors:

418

elizabeth tilley

The Pictorial Times; a Weekly Journal of News, Literature, Fine Arts and the Drama (1843–8) The Illustrated Times (1855–72) Penny Illustrated paper and Illustrated Times; a Pictorial journal and family newspaper (1861–98) The Graphic; an illustrated weekly magazine (1869–1932)

Chapter Fifteen

THE SATIRICAL PRESS Michael de Nie

T

he nineteenth-century satirical press is a unique and somewhat underutilised source for examining almost any facet of Victorian culture and politics. The number of satirical newspapers in print for at least a few months varied by decade over the course of the century, beginning as a mere handful in the 1810s and 1820s, expanding into the twenties in the 1830s and 1840s, declining in the 1850s, and then growing fairly steadily from the mid- to late 1860s, with at least fifty or so titles in print at some point over the course of each of the last three decades of the century. These periodicals have interested scholars for some time, but most researchers have overwhelmingly focused on papers’ weekly cuts, or full-page editorial cartoons. These cartoons are often eye-catching, fascinating and sometimes quite humorous (although probably not in the same manner as to contemporaries), but the weekly comic newspapers present so much more. Each issue of Punch or rivals such as Judy, Fun or Funny Folks, contained a rich collection of jokes, puns, poems, songs and illustrations that reveal the boundaries, character and evolution of a shared popular culture. A close reading of the Victorian satirical press, particularly of the interplay and tension between text and images, illuminates key aspects of the material culture, social customs and worldviews of its middle-class, urban readers. In addition, these comic papers also offer invaluable information on the political conventional wisdom of their era, helping us to better understand the political and social context in which domestic and foreign policy was crafted. Published weekly or sometimes monthly, the content of the satirical newspapers was relatively consistent, at least from the 1830s. Most contained a weekly or big cut, a full- or two-page cartoon which typically commented on the dominant political news story of the 419

420

michael de nie

week. These included parliamentary manoeuvrings, social reform, and foreign or imperial affairs. The weekly cut was not the only cartoon, however, as most featured a number of illustrated jokes, single- and multiple-panel cartoons, and comic illustrations of varying size and design. The bulk of each issue was of course print – jokes of varying lengths, parodies of popular literature or drama, puns and wordplay, dialogues, plays  of  one to three acts, poems, fake letters and correspondent reports, diaries, fictional documents and other items.1 While written and drawn to tickle their readers, this content was also designed to achieve some end. Many Victorians clearly felt that all their activities, including laughter, must ultimately serve some purpose. Victorians, in other words, were serious about their humour (but also more fun-loving and self-deflating than often assumed). They loved to laugh at the many incongruities of their rapidly modernising world, but this laughter was an education that would lead to positive action. As the great contemporary critic George Meredith put it, ‘the test of true Comedy is that is shall awaken thoughtful laughter’ (Meredith 1903: 88). Humour, particularly satire, was a corrective force that inspired both merriment and the desire to correct the incongruities it highlighted. Scholars of the British comic press generally agree that it existed in a symbiotic relationship with the mainstream daily press, largely reflecting and confirming the opinions expressed in the leaders (editorials) of the London or local papers. Utilising a collection of instantly recognisable images, symbols and tropes, the satirical press was designed for a mobile (often train-riding) audience with a deeply ingrained daily newspaper reading habit. At their root, the comic newspapers of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales and their readers were all deeply intertextual. If the readers of Punch or Pat were not aware of the latest news, hit plays, popular novels, or their Virgil and Shakespeare, then the countless puns, poems and one-liners touching on these events and topics would have made little sense. Simply put, jokes and cartoons require both immediate recognition and shared sentiment in order to be funny. The satirical press, then, might be considered a deeply influential news aggregator, a producer of synthesised knowledge that both reflected and moulded Victorian social and political opinion. No other periodicals could so effectively crystallise the conventional wisdom, 1

What has been little noted, reflecting the overwhelming scholarly attention paid to Punch, was that Punch’s London rivals and provincial imitators also contained a section of more or less straight political commentary, sometimes slightly satirical. This section was known as ‘Parliamentary Memos’ in Fun, ‘Man in the Street’ in Funny Folks, ‘Parliamentary Palaver’ in Judy, ‘What I have to Say’ in the Owl, and so on.

­

the satirical press

421

representing and shaping the public mood with a short joke or a single image. Although it was often (but not always) ‘only joking’, the power and influence of the comic press in this regard was perhaps unique. The comic papers were also closely identified with the middle classes and the political Establishment. As M. H. Spielmann put it in an 1891 Contemporary Review article, Mr Punch had ‘identified himself with the British constitution’ (Spielmann 1891: 52). Especially after midcentury, the satiric press was a sounding board and guide for action for politicians, most of whom read the comic press closely. So, in one sense, the humour in these newspapers was essentially a conservative force, working to confirm rather than challenge dominant opinions. Just as the figure in an editorial cartoon must be instantly recognisable to the reader, so too must the opinion or message expressed in it. In other words, like the majority of the highly politicised and partisan Victorian press, the Liberal and Conservative comic weeklies played to the well-known attitudes of their readers. As Nicholas Garland, ­himself a ­political cartoonist, has argued, the idea contained in a political cartoon must not only be easily understood but even be already widely established before the cartoonist uses it. It could reasonably be argued that political cartoons are merely telling people what they already know in a highly simplified form. (Garland 1988: 82) Or, as a late Victorian contemporary put it in Good Words, ‘from the very nature of the purposes he has in view, the caricaturist must appeal to the knowledge, the beliefs, the prejudices of the majority of his contemporaries’ (Walker 1884: 185). The Victorian comic press, which was produced largely by and for metropolitan, middle-class men, generally affirmed the social and political order, yet derived energy from its many tensions and ironies. As has been widely observed by others, the satiric press underwent a number of important changes over the course of the nineteenth century (Gifford 1976; Gray 1972; Spielmann 1895a; Von Dann 1994). The common understanding among both contemporaries and scholars of the general arc of this development is as follows. Many early nineteenth-century satirical periodicals, such as the Satirist and Black Dwarf, were notable for both their pugnacity and nearly exclusive focus on political matters, while some of their peers seemed to revel in scandal and lewdness. On occasion, both tendencies resulted in threatened or genuine legal action against publishers and journalists for sedition or libel. Although it had some radical tendencies in its early youth, the 1841 launch of the quintessential Victorian comic periodical, Punch,

422

michael de nie

marked a decisive shift in the tone and content of the satirical press, which became increasingly domesticated and respectable over the next sixty years. Genteel detached amusement gradually replaced blunt and bitter satire as the comic press transformed from an agent, or at least proponent, of political and social change, to a reassuring voice validating the opinions and tastes of its mainly middle-class readers, even while gently mocking them. This trend culminated in the closing years of the century with comic papers such as Ally-Sloper’s Half-Holiday, which largely eschewed political or social commentary in favour of light fun aimed at broad audiences. This evolution, which will be examined in more detail momentarily, was driven by many of the same social, political, legal, economic and technological changes that combined to produce the great expansion of the press more generally in the second half of the nineteenth century. The legal and technological changes that steadily drove down the price of newspapers around mid-century not only made comic papers more affordable, but also produced the great flowering of morning and evening newspapers on which the satirical press depended. Their cost was further lowered, and visual appeal increased, by technical changes or choices such as the widespread adoption of woodcut engraving, which allowed illustrations and letterpress to be printed together. The steady domestication of the satirical papers over the century reflected not just the dominance of Punch, but also the changing political climate from the turbulent 1830s, to the mid-century age of equipoise, to latecentury confidence and democratisation. All of these developments and trends have been well noted and examined by scholars, but somewhat less attention has been paid to the role of the readers in the evolution of the satirical press, especially in regard to its look and content. The significance of sound financial backing to the viability of a satiric newspaper cannot be overestimated. The catalogue of Victorian comic papers is littered with short-lived titles that did not survive the typically financially difficult early months and years of a new periodical. Even Punch might not have continued, if not for its timely purchase by William Bradbury and Frederick Evans in December 1842. Tomahawk went under in 1870 after the death of  its  proprietor, despite a circulation (over 50,000) that matched any of its competitors, including Punch. One of the key factors in the continuing viability of Punch and its long-lived competitors was the repackaging and sale of content from the weekly issues in topical collections, Christmas specials, bound annual volumes and so on. The reading public thus expressed its preferences, and thereby shaped the development of the comic press, with its purchasing decisions. In

­

the satirical press

423

other words, the evolution of the satirical press from the sharp and sometimes scandalous Satirist, to the polite Punch, to the non-political and broad Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday, was both driven by the readers’ changing humour preferences, and made possible by the technical developments and legal changes that enabled the cheap mass production and distribution of satirical weekly newspapers. In the opening decades of the century popular taste for satire and humour still leaned towards biting wit and semi-scandalous caricatures in the style of James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson and, later in this period, George Cruikshank. The weekly and monthly satirical newspapers of these early years, such as the Anti-Jacobin Review (1798–1821), the Satirist (1807–14), the Scourge (1811–16) and the Age (1825–43), often contained bitter, personal attacks on political opponents and evinced a strong partisan tone. This dabbling in character assassination produced numerous lawsuits and the occasional physical assault, but also drove up circulation. Building on the success of William Cobbett and his Political Register (1802–36), Black Dwarf (1816–24) offered a decidedly radical critique of British society and its political system in the Peterloo era under its editor Thomas Wooler. Expressly aimed at the working classes, Black Dwarf used various forms of sarcasm and satire, as well as some serious commentary, but also continued the tradition of personal attacks, as evidenced by Wooler’s (unsuccessful) prosecution for seditious libel in 1817 (Hendrix 1976: 110). The following two decades were a critical period in the development of satirical newspapers in terms of their appearance and content. As many contemporaries and scholars have noted, it was during these years that the humour in these periodicals began to be domesticated. This was meant in two ways. First there was a general softening in the tone and character of their jokes, which became less pointed and personal. The caricature, which aimed to capture the spirit or essence of its subject through distortion or exaggeration, was steadily replaced by the cartoon, which instead usually sought to capture a good likeness of the subject, but still in a humorous fashion. Similarly, in the text portions of the newspapers, which were after all the bulk of their content, wit and invective gave way to gentle humour, puns and wordplay. The second aspect of this domestication was a broadening of the topics or subjects of humour. Most of the satirical press still remained strongly interested in political matters, but jokes on parliamentary matters were increasingly joined and eventually surpassed by social satire, much of it set in domestic locations. While still expressed principally in letter press, these jokes also began to increasingly appear as small single cuts or multi-panel cartoons. The

424

michael de nie

small cut was typically unconnected to current news and instead might depict an urban or domestic setting, a social archetype, or a scene from a popular novel or play. These small cartoons may have been pioneered by Pierce Egan’s Life in London (1824–7), which was bought by Robert Bell, who subsequently added a small comic cut to the top of the upper right column of the front page of Bell’s Life in London (1822–85) (Kunzle 1983: 340). Bell’s, along with the Penny Magazine (1832–45), which also sometimes included small cuts, paved the way for the Illustrated London News (1842–2003) and the many other Victorian illustrated newspapers. Bell also pioneered another important development in the satirical press by republishing the small cuts in his biannual Gallery of Comicalities, a four-page collection of cartoons and images that sold in very large numbers for 3d (Kunzle 1983: 343). Gilbert à Beckett briefly followed suit with the Comic Magazine (1832–4), a monthly containing recycled material from his Figaro in London and elsewhere. While Bell’s Life in London and others helped to introduce the apolitical small cuts, the moderate radical, anti-Corn Law Penny Satirist (1837–46) pointed the way towards the weekly big cut, with C. J. Grant’s multicolumn topical cartoons on its front page. Both of these developments were greatly aided by continued refinements in woodblock engraving techniques, culminating in the 1840s with the invention of a method to break large blocks into multiple pieces, which sped up engraving by allowing multiple artists to work on the same image, discussed in more depth in Chapter 3 of this volume (Doran 1991: 54). All of these trends in the content, appearance and production of the satirical press came together in Figaro in London (1831–9), which established the standard for the Victorian comic newspaper. Founded by Gilbert à Beckett at the age of twenty-one, Figaro in London itself was modelled on the Parisian satirical weekly Le Figaro, which began five years prior. The first issue was not illustrated, but subsequent issues featured large cuts (although not full-page ones) by the chief artist Robert Seymour, as well as other, smaller political cartoons and comic illustrations. Seymour and à Beckett had a falling out, and the former left in 1834 to be briefly replaced by Robert Cruikshank (Spielmann 1895a: 654). Seymour returned in 1835 after à Beckett left, and was succeeded as editor by Henry Mayhew. The paper was initially quite popular, selling over 70,000 copies a week in 1832, and inspired numerous short-lived competitors hoping to cash in on the ‘Figaro-mania’, such as the New Figaro (1832), Punchinello (1832), Figaro in Sheffield (1832), Figaro in Birmingham (1832) and Figaro in Liverpool (1832). Figaro in London paved the way for Punch in a number of ways, perhaps most importantly through its content and tone (see Figure 15.1).

­

the satirical press

425

Figure 15.1  Front page, Figaro in London, 10 December 1831 (© British Library Board)

As à Beckett’s son Arthur put it in his 1903 memoir, ‘Figaro in London was the advance guard. For the first time a humorous periodical rested upon something better and purer than vile personal abuse. The miserable scurrility of the Satirist and sheets of that class was abandoned for healthy genuine fun’ (à Beckett 1903: 45). In practice, Figaro in London was usually more politically focused and sharper edged than Arthur à Beckett claimed or remembered, but it did offer a rich collection of anodyne jokes and illustrations, puns, parodies, theatre reviews and commentary on a wide variety of topics. The paper also shared common staff with its successor – Mayhew was one of the founders of Punch, and à Beckett a regular contributor from the first issue until

426

michael de nie

his death in 1856. Like its progenitor, Punch, or the London Charivari also named itself after a Parisian satiric newspaper, Le Charivari (1832–1937), and both newspapers shared a common printer in their late/early years (à Beckett 1903: 28). The scene was now set for the arrival of Punch, the best-known, most influential and most studied satirical newspaper of the nineteenth century. There were a number of factors in Punch’s great success, and the first of these was timing. Punch arrived at the right moment in a political, social and business sense. By 1842 the political passions of the 1830s had receded somewhat, the rising middle classes were in search of more respectable entertainment, and Figaro in London and other recent papers provided both a successful format and a growing mass market interested in a mix of polite political humour and social satire. The story of Punch’s founding and early years are well known and need not be retold here (à Beckett 1903; Altick 1997; Leary 2010; Spielmann 1891, 1895b). Instead, I will focus on how Punch built on the model provided by Figaro in London, Bell’s Gallery of Comicalities, and others, to become the pre-eminent satirical newspaper of the Victorian era. The three most significant innovations or refinements of Punch were its consummate respectability, the full-page big cut, and its branding and marketing. There were several facets to Punch’s respectability, which at root was a natural progression of the declining temperature of political humour, and the shift from caricature to cartoon. While written by and for middle-class metropolitan men, the paper was from the first also intended to be a satiric periodical that these readers could take home. As the foremost contemporary historian of Punch put it, the founders successfully attempted to show ‘what had never been dreamt of, that a weekly comic and satirical paper might not only be clean and wholesome and fair, but that it might claim and honourably occupy a place on the drawing-room and boudoir tables’ (Spielmann 1895a: 656). Another contemporary observed that, ‘Grown men find amusement in its pages, and it never brought a blush to the cheek of an innocent girl’ (Walker 1884: 816). The family friendly nature of the paper was demonstrated by its polite tone, but also by the subjects of its puns, poems, cartoons and jokes, the majority of which played on domestic or social topics rather than the latest political news. Punch further demonstrated its respectability with a strict prohibition on any content that might strike (Protestant) readers as irreligious. The propriety of the paper’s content was mirrored in its staff, many of whom were civil servants, or respected writers and artists. The principal Punch artists of the Victorian era, John Leech and John Tenniel, took on many of

­

the satirical press

427

the same abuses and problems as their artistic predecessors Gillray and Hogarth, but lived much more respectable lives, enjoying greater income and social standing (Miller 2009: 273). Their big cuts were full- and occasionally two-page cartoons at the centre of each issue that commented on one of the major topics of the week’s news. The majority of these touched on domestic politics, but they also commented on foreign and imperial events, social issues, London-specific matters and various other topics. Although they are often overlooked or ignored by scholars examining these cartoons, Punch typically included a comic poem or other short piece in subsequent pages that contextualised the big cut, especially its title or other text. Just as the small cartoons in Bell’s Gallery of Comicalities were designed to be cut out, shared and scrapbooked, Punch’s big cuts were printed with a blank page on the verso so that they might be removed, hung and otherwise shared. This model was generally followed by its imitators, although some of these, such as Fun, printed the accompanying poem on the back side of the weekly cut. The subject of each week’s cartoon was famously decided upon at Punch’s weekly dinner table, where editors, writers and artists pitched topics culled from the latest leaders in London papers (especially but not solely the Times) and conversations overhead at the clubs (Leary 2010). The big cuts, drawn first by Leech and then by Tenniel after 1861, were notable not just for their polite humour but also for their artistry. Gone were the exaggerations and grotesqueries of Hogarth and Gillray; the subjects of these cartoons were drawn accurately and skilfully, with strong lines and clear composition. These big cuts and the content that surrounded them were successfully marketed in a variety of ways. Taking a cue from Bell and others, the Punch staff issued its first collection of recycled content as the Punch Almanack in 1842, which sold some 90,000 copies at a time when the weekly circulation was but 6,000 (see Figure 15.2). Like à Beckett’s Comic Magazine, the Almanack refrained from reprinting political jokes and cartoons in order to be as family-friendly and timeless as possible. The Almanack was subsequently joined by Punch’s Pocket Book (1844–81), a travel-sized version that also included a business ledger, diary and other useful content for the man on the move. These and other regular and one-off collections of republished material throughout the century generally sold well, providing revenue that enabled the paper to hire the best talent and outlast its rivals. Punch’s brand was of course best represented by the iconic Mr Punch, a fairminded and good-hearted patriot who put the interests of the nation above partisan politics.

428

michael de nie

Figure 15.2  Punch Almanack, 1860 (Courtesy of Michael de Nie)

Almost all of Punch’s major rivals sought to replicate this formula, from developing a distinctive voice or persona, to republishing content, to featuring political big cuts and light-hearted family fare in their pages, but only Mr Punch became a national institution, supposedly synonymous with Victorian sensibilities. Punch was successful in this regard in part because of its reputed non-partisanship, an example not followed by its chief rivals in the next few decades. As has been widely discussed, the paper sometimes offered a somewhat cutting and radical slant on some political and social issues in its early years, particularly in the pieces by Thackeray and Douglas Jerrold, but even at its start the character of Mr Punch was presented as ‘a progressive whig in his love of small change’ (Gray 1972: 6; Spielmann 1895b: 23). As the 1840s

­

the satirical press

429

faded into the 1850s and beyond, both Punch and its middle-class readers became the Establishment, or at least an important part of the Establishment, and their political fires burned lower. Generally speaking, in the second half of the century, Punch tended to be socially conservative but liberal leaning on many political issues. In Spielmann’s view, the paper assumed the posture of an Old Liberal, an elderly member of the Reform Club, with just enough desire for reform to be written down a Radical by Tories, and enough Conservatism and patriotism to be denounced as a Jingo, or its equivalent, by their opponents. (Spielmann 1895b: 106) Between 1842 and the 1880s Punch inspired many imitators and rivals in London and beyond, most of them folding in less than a year or even a few weeks (Gray 1972; Savory 1984). There were, however, several important and long-lived rivals published in the metropolis. Although it seems to have enjoyed a circulation only about half as large, Fun (1861–1901) was universally acknowledged as Punch’s closest competitor, following its example in layout, tone and the publication of recycled content in annual Almanacks (See Figure 15.3).2 More Liberal in its politics, Fun aimed at a more of a lower-middle-class readership, costing just 1d to Punch’s 3d, although its humour drew on the same general levels of learning and familiarity with current news. Fun was regarded by contemporaries as a friendly rival, and the senior paper was known to poach some of its talented staff. An important exception to this was the principal artist James Frank Sullivan, who penned the big cuts and other illustrations from 1875 to 1901. Sullivan was also responsible for developing what was perhaps the first strip cartoon, ‘The British Working-Man’, a rival of sorts to Ally Sloper. In 1870 the Dalziel brothers, who already owned the Conservative Judy, purchased Fun and gradually asserted more control over its content and look, especially after the death of the first editor, Tom Hood, in 1874. By early 1881 the brothers edited, engraved, partially wrote and drew, and printed every issue (Lauterbach 1961: 25). The Dalziels’ other comic weekly, Judy (1867–1910), offered the most successful Conservative challenge to Punch (see Figure 15.4). Like Fun, it was marketed to an upper to lower-middle-class audience (costing 2d), but notably one that was supposedly largely female. Its look 2

Despite its contemporary prominence, there has been very little scholarly work on Fun. The most important study by far is Edward Stewart Lauterbach’s ‘Fun and Its Contributors: The Literary History of a Victorian Humor Magazine’ (diss., University of Illinois, 1961).

430

michael de nie

Figure 15.3  Page 2, Fun, 30 October 1869 (© British Library Board)

and content mix was clearly modelled after Punch, although like Fun (and unlike Punch), it also contained a weekly column (‘Parliamentary Palaver’) of relatively serious political commentary. The voice of the paper was mainstream Conservative, defending the party’s principles and consistently attacking William Gladstone and the Liberals for their Irish, domestic and imperial policies. Perhaps the most notable contribution of Judy was that it was the birthplace of the iconic comic character Ally Sloper, who debuted in its pages in August 1867. Originally created and drawn by Charles Ross, Sloper was principally drawn between 1869 and the mid-1870s by his wife Isabelle Emilie de Tessier under the pen name Marie Duval. As Sloper’s popularity grew, the Daziels began to reprint his adventures in a series of collected volumes, and the success of these inspired the launch of character’s own spin-off comic paper, Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday, in 1884.

­

the satirical press

431

Figure 15.4  Judy, 1878 (Courtesy of David Finkelstein)

The other two (London-based) longest-lived satirical newspapers were Funny Folks (1874–94) and Moonshine (1879–1902) (see Figures 15.5 and 15.6). For the most part, Moonshine offered a conventional Conservative viewpoint, sometimes with a harder edge than Judy, but it could also be more sceptical of the party’s leaders and especially of imperial adventures. Funny Folks (1874­­–94) was a Liberal paper aimed at the educated working and lower middle classes, containing plenty of general humour but also a sharp political message in many of its front-page big cuts, drawn by the principal artist, John Proctor. Because of its format, an eight-page tabloid with increasingly more illustrated content than its peers, Funny Folks is often regarded as the first of the new generation of mass-market comic papers, selling some 430,000 copies a week at 1d in 1892 (Waterloo Directory). But, given

432

michael de nie

Figure 15.5  ‘The Irish Caliban’, Funny Folks, 4 September 1880 (© British Library Board)

the sharp and partisan political sentiments frequently displayed on its front page during most of its existence, the paper is probably best described as an important bridge between the traditional Victorian satirical press and the new comics.3 The successors of Funny Folks kept the eight-page tabloid format but dropped its politics. The new comics of the last decade completed the long journey of the nineteenth-century satirical press. These new papers had little concern for the constructive or corrective purpose of 3

In January 1891 Funny Folks changed from displaying a full-page cartoon on the front cover to two and then later three cartoons. The larger top cartoon remained topical and political at first but this gradually faded. In its last two years the paper returned to a single cartoon, but on a social or domestic topic.

­

the satirical press

433

Figure 15.6  ‘Woman’s Work’, Moonshine, 23 December 1882 (© British Library Board)

humour and satire, and often proudly denied having purpose at all beyond amusement and profit. They were a manifestation of the new opportunities for, and attitudes about, leisure in fin-de-siècle Britain. The progenitor of the comic turn was Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday (1884–1914). After a number of successful compilations and special numbers such as Ally Sloper: A Moral Lesson (1873, perhaps the first British comic book), Ally Sloper’s Book of Beauty (1880), Ally Sloper’s Comic Crackers (1883) and Ally Sloper’s Comic Kalender (1876–84), the Dalziel brothers decided to give Sloper his own paper (Gifford 1976: 7; Waterloo Directory). The new venture was placed under the control of Edward Dalziel’s son Gilbert, who had been taught the trade working at Fun and Judy, and had illustrations by William Giles Baxter (until his death in 1888) and William Fletcher Thomas. While Ally Sloper’s

434

michael de nie

Half-Holiday was aimed primarily at a lower-middle-class audience, it was known to have many working- and middle-class readers, as well as young adult fans of all social backgrounds. The success of Funny Folks and Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday inspired numerous imitators, most of whom also incorporated the scrapbook journalism style of George Newnes’s hugely successful Tit-Bits (1881– 1956). The resulting comic boom of the 1890s was set in motion, or at least best represented, by Alfred Charles William Harmsworth’s Comic Cuts (1890–1953) and Chips (1890–1952) and Gordon Phillip Hood’s Funny Cuts (1890–1920) (Gifford 1976: 10–11). These papers, and most of their short-lived competitors, offered eight pages in tabloid format, cut and pasted with a mix of reprints and new cartoons, selling for ½d. They sought to gently amuse the widest possible audience, setting the standard for comic journalism well into the next century. Punch, the sole survivor of the major London satirical newspapers, weathered these changes and endured to see a return of sorts to the old ideals and practices of satirical journalism in the second half of the twentieth century. Outside of London, the satirical press followed a similar general trajectory. There were a few short-lived publications in the decades before Punch, most of them somewhat crude in execution if not tenor. As in London, the rapid success of Punch sparked numerous briefly published imitators in the 1840s, but it was not until about 1870 that satirical newspapers with some staying power began to appear. The new papers of the last third of the century owed their success to the same factors driving the tremendous expansion of the penny press more generally: the final abolition of the taxes on knowledge, technical advances and increased advertising revenues. The format and layout of the local humour weeklies was broadly similar: penny weekly papers of about sixteen pages containing a mixture of humour, cartoons, society gossip, theatre reviews, illustrations and, in some cases, serious editorials, with a large amount of advertising, which often crowded the margins (Miller 2007: 294–5). The exact mix varied, of course, and some were probably more illustrated papers with a few jokes than satirical periodicals. While these papers copied many elements of the London papers, their focus was mostly local, poking fun at regional celebrities and politicians and highlighting injustices or poor behaviour close to home. Many of the large cities in England had a satirical newspaper at some point in time, but Birmingham seems to have had the bestdeveloped comic press, with three long-running titles and many other ephemeral ventures (Roberts and Ward 2014: 1–2). The first

­

the satirical press

435

of these three, The Town-Crier (1861–1903), was for many years ‘the voice of Birmingham Liberalism and civic improvement’ but trended rightward as the century wore on (Roberts and Ward 2014: 1–3). The Dart (1876–1911), the most popular of the Birmingham comic papers, was also launched as a Liberal paper, but the owner, Robert Simpson Kirk, accepted subsidies from a prominent local Tory and typically positioned the paper to the right of its decidedly pro-Chamberlain rival (until the Home Rule split), the Owl (1879–1911). All three news­ papers were illustrated at different points by the leading local cartoonist George Henry Bernasconi. The Celtic Fringe also produced its own, mainly locally focused, comic periodicals, most of which survived only a few months to a few years. The most durable Scottish title was Bon-Accord (1880–1, 1886–1959), published in Aberdeen, followed by Bailie (Glasgow, 1872–1926), the Piper O’Dundee (1886–1913) and the Quiz (Glasgow, 1881–98). Wales had fewer offerings, the most notable of which were Y Punch Cymraeg (1858–64), the Ferret (Swansea, 1870–79), and Swansea Boy (1878–81). Ireland had its share of briefly published comic papers in the first half of the century, as well as some longerlasting titles in the second half, such as the Unionist Blarney (Belfast, 1871–86). In addition, the major weekly Dublin newspapers of the last quarter of the century, such as the Weekly News, United Ireland, Weekly Irish Times and Weekly Freeman, typically included large editorial cartoons, the latter three using multicolour chromolithographs rather than woodcuts (Bowen 1952; Tilley 2014). The chief artist of the Freeman cartoons, John Fergus O’Hea (Spex), was arguably the most important figure in late Victorian Irish cartooning, serving as principal artist on four successive Dublin satirical papers. The first of these was Zozimus (1870–2), founded by the journalist and Nationalist politician A. M. Sullivan. O’Hea then drew for Ireland’s Eye (1874–5), Zoz (1876–8) and Pat (1879–83), all of which were edited by Edwin Hamilton (Bowen 1952). While the first three of the papers on which O’Hea worked contained fairly middle-of-the-road light fare, Pat had considerably more political bite, reflecting the changing political climate initiated by the Land War (1879–82) and the rise of Charles Stewart Parnell. O’Hea’s cartoons in the Weekly Freeman also grew more pointed as the decade wore on. Parnell and his compatriots frequently appeared in the pages of the London satirical newspapers, one of several important groups of outsiders satirised with varying levels of animus. Content analyses of comic commentary on minority or outgroups in the Victorian period have focused almost exclusively on Punch, reflecting both its outsize

436

michael de nie

role in the culture and its availability to modern scholars. For the most part, the treatment of groups such as the Irish, Catholics, Jews, women, working men and the poor in Punch and its main Liberal rivals demonstrated a duality or contradiction, in that these papers generally supported larger goals or ideals such as ‘Justice to Ireland’, removing Jewish disabilities, expanding suffrage, or education for women, while still demonstrating considerable suspicion, concern or hostility towards members of these groups (Collins 2010; Curtis 1997; de Nie 2004; Johnson 2002; McNees 2004; Wohl 1995, 1996). In cases such as Ireland or the working class, this duality mirrored the common distinction made in the mainstream press between the loyal workers or Irish people, and the dangerous union activists or Fenian rebels. This same distinction was often made in the pages of Judy and other Conservative comic weeklies, which generally did not support the larger reform goals. On occasion, jokes and cartoons on both sides of the comic press political divide elided this distinction, portraying all members of a particular groups as suspect or dangerous. As was also the case with satires of imperial policy and imperial peoples, jokes about outgroups reflected both the self-confidence of the metropolitan writers and readers, and their many ambivalences over the pressing social and political issues of their time. Content analysis of the comic press can thus illuminate the depth and breadth of popular awareness of, and engagement with, a wide range of issues or questions. By drawing on so many news sources and relying on the fact that their readers did the same, the comic press constitutes one of the finest insights into the dominant social and political questions of their day. The jokes and cartoons only worked because of this wider knowledge, this sense of familiarity and shared culture. Collectively, the satirical press thus helps uncover and reveal the issues and problems that most occupied the Victorian press and political classes in any given period, as well as the contours of the received conventional wisdom. The cartoons and jokes of the comic press certainly reflected a considerable amount of conventional press commentary, but this was not simple mimicry, reflection without thinking. This content demonstrates that the satirical papers and their readers were well aware of the many contradictions and hypocrisies inherent in their modernising world, and that they were often sceptical consumers of the dominant political and newspaper narratives. Victorians were clearly capable of possessing a multifaceted understanding of their society, government and empire that freely mixed both positive and negative qualities. The satirical press thus offers unparalleled insight into not just the

­

the satirical press

437

manners and material culture of the Victorian era, but also its complex and sometimes contradictory social and political sensibilities. With the exception of Punch and its closest peers, the utility of the satiric press in exploring these more sophisticated aspects of comic commentary, at least in regard to political issues, does seem to decline as the century drew to a close. Like the mainstream press with which in was in dialogue, the comic papers’ shift away from political topics and controversy accelerated in the closing decades of the century, as the commercial imperatives of the New Journalism and the rapidly expanding mass market of readers clearly rewarded titles that prioritised general and gentle humour for broad audiences over seriousminded satire aimed primarily at the middle classes. As the more long-lived and politically focused peers of Punch faded away at the turn of the century, the transformation from satiric newspapers to comics became complete.

Chapter Sixteen

THE MEDICAL PRESS AND ITS PUBLIC Sally Frampton

I

n the 1800s the literary marketplace was home to a vast constellation of medical periodical literature that catered to the tastes of a wide range of audiences. Weeklies aimed at medical practitioners circulated in tandem with journals that were riding the ebbs and flows of fashions in alternative medicine. Myriad penny publications on health and hygiene competed for the attention and purses of the public, while journals on everything from nursing and first aid to mental science, dermatology and physiology amplified the market. Around 1800 there were perhaps ten or fewer medical journals circulating in Britain and Ireland. By the end of the century there were over a hundred, with periods of rapid growth in the field at the beginning and end of the century (Bynum and Wilson 1992: 30–1). This is not to mention the multitude of generalist titles that relayed medical news and health advice to their readers, often reproduced from the pages of doctors’ journals, and which saw medicine firmly embedded within the mass media by the end of the century. The construction and communication of medical knowledge through print culture involved the whole spectrum of society, and the sheer number of journals either wholly or substantially devoted to matters of medicine and health that were available belies any easy answer as to what constituted the medical press in the nineteenth century. Its meaning was not necessarily stable, as audiences and content altered and adapted to changing medical, social and journalistic currents. In this chapter, I chronicle the changing face of medical journalism over the course of the century, paying particular attention to three genres: the professional press, journals devoted to non-orthodox medical practices like homeopathy and mesmerism, and medical and health journals which actively sought to include the public in their audience, 438

­

the medical press and its public

439

the latter of which found increasing popularity in the last three decades of the century. These categories are neither neat nor exhaustive; indeed, by examining them together I evince their continuous entanglement with one another. Collectively, they serve as an introductory point to what was an expansive medical press. They show too that as well as promoting professional cohesiveness, medical journals of the nineteenth century were also significant in facilitating laypeople’s engagement with and contributions to medical knowledge and politics.

The Making of the Medical Weekly Most medical journals circulating at the beginning of the nineteenth century had connections to one of the numerous societies that had sprung up during the eighteenth century to accommodate practitioners joining together to discuss their cases in the congenial company of fellow medical men. Titles such as Medical Observations and Inquiries (begun in 1757), and Medical Communications (established in 1784), selected for publication reports that had been read at such gatherings. These journals dissected medicine away from generalist scientific periodicals such as the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, which generated only minimal interest among medical practitioners due to its focus on natural history, astronomy and other non-medical sciences. The emergence of such venues for knowledge exchange, and the demarcation of occupational boundaries that it signified, facilitated a change in the content and style of doctors’ communications. The focus shifted from outlining intriguing cases of medical curiosities and the recording of disease outbreaks to more practically grounded observations, based on practitioners’ experiences with patients. This reflected a reorganisation of medical practice in the eighteenth century centred upon the clinical observation of patients’ symptoms. Erudite and philosophical musings were discouraged to make space for communications that offered guidance to practitioners in their everyday encounters with the sick (Kronick 1994: 279). The establishment in 1805 of the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal by the physician Andrew Duncan heralded a further recasting of the medical journal model, with Duncan emphasising the role journals could play in furthering the social and ethical responsibilities of the medical profession. Duncan allotted space within his journal for discussions of public health, medical jurisprudence and the philanthropic duty of doctors (Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, January 1805: 4; Coyer 2017). Despite its nod to Edinburgh in the

440

sally frampton

title, where Duncan was based, The Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal was jointly published in London and Edinburgh, both traditionally the hubs of medical activity in Britain. However, by the early nineteenth century the locus of medical publishing had definitively shifted to London’s Paternoster Row, as practitioners from across the country gravitated towards the large teaching hospitals and lucrative private practice opportunities that the city held. Among the most innovative publishing endeavours was the Monthly Gazette of Health, which ran between 1816 and 1832, and which was edited by the physician Richard Reece. Reece intended for the journal to be accessible to both medical practitioners and the public. In the Gazette’s opening editorial, he contended that unethical and unqualified ‘quack’ practitioners were sustaining themselves on the ignorance and naivety of the public. The solution was to create a more informed lay community, and the Gazette, he claimed, would ‘enlighten the mass of mankind’ (Monthly Gazette of Health, January 1816: iii). It would provide rigorous analysis of proprietary medicines – exposing those which were ineffective and dangerous – as well as tips and advice on remedies, cleanliness, diet and exercise, all of which would furnish the lay reader with enough knowledge to avoid the overtures of quacks. Reece cited as his influence the Gazette de santé, a French medical journal that had run between 1773 and 1789. The Gazette de santé similarly aimed to draw in an audience of both doctors and laypeople, a common characteristic of the plethora of medical journals that emanated from France in the late eighteenth century, and which Reece appeared to be trying to replicate (Brockliss and Jones 1997: 647). The 1810s and 1820s saw a further widening of the medical periodical market, with editors attempting to cater for neglected audiences within the professional community. In 1816, the same year that Reece began the Monthly Gazette of Health, the surgeon James Johnson launched the Medico-Chirurgical Journal (later retitled the MedicoChirurgical Review). Johnson had returned to England two years prior, after a long career overseas as a naval surgeon, during which he had travelled extensively throughout the British colonies. Through the Review, Johnson mediated his own experiences as a practitioner sent to far-flung lands, and he pledged to make the journal particularly suited to army and navy practitioners, as well as to those located in the countryside and colonies, away from the metropolitan centres of medical practice. He professed an international outlook, printing and exchanging content with Continental and American journals, and believed that knowledge of foreign environments, which came with their own peculiar diseases and disorders, could be gleaned only from

Plate 1   The Cossar Patent Flat Bed Web Newspaper Printing Machine (1907 example) (National Museums Scotland, Courtesy of Alison Taubman)

Plate 2  (Left) A schematic drawing showing how the copper interacts with the mould in a chemical bath, by Easchiff CC BY-SA 3.0 (https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrotyping#/media/File:Electrotyping.svg); (Right) Harper & Brother’s Battery Room where electrotypes are prepared by submerging copper and wax mould into a chemical bath. Note the batteries in this image, which supply positive and negative charges

Plate 3  Answers cover image, 11 June 1892 (Courtesy of Paul Raphael Rooney)

Plate 4  Answers advertisements, 1892 (Courtesy of Paul Raphael Rooney)

Plate 5  N. Chevalie, ‘English Mail Day at the Post Office, Melbourne’ [1862] (Creative Commons licence, courtesy of National Library of Australia)

Plate 6  London premises of Alexander Herzen and the Free Russian Press (Courtesy of Helen S. Williams)

Plate 7  An Gaidheal cover, 1873 (Courtesy of Department of Celtic and Gaelic, Glasgow University)

Plate 8  Cornhill Magazine cover, first issue, January 1860 (Courtesy of David Finkelstein)

5

Plate 9  Baily’s Monthly Magazine, 1881 (Courtesy of David Finkelstein)

Plate 10  Two-page display of hand-coloured fashion plates from the New Monthly Belle Assemblée, March 1841 (Courtesy of Kathryn Ledbetter)

Plate 11  Berlin wool work pattern for a footstool cushion from the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, 1863 (Courtesy of Kathryn Ledbetter)

Plate 12  Front page of Bright’s Intelligencer, 21 September 1860 (Courtesy of Ilfracombe Museum)

­

the medical press and its public

441

the observations of those who had experienced them (Harrison 1992: 304–5). Johnson saw medical journals as an indispensable resource for doctors at all stages of their career wherever their location, the conduit for dialogue between the professional community at large. Even the most cultivated doctor, Johnson argued, could not be a force of progress unless they took in periodical literature, which informed him ‘what others are doing, and what others are thinking in the world around him’ (Medico-Chirurgical Review, June 1820: ii). Johnson’s Review grew steadily more popular among doctors, with a circulation of over 1,300 in 1821 (Medico-Chirurgical Review, 1822: i). But just two years later he would be forced to contend with a startling new competitor. Arriving in October 1823, the Lancet was immediately distinctive. Its name, weekly frequency and cheap price distinguished it from the transactions, quarterlies, monthlies and reviews that had traditionally dominated the medical periodical market. Edited by the surgeon and general practitioner Thomas Wakley and named in reference both to the surgical instrument and the type of arched window of the same name, the Lancet promised to shed light on the workings of the profession, opening to public scrutiny the corruption and nepotism that Wakley believed was rife in the higher echelons of the medical community. By 1824 the circulation of the Lancet was somewhere between four and ten thousand copies a week – a remarkable feat for a medical journal (Brown 2014: 183). Michael Brown has argued that the immediate and immense popularity of the Lancet has led historians to focus on its exceptionalism, serving to decontextualise the journal from the cultural milieu within which it was established (Brown 2014: 184–5). In fact, Wakley was influenced by an array of journalistic contemporaries; the Lancet’s opening editorial, where Wakley pledged to make the journal accessible not only to all medical and surgical practitioners, but also to ‘every individual in these realms’, echoed the mission statements of both Reece’s Monthly Gazette of Health as well as Johnson’s Medico-Chirurgical Review (Lancet, 5 October 1823: 2). Wakley’s journalism, which saw him avoid obscure technical language and terminology in favour of an accessible literary style, augmented by the fast pace of a weekly format, was also influenced by his personal association with the radical pamphleteer William Cobbett, whose own weekly publication, the Political Register, had attained great success (Brown 2014: 187; Clarke 1874: 19). Wakley’s call to the public to help reform medicine, by educating themselves in the dangers of quackery, echoed the participatory rhetoric of Cobbett, who sought to reform Parliament, expand suffrage and reach out to communities that had been ignored by the political classes.

442

sally frampton

Nonetheless, the Lancet also distinguished itself from its predecessors through a controversial strategy designed to garner attention to Wakley’s cause and procure a large audience. In the first issue, Wakley published a lecture given at Guy’s Hospital by Sir Astley Cooper, London’s most famous surgeon, attended and transcribed by Wakley himself (Clarke 1874: 16). Wakley promised that the entire series of Cooper’s lectures would be published over the following months. Lectures were the livelihood of hospital surgeons, who made their fortunes by attracting students to their institutions, charging them substantial fees for the privilege of hearing their pedagogical orations. As a result, Cooper and others like him tended to be selective in what they published, carefully preserving enough non-published material so that they could continue to attract students to their lectures. Wakley’s appropriation of such material in his sixpence journal caused a sensation and precipitated numerous legal disputes during the Lancet’s early years, as Wakley continued to publish lectures and cases drawn from the confines of the hospital, along the way exposing the incompetence of various members of the medical profession. He quickly gained a reputation as a troublemaker, unafraid to expose the shortcomings of the medical elite to his readers. Perhaps most notorious was Wakley’s pursuit of Bransby Cooper, nephew of Astley Cooper, who through his family connections had found employment as a surgeon at Guy’s. Wakley used the Lancet to expose the younger Cooper’s questionable skill in surgery, publishing a harrowing account in 1828 of a botched lithotomy (the removal of bladder stones) undertaken by Bransby, which had resulted in the death of the patient the following day (Lancet, 29 March 1828: 959–60; Brown 2014: 195–6). Bransby Cooper later successfully sued Wakley, but the incident left its mark on the surgeon, calling into the question his suitability for the role of hospital surgeon and making visible the nepotism that was rife within teaching hospitals (Clarke 1874: 78). Wakley did not restrict himself to the professional aristocracy of London either; one of the most popular features of the Lancet during the 1820s and 1830s was a regular ‘letter’ from ‘Erinensis’, an anonymous correspondent who wrote a long series of satirical pieces viciously lampooning the incompetence and unsavoury behaviour of doctors in Dublin (Clarke 1874: 151; Cassell 1997: 29). Other titles that attempted to emulate the Lancet’s winning combination of anti-elitist politics, cheapness and weekly frequency met with varying degrees of success. The Forceps, begun in 1844, was a clear attempt to create a Lancet of sorts for dental practitioners, but lasted less than a year; the London Medical and Surgical Journal, which, like

­

the medical press and its public

443

the Lancet, adopted a radical stance, survived only from 1828 to 1836. More successful was the Medical Times, begun in 1839 by an ambitious young medical student named Frederick Knight Hunt, who managed to undercut the Lancet in price by selling his journal at 3d. Like Wakley, Hunt proclaimed a mission to root out quackery and humbug and gained an audience from across the spectrum of the medical community as well from the public. However, where the Lancet ignited controversies and feuds, the Medical Times shied away from them. Astutely positioning the Medical Times as a more respectable publication than Wakley’s journal – but one which nonetheless shared its egalitarian principles – its editors and publishers transformed the publication into one of the leading medical journals of the mid-decades. In Ireland, the Dublin Medical Press began in 1839 and in 1867 merged with a London-based title, the Medical Circular, to form the Medical Press and Circular, priced at 6d, which ran for almost a hundred years. Despite its focus gradually shifting to English and Scottish medicine, the journal’s editors retained an active connection with Irish medical culture through its features and news items (Daly 2008: 28). The journal, for example, was noticeably more open to the idea of women joining the profession than its competitors, reflecting the more liberal attitude towards female doctors that there was in Ireland compared to Britain (Kelly 2013: 4–5). Thus, medical journals acted as hubs for the discussion of professional politics. In the mid-decades of the century doctors were becoming vocal about the need for stricter regulation within the profession. This was partially fulfilled with the passing of the 1858 Medical Act. The Act established the Medical Register, which legally distinguished doctors with recognised qualifications from the vast throngs of practitioners, many with no qualifications at all, who crowded the medical marketplace (although it did not criminalise unqualified practitioners). The British Medical Journal, which began life in 1840 as the Provincial Medical and Surgical Journal, was the product of this changing culture of medicine. Established to represent the interests of provincial practitioners, it was sent out to British Medical Association members as part of their subscription, and consequently boasted the highest readership of any medical journal in Britain in the second half of the century. In this fashion, the British Medical Journal ostensibly integrated the journal format into the everyday world of thousands of doctors. By the 1850s medical weeklies were sufficiently authoritative that they could affect campaigns that extended beyond the realm of the clinic into broader issues of public health and social reform. These

444

sally frampton

often saw medical journal editors acting as early innovators in investigative journalism, foreshadowing the trend within the general press in the second half of the century for the New Journalism, which was of a reformist bent and often focused on investigating social conditions. Ernest Hart, who edited the British Medical Journal between 1867 and 1898, became well known for campaigning on a vast range of issues around public health and hygiene. In the late 1860s, for example, he began reporting on ‘baby-farming’, the practice of babies and young children, often those who were illegitimate, being left with a guardian in exchange for a fee. Hart exposed a murky world of overcrowded and unsanitary lodgings and unscrupulous individuals neglecting children in their care. His campaign brought significant attention to the issue, and the Infant Life Protection Act was passed in 1872, which required homes where more than two children were being fostered to be registered. The Act was an example of the growing power medical journals wielded as the profession consolidated its authoritative status in society. Increasingly throughout the century medical journals would also wade into the politics of colonial administration. In 1894 Hart visited Calcutta to address the Indian Medical Congress, giving a damning critique of the organisation of the Anglo-Indian medical profession, which was predominantly comprised of doctors in service to the government or military. Most were overburdened by the sheer amount of practical and administrative duties they were expected to perform. Hart sharply criticised the government for failing to invest time and resources into medical research in India, which, he claimed, meant that Britain trailed behind other European powers in reaping the fruits of scientific discovery that the colonies offered (Arnold 2000: 141). Hart’s remarks were widely reported, not just in the medical press but in the daily newspapers as well, and fostered a growing consensus that the investigation of tropical pathologies needed to be taken seriously by those in charge of governing the British Empire (Times, 31 December 1894: 5). Those who worked in medical journalism revelled in their influence. ‘No delusion can long pass undetected, no imposture unexposed, and, I will add, no wrong unredressed,’ wrote the obstetrician and former Lancet journalist William Tyler Smith in 1853 on the growing power of the medical press: ‘it is thus that the medical press must become more powerful than Halls or Colleges in uniting the whole profession as one body’ (Smith 1853: 586). In medicine, where the profession was rife with fractures and divisions between the ranks, where regional differences were felt intensely, and where competition for patients could be divisive, the medical press, or at least the idea of a medical

­

the medical press and its public

445

press – in truth, medical journals often vehemently disagreed with one another – reinforced the notion of a profession united in its values. As I will explore in the next section, it also served to further separate mainstream doctors from non-orthodox practitioners, the latter of whom were roundly dismissed by the professional weeklies, and in whose disparagement doctors could find common ground.

Medical Journals in the Mid-Century: Professional Orthodoxy and Resistance Wakley’s early attempt at exciting popular appeal served both as an inspiration and as a counterpoint to other medical journal editors, some of whom avoided the risky public-facing strategies of their rival and asserted the centrality of professional dialogue to their publications. The Lancet too, after receiving criticism from its journalistic contemporaries in its early days – Johnson’s Medico-Chirurgical Review accused it of aiming for ‘the popularity of a pot-house or a smoaking club’ (Medico-Chirurgical Review, March 1824: 978) – eventually began to adopt a more austere tone towards the middle of the century and became cautious about reaching out to the public. Regardless, the Lancet continued to have a relatively wide appeal, and its correspondence columns suggest it retained a degree of popularity among non-professional readers throughout the century (see Figure 16.1), as correspondents who claimed to be ‘laymen’ wrote to the journal on a range of issues, often relating to public health issues such as vaccination and teetotalism, and sometimes had their letters published in its back pages. Unlike audiences for other, more specialised scientific journals, the public were, of course, a central component to the content of medical journals, with doctors’ case reports comprising a significant portion of the material included. By the second half of the nineteenth century publishing cases had become essential to practitioners wishing to lay claim to new treatments and procedures. Indeed, not publishing cases was increasingly seen as tantamount to deliberate concealment, particularly when it concerned risky or failed innovations, where the patient’s condition had not improved or had even resulted in their death (Frampton 2016: 574). Patients’ cases, their histories and experiences of pain and illness, were crucial to doctors’ medical journal narratives, constructed in a way that would present their treatment plans in a positive light, and which were shaped by the prevailing trends of contemporary science and medical practice. Though increasingly technical in nature, accounts of illness and its treatment retained

446

sally frampton

Figure 16.1  A cartoon from an 1883 issue of Punch where a man is admonished by his friend for reading the ‘depressing’ Lancet. The cartoon attests to the continued appeal the Lancet retained throughout the century among a public perennially curious about matters of medicine and health. Wood engraving by C. Keene (Courtesy of Wellcome Collection)

an element of interest to a public perennially fascinated with matters of health, and public reading rooms were stocked with the latest issues of the most popular medical weeklies (Cobbe 1888: 29). There was a financial advantage to maintaining the attention of laypeople: doctors comprised a relatively small subscription base upon to rest a journal’s fortunes, given that few of them had the time, inclination or money to peruse more than one or two journals at a time. Sustaining a degree of appeal beyond the profession could mean the difference between commercial success and failure, but it had to be accommodated subtly and within the context of the professional weeklies’ increasingly formal tone. The changing content and style of medical journals in the middecades was also informed and shaped by the profession’s efforts to expunge the nefarious effects of quackery in its midst. The 1840s saw

­

the medical press and its public

447

an upsurge of interest in new and non-orthodox medical theories and practices in Britain and beyond. Homeopathy, hydropathy, mesmerism and phrenology found favour among the public, including highly influential members of the upper classes. As such, their popularity could not be ignored. Positioning themselves as mouthpieces of the medical community, the Lancet, Medical Times and others put themselves at the forefront of the fight against their infiltration into British life. Homeopathy especially troubled the profession, given that several high-profile doctors had converted to Samuel Hahnemann’s system, which based treatment on a ‘law of similars’ – medicines that produced symptoms mimicking a certain disease were thought by homeopaths to cure that disease. In 1844 the profession’s most prominent homeopathic convert, John Epps, had sent four of his cases to the Lancet, which were promptly returned to him unpublished. In accompanying correspondence, Wakley indicated to Epps that he would have printed the cases, despite his opposing views, but that readers and ­subscribers of the Lancet were so opposed to homeopathy that their inclusion was impossible (Epps 1845: iv). Wakley depicted his audience as the driving force behind the journal, of whose opinion the Lancet was simply the channel. In fact, Wakley continued to exercise considerable control over the direction of the journal he had begun and of which he remained the editor until his death in 1862. Despite Wakley’s claim that medical journals were merely a mirror of current medical opinion, the Lancet and other titles took an active role in excluding homeopaths and others from professional dialogue, and non-orthodox practitioners were generally compelled to create their own literature in the absence of being granted any space in the professional weeklies. John Drysdale, editor of the British Journal of Homoeopathy, founded in 1843, and which stayed in print for over forty years, saw the need for his journal as regrettable but that ‘the necessity for a sectarian title results from the utter neglect of the subject by the Medical Journalists of the country’ (British Journal of Homoeopathy, January 1843: vi). Journals designed to promote new and non-orthodox systems of medicine diverged in their approach. The British Journal of Homeopathy, as well as the Homoeopathic Times, which ran between 1849 and 1854, were both dry and dense. They focused on converting the profession to their cause and attempted to draw in doctors with complex clinical cases, as well as the latest news on medical politics, clearly emulating the format of the professional medical weeklies. Others sought to harness the broad, popular appeal of what were seen by many members of the public as exciting and novel medical

448

sally frampton

treatments. The Homoeopathic World, begun in 1866, had been named both in reference to the holistic nature of the homeopathic lifestyle as well as to express the journal’s intention to bring together doctors and laypeople as readers and contributors. Its aim was to provide articles that would be readable to those with only a minimal education, and which could be shared among family members. The journal invited its lay readers to be active participants in the construction of the homeopathic community: ‘In our endeavours to make good our entry in the households of the land we must mainly depend upon our correspondents in various parts of the country from whom we earnestly solicit information of a practical and general character,’ the journal stated in its opening issue (Homoeopathic World, January 1866: 1). The public were thus entrusted with contributing their knowledge and experiences to the journal, to an extent that would have been prohibited by the mainstream medical weeklies. This strategy allowed homeopathists to market themselves as more closely aligned to the wants and needs of the populace than orthodox doctors. As Jennifer Ruth has argued in her work on the mesmerist journal the Zoist, which ran between 1843 and 1856, many of the non-orthodox journals attempted to straddle the boundary between the professional and the lay press (Ruth 1999: 304–5). Their existence problematises concepts of the medical press and how journals defined themselves in relation to it. While the Homeopathic Times, for example, described itself as a medical journal, the Homeopathic World rejected such selfidentification, largely because of its emphasis on lay contributions. This speaks to the broader issue of the extent to which we can ascertain the individual identity of medical journals at all. Like other types of periodicals, medical journals were unstable objects: their aims, content and style frequently changed, while the competing voices of contributors, correspondents and staff may not have silenced the editorial voice but did complicate it. The boundaries of the medical press were further blurred by developments in both print culture and medicine in the second half of the century. An increase in literacy rates, as well as cheaper, more efficient printing, fostered a transformative effect on publishing, rapidly expanding the market for cheap periodical literature aimed at the middle and lower classes. The parameters for involvement in healthcare were also shifting. Within this context, entrepreneurial editors and publishers found scope for new types of medical publications aimed at more diverse audiences.

­

the medical press and its public

449

New Genres and New Audiences: Medical Journals in the Late Nineteenth Century Following a period of relative stasis in the growth of the medical journal market, the last two decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a rapid expansion in the titles available, in regard to both their numbers and the diversity of their content, as publishers and editors responded to a trend towards specialist medicine as well as an increasing demand for popular health literature. Medical practitioners were forming burgeoning communities of practice in ophthalmology, laryngology, dermatology and gynaecology, and the profession at large was becoming swayed by the idea that specialisation among doctors was the most efficient and progressive mode of medicine, allowing for better teaching and exploratory research (Weisz 2003: 546). Specialist journals were presented as a solution to the overcrowded pages of ‘generalist’ medical weeklies, which, it was argued, could not accommodate the ever-growing base of new, complex medical knowledge. The British Gynaecological Journal, begun in 1885, and the British Journal of Dermatology and Syphilis, established in 1888, were two such examples of this new direction in medical journalism. A blend of ‘experience, craft and new science’ characterised much of the clinical work of doctors in the second half of the nineteenth century, with theories and techniques from physiology, pathology, chemistry and bacteriology incorporated into practice (Worboys 2011: 113). This opened further journalistic avenues for new publications focused on the experimental medical sciences, including the Journal of Physiology (1878) and the Journal of Pathology and Bacteriology (1892). The vast endeavours of the medical profession in the field of public health at this time also produced additional titles devoted to sanitation, food science and regulation, including Public Health (1888) and the British Food Journal (1899). These diverging sectors and fields of medicine offered new market opportunities for publishers. Yet taking on specialist journals was not without its risks. Unable to compete directly for circulation with the likes of the British Medical Journal or the Lancet, publishers sometimes struggled to sell advertising space in such journals. Nonetheless, some were remarkably successful, often those oriented towards the medical sciences and public health, and this paved the way for the firm establishment of specialised practice as a journalistic field by the beginning of the twentieth century. The growth of the specialist journal in many ways marked the beginning of a publication model for medical practitioners that prevails today, that of journals written in highly technical, scientific language

450

sally frampton

and read by a limited and predominantly professional audience. But while such specialisation was taking hold in the 1880s and 1890s, opposing trends in medical practice also saw journals emerging which focused on making medical knowledge accessible and interesting to lay audiences. The success of the public health movement relied not just on doctors but also on the participation of the public. Women, especially, were heavily involved in organisations such as the National Health Society, which promoted preventive health measures like cleanliness, good diet, domestic sanitation and hygiene among the less well off. A series of new periodical publications, aimed at both middle-class and working-class audiences, combined public health news and tips on domestic hygiene with space for readers to consult the editor for medical advice. The latter feature was one replicated from cheap generalist publications, including the hugely popular Reynolds’s Miscellany, which had a long-standing medical advice column that readers could write to, and which saw the journal acting as ‘a source of medical authority that inserted itself between readers and more formal sources of medical knowledge’ (Furlong 2016: 35). The advice column model was used to maximum effect by Health: A Weekly Journal of Sanitary Science, launched in 1883 and edited by the Scottish physiologist and ardent science populariser Andrew Wilson (see Figure 16.2). Health was priced at just 2d and promised tips and news on health preservation and disease prevention ‘written in plain and non-technical language, and in a thoroughly popular style’ that would be suitable to all classes (Health, April 1883: 1). A large portion of each issue was devoted to Wilson’s responses to anxious readers, who solicited his advice on everything from acne and insomnia to piles and dyspepsia. The pseudonyms that correspondents used (‘Anxiety’, ‘Wearied Out’, ‘Perplexed’) suggested an audience looking to the correspondence columns of Health for help with persistent or embarrassing ailments. The anonymity of print allowed individuals to mitigate or delay fully fledged patienthood, circumventing a face-to-face encounter with a doctor, and the financial and emotional burdens that came with it. Doctors worried about the impact of lay-oriented medical and health journals upon the public. In 1887 the Lancet published a series of editorials criticising an apparent upsurge in ‘popular’ medical journalism. They complained about the movement of content drawn from the medical weeklies into the generalist press, fearing it would encourage individuals to try and self-diagnose and self-treat, damaging their health in the process. Two journals which attempted to appeal to lay audiences, the Hospital and Baby, established in 1886 and 1887 respectively, brought to a head the Lancet’s concerns about the public’s

­

the medical press and its public

451

Figure 16.2  The ‘Queries and Answers’ section from the first volume of Health (1883). The popular journal, which sought to link the public to the latest medical news and knowledge, provided ample space for readers to write in for advice about their health. (Courtesy of Wellcome Collection)

interaction with medical content. The Hospital was a journal recounting hospital work, as well as providing health and hygiene news, while Baby, edited by the public health campaigner Ada Ballin, was focused on child health, specifically targeting female readers: something which likely amplified the Lancet’s anxieties about the diffusion of medical knowledge to new and potentially unfitting audiences. ‘Have not those who have been brought into contact with the public by service at hospitals, and as lecturers on science applied to public needs, yet learned that “a little knowledge is dangerous” in everything, and in nothing else so much as in the science and art of healing?’ complained the Lancet about the two titles (Lancet, 19 November 1887: 1028). The thorny question of commercialism was also raised by the existence of journals such as Health, the Hospital and Baby. Doctors who wrote for them – of which there were many – were liable to be

452

sally frampton

accused of advertising their name, and some were compelled to write anonymously or pseudonymously. Similar publicly oriented journals had existed throughout the century, but the increasing surveillance within the profession of ethical transgressions by doctors, as well as the increased demand from the public for health literature, compelled the medical community to more explicitly position themselves in relation to ‘popular’ health journals. Ostensibly the concerns raised were moralistic, but financial considerations also played their part: the professionalised medical establishment feared the effect such publications would have on their own purses if the public chose printed health advice over consultations with doctors. In the latter decades of the century medical journalism was also being transformed by other major changes in the landscape of healthcare. The period was marked by a hive of activity centred upon the improvement of nursing training and management. Nurses and doctors were divided on the best means of supporting such changes. Many favoured the registration of nurses as a way of advancing their status. However, influential figures, such as Florence Nightingale, opposed this initiative, believing it would make nursing akin to doctoring, focusing nurses’ attention on the acquirement of medical knowledge rather than on their primary role as providers of compassionate care. The split was steeped in the politics of gender, for at its heart was the question of whether women should be accorded the privilege, status and access to knowledge that came with professionalisation. Such splits and divisions were reflected in the nursing journals that emerged at this time. Britain’s first journal devoted to nursing, Nursing Notes, founded in 1887 and primarily aimed at midwives, as well as Nursing Record, which began in 1888, were both of the proregistration camp. The Nursing Record, despite being a rather dry read, gained influential followers and soon became key in the push for professionalisation (King 2009f: 463). The Nursing Mirror, on the other hand, founded in 1888, firmly opposed registration from the start. Its backer was the businessman, philanthropist and hospital reformer Henry Burdett, who had also founded the Hospital, of which the Nursing Mirror was a supplement. Burdett was greatly interested in the improvement of nursing but against a formal register of nurses, and he used both the Hospital and the Nursing Mirror to express his views on the matter. Chatty and informal, offering job advertisements, correspondence columns, excerpts of medical lectures and passages of prose for comforting the sick, the Nursing Mirror was a popular read among nurses. All three journals achieved considerable success, a sign of the demand for nursing literature during this period.

­

the medical press and its public

453

Like other occupational groups, nurses were using periodicals as tools for improving their status. But the establishment and history of the first nursing journals cautions against defining the relationship between print and professionalisation in simplistic terms. The Nursing Mirror, for example, while clearly intended to foster a sense of group identity among nurses, was also challenging the most visible signifier of professionalisation, by opposing registration. What is more, the lengthy passage to registration – it would not be enacted in the United Kingdom until 1919 – speaks further to the uneven relationship between the two, with Nursing Notes and Nursing Mirror struggling to counteract the strong opposition towards it in Britain. Successful journals did not guarantee the achievement of professional aims, even though they might help create them, nor, as we have seen, did the growing professionalisation of a community, such as with doctors, assure the success of a journal in the field. The nursing journals were one subset of a broader category of journals that were created to cater to occupations allied to medicine. They joined several pharmaceutical journals that were already well established, including the hugely successful trade magazine Chemist and Druggist, begun in 1859 and which continues to be published today. Non-clinical staff at hospitals and institutions also formed a new audience: Henry Burdett’s Hospital, described above, addressed a mixed readership that included doctors, medical students, nurses and the general public, the latter of whom Burdett hoped to interest in hospital news as a means of increasing donations to charitable hospitals. However, Burdett was especially concerned about using the journal to build a sense of community between hospital administrators: laymen and laywomen who played an increasingly significant role in the management of institutions. The Hospital carried news and advice on management practices, fundraising, building and construction, and other topics that were likely to attract the attention of administrative staff. The incorporation of the first aid movement into civil life garnered further audiences for new publications at the boundaries of medicine: First Aid, for example, begun in 1894, was written ‘by ambulance men for ambulance men’, although it acknowledged, and welcomed too, the strong interest in first aid work among women (First Aid, July 1894: 1) (see Figure 16.3). The journal carried news of heroic actions among St John Ambulance members, as well as instructive information on caring for the sick and injured, and more general advice on health and illness. It also functioned as a campaigning periodical, calling for the systematic organisation of ambulance transport to service the London hospitals.

454

sally frampton

Figure 16.3  Front cover of First Aid from 1895. A popular read among St John Ambulance members and others with an interest in first aid, the journal recounted tales of lifesaving heroism from across the country, shared tips on health and hygiene, and pushed for better ambulance provision in London (Courtesy of Museum of the Order of St John) 

Like journals devoted to non-orthodox medicine, these new genres of publications and their audiences further blurred the boundaries between professional and popular medical publications. In his editorial to the first issue of Health, Andrew Wilson pitched his publication as a much-needed link between doctors and the public. Positioning the journal in this way, Wilson asserted the essentially non-professional character of Health, while also justifying his inclusion of material from titles like the Lancet and the British Medical Journal which he quoted verbatim to his audience. But other titles took a different tact. Henry Burdett identified the Hospital not as a link to the professional medical

­

the medical press and its public

455

press, but as part of it, much to the chagrin of both the Lancet and the British Medical Journal, both of which criticised the popular style of the Hospital and the attempt by Burdett to blend within it professional and public discourse. In 1896 the British Medical Journal did not include the Hospital in its round-up of the circulation statistics of medical journals, refusing to countenance the idea that it belonged to the genre (British Medical Journal, 4 January 1896: 36). This was despite a gradual move on Burdett’s part towards prioritising his medical audience over lay readers. Burdett responded to the criticism levelled at the Hospital by making a claim for its rightful place within the medical press. ‘It does not appeal for the support of the general public any more than “The Lancet” itself,’ wrote Burdett in private correspondence to the then editor of the Lancet, Thomas Henry Wakley, son of the journal’s originator. He went on to say: this is proved by the circumstance that the articles in ‘The Hospital’ are quoted side by side with those from ‘The Lancet’ in leading medical papers like the ‘New York Medical Record’, and ‘The Hospital’ only goes to the public exactly as ‘The Lancet’ does, by being taken by clubs and being on sale at Messrs. W.H. Smith & Sons Bookstalls. (Burdett 1895) Thus, Burdett claimed an inescapable connection to commercialism that bound together medical journals of all kinds, and which made any division between the Hospital and the Lancet arbitrary, particularly so given that the diffusion of medical knowledge across print media spaces was already occurring with frequency.

Conclusion In the nineteenth century the media was both a source of authority and of unease for medical practitioners. In utilising the massive expansion in publishing that was happening, doctors were able to create journals that acted as leaders and arbiters of opinion, strengthening the stillfragile professional status of medicine. In this way, they shared tactics with other occupational communities in using periodical literature to consolidate a shared identity. Medical journalism was ‘government of the profession by the profession for the profession,’ claimed Ernest Hart in 1893 (British Medical Journal, 1 July 1893: 19). But medical journals also laid bare the vulnerabilities of the medical community. They publicly exposed its inner workings, transforming its debates and discussions into news for public consumption, and drawing attention

456

sally frampton

to the disputes and scandals that medicine was rarely free of. The ingrained commercialism of periodical publication was also problematic. While doctors premised their increased cultural authority upon an ideal of their professional community as motivated by selfless concern for the sick, medical knowledge required circulation within an increasingly commercialised press space. The taint of trade which came with publishing journals for a profit meant that doctors often viewed the journalistic world with anxiety, carefully working to avoid accusations of advertising and self-promotion. The nineteenth-century medical press is often conceived of as insular, cultivated only by those within the medical profession, becoming ever more obfuscatory in its language and specialised in its audience as the century progressed. The exclusivity of the medical press to doctors was an image the profession itself strove to present, and one which continues to resonate to this day. In the British and Irish context, the historiography of medical journals has not moved much beyond the two titles that remain best known today: the Lancet and the British Medical Journal. Certainly, these journals held huge significance in the period under question. But we cannot comprehend the nineteenthcentury medical press without widening our focus. The medical press at this time is best understood through its contextualisation in the broader public sphere, for even the most esoteric of medical journals was embedded within a wider network of culture, politics and literature which informed its content. Either through the medical journals themselves, or via the intermediary of other periodical publications, non-professional audiences were, alongside doctors and other allied professionals, also consumers and contributors of medical journal content. The medical press was a fluid concept, its moral codes and meanings often changing, and its diverse forms, genres and audiences are worthy of further exploration. By doing so, light is thrown on the ways in which periodical literature has been used to formulate and define medical knowledge, and the role it has had in both prohibiting and promoting access to it.

Chapter Seventeen

SCIENCE AND THE PRESS Alex Csiszar

T

he changing character of the systematic study of nature and its status in public life in nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland cannot be understood without close attention to the history of the periodical press. Of course, a variety of periodical formats were central to the circulation of scientific knowledge claims. Throughout the century the range of periodical genres and formats in which scientific views and  news circulated was vast and constantly expanding. Scientific topics found their way not only into the publications of scientific societies and other specialised journals, but also into a wide swathe of the general press, not to mention serially published encyclopaedias and even daily papers. But the history of science and the press is not simply a history of transmission and circulation. The press was also a key factor in the changing status of science in Victorian culture, the evolving identity of scientific practitioners, and debates over the nature of knowledge. Paradoxically, the fluid and wide-ranging array of venues for scientific exchange developed alongside an emergent idea that there was one periodical genre that had a privileged claim to the publication of new knowledge claims: the specialised scientific journal. Whether controlled by a commercial publisher or a scientific society, these publications were compilations of papers largely dedicated to original claims, written (and signed) by active investigators, who were expected to take responsibility for their contents. By the end of the century periodical authorship in this narrow sense had taken on immense importance in defining a life in science. Understanding this tension between diversification, on the one hand, and efforts at standardisation and consolidation, on the other, reveals a great deal about evolving configurations of the scientific public, popular science and scientific expertise. 457

458

alex csiszar

The Rise of a Scientific Press The intertwined history of science and periodicals in British and Irish contexts is commonly agreed to have begun with the founding of the Philosophical Transactions in 1665. According to the common narrative, the Transactions initiated a new publishing format that made scientific communication more efficient and trustworthy, and thus hastened the flowering of modern science. But this idea has misled many to suppose that specialised scientific periodicals had already achieved their modern form and functions well before the nineteenth century, so that the subsequent history is largely one of proliferation and specialisation. In fact, however, the relationship between science and the press, and the role of specialised journals in particular, remained profoundly unstable throughout the century. The tangled history of the Philosophical Transactions itself exemplifies this complexity. Although it was indeed an early learned journal, appearing every month and carrying a wealth of philosophical news, it evolved into something quite distinctive after the Royal Society of London took control of it in 1752. The Society set up a formal system in which a committee voted on each memoir to be included, it came to be published less frequently (once or twice per year), and the median length of papers grew severalfold. Late in the century, inspired by the lavish collections of memoirs published by Continental academies, the Society hired the ‘fine printer’ William Bulmer – who had recently set up the Shakspeare Press to print an extravagant new folio edition of the works of the playwright – to produce the Philosophical Transactions using the most expensive techniques and materials available (Csiszar 2018). By the turn of the century, as more specialised and regional societies were founded and followed this model, ‘transactions’ became a generic noun that referred to the quarto collections of memoirs published by these societies. Of course, many other periodicals continued to play an important role in communicating scientific discoveries, but there was a well-recognised distinction between these transactions and the (usually octavo) journals associated with commercial publishers. Quarto transactions were dedicated to original, polished memoirs largely written by a society’s own members, while journals and magazines generally collected news and reprinted information from a wide variety of sources. Until the very end of the century, however, British journals involved in communicating philosophical news did not normally specialise in natural philosophical topics. The London-based Gentleman’s Magazine was typical. Its editor claimed in 1782 that its volumes over the past half-century contained a near-complete archive of new

­

science and the press

459

discoveries and inventions in that time period. Featured material relating to natural philosophy and natural history included reprinted items from other publications (including translations from Continental periodicals), papers read at learned societies, and original letters. This publication and its rivals, such as the European Magazine, provided a basic template for the more specialised periodicals that were founded near century’s end. William Nicholson’s Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, and the Arts (launched 1797) and Alexander Tilloch’s Philosophical Magazine (launched 1798) both echoed these earlier magazines, claiming to be storehouses of philosophical intelligence (Topham 2013; Watts 2014). They joined other specialised ­­periodicals – focused on medicine, sport or religion, for example – as publishers looked to diversify their products by catering to particular segments of the reading market. Nicholson’s and Tilloch’s London-based journals were octavos of between three and seven sheets, and were published monthly. Each number was priced at half a crown and contained extracts and translations from other publications, letters to the editor, summary articles on topics they thought would interest their readers, and some original contributions of discovery claims. While both editors counted on active philosophers finding their journals useful, they also touted them as expanding the potential audience for natural philosophy. Neither editor was an eminent man of science: while Nicholson was involved in chemistry, he was far from the London elite. Each insisted that they favoured topics that were practical and instructive, and that they should be presented in a form accessible and interesting to a wide educated audience. They emphasised the contrast with the transactions published by learned societies, where even the best memoirs remained ‘unknown to a very large class of men of science’ because of their expense and the difficulty of obtaining them (Nicholson 1797: iv). While the journals of Nicholson and Tilloch encouraged contributions of new papers, they made no claim to focus on original matter. In fact, a major selling point of such journals was that they gathered and reprinted philosophical news from periodicals across Europe. Likewise, editors such as Nicholson attracted contributors by promising that materials appearing in their pages would also find their way into ‘the best Foreign Journals’ (Csiszar 2018: 46). On the Continent, journals focused on natural philosophy – or a particular branch of it – had emerged earlier, including the Observations sur la physique, sur l’histoire naturelle et sur les arts (1771) and the Annales de chimie (1789) in Paris, the Chemisches Journal für die Freunde der Naturlehre, Arzneygelahrtheit, Haushaltungskunst and Manufacturen (1778) in

460

alex csiszar

Lemgo, and the Annalen der Physik (1790) in Halle. All of these participated in an informal system of mutual reprinting and translating that helped to diffuse philosophical intelligence across Europe and beyond. In this way, they resembled (and participated in) the networks of reprinting through which political news spread through daily newspapers (Slauter 2012; Slauter 2019). Daily papers were themselves an important vector for the spread of philosophical intelligence, especially during the Napoleonic blockade. The burgeoning science of galvanism, spurred especially by the Italian Alessandro Volta’s assembly of an electric battery around 1800, was largely enabled via the reciprocal exchanges between periodicals and their editors (Watts 2015). In the second decade of the century, as the Napoleonic Wars ended and reading audiences expanded, publishers of fashionable books and review journals saw an opportunity to diversify by entering the market for philosophical news (Topham 2016). Titles such as the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review, which already included articles on scientific topics, were to some extent the model. But while each new prospectus claimed to be filling a hole in the marketplace, the periodicals that emerged nevertheless resembled the journals of Nicholson and Tilloch, with a range of material such as excerpts and translations of memoirs published elsewhere, new articles and letters, and other kinds of news. In 1813 the Annals of Philosophy, edited by the Scottish chemist Thomas Thomson, was set up by Robert Baldwin, publisher of the Literary Journal (a weekly that contained scientific news among other general literary content). A few years later, John Murray – publisher of the Quarterly Review – backed the Journal of Science and the Arts (1816), edited by William Thomas Brande, chair of chemistry at the Royal Institution. Archibald Constable, publisher of the Edinburgh Review, published the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal beginning in 1819, co-edited by David Brewster and Robert Jameson. In 1824, after Brewster and Jameson had a falling out, Brewster convinced William Blackwood to start up the rival Edinburgh Journal of Science. Save for the Annals, which was a half crown monthly like the journals of Nicholson and Tilloch, these were all quarterlies priced 7s 6d per number. Their hope was to appeal to a variety of readers, from active investigators looking to keep informed about new discoveries, to more practical readers looking for useful discoveries and inventions, as well as a broader non-specialist but educated audience. Their editors worked to strike the right balance between papers announcing new discoveries and articles with a broader appeal, in the hope that they might support print runs of perhaps a few thousand. Key to their

­

science and the press

461

­­ strategy was to put an authoritative man of science at the helm as editor, and to follow the strategy of the quarterly reviews by paying well for contributions (Topham 2016). None of these periodicals brought in anywhere near the subscribers that they had hoped for. By 1832 all these new publications (save for the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal) had either folded or been absorbed by Richard Taylor’s Philosophical Magazine (Taylor had taken on the editorial and publishing roles after Tilloch passed away), which had already absorbed Nicholson’s Journal of Natural Philosophy (Brock and Meadows 1998). In 1838, testifying to the House of Commons Select Committee set up to consider instituting a penny post, Taylor reflected on the difficulties attending the publication of scientific journals in Britain. He explained that nearly all of his competitors had failed because the expense of postage, the difficulty of reliably communicating with contributors outside of London, and delays in acquiring foreign publications, made it impossible to turn a profit (Taylor 1838: 315). The price of postage was one of several so-called ‘taxes on ­knowledge’ – on paper, advertising and news – that hit periodicals with small print runs especially hard. Taylor claimed that his own periodicals had survived only because he could streamline operations by acting as printer, publisher and editor simultaneously.

Knowledge for Pennies Another of the obstacles facing these publications was that beginning in the 1820s they were competing in a diversifying periodical marketplace where scientific and technical topics sometimes figured prominently. Cheaper weeklies had been thriving since the 1820s, many of which included materials on science, inventions and medicine, and some even made it their focus. Leading the way was the Mechanics’ Magazine, begun in September 1823 by the patent agent Joseph Clinton Robertson with the radical journalist Thomas Hodgskin. This weekly sixteen-page octavo, featuring two columns, small margins and wood engravings, adopted the format and approach of wildly successful cheap periodicals such as the Hive and the Mirror of Literature. Cheap miscellanies such as these, which gathered together and reprinted choice excerpts from other (often more expensive) publications, emerged after a dramatic increase in the stamp tax on political journals in 1819. Publishers associated with the radical press could avoid the tax by founding publications that steered clear of political matter (Topham 2005). While the Mechanics’ Magazine focused particularly on practical arts and inventions, it was joined

462

alex csiszar

by the Chemist (edited by Hodgskin) in 1824, which focused more on natural philosophy, and the Lancet (edited by Thomas Wakley), which publicised medical news, lectures, and agitated for medical reform (Bostetter 1985; Mussell 2006; Stack 1998). All were published and printed by Knight and Lacey, and used the same, cramped, two-­­column layout. They also took a uniformly aggressive stance towards  elite  bodies  of  science  and medicine, critiquing them as exclusive domains that abused their power to hinder the progress of knowledge. Publications such as the Penny Magazine that focused on improvement through useful knowledge were both inspired by, and a response to, the rise of these earlier cheap weeklies with their radical associations. Henry Brougham, the Liberal reformer who spearheaded the formation of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) in 1826, publicly extolled them for communicating ‘far more valuable information, both scientific and practical, than was ever before placed within the reach of those who could afford to pay six times as much for it’ (Brougham 1825: 3). The SDUK aimed to tame working-class radicalism by channelling this energy into improvement rather than dissent. The SDUK’s first series was the Library of Useful Knowledge, a fortnightly series of pamphlets on scientific topics, but it was the weekly Penny Magazine (from 1832) that became a runaway success. Published as a collaboration between Charles Knight and the SDUK, the Penny Magazine included a great deal of material on subjects connected with science and the practical arts, among other forms of what its editors considered useful instruction. (The SDUK’s influence on science coverage in foreign periodicals, such as those founded in Sweden, is addressed in Case Study 8 of this volume.) Its sales reached 200,000 within a year, and it was a signal example of the explosive success of cheap periodicals in the 1830s that catered to a vastly expanding reading public (Fyfe 2004; Kinraide 2006; Secord 2000; Secord 2014; Topham 2007). In competition with the publications of Knight and the SDUK, the Edinburgh-based brothers William and Robert Chambers founded Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal in 1832, a 1½d weekly that turned out to be longer lasting than the Penny Magazine (Fyfe 2012). Both were early adopters of steam-powered printing which allowed for more efficient production, and the Chambers pursued several other technical and organisational innovations that allowed them to distribute their massive print runs efficiently throughout Britain. Like the earlier cheap weeklies, Knight’s publications avoided expensive engraved

­

science and the press

463

plates and utilised cheaper wood-engraving integrated with the text, while the Chambers avoided illustrations altogether. Although these journals were ostensibly targeted at a lower-class audience quite distinct from the kinds of readers Richard Taylor and fashionable publishers set their sights on, the truth was that they drew a rather wider spectrum of readers, and they likely siphoned off some of the readers that publishers of the higher-class journals coveted. Many other publications sought to occupy various other niches. Most failed within a year or two, but some, such as the London Journal of Arts and Sciences (from 1820, 1s per monthly number), and the Magazine of Natural History (from 1828, bi-monthly, 3s 6d; from 1834, monthly, 2s), eked out somewhat longer existences. Most of these publications have often been grouped together under the label of ‘popular science’. But we should not suppose that all forms of popular science are reducible to popularisation, in the sense of diffusing and simplifying for a passive lay audience the discoveries of elite practitioners (Cooter and Pumfrey 1994; Secord 1994; Topham 2008). While popularisation might indeed have been a central aim of the SDUK (although the term itself was not yet common), the aims of publications such as the Mechanics’ Magazine and the Chemist had just as much to do with encouraging readers in the pursuit of philosophical and inventive activity. Likewise, popular magazines of natural history were often predicated on reaching an audience engaged in natural historical pursuits. Moreover, it is by no means safe to assume that readers’ actual reactions to and uses of these publications corresponded to their editors’ designs.

Professional and Scientific Authorship Even as scientific topics found their way into a wide range of publications, a notion was gaining ground by mid-century that truly scientific periodicals constituted a special category. Richard Taylor, publisher and editor of the Philosophical Magazine and Annals of Natural History, was keen to distinguish his publications from the Penny Magazine and similar widely read publications. ‘I should hardly call those scientific works,’ Taylor said of the latter. ‘They are compilations; they are hardly works of discovery, but rather entertaining miscellanies’ (Taylor 1838: 321). These cheaper publications, he argued, were not in the business of communicating new facts or ideas at all, whereas his journals published the original work of men of science. Originally, when the Philosophical Magazine had been founded, its projectors had celebrated the fact that it was a compilation, but

464

alex csiszar

the Magazine and its direct competitors did come to publish much material submitted directly by original investigators, work that might otherwise have been read at a learned society or reserved for a singleauthored book. Moreover, like the transactions of societies, but unlike the lion’s share of articles in periodicals, much of this work was attributed to individual authors. It is thus worth pausing to consider why men of science were choosing to contribute to such journals in the first place. Historians of science have normally supposed that this was simply because authors wanted to establish priority of discovery, and submitting work to a monthly or even a quarterly journal was a quicker way to do that than reading a paper to a society in the hopes that it might eventually appear in their transactions. But while priority claims were indeed a significant consideration, this answer takes for granted both that priority was established exclusively through print publication, and also that priority claims outweighed other social benefits that might flow from reading one’s work to a prestigious learned society and publishing in their transactions. But there were other important motivations for publishing in commercial journals. In Britain, where possibilities for making a career by the pursuit of natural philosophy or natural history were extremely limited, young aspiring researchers were willing to try out professional authorship as a way to support such a career. Writing for pay was gradually coming to be perceived as a viable, if risky, source of income for young, educated men. Following the lead of new quarterlies such as the Edinburgh Review (Shattock 1989), the publishers of most of the new scientific journals founded beginning in the 1810s paid not only their editors but also their contributors. Journals such as the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, the Quarterly Journal of Science, the Edinburgh Journal of Science and the Philosophical Magazine all paid regularly contributors for content (Topham 2016). Indeed, many well-known natural philosophers – figures such as John Herschel, David Brewster, Michael Faraday and Thomas Henry Huxley – engaged in scientific writing, not only of single-authored books but also of periodicals and encyclopaedias – in hopes of supporting a career in science. Moreover, while books and more general quarterlies and monthly magazines were sometimes lucrative venues for natural philosophical authors, the rise of specialised periodicals based on these models held out the intriguing possibility of simultaneously establishing a philosophical reputation and earning an income. When the Journal of Science and the Arts was projected in 1816, for example, the young astronomer John Herschel asked his friend Charles Babbage whether

­

science and the press

465

he knew if the publisher, John Murray, was willing to pay contributors: ‘In a word I want to get money and reputation at the same time, and to give up cramming pupils, which is a bore & does one no credit’ (Herschel to Babbage, 14 July 1816). This desire to establish a scientific reputation – along with the example set by transactions published by learned societies – made it relatively common for articles appearing in commercial scientific journals to appear with their authors’ names, even while anonymity remained the rule in many other corners of the periodical press. But just what sort of scientific reputation one could expect to acquire through this kind of authorship remained ambiguous. While Babbage thought that the editor of the new journal was indeed willing to pay contributors, he himself had a dim view of periodical writing as a reputable career choice. Indeed, William Nicholson and Alexander Tilloch, editors of the Journal of Natural Philosophy and the Philosophical Magazine, had been unable to gain admission to the Royal Society of London in part due to their being associated with periodicals (Watts 2014). The Society’s president at the time, Joseph Banks, insisted that he himself had no interest in being known as an author, ‘which in Fact’, he wrote to a correspondent, ‘I do not Consider as a gentlemanly vocation’ (Carter 1987: 153). David Brewster, who did derive a significant portion of his income from books and contributions to periodicals and encyclopaedias, complained that the requirement to write for broad audiences in commercial works took too much time away from pursuing original research (Brewster 1830a: 327). He even warned a young protégé of the perils of writing for money, as it would be ‘injurious to your happiness to rely on such a source for a permanent portion of your income. – The moment you do that you become a professional author – who is the worst of all authors – following the worst of all professions’ (Brewster 1830b).

Scientific Societies Enter the Marketplace If writing for commercial periodicals remained an ambiguous pursuit in some circles, it was nevertheless one that greater numbers of active researchers were engaging in, whether for pay, to publicise their discovery claims, or both. That independent periodicals were coming to be seen not simply as a means of diffusing scientific news but as a venue for original scientific memoirs placed learned societies such as the Royal Society of London in an awkward position. These bodies only published papers that had never been made public elsewhere; they imagined their meetings as privileged sites for the publication of new

466

alex csiszar

claims (Fyfe and Moxham 2016). This discouraged some authors, and it also led the societies to reject many papers that they otherwise would have liked to have published (Sedgwick 1830: 291). A related source of pressure on learned societies exercised by the press – one that would have especially far-reaching consequences – was the increasing prevalence of reports on the proceedings of their meetings. Proceedings of legislative meetings had long been a touchstone of political journalism, and the legitimacy of parliamentary bodies had become closely associated with their being the subject of press reporting (Aspinall 1956). The same idea was increasingly applied to elite scientific bodies in the 1820s, with radicals such as Richard Carlile and editors of periodicals such as the Chemist and the Mechanics’ Magazine critiquing the secrecy of elite scientific bodies. ‘It has certainly long been the fashion for those at the head of science,’ wrote Hodgskin in the Chemist, ‘to keep it in a manner inaccessible to the profaning touch of the vulgar’ (Hodgskin 1824: vii). Meeting minutes had long been a source for the miscellaneous intelligence that appeared in specialised and non-specialised magazines, but these generally appeared on an ad hoc and occasional basis. During the 1820s, however, they took on new life and prominence, with editors clamouring to provide readers with regular reports. These accounts might be based on information provided by authors themselves, or on notes taken by someone who was able to attend. Many societies discouraged such reports, since meetings were technically for members only. Thomas Thomson (editor of the Annals of Philosophy) complained, for example, that the Royal Society of London prohibited him from taking notes at its meetings, forcing him to write reports from memory (Crum 1855: 256). Some learned societies, however, aimed to make a new kind of claim to collective expertise, and decided it was in their interests to assist editors in search of accurate reports of their meetings. In 1825 both the Astronomical Society of London and the Geological Society of London began to provide Richard Taylor with regular abstracts of papers presented at their meetings for publication in the Philosophical Magazine. These summary accounts proved so popular that Taylor offered to produce separate copies of them for the use of fellows, thus turning these reports into de facto issues of a periodical (Csiszar 2018). In 1827 both organisations chose to take control of these and turn them into an official publication. Over the next decade other societies followed their lead, including the Royal Society of London in 1832, the Royal Irish Academy in 1836, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Linnean Society in 1838. By the late 1830s many societies had

­

science and the press

467

created their own ‘proceedings’ publications alongside their quarto transactions, and some newly founded societies, such as the Zoological Society of London, began by issuing proceedings before even considering transactions. This development occurred across Europe and the United States as well, with Continental academies founding their own comptes rendus, Sitzungsberichte and bulletins. At first, most of these proceedings remained minor affairs for the societies. They were small octavos of a sheet or two each, without illustrations, and they were not usually sold to the public. They were simply given free to fellows, exchanged with other societies and academies, and sometimes made available to editors and other interested individuals. They were extremely cheap for societies to produce, especially for the many London societies that employed Taylor as their printer: since he was reusing much of their contents in his own periodicals, he tended to charge only for presswork and paper. But over time they took on a great deal more importance. Once societies took control of publishing abstracts, authors and readers began to treat those abstracts in many ways as if they were independent publications. Many claimed that a good, thorough abstract could often substitute for the longer memoir on which it might be based, and authors began to send shorter papers to societies in the expectation that these might be published in their proceedings. Gradually, as proceedings rose in prominence, the councils of societies began to re-evaluate their overall publishing strategy. Finance committees complained that their transactions were too expensive to produce, especially given their limited circulation. As the geologist Henry De la Beche noted, the Geological Society’s proceedings ‘for the most part … contain the cream of the papers read’ and thus contributed to low sales of their Transactions that appeared later on (De la Beche 1834). Many societies gradually upgraded their proceedings by including wood engravings and illustrated plates (often cheaper lithographs rather than copper-plate engravings), publishing more independent papers in them, and keeping to a more regular (often quarterly or monthly) publication schedule. Prestigious London societies such as the Geological, the Linnean and the Chemical switched to using the title ‘journal’ for their proceedings, and these octavos displaced their quarto transactions as their primary publication. In some cases, their editors expanded their mandate by also publishing miscellaneous intelligence such as translations of papers from Continental publications. In Ireland, for example, a number of learned societies banded together in 1854 to publish their own quarterly octavo journal, the Natural History Review, which included not only the proceedings of

468

alex csiszar

their meetings but also reviews of scientific works and notices of other periodicals. These upgraded octavo periodicals were usually offered for sale both to the public and to members (at a discount), so that societies were now competing directly against publishers with a product of their own, modelled on commercial periodicals. The idea that learned societies publish ‘journals’ dates from this mid-century transformation. Later in the century this fluidity meant that it became unexceptional for societies to absorb a commercial journal (as the Royal Geographical Society did with the Geographical Magazine in 1878), or for a commercial periodical to overtake a society publication as the journal of record in a field (as the Geological Magazine eventually did with the Geological Society of London’s Journal). The distinction that obtained early in the century between the publications of societies and specialised journals thus became far less relevant over time. Of course, there were still some differences. Since the 1820s many societies had developed so-called referee systems, in which individual experts reported on the fitness of papers to be published, a cumbersome and slow process that editors of independent journals generally eschewed until the twentieth century (Csiszar 2018; Moxham and Fyfe 2018). But in both format and content it was becoming difficult to tell the difference. Societies themselves were being reshaped in such a way that reading their periodicals vied with attendance at meetings as their social locus. Societies such as the Royal Astronomical Society and the Chemical Society of London actively promoted their periodicals as a means of expanding their membership. To be a member of such bodies was becoming indistinguishable from simply being a subscriber.

Science in the General Press The emergence of a range of periodicals with a focus on natural philosophy, natural history and invention by no means meant that these topics vanished from less specialised corners of the press. Nor did any clear-cut division of reading audiences emerge whereby content aimed at practitioners became limited to more specialised venues. Among the most important periodical formats for scientific news, especially beginning in the 1830s, were the literary weeklies the Literary Gazette (1817–­­63) and the Athenaeum (1828­­–1921). Although well known for their extensive reports of the summer meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, their coverage of science, technology and medicine included a great deal more than that.

­

science and the press

469

For several decades beginning in the 1830s, both regularly included proceedings of learned societies, reviews of scientific publications, and reports of lectures at the Royal Institution (James 2004). The Athenaeum also became a preferred venue among men of science for letters to the editor sounding off on contemporary controversies. Its prominence and longevity as a site for such scientific exchanges was such that on the founding of the weekly journal Nature in 1867, the botanist Joseph Hooker scoffed that the newcomer was a foolhardy attempt to supplant the Athenaeum as the primary organ of communication for scientific men in London (Meadows 2008: 25). These two weeklies were especially known for their extensive coverage of the British Association’s annual summer meetings. Beginning in 1831, these meetings travelled to a new city each summer and came to attract not only scientific practitioners but also large public audiences. Early criticisms of the Association pointed to the absurdity of holding scientific discourse among such a broad public, the Times calling it absurd that ‘philosophers should be dependent on an assemblage like that’ (Morrell and Thackray 1981: 144). But the Association’s leaders actively sought out press coverage of its meetings while at the same time attempting to mitigate the risks of inaccurate reports that might paint contributors, or the Association itself, in a bad light. For the second meeting at Oxford, the Association employed a House of Commons shorthand reporter (ibid.: 131), while a number of correspondents were sent by independent periodicals to gather intelligence on sessions, personalities and papers. Besides featuring in the literary weeklies, reports about British Association meetings made it further into many daily newspapers, especially those in the vicinity of that year’s meeting. The intrepid correspondent providing an eyewitness account of these grand scientific and social spectacles became such a familiar personality that he was soon the subject of satire. Charles Dickens aped such science correspondents in his reports on the fictional Mudfog Association for the Advancement of Everything, giving up-tothe-minute accounts of the comings and goings of Professors Snore, Doze and Wheezy about town (Dickens 1837). Gradually, however, the reports in the Athenaeum took on a more staid character, as the Association collaborated with its editors to ensure that they contained reports that were accurate, or at least not embarrassing. Abstracts in the Athenaeum (and sometimes in the Literary Gazette) were often supplied by authors themselves, and it was commonly revised versions of these that later appeared in the Association’s own annual reports of meetings.

470

alex csiszar

The importance of the press went beyond it being a means of publicising these scientific meetings to the broader reading public. Because it was distributed so widely and quickly, the publication of abstracts in the Athenaeum was a significant factor in authors’ decisions to contribute papers to its Section Meetings in the first place. In 1848, for example, the physicist William Thomson explained to his friend Georges Stokes that he wanted to make sure that the Athenaeum received an abstract of papers that he had submitted because he knew that this was the surest way for them to reach Paris and appear there in translation (Thomson 1848: 52–3). (The Paris weekly L’Institut regularly translated scientific content appearing in the Athenaeum.) But entrusting such claims to a weekly in which general editors were ultimately responsible for the text was also a source of controversy. Vicious priority disputes, for example, sometimes erupted that hinged on questions about the accuracy of the Athenaeum’s reports.1 Literary weeklies were especially important as an organ of scientific exchange in Victorian Britain, but they were only the tip of the iceberg. A great deal of historical research over the past decades has shown that scientific news, discoveries and controversies continued to circulate throughout the century in a wide variety of publications. The range of contributions to science in highbrow quarterlies such as the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review have long been a subject of historical attention (Yeo 1993; Young 1985). But the ambitious SciPer project (1999–2007) has demonstrated, through a wealth of case studies, the diverse range of periodicals in which science, nature and its systematic study figured prominently (Cantor, Dawson and Gooday 2004; Cantor and Shuttleworth 2004; Henson et al. 2004). For example, the new shilling monthlies that emerged in the 1860s, led by the Cornhill Magazine and Macmillan’s Magazine, regularly included articles on scientific subjects. Geared to an expanding middle-class readership, they aimed both to entertain and inform. Macmillan’s Magazine was dedicated to covering important issues of the day and reported regularly on scientific developments. The Cornhill Magazine tended to lead with fiction, but science made it into its pages on a regular basis, especially when they related to public controversies such as those sparked by Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and the debates regarding spiritualism. Its regular summaries of science, which were 1

There was, for example, an especially virulent dispute in 1839 between Alexander Nasmyth and Richard Owen over a theory of the constitution of the ossified matter of teeth, which led to the Association’s Council secretary, James Yates, resigning in disgust and to an overhaul of its publishing procedures (Csiszar 2018).

­

science and the press

471

written at one point by the astronomer John Herschel, even attracted the notice of Charles Darwin (Dawson 2004a). Illustrated magazines and comic periodicals incorporated scientific topics on a regular basis as well. If in its early years Punch tended simply to poke fun at British Association meetings and medical quacks, its writers and illustrators used humour to engage in more substantive commentary on scientific and medical topics (Noakes 2004; Secord 2000). Moreover, many encyclopaedias and dictionaries that were published during the nineteenth century worked in practice as if they were periodicals. These nearly always contained a great deal on scientific topics, and in some cases they were treated by contributors as opportunities to put original claims into print and to engage in ongoing scientific debates (Corsi 2016). Importantly, the lion’s share of science-focused journalism discussed up to this point was controlled and written by men. The very terms used to designate investigators of nature at the time – ‘man of science’ or ‘scientific men’ – highlighted the extent to which this world was coded in masculine terms. On the one hand, the increasing importance of privileged forms of scientific authorship in defining scientific eminence helped to foster the neglect of the scientific contributions of women, such as the astronomer Caroline Herschel and the palaeontologist Mary Anning. On the other hand, the broad swathe of general periodicals in which systematic reflections on the natural world had a place meant that women writers found other ways to contribute to and engage in scientific debate (Shteir 1996; Shteir 2004). Reflections on scientific knowledge were significant, for example, in some periodicals produced largely by and for women, such as the Ladies’ Companion at Home and Abroad (1849–50, edited by Jane Loudon) and the Treasury of Literature (1868–75), a supplement to the Ladies’ Treasury (De Ridder 2010). Moreover, the juxtaposition of science with the varied contents of general periodicals provided women authors opportunities to comment on contemporary science by other means. When George Eliot’s serialised novel Romola (1862–3) appeared in the Cornhill Magazine, for example, its foregrounding of female intellectual aspiration appeared alongside Herschel’s critical summaries of science that surveyed research on gender, brain size and intellectual capacity (Shuttleworth, Dawson and Noakes 2001). The juxtaposition of contrasting perspectives on scientific topics in the press also provided opportunities for shaping and defending boundaries between scientific and literary authority. In the second half of the century men of science such as Thomas Henry Huxley and John Tyndall who wrote regularly for the quarterly reviews made

472

alex csiszar

sure to distinguish between the writing of trained men of science and those with merely a literary background. Huxley, for example, used the platform of the Westminster Review in the 1850s to criticise his fellow contributor George Henry Lewes for hazarding scientific opinions without any real training. Lewes responded by critiquing writers such as Huxley for their narrow education, and for lacking the erudition required to be a responsible and sympathetic critic (White 2002).

Periodicals and Bounding The important role that this diverse range of publications played in the circulation of scientific news and opinion could be viewed as a twoedged sword. On the one hand, general weeklies and review journals provided crucial outlets for publishing discoveries and exchanging scientific ideas at times when specialised venues remained difficult to support financially. For those interested in promoting science as a public activity with vast social benefits, it also had the advantage of keeping science at the forefront of Victorian culture. But some saw potential disadvantages too. The ‘low condition of natural history journalisation’ (Huxley 1900: 303) motivated Huxley to agree in 1860 to take over the Natural History Review, transforming it from an organ of Irish learned societies into a London-based quarterly review journal. It was part of a boom in periodicals focused on scientific subjects in that decade, made more attractive to publishers by the gradual abolition of the notorious ‘taxes on knowledge’ over the previous two decades. Like Huxley’s, some of these – such as the Chemical News (1859­­–1932; 3d per weekly number, and from 1861, 4d), the Quarterly Journal of Science (1864­­–85; 5s, later the Journal of Science) and Nature (1869–present; 4d per weekly number, and from 1878, 6d) – were intended to be organs of communication for scientific workers in addition to other readers (Baldwin 2014; Brock 2008). Others were declaredly focused on the ambiguous, catch-all category of ‘popular science’ (Barton 1998; Lightman 2007; Mussell 2007; Sheets-Pyenson 1985). Some, such as Recreative Science: A Record and Remembrancer of Intellectual Observation (1859–71, monthly, 8d; later the Intellectual Observer) and Hardwicke’s ScienceGossip: An Illustrated Medium of Interchange and Gossip (1865–93, monthly, 4d), continued to encourage readers to engage in scientific – especially natural historical – pursuits (Barton 1998). In contrast, the same period was a golden of age for the popularisation efforts of men of science such as Huxley and Tyndall, who were prominently involved in general diffusion of knowledge produced by specialists and

­

science and the press

473

in advocating on behalf of an increasingly self-conscious professional group (Turner 1980). A multiplicity of aims and potential audiences remained the rule for most publications, however, just as it had been in earlier waves of new publications. Publishers’ understandable desire to reach a wide readership put what some saw as artificial constraints on what kinds of science most readily found their way into print, as well as what form these took. Mathematics, widely held to be particularly abstruse, was a notorious example. Thus, although William Thomson valued the Athenaeum as a venue that could publicise his work more quickly and widely than more specialised periodicals, George Stokes warned him that its editors would prune anything Thomson sent – especially mathematical ­notation – to such an extent that it would be impossible ‘to let the reader see what you were about’ (Stokes 1848). Even the most respectable commercial scientific periodicals wanted to avoid alienating readers, and their editors made decisions about what to publish based as much on matters of accessibility as on the soundness or perceived importance of the work. Such issues also affected domains of science that tended to be more attractive to publishers. In fields of natural history such as zoology, for example, problems associated with commercial publishing took on special significance because of the role that print had come to play in fixing names and descriptions of new species. The so-called ‘Law of Priority’ – put forward as the central rule of zoological nomenclature by a British Association committee in 1842 – stated that the only valid name of a species was the first one put into print. In 1844 the Scottish zoologist and editor William Jardine drafted a long and colourful lament about the difficulties facing natural historical authors. Because there were ‘some subjects which this reading public cannot understand, or what is of more importance they have not yet become fashionable’, many authors found it impossible to find publishers willing to publish their work in the form that it deserved. Authors were ‘forced to a periodical’ to publish portions of their work when a longer, fuller treatment would have been the more appropriate option (Davis 1998). It was to shield natural history from the vagaries of the press that Jardine and his collaborators founded the Ray Society in 1844, a cooperative publishing venture aimed at subsidising the printing of important works in natural history that might not otherwise find an appropriate venue. A significant consequence of the fragmentary and dispersed character of natural history publishing was that it was extremely difficult to know where to look for the first designation of a species, in part because works were dispersed in so many different periodical works. One of the

474

alex csiszar

larger projects undertaken by the Ray Society was the Bibliographia Zoologiae et Geologia. Edited by Hugh Edwin Strickland, it sought to combat this dispersion by creating a master list of all works – whether whole books or periodical articles – that might contain original zoological species. Commercial journals, Strickland explained, proved particularly taxing to work with: ‘Our popular “Magazines” of Natural History teem with trifling notices,’ he complained, ‘often anonymous, sometimes brief and indefinite, sometimes wordy and inflated, but which do not contain a single fact of scientific importance’ (Strickland 1848: ix). Strickland’s Bibliographia was one of several mid-to-late-century attempts to catalogue and thus partially tame the vast wilderness of scientific publishing. By far the grandest was the Royal Society of London’s Catalogue of Scientific Papers (1867–1925), an effort to create a complete list – ordered by author names – of original contributions to science contained in periodicals since 1800. Just as important as the list of papers was the carefully curated list of periodicals that its editors chose to index. While transactions, proceedings and higherclass scientific journals were included, general periodicals such as the quarterly reviews and the Athenaeum were not, and specialised periodicals not deemed respectable enough, such as the Mechanics’ Magazine, were left out (Secord 2009; Csiszar 2017). Some criticised the venture for significantly distorting ‘the progress and history of discovery both in Physical and Natural Science’, by excluding nearly all the popular venues in which science had been published, especially ‘journals not professedly scientific’ (F.R.S. 1869: 100). The production of such catalogues contributed by their existence to the later idea that authoritative contributions to knowledge ought always to appear as individual papers, with authors’ signatures clearly indicated, in specialised periodicals. These efforts to imagine knowledge through the medium of the press played a key role in more general reflections on the progress and unity of knowledge. Around the same time that the idea for the Catalogue was conceived, the physicist James Clerk Maxwell speculated about the unity of nature by asking whether the idea that nature is a book might now be outmoded: ‘if it is not a “book” at all, but a magazine, nothing is more foolish to suppose than that one part can throw light on another’ (Maxwell 1882: 243). An early review in the Athenaeum enthusiastically compared science as it was represented in the Catalogue to an island of coral, a massive edifice that was built up imperceptibly over time by the addition of each new individual paper (Csiszar 2017: 45). Representations of scientific progress as serial accretion became

­

science and the press

475

popular in late-century positivist philosophies of science, and these were rooted in part in such bibliographical efforts to identify original contributions to knowledge with scientific periodicals.

From Fragmentation to Reconfiguration Efforts to segregate authoritative scientific periodicals from the broader press would seem to be grist to the mill for a long-standing historical idea that the latter part of the century saw a gradual fragmentation of a ‘common intellectual context’. Once, fundamental questions regarding not only the natural world, but politics, the arts and literature, had been treated and discussed alongside one another in salons and publications that attracted participants from across a broad spectrum of intellectual perspectives. But late in the century this broader (if largely upper-class) public is said to have fragmented into specialised groups, who met among themselves and wrote for more restricted audiences. Robert M. Young provided the classic formulation of this idea as part of an investigation into the changing fortunes of natural theology in British intellectual life (Young 1985). He found that while such discussions had long been focused in venues such as the highbrow quarterly reviews, by the 1880s a new generation of scientific investigators had largely withdrawn from such forums. Historians since have made similar observations, fixing especially on the success of the weekly Nature as an organ that provided practitioners with a venue through which to conduct such debates at some remove from the general press (Baldwin 2015). There is no denying the significance of the long-term success of Nature, a weekly publication that ultimately catered to working researchers and was originally edited by the astronomer and scientific journalist Norman Lockyer. But there was little that was novel in its stated goal of ‘expounding the grand results of scientific research’ to the public, while at the same time serving as ‘the accredited organ of Science among the English-speaking peoples’ (Nature, 15 September 1870: lxxix, lxxxii). What is significant is that a weekly publication focused entirely on scientific news, with a readership that ultimately came to consist largely of active researchers (or ‘scientific workers’, as they had come to be called), had at last turned out, by the 1870s, to be financially viable. We should be very cautious, however, about using the changing visibility of science in any specific periodical format to make generalisations about the changing fortunes of scientific expertise in Britain (Dawson et al. 2004). From the emergence of specialised periodicals early in the nineteenth century, to the spread of refereed journals in the

476

alex csiszar

mid-twentieth century, it is easy to find several other moments during which specialised formats were in the ascendance, seemingly isolating science from a broader readership. At such moments, however, other formats also tended to emerge in which scientific knowledge came to be represented in novel ways. Thus, for example, the rise of the so-called ‘New Journalism’ at the century’s end provided new kinds of insight into the social life of science, including in-depth interviews of active researchers (Dawson 2004b; Gooday 2004). Moreover, researchers at the century’s end quickly embraced new formats and communication technologies to exchange scientific information and to publicise new claims. In the 1890s, for example, astronomers seized on the rise of international telegraph networks that connected newspapers as a medium through which to circulate information among remote observatories (Nall 2017). Moreover, binaries such as elite and popular, specialised and general, tend to obscure the extent to which any expert reader is also a lay reader with respect to most specialised topics. As scientific sub-specialties multiplied, researchers found increasing utility in reading popular accounts of fields that lay outside their own expertise (Fleck 1979; Topham 2009). The tragic narratives of scientific information fragmentation posited by Young and others are essentially a retelling of the narrative of the early nineteenth-century dissolution of the unified public sphere associated with Jürgen Habermas’s book Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. But these narratives, when focused on the press, tend to overlook the extent to which new forms of expert communication not only adopted generic elements from more general publications with which they were competing, but also incorporated ideological commitments drawn from the wider press about legitimate forms of knowledge expression. Fragmentation and specialisation might thus both be somewhat misleading terms. Reconfiguration and incorporation might be more useful. For example, when societies began to publish their proceedings in the 1820s and 1830s, these publications derived both their form and their inspiration from commercial magazines. Later on, the increasingly prestigious practice of publishing short notes in Nature was derived from the abstracts and excerpts that had been published in journals which claimed to summarise the results of scientific research for broader audiences, and which were especially common in such weeklies as the Athenaeum. Finally, as Joshua Nall has argued in his study of the 1892 controversy over whether there were canals on Mars, the role here played by the telegraph-news network helped shape astronomical practice itself by foregrounding ‘event astronomy’ (Nall 2017).

­

case study 13 : natural history periodicals

477

Most fundamentally, what constituted elite, expert and popular science was itself transformed, alongside transformations in the media with which they were associated. By inhabiting formats, especially cheaper weeklies and monthlies, associated with the general press, and by claiming to digest the latest scientific news for a grand public, even if its audience may have become more restricted in practice, specialised periodicals that were in practice intended for limited readerships nevertheless were able to maintain that they were, or ought to be, public and universally accessible. In this sense, the public-oriented expertise associated with modern science is inextricably connected with the history of the periodical press (Broman 1998; Csiszar 2018). Thus, if narratives of fragmentation and specialisation have proven unsatisfactory, what is certainly true is that the periodical press had become central to emerging conceptions of the boundary between scientific expertise and public opinion. But to understand how periodicals contributed to the canonisation of knowledge, we must widen our view from the function of the press in communicating knowledge to its other functions in defining careers, fields of research, and the identity of scientific experts. The specialised scientific literature was coming to be conceived as a unitary archive of scientific knowledge claims, one whose authority derived from it being simultaneously open to all and closely protected by the scientific community (represented by editors and referees). Investigators established their reputation via the prestige and quantity of their periodical publications – in a word, through scientific authorship. Late-century attempts to better control and standardise the production, format and distribution of the scientific literature, to purify it of wasteful excess and amateurism, and to track its growth through ambitious international bibliographical projects (Csiszar 2010), were an index of this transformation. This is the paradox of science and the nineteenth-century press: the specialised scientific paper rose to privileged status in the social life of science even as the actual channels through which scientific news and opinion were transmitted remained extremely diverse.

Case Study 13: ‘Fellows that never knew each other’: Natural History Periodicals Matthew Wale In December 1866 a Mr William Gray was arrested in Londonderry and charged with ‘coming down Pump Street and knocking at every house’. Upon questioning, it transpired that the prisoner was, in fact, a naturalist in search

478

matthew wale

of a Mr Greer. The two men had made contact through the pages of the periodical Hardwicke’s Science-Gossip and struck up a correspondence. Gray had hoped to personally deliver a sample of ‘diatomaceous earth’ – a soft sedimentary rock consisting of fossilised diatoms (hard-shelled algae) – but an unfortunate confusion over the correct address had led to his alleged crime. Thanks to the testimony of Mr Greer, Mr Gray was eventually set at liberty, much to the annoyance of the police constable, who had watched with growing consternation as the two men enjoyed an animated conversation about their ‘favourite pursuits’, despite never having met in person. The officer was heard to remark, ‘it was d–d quare that fellows that never knew each other should have so many acquaintances’. An account of this incident was later published in Science-Gossip as an amusing aside for its readers (Hardwicke’s Science-Gossip, 1 January 1867: 15–16). Charles Kingsley remarked upon the unprecedented popularity of natural history in nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland, stating that ‘every welleducated person is eager to know something at least of the wonderful organic forms which surround him in every sunbeam and every pebble’ (Kingsley 1855: 6). This taste for nature study permeated almost all levels of society, including wealthy metropolitan men of science, fossil and fern-collecting young women, and working-class botanists (Allen 1976; Secord 1994). The increasing number of practitioners presented opportunities for both commercial gain and the advancement of science, with these two goals not necessarily being mutually exclusive. Hardwicke’s Science-Gossip (1865–93) is an excellent example of one of the more successful natural history magazines, aimed at a broadly construed readership. Other periodicals were more focused in subject matter, concentrating upon a single sub-field of natural history such as botany or entomology. The great majority of these titles originated from within networks of scientific publishing in London, but reached a far wider national audience (and beyond). Robert Hardwicke (1822–75), the man who lent his name to Science-Gossip, was an entrepreneurial publisher who ran a number of similar periodicals from his business premises in Piccadilly. In the second half of the century, however, almost every city and town became home to a natural history society or ‘field club’, many of which published periodical transactions, recording the work of their members in studying the minutia of the local area. If we count these small-scale, regional journals, it is possible to identify over a hundred periodicals dedicated to natural history during this period. The above anecdote nicely illustrates the importance of periodicals to the practices of natural history during the nineteenth century. Natural history journals served to facilitate communication between naturalists, permitting ‘fellows that never knew each other’ to cultivate a wide circle of ‘acquaintances’. The readers of Science-Gossip, and many similar magazines, formed a community

­

case study 13 : natural history periodicals

479

of practitioners bound together by their shared interest in the natural world. Greer and Gray were not professional men of science, as very few such positions existed at this time, but they were among the many men and women of all classes who pursued natural history, taking to the woods and fields to collect butterflies and plants as a form of rational recreation, and as part of the more serious endeavour of documenting the flora and fauna of Britain and Ireland. Periodicals permitted these individuals to participate in the creation and circulation of scientific knowledge, enabling naturalists to share their highly localised expertise, exchange specimens, and gain mutual support and assistance from like-minded persons they would otherwise never encounter. An ideology of active participation permeated many nineteenth-century natural history periodicals (Sheets-Pyenson 1985). For example, the introductory address of the Zoologist emphasised that in its pages, ‘every one who subscribes a single fact is welcome – nay, more than that – has a direct claim to be admitted as a contributor’ (Newman 1843: vi). Likewise, the Phytologist sought ‘FACTS, OBSERVATIONS and OPINIONS’ which would otherwise be considered ‘too trifling’ for those of ‘high scientific pretensions’. Its audience was assumed to be the ‘field-botanists – these observers - these labourers in the delightful fields of botanical enquiry’ (Newman 1844: v). A host of publications relied on the observations of correspondents for their content, publishing short notices and any other information gathered by these contributors in the course of their fieldwork. Hardwicke’s Science-Gossip is a prime example, its friendly title inviting both beginners and more seasoned naturalists to take part: We make no great pretensions, our desire being to gossip with our readers, as a man chats to his friend, of passing events in which we are interested, to ask and answer queries, and pass a pleasant half-hour in talking scientific subjects in the language of the fireside, and not as savans. (Hardwicke’s Science-Gossip, 1 January 1866: 1) This emphasis on ‘gossip’, incorporated into the very title of the periodical, was an attempt to be inclusive. The beginner would not be mystified by long lists of Latin species names, nor would their contribution necessarily be excluded if it failed to use the correct terminology. If the editors felt something was worth communicating to other naturalists, it stood a reasonably good chance of being printed, regardless of who it came from. This was not simply inconsequential chatter, however, as the editors hoped their periodical was serving a useful purpose in the advancement of science: Natural Science is extending its borders and increasing in the range and boldness of its speculations. Only a few, however, are privileged to stand on its mountain peaks, and view the land that is afar off! But it is surely not too ambitious a hope to entertain that the facts collected and recorded

480

matthew wale

in such magazines as Science-Gossip afford some additional data out of which the great scientific superstructure is being built. (Hardwicke’s Science-Gossip, 1874: ii) It is perhaps not surprising that those who stood ‘on the mountain peaks’ of science sought to harness the power of periodicals in order to amass the data required for their work, actively seeking to create specialist scientific communities through such publications. The best instance of this comes from within the field of entomology, which had a variety of periodicals solely devoted to it throughout the period. These titles include the Entomological Magazine (1832–40), the Entomologist (1840–2, revived 1864–1973), the Entomologist’s Weekly Intelligencer (1856–61), the Weekly Entomologist (1862–3), the Entomologist’s Monthly Magazine (1864–present) and the Entomologist’s Record and Journal of Variation (1890–present). With the exception of the Cheshire-based Weekly Entomologist, all of these periodicals originated in London, but were read throughout Britain and Ireland. Each of these publications had a unique agenda, but essentially each was an attempt to construct and serve a community dedicated to the study of insects. In June 1860 Charles Darwin was pondering the question of how British orchids were fertilised by the action of insects. He was particularly fascinated by how certain orchids attracted specific types of insect, and the delicate mechanism by which pollen was transferred to the insect as it fed on the flower’s nectar. In the wake of publishing the Origin of Species, such a complex, mutually beneficial relationship between animals and plants was compelling evidence for Darwin’s theories. However, he was unable to identify the pollinator for a number of species. Having noted that no diurnal (daytime flying) insect had visited the plants under his keen observation, Darwin had come to the conclusion that ‘moths are the priests which perform the marriage ceremony’ (Darwin, 23 June 1860: 93). Rather than continue the task of flower-watching himself, he turned to periodicals to supply him with the answer. Darwin first wrote a letter to the Gardener’s Chronicle, his preferred publication, but then passed the same message on to the Entomologist’s Weekly Intelligencer. Aware that moths had on occasion been caught ‘with pollen-masses adhering to them’, Darwin requested ‘if any entomologist reads this, and can remember positively having caught a moth thus furnished, I hope he will give its name, and describe exactly to which part of the moth’s body the sticky gland adhered’ (Darwin, 23 June 1860: 94). The Intelligencer was edited by Henry Tibbats Stainton (1822–92), one the foremost entomologists of the nineteenth century, and a leading expert on Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) (see Figure 17.1). As the full title of Stainton’s periodical suggests, it was published weekly (every Saturday), costing a penny an issue. Darwin wrote to Stainton, asking him to publish

­

case study 13 : natural history periodicals

481

Figure 17.1  Entomologist’s Weekly Intelligence, 21 August 1858 (Courtesy of The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London) the above enquiry, and remarked that he had already received one ‘very satisfactory answer from Mr Parfitt, who is evidently a careful & conscientious observer’ (Darwin 1993: 263). Edward Parfitt had worked as a gardener before attaining the curatorship of a museum in Taunton, Somerset, and his letters appeared regularly in the pages of the Intelligencer (although it seems to have been through the Gardener’s Chronicle that he made contact with Darwin). Through periodicals, Parfitt was taking part within a network of ­practitioners, communicating with a far larger number of individuals than would have been possible through personal correspondence. Without such publications, Parfitt’s participation is likely to have been on a more limited scale, and it is quite possible Darwin would not have received his answer to the orchid question.

482

matthew wale

Darwin, Stainton and Parfitt illustrate the range of individuals who pursued natural history during the nineteenth century. None of them were professional men of science, but nor can they adequately be defined as amateurs. Darwin and Stainton were both gentlemen of independent means, allowing them to devote their lives to research. Parfitt, at least until attaining his curatorship, had only the leisure hours afforded him by the necessity to earn a living (though employment as a gardener would have provided more opportunity than most to observe pollinating insects). Periodicals could bring together a broadly construed scientific community, otherwise separated by boundaries of class and geography. The Intelligencer begun publication in 1856, a year after the abolition of newspaper stamp duty made a penny weekly journal a viable enterprise. The periodical was also the result of a number of other mid-nineteenth-century developments, as noted by the British Naturalist in its obituary of Stainton: Just at the right moment, when extra postal facilities, and the extension of the railway system gave greater opportunities for the inter-communication among Entomologists, he [Stainton] brought out his Entomologist’s Annual (1855), his Manual of British Butterflies and Moths (1856), and the Entomologist’s Weekly Intelligence [sic]. These gave the impetus wanting, and made Entomology what it is to-day. (British Naturalist, January 1893: 18) The Intelligencer, therefore, was made possible by a combination of technological advances, enabling the printing and distribution of a periodical that needed to convey information as quickly as possible. Furthermore, the establishment of the Uniform Penny Post in 1840, which enabled letters to be sent far more cheaply and reliably than before, is particularly pertinent with regards to the circulation of scientific knowledge. The very first editorial of the Intelligencer asked the question, ‘why do entomologists need a weekly newspaper?’ In answer, Stainton pointed to the necessity for any discovery to be laboriously relayed via personal correspondence to multiple acquaintances, taking greater time and effort than many could spare. With a weekly newspaper, however, ‘each discoverer has but to write one full notice of his discovery and forward it to us’, and within ten days, ‘it is in print and in the hands of nearly every Entomologist in the kingdom’ (Intelligencer, 5 April 1856: 1). Correspondence between individuals had been the primary mode via which scientific knowledge was circulated for centuries, and remained central to the practice of natural history in the nineteenth century (Browne 2014). However, a periodical rendered the process of corresponding more efficient, allowing its contributors to relay information at a hitherto unprecedented speed and scale. As a great deal of the information conveyed was of a time-sensitive

­

case study 13 : natural history periodicals

483

nature, with insect populations being highly transient and subject to considerable fluctuations dependent on climatic conditions, speed was of paramount importance. The Intelligencer fulfilled its projected purpose, at least in the opinion of Stainton, who later asserted that ‘as an instantaneous medium of communication between Entomologists in all parts of the country it has proved most serviceable’ (Stainton 1857: 173). The Intelligencer continued until 1861, reaching ten volumes in total, at which point Stainton chose to discontinue the periodical. It seems likely that the editorial effort involved in single-handedly producing an issue per week had proved unsustainable. A few years later, in 1864, Stainton went on to establish the Entomologist’s Monthly Magazine, in collaboration with a select group of his closest entomological friends. All were members of the Entomological Society of London and represented the elite of metropolitan entomology. The very title of this periodical points to an important difference from its predecessor ­­ – the Weekly Intelligencer – as it was published monthly. This was ostensibly to save labour on the part of the editors, but brought with it an attendant shift in content. No longer were short, gossipy notices published: in their stead were long essays on taxonomic classification that were often impenetrable to the beginner. The type of contributors admitted to its pages changed accordingly, with the editors largely favouring other members of the Entomological Society, men known to them and thereby accorded the highest scientific credentials. This reflects wider changes in science from the 1860s onwards. With the rise of professionals, the Entomologist’s Monthly Magazine was a deliberate attempt to establish a more rigorously scientific community of practitioners, distancing itself from the less exacting Intelligencer. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, periodicals remained a vital part of entomological practice. The Entomologist’s Record and Journal of Variation, established in 1890 by the schoolmaster James William Tutt (1858–1911), demonstrates the persistent need for a periodical that permitted the publication of short notices akin to personal correspondence. As Tutt himself observed, ‘much of the more important information I have learned from other entomologists has been obtained in a casual way from letters’ (Tutt 1890: i). The Entomologist’s Record once again wished to harness a diverse community of observers, more akin to the Intelligencer than the Entomologist’s Monthly Magazine, but its aim was not the work of systematic classification that had characterised so much of the entomological work done during the nineteenth century. Instead, its objective was explicitly stated within the title – to serve as a ‘record of variation’ – thereby providing vital evidence for a distinctly Darwinian study of insect evolution that had hitherto been largely ignored by the majority of leading entomologists. Tutt’s agenda was more aligned with the emergent biological approach to nature, which is often considered distinct from the more antiquated mode of natural history, but he was nevertheless

484

matthew wale

employing established methods to answer the pressing questions of the nascent discipline. Nineteenth-century natural history periodicals served to construct scientific communities, drawing together diverse practitioners by providing an efficient means of communication with the potential to cut across social divisions. These communities could be based on inclusivity or exclusivity, with a publication such as the Entomologist’s Weekly Intelligencer operating on the former principle, while the Entomologist’s Monthly Magazine worked on the latter. The expansion of the nineteenth-century press changed the ways in which scientific knowledge was created and circulated, as for many naturalists engaging with periodicals became central to their scientific practice. It allowed them to connect with others – just as Mr Gray and Mr Greer did – by placing them within a network of ‘fellows that never knew each other’. However, despite the technological advances that made this possible, older forms of interchange endured. The Intelligencer replicated the mode of correspondence, cultivating a community based on the informal exchange of information and specimens, while the elitism of the Entomologist’s Monthly Magazine was largely based on the clubbability of metropolitan learned societies. Periodicals, therefore, offer us a way to understand how the boundaries of scientific communities were negotiated, demonstrating who could (or could not) participate in science, and, indeed, what was (or was not) considered to be true ‘science’.

Chapter Eighteen

THE BUSINESS PRESS Melissa Score

T

he story of the business press in nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland encapsulates many of the features of wider developments in journalism and publishing during the period. It is inextricably tied to the growth of financial markets, trade and industrial expansion. As Andrew King rightly notes, the real expansion of business publishing emerged in the final decades of the nineteenth century (King 2009c: 219). Searching the Waterloo Directory database shows 1,429 specialist business titles, including directories and almanacs, appearing between 1800 and 1899. However, a search on the first half of the century yields only 319. A search based only on the last quarter of the century comes up with 907 titles. This expansion parallels the spread of news reporting and the availability of specialist titles across the board, which is also matched by the significant increase in copy length and number of pages dedicated to business news in non-­specialist newspapers in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Like the London Stock Exchange, the business press can trace its origins to the London coffee houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the price sheets that were circulated among brokers transacting in those spaces. Effective financial news reporting depended then, as now, on the combination of accuracy and speed: as markets grew and investors sought to expand, shorter publication intervals and innovations in technology and distribution became paramount. Foreign news reporting was also essential, as wars and events abroad brought risk for some investors and profit opportunities for others. Another important development in the sector’s growth was the broadening of readerships. It had been constrained in the first half of the century by taxation of news and duty on paper, which raised cover 485

486

melissa score

prices and production costs and confined readership to those who could afford such texts. As King points out, advertising duty (removed in 1853) also applied to notices of shareholders meetings and dividends, a significant feature of business material in print news channels (King 2009c: 219). As taxes on advertising, newspapers and paper were gradually removed, production became cheaper and circulations expanded. Business reporting progressed from the piecemeal and often locally oriented recording of shipping, commodity prices, stocks and bonds, to daily specialist newspapers targeted at a global audience and incorporating all the features associated with ‘New Journalism’ – speed, technology, personal reporting, persuasive writing and even sensation. Fast and accurate transmission of exchange information across Europe and the Atlantic, served by wire agencies such as Reuters and Havas, gave added weight to the modern concept of journalistic objectivity. Moss and Hosgood note the recent expansion of interest in business history, and a correspondingly untapped potential for research into its press outlets (Moss and Hosgood 1994: 199). This may reflect a tendency of nineteenth-century serials research work to focus more on periodicals than on news. Nonetheless, as they note, ‘spectacular business advancement was a recurring theme in the popular culture of the late Victorian petty bourgeoisie’, even as they conclude that the nature of most ordinary business people’s lives was generally pretty unremarkable (ibid.: 199). This suggests that what captured the newspaper reader’s attention was partly stories of rapid rises in fortune, or spectacular falls from grace, that resulted from involvement in the financial markets. By definition, business (or financial) journalism is essentially writing about businesses and the economy. It includes personal finance, labour and consumer issues, but its underlying basis is money – ‘who spends it, who earns it, who makes it, and where it comes from’ (Sterling 2009: 225). In an observation that is as relevant to the readers of the nineteenth century as it is to those of today, the Encyclopedia of Journalism comments: ‘As more consumers of journalism become more aware of how the economy and the stock market affects their daily lives, they are increasingly turning to business journalism to explain the significance’ (ibid.). Moreover, Iuliana Roibu comments that, although business publications are considered to be ‘niche products’, financial newspapers did not develop separately to mainstream newspapers, but in parallel – elites needed trade news to help promote the development of their businesses (Roibu 2011: 6). The growing importance of financial news to metropolitan and provincial news circulation during the nineteenth century can be seen

­

the business press

487

in the major expansion of page space devoted to the subject, and the variety of copy – advertisements, listings, prospectuses, market reports and articles – that could be found within them. Elites needed information about events that could have a potential impact on their wealth; merchants and manufacturers sought the latest news about the factors that affected prices of raw materials and finished goods. Newspapers and periodicals were often categorised by party political affiliation, but specialist business titles with no political agenda were frequently launched, supported by business interests. One such example was the Financial and Commercial Record, a twice-weekly twopage newsletter of Stock Exchange prices, government funds, grain prices and stocks news published by the stockbrokers Jonah Smith Wells & Son, and available by annual subscription, until 1835, when it passed into the hands of another brokerage firm, Wells, Westrop and Prinsep. Its demise appeared to be linked to a dip in some of the businesses it used as key sources, since the last edition stated, ‘The Business of the Stock Exchange being now wholly in Shares of Railways and in Stocks, a Price List of Shares of Canal and Assurance Companies cannot be kept up from the difficulty of procuring Quotations’ (Financial and Commercial Record, 1845, no. 2820: 2). The profile of the typical investor-reader also changed profoundly during this period. Whereas in the first half of the century shareholding and metropolitan newspaper consumption belonged to the wealthier classes, in the second half higher returns from investments and lowerrisk opportunities, along with the introduction of £1 shares, encouraged a wider audience, including women investors, who were catered to with the availability of more modest shareholdings. Women were increasingly present in the workplace and able to control their property after marriage, though single women – such as the Brontë sisters, who owned railway shares – were investors earlier in the century. What all investors needed, particularly in times of economic turbulence, was accurate news (see Maltby and Rutterford 2006). Newspapers were the most reliable and most easily accessible source to access for timely and accurate reporting of prices and analysis. The best-known daily business publications, the Financial News and the Financial Times, emerged comparatively late in the century, but they were preceded by many specialist, if often short-lived financial and trade publications, along with the growth of space allotted to financial reporting within metropolitan and regional newspapers. It has been argued that, early in the century, press analysis of economic policy and the impact of government actions on trade was mainly to be found in ‘multi-purpose journals’ such as the Edinburgh

488

melissa score

Review, the Quarterly Review and the Westminster Review – quarterly publications aimed at the ‘gentleman’ reader, and with strongly demarcated political affiliations (Whig, Tory and Radical respectively). But, as Moss and Hosgood note, a focus on such elite periodical titles ignores the fact that there were other specialist titles with equal impact, possibly more attuned to the inside information of the business world, and more widely read by those who actively participated in it. ‘When they are disregarded, an important piece of the business world is removed, and analysis is, in consequence, incomplete. It is through the press, in all its forms, that the language of the marketplace becomes structured and translated into the common forms of a common culture’ (Moss and Hosgood 1994: 200). I would argue also that, by seeing how business news was integrated with other, related forms of news within the construct of the layout of the page, we get a more complete picture of the development of journalism and the ability of newspapers to reflect the dominant discourse of a particular moment in time. The British banking sector significantly influenced the nature and scope of business reporting. At the start of the century the system in Britain and Ireland was already more unified and developed than elsewhere in Europe; the key change by the 1880s and 1890s was the huge expansion of London’s role as the international financial centre of the world, with many foreign and colonial banks opening branches in London. Anglo-Indian banks began to emerge in the 1840s, AngloChinese from the 1850s, and investment banks in the 1860s (Crouzet 1982: 334). This helps to explain the rise in the amount of space given to financial reporting in the press, compared with the period before the 1820s. At this point, England’s banking system, as Francois Crouzet notes in The Victorian Economy, could be compared to ‘a three-storey pyramid’ (Crouzet 1982: 317). At the top was the Bank of England, at the time the only joint-stock bank in England, responsible for the stability of the entire banking system and the economy as a whole. Crouzet’s second layer, the private banks, were mainly family businesses and often prestigious (ibid.: 319). Crouzet notes that the Bank of England’s monopoly did not extend to Scotland, which had a different banking system (Crouzet 1982: 317) nor to Ireland. The Bank of Scotland, established in 1695, was one of three joint-stock banks. There was also no restriction on the creation of private banks in Scotland, for example, by merchants. In London, West End firms served the nobility and gentry, while city firms focused on short-term business lending. At the base of the pyramid were the country banks, which thrived during the war as they could issue banknotes

­

the business press

489

and were the main credit institutions outside London. The addition of bill-brokers (later discount houses) who connected agricultural investors holding short-term surplus funds with industrialists in need of short-term capital financing laid the basis for the capital market at this time. On the other hand, the system was also vulnerable to the rise and fall of the business cycle, and every economic crisis tended to be followed by the collapse of country banks. The role of the Bank of England as the central bank and regulator of the money supply was cemented by the Bank Charter Act of 1844. It separated its ‘issue’ and ‘banking’ departments, so that funds from one could not be used by the other. After 1873, ‘open market’ operations became the regular practice, whereby the Bank of England bought or sold government stock in order to control the money supply. There was a clear need for timely information in the press that informed investors on when to act, and the rates were published in daily metropolitan papers along with limited commentary. A bigger incentive to business publishing came with the century’s expansion of joint stock companies and the brokers who traded in their shares. This applied to the banking sector as well as to various branches of transport, industry and retail. In addition to commercial, merchant and investment banks and discount houses, company legislation in 1856 and 1862 paved the way for limited liability companies to trade on the London Stock Exchange, though the take-up of capital funding via share issues on the Exchange was too slow to get going. Crouzet notes that industries undergoing rapid change, particularly the railways and shipbuilding, made the most use of this form of financing, whereas the traditional family partnership continued to be the model for ceramics, textiles, metal-working and retailers (Crouzet 1982: 338). As a result, reporting of Stock Exchange activity continued to focus on government and railway securities, which dominated both metropolitan and provincial business reporting. Just before the outbreak of the First World War, the stock exchange accounted for only a fifth of total net investment in Britain. New companies rarely began by floating on the Exchange; more often new listings were the result of a capital expansion by existing companies. Nevertheless, the number of public companies and shares offered to the public rose pretty consistently from the 1880s, as did the spread of share ownership among a much greater cross section of society, fuelling demand for the launch of new daily financial titles such as the Financial News and the Financial Times. The nineteenth-century business press included a broad range of titles, reflecting diverse specialist interests. They were subject,

490

melissa score

Figure 18.1  ‘The Rotunda at the Bank of England’, from the Illustrated London News, 30 December 1843, p. 428 (© British Library Board (General Reference Collection))

nevertheless, like so much of the press, to the commercial vagaries and regulatory pressures of the period, where titles could be quickly launched and just as quickly abandoned. Nonetheless, a select few lasted well into the twentieth century, such as the Course of the Exchange (1803–1908), a twice-weekly journal started by James Wetenhall and published by the Committee of the Stock Exchange. Its content included news of British funds, Indian government securities, colonial government securities, foreign stocks, joint stock banks, telegraph companies, insurance companies, water works, railways, ordinary and preference shares and mining stocks. The Financial Times (1888–present) and the Economist (1843–present) continue into the twenty-first century. Some, such as Lloyd’s List, Public Ledger and the

­

the business press

491

London Gazette (the record of bankruptcies from 1665–1877), predated the nineteenth century, with the latter two maintaining circulation right into the twenty-first century, thus reflecting an ongoing demand for commodities and shipping news. There were publications devoted to the banking sector, the Board of Trade, cotton spinning and the clothing retail trade (Draper’s Record, 1887–1988). Specialist publications devoted to the railways rose and fell according to the vagaries of the sector itself. Some, like the Circular to Bankers (1826–60) and the Financial and Commercial Record, were constrained in their coverage through having to censor or omit content (such as notices to shareholders and prospectuses) to avoid paying advertising tax until this was lifted in 1853. The Circular to Bankers was an eight-page weekly founded by Henry Burgess ‘to diffuse information’ on banking and relevant parliamentary news, and cost six guineas per annum by subscription. It was nonparty political but, unusually for business publications at the time, opposed free trade. In 1850 ownership passed to Henry Ayres, who expanded the title, targeting a wider sector of readers, and doubling the number of pages. Content expanded to feature produce markets, money market, and commercial intelligence, and it became less personal in tone. By 1859 ownership had changed again, along with the title. The retitled Monetary Times and Bankers’ Circular also shifted its political stance to become strongly in favour of free trade, but falling circulation forced it to close a year later (King 2009c: 219) Another politically neutral publication was the weekly gold market title the Bullionist, owned by David Morier Evans, the editor of the City column in the Standard. Less contentious but widely read was the Banker’s Magazine and Journal of the Money Market, which ran from 1844 to 1900. Because of its ‘ability to channel opinion and prejudice among bankers and money men, it far outweighed the Economist’, claim trade historians Moss and Hosgood (1994: 206). The origins of the specialist business press go back to the eighteenth century, and the use of Lloyd’s Coffee House in Lombard Street in the City of London as a venue for making business deals, and listening to the latest news and gossip from businessmen, underwriters and merchants. In 1734 Thomas Jenson, proprietor of the coffee house, produced a two-page publication called Lloyd’s List: page one contained stock prices and rates of exchange, and page two was devoted to shipping movements. Initially, it appeared twice a week, but from 1837 it was a daily publication whose circulation was boosted by the speed of information it could deliver as a result of steamship deliveries of ­overseas and maritime news.

492

melissa score

Lloyd’s information-gathering, which had begun with coffee-house gossip, became more organised due also to the cultivation of a strong network of knowledgeable correspondents, and an astute use of resources: ‘From its early days, the paper had special arrangements with two leading Post Office officials … which allowed correspondents to send shipping intelligence free of charge to the Post Office just around the corner from the coffee house’ (Cameron and Farndon 1984: 15). This came to an end in 1837, when the government stopped Post Office employees running private businesses from public resources. A rival, the Shipping Gazette, appeared in 1836, but its editor switched to the new daily Lloyd’s List the following year. He added the customs records of ‘Ships Entered Inwards and Outwards and Ships Cleared Outwards in the Port of London’, which offered readers the ability to track investments in overseas cargo and shipped commodities. Its circulation soon rose to over 1,000 copies per day. The successive removals of advertising tax in 1853, newspaper stamp tax in 1855 and the paper duties in 1861 enabled expansion and innovations in the layout and content of the paper, as well as further income generation from advertising revenue. Lloyd’s List introduced advertisements on its front page, along with lengthier news reports covering information gained from the Board of Trade. It covered international business across a range of categories: shipping, ports news, shipbuilding, energy, commodities, finance, railways, government, freight and, in the twentieth century, aviation. Illustrations in such outlets were limited. When the firm of Spottiswoode took over publication of Lloyd’s List in 1879, small visual innovations were added, such as advertising images used to differentiate passenger services offered by sailing vessel, or by steamer (Cameron and Farndon 1984: 16). In 1872 the Lloyd’s masthead was changed to read Lloyd’s List and Commercial Daily Chronicle. It also at this stage expanded coverage of subjects, including sections on the bullion market, bank failures in the United States and insurance companies in Russia. Coverage reflected the general state of various business sectors, with more space devoted to areas that were in expansion, such as mining (ibid.: 16). While Lloyd’s became a daily evening paper, the Economist, still as of today a mainstay of economic and business analysis, remained a weekly. Established in 1843 by James Wilson as a free trade paper, early campaigns in its pages included arguing for the removal of the duty on corn. On the Corn Law repeal in 1846, it continued to use its pages to campaign for the free trade cause. Strongly laissez-faire and devoted to political economy, the Economist’s obsession with facts

­

the business press

493

and statistics were viewed as a key to its success, although as David Kynaston notes, in the second half of the century its style was noticeably more ‘staid’ than that of the later dailies (Kynaston 1988: 3). Its weekly publication intervals meant, however, that its usefulness in terms of reporting the daily minutiae of prices on financial markets was limited. Its value was as a source of considered opinion about the economy, and as a commentator on government policy, but it was not a daily or intra-daily recorder or indicator of market movements. The Economist also spun off related magazines: one less successful venture was the short-lived Railway Monitor, but it had greater success with the Investors’ Manual (1864–1900) and occasionally published other supplements to its main publication. The only serious rival to the Economist was the Statist. The Waterloo Directory records that it was founded in 1878 by Robert Giffen, a journalist and former civil servant from the Board of Trade, and Thomas Lloyd, an author of books on monetary theory (Waterloo Directory online). It included charts and tables and was politically neutral, but, like the Economist, it combined information and opinion. Unlike the Economist, and in an indication that business journalism of the later century was becoming more persuasive, it offered advice on specific stocks. The advent of New Journalism, with an appropriate emphasis on speed and new technology, strongly influenced the style of two daily financial papers that emerged in the 1880s, the Financial News and the Financial Times, reflecting the unprecedented importance of the City of London. By 1884 the London Stock Exchange employed more than 2,500 brokers and jobbers. The typical investor was drawn from a far broader social class than at the start of the century, helped by the growth of £1 share offering and other initiatives that stimulated this wider participation across the class spectrum. Kynaston comments that the Empire was ‘creating a class whose principal income derived from Stock Exchange Securities’ (Kynaston 1988: 2). The trading news of the period continued to focus on ‘consols’ (British government stock), the foreign market, home railways and the American market, but added to this were details on such subjects as the new mining companies that floated in India, America and West Africa, and the gold rush sparked by events such as the discovery of gold in South Africa in 1884. Investment could be risky, particularly in overseas mining ventures, and investors were increasingly hungry for timely news on which to base their investment plans. The metropolitan newspapers’ coverage remained limited to reporting news events rather than on forecasting and analysing trends. For example, the Financier, established in 1870

494

melissa score

Figure 18.2  ‘The Stock Exchange’, from the Illustrated London News, 13 April 1844, p. 225 (© British Library Board (General Reference Collection))

and priced at 2d, offered information that could help guide investors as to what the future held, and included reporting of American stock news.

A Specialist Press Change to both the range and depth of business coverage in UK newspapers came from a journalist who embodied the transatlantic interrelationships of the press of this period. Harry Harland Marks, born in London in 1855, was a peripatetic traveller who journeyed to New Orleans at the age of fifteen and then to Texas, where he snagged first a reporting job on the San Antonio Express, and then a job as managing editor of the San Antonio Daily Press. In 1873, aged eighteen,

­

the business press

495

he moved to New York to work for the New York World, and later the Daily Mining News. In 1881 he launched a new title, Financial and Mining News, which contained prices and short commentary, much in keeping with the normal frame of business reporting on both sides of the Atlantic at the time (Kynaston 1988: 4). After securing finance for a London edition of the Financial and Mining News, he returned to Britain in 1883, launching the four-page title on 23 January 1884. It was published daily, Tuesday to Saturday, and priced at 1d. The main item on page 1 was the ‘Stock Market’, while succeeding pages demonstrated Marks’s awareness of developments in journalism in terms of the speed of delivering news and reporting on the activities of chief executives and company owners: ‘Our Programme’ on page two featured US financial news, emphasising the timeliness of the paper’s American connections, while the rest of the page had snippets about personalities in the business world, another innovation from the American press. News reporting and advertising followed on the next two pages but, as Kynaston comments, the new paper was more outspoken and keener to report on controversy than was usual in British business journalism at the time (Kynaston 1988: 8). Another American innovation, becoming more prevalent in British newspapers in the 1880s, were long-form interviews – in its first week, Marks secured an interview with the American railway magnates William H. Vanderbilt and Jay Gould, adding ‘personal journalism’ to the financial pages through insight into their views and lives (ibid.). The use of interviews was becoming more common in British newspapers as a result of their adoption by editors such as W. T. Stead on the Pall Mall Gazette, but the integration of reported speech in British news stories was still very new (Rubery 2009: 309). Two months later Marks increased the length of the paper, added letters, and even gossip, under the heading ‘Some Things We’d Like to Know’. He defended such additions as relevant to the new ‘personal journalism’ style espoused by the title – in which gossip and comment about individual businessmen and companies was given prominence – against criticisms from Stock Exchange sources unused to such innovative flamboyance in their business news (Kynaston 1988: 8). In May 1884 the paper gained a major reporting scoop by being the first to report on the collapse of the Marine National Bank, which precipitated an American banking crisis at the time, and in July it refocused its coverage and simplified its long-winded title by dropping the Mining aspect, although it continued to report on the sector. The South African mining boom of the late 1880s helped further boost the paper’s circulation, despite facing the rise of several

496

melissa score

short-lived papers hoping to exploit business readership expansion, such as the Statist. In 1888 a credible rival to the Financial News emerged, first called the London Financial Guide but later recast as the Financial Times. The Financial Times was published daily, Monday to Saturday. Its masthead declared on the left-hand side that it was the friend of THE HONEST FINANCIER/THE BONA FIDE INVESTOR/ THE RESPECTABLE BROKER/THE GENUINE DIRECTOR/ THE LEGITIMATE SPECULATOR while on the right hand side it proclaimed itself the enemy of THE CLOSED STOCK EXCHANGE/THE UNPRINCIPLED PROMOTER/THE COMPANY WRECKER/THE ‘GUINEA PIG’/ THE ‘BULL’, THE ‘BEAR’ THE GAMBLING OPERATOR. (Financial Times, 9 January 1888: 1; see Figure 18.3) By juxtaposing these opposing ideas, the Financial Times was stressing its role as an opponent of secrecy, wild speculation or unnecessary risktaking; instead, it presented itself as a trustworthy source of financial information. Like the Financial News, the Financial Times was a fourpage news-sheet devoted to a wide range of business reporting. Under its first editor, Leopold Graham, and then Douglas Gordon Macrae, it also ran social campaigns – as for example lobbying against ‘outside’ or non-Stock Exchange brokers and ‘ornamental’ directors (aristocrats appointed to boards for their social connections rather than their business acumen). On the whole, however, it was more restrained in its reporting than the controversial and more sensational Financial News, which had built up an enviable reputation due to its investigative scoops. Inevitably, the Financial Times also targeted its close rival, and in 1889 enticed William Ramage Lawson, who had written a series exposing the corruption of the Metropolitan Board of Works for the Financial News, to come over and edit the Financial Times. The last part of the century proved difficult for both papers, in the

Figure 18.3  Masthead of the Financial Times, Monday, 13 February 1888 (© British Library Board (Open Access News))

­

the business press

497

face of curtailed readership following the Stock Exchange slump of the 1890s. The Financial News was also marked by various personal scandals attached to Marks, which were widely reported in the press and drove down circulation. The Financial Times, on the other hand, remained financially viable due in part to its ownership of the successful Draper’s Record. Both papers did face ‘a severe test for the nascent craft of financial journalism’ during the Baring Crisis of 1890, when neither was able to report on the matter until the crisis was over (Kynaston 1988: 31). The bank Baring Brothers & Co., commonly known as Barings, faced insolvency over a series of risky securities investments in Argentina that affected that country, the wider Latin American economy and indeed the entire world (Paolera and Taylor 2001: 67). The crisis was only averted when an international consortium led by the governor of the Bank of England, William Lidderdale, created a fund to guarantee Barings’ debts. The journals’ readers were often frustrated at the lack of information appearing in the news pages. However, the newspapers’ fortunes resurged with the renewed South African mining boom in the 1890s, and, alongside them, the specialist business press also expanded, with the rise of investors and brokers who needed up-to-date news to protect them from risk, and the emergence of small investors and ordinary people saving for the future. The latter did not necessarily need a specialist newspaper; instead, this growing readership encouraged the expansion of business news as a department in metropolitan and regional newspapers.

Financial News in the Non-Specialist Metropolitan Daily Both the Financial Times and the Financial News demonstrated the viability of specialist daily newspapers devoted to business matters in the late nineteenth century. But wealthy readers had long been served in the preceding decades of the nineteenth century by London metropolitan dailies such as rival political newspapers the Times and the Daily News. The reader of the Times in 1815, considered the metropolitan newspaper of record, would have been left in no doubt of its main preoccupations and intended audience. The paper was expensive, due to newspaper stamp duty, advertising tax and paper duty, all of which were intended to ensure that the vital commodity of news remained in the hands of the few, not the many. Like its contemporaries, including the Morning Chronicle and Morning Post, its focus was on reporting parliamentary news to the small, male minority that was able to vote. As far as financial news was concerned, the paper focused on shipping news, reports of bankruptcies taken verbatim from the London

498

melissa score

Gazette, some commodities prices (mainly coal and corn), and limited reporting of government securities trading on the Stock Exchange. These news items tended to be published as short news reports in regular sections on pages 2 and 3, which meant that readers knew where to find the latest market news. Any comments on markets or economic policy were confined to the paper’s editorial and letters sections; reporting was strictly factual and limited to details on stock and market prices. By 1830, however, the paper was devoting a column on its inside page to these issues under the title of ‘Money Market and City Intelligence’, to which was added in subsequent years a column on the ‘Shipping News and the Corn Exchange’. This expansion in coverage reflected similar expansions of activity by 1850 in regional as well as London and overseas exchanges. This expansion was materially represented by such key industries as the burgeoning railway companies, which posted frequent sales of stocks and shares to fund expansion and development or railway networks across Britain and Ireland. For example, on 11 April 1850, the paper published Paris and Rouen coupon prices on page 4, the ‘Money Market and City Intelligence’ column on page 6 along with a trade report, the coal market prices, railway shares, and the Liverpool and Birmingham Stock Exchange prices. On the next page, readers could peruse the report of the Court of Bankruptcy and the Ship News, with further coverage of the railways in ‘Railway Intelligence’ and ‘The Corn Trade’ on page 8 and finally Corn Exchange prices and English Funds on page 9. Other regular items that continued to be prominent over the next few decades included ‘The State of Trade’, ‘The Corn Trade’ and ‘The Cattle Trade’, indicating the importance of commodities markets. The Daily News followed much the same editorial policy on business as the Times, although, if anything, it carried more railway news since railway money had played a major part in investment in the launch of the paper in 1846. However, in the 1850s the nature of the London daily newspaper market began to change, as cheaper, more accessible titles emerged to challenge the Times’s dominance. The abolition of the newspaper stamp duty in 1855 spurred the rise of two daily penny newspapers from 1856, the Daily Telegraph, edited by Thornton Hunt, and the Morning Star, and its evening counterpart, launched by the ‘Manchester School’ MPs Richard Cobden and John Bright. Both Cobden and Bright lost their parliamentary seats in the 1857 election and saw the newspaper as the medium through which they could spread their radical political and economic ideas. The Star was the more obviously driven by a particular school of economic thought, strongly emphasising free trade

­

the business press

499

in its business news coverage; however, it was the Telegraph that soon dominated the penny daily newspaper market with the lion’s share of advertising revenue and circulation. The Telegraph carried very similar financial and business news to the Times, but in a cheaper format that reached out to lower-middle-class readers. Readers of the Times and the Telegraph still had to make up their own minds on what to do with the information. From the 1850s, the Times’s correspondents were beginning to offer very limited comment on the impact of instability overseas on prices of various securities, but there were no recommendations on trading generally; mostly, the reader was presented with prices and fixtures, without interpretation or any attempt to forecast. Sometimes the link could be made by the placings of stories on the page, with foreign news adjacent or close to financial reporting. As time went on, newspapers made overt statements on the impact of foreign conflicts on markets; an example was the ‘Money Market’ column dated Saturday evening and published on Monday, 2 October 1876 in the Telegraph, which typically noted, in contextualising recent news items from the East, ‘As a matter of course, the loans of those countries that have anything to do with the Eastern Question were the chief sufferers.’ Further information on the latest developments on the ‘Eastern Question’ were available elsewhere in the newspaper, but the reader of the ‘Money Market’ column was not specifically directed to further coverage by the writer of the column in the way a modern newspaper would have done, but left to infer what the impact indicated. A key feature of the latter part of the century was the rise of large display advertisements. By the 1890s the Telegraph had changed format to feature a much clearer, brighter appearance than its midcentury incarnation. In addition to detailed financial coverage over several pages, it also featured large, two-column adverts for commodities such as Bovril and illustrated full-page adverts for Dr Tibbles’ Vi-Cocoa (featuring images of the cheering cotton mill workers of Lancashire gazing at a steaming cup of cocoa). Subsequent adverts were targeted at workers in other industries associated with particular locations, such as Birmingham or Stoke, and these changed from day to day.

The Regional Press In addition to the London Stock Exchange and the Bank of England, there were a host of regional stock and commodity exchanges and,

500

melissa score

for part of the nineteenth century, country banks serving particular localities. For provincial and regional investors, the best source of news on such activities came from local, rather than metropolitan, papers. Before newspaper stamp duty was lifted in 1855, these publications were usually weekly and published on market day. Large towns and cities would have more than one local newspaper, usually allied to a particular local political party. For example, the Manchester Guardian (founded by the Manchester cotton merchant John Edward Taylor in 1821) was Liberal, rather than Radical, and competed alongside rivals such as the Tory Manchester Courier (1825–1916) and the Liberal Manchester Examiner and Times (1848–55). Regional newspapers were more likely to attract women readers than the metropolitan dailies, and editorial assumptions of female readership were reflected in the inclusion of ‘domestic economy’ topics such as the prices of food items at local markets. This feature was common across many titles produced across the century, from the Chartist press of the 1830s, such as the Leeds-based Northern Star, to cheap, popular mid-century Sunday newspapers such as Lloyd’s (published in London), and the Darlington-based daily Northern Echo (edited by W. T. Stead) in the 1870s and 1880s. Local newspaper offices and staff were small in size and number: an editor and subeditor took care of most of the content, relying on freelancers and scissors-and-paste journalism from the metropolitan papers to fill their pages. However, as the financial and industrial power of regional cities boomed, the amount of business coverage, with a distinctly regional slant, expanded significantly. When the first detailed ‘Prices of Shares’ for the Liverpool share trading market was published in the Liverpool Mercury on 12 March 1830, it was presented as the most reliable source of the week’s prices, and a counterbalance to false and inaccurate reports elsewhere. Featured in such trading reports were local coal, gas, railway and canal companies. By 1833 the Liverpool Mercury had added seven more railway companies and two banks to its news roster, including the Bank of Manchester (formed in 1829) and the Bank of Liverpool (formed in 1831). Lancashire was one of the most prolific areas of stock company formation. Nationally and regionally, railway stocks remained important, but business coverage expanded to reflect growth in other sectors. Scottish newspapers showed a similar gradual expansion in business coverage as the need to report local agricultural markets widened to include stock prices and tenders. The politically independent Scotsman, founded in Edinburgh in 1817, from the start provided its readers with small tables of price news just before its leader section on

­

the business press

501

page 5. It also provided a grains market report from London on page 6, with a limited amount of commentary on the supply. Similarly, the Inverness Courier (1817–82) initially gave only limited local shipping and grain market news but expanded its coverage to include news from the corn markets. From the 1860s, when it had doubled the number of pages from four to eight, its coverage also included cattle, British and foreign wool prices, grain averages, the latest market news and railway news. A similar expansion occurred in the Scotsman: both it and other Edinburgh-based papers such as the Caledonian Mercury (1760–1867) published London Stock Exchange prices as well as those from the local exchanges. Despite being somewhat dwarfed by the power of the London market, regional stock exchanges continued to form during the nineteenth century, and regional newspapers were the main outlet through which they published price information. Liverpool stockbrokers formed an official exchange in 1836, as did broking firms in Manchester. Others followed in cities such as Birmingham, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Bradford and Leeds. All reflected the dominance of particular industries and businesses, and financial news focused on such areas where relevant to local interests. Alongside share prospectuses, local newspapers reflected their regional readership base through providing space for advertising local tenders for agricultural freehold, land for mining iron ore and coal, railway franchises, canal franchises and news of locally significant joint-stock banks, bankruptcies and other financial news. Venture capital was needed to finance the new transport systems and the mining companies that were key to Britain’s industrial expansion, and the press was the means by which such financing was promoted and sought. It is clear that the expansion of the regional press in the commercial sectors was supported by local business interests and was a reflection of the growth of various business and industrial sectors whose prominence was evident in coverage in the local press. Thus, commercial interests and the local press were closely intertwined, since each depended on the other for the profitable continuation of their businesses.

Wires and Telegraph: The Rise of Reuters The nineteenth century saw the rise of news agencies, which supplied business information to newspapers, and which came to be synonymous with speed and the accurate transmission of prices across continents. The most prominent of these was Reuter’s, which would dominate price reporting in the British press for many decades.

502

melissa score

By the 1850s Britain’s international trade was expanding, and the country was the world’s leading economic power. As Donald Read comments, British merchants and manufacturers in general, and the bankers, brokers, and traders of the City of London in particular, needed the latest news and information from around the world. They were interested in crop and commodity prices and prospects, in stock market reports, in shipping news, and in political news likely to affect trade. (Read 1992: 5) Although bankers and traders collected as much information as they could through conventional press means, the results were inconsistent and based on the strength of individual news networks. Competition among the London newspapers meant that they did not collaborate in sharing information, with sometimes mixed, contradictory results. The first news agency to pick up on the need for accurate and swift reports of national and international stock prices was the French service Agence Havas, founded in 1835. Charles Havas’s early innovative methods of business communication included using pigeons to carry stock price news between London and Brussels, allowing the Paris Bourse to receive up-to-date London stock market prices flown across the Channel by early afternoon. Julius Reuter became a subeditor for Havas in the late 1840s before opening his own correspondence agency in Paris in 1849. His bulletin, issued at 5 p.m. every day, contained National Assembly proceedings, general news and gossip, but lack of subscribers led it into bankruptcy in 1849, and Reuter then moved back to Germany (Read 1992: 7) Undeterred by this initial failure, Reuter began a new venture on the back of the establishment of a Prussian state telegraph line between Berlin and Aachen: on 1 January 1850, he began a news service that, through use of the telegraph, circulated news and market prices between Berlin, Vienna and Paris. By October he had expanded his network to encompass French material. Within two years, he convinced Mowbray Morris, the editor of the Times, to use his service, although initially Morris was selective in his subscription, choosing to restrict his subscription to commodity and stock market news. It was only in January 1859, after Reuter began supplying rival newspaper, that Morris finally took out a full subscription. The significance of Reuter to business reporting lay in the ability of the firm he founded to meet the ever-increasing demand for speedier information delivery with an ability to innovate: the key development was the use of the new

­

the business press

503

telegraphy to ensure fast, accurate price information, across land and via undersea cable. Risky political situations drove the need for accurate and fast news. Much of Britain’s grain imports came from the Black Sea area, with Odessa was a key port outlet. For this reason, the Crimean War, as the Reuter’s chronicler Read has noted, proved an opportunity for both Havas and Reuter to expand their operations. While London newspapers did not use Reuter’s news at this time, the Manchester Guardian, Manchester Courier and Liverpool Mercury did, subscribing to Reuter’s Paris Bourse prices and European news. In the 1860s the American Civil War amplified the value of Reuter’s business newsgathering network. By then he had incorporated use of mail ­steamers to bring the latest news of the war from America, as well as to deliver staccato summaries by telegraph of details of American grain, raw cotton and other commodities prices. In February 1865 the firm restructured into a limited company, Reuter’s Telegram Company, and its news was distributed for the provincial press after 1868 by the new Press Association. Apart from war news and the need to communicate prices, Reuter’s operations were also boosted by Britain’s colonial expansion into India and elsewhere in Asia. In 1866 Reuter’s assistant, Henry Collins (1844–1928), went to British India following the completion of a cable connection to Bombay in 1866 (Mann 2017: 126). Michael Mann notes that Collins set up a cable link to send cotton prices between Gujarat,  London and Liverpool, and this was followed by a news service between Bombay and Liverpool, the centres of cotton production, processing and marketing. Reuter’s colonial news expansion continued, with additional offices in Burma and Sri Lanka, and by 1868 Collins had a monopoly on news from India and had extended Reuter’s news networks to include Australia and China in its ‘empire’ (ibid.: 127). Reuter guarded his impartiality with regard to brokers and bankers in the City, a point that was crucial to maintaining the integrity of his service. As one contemporary noted, Reuter controlled news access so as to ensure it was not leaked for commercial gain or leverage: All the telegrams first come into the hands of Mr Reuter, whose day offices are near the Exchange, and whose night offices are in Finsbury Square – thus this man is without doubt, as regards the affairs of the world, the best informed man in it. He gives his political telegrams to the press alone, and never allows them on any account to be communicated beforehand to

504

melissa score

merchants and bankers for the purpose of speculation. (Wynter 1861: 246) It was essential to the success of Reuter’s venture that he was seen to be independent of political influence. Any business subscriber in any country could thus be confident that reporting was objective and free from manipulation. The extent and speed of delivery of Reuter’s operations enabled it to support mass circulation across European newspapers of political and business information. To support such transnational operations, Reuter separated the political news reporting and commercial reporting arms of his businesses, which were open day and night, with the nightshift working in relays from 6 p.m. until 10 a.m. the following morning. The use of 24-hour shifts and the ability to use telegraphy as part of the reporting process transformed the practices of business and political reporting. No longer was the aim simply to print the morning edition of a newspaper in time for breakfast. Instead, telegraphed news meant exchanges around the world could receive international prices and market-moving news at any time. Readers could access marketmoving information from across the world within minutes, rather than having to wait for the next day. Although the emphasis on speed in delivering news, whether of markets, wars or political upheaval, is often viewed as an American phenomenon (see Wiener 2011), Reuter’s network dominated financial wire reporting in Europe and across Asia from the mid-century onwards. However, in terms of American news, the Associated Press would prove more adept at its circulation, born out of newspaper demand for fast transmission of news across the continent as early as 1846. Moreover, by the end of the century Dow Jones & Company in New York introduced innovations such as the establishing telegraphic ticker-tape systems carrying stock market news. In July 1889 Dow Jones would found the Wall Street Journal, and in 1896 it would begin compiling its index of average closing prices, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which became the market leader among business clients seeking to track news stock market movement on a daily basis (Landers 2008: 146).

Conclusion Although often classed as a sectoral or ‘niche’ part of the Victorian press, business journalism was nevertheless an intrinsic part of the development of journalism as a whole. Targeted audiences shifted in

­

the business press

505

a trajectory that echoed the journalistic accommodation of different readers as the century progressed: a progression that moved from upper-class and professional male readers to an expanding middleclass audience, and then to a mass readership serviced by mass-­ circulation newspapers and journals. The permanence and reliability of business news in newspapers became fixed, and during the century newspapers increasingly took on a more analytical and forecasting role, in addition to simple news reporting. The emphasis later in the century on news-driven features, however, would prove far removed from the slow pace of commentary of the quarterly reviews of the earlier part of the century. Business journalism reflected and commented upon the development and crises of the Victorian economy, its banking system and its markets. Its scope ranged from small circulation, specialist titles intended for members of a particular sector, to broader economic analysis, and then to larger-circulation financial daily newspapers that reflected New Journalism’s preoccupations with speed, personal journalism, investigation, gossip and scoops. It even encompassed the sensational. At the start of the century press focus was on a London-based financial market of interest to the elite readers of expensive metropolitan newspapers. This focus grew, as the century progressed, to embrace and address the preoccupations of provincial and small investors, who read their financial news in cheap daily or evening newspapers. The number of pages dedicated to business news expanded as the cost of news production fell. At the same time, advertising played an increasingly important role not only as a source of revenue, but also as ‘copy’ in its own right. For example, prospectuses and tenders were primarily advertised in the financial press, and advertisements were featured that reflected and targeted regional preoccupations with particular industries, as for example news of iron and coal tenders in South Wales. Beginning with brief accounts of Bank of England bills, government securities and corn and cattle prices, moving on to railway shares, coal and iron, and finally to the reporting of company news and management appointments such as we would recognise today, the type of information featured in the business press underwent a transformation in the nineteenth century. Its particular drivers of speed and timely reporting were important in fostering technical innovation and shifting expectations of access to business information. It also drew previously unrecognised readers to newspapers: while the business press did not consider female readers as a key audience, the increasing

506

melissa score

involvement of women in share ownership, as well as their involvement in businesses, meant that, by the end of the century, they, too, were significant consumers of the business pages. This was part of an overall trend in which audiences who had previously been invisible as readers of the daily press became part of a mass readership whose interests were directly or indirectly bound up with investments and the economy.

Chapter Nineteen

THE PRESS AND RADICAL EXPRESSION: STRUCTURE AND DISSEMINATION Martin Conboy Introduction The radical press of the first half of the nineteenth century is often seen as an element in journalism’s evolution (Chalaby 1998; Conboy 2004; Harris and Lee 1978; Thompson 1968). If this is so, then how was it different from earlier deployments of printed periodicals that sought to engage readers politically during, for example, the English Civil War, and the early eighteenth-century opposition to Walpole’s political hegemony? This chapter will argue that, on the evidence of the content and intention of this range of radical periodicals, the key distinguishing element was that of social class. In order to demonstrate this innovative aspect of print culture, it will explore how these publications created identities of class as well as propagandising politically on behalf of new readers. To this extent, the radical press marked both a continuity as well as a rupture with previous traditions of the press: continuity in the claims of the press as a force that eroded the traditional hierarchies of information flow, claims which had accompanied print as a technology since its introduction into Western Europe; rupture in that the press had hitherto been incapable of generating a lexicon of appeal to anything other than an elite political or mercantile audience. The radical form of advocacy that the radical press launched was not long in the ascendancy. Its disruptive impact was dramatically reduced when many of its claims and much of its rhetoric were subsumed within a mainstream popular press, responding reflexively as it claimed to incorporate the interests of the ‘people’ in its own coverage. We will consider the radical newspapers across the threshold of the eighteenth and into the first third of the nineteenth century as, 507

508

martin conboy

in effect, a thwarted branch of journalistic development crushed by commercial and political pressures. However, their legacy continues to assert an alternative vision of advocacy and engagement to many of the core claims that journalism in the contemporary age fails to live up to; for example, telling truth to power and acting as a watchdog on behalf of ordinary people. Key to radical developments in periodical print publications was the language deployed. A language that would enable protest had emerged slowly across Britain and Ireland largely through the Dissenting religious tradition (Smith 1984; Thompson 1968), but it was print and increasingly periodical print publications that harnessed and directed these energies, creating ‘a condition of possibility for a popular radical platform’ (Mee 2016: 1). As for the writers themselves, publicists and journalists are the distinctions that Chalaby (1998) makes between the authors of much of the radical press and the later reporters who based their work on the ‘fact-based’ discourse of the commercial press from the midnineteenth century onwards. This distinction between commentary and facts is as much a political as a professional one, but, although most of the radicals were predominantly propagandists, it is perhaps a little too dismissive of the efforts they made to include reporting on current events and contemporary discussion of these events within their publications.

The Periodical Realignment Newspapers, from the early eighteenth century, had become conduits for relatively safe political news, commercial information and lucrative clearing houses for advertising. It was the periodical tradition, rather than the newspaper proper, that was the locus for serious challenges to the government and contestations of the accepted norms of latitude for commentary and debate in the press, moving across, for example, from the eighteenth-century formats of the Tatler, Spectator, Examiner and  the Gentleman’s Magazine through to the True Briton of John Wilkes in the late eighteenth century. Smith has identified the limitations that the radical press would come to address: The press could record public events and it could enliven debate among the politically involved. But as a means of social communication it was a non-starter … The social structures were too solid to admit of any new agency. Journalism was kept from communicating between classes, from spreading its truths in such a way as

­

the press and radical expression

509

to allow the crowd to set up in judgement against the governing classes. (Smith 1984: 164–5) At the end of the eighteenth century, the French Revolution ­­combined with long-standing concerns about ‘popular ­­constitutionalism’ (Epstein 1994: 3–28). Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man (1791) had provided a seminal text for radicals in the English language, creating a lexicon and style of address with which to challenge existing political structures and question the authority of the ruling classes, while at the same time asserting confidence around a vernacular populism (Smith 1984). There was neither coherence nor stability around the aims or styles of the radicals. In their place, there was a great deal of experimentation and even opportunism. Within this political ferment, print was so important that we could consider ‘popular radicalism as a kind of “literary” culture’ (Mee 2016: 2), and indeed many earlier polemical exemplars from Milton to Paine are  referred to explicitly as touchstones by radical exponents of the press. This culture was structured through the regularity of periodical publications, which enabled a growing coherence within the radical  movement as they allowed the repetition, questioning and ­­refinement of discussion on contemporary events in print to permeate  from  a London base across communities throughout the four nations. We see a shift in this period from pamphlet production, as an isolated expression of radical opinion on a particular matter, to the more sustained and editorially coherent periodical press approach, combining opinion, satire, commentary and creative expression such as poetry. Regular publications provided a more sustained voice, and a means of following certain editorially constructed lines of argument in this emergent radical tradition. An early example in London from 1789 was the Argus, published and largely written by Sampson Perry, a friend and political associate of Paine’s, advocating violence to procure political ends, and hugely critical of the state of the British Parliament. He continued the paper despite his exile in Paris after his conviction in London for libel in 1792. Less newspapers and more in the tradition of radical pamphlets, Spence’s Pig’s Meat and Eaton’s Politics for the People were both published between 1793 and 1795. Spence, in particular, was one of the main insurrectionist influences on the radical movement. These publications provided a vocabulary that was utilised to shape a popular appeal against corruption in Church and State that can be traced directly all the way forward to Cato Street in 1820, where conspirators

510

martin conboy

plotted to assassinate the Cabinet and ultimately trigger a revolution in Britain, and more indirectly to many political insurrectionist ­­traditions following that. In 1795, anxious at the success of such ­­publications in firing the imaginations of the populace, the government stepped in and enacted two acts severely curtailing radical activity both in terms of assembly and publication. It is worth noting this successful experimentation with techniques of suppression that the government deployed at this point, a proven formula that would be used again to deal with press agitation in the early nineteenth century. As a contrast to developments in metropolitan London, the Manchester Herald, Derby Herald and Leicester Chronicle were early-decade examples of radical provincial newspapers enthused by the implications of the French Revolution (Smith 1979: 283–92). Provincial papers tended to be more news driven than their metropolitan counterparts, and also managed to distribute a fair amount of reprinted literature from radical pamphlets. In their continuity and the general accessibility of their approach to specific communities, they could be seen as more representative of popular politics. Many regional news­papers at this time were founded on radical principles, such as the weekly Sheffield Register (1787–94), run by the Unitarian Joseph Gales until forced into exile by the threat of repressive legislation. The newspaper that succeeded it was the Sheffield Iris (1794–1825), edited by James Montgomery, and it followed the strategy, which would become familiar in commercially successful radical publications, of reining in the harder line of radicalism to press for middle-class reform. Most northern English towns, in fact, had their radical newspapers, which had mixed success with readers, and whose radicalism was mostly extinguished by the repressive measures enacted in 1795. In shaping material in the wake of legislative measures curtailing the radical content of some newspapers, a great number of provincial press outlets developed a more moderate line in printed opposition to the French Revolution and Jacobin tendencies. Such newspapers were better suited to drawing in consistent advertising from the commercial classes and so were able to survive longer than their more radical counterparts. It was one of the key aims of the radicals to generate a wider form of public opinion, based on a combination of discussion and dissemination. This meant that the interrelationship between periodicals and newspapers, on one hand, and debating and corresponding societies, on the other, was an essential part of the maturing of this radical culture of communication. Corresponding societies in northern English cities were established in Sheffield and Norwich as the leading Jacobin centres outside

­

the press and radical expression

511

the capital. As an illustration of this trend, the first and most active corresponding society was set up by five mechanics in Sheffield in December 1791. Within months it had over 2,000 members. It was quick to exploit the presence of a sympathetic organ of publicity in the shape of the Sheffield Register. As well as militating for reform locally, the Sheffield Corresponding Society was soon helping to organise similar societies  in other industrial towns across northern England and the English Midlands. It was also the key disseminator of radical publications, and a forum for discussion of the ideas and ambitions  of  the  French Revolution. With its large population of  skilled craftsmen, Sheffield became a key centre for political reform,  but  there  was little political power for the majority: the people  wanted parliamentary representation and political rights, yet the town itself had no Member of Parliament to represent those interests. The London Corresponding Society was founded by the shoemaker Thomas Hardy in 1792 to broaden out political discussion to a wider range of social class than had hitherto been politically active in any formal way. It acted as a coordinating and organising forum, allowing  for a certain measure of continuity through this period of experimentation in both the form and language of debate and for radical  activities across Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales. It was proscribed by Pitt in 1799 through the Seditious Societies Act to suppress  ‘seditious and treasonable’ organisations including the Jacobinical Society, the Society of United Irishmen, the Society of Scotsmen, the Society of Englishmen and the Society of Britons, demonstrating, as in 1795, that the ruling classes understood the challenge posed by the radical movement and were determined to impose the harshest sanctions to defeat its aims and influence. The dangers have been well identified by Gilmartin: The broadly defined radical movement emerged onto a stage that had been mapped out between the main political parties of the time, leaving little space for dissent through the narrow, conventional political channels … the radical movement developed a style of political opposition that aimed to replace the distinction between whig and tory with a more ominous one between the people and corrupt government, and to make the press a forum for mobilizing this distinction on behalf of radical parliamentary reform. (Gilmartin 1996: 1)

512

martin conboy

Radical Momentum After a period of respite for the British government, the process of protest began in earnest once more. One strong example leading the way was Leigh Hunt’s Examiner, founded in 1808, as part of the new wave of radical critique that sought to reform both politics and even journalism itself. It argued for and undertook a self-imposed ban on advertisements to prevent the contamination of independent journalism through its propinquity with commercial interests. Hunt’s Reformism built on that of the Edinburgh Review, a quarterly that had been founded in 1802 to promote a radical Whig agenda against the ruling Tory party. Like the Edinburgh Review, it took an aesthetic as well as a political approach to restructuring sensibilities. A longer-lasting and more pugnacious approach was adopted by William Cobbett in his Weekly Political Register (1802–36). Cobbett had been imprisoned in Newgate for two years (1810–12) for his vitriolic criticism of a case of military floggings in Ely, made notorious largely through the publicity he gave it. The founding of the Hampden Club in 1812 by John Cartwright as an extension of the tradition of the London Corresponding Society, enabled a platform to support Cartwright’s tours espousing Reform across the industrial centres of the English Midlands and northern England in 1812, 1813 and 1815. In his lectures and speeches, Cartwright promoted and provided a conduit for Cobbett’s swiftly radicalising Political Register to become a national organ of communication. By 1815 a confluence of events and circumstances had brought to the fore social inequalities facing a widening section of the population. The end of Napoleonic Wars saw the return of troops to widespread unemployment; income tax was abolished, meaning that more indirect taxation was imposed on the lowest paid; the price of grain and bread rose exponentially as a result of Corn Laws enacted to placate the landed interests that the government thought key to its authority, resulting in hunger riots; and discontent grew against an obstinate refusal by government to acknowledge the concerns of ordinary labourers. Increasingly, these concerns were channelled not through debating club or platform but through the radical press, galvanising awareness in a ricochet effect across the country as publication encountered public. Cobbett’s conversion to the radical unstamped press came from the point his Register was published as an unstamped pamphlet from 1816 onwards. Its first manifestation was entitled polemically Address to the Journeymen and Labourers of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland.

­

the press and radical expression

513

Wickwar claims that the sales of this two-penny publication had surpassed 200,000 by the end of 1817, while Hollis suggests that, under its regular title of the Two Penny Trash, it eventually settled down to a sale of 20,000–30,000 per issue (Wickwar 1928: 52–4; Hollis 1970: 95). We can see the unmistakable rhetoric of Cobbett’s appeal in his rousing introduction: Friends and Fellow Countrymen, Whatever the Pride of rank, or riches or of scholarship may have induced some men to believe … the real strength and all the resources of a country, ever have sprung and ever must spring from the labour of its people … Elegant dresses, superb furniture, stately buildings, fine roads and canals, fleet horses and carriages, numerous and stout ships, warehouses teeming with goods; all these … are so many marks of national wealth and resources. But all these spring from labour. Without the Journeymen and labourers none of them could exist … (Cobbett’s Twopenny Trash, 3 November 1816) By 1817 the government moved to pass the Seditious Meetings Act, in order to quell the success of Hampden Clubs and public readings of radical publications such as Cobbett’s periodicals. On suspension of Habeas Corpus in 1817, Cobbett, fearing that it would be used to arrest him, and not wishing for another spell in prison, fled to America in March, only to return at the end of 1819, and continuing to publish his Political Register from exile. Others leapt to fill the space vacated in the radical armoury. Wooler’s Black Dwarf, Hone’s Reformist’s Register and Sherwin’s Political Register, for example, were launched around this time, along lines established by Cobbett. The new radical press ‘differed from the great reviews in that they reviewed current events rather than general policies; they differed from newspapers in that they aimed at moulding events rather than at recording them’ (Wickwar 1926: 51). Some were short lived and fitted into the agenda of figures who would become wide-reaching figures in the radical reform movement, such as Hone’s Reformist’s Register which ran only from 1 February 1817 to 25 October 1817. Priced at 2d, it set the tone and style of opposition to the Whigs with a more radical programme of reform. Others lasted longer, such as Wooler’s Black Dwarf, which ran from January 1817 to November 1824. Another prominent editor, author and publisher was Richard Carlile, who continued throughout his career to be deeply influenced by the writings of Paine, and followed very much the echo of his

514

martin conboy

rhetorical footsteps as well as disseminating his ideas and his writings. For Painites such as Carlile, the freedom of the press was merely part of a broader fight for a democratic republican form of government. He began managing Sherwin’s Political Register in 1817, and his first independent publication had the Painite title of the Republican (1819–26). Commonsense and The Rights of Man were reprinted in instalments in this forum, and eventually all of Paine’s collected works. Short-lived examples such as the Gorgon from 23 May 1818, produced by Wade and Place, was Benthamite Utilitarian in its politics, and contributed to the formation of working-class theory by propagating the ideas of the philosophical radicals of Westminster and, among other notable characteristics, gaining notoriety through its attacks on the Black Dwarf. Its motto was: ‘Let not, whatever other ills assail, / A damnèd aristocracy prevail.’ Equally short lived, Davison’s Medusa: or Penny Politician (20 February 1819–7 January 1820) advocated violence, as did his ultra-radical Cap of Liberty: A Political Publication, which survived from 8 September 1819 to 4 January 1820. Retrospectively, one of the new generation of radical publications gives credit to Cobbett as the founding father of the radical press: The invention of printing itself scarcely did more for the diffusion of knowledge and the enlightening of the mind than had been effected by the Cheap Press of this country. Thanks to Cobbett! The commencement of his twopenny register was an era in the annals of knowledge and politics which deserves eternal commemoration. (White Hat, 13 November 1819) In response to such press vehicles, the government subsidised loyalist counterblasts such as Merle’s White Dwarf (29 November 1817–21 February 1818), the True Briton (1818) and Shadgett’s Weekly Review of Cobbett, Wooler, Sherwin and Other Democratical and Infidel Writers in 1818. Attempts to ground radicalism in more traditional newspaper forms continued with, for example, the foundation of the Manchester Observer in 1819, which contained more news content on the radical movement than most publications. On 16 August 1819, a protest at St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, drew such a violent response from the authorities that the subsequent butchery of protesters was dubbed ‘Peterloo’. It provided both the highpoint of public disapproval of the political culture of the time, as well as the impetus for the suppression of the radical press in 1819 through the Six Acts. These included measures to raise duty of 4d on pamphlets, as had previously been the case with newspapers, if they were published more often than once a

­

the press and radical expression

515

month and if they contained opinion or comment on contemporary affairs of Church or State. The ‘seditious libel’ outlined in the legislation was interpreted more or less as any attack in print on the political or economic status quo. Securities were demanded of publishers, with what were seen as prohibitive fines of £20 per violation (Wiener 1969: 5). The only radical papers to survive the passing of the Six Acts were those with substantial readership bases or sponsorship external to their publication, most notably Cobbett’s Political Register, Wooler’s Black Dwarf and Carlile’s Republican. By 1819 the popular movement for radical reform had spread throughout the country, although London remained a significant printing centre for many press publications supporting the radical agenda (Wickwar 1926: 102). There were significant regional radical press powerhouses: Manchester had its radical weekly, the Manchester Observer; Boston had the True Briton; Birmingham supported Edmond’s Weekly Register; Coventry had Lewis’s Coventry Recorder and Glasgow the Spirit of the Union. Such regional publications were often dependent on material from London, adapting them as a basis for applying theories and observations on reform to local circumstances. Freedom of the press, freedom to attend and organise public meetings, and the right to vote were at the core of radical demands, and the press played an essential coordinating role in this triangle. Thus, the press moved ‘from secrecy to publicity’, from plots to pamphlets (Wickwar 1926: 77). E. P. Thompson has pointed out that at this time there was a relatively egalitarian base to communications, as investment necessary for production and distribution was limited to the hand press and the horse-drawn carriage. Steam-printing and the railways would, among other things, severely compromise that state of affairs as the century progressed, since increased capital investment was needed to keep pace with mechanical developments, and to meet increasingly sophisticated distribution methods. In the first third of the century, though, costs were low enough that radicalism could provide both an alternative discourse of political thinking but also a steady source of income for working-class agitators (Thompson 1968: 739–40). Such radical papers provided for an ‘increasingly articulate working class’ (Hollis 1970: 99), and their ability to destabilise authority as a solution to the dismissive contempt of their rulers has been summed up in the following terms: They stimulated an almost unexampled discontent among the people. They made many of them disaffected towards their rulers. They suggested an intelligible, though not a complete, explanation

516

martin conboy

of their distress; and they suggested a remedy which, in its democratic spirit and in its main outline, was practicable. But it was a remedy that their rulers showed no wish to apply. So men and institutions were brought into hatred and contempt. By no other conceivable means would there have been the least likelihood of altering them. (Wickwar 1926: 75)

The Second Wave In contrast to the end of the Napoleonic Wars, which had triggered a wave of interconnecting economic and social dissatisfactions, from 1820 to 1825 a combination of falling prices and much improved employment rates took the edge off radicalism on the streets (Thompson 1968: 778). The bloody repercussions of the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820, with Arthur Thistlewood and co-conspirators executed or transported, brought to an abrupt end the ‘heroic age of radicalism’, according to Thompson (ibid.: 774). On top of this, the successful press suppression undertaken through the Six Acts (of 1819) proved highly effective in closing down the loopholes that the radical press had exploited so efficiently. Cobbett’s longevity provided a continuity across movements, as well as geographically dispersed communities; bringing disparate members of the artisan class into a remote conversation, his tone and style were as formative as the content of his continuing publication. Carlile was also a bridge between the first and second wave of radical journalism. In July 1830 revolution in France prompted a return to the rhetoric and activities of press agitation, rekindling demands for reform and other issues that found favour with the working class. Hollis argues that the unstamped press of this period provided the publicity for this fresh set of political issues as fundamentally turning on an educational problematic (Hollis 1970). Newspaper reading was seen as key to the informal educational advancement of the working classes. This does not mean, however, that it was one-dimensional, since the question of education for the working classes was political and highly complex. Each side of the argument had nuance. The middle class aimed for education as a conduit to a more peaceful society, where the working class knew their place and could strive accordingly to make the best of their situation. In contrast, working-class radicals saw education as a tool of emancipation that could be deployed to gain access to the levers of political power. To make a complex situation even more intriguing, the radicals ranged from those who wanted a fairer form of representative democracy and those who saw education as a means

­

the press and radical expression

517

of encouraging self-help and cooperative organisation among the labouring classes, to those who wanted to use education to encourage people to challenge the fundamentals of the political economy of the capitalist system. Unlike the radical papers of the early century that may have drawn the opprobrium of the courts for their content but were not in themselves published in contravention of the law, the unstamped publications of the 1830s were from the outset illegal. The press historian Joel Wiener estimates that 10,000 is probably an accurate assessment of the average circulation for some of these papers (Wiener 1969: 138). They shared more similarities in style than the radical press of the early century, containing a good amount of general news as well as polemic and commentary on events. Carpenter was the first of this new generation of publishers to be imprisoned. In October 1830 he published Political Letters and Pamphlets, a weekly that he claimed, unsuccessfully as far as the authorities were concerned, was not a newspaper. It managed thirty-three issues before he was prosecuted, and the paper closed down. The Prompter was launched in November 1830 and supported the ‘Swing’ revolt, among other radical causes. Both were prosecuted, and the war on the unstamped press had begun. Wiener traces the expression ‘taxes on knowledge’, seen as a call to action, to 12 November 1830, when the London-based Examiner carried the masthead: ‘Paper and Print 3 ½ d. Taxes on Knowledge 3 ½ d’. Carlile continued with his Unstamped Gauntlet (1833–4), which was still Painite-republican in tone, with an emphasis on the triple incantation of the Old Corruption: ‘kingcraft, priestcraft, lordcraft’. Henry Hetherington (1792–1849), an active organiser and advocate of working men’s rights, was from a poor background himself and worked his way through an apprenticeship to take up employment as a printer in the 1820s in London. He was very much the organic intellectual, self-taught and militant. He published penny papers on an almost daily basis through late 1830, until the launch of the Poor Man’s Guardian in July 1831, with its full title provocatively expressing its mission: the Poor Man’s Guardian: A Weekly Newspaper for the people, Established Contrary to ‘Law’ to Try the Powers of ‘Might’ against ‘Right.’ The Poor Man’s Guardian provided political criticism of the most pungent variety, plus news of domestic and even international radical activities. It led the way in style and ambition aimed at establishing an authentic working-class appeal. Other projects of Hetherington’s included the ‘Destructive’ and Poor Man’s Conservative (1833–4) and Hetherington’s Twopenny Dispatch, and People’s Police Register (1834–6).

518

martin conboy

Hetherington wrote comparatively little in these publications, relying instead on the authorial skills of his political collaborators and fellow writers, John Cleave and James ‘Bronterre’ O’Brien (1805–84). The latter, his greatest collaborator, arrived in England in 1829 from Ireland. He acted as editor and contributor to most of Hetherington’s projects, in addition to contributing significantly to the emergence of working-class theory. Such was his legacy that he was dubbed the ‘schoolmaster of Chartism’ by the later radical editor of the Poor Man’s Guardian, T. P. O’Connor (Turner 2003: 237). An example of his radical reasoning illustrates the potency of his polemic: Now, since all wealth is the produce of industry, and as the privileged fraction produce nothing themselves, it is plain that they must live on the labours of the rest. But how is this to be done, since everybody thinks it enough to work for himself? It is done partly by fraud and partly by force. The ‘property’ people having all the law-making to themselves, make and maintain fraudulent institutions, by which they contrive (under false pretences) to transfer the wealth of the producers to themselves. All our institutions relating to land and money are of this kind. (Poor Man’s Guardian, 26 July 1834) The Poor Man’s Guardian held steady at 16,000 copies a week through 1832–3 (Hollis 1970: 105). Readership has been estimated at twenty times the circulation, but this would not count the numbers who listened to the papers read out in public houses or other reading rooms (ibid.: 119). The Irish Coercion Bill kept up sales after the passage of the Reform Bill in 1832. Despite the clarity and vigour of O’Brien’s prose, and Hetherington’s organizational zeal, the radical duo ultimately failed to sustain a long-term analysis on their terms. As Hollis noted, ‘Hetherington and O’Brien always tried to turn isolated issues into a coherent public opinion, not just by broadening the basis of their class or regional support but also by meshing them into a wider ideological analysis’ (ibid.: 278). She continued, ‘But if O’Brien and Hetherington failed to displace the old analysis, at least elements of the new analysis became an accepted and important part of working-class radicalism’ (ibid.: 289). These publications were soon joined by a mushrooming assortment of additions: James Watson’s Working Man’s Friend; and Political Magazine (1832–3), for example, stood out for its extensive coverage of Irish affairs. Some of the unstamped publications had a more specific and sustained focus of attack, such as John Cleave’s and William Carpenter’s Church Examiner and Ecclesiastical Record and Slap at

­

the press and radical expression

519

the Church, both started and folded in 1832, and both ridiculed the corruption of the Church. In Scotland, William Smith of Edinburgh used his stationery business to produce at least two short-lived illegal publications of note: Bawbee Bagpipe (1833) and the Advocate: A HalfPenny Periodical. Both were comprised of a blend of Scottish tales and an assortment of radical discontent. Life in Edinburgh, or, the Police Intelligencer, and Dramatic Review (1831–2) provided in its short existence a familiar blend of sensation and police court material. The unstamped press provided cheap knowledge for the masses, campaigned for stamp reduction, developed working-class theory and rhetoric, and made a profitable business for publishers. All reported on political meetings and debates, and published letters and responses to letters. According to Hollis, there were four functions of the unstamped titles: 1) they acted as newspapers; 2) they provided propaganda for the unstamped cause; 3) they gave didactic advice on the rights of workers; and 4) they represented the voice of London working-class movements as both a medium of information and a sustained call to action (Hollis 1970: 106). The 1830s saw a flowering of diverse varieties of alternative political thought, from republicanism and Chartism to Owenist collectivism. These various political formations were articulated in periodical form across different parts of the country, testimony to the mobility and agitational zeal of the authors and publishers of radical periodicals. From 1831 Hetherington, Carlile and Cleave toured the country, setting up agencies to distribute their papers and to coordinate between various political organisations and interest groups that clustered around the radical working classes. As London was the hub of this activity, outside the capital it was claimed that there was little of originality or significance, given that ‘most of the smaller provincial papers were ephemeral and derivative’ (Hollis 1970: xi). Evidence suggests there were powerful and distinguished exceptions to this characterisation. As noted already, Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, Liverpool and Glasgow produced their own radical unstamped titles, of which some further examples include the Manchester-based Voice of the People (1831), and northern England–based Joshua Hobson’s Voice of the West Riding (1833–4). The variety and quantity of the unstamped press was quite bewildering. It is estimated that there were literally hundreds of titles issued between 1800 and 1836, and that they ranged from political, religious, crime, literary and theatrical in theme to purveyors of ‘useful’ knowledge. However, Hollis also claims that two-thirds of these were the product and effort of just a half a dozen men (Hollis 1970: 108).

520

martin conboy

Hollis (1970) argues that the Old Corruption thesis promulgated by Paine, and continued through Cobbett and Carlile – a position that asserted politics as a struggle between aristocrats and the people – was challenged but never quite replaced by a more structured socialist account that highlighted the inequity of the capitalist economy with its profiteering middle classes. Responses to this ranged from Owenite self-help, to O’Brien’s political radicalism, and shifted emphasis from taxation to profits (ibid.: 4). Working-class radicals led an assault on the government to militate for the abolition of taxation on periodicals, and the representation of workers in voting, and to provide their readers with an incipient, class-based political economic analysis of capitalism. Thompson has claimed that by 1832 there were two radical publics (1968: 799): a middle class looking forward to and supporting reform and the Anti-Corn Law League, and the working class looking forward to and supporting Chartism and more systematic analyses of the political economy. Much of the mainstream press had by this point cut formal and subsidised links with the government and so were better able to claim the side of the middle-class reformers.

The Incorporation of Radical Sensation Competition increased from a new brand of unstamped press outputs, namely broadsheets that were popular newspapers rather than political miscellanies, similar in size and structure to standard newspapers, but aimed at a crossover between middle- and working-class readerships. With their appeal to working-class readers, their sensationalised accounts of the crime affecting the class of their target readers, and with illustration that added to their visceral entertainment, these new titles were so successful that they soon were in direct competition with the mainstream press. Most notable were Cleave’s Weekly Police Gazette from January 1834 – which reached a circulation of 30,000–40,000 – and the Police Register (Wiener 1969: 177). Hue and Cry, or Weekly Police Register, in print from March 1834, was the official police gazette, and although technically illegal, it did not contain the radical material or social critique of other unstamped titles such as Cleave’s. Hetherington joined in with the Twopenny Dispatch in 1834. Such titles rapidly became too popular to suppress, and therefore, as an astute alternative strategy, the stamp duty was reduced in September 1836 from 4d to 1d. This was the definitive blow, as it had the effect of making middle-class readerships almost unaware

­

the press and radical expression

521

of the expense of their newspapers, so cheap had they become, while hoisting the price of working-class periodicals to a level unaffordable to most of their target readership. Authorities also started directly attacking the publishers, for example breaking the presses of Cleave and Hetherington in 1835. The range of attack was therefore on three fronts: legal, physical and fiscal. In addition, there was an increasing flow of news from the growing trades union movement throughout 1834–6. Synergies developed between the National Union of the Working Classes and the unstamped press, which saw funds raised, meetings called, petitions signed and, of course, copies sold. A good example was the Chartist Convention–backed Northern Star, which was published between 1837 and 1852, and campaigned on the agenda of the Six Points Charter from 1838 onwards.

The Scottish Radical Contribution The impact of the underlying principles of the French Revolution, as elsewhere across Britain, had led to growing discontent with the status quo in Scotland. Repression followed the emergence of a radical surge in political activity and working-class organisation in the 1790s. It was only a small faction of Whigs who continued to press for reform, anxious that the underground but increasingly volatile working-class trades union movement would press on for more extreme solutions. The Edinburgh Review, founded in 1802, was the most prominent expression of this moderate reformism, and provided an eloquent and far-reaching international contribution to political and literary debates. Most Scottish newspapers took a balanced view of the French Revolution and its potential relationship to questions of domestic reform up until the autumn of 1792 (Harris 2005: 39). The Edinburgh Gazetteer was the most prominent of the Scottish radical papers, and sought to provide a corrective if moderate view of events in France, but this paper was forced to close in 1794. The Morning Chronicle, Sheffield Iris and Cambridge Intelligencer were well distributed in Scotland (Harris 2005: 59), and broadly supportive of the French Revolution, although no Scottish publications of a radical hue emerged in the late 1790s to match the corresponding English publications (ibid.: 58). An early pioneering society that fostered press outputs was the Friends of the People, founded in 1792 in Edinburgh very much along the lines of the reform and corresponding societies that had emerged out of Painite exposure in England in the wake of the French

522

martin conboy

Revolution. This reform agenda soon spread to other Scottish towns and drew the attention of the authorities, which did their best to keep such discussions under close scrutiny. Corresponding societies and reform societies, such as the Friends of the People, acted as conduits for the dissemination and organised reading of radical pamphlets and periodicals that drew ordinary working people into debate on democratic reform and education as a tool to transform the lives of the ­workers (Anderson 2015: 254). There was also a clandestine group under the name of the United Scotsmen, founded in 1796 in close cooperation with the insurrectionist United Irishmen. As in England, the end of the Napoleonic Wars brought economic depression and social dislocation, as demobilised soldiers encountered mass unemployment as a consequence of business collapses, recession and the accelerating consequences of urbanisation. To add to this febrile environment, imported radical periodicals such as the Belfast Irishman, the Manchester Observer and the Black Dwarf were in circulation through sympathetic public houses (Whatley 2000: 314). In 1819, in response to events in Manchester, aggrieved protesters organised many public gatherings, and by October Scottish radicals had launched a new paper, the Spirit of the Union. Only eleven issues were published before its editor, Gilbert McLeod, was arrested in January 1820 and the paper suppressed. The Scotsman was founded in Edinburgh in 1817 as a radical pamphlet at the height of popular rioting and political unrest. Its aim was to provide a much-needed alternative to the dominance of the Tory press. Later, building on the model of the radical, unstamped press in England, Glasgow provided an ideal testbed for similar publications, given the ready audience among its politically aware industrial working classes. Emerging out of this ferment were journals such as the Loyal Reformers’ Gazette (1831–8), the Scottish Trades Union Gazette (1833) and the Tradesman (1833–4). The last was published by Alexander Campbell, whose efforts earned him the reputation of the  ‘founding father of the Scottish labour movement’ (Fraser 1996: 35). Glasgow had industrialised rapidly in the nineteenth century and had an established tradition of educational provision for the working classes, thus providing a ready market for material aimed at a working class politicised through exposure to industrialised life. According to Montgomery, Glasgow in the period 1831–6 had thirtyfour unstamped papers, of which sixteen were political, and one, the Herald to the Trades Advocate, was owned and run solely by working men (Montgomery 1980: 155). Despite its suppression by the

­

the press and radical expression

523

authorities, it espoused a reformist, non-violent approach to questions of political representation. The Glasgow papers ranged in politics from trades union, to Owenite socialist, from political reform to occasional proto-Marxist explorations of the inequity of the economic system. Above all, they remained wedded to the ‘Old Corruption’ analysis (Montgomery 1980: 159–60). They were also subject to government intervention: the Herald to the Trades Advocate, for example, was suppressed under the Stamp Acts on 3 June 1831 (ibid.: 164), having reached a circulation of 14,177 (ibid.: 163) by the end of 1830. By the standards of the time, it may have been radical in its cooperative working-class ownership, but it was far from revolutionary in spirit, seeking for better understanding and dialogue and entrusting education as a prerequisite for social change (ibid.: 168).

The Radical Press and Ireland’s Insurrectionary Tradition In Ireland, late eighteenth-century class agitation was galvanised, as in most European countries, by the implications and consequences of the French Revolution. Overlaid on this were the particularities of enforced political union with England, Scotland and Wales in 1800. Revolution and republicanism were considered as potential strategies for Irish radicals, as the influence of these external events were grafted on to internal conditions and social contradictions that had beset Ireland for the best part of a century (Foster 1989: 195–225). The writings of Paine were extremely influential, with seven editions of his Rights of Man published between 1791 and 1792 and Wolfe Tone’s Argument on Behalf of the Catholics (1791) regarded as a key text in the development of the cause of emancipation. Although the taste of the time was more for the pamphlet, regular periodicals also began to play a part in constructing radical arguments and reporting favourably on international revolutionary events. In 1791 the Society of United Irishmen was established and immediately took the decision to initiate its own newspaper, certain in the knowledge that the existing and heavily policed commercial press would not provide the appropriate platform to expound its views or its commentary on current affairs. The Belfast Northern Star was published regularly on Wednesdays and Saturdays from 1 January 1792. The Society of United Irishmen supported the establishment of various branches in Dublin, Belfast and other large towns. The Belfast Northern Star, a radical publication, was founded with Samuel Neilson as editor. It was also initially highly successful as a commercial

524

martin conboy

venture, although perhaps clearly living on borrowed time politically. It lasted until 1797, and by its close Neilson was in prison. This paper was the conduit for the radical  views of Wolfe Tone and William Drennen; in Dublin the Press was its radical counterpart, sponsored by Emmett and Arthur O’Connor. From the start of the Revolutionary Wars, things became more confrontational as the French Revolution could no longer be regarded outside France merely as an exchange of ideas and the triumph of a set of ideals. It triggered existential threats to ruling classes across Europe, and Ireland was no exception. Regular newspapers in Ireland had to tread carefully in a period where limitations were being implemented with increasing zeal by an anxious London government (Stewart 2011: 510). The United Irishmen were drawn into international conspiracies as a means of facilitating change at home, offering support for a French invasion of Britain using Ireland as a base. The radicalised United Irishmen were persecuted, put on trial and suppressed from 1794. Yet, despite this political pressure, in 1797 the Morning Chronicle was established in Dublin, aligned with the aims and views of the United Irishmen. In the 1830s journal restrictions eased somewhat, allowing the Dublin University Magazine to launch as a space for academics, lawyers and writers interested in promoting a vision of a Unionist, Protestant, Irish identity. Of further note was the export of Irish radical journalists to Britain. John Doherty transferred his Voice of the People to London in an effort to make the Owenite cause a national movement. Feargus O’Connor took the lead on the Chartist Northern Star in 1837, and James ‘Bronterre’ O’Brien wrote for and edited several radical publications, including the Poor Man’s Guardian, shifting to the Northern Star from 1838.

Conclusion The radical press sought to fashion a language of analysis that could offer a coherent, popular response to the clear shortcomings of the economic and political situation facing labouring classes at the turn of the nineteenth century. It was a live experiment in analytical, advocacy journalism, which did a great deal to secure the reputation of periodical publications as potential conduits for change. As such, it was never a monologic process, shifting its aims from the insurrectionist provocations of Spenceans and Jacobins of the early part of the century to the later, proto-socialist appeal of Hetherington and the 1830s Chartists.

­

the press and radical expression

525

Although centred mainly in London, such press work was disseminated by enthusiastic agitators and editors based elsewhere, inspiring regional press experiments in radical political thought, and engaging in conversation and dialogue with urban-based press disseminators in turn.

Chapter Twenty

THE POLITICAL PRESS James Thompson

I

t would be very strange indeed if a volume on the British and Irish press in the nineteenth century did not contain a chapter on the political press. Our image of the nineteenth-century press has politics at its very centre (Hilton 2006; Hoppen 1998; Searle 2004). The nineteenth century has often been presented either as the golden age of the serious political press, or as a politics-obsessed era rightly superseded by the twentieth-century media’s discovery of human life in the round. Despite, or perhaps because of, the prevalence of this view of nineteenth-century newspapers, recent years have not seen an outpouring of work on the political press. Indeed, much of the scaffolding of our present understanding dates back decades. Much of the most stimulating writing about the political press has appeared as part of the flowering of political culture as a subject, evident particularly in studies of popular politics with a strong sense of place, along with accounts more concerned to trace the emergence of subjectivities and the nature of governmentality. The growth of digitisation has created new possibilities for the investigation of content at scale, enabling us to trace changing patterns of partisanship, ideology and language use across large numbers of periodicals. It is, therefore, timely to look again at the political press in Britain and Ireland in the nineteenth century. Historians of the political press owe a considerable debt to Stephen Koss’s epic and pioneering two-volume account of The Rise and Fall of the Political Press (Koss 1981, 1984, 1990). Dealing with both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries and rooted in prodigious archival labour, it remains an indispensable starting point and has proven deeply influential. It is, though, now almost forty years since its publication, while the underpinning research and methodology reflect the 526

­

the political press

527

concerns of a decade earlier. Koss’s meticulous quarrying of personal correspondence between editors and politicians was an analogue in media history to the ‘high politics’ research current in the 1970s. It is the world of London clubland evenings and country house weekends – a world of intimate, often intense relationships between pressmen and politicians – that Koss evoked. The result of this approach, as is apparent from a comparison with Alan Lee’s more regionally oriented portrait of The Origins of the Popular Press in England, is a concentration upon Westminster politics (Lee 1976). While Koss argued that the provincial press took its lead from the metropolitan press, and was relatively unimportant, this conclusion reflected his London-centric approach. The understanding of the ‘political’ deployed was premised on a flawed interpretation of the view from the Olympian heights of Victorian politics, comparable to the insistence upon the narrowness and self-sufficiency of the elite in some, though not all, high political history of the time (Craig 2010). As recent work has shown, even the most august late Victorian politicians had little choice but to engage with popular politics and frequently attributed real electoral significance to regional newspapers (Lawrence 2009; Crewe 2015). Lastly, and importantly, while Koss’s work does feature occasional reference to the provincial press in England and Scotland, Welsh and Irish press history was excluded completely (Koss 1990: 21).
 It would, of course, be wrong to overstate the impact on the historiography of The Rise and Fall of the Political Press. As Koss acknowledged, his first volume was chiefly concerned with the second half of the century, in part, he suggested, in recognition of Aspinall’s work, dating back to the 1940s, on the first half of the century (Koss 1990: 20). Aspinall’s Politics and the Press must be one of the few works of its time still to feature regularly in scholars’ footnotes. It offered a pathbreaking picture of the links between government and the press, most particularly the financial links in the form of subsidies. Its story was one of the journey from political control (subsidies) to press ‘freedom’ in the 1850s, and the spectre of totalitarianism could be glimpsed in its definition of ‘freedom’ purely in terms of the absence of state intervention. The conception of ‘politics’ employed was, as in Koss, that of ‘party politics’ (Aspinall 1949: v–vi). In the last generation, however, there has been a series of important studies – often adopting a broader conception of politics – that have fundamentally altered our understanding of the early nineteenth-century press. As Asquith and others have shown, the commercial vitality of the press limited the impact of government

528

james thompson

subsidies or advertising choices on newspaper budgets (Asquith 1975). Historians of radicalism, and Chartism, especially have revealed the significance and the readership achieved by newspapers operating outside the bounds of the established press (Allen and Ashton 2005; Taylor 1995). (This is discussed in Chapter 19 of this volume.) Common to much of this work has been a re-evaluation of the significance of the press outside the metropole, which both Aspinall and Koss tended to downplay. Writing about the political press outside England has itself a lengthy history; Cowan’s ground-breaking survey of the Scottish press, for example, was researched during the Second World War (Cowan 1946). It was, however, only more recently that historians began systematically approaching British history as that of the making and experience of a multi-national polity. Recognition of the distinct situation of the press in Britain and Ireland is long-standing but remains insufficiently integrated. The history of the political press looks importantly different, when Welsh, Scottish and Irish realities receive due recognition. Claims about lessening political engagement in the late nineteenth century – already questionable as a generalisation about England – neglect the deepening nationalist hold upon the Irish provincial press, and the fierce battles fought over the tithe in the Welsh press. Given the centrality of newspapers to nationalism in Scotland, Ireland and Wales, a four nations perspective is essential for grasping the history of the political press (Cowan 1946; Jones 1993; Morash 2010). The efforts of some London-based journals to bolster a Unionist definition of Britishness – evident in the description of Liberals as ‘Separatists’ in the Times – was informed by an awareness of the intimate links between nationalist politicians and the press, especially in Ireland (Thompson 2011: 130). Flows of political news and comment cut across nations; newspaper-reading communities straddled such divides. This was apparent not solely in the penetration of the London papers, but also, for instance, in the importance in North Wales of Liverpool as a press centre (Jones 1993: 5). The legacy of Koss’s work is evident in the extent to which the literature on the political press focuses upon its supposed ‘rise’ and ‘fall’. Discussions of this question have often conflated distinct questions, one about the number and circulation of ‘political’ papers, the other about the degree of ‘politicisation’ among such papers. This debate has, though, impeded a more wide-ranging assessment of the changing character, function and role of the political press. It has tended to treat ‘the political’ as a relatively fixed category, and proceeded to evaluate the extent to which nineteenth-century newspapers were, or were

­

the political press

529

not, political. This is to neglect the degree to which the press was part of a process through which the bounds of the political were asserted, contested, and sometimes recast, over time. As much recent work has shown, the same can be said of ‘party’: newspapers were not simply devices used by pre-existing parties, but rather were part of the process by which party identities were constructed and resisted (Lawrence 1998; Windscheffel 2007). The role of the press in the forging of party was emphasised in some older work, but within a framework that overstated the coherence and dominance of parties within popular politics (Vincent 1966: 61). Historians of the political press have paid considerable attention to individual journalists. Mirroring the predilections of political historians, biographies of celebrated journalists feature prominently (Havighurst 1974; Leventhal 1985). Media scholars, often shaped more by sociology as a discipline, traditionally devoted more effort to structural questions of ownership and to processes of commercialisation (Boyce, Curran and Wingate 1978; Curran and Seaton 1991). Disciplinary differences can conceal commonalities. In both cases, relationships with politicians, and with ‘the public’, loom large: the former in discussions of influence; the latter in debates over bias, representativeness and power. These are important, albeit problematic, questions requiring careful handling. The model of ‘influence’ is not always helpful, given how closely interwoven elements of the London press were with leading politicians. It is hard to separate personal and journalistic influence in such instances: a newspaper like the Westminster Gazette was an integral component of Liberal Party culture rather than an outside factor acting upon it. Similarly, the ‘impact’ of the press on opinion is an elusive topic, although nineteenth-century views of that questions are now much better understood than they were (Hampton 2004b; Jones 1996; Thompson 2013). This chapter, therefore, aims to connect a range of literatures dealing with the political press to develop a clearer view of its rich history. The first section challenges a focus on narratives of ‘rise’ and ‘fall’ by emphasising the extent and the changing nature of coverage of politics across the century. It argues that the press played a central role in constructing the category of ‘the political’, not least in Ireland where a tendency to focus on violence and ‘corruption’ has until recently obscured the importance of newspapers and political speech in the nineteenth century. It goes on to question simple stories about the ‘rationality’ or ‘irrationality’ of the political press in different periods. The chapter then turns to the relationship between political parties and the press. It examines the coexistence of partisanship and a rhetoric of

530

james thompson

‘independence’. It charts the limits on party power, and the dangers of exaggerating the coherence of party in the nineteenth century. Newspapers were, as Koss rightly noted, often a medium for intraparty, as much as inter-party, conflict. The third section then turns to the activists outside party politics for whom newspapers were often particularly significant, whether it be Chartists in the first half of the century or women’s suffrage campaigners in the second. The final part reflects upon the role and significance of the political press in Britain and Ireland in the nineteenth century.

Newspapers and the Nature of the Political The press, and the political press, at the start of the nineteenth century was small by later standards, both in terms of number of titles, and number of copies printed. Aspinall calculated there were nine daily papers in 1783, all published in London, and five devoted to advertising (Aspinall 1946: 6). In 1797, according to Aled Jones, there were no newspapers in Wales, with the nearest being published in Hereford and Bristol (Jones 1993: 1). The Volunteer Evening Post, founded in 1783, expressed the link between patriotism and the press in Ireland, later powerfully displayed by the Northern Star (Morash 2010: 50). Cowan dated the emergence of a self-consciously political press in Scotland to the appearance of the Edinburgh Gazetteer in 1792. While political news was integral to reportage, central features of the later nineteenthcentury political press were absent; Cowan observed that there were no leading articles in Scottish papers in 1815, though the editorial plural, with its suggestion of the newspaper as a corporate entity, was starting to be used (Cowan 1946: 28). As Barker observes, though, and as Irish developments suggest, early nineteenth-century newspapers could be highly oriented towards politics and embody clear political identities (Barker 2000). Koss dated the ‘rise’ of the political press to the 1850s, yet, as Lucy Brown wisely notes, the links between party politicians and the press upon which Koss focused long predated the 1850s (Koss 1990: 26; Brown 1985: 55–6). Political competition between cities, such as that between Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Dundee in 1808–9, often led to the founding of newspapers with strong party allegiances (Cowan 1946: 18). Nonetheless, the scope of the political press geographically was limited. As Miles Taylor has noted, the expansion in the number of newspapers over the nineteenth century was not merely a matter of familiar statutory landmarks, such as the repeal of stamp duty in 1855, nor of technological developments, important as these were. In charting the

­

the political press

531

number of titles first published between 1830 and 1855 (more than 400), and the explosion of new titles established between 1855 and 1861, Taylor concluded political factors played a major role in shaping which papers survived. Competition between, and within, the broad coalitions that were political parties in the nineteenth century was certainly an important spur to the creation of newspapers, and strong financial support from party backers improved the likelihood of survival for newspapers. The Reform Act enhanced party rivalry accelerating the growth in newspaper titles, while the limited inclusivity of the Act intensified extra-party politics. Political dynamics were integral to the pre-1855 geographical expansion of the press that penetrated almost all areas of mainland Britain with the important exceptions of northern Wales and northern Scotland. Mid-century creations were concentrated in Lancashire and Yorkshire, embodying a radical challenge to moderate Liberal papers, especially after the 1857 general election (Taylor 1995: 356–66). If a politically minded regional press was well established in England by 1870, its numerical strength swelled in the remaining decades of the century. According to Lee, the number of provincial dailies rose from fifty-nine in 1870 to 120 by 1880 and then up to 171 in 1900. But such data masks complexities regarding growth and flux: while the second half of the 1870s was a period of marked expansion, the 1880s proved an era of greater financial and economic challenges, which were only resolved during the expansionary period of the 1890s. Classifying the political position of newspapers is a complex, and contested task; contemporaries often differed on where newspapers stood on the political spectrum. Nonetheless, some light can be shed on patterns of partisanship. Using Lee’s figures, excluding ‘independent’ and ‘neutral’ papers, thirty-five regional English dailies had identifiable party preferences in 1868; ninety-two by 1880; 104 in 1886; 111 in 1900. Self-proclaimed ‘independence’ or ‘neutrality’ in the world of nineteenth-century newspapers was often compatible with considerable coverage of politics, and with having a clear position on the ideological spectrum. The number of papers proclaiming ‘independence’ or ‘neutrality’ in the English regions should not be overstated; it ran at about 20 per cent in the 1880s and early 1890s, before increasing sharply at the very end of the century when predictions of the death of the party system were widespread (Lee 1976). Crucially, however, we need to look beyond England. Legg argues that, from mid-century onwards, the language of independence became less popular in Ireland, while the number of provincial papers grew from sixty-five in 1850 to 103 in 1865 before rising to 120 in 1879

532

james thompson

and 144 by the end of the 1880s. It was, though, in the 1890s that Legg found the urge to establish political papers to be greatest, while by the end of 1880s almost a third of newspapers were pronouncing themselves ‘nationalist’, with a concentration in the south and south-west of Ireland (Legg 1999: 19). It is thus apparent that the number of newspapers covering politics remained high up till the end of the nineteenth century. Koss argued that it was the general elections of 1950 and 1951 that really signalled the end of ‘the old-fashioned party tied rag’ (Koss 1990: 451). He suggested that the Edwardian period witnessed a revival of journalistic interest in and engagement with politics, observing that ‘the political press continued to rise after 1901, though increasingly in uncharted directions’. Given the intense passions aroused by politics in the years up to 1914 – evident in the massive mobilisation around the fiscal question –­­ this is highly plausible (Lawrence 2009; Thompson 2007; Trentmann 2009). Newspaper interventions in both national and local elections – as well exemplified by the 1907 London County Council elections – confirm that the press both reflected and contributed to the political ferment of the pre-war years (Thompson 2017). It is important not to overstate any supposed decline in political engagement in the fin-de-siècle press. The reduction of reporting of parliamentary debates was certainly a feature of some newspapers, but it was not universal, nor was it necessarily a marker of a lessening interest in politics per se. The strenuous efforts of the Daily Chronicle, for example, through specially commissioned illustrations and accompanying articles to eulogise the achievements of the London County Council in 1895, demonstrated a clear willingness to turn new journalistic techniques to political ends. The Daily Mail – sometimes presented, including by those associated with it, as putting politics in its place – remained highly political, and often highly partisan, before 1914, as testified by its vociferous coverage of London County Council elections, and its various stunt campaigns on issues like the ‘Soap Trust’ (Thompson 2017). The way in which newspapers discussed politics, and thus helped define what was politics, undoubtedly changed over the century. This was apparent in the growth of coverage of the labour question in the late nineteenth century, notably in the pages of the Daily Chronicle. It was also, and relatedly, evident in attention to ‘unemployment’ in the 1890s as a discernible economic phenomenon, but also as a political problem (Harris 1972). Such extensions of the ambit of politics were vigorously contested, but this very contestation was itself political, and seen as such. Newspapers were central to the everyday struggle over

­

the political press

533

the boundaries of the political. The labour press, while small, energetically promoted a broader conception of politics embracing economics and the social, as did women’s suffrage campaigners in the early twentieth century. This process whereby newspapers played a part in determining what was considered political was not confined to the last part of the century, or to labour questions. In campaigns against the stamp duty, radical journalists had argued that reducing the costs of information was essential for the spread of enlightened liberty, casting the newspaper industry itself as a political cause (Hewitt 2015; Hollis 1970; Thomas 1979). Struggles over the meaning of the constitution were central to nineteenth-century political culture, and were often conducted through the medium of the press (Hawkins 2015; Vernon 1996). For example, the right-leaning Banner was established in 1883 ‘to support the constitutional party in the state’, and exemplified the Conservative attempt to cast Liberal policy towards Ireland as unconstitutional (Koss 1990: 249). Historians have long noted the intense moralism of W. T. Stead’s brand of campaigning journalism, which was fiercely attached to a reading of personal conduct in which he sought to make the personal political. In the influential work of Colin Matthew, the press in the second half of the nineteenth press was held to foster a liberal political culture, albeit one threatened by the developments of the 1890s. Matthew emphasised the role of extensive reporting of extra-parliamentary speech-making in creating a political culture congenial to liberalism that prized sustained argument and gave readers direct access to the views of politicians of disparate views. He suggested that changes in the media, and the emergence of more identity-based forms of electoral behaviour, eroded this culture, so damaging the prospects of both liberalism and the Liberal Party (Matthew 1987). Matthew’s argument extended earlier accounts of the symbiosis between the press and liberalism in the middle of the century and was echoed by subsequent analysis of popular Gladstonian liberalism (Biagini 1992; Vincent 1966). Matthew overstated the decline of speech-reporting before 1914. His picture of liberalism downplayed its more demotic, sloganeering aspects, while underestimating the role of extended speechmaking elsewhere on the political spectrum. The focus of Mathew’s argument was on the written word, though he wrote elsewhere with great appreciation about political cartoonists. Through their use of stock figures and iconic devices, cartoonists – who could be, as in the case of Carruthers Gould at the Westminster Gazette, senior editorial figures and significant commercial assets – employed

534

james thompson

an established pictorial vocabulary to construct condensed visual arguments. While it is thus misleading to present ‘word’ and ‘image’ as antithetical, it is important to integrate the visual into accounts of the political press, as is discussed more fully elsewhere in this volume. Mid- and late Victorian political cartoons have often contrasted with their eighteenth and early nineteenth-century precursors, usually to the latter’s advantage. As more generally in the historiography of nineteenth-century Britain, the growth of respectability is much emphasised (Thompson 1988). While the scatological energy of Georgian printmakers was not characteristic of the latter period, it is important not to exaggerate the politeness of Victorian political cartooning, not least in the vibrant and often highly partisan comic press. A series portraying Gladstone making a rake’s progress first published in St Stephen’s Review may have omitted the black spots signifying syphilis, visible in the Hogarthian original, but it certainly did not lack satirical bite (Merry 1884). While Carruthers Gould was admired by those on the political right, his cartoons nonetheless generated controversy, and could be hard-hitting, as could those of Halkett attacking the Liberal Party from the political right. Over time, as the pictorial construction and iconography of cartoons became simpler, the prominence of representations of individual politicians grew (Thompson 2007). As Tom Crewe has noted, portraits of politicians in the illustrated press became less formal in the last decades of the century (Crewe 2015). This more informal style was humanising, presenting politicians as relatable ‘characters’ (see Figure 20.1). The visual shorthand of caricature – the Chamberlain monocle, the Gladstonian collar – intimated familiarity and imparted an emblematic quality of personifying a larger type (Cordery and Meisel 2014). These representational styles built upon but also remade enduring tropes for rendering the gentlemanly leader, helping to bind voters and non-voters alike into a refashioned political nation. As part of this process, politicians were to be found in mid- and late nineteenth-­century lists of celebrities deserving of newspaper profiles and extended interview. Gladstone, Russell, Derby, Bright, Rosebery, Hartington and Lowe all featured in the World’s innovative and later much copied series on ‘Celebrities at Home’ (Crewe 2015: 70; LansdallWelfare et al. 2017). The changing character of the political press, and its incorporation of politicians into a developing celebrity culture did, though, shift understandings of what was politics, as well as altering ways of practising it. As the most frequently appearing newspapers moved increasingly to daily production, and as evening papers spread from the 1870s,

­

the political press

535

Figure 20.1  ‘United Ireland’. Irish newspapers at the close of the century were often fiercely political. The 1890s saw an increased presence for political cartooning within the press (© British Library Board)

the rhythm of political news accelerated (Jones 1990: 26). Weeklies, however, remained influential throughout and beyond the century. Political time did not pass at a single speed; monthlies may have overhauled quarterlies but periodicals continued to be a valued vehicle for extended political argument, and a useful means for politicians of both testing policy proposals and exhibiting ‘seriousness’. The rise of the parliamentary press lobby in the 1880s deepened links between MPs and journalists, but journalistic interest in Parliament could be extended to coverage of institutions that borrowed its forms, such as the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, the Trades Union Congress, or indeed local mock parliaments (Goldman 2002; Thompson 2013). In these ways, the political press throughout the century connected localities to the capital, and vice versa.

536

james thompson

The relationship was, of course, much contested, as regional papers sought to assert their independence and significance in the face of the expansionary impulses of the London press. By the close of the century, much of the Irish press was both highly regional and powerfully nationalist; while in Scotland the Glasgow Herald combined a sense of being a Scotland-wide paper with extensive London coverage, pride in its metropolitan reputation, and rivalry with the Edinburgh-based Scotsman. In different parts of the United Kingdom, the relationship between political parties and the press took distinct forms. It is to that relationship that we now turn.

Parties, Politicians and the Press As indicated in the introduction, relations between parties and newspapers have been central to the historiography of the political press. Historians have offered differing interpretations of the balance of power in this relationship, as well as disagreeing over questions of chronology. In the last twenty years political historians have usefully charted the enduring popular scepticism towards central party organisation, drawing extensively upon the evidence of local newspapers to highlight the persistence of the politics of place (Lawrence 1998). Newspapers could argue against the growth of party machinery in the constituencies, as well as assist in the formation of party feeling. The attribution of party labels to newspapers could be a matter of considerable dispute, and it was not simply the Times that sought to present itself as above the partisan fray. It is therefore essential to consider both the various uses to which political parties sought to put the press, and to distinguish between different parts of the political press. From the perspective of political leaders, the press could serve as one element of an ‘elaborate system of party management’, particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century (Koss 1990: 9). Party managers attempted to use the London press to discipline backbench MPs, as when, for example, the Liberals tried using the Daily News (Brown 1985: 179). The need to do this reflected real problems in coordinating MPs, but newspapers were far from a dependable means of doing so (Parry 1993). Rather than a device for exerting control, the London press might, as it did during the second Gladstonian government in the 1880s, act primarily as a means for Cabinet rivals to advance their own agendas. In both the 1850s and 1890s, for instance, complex factional divisions within and beyond the Liberal Party were replicated in the pattern of allegiance within the political press. This phenomenon was not,

­

the political press

537

though, restricted to those decades: nineteenth-century parties were broad ideological coalitions, and representing their component parts was an enduring function of the political press. The London press – many titles of which were linked from the 1830s to the new partisan clubs and emerging forms of broader party organisation – was thus integrated into the structures and networks of elite politics, though interactions between politicians and journalists were rarely straightforward, or without frustrations on both sides. While the press was often reliant upon politicians for precious information, the power of party organisation was limited, not least by the inability to control more senior political figures in a milieu rife with off-the-record conversations between politicians and journalists. Politicians could also benefit from close relations with newspapers in their constituencies and home towns, as with Joseph Chamberlain and the Birmingham Daily Post (Koss 1990: 219). This helped cement the local sway of a politician – important in an era of suffrage extension and often fierce electoral competition – and provided an outlet for doctrinal musings and self-projection beyond the pages of the Fleet Street press. The links between politicians and the local press could either diminish or amplify the voice of party. Joseph Cowen’s use of the press of north-east England in the 1870s, for example, fell into the first category, and promoted his identification with what his biographer referred to as ‘the banks of the Tyne … the rendezvous of a sturdy outspoken democracy’ (Jones 1885: 3; Todd 1991: 51). Cultivating the regional press could communicate an anti-­ metropolitan political identity; it could, as it did in Cowen, express sharp hostility to the centralising forces and party machinery. As observed previously, during the closing decades of the century in Ireland, the regional press became increasingly nationalist and politicised. Parnell especially advanced his agenda, and persona, through the press, especially in the less fervent period after the Land War of 1879­­–82, via the pages of William O’Brien’s United Ireland (Loughlin 1991). Political journalists were strongly represented in the Irish Parliamentary Party of the 1890s, which built upon the developments of the 1880s (Foster 1987: 93). Likewise, the relationship between party and the press was strongest in Wales in the tithe controversies at the end of the century (Jones 1990: 169). In both Wales and Ireland, politicians collaborated with a local political press that could also be a vehicle for the expression of national feeling, not least – especially in the latter case – through criticism of English policies and attitudes. In these cases, there was a close alignment between individual ambitions and party interests.

538

james thompson

The partisan commitments of newspapers could spring from journalists, editors and proprietors operating independently from the organised machinery of party. It was right-wing journalists who created the Conservative press in nineteenth-century Wales rather than politicians (Jones 1990: 125). For most of the century good political coverage and a discernible political identity were commercial assets for newspapers; journalists tended to work for papers whose politics they shared. The proud proclamation of allegiance – the Daily News’s self-description as a ‘Liberal’ paper – was common, but was also often combined with a definable location within the spectrum of party views. Political newspapers could seek to cast their version of ‘Liberal’ or ‘Conservative’ doctrine as the definitive account of party ethos, although there was also widespread recognition of the breadth of the respective creeds. The 1850s and 1890s were periods in which the factional character of the press was especially apparent: the Morning Star was perceived as Cobdenite, the Morning Chronicle was regarded as Peelite. However – whether papers were identified, or identified themselves, with particular groups – the rhetoric of independence was rarely wholly eschewed. Commercial imperatives, journalistic self-image, and ambivalence about party, all pointed towards the assertion of autonomy. Prevailing ideas about ‘public opinion’ conferred an important representative role upon the press, fostering attention to competition in an imagined market place of ideas (Thompson 2013). Proprietors could and did seek to determine editorial lines, and political insiders possessed valuable information; but the relationship to broader currents of opinion was an important consideration for newspapers throughout the century. The efforts of individual politicians to mobilise the media have been much studied in recent years, largely through close attention to correspondence, and in the case of Gladstone, through diaries. While nineteenth-century politicians acknowledged the significance of the press, not least at events celebrating notable journalists, contemporary conceptions of statesmanship encouraged a public stance of being above the journalistic affray. The growth of extra-parliamentary speaking by leading Westminster politicians was compatible with this ideal, as it positioned the press as chiefly recording and reproducing public speech. Given dominant understandings of the constitutional function of the press, it suited neither politicians nor journalists to rehearse the full extent of their dealings. It was consequently a surprise to their editor H. C. G. Matthew when Gladstone’s diaries revealed the frequency of his meetings with favoured journalists in the 1860s. In this respect, as in others, Gladstone built upon precedent, notably Palmerston’s cultivation of the press.

­

the political press

539

Palmerston was shrewd in his courting of the press and exploited his capacity to supply foreign news in the 1840s to telling effect: both the Globe and the Morning Chronicle benefited from the foreign secretary’s revelations (Brown 2001; Kingsley Martin 1924). Palmerston’s attention to newspapers was partly a strategy to distinguish himself from Whigs in general, and Lord John Russell in particular, but also reflected a desire to work through the force of ‘public opinion’, in contrast to more conservative strategies of rule both at home and abroad (Lamb 1993; Parry 1993: 186–91). His relations with the press were both enduring and intense, and the support of the Chronicle and the Morning Post bolstered his parliamentary position in the 1850s. Brown has contrasted Palmerston’s exchange of information for support with the strategy of ownership adopted by the Peelites after 1848, through management of the Morning Chronicle, and Disraeli’s use of the Press in 1853 (Brown 2010). Palmerston recognised the commercial demands on newspapers, and their need to retain close contact with their readership’s views (Steele 1985: 118). As well as understanding the market value of information, Palmerston grasped the press’s capacity to amplify extra-parliamentary speech, notably in his 1855 speaking tour, and was an early adopter of speech as a part of a larger ‘political event’ (Crewe 2015: 25). In both his relations with journalists and his use of extra-­­ parliamentary speaking, Gladstone owed a debt to Palmerston, evident in the coordination of their speaking engagements in 1860 (Steele 1985: 132). Gladstone’s platform speaking was episodic rather than continual, but nonetheless set important precedents. As recent work has demonstrated, extra-parliamentary speaking was a cross-party phenomenon in late Victorian Britain, and serious politicians of all stripes needed to meet the demand for sustained argument in an importantly liberal political culture (Crewe 2015; Thompson 2013). This demand persisted beyond 1900 and was deeply inscribed in early Labour politics and publicity. Enthusiasm for extended political speech could be harnessed by the party machine, but it could also be harnessed by ambitious individuals. The press could also initiate campaigns itself, as activist editors like W. T. Stead argued was its duty as well as its right. The next section looks at press campaigning, and at newspapers as vehicles for extra-party politics.

Press Campaigns, Agitation and Extra-Party Politics Press historians have devoted much attention to the ‘New Journalism’ of the 1880s, often stressing its roots in established practices in popular

540

james thompson

weekly newspapers. Press developments of the 1890s, most obviously the founding of the mass-market Daily Mail, have likewise been subjected to repeated scrutiny. The sustained press campaign on a single issue was certainly a characteristic of W. T. Stead’s time at the Pall Mall Gazette in the 1880s, and one that exercised a real influence upon later practices. The Pall Mall’s series of articles in 1884 on the state of the Navy drew upon leaks from naval officer and future sea lord John Fisher, while the famous Gordon editorial was linked to an interview conducted by Stead (Pall Mall Gazette, 9 January 1884). There was, however, a real sense of the paper seeking to create a stir, most evident in ‘The Maiden Tribute of Babylon’ reporting of July 1885. This kind of journalism was not unprecedented, but it did intensify in the final years of the century, reflecting an enhanced sense of the power of ‘public opinion’. It became used as a model for political reporting by parts of the press, especially during the ideologically riven politics of Edwardian England. This was apparent, for example, in the Daily Mail’s approach to the 1907 London County Council elections, and in journalism on both sides of the tariff controversy (Thompson 2017; Trentmann 2009). In this respect, the press was becoming more not less political at the close of the century. As Hannah Barker has argued, print culture was integral to radical politics in nineteenth-century Britain (Barker 2000: 223). Print was important to reformers of a wide range of political hues. For philosophic radicals in the 1820s and 1830s, periodicals and news­ papers were central to their sense of identity and political purpose. The sustained argument offered quarterly from 1824 by the Westminster Review was for Utilitarian Liberals a welcome riposte to the doctrines of the Edinburgh and the Quarterly Review. In the 1830s, under Albany Fonblanque, the Examiner provided a weekly equivalent with a sharp satirical edge (Thomas 1979). The conviction that the written word offered a weapon against the status quo extended well beyond the relatively small forces of committed philosophic radicals and Benthamites. The currency of ‘steam intellect’ and ‘useful knowledge’ encapsulated a broader belief that popular enlightenment would overwhelm hidebound institutions. This conviction was often apparent in successful local struggles against unreformed urban corporations (Trinder 1982). It was the Anti-Corn Law League that offered the most developed example of an association organising for a political cause in the first half of the nineteenth century, albeit one with important antecedents in anti-slavery campaigning and radical political culture (Howe 1997: 30). The League adopted a variety of methods to advance its views and publicise its activities through the press. It paid for adverts in the press,

­

the political press

541

bulk-purchased copies of newspapers in return for sympathetic coverage, subsidised favourable newspapers, produced its own periodicals, including the Anti-Corn Law Circular, and supplied ‘experts’ to write pro-free trade columns (Howe 1997: 30–7; McCord 1968: 181–7). The most enduring legacy of its efforts was The Economist, founded as a free trade publication rather than a narrowly pro-League organ, but that was nonetheless indebted to the League’s support in its early years. The Economist outgrew its immediate origins, particularly under the editorship of Walter Bagehot between 1861 and 1877, to establish itself as a respected source of news and views, especially on financial matters (Edwards 1993: 271­­–2). The press strategy of the League, however, went far beyond The Economist, embracing attempts to use local newspapers, such as the Sheffield Iris, and, less successfully, to reach poorer readers through the cheap press (Pickering and Tyrell 2000: 152­­–4). The League proved influential through its campaigning devices, but also through an idealised account of its actions. It came to be widely seen to epitomise the power of ‘public opinion’ in British political culture (Thompson 2013: 91, 149). Historians have devoted considerable attention to the relationship between the League and Chartism (Pickering and Tyrell 2000: 139– 65; Stedman Jones 1983: 90–179). One thing they shared was attentiveness to the efficacy of the written word. In recent years, important work has demonstrated the centrality of print journalism to Chartist political culture, and extended our understanding of its geographical spread (Allen and Ashton 2005; Taylor 2003). (The radical press is covered in more detail in Chapter 19 of this volume.) Between 1838 and 1858 around 120 Chartist newspapers were founded. Many had brief lives, but some, most conspicuously the Northern Star, survived longer and secured significant readerships. Attention to O’Connor’s use of free engraved portraits to boost sales and foster a respectable Chartist identity has confirmed the status of the Northern Star within Chartist print culture (Chase 2005). The integrative role performed nationally by the Star was unusual among Chartist papers, most of which had a more localised appeal. Nonetheless, the Chartist press network connected different areas, and the Star especially transcended local particularities. Chartist newspapers were not confined to England, nor to the British Isles. The Northern Star took its name from the Irish paper of the 1790s, with which O’Connor’s father had been associated; Scottish Chartist publications sought to combine Chartism and Christianity with hostility to existing churches; Irish Chartist papers pondered the relationship between nationalism, democracy and Catholicism. As

542

james thompson

elsewhere, newspapers were often vehicles for political rivalries, and the construction of personal followings, as O’Connor’s proprietorship of the Northern Star well exemplifies through its promotion of the ‘gentlemanly leader’. Competition between cities was evident here too, as the history of the Chartist press in Edinburgh and Glasgow testifies. While Chartism’s relationship to popular culture was complex, the diversity of material in the Chartist press, incorporating fiction, politics and crime, anticipated popular Sunday newspapers, particularly Reynolds’s, upon whose practices the mass daily press of the 1890s drew. The socialist press of the 1880s and 1890s shared features with its Chartist predecessor, including the short lifespan of many publications, sharp rivalries between papers, and close ties to individual personalities. Like the Chartist print culture, it was also a site for sustained political debate, attuned to international currents. For many contributors, writing in the London socialist press of the 1880s was a highly self-conscious act, a kind of self-making fraught with personal and moral significance. The print culture of late Victorian socialism unsurprisingly owed something to that of advanced liberalism, not least in the importance of political discussion in monthly periodicals, although publications like the Practical Socialist, Our Corner, the Sower and Today­­were more homespun in style and closely tied to progressive and socialist meetings and groups. Socialist journalism did, however, also produce weeklies that proved more enduring than their Chartist precursors, notably Labour Leader, Clarion and Justice. The role of fiction and poetry in these publications remains underexplored, but these clearly served a political function, and echoed earlier radical publishing strategies. Cartoons featured more prominently in such publications, reflecting technical changes and the rise of illustrated papers as genre. These could be satirical, as well as the now more familiar imagery of the craft tradition associated with Walter Crane. Clarion also included portraits, in keeping with broader representational trends and the radical inheritance, though the balance of imagery across genres differed from the publications of the 1840s (Miller 2015). Reading Clarion – although this also applies to other papers of the left – was often one element of a broader socialist way of living, extending into domestic life and leisure. This was an active sort of reading, closely linked to speaking and discussion, embodying a strenuous conception of the political and personal demands of the new life. The readership of the socialist press may have been small compared to the mass-audience papers of the 1890s, but its belief in the political power of publicity was much noted,

­

the political press

543

and its reach and efficacy often overstated by its ideological opponents. Its existence thus served to foster attention to politics within the press more broadly, as well as to extend the meanings of the political. The role of the press in the propagation of political ideas was central to the emergence and growth of a women’s movement in the second half of the nineteenth century, a theme explored further in Chapter 26 of this volume. A good example of such engagement could be found in the English Woman’s Journal, supported by Barbara Bodichon, which offered monthly updates on the wide-ranging activities of the women activists associated with Langham Place in London in the late 1850s and 1860s. It provided a forum for feminist concerns through reporting, fiction and comment, connecting women well beyond the capital in a community of readers. The campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s, led by Josephine Butler, rallied a range of political actors in defence of the rights of women. The weekly Shield was one of several press outlets that functioned as promoters of the campaign, and was edited by Josephine Butler herself. Its coverage embodied the wide-ranging discussions of class, gender and sexuality that characterised the diverse movement opposed to the Contagious Diseases Acts. As with earlier Chartist publications, and later socialist journals, the Shield offered both a clearing house of news and views, and a source of shared identity and purpose. The Women’s Suffrage Journal that ran from 1870 to 1890 was, like many radical political prints, dependent on its creator for sustainability, in its case the feminist Lydia Becker. It linked the work of various local suffrage societies, reported on national political developments especially in Parliament, and published readers’ letters. Its coverage was far from confined to the suffrage question, but rather incorporated a wealth of issues relevant to feminist women, not least through the letters pages (Brake and Demoor 2009). Within the feminist press, letters pages provided a valued space for readers to discuss topics difficult to broach elsewhere, and in doing so helped foster a sense of community. The very act of writing, and publishing, in the feminist press was an assertion of agency and subjectivity, and in that sense inherently political. It was not, of course, only radicals or feminists for whom newspapers were an important means of political expression in the nineteenth century. Associations of diverse politics created bespoke journals to advance their views, link their members, and bolster their cohesion. The broad left was, though, especially committed to an enlightened conception of public opinion within which the press, along with the petition and public meeting, had significance. It also often had weaker

544

james thompson

access to established periodicals. The prevalence across the political spectrum of similar publicity strategies reflected the dominance of a broadly Liberal understanding of public opinion, as well as the realities of communication in nineteenth-century Britain (Thompson 2013).

Conclusion This chapter has examined the political press in nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland. It has sought to move debate on from narratives of its rise and fall in part by demonstrating the enduring significance of the political press throughout the century. It has done so not least through embracing a four-nations perspective that brings out the importance of the press to nationalist politics in late Victorian Wales and Ireland. It has challenged accounts that focus upon evaluating the supposed ‘rationality’ or ‘irrationality’ of press debate. The mut­ able and constructed nature of ‘politics’ has been stressed throughout. This complicates attempts to establish predetermined benchmarks for politicisation, and encourages instead an exploration of the broadening of understandings of the political across the period as a whole. The press played a crucial part in these processes, both as a venue for the exchange of ideas and the discussion of principles, but also as a vehicle for the assertion of new political identities and communities. The press played a central part in the history of the political party in the nineteenth century. This certainly included the consolidation of party identities at Westminster visible in the 1830s and 1860s. It also, however, embraced the history of popular hostility to centralised parties, and the importance of the politics of place in Victorian Britain. The political press was often a conduit for individual and factional rivalries. The limits on, as well as the realities of, parties within the structure of politics in Britain need recognising in writing the history of the political press. While metropolitan papers had undoubted importance and influence within British print culture, the significance of the regional and national press outside London demands recognition. Regional and local papers helped preserve the politics of place, often with the connivance of local politicians. Intense newspaper competition in Scotland and Wales reflected distinctive preoccupations, whether it be rivalry between Glasgow and Edinburgh, or the anti-tithe agitation in late Victorian Wales. In Ireland, region and nation increasingly reinforced each other in the nationalist press of the 1880s and 1890s. The history of the political press that emerges has change and contestation at its heart. What is clear, though, is the impossibility of understanding

­

case study 14 : the glasgow herald

545

either politics or the press in nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland without attention to the other.

Case Study 14: The Glasgow Herald James Thompson In 1958, in the pages of a striking publication marking the 175th anniversary of the Glasgow Herald, the Glaswegian political scientist D. W. Brogan reflected upon the significance of the paper. In his youth, he noted, there were five Glasgow papers, with a sixth arriving in 1915, but the Herald was not one among several: ‘it was a thing in itself’. For Brogan, the paper’s long history was central to its status as a Glaswegian monument for ‘it was one of the oldest institutions in a city not kind to old institutions’ (Brogan 1958). The Glasgow Herald, 1783–1958 was, though, not the first memorial to the paper’s accomplishments. The 150th anniversary had already been marked through a handsome newspaper supplement in 1933, prior to which the Scottish Historical Exhibition of 1911 had given rise to The Glasgow Herald – The Story of a Great Newspaper. The urge to celebrate the paper’s lineage was already apparent in the nineteenth century itself, although confusion about its origins led to the centenary dinner taking place in 1882 rather than 1883. The paper’s memorialisation reflects the multiple identities it developed in the nineteenth century. By 1911, as reproduced in the souvenir catalogue, the weekly version proudly proclaimed itself ‘Scotland’s National Newspaper’ (Anon. 1911). Yet, as Denis Brogan’s remembrances suggest, the paper was also strongly identified with Glasgow. Brogan ended by describing the Herald as perhaps ‘more useful than sweet’, but argued this was in keeping with ‘the spirit of the city’, and that ‘pleasure-seeking’ could be left to the ‘youthful’ Edinburgh press (Brogan 1958). There was, though, a third aspect to the paper’s self-conception, as apparent in the attention given to the creation of a special wire service from London in 1866, followed by a Fleet Street office in 1870, along with the methods of distributing the paper to ‘its thousands of readers throughout the British Isles’ (Anon. 1911). This was a paper whose self-perception, one that was widely shared, was as at once Glaswegian, Scottish and British (see Figure 20.2). At the 1882 dinner, the then editor, James Stoddart, declared that ‘during the hundred years of its existence it never was at any time the tool of party’. Proud boasts of ‘independence and freedom’ were part of the rhetoric and selfimage of the nineteenth-century political press; these could coincide with close relations in practice with political parties (Anon. 1911). The Herald nicely exemplifies some of these complexities. Brogan remembered his Liberal father respectfully recalling that, while Unionist, the Edwardian Herald remained

546

james thompson

Figure 20.2  The Glasgow Herald’s self-image was as Glaswegian, and as Scottish, but also as an important force in UK journalism, hence the prominence here of its London office (© British Library Board) pro-free trade ‘as befitted the newspaper contemporary with Adam Smith’ (Brogan 1958). As a Liberal Unionist paper in the last decade of the nineteenth century, edited by a Vice President of the West of Scotland Liberal Unionist Association, the Herald retained its support for temperance (Cawood 2012: 59). It was not, however, constant in its political allegiance over the nineteenth century. Under Samuel Hunter at the start of the century, it was a Tory paper, though generally cautiously so, with parliamentary reporting widely regarded as full and reliable, and some contemporary evidence that it satisfied many Whigs as well as Tories (ODNB). Hunter was certainly anti-radical, and the potential tensions between his views and those of many Glaswegians, became

­

case study 14 : the glasgow herald

547

apparent over Hunter’s opposition to parliamentary reform in 1831, during which his effigy was burnt at Glasgow Cross. Hunter favoured tax reductions and objected to the cost of Canningite diplomacy. He was succeeded after a mammoth thirty-four-year editorship by George Outram. Editor from 1837 to 1856, Outram preserved a stance of moderate conservativism while embracing a forceful Scottish patriotism. Under his successor, James Pagan, the Herald became a daily newspaper in 1859, and its price was lowered from 3d to 1d, driven in part by competition with the rival Glasgow Courier. Pagan was regarded by his obituarists as, in the words of the Dundee Courier, ‘generally steering the middle path’, and consolidating the position of the Herald as ‘the great commercial organ of the manufacturing interests of Scotland’ (Anon. 1870). Under his editorship, the Herald opposed rigid Sabbatarians and extended its coverage of political and religious meetings, including verbatim reporting of the General Assembly. In the early 1870s William Jack interrupted his long academic career to edit the paper before responsibility passed on to J. H. Stoddart. Stoddart had an established connection to the paper and was thought to have been the prime mover behind its support for the North in the American Civil War. While Jack’s editorship saw the paper’s reputation outside of Glasgow grow, it was under Stoddart that its status as a nationally significant Liberal organ was firmly established. Occupying a London office with Wemyss Reid’s Leeds Mercury, and, like the Mercury, receiving foreign news via the Standard, the Herald was strongly Gladstonian through the 1870s and early 1880s, pointedly observing on the death of Disraeli that ‘certain points of his career cannot be defended on the ordinary conceptions of honour and truth’ (Burnet in Brogan 1958). It was in the late 1880s that the Herald moved towards Liberal Unionism. Charles Russell, who succeeded Stoddart as editor in 1888, was prominent in local Liberal Unionism. His was a serious creed – his obituary in the Times noted his popularity in university circles and described the study of foreign languages as ‘his only hobby’ – in keeping with the longstanding ethos of the paper (Times). Nonetheless, under Russell in the 1890s the paper could be sharply partisan, attacking defeated Liberals as ‘the tribe of carpet-bag prigs’ who prompted by ‘caucuses and dissenting Presbyteries’ had been ‘good enough to come down to Scotland of recent years and teach its inhabitants the rudiments of politics out of the abundance of their supercilious superficiality’ (Burnet 1958). As with the vast majority of the political press, the Herald covered much more than politics, and its influence depended in part on that broader coverage. In the closing years of the century, it added literary lustre to an established reputation for commercial news. The weekly version of the paper had in 1879 published Meredith’s The Egoist, and its London-based art critic of the

548

felix m. larkin

1880s, William Sharp, became notably well connected. Arts coverage was not, though, allowed to distract from the imperative to maintain its catalogue of commercial life, not least the ‘annual statistics of shipbuilding and engineering’ it described as ‘world-renowned’ (Anon. 1911). Its self-image as the embodiment of Scottish commerce was widely accepted by its peers, with the Inverness Courier describing it in 1870 ‘as the great commercial organ of the manufacturing interests of Scotland’ (Anon. 1870). The Herald’s sense of itself as simultaneously Glaswegian, Scottish and British was informed by an ethos in which the progressive spirit of British industry was identified with Scottish, and more particularly, Glaswegian enterprise. The 150th anniversary supplement presented the growth of city and newspaper as two parts of a whole (Anon. 1933). Its thorough reporting of political speeches itself served to integrate locality and nations, as well as typifying more general patterns in the political press in the second half of the nineteenth century. The paper’s manager attributed a small fall in circulation in 1895 to Gladstone’s retirement from politics, and quoted the Press Association’s claim that his departure had cost them £1,000 that year (Anon. 1933). The chequered history of the paper’s relationship to political parties, alongside its vigorous commitment to ‘independence’, is a reminder of the complex and changing character of the nineteenth-century political press.

Case Study 15: Parnell, Edmund Dwyer Gray and the Press in Ireland Felix M. Larkin Charles Stewart Parnell, the pre-eminent nationalist political leader in Ireland in the late nineteenth century, was first elected to Parliament in a by-election held on 17 April 1875. Seven days earlier Sir John Gray had died in Bath. Since 1841 Gray had been proprietor of Dublin’s Freeman’s Journal, the leading nationalist daily newspaper in Ireland, and the only one published in Dublin. It now became the property of his son, Edmund Dwyer Gray (see Figure 20.3) – Parnell’s almost exact contemporary. This essay will consider their intertwined careers in the worlds of politics and newspapers, and will also explore the later history of the Freeman after Edmund Dwyer Gray’s premature death, aged forty-two, in 1888. Parnell would likewise die young in 1891, less than a year after the infamous ‘split’ in the ranks of his Irish Home Rule Party at Westminster as a result of the O’Shea divorce case, in which Parnell was named as the co-respondent. The Irish Daily Independent which Parnell established in opposition to the Freeman just before his death – although the first issue did not appear until two months after his death – is arguably his most enduring legacy to the people of Ireland (Larkin 2013b: 88).

­

case study 15 : parnell, dwyer gray and the press 549

Figure 20.3  Portrait of Edmund Dwyer Gray (Courtesy of Archives Office of Tasmania) The power of the press was coming to its zenith in Britain and Ireland during the period of Parnell’s political career, and he clearly recognised its influence. He was ‘alive to the importance of the role of the press in getting his speeches accurately reported to the public beyond his immediate audience’, and his speeches were rarely longer than would make up a single newspaper column, so as to ensure that they were reported in full and not distorted by being abbreviated to fill the space available (McCartney 2006: 47). He himself attested to the influence of the press when in August 1891, at the height of the crisis of the Parnell ‘split’, he said: The profession of journalism is a great and powerful one in these days. It is likely to become more influential as the years go by. The readers of

550

felix m. larkin

newspapers increase from time to time, and the press is becoming even mightier than the politician … In these days politics and journalism run very much together, and a tendency is more and more to combine the two. (Freeman’s Journal, 29 August 1891; Byrne 1991: 4) Nowhere was this tendency of politics and journalism to run together more evident than in Parnell’s party at Westminster. Many of his closest associates were, or had been, journalists or otherwise associated with newspapers. They included Justin McCarthy, T. P. O’Connor, William O’Brien, Thomas Sexton, J. J. O’Kelly, T. C. Harrington and T. M. Healy and his uncles, the brothers A. M. and T. D. Sullivan – as well as Edmund Dwyer Gray (Larkin 2013a: 126–9). Gray was first elected to Parliament in 1877, two years after Parnell. He was a capable and ambitious politician. But for Parnell he might have led the Irish Home Rule Party. To protect his political prospects, Gray strongly opposed Parnell’s rise within the party. He threw the weight of the Freeman unsuccessfully against Parnell’s candidate in a decisive by-election in Ennis, County Clare, in 1879 – and later he smeared Parnell by accusing him of having called certain colleagues in the party ‘papist rats’. When, after the 1880 general election, Parnell was elected party leader, Gray was one of eighteen MPs who voted against him – out of a total of forty-three (Larkin 2007: 130). Thereafter, however, he largely supported Parnell’s leadership – partly because he accepted that Parnell was now invincible, but also because in 1881 Parnell established his own newspaper, the weekly United Ireland, with William O’Brien, later MP, as editor. The threat that United Ireland might be turned into a daily publication to rival the Freeman underpinned Gray’s loyalty to Parnell. The business side of running the newspaper was at least as important to Gray as politics: he was exceedingly rich and wished to preserve and expand his business. This, inevitably, had an impact on the politics of the Freeman, requiring it to have regard to public opinion and articulate positions broadly acceptable to its readers, so as not to lose their custom (Larkin 2014: 36–7). Parnell’s United Ireland newspaper remained under O’Brien’s management until the ‘split’ – though from November 1887 it was edited by Matthias McDonnell Bodkin, later county court judge for Clare. At the outset of the ‘split’ in December 1890, acting on instructions from O’Brien, who was in America, Bodkin followed the majority view in the Irish Home Rule Party and steered United Ireland into the anti-Parnell camp. Parnell, however, quickly re-established his authority over the newspaper. When he returned to Dublin immediately after the ‘split’ had occurred, he forced his way into its offices with some associates and ejected Bodkin – and then installed a new editor loyal to himself (O’Brien 1899: vol. 2, 291). In contrast to United Ireland, the Freeman’s Journal came out strongly in Parnell’s favour when the ‘split’ occurred. Following Edmund Dwyer Gray’s

­

case study 15 : parnell, dwyer gray and the press 551

death in 1888, the paper was now under the control of his widow – a devout, English-born Roman Catholic. She was the daughter and namesake of the philanthropist Caroline Chisholm, celebrated for her work for female emigrants to Australia but caricatured as Mrs Jellyby in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (Larkin 2007: 122–6). Despite her religious convictions, Mrs Gray was active in support of Parnell. She even appeared with him in public in Dublin in early 1891 (ibid.: 134). However, in March 1891 the anti-Parnellites launched their own daily newspaper, the National Press, to counteract the influence of the Freeman – and when the Freeman began as a result to lose circulation and revenue, Mrs Gray wavered. Her son, the third generation of his family associated with the Freeman, now enters the story. Aged twenty-one and also named Edmund Dwyer Gray, he had just returned from an extended visit to Australia and was alarmed to find his inheritance at risk. Under his influence, Mrs Gray resolved that the paper should switch sides in the ‘split’. This it did in late September 1891, a fortnight before Parnell’s death. Parnell himself then made arrangements for the establishment of the Irish Daily Independent to fill the vacuum caused by the Freeman’s defection. This compounded the Freeman’s difficulties: it now had two competitors instead of one. The Freeman and the National Press later merged in March 1892, under the former’s more venerable title. Mrs Gray relinquished her shareholding as part of the deal, and Mrs Gray’s shares were distributed to the shareholders of the defunct National Press company (Larkin 2007: 135). The Freeman served as the organ of the anti-Parnellite wing of the Irish Home Rule Party at Westminster until the party’s reunification under John Redmond in 1900, and afterwards it was the organ of the reunited party (Larkin 2010: 210–22). The Irish Daily Independent continued as the organ of the Parnellite wing of the party until the reunification, after which it was purchased by the Dublin businessman William Martin Murphy. In 1905 Murphy transformed the paper into the modern Irish Independent, at half the price of the Freeman – a ½d, instead of 1d – and with a more popular format and a less partisan editorial policy. He copied what Lord Northcliffe had done in London in 1896 when Northcliffe launched the Daily Mail, the first mass-circulation newspaper in Britain and Ireland (Larkin 2013b: 79). James Joyce has left us a very harsh assessment of the Grays: in his story ‘Grace’ in Dubliners, when one of the characters recalls the elder Edmund Dwyer Gray ‘blathering away’ at the unveiling of his father’s statue in O’Connell Street, Dublin, another comments that ‘none of the Grays was any good’ (Joyce 1963: 473). It was the Grays, however, who made the Freeman an important newspaper. The repeal in the 1850s of the oppressive duty on advertisements and on the newspapers themselves opened the way for a great expansion in the newspaper market, and Sir John Gray had exploited this

552

felix m. larkin

opportunity – growing the circulation of the Freeman from between 2,000 and 3,000 copies per day to approximately 10,000. Under his son, Edmund senior, the Freeman’s production capacity was further increased, its circulation grew threefold – to 30,000 copies per day – and it became extremely profitable. Its success was such that in 1887 – the year before he died – Edmund had converted the Freeman into a public company, while retaining control for himself and his family (Larkin 2013b: 78). William O’Brien – who, before becoming editor of United Ireland, had been the Freeman’s star reporter – later wrote of Edmund that he was ‘the most enterprising newspaperman Ireland ever produced’ (O’Brien 1905: 182–3). O’Brien’s encomium reflects not only Gray’s business acumen, but also his ready embrace of the then current trends in journalism. Thus, in 1877 Gray had given O’Brien a commission to write what is acknowledged as the first significant piece of investigative journalism in Irish press history – in O’Brien’s own words, an ‘investigation of a historic agrarian struggle on an estate around the Galtee mountains’ in County Tipperary (O’Brien 1905: 191). Entitled ‘Christmas on the Galtees’, it was published in the Freeman in a series of five articles in December 1877 and January 1878 – and subsequently issued as a pamphlet. O’Brien’s highly innovative journalism parallels similar developments in journalism in Britain at that time, developments seen as the first phase of a new genre of journalism – the so-called ‘New Journalism’, associated with W. T. Stead. O’Brien’s final article in the series in question concludes with the following appeal to public opinion which, with its implicit assumption that journalism could galvanise public opinion, is entirely characteristic of the New Journalism: This, then, is the issue – whether a quiet, pious, simple race, whose hands have made the barren places give forth food, are to be driven from their poor shelter, or forced to undergo burdens which are in reality a species of veiled eviction, in order to add one paltry thousand more to the revenues of a princely stranger? … One wave of that English opinion, before which Cabinets have fallen and nationalities been raised up – one ­­generous impulse, such as was at the call of undeserved human misery in  Bulgaria  – would either end this unhappy strife or sweep away for ever the law that allows it. (Freeman’s Journal, 5 January 1878; O’Brien 2010: 56) This prefigures by nearly a decade Stead’s famous boast that he had ‘seen Cabinets upset, Ministers driven into retirement, laws repealed, great social reforms initiated … by the agency of newspapers’ (Stead 1886a: 655). By linking his exposé of conditions on the Galtee estate with the Bulgarian atrocities controversy of 1876 in which Stead played a central role as editor of the

­

case study 15 : parnell, dwyer gray and the press 553

Darlington Northern Echo, O’Brien was deliberately identifying himself with the newly minted, crusading school of journalism that became known as the New Journalism. O’Brien’s work was followed by similar in-depth studies of agrarian conditions in Ireland published by the Freeman over the following ten years – and indeed there are several other manifestations of the New Journalism in the columns of the Freeman and in the way the business of the newspaper was conducted in the 1880s (Larkin 2014: 40–8). In Britain, many elements of the New Journalism began in the provincial press and were brought to London by former provincial journalists such as Stead, who arrived there in 1880 to become assistant editor, and later editor, of the Pall Mall Gazette (Hobbs 2012). The Freeman’s early espousal of aspects of the New Journalism puts it on par with the British provincial press – and within the framework of the then United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, its profile was that of a provincial newspaper. Gray, incidentally, claimed in an interview with the Pall Mall Gazette that his decision to convert the Freeman into a public company had been inspired by Stead’s article on ‘The Future of Journalism’ published in 1886 in the Contemporary Review (Freeman’s Journal, 26 March 1887). Stead’s imprisonment in 1886 is an iconic event in the history of the press, and even today it helps to define the spirit of the New Journalism. Few now remember, however, that some four years earlier – in August 1882 – Edmund Dwyer Gray had suffered the same fate in the cause of a newspaper’s right to expose wrong as it sees it. He was held to be in ‘contempt of court’ because of a letter written by William O’Brien, and published in the Freeman, criticising the conduct of the jury in the trial of one Francis Hynes for murder. By chance, O’Brien had lodged in the hotel in Dublin where members of the jury were sequestered and witnessed their riotous and drunken behaviour. He later wrote: ‘I thought it my duty to relate … my experience of how the Hynes jury had passed the night, while a human life was hanging on their word’ (O’Brien 1905: 453). Hynes was convicted and hanged, probably wrongly – and Gray went to prison for exposing the circumstances of this miscarriage of justice. Like Stead, he was given a term of imprisonment of three months (Larkin 2014: 42–3). The best tendencies of the New Journalism were stifled in Ireland in the turbulent aftermath of the Parnell ‘split’. The internecine struggle within the Irish Home Rule Party precipitated by the ‘split’ quickly came to dominate the news and newspapers – and the Freeman, faced with unaccustomed competition due to the formation of the new organs representing various factions within the Irish Home Rule Party, no longer had an interest in, or the resources for, serious investigative journalism. When William Martin Murphy launched the modern Irish Independent in 1905, it brought into the Irish newspaper market some of the later features of the New Journalism – especially the development of mass

554

james quinn

readership and a popularised presentation of news and features – but it lacked the crusading, reforming impulse that was evident in the Freeman’s Journal in the 1870s and 1880s (Larkin 2014: 48). Murphy’s revamped Independent sealed the fate of the Freeman’s Journal. The Freeman failed to meet the challenge to its primacy represented by the Independent after 1905. Because of its tribulations in the early 1890s flowing from the Parnell ‘split’, it was starved of funds for investment – and its board, afraid of losing control, would not raise new capital. It was not, therefore, in a position to take advantage of the growing demand for newspapers in Ireland, as elsewhere, at this time. Total sales of daily newspapers in Ireland grew by a factor of seven between the early 1880s and the 1920s – from 75,000 copies per day in the 1880s to over half a million in the 1920s. However, the Freeman’s circulation – at between 30,000 and 35,000 copies per day – remained much the same as it had been under Edmund Dwyer Gray in the 1880s, and was quickly exceeded by the Independent. With the consequent loss of advertising, the newspaper began to incur heavy trading losses, and eventually required subsidies from Irish Home Rule Party sources in order to ensure its survival. It was sold to a Dublin wine merchant, Martin Fitzgerald, in October 1919, but ceased publication on 19 December 1924 (Larkin 2009: vol. 3, 890–1).

Case Study 16: The Nation James Quinn The Nation (1842–8) emerged out of discussions in 1842 between three young Irish nationalists (Thomas Davis, John Blake Dillon and Charles Gavan Duffy), who brought varying amounts of idealism and practicality to the venture. Davis (a Protestant) and Dillon (a Catholic) were former students of Trinity College Dublin, and presidents of its Historical Society, who had exhorted Irishmen to put their political and religious differences aside and unite to assert their country’s independence. They had already gained experience on local magazines and papers such as the Citizen, the Dublin Monthly Magazine and the Morning Register. Duffy, despite his youth, was already a veteran newspaper man, having edited the pro-Catholic Belfast Vindicator since 1839. All three were members of Daniel O’Connell’s Repeal Association, dedicated to the repeal of the Act of Union with Great Britain, and the re-establishment of an independent Irish parliament in Dublin. Believing that existing Irish nationalist papers carried little intellectual weight, they concluded that there was a glaring need for a lively new pro-independence paper along the lines of the London Examiner or the Spectator. The Nation first appeared in Dublin on 15 October 1842, its prospectus proclaiming its mission to promote ‘a Nationality

­

case study 16 : the nation

555

which will not only raise our people from their poverty, by securing to them the blessings of a DOMESTIC LEGISLATURE but inflame and purify them with a lofty and heroic love of country’ (Nation, 15 October 1842: 1). Such sentiments proved popular with a public newly energised by O’Connell’s Repeal campaign and, despite the relatively expensive price of 6d, the paper’s circulation grew rapidly (up to 10,000 copies a week, according to unverified figures published by Duffy) (Duffy 1880: 387–8). By the standards of the day, its news coverage was extensive, concentrating mostly on national events. O’Connell’s speeches to the Repeal Association in Dublin and the House of Commons at Westminster were reported in detail, often with respectful commentary, contributing significantly to the cult of the ‘Liberator’, and his reputation as Ireland’s leading orator and statesman. International news was not neglected, particularly when events abroad affected Ireland. The progress of political reformers in France, or of nationalist movements in Germany, Italy, Poland and the Habsburg lands were reported on, often with a commentary drawing attention to their relevance to Ireland. Similarly, events in the British Empire were highlighted that had obvious lessons and implications for Ireland, such as the oppression of indigenous peoples in India, Afghanistan or New Zealand, or constitutional developments in the colonies (including the progression of the Canadian provinces towards responsible government). Taking its lead from publications such as George Petrie’s defunct Dublin Penny Journal and the Dublin University Magazine, the Nation devoted considerable space to cultural matters, featuring detailed articles and substantial book reviews on Ireland’s history and antiquities. Above its editorials, it proclaimed its intention to ‘Create and foster public opinion and make it racy of the soil’, seeing itself as having a mission to recreate an authentic nationality deeply rooted in Ireland’s past. The past was of particular importance to those who believed themselves wronged, and the writing of history was central to stoking the blend of pride and grievance that propelled nationalist movements across Europe. For Irish nationalists, history took on an additional importance. Religion and language, two of the most powerful components of national identity elsewhere, were matters of division in Ireland, prompting the Nation’s writers to stress their country’s history as a powerful national unifier. They sought to lay claim to the past as a basis for Ireland’s collective identity, and refute the misrepresentations of hostile historians that this was nothing more than an unending series of internecine squabbles. Instead, they insisted that Ireland’s centuries-long struggle to resist foreign conquest and recover national independence had as much nobility, purpose and courage as that of any other country. Nationalist writers were also anxious to show the richness of the Irish past, and eagerly popularised the pioneering work of a new generation of antiquarian scholars such as George Petrie, John O’Donovan and Eugene O’Curry, whose studies

556

james quinn

had shown that pre-conquest Ireland was a cultured society that had produced laws, literature and historical annals of learning and sophistication. The Nation’s founders had high hopes for their venture, seeing it as an instrument of moral reformation rather than just as a standard newspaper. Its watchword was ‘Educate that you may be free’, and every issue exhorted readers to prepare and inform themselves as a patriotic duty. To cater for those who could not read (roughly half the adult population of Ireland was illiterate in the 1840), the paper was often read aloud to sizeable crowds by Repeal wardens, further extending its reach. Many nationalists who grew up in the 1840s recalled the eager anticipation of waiting for the weekly Nation, and the inspirational thrill of its editorials, articles and patriotic verse (see Denvir 1910: 37; Devoy 1929: 39, 290, 378; O’Brien 1905: 56; O’Leary 1896: i, 257–9). The last of these (the patriotic verse) gained particular attention. Poetry proved an effective form of propaganda, repeatedly performed in public in family and communal settings that confirmed and reinforced nationalist solidarity. Ballads were an important link to an earlier oral tradition and, much to the annoyance of conservative critics, allowed the celebration of violent rebellion in the past while avoiding the risk of prosecution for sedition in the present. Thomas Davis (the dominant figure among the three founders) churned out ballads for the Nation by the score, and others such as James Clarence Mangan, John Kells Ingram and M. J. McCann also made notable contributions. Some of Young Ireland’s most distinctive poetic voices were those of women such as Mary Kelly, who became widely known as ‘Eva of the Nation’, and Jane Francesca Elgee (the mother of Oscar Wilde), who wrote fiercely militant verse under the name ‘Speranza’. The paper’s defiant anthems helped forge the vocabulary of Irish nationalism and were collected in best-selling anthologies such as the much-reissued The Spirit of the Nation (1843). Even the title, The Spirit of the Nation, implied that the soul of a people resided in these songs, and Davis regarded them as Young Ireland’s greatest success in creating a national literature (Duffy 1890: 95). The Nation’s tone became somewhat more militant after Davis’s death in September 1845 and his replacement by the fiery John Mitchel. Increasingly, the newspaper’s bellicose rhetoric irritated Daniel O’Connell, and contributed to the split in the Repeal Association in July 1846, after O’Connell had insisted that all members of the Association publicly reassert their commitment solely to peaceful political agitation. The Nation group refused to do so and walked out of the Association. The split with O’Connell was a blow to the Nation and led to the paper being banned from many Repeal Reading Rooms. (O’Connell, too, keenly felt the loss of the paper, as none of the other papers that supported him had its quality or circulation.) From then on, the Nation became one of the most trenchant critics of O’Connell (who died in May 1847) and his successors

­

case study 16 : the nation

557

in the Repeal Association, accusing them of failing to assert Ireland’s claims with sufficient vigour. As a consequence, it lost many readers among moderate nationalists. The severe social and economic dislocation caused by the Famine of 1845–8 further diminished the paper’s readership and shook its confidence. Its high-minded mission of cultural and moral renewal now seemed less relevant in a world in which most of the population were fleeing abroad or struggling for survival at home. From January 1847 the Nation was closely identified with the Irish Confederation, founded that month by seceders from the Repeal Association. The worsening famine crisis led it to focus more intently on economic issues and advocate agrarian reform, most notably with the publication in April and May 1847 of the radical proposals of James Fintan Lalor (Lalor 1847a, 1847b, 1847c). For Lalor, notions of historical and cultural identity were dwarfed by the land question, which by 1847 had become a matter of life and death. He argued that since society had failed in its basic task of feeding its members, it ‘stands dissolved … and another requires to be constituted’ (Lalor 1847a). He advocated linking agrarian grievances directly to the campaign for political independence, thereby repealing not just Ireland’s political subjugation but also the confiscation of its land by alien invaders. Ideas such as these, and the growing political and economic crisis of 1848, opened up divisions between the paper’s militants and moderates, and pushed the Nation itself to adopt ever more extreme positions. As thrones toppled across Europe in the spring of 1848, and revolutionary ideas gained greater currency, the Nation made thinly veiled calls for national insurrection. These were finally acted on in July 1848, but the poorly prepared Young Irelander Rebellion was a fiasco, and led to the paper’s suppression. The Nation was revived by Duffy in September 1849, and in the following decade it became an important adjunct of the Tenant League in its campaign for reform of the Irish land system. Although never fully recapturing the vigour and influence it had in the 1840s, the Nation remained in circulation for almost a full half-century afterwards, establishing itself as an important Catholic constitutional nationalist organ under the brothers A. M. and T. D. Sullivan. Its championing of Irish political and cultural independence through fiery journalism and stirring songs inspired generations of Irish nationalists, and its example firmly established the newspaper as an integral part of all subsequent nationalist movements.

Chapter Twenty-One

THE TRADE AND PROFESSIONAL PRESS1 Andrew King

T

able 21.1, marking a continual rise in the number of trade and professional periodicals over the nineteenth century, summarises the narrative of this chapter. While a rise in itself is only to be expected given the well-known rise in population and literacy over the period, by recording for each year how many periodicals were being published in the various categories (not just the new ones but those continuing as well), the table shows the varying densities of the ­­categories in print space occupied by the nineteenth-century trade and ­­professional press. Of course, the table raises pressing questions, not least what in reality it refers to, how it was created and how reliable it is. This chapter seeks to address these questions by first offering a brief  review of previous work in the field, where I show that what is missing is precisely such an overview as Table 21.1 presents, before explaining how the dataset that underlies it was fashioned and what we can learn from it.

‘Representative Journals’ In 1860, taking its cue from three articles published the previous year (‘Cheap Literature’, 1859; ‘British Press’, 1859; [Dallas] 1859a), the anonymously written Newspaper Press of the Present Day devoted the third chapter of its ‘statistical’ history to ‘class journals … which 1

The full database upon which my tables and this chapter are based is freely available at BLT19. co.uk. Thanks are due to Shaf Towheed and Ed King of the Open University for inviting me to present my findings at HOBAR in April 2018; to the 2018 RSVP conference organisers in Victoria, Canada, for accepting a summary of this chapter; and especially to the members of both audiences from whose generous comments I greatly benefitted. Patrick Leary, with his typical kindness and learning, pointed me to Altick 1951 as an unusually early academic article on a trade periodical. Any errors are, of course, my responsibility.

558

­

the trade and professional press

559

Table 21.1  Trade and professional periodicals, 1846–1900, in press directories: Mitchell’s, Hammond’s, ‘An Old Advertiser’ and Layton’s

might more properly be called representative journals, because they represent not only classes but professions, arts, occupations, almost every ramification of study and industry’ (Newspaper Press 1860: 33). The volume claimed there were 125 such journals ‘for the most part … established within the last twenty-five or thirty years’, and the number was growing all the time (Newspaper Press 1860: 34). It listed the various classes thus: Naval and Military — the Civil Service — Shipping — Commercial — Mercantile — Agricultural — Mining — Railway — Engineering — Architectural — Building — Banking — Law — Medical  — Surgical — Chemical — Indian and Colonial — Religious — Educational — Literary — Arts and Sciences — Music — Insurance — Photography — Gardening — Sporting — Racing — The Turf — The Ring — Illustrated Newspapers. (ibid.: 33) In fact, the chapter included other classes as well – ‘Court and Fashionable World’, for instance; it subdivided some (‘Religious’ becomes ‘Church of England’, ‘Roman Catholic’, ‘Wesleyan’, ‘Unitarian’ and ‘Jewish’) and mashed others, like ‘Railway — Engineering — Architectural — Building’ and ‘Medical — Surgical — Chemical’, into

560

andrew king

single undifferentiated paragraphs. On the other hand, it refused to categorise Punch at all even while affirming it as a ‘class journal’. The Newspaper Press chapter, the most extended periodical press discussion of ‘class journals’ up to that time, helps us focus the questions with which this chapter began. First, not all the items it listed can by any means be considered ‘trade and professional’ periodicals: we must therefore ask how decisions regarding categorisation are made. Second, while the numerical precision and the sheer number of journals that the Newspaper Press listed rhetorically validated its claim to being complete, according to the compilation in Table 21.1 above, by 1858 there were already 137 periodicals (as opposed to 125) addressed to just the trades and professions. How ‘complete,’ therefore, can a ‘statistical history’ like that of the Newspaper Press – and Table 21.1 – hope to be? In terms of our knowledge of periodicals devoted to the trades and professions, there is a significant gulf between them: we know far less about the former than the latter. This is little different from the 1860s when a leading article in Chambers’s Journal made the point that ‘the trade newspapers and journals are so curious and so little known, that the reader might perhaps like to be told something about them’ (‘Trade Newspapers’, 1863: 369). It then categorised them as ‘periodicals addressed to a particular class of traders and manufacturers, and dwelling in a marked way on subjects which those persons understand, and in which they alone are likely to take much interest’ (‘Trade Newspapers’, 1863: 370). But even this capacious definition, centred on a periodical’s target demographic, threatened to burst open, for at the end the piece confessed that ‘the very jumble which we have made in putting these items together … well illustrates the heterogeneous medley of trade or special newspapers’ (‘Trade Newspapers’, 1863: 371). Even if we might readily agree that the category of the trade press (whatever its limits) must influence what and how products and services are offered us, it remains virtually unknown and undiscussed beyond its target readership or academics devoted to specific areas such as Finkelstein (2018) on the typographical press, or economic historians such as Scola (1992) and Johnson (2010).2 The nineteenth-century professional press, on the other hand, is much more familiar to humanities academics, its importance widely recognised as forming domains of knowledge, practice and identity. There are studies concerning aspects of well-known publications like 2

Very often periodical sources are not specified by historians even though their use as sources is admitted: see, for instance, Magee 1997: 9.

­

the trade and professional press

561

the Lancet (1823–present) (Bartrip 1990; Bynum, Lock and Porter 1992; Kynaston 1988; Edwards 1993; Harrison 2009; Richardson and Thorne 1994), and histories of individual periodicals published to celebrate anniversaries, such as of the British Medical Journal (1840–present), the Financial Times (1888–present), the Economist (1843–present) and the Builder (1842–present). On the whole, though, professional periodicals have been mined for data, often by insiders of a profession or those employed by the profession to write the history of a profession. In 1984, for example, W. D. Foster, the Honorary Librarian of the Royal College of Pathologists, used the British Medical Journal and the Lancet extensively for his history of pathologists, while the Builder and the Estates Gazette (1858–1912) were raided on the same footing as Parliamentary Papers and the Transactions of the Institution of Chartered Surveyors (1868–present) for F. M. L. Thompson’s 1968 account of chartered surveyors. More sophisticated was the usage of the Chemist (1824–58) and the Quarterly Journal of the Chemical Society (1848–62) in Russell, Coley and Roberts’s Chemists by Profession (1977), although even here periodicals were valued by how well they performed according to contemporary standards of what a ‘professional’ journal should be. More recent histories of science and medicine have demonstrated awareness of the peculiar nature and historical specificity of professional periodicals as print media forms (Broks 1997; Cantor, Dawson and Gooday 2004; Mussell 2007), and the first chapter of Parson’s The Power of the Financial Press (1989) remains a persuasive account of the influence of pre-twentiethcentury financial journalism on government policy. Most unusually, Michael Martel (2018) has written an account of turn-of-the-century journals that were directed at local government officials and general local readerships. While important contributions to knowledge, such studies of individual areas are not the focus of this chapter; neither am I writing a history of the trades and professions themselves. What I am concerned to think through is how we might arrive at a general history of the trade and professional press, not of trades or professions themselves, or of domains of knowledge. Surprisingly, no such history has been written before. In 1994 J. Don Vann and Rosemary T. VanArsdel noted that the contributors to their Victorian Periodicals and Victorian Society, a volume of essays largely devoted to the trade and professional press, universally found the proliferation of such publications in the nineteenth century ‘overwhelming’ (Vann and VanArsdel 1994: 4). The chapters on the legal, medical, architectural, military, scientific and music press tended to respond to that feeling of dizzying plenitude by taking a selective approach,

562

andrew king

proceeding mainly as catalogues raisonées. Van and VanArsdel themselves offered neither a panoptical overview of the trade and professional press as a whole nor a definition of the category. A quarter of a century later, David McKitterick seemed to promise such an overview with a chapter entitled ‘Publishing for Trades and Professions’ in volume VI of his Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (2009). Most of the chapter concerned the professions, with one substantial portion devoted to university publishing, and another equally large to the medical press. The decision to focus on the latter was because, so McKitterick claimed, ‘medicine was more prolifically served with print than any other [profession], as the publication industry throve on professional disagreements and demands for reform’ (McKitterick 2009: 506). McKitterick also offered shorter sections on the legal press, school teaching, the civil service, professional directories, learned societies, accountants, and a few technical publishers such as Charles Griffin. There was just one paragraph on the trade press. The same year, 2009, the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Periodicals offered six general entries relevant to this chapter (de Waard and Tildesley 2009; King 2009c, 2009d, 2009e, 2009f, 2009g), and King and Demoor brought out a special number of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies on ‘Gender, Professions and the Press’. King’s ‘Army, Navy …’ (2009a), published in the latter, considered the gendered professional press from the perspective of a sociology of work, while the other articles in the special number kicked against definition, instead preferring thematic approaches that covered gardening, journalism, science, music and fictional depictions of doctors. Since then there has been virtually no development in the general study of the British and Irish trade and professional press. The two most recent volumes devoted to a broad picture of the nineteenth-century British press virtually ignore it: the Routledge Handbook to British Periodicals and Newspapers (King, Easley and Morton 2016: 71–4, 255–6) devotes only a few casual pages to the area, and in Journalism and the Periodical Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Shattock 2017), after an extended quotation from [Dallas] (1859a) that lists some trade and professional journals, the category is entirely excluded from the rest of the volume.3 We must ask ourselves the reasons for this combination of neglect yet acknowledgement of importance. The first, and perhaps most 3

The 2014–17 ESRC project on ‘Victorian Professions’ from the Universities of Oxford and Northumbria (see http://www.victorianprofessions.ox.ac.uk/index.html) has produced just one output so far, Price 2016, a volume that mines periodicals for data to answer its research questions in the manner of Bartrip 1990 and other historians.

­

the trade and professional press

563

important one, is institutional: where does one place the study of trade and professional periodicals in terms of discipline? Historians may mine these periodicals for evidence, but press historians concentrate on newspapers and book publishing. Students of periodicals, largely situated in English Literature, find – with the exception of the medical and scientific – trade and professional periodicals hard to integrate, for even though such periodicals are readily open to stylistic and narrative analysis as well as cultural study, their anonymity and subject matter can only with difficulty be incorporated into a discipline still (for all its changes and challenges) centred on sacralised authors, aesthetics and leisure-reading. There has not been a detailed study of the stylistic characteristics of trade periodical articles, even if medical and scientific writing in the professional press has benefitted from close analysis for a long time (though usually without attention to the medium-specificity of the language analysed). Jonathan Topham urged us in 2000 to study the reading strategies encouraged by the scientific press, and Charles Bazerman (1988) had previously examined the genre and activity of the experimental article in science. Unfortunately, Bazerman did not examine material from nineteenthcentury British periodicals: while acknowledging that modern scientific styles and narratives arose in the nineteenth century, he was forced, like Vann and VanArsdel’s contributors, to admit defeat at the quantity and diversity of material. Stylistic analysis no longer relies on time-consuming manual methods as in Bazerman’s time, or necessarily on expensive software and supercomputers with restricted access. However, given the state of the OCR’d text of virtually all periodicals relevant to this chapter that are available online – and few of the periodicals are in fact available – there is at present little that can be achieved through these methods. To discuss the content and stylistic features of trade periodicals especially still requires manual coding. Without an army of researchers, the procedure therefore risks advancing knowledge only in very niche areas, for the question would remain of how generalisable any conclusion would be. I might assert, for example, that trade periodicals, unlike professional ones, typically carried a ‘gazette’ of bankrupts, notifications of businesses that changed hands, job openings, discussion of trade nationally and locally, perhaps a directory of relevant suppliers or services, and that the advertising they carried was more innovative in terms of design than that found in the general press. In common with the professional were news and discussion of relevant legal and political changes, social issues, obituaries, correspondence and information about new products, services or methods (whether of

564

andrew king

anaesthesia, sewage management or window dressing). Yet such broad morphological analysis into elements, common in the few descriptions of the trade and professional press that we have, ignore the varied sequencing of these elements, their emphases (typographic or layout), their functions at different times and places, and especially their styles and tones. Then again, I might claim that trade periodicals tend to be less combative and more intimate than the impersonal and heavily gendered pronouncements ex cathedra of professional journals (cf. King 2009a: para. 34), or that they are more concerned to maintain friendly relationships with readers than assert a position in a hierarchy within the relevant domain. But, without evidence on a large scale, these would remain either impressions or of limited applicability in an already ignored field. Second, as I pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, we must acknowledge the difficulty of deciding what the trade and professional press actually is. Previous attempts to grapple with the question have tended either to sidestep the issue (Vann and VanArsdel 1994), to confuse the issue so as to offer a genealogy for selected academic interests (McKitterick 2009), or to address it through the abundant academic literature on the various sociologies of work (King 2009a). This confusion is partly a result of the gradual appropriation of the term ‘profession’ by many different occupations in the nineteenth century beyond professional actors and musicians (for whom the distinction between professional and amateur had arisen in the eighteenth century), and the four traditional professions of the army, church, law and medicine (King 2009a). The term became a ‘fiduciary’ one – an idea I have appropriated from Barrell (1986: 145–6) – without fixed meaning but which acts as a guarantor of the validity of an argument and, in this case, social status. As even a cursory search in the British Newspaper Archive will confirm, in the 1890s the term was applied indifferently to cricketers, manicurists, singers, doctors, accountants and many other occupations, including, of course, ‘gentlemen’. The status of a professional was exploited to guarantee the quality of an item: doctors authenticated the nutritional value of milk or meat extract, and chemists the purity of flour. Professional journals in turn lent their own status to products: endorsements from the Lancet appeared in ads for soap, for example. Later, the trade press also provided such guarantees, although a decided hierarchy remained: the professional was always more authoritative in promotional notes and features, as we can observe in the arrangement of the endorsements for Hay’s Ginger Champagne in Figure 21.1. More recently, and in the academy, the capacious ambiguity and legitimating power of the term ‘professional’

­

the trade and professional press

565

Figure 21.1  Adverts with endorsements from a chemist and from the professional and trade press. From the British and Foreign Confectioner, 1 December 1883, p. viii (Courtesy of Andrew King)

has been appropriated by scholars to question hegemonic gendered and class identities (Cohen 1998; several chapters of Goodlad 2003; Hajiafxendi and Zakreski 2013; chapter 4 of Rotunno 2013; Ruth 2006; Salmon 2015). Yet while politically important, such work does not help us here. The periodicals themselves refuse tidy categorisation by target demographic. Early in the century, especially, they do not ‘represent’ any single group. The Merchant (1835–53) was, on the one hand, ‘mainly devoted to Commercial objects, and contains a special article on the state and prospects of the TEA MARKET’ [sic] while, on the other, it was ‘a General Newspaper of the largest size’ (Hammond’s 1850: 32). Medical journals regularly devoted articles to sanitary

566

andrew king

reform and building regulations: the British and Foreign MedicoChirurgical Review (1781–1877) kicked off its second series in 1848 with a hefty article on the topic (‘Sanitary Reform’, 1848). In the early nineteenth century, general London daily newspapers featured advertisements for particular kinds of goods aimed at a specialist or particular ‘class’ readership: the Morning Post was known for its advertisements for horses and carriages, for example; the Chronicle for books (Hunt 1850, vol. 2: 118; Andrews 1859: vol. 2, 69). The ‘money’ column in the Times became the leading authority on finance in the first half of the century (Parsons 1989: 23). All the dailies carried legal, medical, military, ecclesiastical, theatrical and trade news and commentary as a matter of course. Then again, provincial weekly newspapers outside the major manufacturing centres almost all devoted a very large proportion of their space to agricultural news while not marking themselves out as ‘agricultural’ in the same way as the Mark Lane Express Agricultural Journal: The Leading British Authority on Farming and Stock Breeding (1832–1948), or the Farmers’ Herald: A Journal of Practical Agriculture, Horticulture, Rural Economy and General Intelligence (1843–1913).4 Finally, should we include the non-­discursive lists of prices current and shipping like Lloyd’s (1734­­–present5) or the ‘mere advertising sheets representing only special individual interests’ (like Bent’s Literary Advertiser (1802–60)) that had existed long before ‘the trade journal [had] become the great organ of communication between manufacturers and dealers and their customers’ (‘The Trade Journal Indispensible’, 1893: 52)? It could be argued that, without a discursive address to the reader, such periodicals are not concerned with occupational identity formation. Yet the reality is that to understand such lists one needs knowledge of a kind that only specialist classes enjoy.

Press Directories Given these complications, then, how are we to define and research a history of the trade and professional press? The most obvious solution would be to base an overview on established data and definitions such as provided for us by the most comprehensive database of nineteenthcentury periodicals, the Waterloo Directory. But searching in the 4

Neither the authoritative Goddard 1983 nor Cook 1994 considers provincial newspapers. Buttress 1950 comprises a sixteen-page pamphlet that is more extensive than either, yet, like them, omits provincial newspapers. 5 Lloyd’s List up to 1825 is freely available at http://www.maritimearchives.co.uk/lloyds-list.html.

­

the trade and professional press

567

‘subject’ engine of the English one for ‘profession’ or ‘professional’ yields zero results, whereas ‘trade’ generates 4,500 hits and ‘trades’ 2,067. The results include entries where the commentary includes the word ‘trade’ even if the periodical had nothing whatsoever to do with trade. The Youths’ Magazine (1805–63), for instance, appears in the ‘trade’ hits because it is described as being distributed through the ‘normal trade channels’. Using the ‘title’ search is even more limiting. To use the Waterloo Directory may offer the temptation of completeness, but it would require manually going through all 50,000-plus entries. There is, fortunately, a more practical alternative which involves an emic procedure (that is, operating from inside the discursive environment of the subject of study). Rather than seek to impose on the past present-day definitions of what ‘trade’ or ‘professional’ periodicals might be, one can turn to those used by the period itself. This is not altogether unproblematic. While there are a few nineteenthcentury articles that discuss the trade and professional press, several of which I have cited already, none are comprehensive or interested in defining the field (see also, for example, ‘Trade Journals’, 1878: 22, a response to ‘Press of the Trades’, 1877). The chapter in the 1860 Newspaper  Press  which I quoted early in this chapter only claims to list items that were being published that year, and even so, as I showed, it is by no means complete. There are also nineteenth-century indexes of select  professions such as Jones’s (1888), a bibliography that aimed to index all legal periodicals in English before 1887. It includes 158, of which forty-one are from England, Wales, Scotland or Ireland. Naturally, however, such indexes do not give coverage of the field beyond their narrow remits: to rely on them would be to endorse extant occupational hierarchies and obscure many other trade and professional periodicals. At the start of this chapter, I began by highlighting ‘class’ journals. The category comprised, according to the law in the 1840s and early 1850s, periodicals that (in theory) contained only one type of knowledge addressing one type – one ‘class’ – of reader. They were thus not obliged to pay the newspaper stamp (Hewitt 2015: loc. 1266–72). This definition on its own has limited usefulness for reasons already discussed. Furthermore, some clearly trade and professional periodicals paid the stamp duty simply in order to take advantage of convenient postal rates: the Lancet, Ecclesiastical Gazette (1838–1900), Economist, Engineer (1856–1967), Chemical Gazette (1842–59), and the Builder all did so (Stationer, 10 November 1859: 6–7; Newspaper Press, 1860: 35). The idea of ‘class’ periodicals, if not the legal definition, is nonetheless

568

andrew king

useful as it was taken up and developed by the nineteenth-century press directories produced by advertising agents to help potential advertisers place their offerings. Initially, the press directories categorised periodicals according to geography and frequency (Brake 2015; Brake 2016),6 but in the 1850s they also began to print lists organised by the interests of target readerships. This was because, while high circulation was important to reach a large number of people, if one were selling products or services aimed at specific target markets, then ‘Class advertisements require class media’ (Hammond’s 1850: 2).7 Hammond’s indeed printed a two-and-half-page list of ‘Magazines &c.’ classified under very general subject areas (see Figures 21.2 and 21.3). One can see the effects of the four traditional professions on this list (legal, military, clerical, medical) and of the learned societies, but the list is sketchy and it is clear that by no means all relevant periodicals are included. Four years later, ‘An Old Advertiser’ confirmed that advertising in class journals – ­­especially professional ones – was far more effective than advertising in the general press. He too gave a list of periodicals organised by ‘classes’ whom advertisers were likely to address. Hammond’s and ‘An Old Advertiser’ were exceptionally early, for it was not until the 1870s that press directories regularly published lists classifying periodicals according to readers’ interests. In 1871, May’s London Press Dictionary and Advertiser’s Handbook launched a ‘Dictionary of the Interests, Professions, Trades, Classes, Religious Denominations, Sciences etc., etc.’8 From then on, such a list became de rigueur for press directories. Mitchell’s, the best known of the directories, had since its inauguration in 1846 given brief paragraphs on what it regarded as the characteristics of target readerships along with bare, alphabetised lists of periodicals and newspapers organised by place of publication, but on the back of interest and demand it launched a similar specifically classified list in 1879 (Wellsman 1895: 11). Mitchell’s was followed shortly by Deacon’s Newspaper Handbook and Advertiser’s Guide (1876?–1904) and, in 1883, by Sell’s Dictionary  of the World’s Press. When Layton’s Handy Newspaper List (1895–1916) started, it classified the publications it listed as a matter of course (see Figure 21.4). 6

The first directory, not referred to by Brake, was Lewis and Lowe’s Advertisers’ Guide to the Newspaper Press of the United Kingdom (1844). It also listed circulation and number of the adverts that publications contained. It included some publications counted in this chapter, though I have not relied upon it as a source. 7 This was already a commonplace: see, for example, ‘Selection of Journals’ (1855). 8 The list was continued when May’s was taken over by Willing in 1890 but retitled as ‘Classification of Interests, Professions, Trades, Religious Denominations, Sciences and Subjects’.

­

the trade and professional press

569

Figure 21.2  Hammond’s List of London and Provincial Newspapers, Periodicals, &c. London: Hammond, 1850, p. 4 (Courtesy of Andrew King)

Besides offering an initial categorisation of periodicals, press directories list prices, frequencies, addresses, publishers and often other information as well. For them, a periodical’s function is to sell advertising space. Of course, they care about a publication’s frequency, price and distribution, and whether it is a newspaper, magazine or legally a ‘class’ publication, but only in so far as those are indexes of potential addressees of advertising. It follows, then, that the category ‘trade and professional press’ as used in the press directories is not legal but functional. It is based on how those involved in the press industry defined a periodical’s readers according to what occupation generated income for them, income that could in turn be exploited by advertisers and

570

andrew king

Figure 21.3  Hammond’s List of London and Provincial Newspapers, Periodicals, &c. London: Hammond, 1850, p. 5 (Courtesy of Andrew King)

thence by periodicals themselves. To that extent, the orientation of the press directories dovetails with that of the academic keen to approach periodicals as media forms rather than as cultural seams to be mined for data. Turning to them to define the category of the ‘trade and professional press’, as I have done to form Table 21.1, is thus the most appropriate method for a volume such as this devoted to press rather than occupational history. Although this is not visible in the tables featured in this chapter (which have been constructed with an eye to legibility), I created for this chapter a spreadsheet covering every year between 1846 and 1900 which recorded title, frequency, price, dates, publisher, addresses and

­

the trade and professional press

571

Figure 21.4  C. & E. Layton’s Handy Newspaper List. London: Layton, 1895, p. 7 (Courtesy of Andrew King)

category of the relevant periodicals listed in four of the press directories available, the famous Mitchell’s (1846–1900), Hammond’s (1850), ‘An Old Advertiser’ and Layton’s (which, even though hardly known, proved the most comprehensive).9 The data was then checked against all the relevant secondary material, including the Waterloo Directory,  9

Mitchell’s was not published in 1848–50 and 1852–5 inclusive, and the following years were not available for consultation on this project: 1859–61; 1876–7; 1879; 1882; 1887. For more detail on how the press directories were used for the spreadsheet underlying this chapter, see BLT19. co.uk. On Mitchell’s, see Brake 2015 and Linton 1987.

572

andrew king

and, wherever possible, physical copies. The full spreadsheet, which forms the basis of the discussion and claims in this chapter, covers almost 3,000 titles, with eighty-two entries in 1846 and 527 in 1900, and is available as an open-access database at BLT19.co.uk. It has enabled a radically new vision of the field, which, unlike the 1860 Newspaper Press chapter, does not claim to be either complete or exact. On the contrary, the tables in this chapter constitute only an ideographic and partial history of the five to six per cent of the total number of newspapers and periodicals published in any one year that could be classed as the trade and professional press.10 Nonetheless, their rigorously maintained point of view from inside the press industry reveals for the first time a general pattern that subsequent refinement is unlikely to challenge except in the few specific areas I comment on below. Both more extensive and precise than any of the previous surveys compiled on this subject, the dataset enables us to trace the publication and printing details of journals both individually and in groups, as well as make comparisons between different categories. Despite the emic inspiration behind my choice of data sources, the categories I eventually ended with (those listed in Table 21.1 and below) mix the emic and etic in a manner familiar to social scientists as well as historians (cf. Jardine 2004). Because the categories employed by my sources (the emic) are unstable in meaning, inconsistent in usage and sometimes just wrong, I found I had to impose consistency. Layton’s classed the Insurance Railway Guide (1885–96) as ‘Insurance’ in the same category as the Insurance and Banking Review (1881–1917), for instance, but on inspection of the physical copy, the Guide turned out to be a timetable that guaranteed the bearer insurance against railway accidents. It was not a trade or professional journal at all. What follows offers more detail about findings under the various categories that my method has enabled.

10

The numbers given in the directories are not reliable but they do give a general idea. Hammond’s (1850: 20) claims that there were 547 newspaper titles that year. The annual ‘Publisher’s Address’ (n.p.) in Mitchell’s gives 1,250 newspapers, 537 periodicals in 1864; in 1870, 1,390 papers, 626 periodicals; in 1874, 1,224 newspapers, 639 periodicals (whereas May’s (1874: vii, ix) gives 1,690 newspapers and 662 periodicals); in 1880, 1,835 newspapers and 1,033 periodicals; in 1890, 2,234 newspapers, 1,752 periodicals; in 1900, 1947 newspapers, 2,328 periodicals.

­

the trade and professional press

573

Periodical Categories Agriculture and Farming While the number of periodicals in this category rises over the period in question, both their proportion to the whole field and their nature change. In 1846 there were sixteen agricultural periodicals, accounting for 21 per cent of the trade and professional press in the database that year. In 1900, there were thirty-one, but they made up barely 6 per cent. Nine of those thirty-one had survived since 1846 or earlier: the best known include the Country Sport and Messenger of Agriculture (the most venerable of them all, starting as Bell’s Weekly Messenger in 1796 and beginning its farming column in 183211), the Gardener’s Chronicle and Agricultural Gazette (started 1841) and the Mark Lane Express (started 1832). Newer entries in the category reflected the changing orientation of the field towards more scientific and managerial approaches (Agricultural Economist, started in 1889), and, despite the huge fall in the employment of women in agriculture between 1851 and 1891 (Armstrong 1972: 255), both the realisation that women were becoming more literate and the belief, promulgated by the journals, that the domestic played a major part in agricultural output (Farm and Home, from 1882; Farm, Field and Fireside, from 1887). Despite rises in rural literacy of both sexes, many agricultural periodicals, even though listed by the trade directories, did not sell well: it seems that few farmers could be bothered to read them even when they could (Collins 2000: 673). Book and Stationery Trades, Journalism and Printing Included in this category were titles such as Bent’s Monthly Literary Advertiser (1802–60), Publishers’ Circular (1837–1959), Booksellers’ Circular (1874) and the Bookseller (1858–present), aimed at booksellers, irrespective of whether the periodicals were ‘mere advertising lists’ or discursive.12 While these periodicals, fundamentally concerned with the distribution of literary matter, are the most studied and quoted by academics today, growth in this category (from just two in 1846 to thirty-two in 1900) becomes noticeable from the mid-1860s 11

Many of the periodicals I refer to in this chapter underwent changes of name, price, frequency and format within the dates I cite in brackets. To save space I have not recorded these bibliographical changes here: suffice it to say that they caused a good deal of confusion in the compilation of the database (on the problems that such changes cause, see Gaskell 2017). 12 Further analysis of this subgenre features in Rachel Calder’s chapter in this volume.

574

andrew king

with the appearance of a second subset equally essential to the industrial manufacture of literature: stationery, typographical and paper-­ making journals. These latter three, corresponding to a large growth of employment in the sector (Armstrong 1972: 263), come to dominate the category in the latter part of the century and, as Finkelstein (2018) demonstrates, offer reviews as well as abundant data for literary as well as industrial histories. Notable examples include the Stationer, Printing and Fancy Trades Register (1859–1912), Printers Register (1863–1956), Press News (1866–1912), Newsvendor (1873–83), Lithographer (1873–1900), British and Colonial Printer and Stationer (1878–present; today Printing World), Paper and Print (1879–84) and Paper Trade Review (1879–1900). Journalism periodicals constitute a third unjustly neglected subset: they include the Journalist (1886­­– 1909) and Central Press (1861–74, a periodical printed on one side only for easy cut-and-paste journalism). Interestingly, neither Mitchell’s nor Layton’s mention the Bookman (1891–1934), a periodical crucial for the development of the concept of the bestseller (Bassett and Walter 2001; Prance 1984). Church The very small number of journals aimed at the professional development of the clergy featuring in the dataset is a surprise given that so many ‘religious’ journals were printed that the press directories separated them out as a category in themselves (Knight 2016: 355). In his comprehensive study of the religious press, Josef Altholtz listed some 600 religious periodicals in his Appendix (Altholtz 1989: 181–201), yet he described as ‘professional’ religious journals only six: those intended ‘to guide ministers in biblical exegesis, the higher realms of theology, and the techniques of homiletics’ (ibid.: 131). None of those he listed appear in my dataset since my definition of the category (as well as my sources) are different from his. Led by the traditional inclusion of Church of England clergy as among the four professions (Nonconformist ministers were not ‘professionals’ in this sense), I included only periodicals aimed at guiding readers in their careers in the Church of England, such as the Ecclesiastical Gazette (1838–1900) and the Clerical Journal and Church and University Chronicle (1853–69, ‘the organ of the Clerical Profession; the Chronicler of Facts’, as its initial address put it). Such periodicals tended to be primarily advertising vehicles, which is unsurprising given my sources (the Ecclesiastical Gazette was in fact distributed free to all clergy). I did not include annual Diocesan Calendars and Clergy Lists (though Sell’s includes them as a separate list). There

­

the trade and professional press

575

is little growth or change in my dataset for this category: most periodicals recorded in it were long-lived (e.g. Church Times [1863–present]; Church Review [1861–1902]). The small numbers of periodicals are perhaps reflected in the comparatively small increase in real numbers of Church of England ministers over the period, from 14,500 in 1841 to 24,200 in 1891 according to Armstrong (1972: 279). Civil Service This very small category, beginning with the Civil Service Gazette (1853–1926) and Civilian (1869–1928), was added to later by a couple of police journals: On and Off Duty (1883–1933) and Police Review and Parade Gossip (1891–1934).13 Although its small size hardly seems to justify a separate category, I included it because of its relation to ­professionals in the non-military state and by the roughly fourfold growth in this employment sector in the period (Armstrong 1972: 275). It contrasts, therefore, with ‘Naval and Military’. From the 1880s, a related subset of periodicals arose that was designed to help students pass the civil service examinations instituted in the previous decade: because of their educative aims, however, I included these under ‘Education and Teaching’. Commercial, Financial and Insurance This is one of the largest categories, and I accordingly comment on its growth in more detail in ‘Conclusions’. Aimed at wholesalers, insurance agents, investors and stockbrokers, the category includes regular ‘prices current’ such as Prince’s (1789–1880), as well as titles that comprise mainly discursive commentary such as the Bullionist (1866– 1900), Financier (1870–1924), London Commercial Record (1831– 1940), Money Market Review (1860–present) and the Economist. Some were subscription only and early in the century carried no advertising (e.g. London Commercial Record in 1844), though they appeared in the press directories later. I also included in this category periodicals aimed at general investors such as the Foreign and Colonial Importer (1893–7). Those aimed at investors in, or wholesalers of, specific fields such as the Fish Trades Gazette (1883–present; now the European Fish Trader) were assigned to ‘Retail, Wholesale, Trades and Services’. The 13

Despite the frequency of the word ‘police’ in periodical titles, very few actually addressed the occupation. Those that did included the Police Chronicle (1866–59) and Police and Fire (1880–1883), neither of which appear in the directories, however.

576

andrew king

lines between these two categories (and between these and ‘Railways and Shipping’) are hazy, as the distinctions between finance, commerce, wholesale and distribution were blurred in the directories, often by the term ‘mercantile’. Construction and Engineering This category comprises journals such as the Architect (1869–1980), Architect and Contract Reporter (1868–1918), Builder,  Colliery Guardian  (1858–1994), Electrical Engineer (1882–1912), Engineer, Journal of  Gas-Lighting, and Water-Supply and Sanitary  Improve­ ment (1849–1972). The term ‘construction’ was not used by the press directories (‘architecture,’ ‘engineering’ and ‘sanitary’ were differentiated), but I have preferred the more general term as it allows the inclusion of related trade journals such as Mechanical World & Metal Trades Journal (1876–1965) as well as association journals like those of the Clerks of Works (1883–1948) and the Royal Institute of British Architects (1835–present). Many journals in this category had long runs. Although hardly visible in Table 21.1, there was detectable growth in the late 1850s, followed by another spurt in the late 1860s, though the main increase was in the 1870s when some 34 per cent of gross domestic fixed capital was poured into this sector and the number of architects, surveyors and engineers had risen considerably (Powell 1996: esp. 51–3, 75–7). The number of publications thus reflected and propelled the employment growth in urban construction, water and energy supply and sanitation, and – a point of much debate  – their regulation (on which see Gaskell 1983). Education and Teaching In addition to the more obvious Educational Times (1847–1923), National Society’s Monthly Paper (1847–1937) and Literarium, or Educational Gazette (1855–7), I placed here the long-running Phonetic Journal (1843–1935), a periodical devoted to Pitman’s spelling reforms and shorthand, which shared intertextual space with other educational publications (Crystal 1988: 15). The Church Worker (1848–64) and the Sunday School Chronicle (1874–1928) were included in this category as they were addressed to teachers; the latter ran, among much else, a regular column of ‘Lesson Helps for Busy Teachers’. The several journals started from the late 1870s aimed at helping students pass exams in professions other than teaching helped boost the small rise in this category. Examples include the Law Students’ Journal (1879–1917)

­

the trade and professional press

577

and Civil Service Candidate (1883–1916), issued by King’s College London. The effects of the 1871 Education Act and the huge rise in the number of teachers over the period (Armstrong 1972: 278) are clear in publications such as the Schoolmaster (1871–1925) and Schoolmistress (1881–1935). Law The periodicals addressed to lawyers and para-legals were usually clearly defined by their titles such as the County Courts Chronicle (1847–1920), Justice of the Peace (1837–2004), Law Journal (1823– present; now the New Law Journal), Law Times (1843–1965) and Solicitors Journal (1857–1998). This was not universally the case: the Weekly Reporter (1852–1906) was, despite its apparently generic title, a record of cases brought before the High Court. The number of law ­journals doubled over the period (from ten to twenty), and all those listed in Jones (1888) that were still running were mentioned in the press directories. Nonetheless, this is by no means as great a number as expected, for neither the press directories nor Jones were interested  in short-run journals, such as the Law (1874–5) or the Lawyer and Jurisprudential Record (1848), of which many appeared in the early nineteenth century before the select canon of periodicals (listed by Jones) formed as the required reading for lawyers. While the number of lawyers did increase by a third over the period, overall numbers for the target demographic were still quite small (Armstrong 1972: 276). Medicine and Science The treatment as a single category of ‘Medicine and Science’ may appear contentious given the amount of academic work dedicated to these two areas separately, but it follows the Newspaper Press (1860) consideration of them as a single category. In terms of the function I have described above, they also have in common their huge underrepresentation in the directories. According to my dataset, they collectively experienced just over a fourfold growth, from eleven to forty-seven. In 1846 Mitchell’s listed only four medical periodicals  – the expected Lancet, London Medical Gazette (1827–85), Medical Press and Circular (1839–1923) and Medical Times (1827–85) – and it continued a focus on a restricted number of medical titles throughout the century. It was Layton’s in 1895 that added journals such as the Chemical News (1859– present), the Journal of Botany (1863–present), Nature (1869–present)

578

andrew king

and Electrician (1878–present). Even in 1900 only nine periodicals listed by Mitchell’s and Layton’s were not medical, and three of those nine were veterinary journals. The well-known bibliographies of medicine by Lefanu (1937a, 1937b, 1938) and of science by Gascoigne (1985) include hundreds of items that the advertising directories omit. The directories do not show the marked growth in medical periodicals in the 1870s and 1890s that M. Jeanne Peterson (1979) notes in her analysis of Lefanu’s work, let alone science. The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1665–present), for example, is never mentioned. While the number of physicians and surgeons remained relatively static, other relevant target demographics like druggists, dentists and chemists grew substantially (Armstrong 1972: 276–7). Unquestionably vital to histories of domains of knowledge, therefore, such publications were not so important to the advertising and media industries. While this may seem a failure of my emic method, it is an omission easily corrected by reference to Lefanu and Gascoigne. Railway and Shipping This is fundamentally a subset of the ‘Commercial, Financial and Insurance’ category, focusing on distribution and investment in distribution. Unlike the railway press, shipping lists had a long history before the nineteenth century, having originated in the early eighteenth century. The shipping press remained important throughout the century, while the railway press had its short-lived heyday, unsurprisingly, at the time of the railway boom in the 1840s and 1850s (see Table 21.2 below, and Palmer and Paar 1994). I provide more analysis of this category in ‘Conclusions’ in combination with my commentary on the ‘Commercial, Financial and Insurance’. Naval and Military As with Medicine and Science, a surprisingly low number of this category appeared in the press directories with a correspondingly small growth (three in 1846 to thirteen in 1900). Only the Army and Navy Gazette (1860­­–1957), Naval and Military Gazette (1833–86) and the United Service Gazette (1833–1921) were listed throughout their runs, although a few others like Seafaring (1888–92) came and went. Apart from the Globe and Laurel (the journal of the Royal Marines, 1892–present), almost none of the many regimental periodicals were mentioned; neither is, more surprisingly, Colburn’s well-known United Services Magazine (1827–1920). Such growth as is recorded, represented by

­

the trade and professional press

579

titles like the War Office Times and Naval Review (1886–1916), is mainly due to the increased visibility and size of the navy in the late 1880s as a result of increased anxiety about the rise of the naval capacities of France and Germany (Armstrong 1972: 276).14 Performance This category raises particular questions of definition based on the long-established division in performance between amateur and professional, which the employment data do not adequately capture (Armstrong 1972: 277 nonetheless notes a huge rise between 1841 and 1891). The press directories listed several musical journals such as Novello’s Musical World (1836–91) which are decidedly technical and suggest ‘professional’ readers (Langley 1990: 588–9; Langley 1994: 101). I did not intend to include journals directed mainly at amateurs in the datasheet, but in the end I felt obliged to do so because of the porousness of the amateur/professional divide (something the censuses do not capture). The difficulty is highlighted in the case of the famous Era (1838–1939) and the much more obscure Professional World, Published in the Interests of the Musical, Dramatic and Artistic Professions (1892–5) set up for ‘the entertainer, the lecturer, and the reciter’. Although the Era is now often regarded as a general newspaper with an emphasis initially on sport and later on the stage, the Professional World saw it as particularly targeting actors and associated stage occupations while neglecting other kinds of stage professionals. The Professional World was accordingly founded to address the latter. I therefore kept the Era in the dataset for the entirety of its run along with, for the same reason, the Entr’acte (1859–1907) and the Musical Times (1844–present). Without these, the number of items in this category would have been even smaller. While nothing like the 200 musical journals that Langley estimated to have existed over the period are listed in the directories, unlike in the cases of Medicine and Science and Naval and Military, the rising curve in the early 1880s and early 1890s that Table 21.1 shows is in harmony with the increase she notes. Retail, Wholesale, Trades and Services This category, along with the related ‘Commercial, Financial and Insurance’, exhibited the most astonishing growth, exceeding by far 14

Further analysis of the Armed Services Press is provided in Margery Masterson’s contribution to this volume.

580

andrew king

the very significant growth in the relevant demographics recorded by Armstrong (1972: 270–3). I comment in more detail in ‘Conclusions’. Starting with just one periodical in the first issue of Mitchell’s in 1846, the innovative Pawnbroker’s Gazette (1839–1958), by 1888 the press directories listed 127, from Wool and Textile Fabrics (1881–90) and Wine Trade Review (1863–1970) through to Tobacco (1881–1929), Fish Trades Gazette (1883–present), Hairdresser’s Weekly Journal (1882– 1949), British and Foreign Confectioner (1877–1972) and the Baker’s Record (1864–1954). I have considered practices like hairdressing and pawnbroking as ‘services’ here: I do not use the term in the sense used by economists to mean the very general sale of expertise or non-­ manufacturing labour, since that definition, encompassing the Church, medicine, education, law, finance, insurance and other occupations, is too broad a category for our purposes.

Conclusions While the growth of the relative sizes of the categories will be evident from Table 21.1, there are some general surprises in addition to the specific ones I noted in the previous paragraphs. The first surprise was the low impact on journal foundings of the phased repeal of the taxes on knowledge (the advertising duty in 1852, the optionality of the stamp in 1855 and the repeal of the paper duties in 1861). This goes counter to all the standard histories of the press, including the Newspaper Press of the Present Day with which I began this chapter. Although discernible, the effect of the repeals was not immediate (to demonstrate this, Table 21.1 offers a higher density of years available to 1865 than later). There was no major rise in the number of titles published until the 1870s when the quantity of periodicals that relate to ‘Retail, Wholesale, Trades and Services’ increased dramatically, along with the closely related category of ‘Commercial, Financial and Insurance’. One might conclude that this rise was due to the origins of my dataset and the appearance of the specialist lists in the press directories at this time, but the directories always claimed that the lists were reactions to and reflections of the rise, not its cause. One reason for the delayed growth was that paper prices did not drop suddenly after the tax on paper was repealed in 1861, although over the next two decades they did fall considerably; in the 1880s, when wood pulp paper became common, the price dropped yet further (Coleman 1958: 338–9). Better printing technology (such as the Walter rotary presses) was an additional enabler overall, as was the rise of literacy both general and related to trade categories (Vincent 1989/1993: ch. 4). But these factors internal to the industry

­

the trade and professional press

581

do not explain the enormous expansion of certain categories while others grew little in comparison. Taken with the ‘Book and Stationery Trades, Journalism and Printing’ and ‘Railway and Shipping’ categories, ‘Commercial’ and ‘Retail’ dominated the field in 1900, occupying 62 per cent of the number of titles. This is an enormous growth from 1846, when Mitchell’s listed just three trade periodicals (Bent’s Literary Advertiser, Publisher’s Circular, Pawnbroker’s Gazette), and only five commercial and banking periodicals (although it did list eleven railway journals).15 To understand such wide disparities in growth rates among the categories, pressures particular to the press industry  are insufficient, whether the size of potential target readerships, legal regulation or technology: precisely because these periodicals are treated functionally (see p. 569 above) we must turn to the wider economy. Besides the varying growth and decline rates of the various target demographics, we need to take into account how the 1870s to the end of the century was overshadowed by what was termed a ‘Great Depression’, which saw profits and prices fall but wages rise. It is what economic historians now see less as a depression than as decelerated growth and a time of fundamental change in distribution and thereby finance. Large-scale retailers such as Boots, Lipton’s, Freeman Hardy Willis and other multiples arose, and even though by 1900 they accounted for only 13.5 per cent of commercial and retail sales, they nonetheless made competition more intense across the field (Broadberry 2014: 353; Jeffreys 1954: 25–6, 73). In other areas, new production processes like the mechanical bakeries of the 1880s and 1890s required efficient delivery services for them to be linked to more than one shop, as they produced too much too efficiently for any single outlet to handle (Jeffreys 1954: 210–13). The manufacturers of machine-made boots and shoes needed mass distribution at the lowest cost: hence the 500 boot and shoe retailers of 1875 had multiplied tenfold by 1900 (Wilson 1965). In this new climate, inherited knowledge transmitted by apprenticeships was insufficient to keep ahead of competitors. This was a problem the trade periodicals promised to solve: they assured readers competitive advantage, from the names and addresses of suppliers with the best cost–quality ratio, to novel methods of window dressing and adverts for new machinery such as, from the late 1880s, mechanical cash registers that (in theory) prevented fraud by shop assistants. 15

Note that the databases include items that the directories only listed later. More detail on the selection criteria that underlie the formation of the database and the tables in this chapter can be found at BLT19.co.uk.

582

andrew king

Table 21.2  Commercial, financial and insurance periodicals in Mitchell’s, Hammond’s, ‘An Old Advertiser’ and Layton’s

Unsurprisingly, the book trades had early seen the advantages of periodicals, and in the 1860s stationery, paper and news manufacturers were ahead of the trend. ‘Commercial, Financial and Insurance’ periodicals experienced even more astounding growth a few years later. Table 21.2 offers a more granular breakdown of this category, along with the closely related ‘Railway and Shipping’ category. The development of the two subsets is very striking: insurance and what I have called in Table 21.2 ‘Mercantile’ journals (not following emic usage). Although life and other assurances were well established by the time the table starts (Alborn 2008; Dickson 1960), periodicals related to insurance really only began increasing from the late 1860s. Indicative of the wider reorganisation of the industry, Lloyd’s List, a key periodical for insurance, changed now from evening to morning publication, with Spottiswood taking over printing premises, staff and plant, and entering into a profit-sharing arrangement with Lloyd’s, a system which apparently worked well (Wright and Fayle 1928: ­330–3). The upward curve of insurance periodicals slightly anticipates the extraordinary explosion from the 1870s of ‘Mercantile’ journals such as the Capitalist (1885–1943), whose subtitle neatly

­

the trade and professional press

583

summarises this subset: ‘a commercial and financial record for investors, bankers, merchants, shippers, and railway, tramway, electric light, mining, insurance, and other public companies’. The explosion goes hand in hand with energetic debates in the City over the most effective nature of the banking system and the rapid rise of mixedportfolio investment trusts, as described by Kynaston (1994: esp. chapters 18 and 20). At this time, too, ‘finance’ and ‘financial’ became fiduciary terms in periodical titles, taking over from ‘mercantile’: in 1885 there were already five periodicals with ‘Finance’ or ‘Financial’ in their title; by 1890, ten; by 1900, fourteen. Other periodicals began using it in their subtitles: the Insurance Investigator (1891–8) became Investigator; Insurance Trade Finance Investment just a few months after it launched; Railway News and Joint Stock Journal (1894–1918) became Railway News, Finance and Joint Stock Companies’ Journal in 1890. As with the ‘Retail’ category, ‘Commercial, Financial and Insurance’ category shows the effects of economic and social factors external to the periodical industry: it reacted to and promoted the burgeoning importance of the City and the restructuring of finance. It is unsurprising that press directories would pay careful attention to this sector of the press, as it addressed monied classes keen to assert their status and their cultural and economic capitals through the pursuit of the opportunities that the specialist periodicals could offer in both their content and advertisements. While there is a great deal more that could be said about the development of particular subcategories and indeed individual titles, I want to end with more general comments derived from material in the database at BLT19.co.uk which allows us to examine the changing patterns of trade and professional press publishing and its geographical spread. In terms of the former, what is interesting is that moves towards consolidation of ownership and towards specialisation were not as pronounced as expected. We must not be misled by a few well-known cases into thinking that publishers necessarily specialised in certain trade or professional categories or anticipated the press barons in acquiring large numbers of titles and businesses. Longman, it is true, had a substantial medical list early in the century and, at the beginning of the time span of this chapter, was bringing out the London Medical Gazette and the Veterinarian (1828–1902). But then he was also publishing Loudon’s Magazine of Natural History (1828–70) and a great deal else besides, including the very different Sailor’s Home Journal (1856–63). The much more obscure John Hutton published the United Gardeners’ and Land Stewards’ Journal (1845–7) and the related Gardeners’ and Farmer’s Journal (1847–9) but went on to

584

andrew king

take over the Weekly Times newspaper (1847–1912) from Vickers in the 1850s. At the end of the century, Biggs and Co. had a very mixed portfolio at their premises at 139 and 140 Salisbury Court, Fleet Street, which included the Stock Keeper and Fancier’s Chronicle (1874–1906), Electrical Engineer (1882–1912), Contract Journal (1875–present) and Journal of Greengrocery, Fruit, and Flowers (1895–1970). While there were several publishers who specialised in certain areas – William Mitchell (shipping), Campbell (finance), Cox (law), Churchill (medicine), Stonhill (paper trades), Tindall (medical and scientific) and Vinton (agriculture) – they had comparatively few titles each. The wider picture remains chaotic throughout the century, compounded by frequent changes of publisher and printer, suggesting the prevalence of short-term jobbing rather than long-term contracts. Chaotic distribution is not the case in terms of national geography. Most publishers of trade and professional journals were located in the expected areas of London: the commercial, financial and insurance near the City, and the legal near the Inns of Court, while others were more spread out. Yet my research has shown that there was also a significant body of work published outside the metropolis. While in the 1840s specialist agricultural journals were being published in Chester, Dublin, Edinburgh and Newcastle, and shipping and commercial periodicals were issued in Glasgow, the trade and professional press in general picked up considerably from the mid-1870s in major industrial and commercial cities throughout Britain and Ireland. When general histories of the Victorian press assert that Edinburgh was, after London, ‘the second centre of the British book trade’ (Fyfe 2012: 862), it is a surprise to see that Manchester led the field in the provincial trade press with, in 1900, seventeen, mainly retail, periodicals, but also some commercial and construction titles (the Medical Chronicle [1888–present] was the only professional journal published there). Edinburgh publishers, in contrast, issued only nine relevant titles (agricultural, book trades, educational and medical). Glasgow matched that (mainly retail and shipping, and the Scottish Farmer [1893–­­present]), while Birmingham published seven trade-related ones (plus, like Manchester, a single medical title, the Birmingham Medical Review [1872–1979]), and Liverpool six (commercial, shipping and retail). Dublin publishers released ten relevant titles comprising a mixture of categories (but no Church, civil service, shipping or commerce). With the addition of smaller publishing centres such as Belfast, Cardiff, Newcastle, Leicester and a few others, in 1900 some seventy-five trade and professional periodicals were being published outside London, or 14 per cent of the total represented in the dataset

­

case study 17 : the book trade press

585

for that year. This slightly misrepresents the picture, as some provincial journals also had publishers in London (the Birmingham Medical Review, for instance, was published both in Birmingham and by the London medical publisher Churchill in the 1880s and early 1890s). Overall, attention to the trade and professional press helps unsettle the notion that London and Edinburgh were the only centres of publishing worth noting, even while it confirms London’s dominance. What, then, have we gained from the overview offered here? My main aim in writing this chapter was to raise questions about how press history is written, and how and what texts are selected to create it. I have not sought to counter previous histories simply by duplicating either their implicit refusal of positionality or their embrace of specialisation, but have constructed a point of view grounded in the commercial transactions of advertising without which the press industry as we know it could not exist. That this has limitations I have been at pains to point out, but it nonetheless offers for the first time an overview that contextualises previous research on the periodicals of individual domains and occupations. Crucially, I have mapped a huge area of the press that, as Kathleen Endres wrote a quarter of a century ago of the American business press, has played a key role ‘in shaping … our economic way of life’ (1994: viii), whether we realise it or not. In 1951 Richard Altick wrote that ‘Some day someone is going to write a book about 19th-century English trade journals, a deed which may well enrich our knowledge of Victorian social history’ (Altick 1951: 333). We still have a great deal of work to do before that book is written (and to limit ourselves to ‘English’ now appears a mistake), yet the general history and the methodological reflections here constitute a step towards it.

Case Study 17: The Book Trade Press Rachel Calder Thirty-one book trade publications were launched in the United Kingdom and Ireland between 1800 and 1900 (Shattock 1999: 85–6). Most of them were short lived. By examining the characteristics of the trade’s three most important titles, Bent’s Monthly Literary Advertiser (1802–60), the Publishers’ Circular (1837–1959) and the Bookseller (1858–present), this case study will explore how these publications evolved from simple advertising sheets into full-service trade journals. By the early nineteenth century technological innovations and more efficient distribution networks led to lower production costs and helped stimulate

586

rachel calder

greater demand for books, newspapers and periodicals. The UK book trade also saw a move by publishers to separate the production and the retail functions from each other, with firms increasingly becoming either publishers focused on editorial functions, printers focused on print production work, or booksellers specialising in retailing and distributing texts. Publishers became the dominant players in the field, controlling the supply of reading material and setting the retail price, selling most of their output to key middlemen wholesalers, to the larger retail booksellers, and to the powerful circulating libraries. For booksellers, accessing essential commercial information such as bibliographic details and retail prices was paramount to succeeding in the increasingly competitive nineteenth-century book trade environment. Not only were they expected to supply the latest books to loyal customers, they also had to be in a position to advise on the best edition of staple classic works, to know whether a new translation was a reprint or a re-edited version, and to know where to find a rare or unusual book. Sources for this information came from publishers’ catalogues, wholesalers’ lists, auction sales catalogues, retrospective catalogues, and the Stationers’ Company Register, as well as from reviews in the emerging literary press and advertisements placed by ­­publishers in periodicals and newspapers. None of these sources was adequately comprehensive and each had shortcomings, forcing booksellers to search through multiple publications for information. An efficient and costeffective method of acquiring and circulating this essential information was required, and soon enterprising editors began publishing journals addressing this need. Among the first to do so was William Bent, who in 1802 launched A New List of Publications, a monthly advertising sheet of between six and eight double-column pages of publishers’ advertisements. The title was later changed to Bent’s Monthly Literary Advertiser. It was funded by annual subscriptions and advertising fees, and was distributed free for the first two years to ‘all booksellers in town and country’. It was also available to be read at coffee houses in London and Westminster, the twin centres of the London book trade (New List, December 1802: 33). The advertisements provided booksellers with specific title information they could use to order the correct book for a customer and to acquire stock for their bookshops. Details of an advertised title’s retail price and format were listed, sometimes with several choices of binding offered at different prices, as well as the name and address of the originating publisher. The advertisements were grouped under headings such as ‘Newly Published’, ‘New Editions’, ‘Works in the Press’ and ‘Works Lately Published’, with a separate section for the latest engravings. An index of all books published in the previous year was published at the end of each year. Later, short notices of ‘literary intelligence’ were added, mainly early advance notices of new titles and announcements of

­

case study 17 : the book trade press

587

offerings of shares in copyrights, announcements of trade sales dates. Notices of situations vacant and jobs wanted were also listed. As it became increasingly standard for publishers to offer books already bound, a uniform price for a whole edition could be set and signalled to the trade in advertisements. However, the publication of these book prices was not merely trade information, it was also a method by which publishers maintained control of those prices. By the late 1820s there was concern that some booksellers were selling books below the stated retail price, which some members of the trade feared would depress both the prestige and the value of books. A mechanism was needed to protect their interests and keep prices high. In 1829 a committee of the leading publishers and booksellers approved a set of Bookseller Regulations stipulating that no London bookseller could offer their cash customers new books with more than a 10 per cent discount on the retail price set by the publisher. Booksellers who refused to comply with these regulations were labelled ‘undersellers’ and denied further supplies of books at the trade price. The publishers used Bent’s to telegraph their protectionist action. In 1837 fourteen of the ‘principal Publishers of London’ challenged Bent’s monopoly on book trade advertising and launched their own ‘authorized medium’, the Publishers’ Circular, edited by the publisher Sampson Low. Although not an official trade organ, it was funded by many of the same publishers who had instituted the Booksellers’ Regulations, and it was an immediately powerful and direct competitor to the independently owned Bent’s. Issued fortnightly rather than monthly, the Publishers’ Circular claimed to be more comprehensive than Bent’s by including details on all the books published in the United Kingdom and Ireland ‘with few exceptions’ (Publishers’ Circular 1838: iii). To maximise its reach and circulation, copies were distributed free for the first few years to 3,000 London and provincial booksellers, publishers, libraries, and colleges and religious establishments. Free copies were also sent overseas to colonial and military outposts, and to American and German colleges. The journal also built up a solid paid readership base, and within a year boasted of 750 subscriptions from individual subscribers and book-buyers (Publishers’ Circular 1838: iv). The paper consisted of between sixteen and twenty-four pages of ­publishers’ advertisements for books, periodicals, textbooks, alongside engravings and prints of works of art. A classified index categorised the advertised titles in subject headings, and the lists were collected into a full annual register of titles at the end of each year. By the early 1840s each issue opened with two or three pages of general trade information such as short pieces of literary news, obituaries, small advertisements for businesses for sale, situations vacant and books wanted. But the paper remained primarily an advertiser sheet. Low received no salary for his work as editor. Instead, he kept the advertisements

588

rachel calder

fees, creating a financial incentive for him to fill the paper with advertising rather than paying for journalism and reviews (Eliot and Sutherland 1988: 5). By mid-century increased demand for reading materials, coupled with a surge in production of books, encouraged new entrants to bookselling (Eliot 1994: 106). One of these, John Chapman, challenged the legality of the Booksellers’ Regulations. Significantly, he used the pages of a literary journal, the Athenaeum, not the trade papers, to make his case. His position was also forcefully supported by the Times (Barnes 1964: 24). The Publishers’ Circular published only one defence of the Regulations before a court of arbitration found against them, and in May 1852 the Regulations were finally removed. In the new era of ‘free trade in books’, booksellers could apply whatever discounts their business could bear, usually between 15 and 25 per cent for cash sales. Although the numbers of books published was rising, the increased competition and ever-lower prices threatened booksellers’ profits and put some of them out of business. By the late 1850s sales of Bent’s and Publishers’ Circular dropped to just under and just over 1,000 copies, respectively, per issue (Bookseller, September 1858: 393). In addition, the trade publications now had to compete with quarterly and monthly periodicals, like the Athenaeum, that printed not only a great deal of book advertising but also literary intelligence, reviews and notices. Nonetheless, one publisher saw a gap in the market for advertising-funded trade publications that prompted the launch of yet another significant book trade journal in January 1858. Joseph Whitaker was an experienced editor, publisher and bookseller. As an editor of the venerable Gentleman’s Magazine, he had been frustrated by the difficulties of collating a monthly book list that included more than just London-based material. Bent’s and Publishers’ Circular were still dominated by London publishers; finding details of books from Scotland, Ireland and English provincial publishers meant hours scouring literary periodicals, local newspapers and publishers’ catalogues (Bookseller, January 1908: 9). Whitaker believed there was a demand for ‘a really efficient and independent organ that would prove itself indispensable to every section of the trade’, as well as to book-buyers (Bookseller, January 1908: 9). He later claimed that the Bookseller was the first publication to combine trade journalism with advertising, news, opinions, business statistics and product information. This targeted journalism significantly improved the quality of information booksellers could access to help manage their business, and it quickly spawned imitators in other trades such as the Ironmonger and Metal Trades Advertiser and the Draper and Clothier (Bookseller, April 1866: 296). The first issue of the Bookseller in January 1858 ran to fifty-six pages, more than twice the size of its rivals. Twenty pages were devoted to news, literary intelligence and gossip, reviews and a large section of advertisements. A

­

case study 17 : the book trade press

589

column of new titles listed alphabetically was printed at the back. Whitaker calculated that, with the right weight of paper, up to 100 pages could be sent through the postal system for 1d, offering his subscribers more value for their money than rival papers, proving thus more useful for advertisers, and, more importantly, making the venture that much more profitable for him (Bookseller, January 1908: 11). Information was collected from a wide variety of sources, including newspapers, literary periodicals and foreign publications. Further information came directly from the book trade itself, from Whitaker’s networks of trade contacts and from his advertisers. The Bookseller aimed to be indispensable to its readers, a comprehensive monthly record of ‘all that is passing in the book world,’ and boasted that it would do ‘ for the bookselling trade what Bradshaw does for the Railways’ (Bookseller, January 1858: 1 and March 1858: 98). Whitaker’s combination of trade journalism and advertising created a virtuous circle; subscribers were attracted to the additional content, and advertisers were attracted to the additional readers. One hundred and twenty-nine publishers were persuaded by Whitaker’s reach and scope to place advertisements in the first issue; in comparison, only twenty-nine featured in the rival Publishers’ Circular (16 January 1858: 617). Two thousand copies were sent out gratis to potential subscribers, and half of them immediately signed up (Bookseller, April 1866: 295). The journal quickly increased in size as publishers realised its effectiveness and took out repeated and multiple pages of advertisements. Some special editions, such as the illustrated Christmas issue, would expand to over 250 pages to accommodate the seasonal demand. The journal tried to represent the whole book trade. In addition to a gazette of business start-ups and bankruptcies, partnerships and dissolutions, there were snippets of literary gossip reflecting the trade’s most pressing concerns. Detailed accounts of parliamentary debates over international copyright appeared alongside warnings of swindlers who did not pay their booksellers’ bills, and requests for advice on how to remedy foxed books. Trade statistics were provided, such as tables of paper prices and the number of stamps issued to newspapers. The personalities of the trade were brought to fore through indepth histories of established publishing houses such as William Blackwood & Sons, or through lengthy obituaries of departed trade members. Information about new types of decorative stationery, and novelty items such as poodleshaped pen wipers, presented the latest innovations in fashionable items. To help booksellers assess the blizzard of titles published each month, there were reviews and notices of the most important new works in the lists. These were written with ‘the assistance of several gentlemen of literary reputation’, and designed to be impartial and to avoid ‘puffery’ (Bookseller, March 1858: 98). From the outset, Whitaker was keen to provide a forum where the ‘feelings and opinions of the trade’ could be heard, where grievances could be

590

margery masterson

aired, and issues debated, if not resolved. It was to be a democratic space, where voices from across the trade, not just those of the powerful, could be represented (Bookseller, April 1866: 295). Although these opinions could be partial, self-serving and sometimes ill-informed, they nonetheless offered keen insights into the attitudes, personalities and undercurrents of the trade. Readers could find complaints about clergymen selling sermons from the pulpit, alongside calls for publishers to desist from supplying drapers with books. Complaints of long hours from booksellers’ assistants nestled next to debates over prices and underselling, or literary matters such as mulling over the true identity of ‘George Eliot’. Whitaker was actively engaged in the trade’s controversies and challenges, and used the journal to make his own views manifestly clear. He warned of the dangers of the ‘monopoly of public patronage’ of Mudie’s Select Library, criticised publishing ‘services’ that tempted authors with blandishments of ‘equitable terms’ when they were no such thing, and encouraged the trade to act together for the benefit of all (Bookseller, May 1859: 926; October 1858: 432). He was also firmly against the ‘insane competition’ caused by underselling (Bookseller, June 1858: 241). Throughout the nineteenth century the book trade press played an increasingly important role in facilitating changes to business practices by circulating specialist information around the trade. By subscribing to trade publications such as the ones noted, booksellers were able to access invaluable, expert and privileged information that helped them manage the ever-challenging business of selling books. Exposure to informed opinion and less informed trade gossip allowed booksellers insights into general business trade practices and the use of trade-specific language and trade argot allowed subscribers to feel they were part of a business community with a shared outlook and purpose. In the book trade press one finds a record of the development of this community, a key to the trade language, campaigns, challenges and personalities of the time, and a flavour of the milieu and the mentality of the nineteenth-century British book trade.

Case Study 18: The Armed Services Press Margery Masterson The armed services press in Britain, Ireland and the overseas Empire was central to efforts to develop a modern army in the nineteenth century. At the same time, it was both more diverse and less straightforward in its aims and audiences than other professional presses. The armed services press was a highly fluid imperial network that was at times, especially in the militarised colonies, indistinguishable from the mainstream press. It served as the local press within

­

case study 18 : the armed services press

591

model military communities in the United Kingdom. It moreover made use of periods of patriotic feeling to target a national crossover military–civilian audience but was not averse to playing a part in chronicling the uneven professionalisation of the armed services, a halting process begun prior to the nineteenth century and concluding in the twentieth. Researchers are only beginning to uncover the full size and scope of military periodicals. Over 200 known military titles were published in Britain and Ireland alone. While several of the most visible and enduring publications were printed in London, the majority of the short-lived single titles were produced within key British military communities in the United Kingdom and overseas. Circulation was low, but most copies were destined for sociable messes and clubs where they might be read by dozens of officers. The exception to the low circulation came when military periodicals attempted a crossover civilian market. Publications dedicated to improving the military profession came from military elites and from the more technical officer corps. Most armed service periodicals served the wider officer community in which there was little consensus of whether the army or navy were a profession in the modern sense of the word. An emerging military periodical press between the 1830s and 1850s cultivated growing protest within military circles against post-Napoleonic ­­stagnation – particularly after losses in Afghanistan and the Punjab in the 1840s (Strachan 1980: 785). The two major weekly armed services papers of the nineteenth century, the Naval and Military Gazette (1833–86) and the United Services Gazette (1833–1921), sought to capitalise upon the growing dissatisfaction within military circles stultifying under the unchallenged leadership of the Duke of Wellington. John Philippart, the Conservative editor of the Naval and Military Gazette for its first thirty-five years, was a former employee of the War Office. Circulation by the 1840s was up to 1,300 copies per week with a far greater number of readers in the subscribing mess rooms and clubs (Strachan 1984: 21–3). While professional antagonism dominated the early exchanges between the two weeklies, the replacement of the combative Alaric Watts by the more flexible J. H. Stocqueler in 1846 as editor of the United Service Gazette ushered in a prolonged period of cooperation between it and the Naval and Military Gazette. These two Conservative-leaning publications found a mutual aim in supporting reform of the armed forces (Tucker 1994: 67). The Naval and Military Gazette would last a further forty years as an independent publication before being folded in 1886 into the Broad Arrow (1868–1917). The most overtly professional of the military periodicals originated from the top and the bottom of the military’s social hierarchy. The advent of the Royal United Services Institution in the 1830s, a learned society designed to mimic similar legal and medical institutions, spawned the Journal of the Royal United

592

margery masterson

Service Institution (1857–1971). The Institute had close ties with the authorities at Horse Guards and the Admiralty, and the Journal of the Royal United Service Institution paid close attention to foreign wars, including translations of articles from their foreign counterparts (Tucker 1994: 69). At the same time, the more technical arms of the service, which had long craved a more professional tone in the forces, sought opportunities to create their own specialist branch publications, including the Minutes of the Proceedings of the Royal Artillery Institution (1858–present) and the Royal Engineer Journal (1870– present).16 While serious-minded monthlies were often associated with the higher end of the market, the Royal Artillery and Royal Engineers, as well as the Royal Marines, were the less prestigious branches of the British military, in large part because of their early professionalisation in a service where social status and amateurism traditionally went hand in hand. Wartime increased civilian interest in military issues and interaction between the armed services press and the mainstream media. So too did scandals within the forces. Outwardly pro-reform, and at times scathingly critical of those men at the top, weekly papers such as the Naval and Military Gazette forcefully refuted assertions of sweeping rot within the service. The responses of the Naval and Military Gazette to the Times’s coverage of the Crimean War winter supply crisis of 1855, and to a bullying scandal the previous year, highlighted the divergence of perspective between military and mainstream press outlets of similar political orientation. While not immune to the appeal of having a powerful press organ in their corner, the Naval and Military Gazette quickly grew alarmed by the expansive character of the Times’s accusations of widespread incompetence; they were further riled by the Times’s assumption of military expertise (Naval and Military Gazette, 5 August, 16 September, 18 November 1854). Ultimately, the very narrative hooks that interested the non-military press in military affairs, sensationalised accounts of villainy and systematic corruption, were resented and resisted by military periodicals. Military periodicals benefited after the Crimean War from the simultaneous expansion of the press and the creation of a popular Volunteers movement in 1859. Civilian publishers already appreciated that military officers were well integrated within wider society and shared prevailing tastes. Henry Colburn, a successful publisher of silver fork novels and literary magazines, was responsible for the Naval and Military Gazette and the monthly United Service Magazine (1827–1920) (Tucker 1994: 65).17 The mid-nineteenth century tested whether expanding middle-class civilian audiences were 16

Minutes of the Proceedings of the Royal Artillery Institution became Proceedings of the Royal Artillery Institution in 1899 before becoming the Journal of the Royal Artillery. 17 United Service Journal and Naval and Military Magazine (1829?), United Service Magazine and Naval and Military Journal (1840s), Colburn’s Unites Service Magazine (1865–present).

­

case study 18 : the armed services press

593

interested in the military world. The proprietors of Punch were sufficiently optimistic of a crossover civilian audience on military issues to launch a weekly paper under W. H. Russell (Tucker 1994: 71). This new market proved sufficient if not lucrative, and Russell edited the Army and Navy Gazette (1860–1921) until his death in 1907. He increased circulation through such means as including attractive supplements – on high-profile courts martial and popular issues – squarely aimed at a mass audience (Gaskell 2018: 56; Masterson 2014: 306). Commercial motivations coincided with government ambitions. The Volunteer Service Gazette (1859–1903), for example, was largely the weekly organ of a government anxious to instil patriotism in the urban middle classes by promoting volunteerism. While national armed services publications have been better archivally preserved due to their London origins and greater longevity, the bulk of the armed services press had a decidedly local character. The establishment of temporary volunteer camps each summer often saw individual regiments seek to form a relationship with a local community, however short lived, through such means as a regimentally produced paper or periodical (Bailey 1988: 38; Bailey 1990: 47). The establishment in Aldershot in 1854 of a permanent military community created a stable local identity that encouraged the launch and sustainable circulation of the Aldershot Military Gazette (1859–1932).18 This ostensibly military paper, which at the same time featured local news items, was distributed both to camps around the United Kingdom and read in the surrounding Hampshire and Sussex towns. The other context in which military papers functioned as the local press was in the colonies, where members of the armed forces formed a substantially higher proportion of the European population. In the British colonies, the armed services press frequently was the mainstream press. Targeting a military audience was one way for colonial publishers to combat a harsh financial environment of low circulation and increased British competition from the likes of Blackwood’s Magazine, Bentley’s Miscellany and Fraser’s Magazine (‘An Indian Newspaper’, Temple Bar, 6 November 1862, 502–3; Finkelstein and Peers 2000: 7–8). This strategy had the twofold benefit of securing a modest readership, while also attracting contributors who would require little or no payment for their efforts. In India, home to the largest concentration of British armed forces outside of the United Kingdom and Ireland, popular papers such as the Mufussilite, Calcutta Journal and Meerut Observer were set up and sustained by the army (‘Starting a Paper in India’, Household Words, 7 March 1853: 94–6; Peers 1995: 55; Sankhdher 1984: 163). 18

Aldershot Military Gazette (1859–60), Sheldrake’s Aldershot Military Gazette (1860–1913), Aldershot Gazette and Military News (1913–32).

594

margery masterson

The journalistic career of Stocqueler, editor of the United Service Gazette, is a prime example of how militarised the mainstream press could be in India. Having spent a great deal of time in India as editor of the Calcutta Englishman and other general-interest publications, he brought this expertise to bear on his return to England to assume an armed services press editorship (Strachan 1984: 24; Finkelstein and Peers 2000: 15). Anglo-Indian papers run by civilians were also heavily influenced by the military character of colonial communities. Robert Knight, founder of the Times of India (1857–present), was perennially concerned with military matters despite his civilian background (Hirschmann 2008: 31). Yet, due to financial and social constraints, it was only with the support of the Indian government that a dedicated military periodical, the Proceedings of the United Service Institution of India (1871–present) ultimately endured (Moreman 2000: 218–20, 229).19 If the colonial press was perennially concerned with the military, then the  armed services press in the United Kingdom and Ireland was consistent in its regard for and attention to Britain’s colonies – if only to report the movement and condition of its members around the world. The major weekly Navy and Military Gazette was from its inception subheaded the East India and Colonial Chronicle. Whether this practical coverage of colonial matters always amounted to uncritical support for empire is debatable. It is clear, however, that popular imperialism and technological advances within the print industry at the end of the century encouraged the military press to target a new ­­audience – the crossover working-class market. The armed services press, long dependent upon educated military officers as contributors as well as readers, had consistently treated working-class British soldiers as topics of discussion rather than as community members. At last, illustrated weeklies such as the Navy League Journal (1895–1914), edited by a Daily Mail assistant editor H.  W. Wilson and with a circulation of around 20,000, began specifically using their pages to target and boost patriotic pride among working-class audiences (Thompson 2000: 46; 1999).20 The relationship between the armed services press and the civilian press was extensive and contentious. The military press had an ambivalent relationship with authority, often being far more critical of their leaders than civilian presses, and yet extremely defensive of what they deemed unjust persecution from uninformed popular opinion. This divergence of perspective was a perennial rather than a wartime problem, as the service press was an important source of information on military deeds and misdeeds throughout the nineteenth century. At the same time, there were productive areas of cooperation 19

Proceedings of the United Service Institution of India (1871–83), Journal of the United Service Institution (1883–present). 20 Navy after 1908.

­

case study 18 : the armed services press

595

between the military press, government and commercial publishers, most notably in publications targeting a crossover military–civilian market. The crucial question remains as to whether the armed services periodicals were in fact trade publications performing a comparable role in professionalising the armed services and raising the reputation of its members. When we view the full range of armed services periodicals, from national weeklies established in the first decades of the nineteenth century, to the proliferation of new magazines later in the century, to the short-lived military papers of the colonies and the Volunteer camps, it is evident that the armed services press was many things: a local press and an organ of Empire, a scholarly press and a leisure press, a middle-class press and finally a working-class press. By maintaining a focused conversation on the performance of military duties, the armed forces press was also a trade press.

Chapter Twenty-Two

THE LEISURE AND HOBBY PRESS Christopher A. Kent

Leisure is gone – gone where the spinning wheels are gone … Ingenious philosophers tell you, perhaps, that the great work of the steam engine is to create leisure for mankind. Do not believe them; it only creates a vacuum for eager thought to rush in. Even idleness is eager for amusement, prone to excursiontrains, art museums, periodical literature and exciting novels. (Eliot 1961: 484) George Eliot in Adam Bede (1859) captured the awkward situation of leisure at the moment when Victorian Britain, the world’s first mature industrial society, gave birth to what is now called mass or modern leisure. The word itself trailed connotations of exclusivity and wealth – the privilege of an elite free to do whatever they wished whenever they wished. ‘Leisure’ is an elevated Anglo-Norman word unlike ‘work’, its demotic Anglo-Saxon antonym. Viewed from this elite perspective, ‘mass leisure’ flirts with oxymoron. While leisure never fully entered common parlance, it has made itself comfortable in the lexicon of social analysis, Victorian Britain, the first predominantly urban nation, saw the wrenching process of industrialisation at last yield a significant improvement in the standard of living – a rise in real wages and fall in hours worked – for the majority of labourers. The result – modern leisure – was an unexpected and not entirely welcome phenomenon. Leisure is not just time spent not working, which obviously is nothing new, but time fully at one’s disposal – time to spend doing as one likes largely independent of traditional community controls and expectations. It is free time. But the question ‘free to do what?’ created anxiety. It was also empty time: Eliot’s metaphor would have reminded her 596

­

the leisure and hobby press

597

scientifically literate readers that nature abhors a vacuum. Anxiety was also the orthodox Christian response to leisure – ‘The Devil makes work for idle hands.’ Victorian Britain prided itself on being the most Christian nation. Britain was also a literate nation. Most of its adults could read to a degree, and the literacy rate was rising sharply. The price of the printed word was plummeting due to new technologies and the abolition of government taxes: its cheap distribution was sped by a burgeoning railway network. Clearly, much of Victorian Britain’s new leisure would be spent in reading. It was a golden opportunity for the periodical press. But reading what? Publications such as the penny weekly Terrific Register (1821) that curdled the blood of the nine-yearold Charles Dickens, or the chapbooks, broadsides and other products of a vigorous commercial publishing industry? The early, anxiety-driven leisure press included three notable periodicals, the Penny Magazine (1832–45), published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge’s organ, the penny Saturday Magazine (1832– 44), and the penny half-penny Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal (1832– 1956). All three weeklies first appeared in the portentous year of the First Reform Act. All were intended to enable ‘the poorest labourer’ with his ‘humble earnings’ to purchase ‘a meal of healthful, useful and agreeable mental instruction … instead of the trash upon which the grown children of the present day’ wasted their time and money (Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, I.1, 4 February 1832: 1). The first two were qualified successes: they did not penetrate as deeply into the working classes as they hoped. Worthy and well produced, offering edifying and instructive articles on a variety of topics, they failed to drive out the ‘trash’, but attracted a substantial readership among upward-striving artisans and the self-improving middle class. With its peak sale of 213,000, the Penny Magazine was indeed ‘making readers’ and could justly claim to be Britain’s first mass-market periodical (Bennett 1982: 237). But it was the entrepreneurial Chambers ­brothers, more sensitive to their readership, particularly to its demand for fiction, who produced a journal with lasting appeal even though it lacked the illustrations of its cheaper rivals. Following this first wave of claimants to readers’ leisure came a second wave of less strenuous penny weeklies in the 1840s. The Family Herald; or, Useful Information and Amusement for the Millions (1842– 1940) pioneered in creating the family-oriented general-­­interest magazine genre with a formula that would inspire numerous rivals. ‘Interesting to All, Offensive to None’ was its motto, and its editorial contract with readers promised ‘A variety of detached reading for

598

christopher a. kent

those leisure moments when we are all inclined to be amused with as little effort as possible and are glad of a certain degree of mental recreation …’ (‘To the Reader’, I.1: 1). Over half its content was fiction, including a serial. It had an ‘answers to correspondents’ page, and offered brief biographical, scientific, historical and travel articles along with household hints recipes, maxims, jokes, puzzles and statistics, Its sales reached 300,000 in 1855, but were exceeded by the 500,000 of the London Journal and Weekly Record of Literature, Science and Art (1845–1928), a penny weekly which, despite its somewhat sober title, was rather racier in content. The London Journal’s serials had a reputation for luridness and had the benefit of John Gilbert’s vigorous illustrations. Critics characterised it as a favourite of servant girls who devoured it in the kitchen during leisure moments stolen from their masters, but it was probably read by a demographic similar to that of the Family Herald. Reynolds’ Miscellany (1846–69) was another contender, with a similar format and sales, but with a distinctly radical political tinge imparted by its owner-editor, the republican novelist G. W. M. Reynolds, who had been the first editor of the Family Herald. Although these three periodicals were the most successful in competing with pernicious literature in the leisure market, many critics deemed them suspect. Specifically founded to challenge their appeal with something more improving and respectable was the penny weekly Leisure Hour: A Family Journal of Instruction and Recreation (1852– 1905) (see Figure 22.1). It was produced by the evangelical Religious Tract Society, a shrewdly managed organisation that paid careful attention to readership and downplayed its institutional influence by not displaying its name. Well printed on good paper, it adopted a content mix similar to its rivals’, but its strong emphasis on family appeal and unimpeachably wholesome content made it, in Aileen Fyfe’s words, ‘the ideal blend of mental and religious improvement for those newly acquired hours of freedom’ (Fyfe 2004: 64). It controversially offered serialised fiction, and though many Christians viewed fiction in any form as morally dangerous, this was one of the journal’s chief attractions, along with its illustrations of good quality. Leisure Hour never matched its targeted competition in sales, attracting readers in somewhat higher strata – the very word ‘leisure’ in its title suggests elevating intentions – but it enjoyed greater respect and approached creditable sales of 100,000. Its changing frontispieces  addressed the important issue of the sites of leisure. The first depicted a father reading aloud to his wife and five children in a cosy domestic setting. In 1869 it offered three vignettes: a mother reading

­

the leisure and hobby press

599

Figure 22.1  Leisure Hour, 14 November 1863 (Courtesy of David Finkelstein)

aloud to her husband and children; a young woman and three men in a railway carriage all absorbed in reading; and a man reading aloud to three female servants. John S. North’s Waterloo Directories (North 1986­­–, 1989–, 1997–), covering Irish, Scottish and English newspapers and periodicals across the entire nineteenth century, are indispensable for sampling the enormous range of titles relevant to the theme of leisure. The emphasis in this chapter is on English periodical publications North’s practice of quoting the customary editorial address to readers from the first issue of a journal offers a valuable window into readership assumptions and aspirations. Some 150 titles commence with ‘home’, and over 600 journals include ‘home’ in their full title. The word appears in the editorial

600

christopher a. kent

address of some 1,700 journals. ‘Family’ appears in over 400 titles. These figures make clear the targeted site and readership of most of the leisure press, particularly up to the 1870s. Although the Victorian home and domestic sphere are conventionally viewed by scholars as female-gendered, it is probably a mistake to underestimate the male readership of this very large segment of the Victorian leisure press, just as it is to underestimate, for instance, the masculine appeal of the sensation novel which thrived there. Other key words searchable in the Waterloo Directories that are useful in identifying the leisure press are ‘Saturday’, appearing in thirty-five journal titles, and ‘Sunday’ in 175 titles. Although Saturday was not yet a regular holiday, the Saturday half-holiday was gaining ground in many industries. But ‘Saint’ Monday, the unofficial holiday still claimed until quite late in the century by many workers, was never acknowledged in a journal title. Many appearances of ‘Sunday’ are in overtly religious periodicals, but the large number reminds us that it was the one unquestioned day of leisure. The Sabbath being the Lord’s Day, the question of how it was spent was momentous for believers, for many of whom the Bible and perhaps Pilgrim’s Progress and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs were the only fit Sabbath reading. The Religious Tract Society’s Sunday at Home: A Family Magazine for Sabbath Reading (1854–1940), which claimed sales of 130,000 in the 1860s, no doubt assisted by strong clerical promotion, was more overtly evangelical than its stablemate Leisure Hour, which was published on Thursday so as not to compete with sacred Sunday reading (Fyfe 2004: 178). A strong Sabbatarian lobby in Victorian Britain was dedicated to restricting Sunday labour, including Sunday trading, travel and recreations, and museum access, in order to preserve the sanctity of the Lord’s Day (Wigley 1980). The most spectacularly successful segment of the leisure press was the mass-circulation Sunday newspapers, which achieved deepest penetration into working-class readership. Their success was, of course, an affront to Sabbatarianism, and underlined the finding of the 1851 census of religious attendance that less than half the population attended church. Lloyd’s ‘Weekly Newspaper (1842–1931), News of the World (1843–2011), the Weekly Times (1847–1912) and Reynolds’ Newspaper (1850–1967) were the four main titles, although News of the World’s circulation languished until it took off dramatically under new ownership in the 1890s. The founders of Lloyd’s and Reynolds’s, the compositor Edward Lloyd and G. W. M. Reynolds, launched their publishing careers in the cut-throat world of ‘penny dreadfuls’, where they gained the sense of the power of melodrama that was central to

­

the leisure and hobby press

601

the success of their papers. The engraver George Stiff, founder of the Weekly Times, founded the London Journal for which Reynolds had written. David Vincent has described their achievement as ‘translating the dissemination of news into a completely new form of popular leisure’ (Vincent 1989: 252). Notoriously, the news content of these papers was chiefly court, police and coroners’ inquest reports. That Sloppy in Our Mutual Friend is a ‘beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices’ (Dickens 1908: 187) – words that captured the imagination of T. S. Eliot, who adopted them as the working title of The Waste Land  – reminds us both that not all newspaper consumers were literate, and that reporting often employed extensive dialogue. Priced at a penny after the abolition of newspaper taxes, the Sunday newspapers largely ‘drove out the street sellers whose stock-in-trade of executions, crimes, and disasters could not compete with the newspapers’ (Vincent 1989: 252). The crimes and scandals of the higher-ups provided moralising entertainment with a politically radical edge, while the exoticism of their world added further interest. The sensational Boulton–Park transvestism case of 1871 received extremely detailed reporting in Reynolds’, for instance. Central to the appeal of these papers, somewhat paradoxically in view of their mass circulation, was their ability to speak directly to the individual reader in various ways, such as their popular ‘answers to correspondents’ page, where individual readers’ questions, often on highly specific legal problems, received precise, professional answers. Another example was extensive readers’ advertisements, many of which were for houses and businesses for sale or rent, or for employment. Even much of the police and local news was personal in the sense that it involved people not so different from the readers themselves, non-elite subjects whose misdeeds and misfortunes took place in familiar settings. This sort of ‘timeless news’ – the crimes, accidents, and private tragedies that recurred constantly but each time with differences of carefully described detail – was news that readers could relate to personally, perhaps with thanks that at least it hadn’t happened to them. If, as Hegel suggested, reading the daily newspaper was the morning prayer of the bourgeois, reading Reynolds’ and its counterparts was perhaps the Sunday prayer of the working classes. The years that saw the take-off of the mass Sunday press also saw the emergence of a new generation of shilling monthlies targeting the expanding leisure of middle-class readers. The market leader was the Cornhill Magazine (1860–1975): its remarkable initial sale of 110,000 copies under W. M. Thackeray’s well-advertised editorship could not

602

christopher a. kent

be sustained, but it offered a model of high-quality, uncontroversial, family-friendly reading, with two finely illustrated serials by leading novelists, supported by articles on a wide range of topics (see Plate 8). The increasingly popular, more relaxed term ‘magazine’ suggested a variety of offerings for the reader to choose from, as well as a distinct journal identity that the reader was invited to relate to. The bland old survivor, the Gentleman’s Magazine (1731–1907), pioneered the term, subsequently adopted by Blackwood’s Magazine (1817–1980) and its rival Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country (1830–82), both of them establishing distinct editorial voices through a policy of anonymity. By contrast, the new mid-century magazines invited readers by adopting a more open address, moving towards a policy of signed articles that advertised authorial identity and authority. Both the Cornhill and Macmillan’s Magazine (1859–1907) were owned by leading publishers and provided a useful venue for introducing the firm’s best fiction. Temple Bar (1860–1906), Belgravia (1867–99) and Tinsley’s Magazine (1867–92) were frothier versions of the same formula. Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper (1853–1930) was perhaps the most successful of the book publishers’ magazines through greater adaptability. Starting as a penny weekly, it became the sixpennny monthly Cassell’s Magazine in 1867, and combined lively middlebrow fiction, sound conventional morality and heavy illustration with general family features. New shilling journals also appeared for those desiring leisure reading of a more intellectual kind. The Fortnightly Review (1865–1954), which soon became a monthly without changing its title, attracted serious freethinkers, while the Contemporary Review (1866–1988) represented liberal Anglicanism. Both eschewed fiction, but their signed articles were more accessible – shorter, more topical and varied – than those of the old-style quarterly reviews, while the Nineteenth Century (1877–1901) offered a kind of celebrity intellectualism, its editor James Knowles purposely commissioning well-known names to address hot topics. A new phase in the development of the leisure magazine opened with the appearance of the upmarket sixpenny weekly Vanity Fair: A Weekly Show of Political, Social, and Literary Wares (1868–1929). Its young, well-connected creator, Thomas Gibson Bowles, was the illegitimate son of the Liberal cabinet minister Thomas Milner Gibson, parliamentary leader of the movement to repeal the Taxes on Knowledge. It was addressed to ‘the Few’, ‘for those alone’ to whom ‘the current pass words of Society’ are ‘comprehensible’ (29 November 1873). Though it targeted the leisured smart set, it attracted aspirational readers who wanted to be in the know. It was the earliest and the best of what came

­

the leisure and hobby press

603

to be known as ‘society journals’, engaging readers with informed political and social gossip, investment advice, travel information, book and theatre reviews, correspondence real and imagined, light fiction, regular features such as ‘Hard Cases’ – social dilemmas to which readers were invited to suggest solutions – and ingenious word puzzles such as anagrams, acrostics and double acrostics. The latter were not unique to Vanity Fair: leisure-oriented brain-teasers inviting reader’s answers were already well established in numerous periodicals (even newspapers offered chess problems). Printed on good paper, Vanity Fair became particularly famous for its clever, collectible coloured lithograph cartoons of celebrities. Its lucrative advertisements provide a revealing glimpse of the leisure expenditures of the well-to-do. Another entrant into this field was the World: A Journal for Men and Women (6d, 1874–1922), which, as its subtitle made clear, was not intended simply for a default readership. Edmund Yates, its ownereditor, was a pioneering gossip columnist, and his journal aimed at establishing an informal, intimate relationship with male and female readers, treating them as social insiders in his column ‘What the World Says’. One of his most successful and widely imitated features was ‘Celebrities at Home’, informal interviews somewhat in the manner of American journalism. Significantly the celebrities were interviewed as if at leisure and were encouraged to dwell on their private lives. Although its editorial declaration promised that the World would never be ‘unmindful of the wants and interests of every section of the English community’, its 1885 advertisement in the Advertiser’s Guardian and Advertisement Agent’s Guide boasted: ‘To reach the wealthy classes advertisers must advertise in The World’ (Waterloo), a reminder that advertisements were becoming part of leisure reading, offering readers entertainment –famously in the case of Pears soap ads – and fantasy for aspirational consumers. Henry Labouchere’s Truth (1877–1957; 6d) also specialised in highquality gossip and cautious scandalmongering in its ‘Entre Nous’ column, particularly concerning business and financial corruption. Both journals featured talented women journalists like Truth’s ‘Madge’ (Mrs C. E. Humphry), who wrote on social conduct for men and women, Emily Crawford, its Paris correspondent, and Mrs E. D. Aria its fashion specialist, and the World’s Mrs Cashel Hoey and Lucy Bethia Walford – women who could engagingly address readers across gender boundaries. An important feature of these society journals was the strength of their art, music and theatre reviews, such as George Bernard Shaw’s art and music reviews for the World. As the higher bohemia became

604

christopher a. kent

increasingly fashionable, the activities and personalities of artists, theatre people and musicians – practitioners of the leisure arts ­­– captured the interest of magazine audiences, making for entertaining reading which offered an inside view of a seemingly glamorous world. Though the formal Victorian discourse of leisure tended to be inflected by concern about its dangers, the attitude of suspicion relaxed somewhat over time. Again, word-searching the Waterloo Directories yields suggestive statistics. While ‘leisure’ appears in twenty-two periodical titles, ‘recreation’, with its pleasingly transformative connotations for nervous Victorians, appears in forty titles. Though ‘relaxation’ appears in only one title, other leisure-related words appear with increasing frequency in the descriptive subtitles of periodicals: ‘entertaining’ appears 101 times, ‘entertainment’ 121 times, ‘amusing’ sixtytwo times and ‘amusement’ 217 times. ‘Pleasure’ appears twenty-seven times and the more blatant ‘fun’ features sixty times. The humorous weekly Fun (1861–1901) was the closest rival of Punch (1841–2002), although it was less preoccupied with respectability. Even cheekier was Judy (1867–1907), birthplace of Ally Sloper, the subversive figure who eventually earned himself his own large circulation weekly ­­– Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday (1884­­–1949) (see Figure 22.2). The coarse, garishly attired Sloper flaunted his disruptive notions of having fun at the seaside and other increasingly popular sites of leisure to the discomfort of more respectable holidaymakers (Bailey 1998: 47–79). Both are discussed in Chapters 14 and 15 of this volume. Another leisure journal that challenged respectability by celebrating men – and women – having fun in somewhat disreputable ways was Day’s Doings (1870–2) (see Figure 22.3). This well-illustrated threepenny weekly was launched by the American magazine magnate Frank Leslie, a former Illustrated London News engraver, as a London counterpart to his racy New York weekly of the same title. After its editor was fined for publishing ‘obscene pictures’ (of cancan dancers), it closed, immediately to reopen as Here and There, which lasted another ten months. The combative poet Robert Buchanan described its readers as ‘pimpled clerks’ (Buchanan 1872: 2). Leslie’s popular New York weekly was the model for Richard K. Fox’s high-circulation National Police Gazette (1845–1977), which was ‘always on sale in low newsagents’ in Britain according to James Joyce, who gave it a place in Ulysses (Joyce 1961: 324; Joyce 1966: 2,471). Fox published a British edition from 1896 to 1900. Britain’s own Illustrated Police News, Law Courts and Criminal Record (1864–1938) was a more crudely produced penny weekly that concentrated on crime stories and was distinctly less ‘spicy’ (Fox’s favourite adjective) than its American

­

the leisure and hobby press

605

Figure 22.2  Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday, 1886 (Courtesy of David Finkelstein)

counterpart, which gave extensive space to sports and unruly women (see Figure 22.4). Such early examples of an emerging genre, the men’s magazine, were descendants of earlier ‘fast’, scandalous journals such as Barnard Gregory’s Satirist, or Censor of the Times (1831–49) and Renton Nicolson’s the Town (1837–42), which celebrated (often under the flimsy guise of deploring) some of the less respectable pleasures of metropolitan life and offered their readers inside information and guidance on manly styles of urban leisure. Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle (1822–85) was the leading authority on the sporting life among men of all classes for many years and is discussed in further detail by Joel Wiener elsewhere in this volume. The surging commercialisation and commodification of leisure by the sports and entertainment industries gave rise to various male

606

christopher a. kent

Figure 22.3  The Day’s Doings (Courtesy of British Newspaper Archive)

lifestyle journals, including the Sporting Times, A Chronicle of Racing, Literature, Art and the Drama (1865–­­1931, weekly, 2d) known as the ‘Pink’un’ from its tinted newsprint, whose band of bohemian journalists prided themselves on being London’s most knowledgeable ‘men about town’, ready share their knowledge about sports – especially prizefighters and horses – actresses, dining, dress, clubs, society gossip and more, with all who wished to be in the know, including women – of a certain kind. The Referee (1877–1939, weekly, 1d) was its somewhat less lighthearted rival. (See Chapter 23 for further insights into this press genre.)

­

the leisure and hobby press

607

Figure 22.4  The Illustrated Police News (Courtesy of British Newspaper Archive)

Brighton (1886–92), originally subtitled A Weekly Journal for Men Only, later became An Unconventional Weekly Journal of Business and Pleasure for Men and Women. Other weeklies serving the leisure market with an eye on both sexes were the Man of the World (1888–1900), which described itself as ‘written for the Man of the World by Men of the World who will not overlook the influence and interests of Women of the World’ (20 October 1888: 3). Those wanting smut might read the penny weekly Town Talk: A Journal for Society

608

christopher a. kent

(1878–88), whose owner-editor Adolphus Rosenberg was sentenced to thirteen months in prison in 1879 for criminal libel of two of the Prince of Wales’s mistresses. Here they could learn ‘Why and How Young Men Are Ruined’ and be warned against wearing paper collars and smoking the unmanly cigarette (3 December, 1 October 1887). Rosenberg’s chequered twenty-five-year career in English journalism ended abruptly in August 1898, when he fled to New York to avoid prosecution for blackmail. More earnest in its social concerns was the Christian monthly Young Man (1887–1915), with articles like ‘Minister’s Sons: Do They Turn Out Bad?’ (answer – no), and prize competitions for entering in its 1890–1 numbers. The surprisingly titled Fashion, ‘The West End Gentleman’s Magazine and Dress Guide’ (1898­­–1905, monthly, 6d), is an early example of the men’s lifestyle magazine, in which masculine, or gentlemanly, identity was largely defined in terms of leisure activities, and particularly leisure clothing, a fast-growing sector of sartorial consumption. In Sandow’s Magazine of Physical Culture (1899–1908, twice monthly), the celebrity body builder Eugene Sandow promoted bodies strong and beautiful for men and women alike. All of these journals, and dozens of others one might identify, testified to the phenomenon captured by Peter Bailey in the word ‘parasexuality’, a new regime of acknowledgement and accommodation in the cultures of leisure in which ‘a little sexuality is encouraged as an antidote to its subversive properties’ (Bailey 1998: 151, 173–4). The last decades of the century saw the ultimate mass-market periodicals emerge to meet the challenge of mass leisure. George Newnes’s Tit-Bits: From All the Most Interesting Books, Periodicals and Newspapers in the World (1881–1994, weekly, 1d), and its rival, Alfred Harmsworth’s Answers to Correspondents on Every Subject under the Sun (1888–1955, weekly, 1d), were mass-circulation leisure magazines that reached millions of readers, yet succeeded in addressing these readers as individuals, thus acknowledging the defining feature of leisure – that of being the realm of individual freedom and choice. Such papers respected and recognised the increasing competition for readers’ leisure by not making excessive claims on their time and attention. Everything was kept short and snappy, an oft-remarked feature of the New Journalism. Increasingly common in such journal subtitles was the word ‘interesting’ in its relatively new subjective sense – ‘of personal interest’, something the reader can relate to – the antonym of its equally subjective but deadly partner, ‘boring’. Paradoxically, these journals created intimacy with their readers by conferring on them a new collective

­

the leisure and hobby press

609

identity: Newnes referred to his ‘loyal Tit-Bitites’ – contest prize-­­ winners, contributors of stories and beneficiaries of free accident insurance in the event of travel accidents that were fortunately much rarer in reality than in the paper’s pages (Jackson 2001: 58, 61). They were active participants in his journalistic enterprise. Such papers filled short spaces of leisure, on the bus for instance, or in the lavatory: in James Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom reads a prize story in Tit-Bits while sitting in the outhouse, and considers sending a ‘sketch’ to the paper (as did Joyce himself ), which paid a guinea a column. He then tears out the page and wipes himself with it – participatory journalism of yet another kind (Joyce 1961: 68–70). Joyce’s exact contemporary Virginia Woolf was an avid Tit-Bitite as a young girl and actually sent a short story to the paper, which presumably rejected it (Woolf 1995: 8). Disparaged as scrapbook journalism, its readers sneered at for their pathetic addiction to ‘snippets’, Tit-Bits and its imitators captured a large segment of the leisure reading market. The ‘leisure press’ – still not identified as such – hit its stride in the 1890s as a manifestation of the New Journalism. Jerome K. Jerome, credited by some with inventing the ‘new humour’ with Three Men in a Boat (1889), a celebration of lower-middle-class leisure pursuits, created two successful magazines. The provocatively titled Idler (1892–1911, monthly, 6d), gave an ironic nod to the ‘idle rich’, while the light and lively To-Day: A Weekly Magazine-Journal (1893–1906, 2d), included good short fiction. The Wheels of Chance: A Holiday Adventure, H. G. Wells’s comic fantasy about the bicycling holiday of a frustrated shop assistant serialised in To-Day in 1896, epitomised the liberating leisure activity which gave rise to numerous magazines, such as the Bicycling Times (1877–87, weekly, 2d). The Clarion, ‘An Illustrated Weekly Journal of Literature, Politics, Fiction, Philosophy, Theatrical Pastimes, Criticism and Everything Else’ (1891–1932, weekly, 1d), attempted to overcome fears among earnest socialists that mass leisure would weaken the class struggle by promoting the various popular Clarion social clubs. The Clarion Cycling Club even had its own journal (1896–8). George Newnes’s hugely successful Strand Magazine (1891–1950, monthly, 6d) was a sort of upmarket Tit-Bits. Described by its cofounder W. T. Stead as ‘light reading from cover to cover’, it also showed the influence of American mass-market magazines. The format of its circulation-boosting Sherlock Holmes stories epitomised the economy of readers’ attention that characterised the leisure press. Giving ­readers a complete story in a single number avoided the demands that serialisation made on readers’ attention, while recycling their residual

610

christopher a. kent

attention with recurrent characters and motifs in a loosely related series of stories (Pettitt 2014: 177–8). Heavy use of illustration was another attention management tactic embraced by the Strand and its numerous competitors, of which Pearson’s Magazine (1896–1939, monthly, 9d) was the most successful. Thomas Richards singles out Pearson’s as exemplifying an emphasis on ‘leisure time, impulse buying, non-partisan quiescence and a therapeutic ethos of individual fulfillment through a manufactured utopia of commodities’ (Richards 1990: 235). By this time, photographic reproduction was providing much cheaper illustrations than wood engraving, and proliferating advertisements, also increasingly illustrated, were mingling with editorial content and competing for readers’ attention. M. A.P. – Mainly About People (1898–1911, weekly, 1d) ‘emphatically belonged … to the New School’, declared its editor, T. P. O’Connor. It was about ‘not politics but politicians, not books but authors, not plays but actors, not finance but financiers’ (18 June 1898: 1). This explicitly stated policy of personalisation was another characteristic of the attention management approach of the burgeoning leisure press. ‘Serious leisure’ is Robert Stebbins’s useful phrase embracing the various systematic pursuits that increasingly filled Victorians’ leisure hours (Stebbins 1992: 3). Two terms are of particular importance here – hobby and amateur. If leisure is a borrowed term, hobby, as Ross McKibbin notes, is a distinctly English term that other European languages have borrowed (McKibbin 1990: 142). As late as 1855, it kept its older, somewhat pejorative meaning of an eccentric mental obsession (Household Words, 10 November 1855: 337–8), but it was redefined in the later nineteenth century as a focused and absorbing leisure activity requiring discipline and specialised knowledge. The proliferation of hobbies, particularly among the working classes and the young, helped to allay concerns about wasted, misused and undisciplined leisure. Indeed, McKibbin has argued persuasively that the passion of the British working classes for their hobbies was one of the main reasons for the failure of Marxism in Britain, a view shared by Marxists, who viewed the individualism characteristic of hobbyists as inimical to a collectivist proletarian identity (McKibbin 1990: 1–41, 139–66). Hobbies: A Weekly Journal for Amateurs of Both Sexes (1895–1932, 1d) covered a wide variety of them, but many hobbies had one or more periodicals specifically devoted to them. Hobbies could have productive outcomes and gratifications of various kinds, both material and intellectual. Almost exclusively the latter was chess. The surging Victorian interest in the game was evidenced

­

the leisure and hobby press

611

by the twenty-six chess journals listed in Waterloo, from the shortlived Philidorian (1837–8) to the British Chess Magazine (1881–1999, monthly, 8d). In addition, many general leisure periodicals published chess columns and problems inviting readers’ solutions, as did numerous London and provincial newspapers. The Field was considered the greatest authority on chess due to a regular column written by the world chess champion Wilhelm Steinitz. Similarly, its columnist ‘Cavendish’ (Henry J. Jones) was considered the leading authority on whist and other card games which were predominantly upper-class leisure activities (Rose 1953: 106–7). A different sort of hobby with broad appeal was photography. The word appears in the titles of fifty-four journals in the Waterloo, including one of the earliest, the Liverpool-based Photographic Journal (1844­­–59, twice monthly, 4d). Such journals charted the progress of photography from an elite hobby requiring both means and technical expertise, to the advent of the ‘point and click’ roll film cameras in the 1880s that enabled ordinary people to record their leisure, particularly on their holidays. Like many hobbies, photography was not just a hobby: for many, it was also an occupation, profession or business. The changing relationship between photography’s different aspects offers insight into the burgeoning phenomenon of amateurism that was an important aspect of the growth of Victorian leisure. In the case of the entirely new art and science of photography, its amateur and professional branches emerged almost simultaneously and were never entirely separate (Seiberling 1986). Thus, eleven photography journals, despite their focus on professional forms, were equally happy to include ‘amateur’ in their main title, Amateur Photographer (1869– 1921) being the earliest. Searching ‘amateur’ in Waterloo yields 179 titles featuring this term, while a global search identifies over 600 periodicals registering interest in amateurism. Music provides a notable example of an activity where amateurism and professionalism flourished symbiotically. For most professional musicians, teaching amateurs was their financial mainstay. Music journals commonly reflected the fact that their readers could include both groups. Although Musical Opinion and Music Trade Review (1877–1912+, monthly, 2d) chiefly addressed the music trade and profession, it is valuable for understanding the commercial forces, particularly the retailing revolution created by the hire purchase system, that made possible the later Victorian ‘piano mania’ and the domestic piano’s position as a badge of social respectability and prime leisure investment. Surprisingly, this mania produced only one short-lived journal, the Keyboard (1892­­–4, monthly, 2d).

612

christopher a. kent

By contrast, violin magazines proliferated, with titles such as the Fiddler (1884­­–8, monthly), which addressed itself to players ‘ranging from the most exalted in the land to the humblest dweller in the cottage’ (Bashford 2012: 20). The Strad: A Monthly Journal for Professionals and Amateurs of All Stringed Instruments Played with the Bow (1890– 9) was another musical journal that explicitly targeted both amateur and professional. Eliding that distinction made sense both from the artistic and commercial standpoint. Banjo World: A Journal Devoted to the Banjo, Mandoline and Guitar (1893–1917, monthly) appealed to the large number of amateurs who took up these instruments due to sudden popularity amounting to a craze in the late Victorian period. That one could sing while playing them was an important part of their appeal. Among music periodicals specifically devoted to singing, often owned by music publishers with a commercial interest in publicising their sheet music, was Novello and Co.’s Musical Times and Singing Class Circular (1844–1900+). John Curwen’s Tonic Sol-Fa Reporter and Magazine of Vocal Music for the People (1853–1920, monthly, 6d) testified impressively to the impact of Curwen’s simplified system of music notation that was used by tens of thousands of amateur singers of all classes, particularly in the popular choral societies that flourished in Victorian Britain, and were viewed as a particularly virtuous form of mass recreation. Wright and Round’s Brass Band News (1881–1959?) was one of ten journals dedicated to the largely working-class phenomenon of the brass band movement, which flourished particularly in factory and mining districts with both community and industry support. Members of these brass bands were almost entirely amateur. Amateur writers, though ‘blockheads’ according to Dr Johnson’s celebrated dictum, had a number of journals in which to publish. Amateur World: A Monthly Journal Devoted to Non-Professional Literature (1875–1918) was one of over a dozen journals specifically intended to provide outlets for those whose hobby was writing. Most were significantly short-lived. Moving from solitary to social hobbies, dancing was a Victorian passion, a recreation central at all levels to social interaction, licit and illicit, between the sexes. Dancing (1891–3, 2d monthly), ‘a journal devoted to the terpsichorean art, physical culture and fashionable entertainments’, was directed particularly to dance instructors and operators of dance halls. The Ball Room (1894–?) promised ‘a record of all matters appertaining to ball room dancing’. Amateur theatricals provided another very popular and highly sociable hobby. Of the 246 Waterloo-listed titles incorporating ‘theatrical’, a number directed some attention to amateurs. The Professional World

­

the leisure and hobby press

613

(1892–5, monthly, 3d), ‘published in the interest of the musical dramatic and artistic professions and all artistes who appear before the public’, despite its title featured an ‘Our Amateurs’ column. Amateur artists were served by several journals, among them Art Interchange: An Illustrated Guide for Art Amateurs and Students, with Hints on Artistic Decoration (1878–1904, fortnightly, 1s) and Amateur Work Illustrated: A Practical Magazine of Constructive and Decorative Art and Manual Labour (1881–96? monthly). Both reflected the rise of popular aestheticism, as did the House, later the House Beautiful and the Home (1897–1905, monthly). The home as a site of beautification and improvement was a fertile site for the amateur craftsperson. Home Handicrafts and Pastimes (1897?–1930, weekly, 1d) exemplified this, offering its readers, patterns, projects and advice. As they often did with domestic hobbies, many general-interest magazines had columns addressing the amateur artist, with women’s magazines especially featuring branches of art deemed particularly feminine such as flower painting and watercolours. It gave particular attention to fretwork, jigsaw cutting elaborate ornamental patterns in wood, a craze that appealed to both sexes in the late Victorian era. The realms of the garden and domestic animals supported perhaps the largest numbers of hobbyists, and a proportionately large press. Among some 250 gardening-related journals were Amateur Gardening for Town and Country (1884–1969, weekly, 1d), the Garden (1871–1927, weekly, 4d), a richly illustrated weekly covering ‘garden, orchard and woodland’, Garden-Work for Villa, Suburban, Town and Cottage Gardens (1884–96, weekly, 1d), ‘an illustrated weekly for the million who take pleasure in having a good supply of flowers, fruits and vegetables all year round’, and even, briefly, Window Gardening (1884). ‘Fancier’ was the term widely used to describe hobbyists whose enthusiasm was animals. The Fancier’s Chronicle (1874–1906, weekly, 2d), ‘a journal for poultry, pigeon, dog, pet stock and bee fanciers’, was one of twenty-eight titles featuring the term. Some twenty journals were specific to dogs, such as Our Dogs (1895–1914, weekly, 2d), and of these several, such as the Fox Terrier Chronicle (1883–1906, monthly, 10s 6d per annum), were specific to particular breeds. The dog show was a Victorian invention, and the Kennel Gazette (1880–2006, monthly, 6d) was one of several journals that chronicled the competitive aspect of the hobby – and its commercial penumbra. Testifying to the hobby’s strong appeal to women was the Ladies’ Kennel Journal (1894–1901, monthly, 1s). Feathered World (1889–1949, weekly, 1d) was ‘devoted to home and fancy poultry, pigeons and other birds’. Homing News and

614

christopher a. kent

Show Reporter (1889–1902, weekly, 1d) was one of six Waterloo-listed ‘Colombophile journals’, that is, pigeon breeding and racing. Victorian Britain supported a large number of periodicals permeated by ‘an ideology of amateur participation in the scientific enterprise’ (Sheets-Pyenson 1985: 562). The still-flourishing ideal of a democratic Republic of Science, embodied by numerous frequently local amateur scientific societies, found a voice in these periodicals, many issued by clubs and societies whose members might without disparagement be called scientific hobbyists, and who created a ‘vital low scientific culture’ that was distinctively British. Philippa Levine also evokes this milieu (Levine 1986). The Midland Naturalist (1878–93, monthly, 6d), ‘The Journal of the Associated Natural History, Philosophical and Archaeological Societies and Field Clubs of the Midland Counties’, reminds us that ‘meteorological observations’ were also part of the scientific hobbyists’ wide remit. The Intellectual Observer: A Review of Natural History, Microscopic Research and Recreative Science (1862– 8, monthly, 1s) noted the ‘great increase in the number of ­purchasers of microscopes and telescopes, which are becoming necessary portions of the furniture of every well-ordered home’ (Intellectual Observer I (1862): 471). Sheets-Pyenson identifies such non-elite ‘low science’ periodicals as the London Journal of Arts and Sciences (1818–67), the Mechanic’s Magazine (1823–72, weekly, 3d) and the English Mechanic and Mirror of Science and Art (1863–1926, weekly, 2d) – which advertised itself in 1881 as ‘the cheapest and best journal published for amateurs and scientific enquirers’ (Waterloo) – as promoting a participatory culture of scientific activity among their readers (SheetsPyenson 1985: 552–5). Although the realms of elite, professional ‘high science’ were becoming increasingly inaccessible, the English Mechanic and World of Science (1865–1926, weekly, 2d) addressed the ‘thousands of working men who would dearly like to have under their hand at the fireside’ a weekly survey of ‘progress in the Arts and Sciences’ (31 March 1865: 1). Scientific amateurism could still make significant empirical contributions to sciences such as geology and astronomy, where the collecting of specimens and observations remained important. The Geological Magazine (1864–1934, twice monthly, 1s 6d) addressed educated ­­amateurs – or serious hobbyists – as the Journal of the British Astronomical Association (1890–present, monthly, 1s 6d) does even to this day. (See Chapters 17 and 17.1 of this volume for further discussions of this press genre.) Collecting was another flourishing field for the Victorian hobbyist. Collecting, of course, was a long established ‘old leisure’ activity among

­

the leisure and hobby press

615

connoisseurs and antiquarians. Stamp collecting was an entirely new hobby, born with the issue of the first postage stamp in 1840. It would gain status from the interest the future King George V took in it from early manhood. It was a tidy hobby that encouraged discipline and curiosity about ‘abroad’, ideal for the schoolboy – or constitutional monarch. As Steven Gelber notes, it also replicated the culture of capitalism in its preoccupation with prices, profits and trading (Gelber 1999: 115). Waterloo lists nearly 100 periodicals related to stamp collecting, most of them short-lived, beginning in the early 1860s when the hobby took off. The Philatelic Journal of Great Britain (1891–1980, monthly, 2d.) was one long term survivor. Many appear to have been published by dealers, most notably Stanley Gibbons & Co.’s Monthly Journal (1890–200?, 6d). Other collecting hobbies with related periodicals included coin collecting and autograph collecting. The Connoisseur and Collector’s Journal (1894–5, 3d), ‘a monthly review devoted to the interests of collectors of and dealers in the antique in china, furniture, jewellery, curios, stamps, books, autographs, bric-a-brac and the fine arts’, attempted to cover a lot of ground – perhaps too much. Not surprisingly, perhaps, its political orientation was ‘anti-socialist’ (Waterloo). A journal that was particularly useful to hobbyists was Exchange and Mart, ‘the journal of the household’ (1868–2009, weekly, then thrice weekly, 2d). This Victorian eBay equivalent consisted mainly of small private ads, many of which were variously hobby- and collecting-related. Working-class women, whether employed outside or inside the home, generally enjoyed less leisure than their men, and what they had was fragmented by ongoing domestic claims, but needlework of various kinds, especially knitting, was a common activity among them. Having the very practical purpose of clothing the family, it was for them not really a hobby, but rather an economic necessity. Middle-class women, somewhat more leisured, were more likely to do needlework as a hobby – particularly fancywork such as embroidery, crocheting and the like. Numerous periodicals addressed these hobbies. One of the longer lived was Mrs Leach’s Practical Fancy Work Basket (1886–1915, monthly, 2d). According to its volume 5 cover page, it contained: practical lessons in applique, minor ornamental arts, home decoration, hints on Christmas presents, church needlework, … nail decoration, decorative needlework, Mountmellick embroidery, Nagasaki, Spanish embroidery … new fancy work, novelties in work, white wood painting, tatting, stocking knitting, crochet and miscellaneous articles …

616

michael bromley and karen hasin-bromley

a dizzying list redolent of lovingly worked pen wipers, smoking caps and altar cloths. Most general women’s magazines such as the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine (1852–90, monthly, 2d) devoted considerable space to these hobbies as well to flower painting and other artistic pursuits deemed feminine. (Chapter 26 of this volume addresses this genre.) Children’s magazines, notably the Religious Tract Society’s highly successful Boy’s Paper (1879–1967, weekly, 1d) and Girl’s Own Paper (1880–1908), encouraged their young readers to pursue a variety of healthy gender-appropriate hobbies, and are covered in Chapter 25 of this volume. In 1865, six years after the publication of George Eliot’s Adam Bede, the thrusting young journalist Edmund Yates published a collection of his articles for Charles Dickens’s All the Year Round under the title The Business of Pleasure. Today he might have titled it The Business of Leisure. In it he describes the ‘inner life’ of various enterprises that existed to meet, and create, the needs of the world’s most advanced capitalist economy. Unsurprisingly, one chapter, ‘My Newspaper’, describes the complex process that puts the morning newspaper on his breakfast table. Even Yates would have been astonished by the future that lay before leisure, one which would, among other things, threaten the very print media which proliferated in his own time – media which paradoxically are today made so accessible to us as a window into the inner life of Victorian leisure, thanks to the digital technology that devours its descendants.

Case Study 19: Galleries without Walls: Art and the Mechanical Mass Culture of the Press Michael Bromley and Karen Hasin-Bromley In 1856 the artist Henry Wallis entered his canvas Chatterton in the Royal Academy of Art (RA) annual exhibition. The following year it appeared in the Manchester Art Treasures exhibition (Catalogue 1857: 6, 134), where such was the public interest that the work had to be protected by two police officers (Oliver 2006: 84). This cemented Wallis’s popularity and ‘propelled him to fame’ (Bristow and Mitchell 2015: 88–9; Hickox 2013; Hickox 2014). After the right to make engraved reproductions was later sold, the renamed The Death of Chatterton was one of the most popular art prints at a time when ‘print sellers were the most effective agents for getting art to an audience and maximising profits’ (Tedeschi 2005: 11). The ubiquity of print in nineteenthcentury British social life – one contemporary estimated that the daily papers alone presented 1,466,150,000 square feet (136,209,792 m2) of printed

­

case study 19 : art and mass culture of the press 617

surface in 1848 (Price 2012: 142) – was imbricated with a parallel visual culture embracing art in its many forms and its extended display in both domestic and public settings by means of an emerging mass market. Reproductions of art were predominately ‘the household pleasure of millions’, according to the engraver John Pye (Macleod 1987: 330). The effect, many believed, was to create a new ‘symbiosis of art and commerce, painting and advertising’ in which the press played a central role (Trodd 2000: 187) A confluence of forms occurred through mechanical reproduction based in illustration and utilising new cheap and abundant supplies of paper: between 1800 and 1860 nominal paper consumption per head of population increased by 240 per cent (Price 2012: 141). This facilitated the ‘the transfer of objects and bodies … from enclosed and private domains … into more open and public arenas’, extending the ‘exhibitionary complex’ beyond the physical spaces of galleries, museums and temporary exhibitions into the products of the printing press – newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, books, posters, cards, prints and the labels, packaging and advertising material for consumer goods (Bennett 1994: 124). The project brought together ‘entrepreneurs, connoisseurs and the public’ as art, commerce and philanthropy mingled (Ott 2014; Pergam 2011). Aesthetic appreciation (the preserve of the noble, the wealthy, the patron and the connoisseur) was complemented by the consumer in a mass market, and permanent and static display was accompanied by ephemerality and dynamism (see Price 2012: 225–6). The case of Chatterton was not an isolated one. After the Graphic newspaper commissioned John Everett Millais to paint a portrait (Cherry Ripe, 1879), in 1880 it reproduced it as an engraving, selling all 600,000 copies and paying compensation to those who missed out on one. The following year, a mezzotint engraving of the painting circulated around the world. In a related situation, building a collection of contemporary art which was to be donated to Royal Holloway College, in the early 1880s the entrepreneur Thomas Holloway bought paintings by Frank Holl and Luke Fildes, which were reworked from images which had first appeared in the Graphic to illustrate journalistic text (Korda 2015: 1). Finally, Fildes was commissioned by Henry Tate to produce a painting (The Doctor, 1891) which was later donated as part of the founding collection of the gallery subsequently bearing the sugar merchant’s name, but which in the meantime was also reproduced as an engraving, selling a million copies in the United States alone. The diffusion of art into a massifying print culture was seen as promoting ‘improvement’ as well as consumption (Report of the Executive Committee 1859: 26). Although the key concept was ‘mass’, and differentiations of class appeared to be elided, the emerging spaces were heavily class-inflected (Robey 2010: 124; Rosenbaum 2010: 202). Royal patronage emblemised the support of the State, and the idea that the quality of both the art and its public reception

618

michael bromley and karen hasin-bromley

reflected the prosperity (moral as well as economic) of the country. The objective of the Manchester exhibition was to make ‘objects of art which exceed in interest and value those of any other country in the world’ accessible to ‘the humbler and more uneducated classes of the community’. The instigators drew on the example of the Great Exhibition of 1851, which was widely believed by contemporaries to have demonstrated the willingness of the working class to be co-opted into Victorian bourgeois consumerist respectability (Briggs 2016: 119; Ciugureanu 2010: 100–1, 105–8; Gurney 2001: 115–16). The daily and weekly newspaper press was key to establishing publicity for, and exploitation of, such events (Mayhew and Cruikshank 1851: 132); for example, the Manchester Examiner & Times published a weekly illustrated periodical, the Art Treasures Examiner, for the duration of the city’s exhibition, which was later sold as a bound volume (Pergam 2011: 14). Some of the owners of this newspaper and magazine press, such as Rothermere, Northcliffe and Colman, were among the century’s ‘industrial élite collectors … business moguls and art aficionados’, as purchasing and collecting power passed particularly in the final two decades of the century from old aristocratic to new commercial–industrial money (Cannadine 2014: 14–17). As the press assumed its modern form, readerships were built through both content and marketing, reaching out to a largely ‘unknown public’ (Andrews and Taylor 1970: 51–2; Chalaby 2000: 33–9; Engel 1996: 62; Seymour-Ure 2000: 11; Taylor 1996: 34–5, 51; Wilkie Collins, cited Huett 2005: 61). Like the manufacturers of other consumer goods (tobacco, whisky, sugar, tea, beer, pills, soap, mustard), who were also art collectors (and regular advertisers in the press), some proprietors of popular newspapers were practised arch (self-) publicists (Sampson 1874: 9). Winston Churchill called it ‘a pushing age’ (cited Taylor 1996: 49). A few, like Jeremiah Colman, straddled consumer goods production and print publishing. Simultaneously, newly instituted department stores relied on advertising to persuade customers of their value as places selling many varieties of goods: the largest share of this expenditure went on press advertising, which brought a secondary gain in editorial support, although not all were keen advertisers until the introduction of display ads in magazines from the 1860s and newspapers from the 1880s (Chaney 1983: 22–3, 27–8; Scott and Walker 2008: 3–4; Turner 1968: 143). Abolition of the advertising duty in 1853 resulted in a large increase in advertising volume (Koss 1984: 443; Sampson 1874: 10–11, 15). In Britain, no less than in France, ‘powerful links were forged among the fields of publishing, journalism, retail and advertising’, as marketing moved from direct interaction with customers to mediated communications (Hahn 2009: 7–8, 17). As the century progressed, art succeeded poetry as ‘the most attractive vehicle’ for advertising brand-name products, particularly in the press (Mason

­

case study 19 : art and mass culture of the press 619

2002: 412). Although advertisers had not been invited to participate in the Great Exhibition, during the next sixty years they were responsible for organising most of the commercial exhibitions held in Britain (Richards 1990: 249). The place of art in this arrangement was exemplified by the production of Bubbles. Millais’s painting A Child’s World (1886), exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery, was bought by Sir William Ingram, the managing director of the Illustrated London News, for reproduction as a presentation plate in the 1886 Christmas issue of the paper. The following year Ingram sold the original to Thomas J. Barratt, the managing director of the soap manufacturer A. & F. Pears, who Northcliffe called ‘the father of British advertising’. With Millais’s hesitant permission, Barratt changed the title to Bubbles, modified the painting by inserting a bar of soap and the company name, and used it as an advertisement. Barratt also promoted art through the Pears Annual, including presentation plates. The controversy over Bubbles was still being debated in the Times in 1899, three years after Millais’s death (de Vries and Laver 1968: 4). As public galleries were established and expanded, drawing on the private collections of the industrial and commercial élites, sometimes partnered by municipal government using the permissive 1845 Museums Act and the subsequent 1850 Public Libraries Act, so the press drew on art in ‘communicating and producing knowledge, … [and] defin[ing] new forms of knowledge  – fragmented, patchwork, non-linear, immediate’ (Leckie 2015: 897 – original emphasis). Between the 1840s and the introduction of photographs, the illustrated newspaper changed from presenting functional visual material, which was supplementary to text, to offering art as an autonomous viewer experience, thereby reaching those whose access to formal places of display was limited (Gretton 2000: 145). For the reader, ‘The reproduction of objects in engravings and photographs … presented a new way of encountering works of art’ (Pergam 2011: 111). Art was so woven into the developing publicity-driven, individuated consumerism that artists were among the (wealthy) celebrities of the age (Spalding 1978: 14; Wood 1976: 204–5). The RA was critiqued for transforming from a supposed arbiter of artistic standards and aesthetics to ‘a sale-room or bazaar’, as the annual (Summer) exhibition became more focused on spectacle and sales in the 1870s (Trodd 2000: 183). The press was instrumental in affording the necessary publicity with a press view day introduced in 1871 (Prettejohn 1997: 72). The visual and textual representation of the exhibition in a range of generalist and specialist serial print publications assumed considerable importance both educationally and commercially (ibid.: 73). By 1875 Ruskin believed that the annual exhibition was ‘nothing more than a large coloured Illustrated Times … the splendid May number of The Graphic’. Ruskin himself, via his so-called Academy Notes pamphlets sold outside the

620

michael bromley and karen hasin-bromley

exhibition, acted ‘a kind of Docent in Print’ (Garrigan 1989: 148). At its peak of popularity the exhibition attracted more than 390,000 visitors in 1879. Over the second half of the century, the RA was increasingly challenged by alternative modes of and venues for displaying art. Nevertheless, it continued to influence public taste, particularly through the annual exhibitions and the publicity they generated (Wood 1976: 202–3). This was aided by the appearance from 1873 of ‘strong realistic pictures’ by Holl and Fildes (Korda 2015: 2). However, the RA was not the only art institution to receive (often illustrated) press notices in the likes of the Illustrated London News and the Builder – from the annual exhibitions of the (Royal) Institute of Painters in Water Colours and the openings (sometimes by royalty) of provincial art galleries, such as those in Leeds (1888) and Birmingham (1885), to the institution of alternative London exhibition spaces, including the Grosvenor and New Galleries (see Figure 22.5). The establishment of the Grosvenor in 1877 was on the back of a concerted ‘elaborate publicity campaign’ which drew coverage by ‘leading newspapers and periodicals’ from the Times to the Art-Journal (Spalding 1978: 7). The press paid attention, too, to the political lobbying for copyright legislation, passed in 1862, which protected paintings, drawings and photographs (‘fine art’) not covered by the Engravings Acts (Cooper 2016: 161–4). Crudely, art was news, and no print publication did more to promote art as news, art appreciation and the ‘domestication’ of art than the Art-Journal ‘with its appealing brand of heady promotion and breathless enthusiasm’ (Haskins 2016: 138–9). Simultaneously, from the mid-1860s art criticism was progressively professionalised and associated from the 1880s with the New

Figure 22.5  Opening of the Leeds City Art Gallery, Illustrated London News, October 1888 (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

­

case study 19 : art and mass culture of the press 621

Journalism of the likes of T. P. O’Connor and George Newnes (Jones 2016: 56; Prettejohn 1997: 76ff.). Mechanical reproduction by means of the printing press allowed art, in its multiple forms, to cascade through most strata of society. Prints were ‘translations’ (re-)interpretations, ‘transcripts’ of original works – craftworks (perhaps ‘qualified’ art works) deploying their own ‘language’. They were ‘created out of a new visual syntax in emerging contexts for disparate audiences’ but also evolving contexts of production arrayed around ‘the demands of the print medium’ (Codell 1991: 4; Fawcett 1986: 186; Fyfe 1985: 402, 405). For many working-class households, art in the form of prints contributed to ‘domestic decoration’ as discretionary spending was used to indicate social worth (Johnson 1988: 32, 37, 40). On the one hand, massification via the press appeared to deliver on William Morris’s (1877) vision: ‘I do not want art for the few, any more than I want education for the few, or freedom for the few.’ On the other hand, the press did little to mitigate the class barriers inherent in the reception of art as many journalists continued to ‘protest against the extension of art appreciation among the lower classes’, or, as one put it, ‘the plebification of art’ (Bailey 2007: 105; Prettejohn 1997: 87).

Chapter Twenty-Three

THE SPORTING PRESS Joel H. Wiener

T

he increased absorption in sports and games in Britain during the nineteenth century – a phenomenon of the greatest social importance – was paralleled and reinforced by the rise of sports journalism. In the early years of the century colourfully written weekly sporting journals such as Bell’s Life in London were published primarily to cater to an interest in traditional sports like shooting, fox hunting, yachting and angling, as well as to more popular sports like horse racing and boxing, which were linked to gambling. From the middle to the latter years of the century the dissemination of a specialised sporting press became widespread, mostly in England but also in Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Dozens of such journals were published in succession and the price dropped from about a shilling for a monthly periodical to one or two pence for a weekly or daily paper. At the same time, attention increasingly became focused on cricket, rugby and the newly popular sport of association football (and, in Ireland, on Gaelic football and hurling). As these spectator sports became more professional towards the end of the century, so too did those who wrote about them: over time, a new breed of full-time, paid journalists evolved who developed expertise in the games they covered. And as with some of the more popular sporting journals, near the close of the century the writings of these journalists gradually became integrated into daily newspapers. Both the playing of games for commercial purposes and the journalism linked to it began to comprise an essential core of the modern press, one encompassing the wider information preferences of the general population, however ‘trivial’ these may have seemed at the time. Bell’s Life in London, founded in 1822, was the most important British sporting journal published during the first three-quarters of 622

­

the sporting press

623

the nineteenth century, although it was preceded by a host of others including the Sporting Magazine (1793), which appeared monthly, Bell’s Weekly Messenger (1796), a sixpenny Sunday newspaper that extensively covered country sports, and Pierce Egan’s Life in London and Sporting Guide (1824). The Sporting Magazine, which sold for 1s, aimed to provide a record of every sport that was (in the words of its subtitle) ‘Interesting to the Man of Pleasure, Enterprize and Spirit’. It relied mostly on its readers and correspondents to provide it with articles and information such as a monthly list of forthcoming sporting events. In its early issues, it focused primarily on boxing, or pugilism (as it was generally known), including round-by-round summaries of major bouts. However, by the 1820s it had begun to shift its attention to the traditional field sport of fox hunting. The writings of Charles James Apperley (‘Nimrod’) on fox hunting garnered special attention (see Figure 23.1). Apperley was of Welsh landed gentry background, and he has been described as both the ‘chief correspondent’ and the ‘star’ of the Sporting Magazine. While not a journalist in the formal sense of the term, he was a prolific writer and foremost authority on hunting who contributed articles to many other magazines and newspapers such as the Times and the Morning Herald (Nimrod 1927). The celebrated comic writer Robert S. Surtees, best known for his creation of ‘John Jorrocks’, the cockney grocer, as well as many comic sporting characters, also wrote a number of articles about fox hunting for the Sporting Magazine, and in 1831 became a founding editor of a rival journal, the New Sporting Magazine, which remained in existence until 1870. Bell’s Weekly Messenger was more of a general information Sunday newspaper than either the Sporting Magazine or the New Sporting Magazine, and it is of lesser import. Founded by John Bell, the well-known bookseller and printer, it attracted a Tory-leaning country readership, especially in its early years. It concentrated on agricultural news, although its coverage of sporting events occasionally rivalled or even exceeded other sections of the paper both in size and positioning. Pierce Egan’s Life in London and Sporting Guide (1824) had a more disparate history than its predecessors because it was tied closely to the life and career of Egan, who was a pioneering sports writer of the early nineteenth century. Egan began as a London compositor and then worked for about five years as a sports reporter for the Weekly Dispatch, a Sunday newspaper founded in 1801 that gave detailed coverage to boxing and other sports. He subsequently launched his 8½d weekly Pierce Egan’s Life in London and Sporting Guide, which published vignettes dealing with crime, as well as with the three leading

624

joel h. wiener

Figure 23.1  Charles J. Apperley (‘Nimrod’) of the Sporting Magazine (Courtesy of Joel H. Wiener)

sports patronised primarily by the fashionable underworld of the day (‘the fancy’): horse racing, hunting and boxing. The bare-knuckle sport of boxing (which was often linked to the disreputable culture of the public house) was a particular favourite of both the ‘respectable and the rough’ elements in the population. Capitalising on this interest, Egan wrote and published the first three volumes of what is generally considered to be the most definitive chronicle of the ring to appear up to that time: Boxiana; or Ancient and Modern Pugilism (1813–24). This was his first major success as a sporting journalist, and it primarily consisted of detailed boxing articles that he wrote for his m­­agazine. His style of composition, both in Pierce Egan’s Life in London and Boxiana (and in a third publication, Book of Sports, which was sold in parts in 1832), was exuberant and grossly inflated, in accordance with

­

the sporting press

625

the commonly accepted style of writing about sports. It made effective use of a vigorous cockney slang (‘flash language’), and it possessed a kind of rhetorical creativity and urgency that had a positive influence on some later sports writing (Snowden 2013: 233). For example, A. J. Liebling, who wrote some of the most trenchant essays about boxing in the twentieth century, deeply admired Egan’s writings and borrowed from him the celebrated phrase ‘The Sweet Science’ to describe this flawed if exciting sport. Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle (1822–86) dominated the reporting of sports news at least until the 1870s, when it began to be undercut (and competitively undermined) by cheaper, more widely disseminated periodicals. A fivepenny weekly broadsheet, it was published in London on Wednesdays (and from 1872 onwards also on Saturdays), and then reprinted with additional articles for general distribution on the following Monday morning. It rapidly acquired the cognomen ‘The Poor Man’s Bible’, although its relatively high price mostly limited its sales to country gentlemen and the urban middle classes (Watson 1899: 344). After absorbing Pierce Egan’s Life in London in 1827, Bell’s Life in London built up a healthy circulation of about 25,000, which continued to increase until the late 1850s. More important than the overall number of papers sold, however, was Bell’s Life’s influence on sports reporting. In its early years, Bell’s Life in London covered the usual range of field and country sports, before turning its primary focus to racing, boxing and, to a lesser extent, cricket. Bell’s Life in London possessed many of the attributes of a general-interest newspaper with its intersecting articles on politics, crime, the theatre and news of commercial markets. But its concentration was on horse racing and boxing, the latter being an especially popular sport that often dominated the sporting headlines. Bell’s Life in London was closely intertwined with the changing fortunes of boxing. This bare-knuckled sport achieved a kind of ‘golden age’ of popularity and celebration during the first half of the nineteenth century, when it was widely reported on in the press. Thereafter, it entered a period of slow decline, as much of the excitement of the game and many of its dominant boxers began to transfer across the Atlantic to the United States. It was an uncommonly violent sport in both countries, especially in the years before the Marquess of Queensberry Rules were published in 1867. These required boxers to wear gloves, instituted timed rounds in place of knockdowns, provided a minute of rest between rounds, and introduced further regulations intended to moderate some of the dangers of these competitions. In many areas of Britain and America boxing was illegal – it was broadly thought of

626

joel h. wiener

as an underground sport – and, as a result, Bell’s Life in London was sometimes caught up inadvertently in the attempted proscribing of bouts by local magistrates, and the last-minute transfer of matches to covert venues. Bell’s Life in London also sponsored many matches and became a stakeholder in their outcome. Its journalists often refereed bouts, though they began to cease doing this in the mid-1860s, after several reported instances of spectators physically assaulting referees. It was also the case that, on several occasions, a detailed report of a bout in Bell’s Life in London led to the prosecution of the participants as well as those who sponsored them. A number of prominent writers and illustrators contributed to Bell’s Life in London, including Charles Dickens (who penned a series of ‘Scenes and Characters’ during the years 1835–6), Thomas Hood, George Cruikshank and John Leech. But the periodical also employed many impressive, if lesser-known, journalists. For example, William Ruff, its chief racing correspondent, gained a reputation for speed and accuracy by transmitting reports from provincial racecourses to London by means of carrier pigeons. Ruff also published an annual Guide to the Turf, or Pocket Racing Companion, commencing in 1851, which won significant recognition for its reliability. Bell’s Life in London had two notable editors during its existence: Vincent Dowling (1824–51) and his son Frank Dowling, who succeeded him as editor and served until 1867. Vincent Dowling played a major role in shaping nineteenth-century writing about sports. Before taking over the editorship of Bell’s Life in London he had gained a reputation as a solid journalist (and, parenthetically, as a government spy) and had worked on several newspapers including the Observer (1791), Britain’s earliest Sunday paper. As editor of Bell’s Life in London he covered racing and boxing from a variety of perspectives and, in a somewhat unusual journalistic initiative for the period, sought to verify the reliability of every sporting article before he printed it. He was often called upon to adjudicate the outcome of sporting competitions and, without notable success, advocated reforms in the sport of boxing, which at this time was even more closely tied to the public enthusiasm for gambling than it had been earlier in the century. His book Fistiana: or, the Oracle of the Ring, first published in 1841 and updated annually in ensuing decades, is a key source for the history of early nineteenthcentury boxing, its proffered objective being ‘to produce a moral effect on the principles and practices of the rising generation’ (Dowling 1846: iv). Frank Dowling is less well known than his father but, among other things, he acquired a reputation for arbitrating sporting controversies, including what was perhaps the most famous boxing match

­

the sporting press

627

Figure 23.2  Tom Sayers v John C. Heenan, 1860 (Courtesy of Joel H. Wiener)

of the nineteenth century held in Britain: that between Tom Sayers (‘Champion of England’) and John C. Heenan, the unofficial IrishAmerican champion (see Figure 23.2). This illegal bout is sometimes regarded as constituting the first world championship of boxing. It took place in an open field in Farnborough, Hampshire, in April 1860, and was one of the first British sporting events to attract extensive first-hand print and pictorial coverage from several New York newspapers, including the New York Herald. Thomas Nast, later to achieve fame as a political cartoonist, was sent by the New-York Illustrated News to report on the fight and bring back sketches of the boxers for publication. After almost forty-two rounds of brutal bare-knuckled combat – fought under the pre-1867 ‘knockdown’ rules –a group of Aldershot constables invaded the site and stopped the fight. The result was declared to be a draw after the intercession of Frank Dowling. Shortly after mid-century two types of more cheaply priced sporting journals began to be published. The first type adhered to the traditional concentration on country sports and pastimes, and was dominated by the Field, or Country Gentlemen’s Newspaper, a sixpenny weekly founded in 1853 that (despite a number of changes in title) continues to publish today. Like Bell’s Life in London, the Field mostly

628

joel h. wiener

directed its attention to rural sports such as hunting, angling, yachting, croquet and coursing. But it also provided news about amateur cricket and rugby (as played in the public schools) to its largely educated, upper-class readership. In its early years the Field eschewed coverage of boxing and horse racing because of their ‘immoral’ connection to gambling, a practice followed by other magazines and newspapers, even as late as the first decades of the twentieth century. On the other hand, the Field enthusiastically trumpeted the virtues of lawn tennis, a sport that – unconventionally for its time – encouraged participation by women as well as men. The Field helped to establish a code of law for this sport, and in 1877 it had the distinction of awarding the trophy for the first Wimbledon Open Lawn Tennis Championship to Spencer Gore (also a well-known cricketer), in a contest limited to men (Brake 2009: 593). At the same time, the many theatrical and literary essays appearing in the Field illustrate how traditional, gentlemanly sporting activities that lacked the subsequent accoutrements of commercialism continued to be integrated into a broader cultural landscape during much of the nineteenth century. Like other sporting journals the Field published numerous illustrations, and it hired well-known artists and caricaturists to perform this work, including John Leach and Hablot Knight Browne (‘Phiz’). Mark Lemon, the renowned Punch journalist, was the first editor of the Field, and Surtees was among its earliest supporters. John Henry Walsh, who edited the paper for more than thirty years beginning in the late 1850s, wrote a number of books about country sports under the pseudonym ‘Stonehenge’, and was a founding member of the All England Lawn Tennis Club. Like the Field, numerous other sporting magazines that focused mostly on traditional popular sports and games were published during these mid-century years. These included Baily’s Magazine of Sports and Pastimes, and Racing Register (1860–1926), a monthly that featured the writings on cricket of Frederick Gale (‘Old Buffer’), a Parliamentary agent and solicitor by profession and a frequent contributor to other periodicals (see Plate 9 and Figure 23.3); and the Sporting Gazette (1862), initially a threepenny weekly founded by a group of ‘Noblemen and Gentlemen’, which gave extensive coverage to the usual miscellany of country and field sports. After undergoing a series of name changes, the Sporting Gazette was merged into the Field in 1920. A large number of sporting journals published during these years gave prominence to racing, notwithstanding that it continued to be assailed by newspapers (and frequently excised from their columns), as a result of its alleged immoral links to gambling. Among the best

­

the sporting press

629

Figure 23.3  Advertisements, Baily’s Monthly Magazine, 1881 (Courtesy of David Finkelstein)

known of these journals was the Sporting Clipper (1872), a twopenny Saturday weekly that published detailed information about racing. It was one of the first sporting journals of the nineteenth century to offer tips on the outcomes of races and one of the first to make extensive use of the telegraph. Another key sporting gazette was the Shooting Times (1882), which published a miscellany of articles on aspects of hunting and shooting, and which continues to exist today as the official organ of the British Association of Shooting and Conservation. The Badminton Magazine of Sports and Pastimes did not make its first appearance until five years short of the end of the century (it survived until 1923), but it is notable among the sporting journals of the nineteenth century for at least two reasons. The first is that it was linked to a comprehensive set of books about sports, a project unprecedented in scope up to then. The Badminton Library consisted of twenty-eight volumes published between 1885 and 1896, later supplemented by five additional volumes. Two books on cricket were included in the Badminton Library (1888, 1920), while one was devoted exclusively to

630

joel h. wiener

football (1899), which by then had developed a large working-class fan base. Unsurprisingly perhaps, no volume in the series is dedicated to either racing or boxing. Another reason for singling out the Badminton Magazine of Sports and Pastimes is that its editor, Alfred E. T. Watson (who was also the general editor of the Badminton Library), was in some ways closer to being a full-time working journalist than many of the other writers and editors of the period who made traditional country sports, including hunting and racing, their area of expertise. Most of the earlier writers for sporting magazines were either themselves participants in country sports (which meant that they wrote from a deeply immersive perspective), or they were occupied in professional work unrelated to sports such as the law. At best they were part-timers – amateurs – in an evolving genre of sporting journalism. On the other hand, Watson was steeped in journalism. He began his working life by writing ‘leaderettes’, or short notes, for the Standard and was promoted subsequently to the position of chief music and theatrical critic for that news­paper. He also composed racing columns for several other newspapers, including the Referee (under the name ‘Gareth’), a Sunday paper that was strongly oriented to sports, and after the completion of his work on the Badminton Magazine of Sports and Pastimes, contributed paid freelance articles to both the Daily Mail and the Times (Watson 1918). Similar types of sporting journals began to appear in Scotland and Ireland during these decades. The most important Scottish sporting paper was the Scottish Athletic Journal, a twopenny weekly that was published in Glasgow beginning in 1882. This paper covered a variety of traditional sports including field athletics, cycling, curling, rugby, golf, swimming and lawn tennis. But its increasing focus was on association football, by far the sport of greatest interest to working-class readers. It endorsed a professional attitude towards sports –­­ ­meaning that athletes should be paid for their services – at a time when amateur ideals still predominated in many sports. At the same time, the structure and organisation of the magazine may be regarded as preprofessional, in that many of the contributors to the journal were unpaid readers, who forwarded random reports of sporting events to the paper from different parts of the country. In 1888 the Scottish Athletic Journal merged with its chief competitor, the one-penny Scottish Umpire and Cycling Mercury (1884), to form Scottish Sport. In Ireland the first important sporting paper to be published was the Irish Sportsman and Farmer, a fourpenny Dublin weekly established in 1870. Although it soon dropped the word ‘Farmer’ from its title, the Irish Sportsman continued to disseminate mostly hunting news

­

the sporting press

631

and to direct its appeal to country readers. More successful was Sport, which appeared in 1880, and was issued weekly (on Saturdays) by the Freeman’s Journal, Dublin’s largest selling newspaper. Sport initially concentrated on racing news and featured the writings of ‘Lux’, a notable tipster. It soon expanded its reporting to a variety of sports, including several of particular interest to Irish readers, such as hurling and Gaelic football, which was played under the rules laid down by the Irish Football Association and differing somewhat from the English and Scottish version of the game. Of the second type of weekly sporting journal that appeared in profusion after mid-century – many of them offering significant news about racing, a sport that enjoyed a considerable revival during these years  – at least four can be said to have had a powerful influence on the history of sports journalism. These were the Sporting Life (1859), which by the 1890s claimed to have the largest circulation of any sporting paper in the world; the Sporting Times (1865); the Sportsman (1865), which began to publish daily in 1876 and was the first major sporting paper to do so; and the Sporting Chronicle (1871), which formed a key segment of the newspaper empire established by Edward Hulton in Manchester. The appearance of these sporting papers (with the partial exception of the Sporting Chronicle) marks the beginning of a shift within the sporting press away from a traditional focus on participatory country games and blood sports like cockfighting, to commercialised spectator sports. Likewise, the nature and format of sports reporting began to radiate in a more popular direction, though these sporting papers continued for a time to give space to wide-ranging cultural subjects such as literature, art and theatre. By the final quarter of the century sport had acquired a more professional dimension and working-class interest in games like rugby, cricket and especially football was to a significant degree generated and sustained by their increased press coverage. Both the greater availability of leisure time, particularly the Saturday half-day, and improved levels of literacy gave a commercial stimulus to those journals and newspapers that popularised sports. Most of the leading morning dailies offered only a limited coverage of sports until later in the century. There were notable exceptions, such as the cricket articles in the Times during the 1840s written by William Denison, who has been described as ‘the father of daily newspaper cricket reporting’ (Booth 2002: 65). However, most spectator sports were covered either in the pages of those existing sporting journals that continued to devote a solid amount of space to traditional rural games, or in popular Sunday newspapers like Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper (1842)

632

joel h. wiener

and Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper (1850). These mid-century Sunday newspapers gave more coverage to crime and scandal than to sports, and in so doing forfeited a significant degree of public respectability. On the other hand, the Referee, a penny Sunday paper founded in 1877, provided comprehensive pioneering sports coverage in an acceptably mainstream way. Edited and partly owned by Henry Sampson, an experienced journalist who wrote under the nom de plume ‘Pendragon’, it was one of the first newspapers in Britain to feature a column of football results. Of the four new journals published shortly after mid-century that portended a defining era in sports journalism, the Sporting Life was from the outset the most successful. It quickly surpassed Bell’s Life in London in circulation and in 1886, three years after transforming itself into a daily paper, absorbed what remained of that venerable journal. Its reports on boxing and racing were widely read, and it likewise reported in depth on cricket and other sports. Among the early news dispatches it published were detailed cricket results from a series of matches held in Australia in 1861–2, which marked the first time an English team toured that country. The Sporting Life also printed a round by round account of the famous Sayers–Heenan boxing match held in 1860, as well as an accompanying special edition dedicated to this ‘Great Fight for the Championship of the World’, which it claimed sold over 360,000 copies. Likewise, this four-page sporting magazine provided an analysis of the first Football Association Challenge Cup final, held at the Kennington Oval in March 1872, when the Wanderers defeated the Royal Engineers by a score of 1–0. Increasingly, the Sporting Life dedicated itself to horse racing at the expense of other sports and soon came to be informally known as the ‘Racing Man’s Bible’. Henry M. Feist (‘Augur’), its first editor, was an acknowledged expert on racing who sought ineffectually to cleanse the sport of its association with betting and bring about its moral reclamation. For a time, he also wrote the ‘Hotspur’ racing column for the Daily Telegraph, begun in 1856, which later became a celebrated entry in the history of sports journalism (McIntire 2008: 364–5). The lengthy storied history of the Sporting Life finally came to an end in 1998 when it merged with the Racing Post (Brake 2009: 594). The Sporting Times: A Chronicle of Racing, Literature, Art and the Drama differed somewhat from the Sporting Life. Unlike the latter, it was published consistently as a Saturday weekly until its demise in 1932. Its eclectic range of articles often veered away from sport (as can be gleaned from its lengthy title), and it was more a product of freewheeling late Victorian bohemianism than a tightly run sporting

­

the sporting press

633

gazette. It was generally referred to as the ‘The Pink ’Un’ because of the tinted pink paper on which it was printed. Arthur Binstead (‘Pitcher’), who wrote for the Sporting Times for almost thirty years, has recorded the anecdotal side of its history in several volumes. Previously, Binstead had been an assistant editor at the Sporting Life, and was connected with a number of sporting magazines, several of them best described as society papers. He also owned a small racing agency that distributed news of the turf, and wrote stories about racing that were popular both in Britain and in those parts of the Empire where the Sporting Times was distributed. Although racing news monopolised a substantial portion of the paper’s space, it reported on other sports, if occasionally in comical ways. For example, in August 1882, the Sporting Times printed a mock obituary written by Reginald Shirley Brooks (‘Peter Blobbs’) in mock homage to England’s loss of a Test cricket match to Australia at The Oval (‘The body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia’), which in the following year led to the permanent naming of the competition between the two countries as the Ashes. John Wisker, Secretary of the British Chess Association and a skilled chess player, also wrote a notable chess column for the Sporting Times during the 1870s. John Corlett, who owned and edited the journal for almost four decades and was a High Tory in politics, has been described by J. B. Booth, a frequent contributor to the paper, as ‘the embodiment of the goodhumoured, fun-loving, tolerant, yet shrewd Rabelaisian ideal’ (Booth 1924: 55) (see Figure 23.4). Corlett was a celebrated figure in late nineteenth-century sports journalism, not as a result of his expertise, which was limited mostly to the world of the turf, but because he hired a number of interesting journalists to write for the Sporting Times. For a time near the end of the century, his coterie of raffish sports contributors turned the Café Vaudeville on the Strand (later the site of Romano’s Restaurant) into a centre of bohemian sports journalism reflective of a traditional kind of literary life that was on the wane and soon to give way to a more professional attitude towards journalism. The third of the newly minted journals, the Sportsman, was a formidable rival of both the Sporting Life and the Sporting Times, and was eventually absorbed by the former in 1924. But during its heyday, when it appeared daily and sold for a penny, it acquired a substantially larger working-class readership than the other two magazines. For the most part, it concentrated on racing news, but its dense pages also disseminated football and cricket information, including a pioneering series of reports from Australia in 1882–3, when England gained the

634

joel h. wiener

Figure 23.4  John Corlett of the Sporting Times (Courtesy of Joel H. Wiener)

Ashes for the first time. These were written by Martin Cobbett, one of the foremost journalists of the second half of the nineteenth century, who used both overseas mail and telegraphy to transmit his cricket dispatches to London. The Sportsman likewise printed news about the annual Boat Race between Cambridge and Oxford, cycling, bowling and professional golf, some of it written by Henry Sydenham Dixon, a journalist highly regarded for his detailed knowledge of racing. Dixon subsequently edited a magazine titled the World of Billiards (1900–7) and served as president of the Billiards Association. Before he commenced his long association with the Sporting Times, John Corlett wrote about the turf for the Sportsman under the pseudonym ‘Vigilant’. Two of the paper’s other journalists who covered racing, Charles Hitchen Ashley and William Allison, were better known than Corlett. Ashley regularly provided racing tips in his column, ‘Vigilant’s Note-Book’, which he initiated shortly after the paper came into existence. Trained as an apprentice printer, he worked for several years

­

the sporting press

635

as a journalist in Sheffield. In a partial reversal of roles with Corlett, he gained valuable experience writing for the Sporting Life before he joined the Sportsman. Later, Ashley became part owner of the Sportsman. Allison was a more traditional product of the racing world. Educated at Balliol, trained as a barrister and well known in late nineteenth-century literary London circles, his perspective on racing was that of a consummate insider who, among other things, bought and sold horses on commission. For thirty years (1891–1921) he wrote a twice-a-week column for the Sportsman under the nom de plume ‘The Special Commissioner’ and in so doing broke new ground, because he was one of the first racing journalists to write in the first person (Allison 1919). In 1895–6 the Sportsman published Racing Illustrated, a sixpenny weekly sporting paper, edited by Henry Smurthwaite, which was distributed in the vicinity of racing towns like Newmarket and Cheltenham. Smurthwaite also wrote a popular column about the turf for Bell’s Life in London under the signature ‘Bleys’ and edited that paper for more than a decade beginning in 1870. The Sporting Chronicle was the fourth of the new sporting papers to have a significant impact in shaping journalism in the late nineteenth century. It was published in Manchester as a penny daily paper (from 1880) by Edward Hulton, formerly a compositor on the Manchester Guardian who has been described as ‘the most original and potent figure in Provincial Journalism in the last quarter of the nineteenth century’ (Sell’s, 1905: 70). In combination with the Athletic News and Cyclists’ Journal (1875) and the Sunday Chronicle (1885), the Sporting Chronicle established the foundation of a print empire under the control of Hulton that transmitted unprecedented amounts of sporting news to the artisans and lower middle-class readers who populated the cities and towns of northern England. Hulton further strengthened this behemoth by establishing the halfpenny Manchester Evening Chronicle in 1897, while two years later his son, Sir Edward Hulton, launched the halfpenny Daily Dispatch. The Sporting Chronicle (‘The Chron’) was a broadsheet with an estimated daily circulation of about 120,000 readers by the end of the century. It reported on traditional country sports as well as on cricket and football, but it was primarily a racing paper. Like the Sporting Life and other sporting journals, it promoted and publicised a variety of sports events, and frequently held the stake money in those contests it initiated. Hulton hired teams of reporters to cover miscellaneous sports, but he personally controlled the structure and composition of the sports pages and for many years wrote a popular tipster column under the pen name ‘Kettledrum’.

636

joel h. wiener

The history of sports journalism began to shift decisively during the last forty years of the century, as sporting activities became less a series of games and recreations and more an integral part of a developing set of commercial activities. Competitive rules began to be codified and rewritten, as in boxing with the Queensberry regulations, which helped to move this sport from a relatively unbridled version of ‘pugilism’, to a series of contests fought in contained environments and witnessed by thousands of paid spectators. Cricket, one of the most popular sports of the period, underwent a substantial reorganisation between the 1860s and the end of the century. Although the Laws of Cricket had been developed as early as the eighteenth century, significant changes were introduced into the game during these later decades, such as the legalisation of overarm bowling in 1864. Likewise, Test matches and county championships began to be organised and administered in a coherent way, and the distinction between amateur cricketers and professional county cricketers came to be more sharply etched (‘Gentlemen v Players’). A number of important cricket journals and almanacs were published during these years, including John Lillywhite’s Cricketers’ Companion (1865–85), known as the ‘Green Lily’, and James Lillywhite’s Cricketers’ Annual (1872–1900), which was frequently referred to as the ‘Red Lily’. Fred Lillywhite, John’s younger brother, launched a third publication, The Guide to Cricketers (1848), which continued to be published until his death in 1866. Fred Lillywhite also managed (and reported on) the first overseas cricket tour by an English team. This tour of Canada and the United States in 1859, resulting in an unbroken series of victories for England, drew press attention on both sides of the Atlantic. He also published a large number of books about cricket, including Scores and Biographies (1862), one of the more useful volumes to appear in what has been described as a ‘swirling, energetic and confusing market in cricket records’ (Winder 2013: 19). Another outstanding cricketing journal, Cricket: A Weekly Record of the Game (1882–1913), sold for 2d and was edited for its first twenty-five years by Charles W. Alcock, who had also edited James Lilywhite’s Cricketers’ Annual for several years. Alcock was a seminal figure in cricket and football journalism. He wrote prolifically about both sports for the Field and the Sportsman, though his preference was for cricket since, in his view, this national game had the capacity to strengthen the qualities of manliness and good sportsmanship. Among other things, Alcock wrote a series of articles entitled Famous Cricketers and Cricket Grounds, which appeared in the News of the World in 1895–6.

­

the sporting press

637

By far the most outstanding of the new cricket journals was the Cricketers’ Almanack, founded by John Wisden, a professional cricketer, in 1864 and subsequently renamed John Wisden’s Cricketers’ Almanack (1870). Wisden (as the journal came to be informally known) was published annually and sold for 1s. It continues to be the essential reference work for the sport (‘the Bible of Cricket’). From its early years Wisden began to publish scorecards and comprehensive statistical records that highlighted the exploits of individual cricketers, both amateur and professional. It also published analytical essays and (from 1889) photographs of leading cricketers. Wisden made comprehensive use of the Cricket Reporting Agency, founded in 1880, and of several reporters from the Times, notably George West, who edited the journal from 1880 to 1886. The success of Wisden was linked to the growing popularity of the sport as it moved into its Edwardian ‘Golden Age’, and in part also to its championing of the legendary accomplishments of W. G. Grace, who, beginning in 1864, dominated cricket for nearly forty years and became one of the first outstanding British sports celebrities of the nineteenth century. Grace’s exploits in scoring first-class runs have never been equalled and he did a great deal to establish cricket as England’s pre-eminent summer game. The link between Wisden and cricket and Grace (the pioneering celebrity) points up the evolving symbiotic relationship between commercial journalism and popular sports (see Figure 23.5). The other two popular sports in Britain – rugby league and association football – also became sharply defined during the final decades of the nineteenth century and became key to the success of a developing commercial journalism. The formation of the Football Association in 1863 led to a division of the two sports, which shared a common origin in the public schools and universities. Until then, newspapers and sporting journals had frequently presented news about both sports under the generic heading ‘Football’. As the rules for rugby football became codified, a split developed between supporters of the Rugby Football Union (1871), with its ethos of amateurism, and those who backed the Northern Rugby Football Union, founded in Huddersfield in 1895, which sought to give the game a professional structure (‘rugby union’ versus ‘rugby league’). These events converted rugby league, the professional version of the game, into a mass spectator sport with intimate ties to the daily press, and particularly to so-called quality newspapers such as the Times. In 1871 Bell’s Life in London organised under its auspices the first international rugby match, played between England and Scotland. Other international matches, involving the four home nations, soon followed.

638

joel h. wiener

Figure 23.5  W. G. Grace, 1890s (Courtesy of the National Museum of Australia, Canberra)

These sporting events and rugby competitions such as the Challenge Cup, first played in 1896–7, attracted considerable mainstream press coverage. Association football (or ‘football’) followed a similar trajectory, and by the end of the century it had established itself firmly as ‘the people’s game’, one that was rooted in the northern English cities and built around powerful local loyalties. The rationalisation of the rules of modern football primarily took place in 1863, when the Football Association (FA) was established as the overall governing body of the sport. Charles W. Alcock, whose journalism did so much to promote cricket, was a key member of the FA for many years, and during this time he launched several football magazines, including the Football Annual, which he edited for almost forty years, and Football: A Weekly Record of the Game (1882), which survived as a twopence weekly into the 1890s. In 1888 twelve clubs from Lancashire and the Midlands

­

the sporting press

639

formed the Football League to manage the professional side of the sport, which (unlike rugby league and county cricket) rapidly achieved dominance. Players began to be paid on a regular basis, and guaranteed fixtures were scheduled on Saturday afternoons. Classic annual competitions, such as the FA Cup (1871), were launched. These and other developments assured that football came to be extensively reported in the many sporting magazines that flourished during the era and, increasingly, in daily, evening and Sunday newspapers. Despite its overarching title and continuing effort to cover a variety of sports, the Athletic News and Cyclists’ Journal, which formed a key segment of Hulton’s Manchester newspaper business, increasingly broke new ground with its specialised and extensive coverage of football. By the 1890s this halfpenny weekly paper had an estimated circulation of more than 100,000. It survived until 1931when it merged with the Sporting Chronicle. The Athletic News was widely read by artisans and working men throughout the north of England, who had become avid followers of the sport. Among other things, it featured ‘On the Ball’, a football gossip column, together with comprehensive Mondaymorning analyses of matches played the previous Saturday afternoon. John James Bentley, who edited the Athletic News from the early 1890s to 1900, was a well-known reporter and sports administrator who served on the management committee of the Football League for more than thirty years. He later wrote a sports column for both the Daily Mail and the Daily Express. James Catton (‘Tityrus’), Bentley’s successor as editor and a key writer on football and other popular sports until his death in 1924, was to become one of the outstanding sports journalists of the age. Catton’s style was more fluent and popular than that of many of his contemporaries, which enhanced his ability to communicate effectively with his readers. Until then, much journal and magazine writing about sports continued to be either overly colloquial (in the style of Pierce Egan) or, paradoxically, too laboured and literary for its audience. Catton is a seminal figure in nineteenth-century ­­journalism because of the use he made of his position on the Athletic News to defend professionalism in sports, especially the payment of athletes, at a time when cricket and rugby, two of the three most popular British sports, had still not worked out a precise relationship between amateurism and professionalism (Tate 2007). In the final decades of the century newspapers began to equal or, in some cases, to supersede sporting journals in their coverage of sports. This included the Sunday press. By the mid-1870s both Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper and the Weekly Times were providing regular football news to their readers, though the percentage of sports coverage

640

joel h. wiener

remained rather limited for at least another decade. Daily London and provincial newspapers like the Morning Post, the Daily News, and the Manchester Guardian, and Scottish and Irish newspapers such as the Glasgow Herald and the Daily Irish Independent (subsequently the Irish Independent), noticeably expanded their sports reporting, which until then also had been limited. The Times continued to give detailed coverage to cricket, especially the Ashes competition with Australia, which it characterised as ‘Sport’s Greatest Rivalry’, and to such annual highlights of the sporting year as the Oxford/Cambridge and Eton/ Harrow cricket competitions. George West, who reported on cricket for the paper from 1880 to 1896, was the first journalist on the Times to be given the formal title of ‘cricket correspondent’, and during those years he briefly served with distinction as editor of Wisden. Many newspapers continued to exclude news of horse racing from their pages, especially tips and starting prices. But most of the leading morning papers found it difficult to gain traction in circulation without offering coverage of racing to its readers, and the majority of proprietors succumbed to this reality. This was true of the Daily News, which offered fine cricket coverage that was increasingly supplemented with articles about racing. It was likewise reported that the horse racing tips of ‘Argus’, a columnist for the Morning Post, attracted large crowds to the offices of that newspaper on the day of an important race (Hindle 1937: 210). At the same time, the demise of the Echo in 1905, London’s first halfpenny evening newspaper was thought to have been the result of its proprietor’s refusal to publish racing tips, notwithstanding its excellent coverage of cricket and football (Fyfe 1949: 68). As well as the established national newspapers, the one-penny Daily Telegraph (1855) and a host of newly published newspapers gave over a portion of their space to sports. Jeff Prowse, a bohemian journalist who contributed to many periodicals, wrote about boating and cricket for the paper in its early days, including a famous poem in honour of Alfred Mynn, the great Victorian cricketer. The Daily Telegraph subsequently hired many freelance sports writers and increased its racing coverage substantially. It featured a celebrated column by ‘Hotspur’ that was written successively by a series of knowledgeable racing tipsters. It was initiated in 1882 by Charles Greenwood, a foremost authority on the turf who was trained on the staff of Bell’s Life in London, worked on the Sportsman for a number of years, and was then hired by the Daily Telegraph. As with many other racing correspondents, Greenwood – despite a personal reputation for honesty – was thought to have amassed large sums of money by betting on the outcome of races. By the 1880s the Daily Telegraph

­

the sporting press

641

had greatly expanded its sports coverage and was among the first newspapers to group all of its sports news into an identifiable section of ‘sporting intelligence’ (Chalaby 1998: 92). From about the 1870s onwards, a number of specialised sporting services began to add to the journalistic mix. The Press Association (PA), founded in 1868, and the Exchange Telegraph Company (Extel), its chief rival, which was founded four years later, both created sports services that collected and sold racing results, as well as cricket and football scores. For many years, the Extel service generally was considered to be faster and more reliable, although the agencies competed against each other with ‘uninhibited and extravagant competition’ (Scott 1968: 122–3; Scott 1972). Extel and the PA regularly accused each other of helping to proliferate the immoral practice of gambling, and of employing duplicitous methods in compiling their information. To a greater extent, the PA tended to rely on several smaller agencies to produce its telegraphed reports of racing and other sports results, that it then distributed to provincial newspapers. It was slower than Extel in making use of the telephone, which began to be widely used in British sports reporting towards the close of the century. Likewise, both Extel and the PA engaged in a competition with a number of smaller sporting agencies, including Central News and Hulton’s (in Manchester), which specialised in the dissemination of racing news. Two other competitors were Ruff ’s Guide to the Turf, a small agency that sold information about racing to both the PA and provincial newspapers, and a ‘Sporting Service’ run by William Wright of the Sporting Times and Charles Hitchen Ashley of the Sportsman, which sold racing results to sporting clubs and individuals, and occasionally to the larger agencies. And as early as 1880 Charles F. Pardon, who became the first sports editor of the PA in 1883, helped to organise the Cricket Reporting Agency, which also provided racing and football results, and for many years was closely linked to Wisden. More important by the 1880s, halfpenny evening newspapers such as the Evening News (1881) and the Star (1888) (both published in London) became increasingly popular and profitable sports news sources. These gave a pronounced fillip to the development of sports journalism. The successful fusion of sports results and crime stories in their pages buttressed their income and circulation, which rose at times into the hundreds of thousands, and in turn generated greatly increased popularity for the sports they covered. This symbiotic relationship was valid for football and, at times, even more so for county cricket, where the overall attendance at matches lagged well behind that for football.

642

joel h. wiener

From the outset, sports reporting loomed especially large in the pages of the Evening News. Racing news dominated the paper’s sports pages, especially during the mid-1880s when Frank Harris was editor. Racing tips and starting prices were sometimes printed on the front page, and it has been estimated that almost 50 per cent of the paper’s circulation dropped off at the close of the racing season. In 1894 Alfred Harmsworth and his lieutenant Kennedy Jones purchased the Evening News and, as a result of the influence of Jones, greatly increased the paper’s football and cricket coverage. A special Saturday edition, the first of its kind to appear in London, provided up-to-theminute football scores, as well as a results competition. Several years later the Evening News introduced a similar ‘Cricket Edition’. The Star exuded a less sensational flavour than the Evening News, although it provided comparably extensive sports coverage. Its chief sports reporter, Edward C. Mitchell (‘Captain Coe’), was best known for his knowledge of racing but he also wrote about cricket, football and boxing (Star, 17 January 1888). Somewhat unusually for a racing tipster, Mitchell rarely spent any time at the racetrack; instead he relied upon ‘knowledgeable watchers’, who forwarded periodic updates to him by telegram (Springfield 1924: 40). Speed was becoming an essential component of journalism, especially in sports reporting, where editors and proprietors coveted quickness in publishing results. Telegraphy and the telephone were both heavily relied on, particularly by the evening press, which employed subeditors (known in America as ‘rewrite’ men) to insert into the papers the scores of football and cricket matches, racing results (‘betting news’), and occasionally even round-by-round summaries of boxing matches. Most of this work was conducted under highly competitive conditions. It became the practice for multiple ‘Stop Press’ editions of some evening papers to be printed to accommodate late results, or for these newspapers to hold back publication until the final score of a match was determined. Likewise, Saturday evening ‘football specials’ became integral to the expansion of the popularity of the sport. Saturday Night, seemingly the first of these specials to be published, appeared in Birmingham in 1882, and others soon followed in London and in Scottish and northern English cities (Mason 1986). Between 1889 and 1893 the Evening News and the Star began to publish ‘Saturday Specials’ on a regular basis. A portion of the extensive sports coverage that developed at this time, especially the results of boxing matches (which frequently involved American participants), was transmitted to the American market, a situation greatly facilitated by the laying of an Atlantic cable in 1867.

­

the sporting press

643

Not surprisingly, the foundations of modern professional sports writing are to be found primarily in the evening newspapers of the late nineteenth century, supplemented as they were by newly launched halfpenny morning papers like the Morning Leader (1892) and the enormously successful Daily Mail (1896). From the outset, the Morning Leader featured a daily column of the ‘Latest Sporting News’, which included extensive information about football and especially cricket. Spencer Leigh Hughes (‘Sub Rosa’), a well-known journalist and Liberal politician, contributed some of the cricket material to the paper. The Daily Mail sought to emulate the Times in respectability and comprehensiveness, although more concisely and at a much lower price. From the outset this meant a large amount of sports coverage because Harmsworth, its proprietor, understood that sports constituted a decisive point of interest for its wide range of readers. Early numbers of the newspaper included about a page worth of sports news, which came to about 12 per cent of the total news coverage. This included football and racing results (with a ‘Stop Page’ edition for late returns) and a great deal of cricket news (Daily Mail, 9 May 1896: 6). Popular Sunday newspapers such as Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, the Weekly Dispatch, the Sunday Chronicle and the News of the World also provided increased sports coverage. In 1895 the News of the World was setting aside about 15 per cent of its news coverage to sports. Much of the sports reporting in this newspaper appeared on the back page – a recent American innovation – and was the work of W. J. Innes (‘Pegasus’), who wrote a popular column headed ‘Sporting Notes and Predictions’. Innes reported on miscellaneous sports, including football, but he tended to give more space to traditional games such as rowing and sculling. In the pages of an increasingly commercialised mass-circulation press reshaped by an imaginative use of headlines and photos – a precursor to the uninhibited coverage of sports by tabloids late in the twentieth century – sports writing thus developed a unique format and set of structures. By the end of the century these structures were coming to be fully integrated into the general press. The powerful role of the traditional, niche sporting press was giving way to this mass press, driven as it was by the power of circulation and advertising. To some degree, these changes were influenced by American practices, a subject that requires further investigation. For example, in emulation of the powerful Hearst press in New York, which relied heavily for success on its coverage of sports, especially baseball, the Daily Mail introduced a distinct sports page from the outset (Wiener 2011). Likewise, the creation of separate sports departments by Joseph

644

jessie wilkie

Pulitzer, in the New York World, and Hearst, in the New York Evening Journal, most likely helped to define the ways in which sports news was reported in Britain. On the other hand, many of the important changes in British sports journalism in the nineteenth century evolved from a complex set of national circumstances that at least in part were determined by individual sports, and by the sporting journals that wrote about them. The convergence of these factors helped to create a modern ‘discourse of sport’, essentially a news commodity based on entertainment that shaped broad social attitudes and linguistic assumptions. For better or worse, this constituted a profound shift in the nature of journalism whose consequences continue to be debated by observers of the press and media historians alike.

Case Study 20: Sport Reporting in the Times from 1800 to 1900 Jessie Wilkie The role of sport in British life increased in the nineteenth century and sports journalism developed in response, becoming a significant part of mainstream press coverage. As Joel Wiener notes in Chapter 23, over the century sports journalism moved from niche reportage to mainstream press coverage. The following case study will examine this phenomenon as it was reflected in the pages of the Times of London between 1800 and 1900. It will analyse data gathered from intensive surveys of digital copies of the Times to measure the increased frequency and expanding scope of sports reporting. It will look at individual stories to see how they became more analytical and sophisticated in content. At the beginning of the century, sporting news columns contained little more than the results of major horse races. Sports coverage slowly grew till, by the end of the century, sport reports filled entire pages with stories about sporting events, the participants, the spectators and the sporting venues.

Introduction Sport became a significant leisure time activity in Britain during the nineteenth century for a variety of reasons. It was seen as an acceptable outlet for male competition and aggression. Team sports were also thought to foster characterbuilding and cooperative endeavour that could be carried over into daily national life. Attending sporting events as a spectator and supporter also grew as a popular pastime. An increase in leisure time and a rise in average incomes helped make attendance at sporting contests grow as a social phenomenon. Major sporting contests were much anticipated occasions that drew thousands of

­

case study 20 : sport reporting in the times

645

Table 23.1  Frequency of sports sections in the Times, 1800–1900

spectators and generated much discussion both before and after the event. The net result was that sport changed from a hobby of the idle rich, to a leisure-time activity for all classes in society. This in turn saw sport over time given greater attention in contemporary newspapers and other media. Data covering the sporting ‘sections’ in the Times can be seen in Table 23.1. Fewer than fifty ‘Sporting Intelligence’ (the main title for the sporting section within the paper) sections appeared on average each year in the newspaper between 1800 and 1830. This began to change in the 1830s. Sixty-one sports sections appeared in 1831, rising to 208 in 1837. An average of 222 per annum appeared between 1840 and 1879, before an exponential rise from 1880, and through to the end of the century (see Table 23.1). Part of the increase after the 1830s was due to the rising popularity of newly invented sports, such as lawn tennis, and the professional associations formed from sporting popularity. Not only did more sports stories begin to appear, but their length and detail also increased. Their location in the newspaper also changed. It is important to note that sporting news would often be outside of the sporting section. Initially sport was discussed in the ‘News in Brief’ section or the social news for a particular region. Such accounts were more concerned with the social dimension, often discussing who was in attendance, what they were wearing and how the event differed from previous years. But gradually sports stories began to migrate from the social pages to dedicated sporting sections. What follows will discuss how sports reporting increased and became more detailed, and also how certain sports achieved mass appeal and attracted a lion’s share of attention in sporting columns

Methodologies The Times is suitable for this kind of analysis because of its longevity (founded in 1795, and still going today), its availability in digital form, and its high status in the media landscape of nineteenth-century Britain. As one scholar has

646

jessie wilkie

noted, in Britain, the Times “has dominated press history into the twenty-first century” (Hobbs 2013: 474–5). The Times also dominates academic research into the press in Britain. Andrew Hobbs has suggested, ‘The Times at its high point became the very definition of a newspaper, the archtype’ (ibid.: 480). To make the analysis more manageable, a binary search was made, with key phrases included and excluded, of multiple online archives of the Times. The first search was done looking through the Times digital Archive Blog. The second involved access through the Times Digital Archive for articles from 1800 to 1900.1 ‘Sport’ was found to be the most consistent search term within section headlines. The heading of sports columns changed over the years. They were initially called ‘Sporting Intelligence’ columns (Times, 1 April 1787: 3), then just ‘Sporting’ (Times, 17 October 1800: 3), before reverting back to ‘Sporting Intelligence’. This changed again to ‘Sporting News’ early in the twentieth century (Times, 26 May 1919: 4–5).

Sporting Microscope Horseracing, boxing and hunting were the kind of sporting events reported in the Times early in the nineteenth century. As time went on, ‘Sporting Intelligence’ columns might include stories about football, rugby, cricket, rowing cycling, motor racing, sailing, golf, tennis, athletics, swimming and sailing. The next section will look at these sports in more detail and consider how sport reporting changed in the second half of the century. Table 23.2 opposite indicates the sparse attention given to sport in the Times till the 1830s. One measure of the growing importance of sport has been ­­identified by Wiener in Chapter 24 in the growing number of sportingonly publications. The Sporting Magazine (1793), Bell’s Weekly Messenger (1796), Bell’s Life in London (1822) and Pierce Egan’s Life in London and Sporting Guide (1824) came into existence and reflected a broad and growing interest in the subject. As such publications emerged, more sports writing was needed to fill their pages, providing work for journalists who specialised in the subject. Not all ‘sports’ were seen as suitable for press coverage. Bull baiting and cockfighting were popular but came under attack in the middle of the nineteenth century from middle-class moralists (Johnes 2005: 1). Because of this change in social values, 1835 saw many of these ‘cruel sports’ or ‘blood The binary search documented a statistically significant rise in the use and frequency of the phrase ‘Sport’ within the Times newspapers over the course of the century, as outlined in Tables 23.1, 23.2 and 23.3, covering the number of sports articles featuring in the overall period of 1800–1900, and microscope sections of 1800–50 and 1850–1900, respectively.

1

­

case study 20 : sport reporting in the times

647

Table 23.2  The Times ‘sport’ search, 1800–1850

sports’ banned. Public attention began to shift to other forms of competition that were less visceral but were equally popular. Wiener notes in Chapter 24 the shift to hunting, horse racing and boxing, all sports frequented by the ‘fashionable underworld’. While today considered a ‘blood sport’, fox hunting was considered a highclass activity often connected with royalty and the aristocracy in the nineteenth century and often given press coverage: ‘Yesterday morning the King, accompanied by his Royal Highness the Duke of Cumberland, Lord Walsingham, the Hon. Mr. Damer, and Major Desbrow took the diversion of hunting with the harriers’ (Times, 11 January 1800: 3). Middleton reports, ‘The newspapers were used to good purpose by the hunting fraternity when they had announcements to make’ (Middleton 1997: 25). Hunts were seen as significant social events, a traditional element in country life, as well as a sport, whereby, as one commentator has noted, ‘the social functions provided by local hunts are mainly organised to meet the needs of hunt participants and farming groups’ (Milbourne 2003: 305). Fox hunting was also justified as a form of pest control and, as such, was reported in the non-sporting news pages of the Times. Announcements of forthcoming hunts appeared in the ‘Hunting Appointments’ section of the newspaper, or in the, ‘Official Appointments and Notices’ section, and, from 1832, in the ‘Sporting Intelligence’ or ‘General News’ sections. After 1845, news of hunts appeared in the ‘Sports in Brief’ section. These notices would alert readers to the starting time and place of group hunts, as well as commenting on past hunts. ‘The Canterbury harriers met on Monday at Shalmesford-street: Wednesday at Stuppington: Friday at Pett Dottom’ (Times, 12 November 1832: 4). Articles on hunts also appear in social news stories and focused on the high-status attendees. Horse racing was prominent in the sporting section of the Times in the first half of the century and often took up the entire column. Early horse-racing

648

jessie wilkie

journalism focused on the attendees and the social element before discussing the races and results. One article reporting on the Ascot Races started with a description of those who attended and upgrades to the venue from the year before: It seemed as though the large amount of added money had attracted every horse in training to that one centre … The attendance was larger, the Grand Stand well filled, and a fair sprinkling of carriages stood near the rails on the opposite side of the course. (Times, 12 June 1861: 9) Racing continued to grow in popularity, and this was reflected in increased press coverage in the second half of the century. A new set of revised racing rules based on practices in the most popular horse-racing venue, Newmarket, were drawn up in 1858, revised in 1868 and again in 1871. Cassidy notes that these rule amendments reflected ‘the rapid period of change undergone by racing at this time’ (Cassidy 2002: 4). While attending race meetings grew in popularity, direct participation in the sport as a racehorse owner remained the realm of the wealthy. Cassidy comments that ‘this influence [of the upper classes] was partly preserved by the work of the Jockey Club in codifying the rules of racing according to aristocratic ideals’ (Cassidy 2002: 3). Cassidy astutely notes also that ‘though some aspects of racing society may seem utterly “foreign” to outsiders, there is also much which finds resonance amongst a wider British audience’, with the sport becoming popular as a vicarious pleasure (Cassidy 2002: 161). Horse racing owed part of its popular appeal to royal patronage, which ‘remains one of the strongest influences over the image of British racing’ (Cassidy 2002: 3). It was because of this royal patronage that Newmarket became the leader in racing events and breeding. The Newmarket races were the most often reported on in the Times, which from 1800 to 1899 featured over 4,400 articles on Newmarket racing in its sporting section. Racing was also reported from Brighton (Times, 8 August 1800: 2), York (Times, 2 September 1800: 3) and Brighthelmston (Times, 26 July 1800: 3). The Times’s horse-racing reportage in general, though, expanded after 1825, with thirty-three different issues over that year featuring racing news. In contrast, in the twenty-four years prior there had only been an average of four stories featured per year. There was a larger spike in horseracing news in the latter part of the century, specifically between 1873 and 1884, when Times coverage averaged around 105 articles per year, before halving in total coverage over the rest of the century. Boxing or pugilism (as it was colloquially known) also made appearances in Times reportage. It was a popular spectator sport in Britain at the start of the nineteenth century, although it was not considered entirely respectable:

­

case study 20 : sport reporting in the times

649

women did not usually attend, and it was part of the ‘fashionable underworld’ of sport, along with cockfighting and bull baiting. It was nevertheless considered one of the ‘manly arts’, and attempts began to make it more respectable. This included formulating rules of conduct and concepts of ‘fair play’ through the publication of the Queensberry Rules in 1867, for both professional and amateur contests. The creation of a unified code of conduct resulted in more attention and analysis of boxing contests than previously in press reports. The Marquess of Queensberry did much to popularise and tame boxing by such innovations as establishing and sponsoring amateur boxing championships run under the jurisdiction of such rules, but it took until the 1880s for the term ‘Queensberry Rules’ to become part of sport reporting vernacular, with phrases used such as ‘The contest was a fair contest under the Queensberry rules’ (Times, 15 May 1882: 6) and ‘Witnesses heard nothing about the Queensberry rules’ (Times, 29 March 1882: 12). Because prizefighting was outlawed, accounts of boxing sometimes appeared cryptically in the press as a ‘conflict between two gentlemen’ (Times, 23 December 1800: 2), or a ‘battle’ (Times, 6 October 1802: 3). Boxing sections in the sports pages began to appear in the Times early in the nineteenth century (e.g. Times, 6 October 1802: 3, when a special correspondent filed one article about a contest at Wimbledon Common). Boxing contests were given their own titled section, sometimes within the ‘Sporting Intelligence’ section. But more often such accounts appeared in stand-alone articles. For instance, a ‘Boxing’ section followed an article on ‘Election of East India Directors’ in an 1807 edition (Times, 9 April 1807: 3). Such accounts of ‘The Battle’ could be quite detailed. They might include a description of the location, the crowd and significant turning points in each round of the contest. Boxing articles were less common than ones on horse racing, possibly because such events were less common, or because of their dubious nature. A problem in finding such accounts is that a search of the terms ‘boxing’ or ‘pugilism’ can also capture references to domestic disputes, private altercations or articles about boxers in other contexts. For instance, an article within the Law Report discussed the court case involving ‘Alexander Reid, the pugilist’ (Times, 27 December 1828: 4). Columns headed ‘Boxing’ appeared 104 times within the century. Within this ‘Boxing’ section, multiple boxing bouts might be discussed and analysed. There were fifty-eight articles for 1800–19, a major gap in coverage for around sixty years, and then a revival from the 1880s onwards, with forty-four articles featured between 1880 and 1899. While this does not exhaust boxing/pugilism reporting, Times data suggests that boxing was popular enough to merit its own titled section from the start of the nineteenth century, that it fell out of favour between 1820 and 1880, and then came back into fashion as a news item worth reporting towards the end of the century.

650

jessie wilkie

Table 23.3  The Times ‘sport’ search, 1850–1900

Other sporting events began taking up news column space from the middle of the nineteenth century, most notably football, rugby, rowing and cricket. The development and formalisation of these sports made them suitable for mass participation by spectators from the 1840s onwards, and become a significant phenomenon in British cultural and social history, with accompanying rise in news coverage of such events. Times data shows a shift in the second half of the century as reporting on these sports grew to reflect their growing popularity with the public. This rise in sport related columns in the Times in the second half of the nineteenth century is clear in the data featured in Table 23.3 above. The rise in material uncovered in the Times between 1850 and 1900 using a search under the term ‘Sport’ is reflective not just of the development of new mass-participation sports, and of the creation of professional associations to support them, but also of increased coverage of and interest in international events, such as the first modern Olympics. Football, rugby, lawn tennis and golf were some of the sports that gained a mass following in the late 1800s, which led to readership interest in seeing columns dedicated to such sports topics. The English Football Association was formed in 1863, creating a representative body for the overseeing of organised football in England, whose deliberations and rulings were closely followed by sport reporters. This gave football an official face and greater standing, and stimulated formal football reporting in the Times from 1864 onwards (Times, 18 November 1864: 7). Professional associations such as the English Football Association introduced standardised rules, which could be easily followed, thus codifying and allowing for standardised approaches to the playing of the game. As Johnes notes, ‘with rules and a governing body behind them, former public schoolboys went out into the world, taking their games with them’ (Johnes 2005: 2). As these sports grew in popularity, they opened up new avenues not only for individuals

­

case study 20 : sport reporting in the times

651

to play the sport, but also for others to contribute to capturing the results for public consumption. Football and rugby were first played in boys schools for years before they were taken up by young men and began to receive newspaper coverage. The first set of official rules for the combined sport was written in 1845, and eventually these schoolyard games were split into two separate sports of association football and rugby. This forking in the sport, with resulting multiple uses of the term ‘football’ to signify both football and/or rugby, makes it difficult to specify numbers of relevant articles dedicated to each sport over the years. For instance, there were 2,220 articles that contained ‘football’ in the title between 1862 and 1899, but these could refer to either association football, to rugby itself, or to both. Football on its own was mentioned in the Times as early as 1819 (Times, 24 February. 1819: 3). However, it was typically mentioned in relation to profiles of people and letters to the editors, rather than in accounts of a game. The first game reports under the heading of ‘football’ was a brief story about a contest in 1864 between two schoolboy teams from Eton and Westminster (Times, 18 November 1864: 7). Early references to ‘rugby’ often related to the school of that name. The Times started to differentiate between ‘FOOTBALL’ (Times, 18 November 1864: 7) and ‘RUGBY FOOTBALL’ (Times, 20 October 1868: 10) in the 1860s, with stories on each code sometimes within the same sports column. Other articles would simply mention games that were ‘played according to the Rugby rules’ (Times, 24 February 1874: 5). Reporting on international football matches was common by the 1870s, with the articles reporting in detail the match, teams, weather and crowd. The first reporting on association football as a term for football within the Times occurred in 1874, with an article on ‘The Association Challenge Cup’ (Times, 16 March 1874: 5). In the article, the journalist summarised the match and listed the players from each side. The late 1860s and early 1870s solidified both codes of football and rugby within the news cycle, and articles on both games had become common as the century closed out (Boyle 2006: 41). The twentieth century saw sport reporting develop with ‘special commentators’ assigned to offer match analysis. Moore (1999: 39, cited in Boyle 2006: 39) notes that in the nineteenth century sports journalists were seldom mentioned by name, the article byline usually reading, ‘Our Association Football Correspondent’. Joel Wiener in Chapter 23 discusses some of the few celebrity sporting journalists of London to emerge over the course of the nineteenth century. However, there was little obvious celebrity status for sports journalists writing in the Times. The start of cricket as a global sport can be dated to 1861–2, when a British team toured Australia for the first time. The first Ashes tour in 1882–3 further

652

jessie wilkie

enhanced the popularity of transnational cricket, and this global interest in the sport continues today. Contests between the participating nations created an international audience for after-match commentary and reporting that was met by newspapers like the Times. The first cricket match reported in the Times during the nineteenth century2 came in 1808, with the notice of ‘CRICKET – On Thursday, July 14, and on following day’ (Times, 13 July 1808: 2). The match was between Essex and Homerton Club, and the article listed players from both sides (Times, 13 July 1808: 2). Cricket is mentioned frequently within the Times, with an aggregated search total of 4,351 article titles relating to the sport featuring between 1808 and 1899, and over 24,000 results for the term generally noted elsewhere in the paper for the same timeframe. There are many intriguing articles which did not focus on cricket as a sport, such as an article in 1827 entitled ‘NOVEL GAME OF CRICKET’ (Times, 31 May 1827: 3), which focused on a sheep dog included in a regional cricketing team. Some cricket coverage appeared under the general news heading of the area in which it was played. For instance, an 1827 column on ‘Brighton’ included details of a match between a team from the Sussex and another drawn from the rest of England (Times, 25 July 1827: 3). These articles were represented as local general news, rather than sporting news, and were not included within the ‘Sporting Intelligence’ section. By 1841 cricket had its own regular headed section, featured directly before the ‘Sporting Intelligence’ section, and would report on matters such as ‘the annual matches between the public schools at Lords’ (Times, 3 August 1841: 6). Cricket was eventually incorporated into the general sporting section in 1848, though typically still with its own subheading (Times, 17 June 1848: 8). Like many of the sports listed above, rowing was included in general news and social appointments sections before it was included in the sporting pages. A typical example of news reporting that only obliquely touched on rowing could be found in 1804, when the Times reported on altercation that occurred ‘as the water parties were returning to town, two cutters ran foul of each other, which occasioned blows between the rowers, and at length on of the persons in the scuffle was knocked overboard, and nearly drowned’ (Times, 27 June 1804: 2). Rowing articles also appeared in the ‘Classified Advertisements’, informing readers of an upcoming event they could attend. A general search for the phrase ‘rowing’ comes up with 5,847 mentions in the Times between 1800 2

Cricket was also reported on in 1786 (Times, 14 August 1786: 4), and earlier including social accounts of groups playing the sport: ‘Thursday a great cricket match commenced in White Conduit Fields, between the gentlemen who usually play there, and the gentlemen of Kent, for one thousand guineas a side’ (Times, 2 July 1785: 3).

­

case study 20 : sport reporting in the times

653

and the end of 1899. Narrowing down this search more specifically, one finds there are 723 articles with the phrase ‘rowing’ in the title, and 2,000 articles for rowing included specifically in the Times sport section. Much like cricket, rowing was reported as general and social news in tandem with featuring in sporting news. Searching for rowing references in the Times is complicated by the fact that articles could feature the name of a rowing event without including the word ‘rowing’, as for example items covering the annual Royal Thames National Regatta. Nevertheless, the quantity of search results offers clear evidence that rowing was a popular sport, with particular interest in reports documenting the social aspects of the event, such as which celebrities and members of royalty were attending, the competitors involved, the teams, the aftermath, and the resulting bets or prizes won (if there were any). Even the colours worn by the rowers was the subject of comment: highlights of the reports of the first placed boat in the 1856 Royal Thames National Regatta, for example, included details of its rowers wearing white, red, black and yellow (Times, 20 August 1856: 7).

Conclusion This case study has detailed the quantitative occurrence of certain sport-related words or phrases in the sporting section in the Times in the nineteenth century. As Johnes notes, ‘modern sport was forged within this heady mix of breakneck change; new ways of working and living brought new ways of playing’, and in turn this brought new ways of engaging, viewing and reporting on those events (Johnes 2005: 1). This case study has shown that sport reporting in the Times grew significantly over the century, moving from small news items and miscellaneous news reports to a dedicated sporting section entitled ‘Sporting Intelligence’, and dedicated sections devoted to specific sports. Imagery and photography was missing from the Times sport coverage in the nineteenth century, although, as Wiener stated in Chapter 23, it was included in other contemporary periodicals such as John Wisden’s Cricketers’ Almanack. The Times was always word-heavy, focusing on headlines, titles and text-based reports. Imagery did not become a priority for its sports reporting until early in the twentieth century. Sporting coverage in the Times shifted in focus over the century from social reporting interests to commercialised, professional sports reporting conventions. The growing role of sport within society created a demand for sportsrelated stories in newspapers, which were quick to respond, given it helped to increase circulation and advertising revenue. Where reportage once focused on who attended a sporting match, it began covering contests in greater detail, as well including more details on the athletes themselves. It is clear that sports reporting increased over the century, and there was a change in what

654

jessie wilkie

was reported and how it was treated. The Times was (and still is) an influential newspaper, and it was quick to respond to this demand from the mass market for quantity and quality sports coverage.

Chapter Twenty-Four

THE CHILDREN’S PRESS Frederick S. Milton

I

n 1888 the literary critic Edward Salmon published the results of a four-year survey carried out by Charles Welsh. This critical appraisal sought to determine the favourite reads of schoolboys and schoolgirls drawn from a broad age range of eleven to nineteen years. Two thousand responses were received from the ‘Board schoolboy to the young collegian’ (Salmon 1888: 9–14). These revealed choices of popular poetry, books and authors with a keen taste for daringdo in the exploits of Robinson Crusoe, Swiss Family Robinson and Ivanhoe. Children also elected their popular newspapers and magazines. Multiple titles were proposed, including those principally aimed at adults, such as Punch, Harper’s Magazine and Chambers’s Journal, as well as, significantly, twenty-one children’s magazine titles of a breadth of genre, purpose and content (Salmon 1888: 15–23). This range of children’s titles only partially reflects the array of periodicals then circulating; indeed, by 1900, 160 children’s periodical titles were in existence (Dixon 1986: 63). This chapter explores how such a number had come about. When did it take place and what were the prompts? Children also found appropriate reading within the weekly provincial newspaper press that had also undergone an exponential expansion during the 1800s. This media will discussed in some detail, as although the relationship between the periodical press and children has received widespread attention, children’s reading of newspapers has, until only very recently, been overlooked (Milton 2008; Milton 2009a; Milton 2009b; Pooley 2015a, 2015b; Scott 2011). To be successful, a publication must sufficiently hold its readers’ interest, and as the children’s press proliferated, its content was continually revised and broadened as publishers sought to meet readers’ needs. What then was the ideal content that delivered reader satisfaction and 655

656

frederick s. milton

proved commercially successful? Salmon suggested that his survey respondents were drawn from a broad pool, but no further light was shone on this data. By exploring children’s periodicals and newspaper columns in some detail, it is possible to indicate the target young audience reached by this periodical press and newspaper outputs. Once located, what was the relationship between publication and reader, and how were young readers regarded and manipulated by their favourite reads?

Children’s Periodicals before 1850 Children’s periodical literature in the early part of the nineteenth century emphasised entertainment that supported social beliefs in the ‘innocence’ of childhood as a special stage of life, aligned in particular with the social and philosophical views emerging from the influential second half of the eighteenth century, although this was not a viewpoint shared by all who were keen to see children retained as workers (Horn 1994: 2–3). Nevertheless, this view of childhood as a time of innocence was reflected in the acknowledged forerunner of children’s magazines, John Newbery’s short-lived Lilliputian Magazine (1751–2). While it was entertaining in content, a possible lack of subscribers meant that just three issues were published (Kirkpatrick 2013: 47–9). Progress after the Lilliputian was at first slow. Just eleven children’s magazine titles appeared in the next fifty years. As the sentimental conception of childhood was swept away by the evangelical revival of the early nineteenth century, entertainment for its own sake was abandoned in favour of a shift towards content that was both didactic and pious. Indolence was frowned upon, and children’s periodical outputs increasingly emphasised the need to control a child’s natural wilfulness in a form appropriate to their proper station in life. This value underpinned the nascent Sunday schools movement that sought to instil discipline through religious instruction (Horn 1995: 1–5; Kirkpatrick 2013: 49). These Sunday scholars were deluged with moral reading material. As early as 1824 five magazine titles designed for Sunday school reading were in circulation (Dixon 1986: 63). Content dripped with heavy religiosity, and any fiction was framed within stark and pious tropes, but this largely captive audience and Church finance ensured a remarkable longevity for several of these early periodicals, as seen in the over one hundred years’ publishing history of both the Children’s Friend (1824–1930) and Child’s Companion, or Sunday Scholars’ Reward (1824–1932). The austere content of these publications comprised

­

the children’s press

657

crude illustrations and contributions covering general knowledge and natural history, albeit mostly with a biblical theme – making for largely grim reading that was little brightened by the arrival of wider denominational religious presses. By the second half of the nineteenth century, such puritanical narratives were gradually toned down. By the 1880s, for example, the Child’s Companion looked quite different, with quality, if somewhat maudlin, images interspersed with moralistic tales, hymns, poetry and natural history features. Though such Churchproduced periodicals were widely distributed and read (the Child’s Companion quickly established a 20,000 monthly circulation via Sunday schools and individual subscription by 1828), contemporary reviewers could be scathing of its lack of creativity and heavy moralising, leaving its target readers unmoved and uninterested. As one critic commented in 1888, ‘Girls as a rule don’t care for Sunday-school twaddle; they like a good stirring story, with a plot and some incident and adventures – not a collection of texts and sermons and hymns strung together’ (Salmon 1888: 29). However, it was acknowledged that such periodicals had their advocates, as both the Child’s Own Magazine (1852–1938) and the Child’s Companion were among the favourite reads selected by girls in the reading survey noted at the start of this piece (Salmon 1888: 23). This has led to questions being raised as to whether this survey truly reflected reading tastes, as it seemingly served to list what ought to be read, with girls surveyed mainly electing respected texts (Moruzi 2012: 6). Prior to 1850, there were occasionally some diversions to this heavily didactic stream, notably the Girls’ and Boys’ Penny Magazine, distinguished by its coloured covers, and the more successful Americanderived Peter Parley’s Magazine (1839–63). However, in the main these early periodical offerings for children were gloomily uninspiring, with the underlining message, as Drotner put it, suggesting it was ‘better to be pious than rich’ (Drotner 1988: 50–6; Kirkpatrick 2013: 55–62).

New Children’s Periodicals, 1850–1914 In marked contrast to what had gone before, the output of publishers in the second half of the nineteenth century has been widely recognised as presaging a golden era for children’s literature, so-called for its high literary and artistic output, elements of which increasingly featured in children’s periodicals. Underpinning this upsurge in output was the decline in paper costs and the rapid industrialisation of publishing. This allowed for improved printing output and quality illustrations, and a growing and comprehensive railway distribution network offered

658

frederick s. milton

speedy transportation of periodicals, accompanied by an increased number of newsstands. The latter provided multiple sales outlets for children – now consumers in their own right – to purchase their own magazines rather than rely on copies bought on their behalf. The abolition of the ‘taxes on knowledge’ enabled a major expansion of all genres of the popular press, including children’s titles, as prices fell and advertising revenue rose. As measurement of this change, an analysis of data collated by Egoff shows that in the period 1800–49, just seventy-nine titles for children were founded, whereas for the remainder of the century 304 new publications were founded. There also developed a clear demarcation in children’s literature, as publishers began producing gender-specific periodicals to serve the separate reading spheres of interest of boys and girls, with gender-specific fiction that increasingly became the mainstay of such magazine content (Dixon 1986: 133; Egoff 1951: 28–43; Moruzi 2016: 295; Simons 2009: 144–5). How much of this growth was linked to the provision of education? The 1870 Education Act was undoubtedly a milestone in addressing deficiencies in elementary education, but its effect on the relationship between children’s learning and the provision of literature is questionable, as Drotner, for one, has argued (Drotner 1988: 96). Working-class children had received basic education of varying quality from parents and the gamut of Sunday, dame, factory and charity schools, which then provided access to their own periodicals. Indeed, literacy figures for 1871 show 81 per cent of males and 73 per cent of females as literate (Altick 1957: 171). It is debatable whether the increased provision of education prompted a real surge in readership and publications, as has been suggested by recent critics (Boyd 2003: 28; Dixon 1986: 135; Dunae 1979: 136). That said, publishers sought to target the new readership emerging from education forms and there was sustained and higher output of new magazine titles from the 1870s onwards, but it was in the preceding decade that a publishing surge first took place linked to increased personal prosperity (Egoff 1951). In 1866 an unprecedented fourteen new children’s periodicals were founded. Still retaining healthy levels of instruction, a new formula to amuse was carried by the pages of three different, but important, publications. The sixpence monthly Aunt Judy’s Magazine (1866–85) was beloved by critics for its high literary content and quality illustrations, but price kept it out of the reach of labouring classes. The long-running Chatterbox (1866–1948) lacked Aunt Judy’s highbrow content, but was competitively priced and drew praise from other editors for its amenable style. Finally, the ground-breaking Boys of England (1866–99) created a template for many to follow, and appeared to be the magazine

­

the children’s press

659

of choice for boys unhindered by adult supervision (Dixon 1986: 133; Lang 1986: 24–5). This was a receptive market that had already shifted from ‘religious didacticism or secular rationalism towards moral entertainment’, a revision marked by the introduction of the first boys’ story paper, Samuel O. Beeton’s Boy’s Own Magazine (1855–74). This prioritised profit margins over pious messages, assuring readers of an intention to offer ‘stronger meat than the Goody Two Shoes style of composition’ (Boy’s Own Magazine, January 1855: preface; Drotner 1988: 66–7). Priced at 6d and carrying stories set in elite schools, this was a quality magazine targeting the well-heeled and educated schoolboy. A mixture of manly fiction, travel and historical adventures, science and natural history enabled Beeton’s new creation to reach a healthy circulation of 40,000 by 1862. Moreover, Beeton demonstrated there was a commercial market for magazines with appropriate content, leading to further periodicals appearing, such as the Boy’s Journal (1863–71) (Boyd 2003: 29). These new magazines, although relatively popular, served a relatively small, studious and class-defined clientele, and were quickly outstripped by a new sort of boys’ story paper, specialising in ‘lurid crime and violence’ (Springhall 1990: 231). Originally, these narratives were produced with an adult audience in mind, but stiff competition from the popular Sunday papers led publishers to switch attention to the young urban working classes. With stories of ‘low-life crime’, these new publications were dubbed ‘penny dreadfuls’, cast as responsible for polluting young minds, loosening morals and engendering criminal activity. However, there was a fine line between a real ‘penny dreadful’, and a shrewd publisher spotting the commercial possibilities offered by sensational stories. Edwin Brett’s weekly journal, Boys of England periodical, was particularly successful. Although it resembled a ‘dreadful’, it claimed to counter the pernicious press by carrying the cornucopia of instructive articles and pet keeping advice found in the upstanding Boy’s Journal. However, its heavy focus on rousing and often violent adventurous tales of nation and empire offered far more exciting reading for teenage boys than the science-oriented Boy’s Journal, and devotees argued that this cheap and thrilling literature stimulated the reading habit, although it also drew much alarm (James 2009: 79; Rose 2001: 368: Springhall 1994: 568–70). Hunting stories loaded with manly rhetoric featured heavily in boys’ magazines, but how they were presented is instructive. The supposedly reputable Boy’s Own Magazine indulged readers with stories emphasising the joy sportsmen experienced when shooting swans, and

660

frederick s. milton

the display of carnage thereafter. This thrill of the hunt also featured heavily in a gorilla-hunting story carried by the much-vilified Boys of England, but, by contrast, there was also heavy focus on the poignancy of the kill and the sorrowful regret of the sportsman (Boys of England, 2 November 1867: 381–2; Wraxall 1866: 325–30). Despite this display of contrition, Boys of England continually attracted adverse comment because of its ‘wild and wonderful’ stories of pirates and highwaymen, leading to it being labelled as a ‘dreadful’. Brett’s previous publishing output in the ‘dreadful’ genre stained his new magazine’s reputation, but priced at 1d, and carrying popular tales of the adventuring Jack Harkaway and offering outlandish competition prizes, including Shetland ponies and dogs, the 150,000 weekly circulation easily outstripped upright rivals. Boys of England set publishing markers, with an elaborate masthead embellished with the legend ‘Subscribed to by his Royal Highness Prince Arthur’ (presumably to counter accusations of its improbity), large front-page engravings illustrating its stories, and offers of free gifts, leading to a host of comparable periodicals from Brett and others. None matched Boys of England for notoriety. It was repeatedly cited in court cases as being found in the possession of the accused leading to a middle-class moral panic as accepted norms were being challenged (Boys of England, 23 November 1867: 1; Kirkpatrick 2013: 118–30). Reputable publishers met this supposed threat in two ways. The easiest route was to strongly encourage children to turn to more wholesome journals. According to Band of Mercy, the risk lay in tasting ‘forbidden fruit – forbidden books and papers; there is poison for the mind as well as the body’, and then sharing such pernicious literature with others (H.C.F. 1890: 2). A more proactive solution was to launch healthier alternatives. This was already a well-used tactic, but the Boy’s Own Paper, begun in 1879 by the Religious Tract Society, was different. Excessive religiosity and moralising, its editor George Hutchinson believed, would have the opposite effect, and he went as far as issuing his new magazine without the Religious Tract Society brand. Hutchison pulled together elements of the most successful boys’ periodicals, and specifically engineered contents to meet the needs of his readers, adopting for the Boy’s Own Paper the motto, ‘What ever boys do is the subject of our little book’ (Dunae 1976: 126– 33; Penner 2014: 631–47). The Boy’s Own Paper certainly did not offer watered-down, ‘milk and water’ tales. Gruesomely illustrated serial stories offered their fair share of ‘blood and thunder’, while instructional taxidermy articles offered graphic advice on gouging out eyes, crushing skulls and scooping out brains of dead birds (Cuthell 1887:

­

the children’s press

661

155–6; Turner 1975: 98–9). The new periodical was successful, appealing to both sexes and their parents, with a content of instructional advice, factual articles and well-written illustrated stories, authored by renowned authors such as Jules Verne. Regular competitions and high-quality coloured plates completed the appeal, as did a 1d price for its weekly edition that targeted readers from across the class spectrum. Hutchison cannily issued a monthly edition to attract family readers and an annual as a refined reference copy. Sales of 200,000 copies per week were claimed within its first year, with circulation reaching 650,000 by the 1890s, although these figures are possibly suspect. Perhaps the best indication of the success of the Boy’s Own Paper was that it sparked off a string of imitative rival publications, including the Union Jack (1880–3), the Captain (1899–1924) and Chums (1892–1934). These were well-regarded quality publications that, Union Jack apart, enjoyed long lifespans, and, by targeting the same readership, gradually overtook the Boy’s Own Paper in popularity, which by the early 1900s was becoming stale and formulaic in presentation (Boyd 2003: 31–4; Penner 2014: 631–47). Science articles were a staple content of these new boys’ magazines. It has been suggested that these publications aided the popularisation of science that increasingly featured on the school curriculum. The Boy’s Journal and Boy’s Own Paper, in particular, carried quite meticulous instructions for practical experiments or constructing equipment (Dixon 2001a: 228). The study of nature had long been a recurrent narrative, increasingly finding favour among the middle classes as it complied with contemporary notions of ‘rational recreation’ – that is, leisure with an improving purpose. Catering for this burgeoning interest, the Union Jack sponsored a naturalist’s field club and encouraged its readers to enrol, contribute natural history notes, and form provincial clubs. Despite attracting 5,000 members, the club shut down after three years, as readers turned away to more popular features (Milton 2008: 134, 154). New specialist periodicals were now available for boys with a keen interest in natural history or other pastimes. The Young Naturalist began in 1879, although by 1891 the magazine had become the British Naturalist as it sought a broader readership (Robson 1891: editorial). Other specific interest periodicals included the Young Mineralogist and Antiquarian (1884–5), Young Scientist (1887) and Young Stamp Collector (1900). These short-lived ventures focused upon rather studious, and at times niche, activities, and they struggled in a competitive market. Pastimes such as stamp collecting were undoubtedly popular, but, as the Union Jack demonstrated, children bought magazines for entertainment, not necessarily for didactic

662

frederick s. milton

purposes. It was questionable as to whether they wanted their informal hobbies commodified into such rigid educational formats. Periodicals for boys dominated publishing outputs, so it is not surprising that girls also elected the popular Boy’s Own Paper as their second favourite, where they were also regular and welcome correspondents (Salmon 1888: 15, 23). In contrast to their male counterparts, for much of the nineteenth century publishers neglected lower-class young female readers as not profitable enough. More affluent girls were served little better. Just 10 per cent of periodicals between 1870 and 1910 were specifically for girls. A handful of girls’ periodicals began appearing from the 1860s onwards, but it was not until 1880, with the launch of the Girl’s Own Paper, published also by the Religious Tract Society, that a publication arrived that could equal, and indeed soon exceed, the popularity of the Boy’s Own Paper. With a similar balance of fiction, instructive articles and practical advice, the Girl’s Own Paper ostensibly sought to appeal to all social classes. However, content was clearly suited to young women rather than working-class girls, with home management advice, menu planning, and images of high-class fashionable dress far beyond the pockets of the less well-off. As divorced from the lives of working-class girls as the Boy’s Own Paper’s tales of public schools were for their brothers, nonetheless this aspirational content offered escapist reading that, like the boy’s magazine, proved popular. Circulation exceeded 250,000 per issue, and this success prompted a rush of comparable publications, including the Girl’s Realm (1898–1915) and the highly regarded Atalanta (1887–98). Priced at 6d, and lavishly illustrated, Atalanta joined a small, select group of publications as publishers intentionally targeted a higher and dedicated readership for profit (Girl’s Own Paper, 25 January 1890: 264–6; Dixon 1986: 138–9; Drotner 1988: 115–19). Initially edited by the respected writer L.T. Meade, Atalanta was a highly regarded literary magazine, but its elitist content, including advice for debutantes and intellectually challenging competitions requiring poetry critiques, greatly restricted its appeal (Dawson 2013: 475–98). Young female audiences, especially those of less able means, had no equivalent of the surge of boys’ papers that flooded retailers, leading to heightened concern that their brothers’ sensational magazines, with the attendant dangers to their morality, could be tempting them to read unsuitable material. However, as Salmon pointedly observed, girls could ‘hardly be much blamed for reading the hideous nonsense they do, when so little that is interesting and stirring in plot, and bright and suggestive in character, is to be had’ (Salmon 1888: 199). It was not until the end of the century that this gap in the

­

the children’s press

663

lower end of the market began to be addressed, albeit slowly, with Harmsworth’s Girl’s Best Friend (1898–1931), the forerunner of a slew of halfpenny and penny ‘mill-girl papers’ that appeared from the first decade of the twentieth century. These contrasted with the ‘sensible’ and now dated content of the Girl’s Own Paper, by offering serialised romantic fiction, with lead characters engaged in the same humdrum occupations as many of the intended working-class adolescent readership (Drotner 1988: 162–6). This cheap press had been preceded by similar innovations in boys’ magazines, where Harmsworth launched the Marvel (1893–1922), which was quickly followed by the Boy’s Friend (1895–1927). With combined weekly sales of over 350,000, both publications were commercially successful, based upon a halfpenny price and offering new types of stories, including detective and well-liked school fiction. Over the next fifty years, Harmsworth, and then his Amalgamated Press, founded a further fifty juvenile titles, replete with popular characters, including Billy Bunter, who first made his appearance in the Magnet (1908–40). The success of these magazines continued to be built upon the perceived and embedded fear of the penny dreadfuls. Harmsworth cannily played on this fear, claiming that his Marvel was ‘good healthy literature’ and the antithesis to these ‘vile publications’ (Boyd 2003: 37–8; Drotner 1988: 172). Critics were of the opposite opinion, with commentators such as A. A. Milne complaining that Harmsworth ‘killed the penny dreadful’ by merely ‘producing a halfpenny dreadfuller’ (Cranfield 1978: 219). One genre of the children’s press that escaped unscathed were the ‘compound’ magazines. Seeking a mixed-gender readership, and aimed at a lower age group than the gender-specific titles, these periodicals were predominately favoured by girls. Both genders had always been served by religious titles, but by now not all of the output from religious publishing houses was dreary. Produced by the Sunday School Union, Kind Words for Boys and Girls (Young England from 1880) proved attractive and popular in a competitive market of mixed-gender offerings by commercial publishers, which also included Little Folks (1871–1931). The popularity of these magazines stemmed from a palatable content that featured just the right degree of storylines, educational articles and quality illustrations. Publishers, sensitive to commercial risk, took care to reflect readers’ interests and Little Folks, according to Darton, was definitely a magazine ‘for children, not a volley at them’ (Darton 1982: 271). Moralisation was not entirely abandoned. Aunt Judy’s set out to ‘instruct in virtue’ a readership from the ‘vicarage and the university lodge’ (Drotner 1988: 70). Yet its contents

664

frederick s. milton

also moved into territory that had previously been the domain of the boys’ press, as it published gender-specific articles in strong muscularChristianity tones, providing boys, for example, with instruction for shooting wild birds as precursory training for young sportsmen to eventually gun down tigers (Aunt Judy’s, 1872: 160).

Newspaper Columns for Children Children had a much longer acquaintance with newspapers than it might be supposed. Memoirs reveal how they sought out the popular press for self-improvement, with some trawling public houses for newspapers to improve reading skills (Elson 1900: 16, 117–18). There was also a degree of compunction to newspaper reading. The 1862 Revised Code of Education had a proviso that the reading ability of a child aged eleven and upwards be measured by their competence in reading a ‘short ordinary paragraph in a newspaper, or other modern narrative’ (Milton 2009a: 279). Whether this developed a taste for newspapers is debatable, given the dense reams of text found in the majority of mid-Victorian newspapers. Outside of London, the provincial press was the newspaper press and, like the periodicals, was undergoing a transformation in content. From the 1870s, a new genre of newspaper appeared in the form of the weekend regional miscellany papers. This provided a wealth of new features, including serialised stories, sport and women’s columns, so that it resembled ‘more closely the magazine, in response to the demand for papers to be entertaining as well as informative’, by offering leisurely weekend reading en famille (Ashton 1991: 127–8; Hobbs 2009b: 16–17). For some titles, this also included reading dedicated to the youngest family members in the form of a children’s column to widen family appeal, although this was a tardy initiative. Publishers of women’s magazines from the 1840s, for example, had frequently included features aimed at children (Onslow 2000: 135–6). The structure and organisation of these newspaper children’s columns varied considerably geographically and across and within titles over time, yet they can be categorised in three basic forms. The first was the brief column written specifically for children. A ‘Corner for Children’ printed by the Belfast News-Letter on 26 August 1873 was possibly the first attempt, albeit short-lived, by a British newspaper to cater directly in this way for young readers. This one-off brief column, a natural history article describing the life of coral culled from the Child’s Paper, reflected the widespread ‘scissors and paste’ composition of the newspaper press that replicated miscellaneous articles and

­

the children’s press

665

snippets from other publications to fill content at minimum cost and effort. This non-participatory, frequently replicated column was a format deployed by many publications, as, for example, the ‘Readings for the Young’ feature in the Paddington Chronicle of 1900, which relied on articles from the Christian Globe and Christian Register with no effort to adapt the material to interact with specific interests of its own readership (Milton 2008: 156, 168). The second type of column was more sophisticated. Cut-andpasted copy still appeared, but this was secondary to original editorials produced by a dedicated children’s editor, which featured alongside competitions and children’s contributions. Typical was the West Cumberland Times ‘Children’s Corner’, started in 1890. It began with a missive from ‘Cousin Charley’, meditating on positive behaviour such as duty or good manners, then followed with letters from readers and a colouring or essay competition. Children responded in droves. The paper crowed that it had received over 20,000 letters, drawings and essays in one twelve-month period. This not only filled the column with good copy, but in turn boosted circulation of these commercial entities reliant on sales and advertisement revenue (Milton 2008: 285, 296, 333). The third type of children’s column was the most sophisticated and required the greatest amount of effort by the newspaper in terms of editing, centred on creating a reading community or club in which young readers could enrol. In 1876 the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle launched its ‘Children’s Corner’, and in it introduced its Dicky Bird Society, the first such children’s club in a British newspaper, and ­­probably the most successful in terms of longevity, enrolment and renown. The column existed until 1940, when its host paper folded. By this time, over 400,000 members had joined its ranks, including honorary members Florence Nightingale, Lord Roberts and Baden Powell. Existing youth movements, such as the Band of Hope, had long published ‘house’ periodicals, but the Dicky Bird Society was the first society conducted entirely for children to engage with literary and press culture. Lacking quality illustrations, and averaging just two columns in length, the space provided by it for young readers was tiny compared to that offered by other periodicals, and some of its later rivals. The Children’s Corner of the Middlesbrough Northern Weekly Gazette, for example, took up an astonishing six pages and printed upwards of forty children’s letters. Despite this, the Dicky Bird Society proved instantly popular. Membership applications poured in. Over 50,000 recruits were secured in its first five years, prompting a rush of

666

frederick s. milton

similar features by other newspapers keen to replicate innovations that could lift circulation. A Sunbeam Society was started by the Dundee People’s Journal, Golden Circles appeared in the Leeds Times and Northern Weekly Leader, and a Kind Hearted Brigade was formed by the Sheffield Weekly Telegraph (Milton 2009a: 177–91; Pooley 2015a: 79). The creation of children’s press columns and attendant societies spread. By the 1890s newspapers in Birmingham, Cardiff, Nottingham and Portsmouth, among others, were managing societies for children. These newspaper societies were well received. In 1914 five societies could boast membership in excess of 100,000 recruits, and 1.2 million children had assigned themselves to various clubs featured in over forty-eight newspaper titles (Milton 2008: 326–30). Despite this apparent countrywide appeal for a children’s column with an associated society, geographical coverage was not evenly spread. There were distinct ‘hubs’ where titles competed and overlapped to reach similar audiences. In north-east England in 1887, for example, Newcastle youngsters could read columns or join societies featured in four titles (Milton 2009a: 277–91). In other parts of the country, provision for children was scant. None of the five weekly papers in Cambridge made space for children’s features (Milton 2008: 181–3). Elsewhere, even when a newspaper sought submissions from young readers, there seemed little readership uptake, as happened to the Bristol Times (Pooley 2015a: 82). As one moved away from the industrial north of England, where working-class mutual organisation was common and the Liberal press predominated, the instances of children’s columns became much scarcer, particularly where the Conservative press dominated. A strong Liberal tradition of social improvement underpinned such children’s columns, as many press editors encouraged essay and letter writing and worked with schools to organise competitions. The majority of newspapers managed their own children’s columns and societies autonomously, but a significant number of titles continued the cost-effective established practice of taking syndicated features, such as popular fiction, by hosting syndicated children’s clubs. The ‘Round Table’ column, managed by the Norfolk-based author Sarah Blathwayt, alias ‘Maggie Symington’, could be found in the Cardiff Times, Durham Chronicle, Ipswich Journal and Nottingham Guardian. Notably, the content of the column did not betray that this was a generic feature appearing in multiple titles, often hundreds of miles apart. Emphasis was very much about creating a close relationship with readers, and repeatedly readers were assured it was ‘their’ column (Milton 2008: 186, 326­­–30).

­

the children’s press

667

Reflecting and Understanding Readership A genuine sense of reader ownership set many newspaper children’s columns apart from the periodicals. Papers with societies invited members to vote upon key organisational decisions, including their society’s name, the admission of adult members, and appointments of helpers. Loyal readers were rewarded with certificates, picnics, concerts and parades, and even balloon rides, thus further cementing reader loyalty and enhancing the host newspaper’s reputation (see Figures 24.1 and 24.2). Column editors worked hard to develop a close rapport with young readers, a relationship that had already undergone a striking shift within the periodical press. Children’s periodicals of the 1820s had an authoritative attitude and, given the tied distribution network and pervading opinion of childhood, no need to seek approval. As attitudes towards children softened, and competition between the children’s press intensified, publishers could no longer afford to maintain an

Figure 24.1  Dicky Bird Society Concert, Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, 31 July 1886 (Courtesy of Newcastle City Library, Local Studies Section, Newcastle upon Tyne) 

668

frederick s. milton

Figure 24.2  Kind Hearted Brigade Picnic, Weekly Telegraph, 9 August 1890 (© British Library Board)

acerbic relationship. Increasingly, a far more amiable persona emerged in such dedicated spaces. This was particularly evident in those papers aimed at both genders, where editors took on avuncular titles to ‘speak’ to their readers. The Children’s Own Paper (1882–1903) was directed variously by ‘Uncle Gilbert’, ‘Aunt Marianne’ and ‘Aunt Lizzie’. Even the editor of the Captain, a popular public school boy periodical, adopted the title of ‘an old fag’ in his dealings with readers. This congenial approach was not universal throughout a title’s content. The Boys’ Own Paper ostensibly sought a chummy relationship with its readers in some of its pages, but retained a degree of aloofness in others, being curt towards correspondents badgering for advice (Boy’s Own Paper, 29 May 1880: 560). Without exception, newspaper columns adopted imagined familial titles for their notional editors. ‘Uncle Toby’ organised the Dicky Bird Society, ‘Uncle Jack’ edited both the Birmingham Daily Times’s Order of Kindness and the Burnley Gazette’s Sunbeam Society, while ‘Uncle William’ was in charge of the League of Love for the Portsmouth Times and the Golden Rule Society of the Nottinghamshire Weekly Express. Female leaders were less common. Maggie Symington, the organiser of multiple syndicated columns, was referred to as ‘Aunt Maggie’, and ‘Aunt Bessie’ conducted the Catholic Legion of the Irish Tribune. This familial relationship was embedded further in the mastheads of the

­

the children’s press

669

Figure 24.3  Dicky Bird Society, Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, 15 October 1881 (Courtesy of Newcastle City Library, Local Studies Section, Newcastle upon Tyne) 

respective societies. Often the sole image within the columns, the genial ‘leader’, such as ‘Uncle Ned’ of the Hull Times, was depicted surrounded by adoring members (Hull Times, 7 September 1901) (see Figures 24.3–24.6). It has been suggested that an editor adopting a female persona was a deliberate tactic to attract the youngest children, with male leaders appealing more to boys. This may be why the journalist Lillie Harris adopted the persona of ‘Captain Trim’ to lead the Sheffield Weekly Telegraph’s Kind Hearted Brigade. The majority of newspaper societies were male ‘led’, and, interestingly, the non-participatory columns in the main had female ‘leaders’ (Dixon 1986: 63–6; Milton 2008: 171, 174–5, 326–30; Pooley 2015a: 79–80). Whatever the motive that lay behind the naming of these appellations, these avuncular leaders created affectionate bonds with their readers, with many children signing their featured correspondence in informal tone, such as ‘your loving/loyal nephew/niece’. Pooley makes an interesting observation regarding these oft-repeated affectionate letter endings, suggesting that less confident children simply copied this regular sign-off (Pooley 2015a: 86). However, given the large numbers

670

frederick s. milton

Figure 24.4  Sunbeam Club, People’s Journal, 1 January 1887 (© British Library Board)

Figure 24.5  Order of the Round Table, Cardiff Times, 6 December 1890 (© British Library Board)

­

the children’s press

671

Figure 24.6  Our Little Contributors, Hull Times, 7 September 1901 (Courtesy of the Hull History Centre, Hull) 

of letters received, there was undoubtedly genuine affection reserved for these societies, with sustained writing and correspondence by individuals continuing over the space of several years. These columns offered a ‘safe’ public sphere, where, as published letters demonstrated, children were emboldened enough to take issue with their editor (Milton 2008: 216). This was in stark contrast to the authoritarian attitudes prevalent in even the most popular periodicals. A letter from George Smith to the Stockport Advertiser’s Uncle George, for example, was typical in highlighting many boys’ confidence in the newspaper, but also their discomfort in the tenor of the Boy’s Own Paper: I like you because you don’t make remarks in your Corner about our writing and don’t make fun of our spelling. I never dare to write to the Boy’s Own Paper for that reason, because in the next number there would surely be some fun made of me; it is so nice finding stories &c, in your paper that have been written by my playmates. (Stockport Advertiser, 10 February 1882) ‘Uncle George’ assured readers that they should not be afraid to write as ‘Uncle George never puts any bad spelling in the paper, nor will he criticise your writing’ (Stockport Advertiser, 17 February 1882). The

672

frederick s. milton

self-improvement educational ideal of the newspaper was very much at the forefront of these columns, and one editor probably spoke for many when he observed that correspondence served ‘as a means of teaching the little folks how to write good letters’ (Leeds Saturday Journal, 6 February 1909). Such letter writing spaces helped schools, where such press examples were regularly used as educational aides, and in turn led to contributions of further batches of letters following class exercises (Milton 2008: 283). The copious published letters of such columns reveal much about the ‘ordinary’ lives of children, and afford a picture of young readers who were provided with a degree of agency lacking in the more formal periodicals, which tended towards polished competition entries or, as in the case of the Boy’s Own Paper, selected reader’s queries, and then ‘presented answers according to tightly focussed editorial agendas’ (Pooley 2015a: 82). Many periodicals, especially those religiously oriented, such as the Child’s Companion, were devoid of reader contribution. That said, children’s letters to newspapers were quite mundane and were what one would expect from pre-teenage children: accounts of holidays, pets, daytrips, schoolwork and pastimes. Occasionally, there were accounts of young people’s employment that confessed real fears about the dangers faced by these young workers, such as twelveyear-old James Lee, who told ‘Cousin Paul’ of starting work as a colliery trapper, and of the darkness of the pit (South Durham & Auckland Chronicle, 1 June 1908; Northern Weekly Leader, 30 June 1894). There was little here of the bravado pedalled in boys’ magazines. A further aspect of ‘real life’ handled quite differently was the recording and reaction to all aspects of dying and death. This had long been a recurrent theme for the periodical press. The stark religiosity of the early periodicals led them to meditate repeatedly on themes of death and dying. Accounts of wayward children meeting premature deaths through their misdeeds were counterbalanced by tales of sickly, but pious, children seemingly joyful at meeting their end (Drotner 1988: 53–6). Both were signposts to readers to heed spiritual or parental counsel. The later boys’ magazines featured narratives that seemed to revel in gruesome depictions of gore and glorious manly battlefield death, or the heroic death of a lost Empire adventurer (Dixon 1989: 140). Yet in an era when child mortality was still frighteningly high, instances of recording actual children’s deaths were rare. In 1883, 198 children were killed in a theatre crush, prompting widespread newspaper coverage (Times, 20 June 1883), but little was said in concurrently running children’s periodicals. Only the Friendly Companion provided the briefest of reports (Friendly Companion, 1

­

the children’s press

673

Figure 24.7  Dicky Bird Society, Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, 19 May 1894 (Courtesy of the Newcastle City Library, Local Studies Section, Newcastle upon Tyne) 

July 1883: 152). By contrast, the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle’s Dicky Bird Society gave a full account of the disaster, marking the passing of the victims in black-framed notices. This was a continuation of the title’s practice of inserting ‘Gone Home’ condolence notices within its children’s column. These notified readers of a member’s death, often in starkest detail, sparing young readers little of the harsh realities of mortality, including explicit accounts of agonising sickness (see Figures 24.7–24.9). Consoling words appended by ‘Uncle Toby’, underlined attempts to reflect parental grief attached to a child’s death, an immediacy neglected by most periodicals of the period (Dixon 1989: 145; Milton 2010: 118–30). That said, there were overlaps in narratives between the newspaper press and some of the earlier periodicals. The ‘Gone Home’ notice for Enoch Davies, who ignored warnings and was crushed after falling between coal wagons he had been riding, was interpreted and received as a chilling warning of blatant disobedience (Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, 5 July 1890). These announcements also provide an indication of the geographical reach of such publications. Predictably, given that the Dicky Bird

674

frederick s. milton

Figure 24.8  Dicky Bird Society, Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, 11 January 1896 (Courtesy of the Newcastle City Library, Local Studies Section, Newcastle upon Tyne) 

Figure 24.9  Dicky Bird Society, Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, 14 March 1896 (Courtesy of the Newcastle City Library, Local Studies Section, Newcastle upon Tyne) 

­

the children’s press

675

Society was headquartered in Newcastle upon Tyne, the majority of the deceased children it reported lived in north-east England. But deaths of society members from Manchester, London and Cornwell were also reported, as well as Buenos Aires, Constantinople and Canada, reflecting the reach of the Newcastle Chronicle (Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, 5 August 1893; 5 October 1889; 30 July 1887; 4 March 1893; 5 December 1896). There are further markers as to who was consuming this literature. The high price of some periodicals restricted readership to an affluent community. Equally, examinations of content of other journals, such as those labelled ‘mill girl papers’, suggests a carefully targeted workingclass audience. Other magazines were repeatedly re-circulated among reading networks, thus widening potential readership. In the late 1880s production of the Boy’s Own Paper ran to over 500,000 weekly copies, and considering that on average two to three individuals read each magazine, actual readership has been estimated at 1.25 million for this one magazine (Dunae 1976: 133–4). The Boys’ Own Paper published correspondence, but the preference for pseudonymous signatories leaves open the question of their veracity. More certain evidence is available within the content of the clubs attached to some periodicals and newspapers. A good example of a children-focused journal for whom readership can be strongly evidenced was the Little Folks magazine, which established an animal protection society for its young readers. The published membership lists of this Humane Society suggest that for this periodical at least, there was countrywide appeal and availability. This society ran continuously from 1882 until 1909, attracting 60,000– 70,000 members, including the Princesses Louise, Victoria and Maud of Wales. Such high-class members were the exception. Assessing enrolled members correlated against decennial census returns reveals an almost equal divide between leisured classes and labouring classes. Of the latter category, ‘skilled’ respectable working-class readers formed one-third of the total membership. In contrast, membership data of the Band of Kindness, operated by the Stockport Advertiser, offers a different picture. Here, the working classes dominated, with 80 per cent of total enrolment. Membership data also reveals reader age and gender. Band of Kindness members had a mean age of eleven years old upon enrolment; thereafter, male recruitment sharply fell, whereas, for females, a much shallower decline was evident (Milton 2008: 199–203, 328). Children’s letters demonstrate that it was girls who proved more enthusiastic letter writers. They may have been drawn to these

676

frederick s. milton

columns given the paucity of girls’ periodicals on offer to them, but for boys the concept of ‘manliness’, all pervading during the late nineteenth century, also played a part. Stories in the boys’ papers repeatedly dripped with sturdy, stiff-upper-lipped tropes of highly masculine fellows. Within the newspaper columns, correspondence reveals genuine hesitancies among boys reconciling received notions of sturdy masculinity with associating with a Guild of Gentleness or Band of Love, the appellations of which, and precepts of kindness and calls to desist from the exciting adventure of bird-nesting, hardly exuded manly enterprise, especially in tough industrial conurbations (Boyd 2003: 46; Milton 2008: 283–4). Acknowledging this, editors took to shaping masculine values within an alternative maxim, that of the ability to be compassionate. Here manliness was framed within the concept of the benevolent male, a quite different persona to that espoused by the periodical press, but one that was only partially successful, given the correspondence gender imbalance (Milton 2008: 225–6).

Fostering Charitable Ideals The children’s periodical press had long attempted to shape the character of its primary young readers, and if possible, their parents, through texts extolling philanthropic sentiments and guarding against the perceived evils of society, particularly animal cruelty and alcohol. Both issues appeared with diligent repetition within Sunday school magazines published from the 1820s onwards, with animal protection especially becoming a mainstay of the later newspaper children’s ­­columns. Cautionary tales abounded: brutal individuals who meted out cruelty to an animal in turn succumbed to interpersonal violence and its inevitable judicial consequences; drunken parents met premature deaths,  or, more commonly, were redeemed by pious children and  then turned teetotal. As temperance movements took hold, the sentiment of these narratives became more sophisticated as the century progressed, fostering their own children’s periodicals. Early children’s temperance periodicals included the Youthful Teetotaller (1836–?) and the Youth’s Temperance Magazine (1842–?). Both were relatively unattractive publications with few illustrations. A far more appealing read was offered by the principle juvenile temperance society, the enormously successful Band of Hope, formed in 1847. Just four years later, the Band of Hope Review and Sunday Scholar’s Friend (1851–1937) was launched, edited by the Sunday school worker

­

the children’s press

677

and temperance campaigner Thomas Bywater Smithies. Meditating primarily on the evils of drink and the persuasive benefits of abstinence, but also the sin of animal cruelty and the benefits of living a God-fearing life, the magazine was enormously successful, offering engaging moral reading with lavish wood-engraved illustrations. By  1862, 250,000 copies per month were issued, by which time it had become the Band of Hope Review. The Band of Hope was a rather fractious movement, with regional divisions wielding autonomy. In 1865 the Lancashire and Cheshire Band, as the largest regional group, launched its own children’s periodical, Onward: The Organ of the Lancashire and Cheshire Band of Hope Union (1865–1910). Lacking the funding of the Band of Hope Review, and, at the outset, few quality illustrations, Onward stayed the course through its focus on regional identity, informal content, and by instigating an avuncular relationship with its young readers, whose contributions were published, an honour rarely found in its national rival. As a marker of the success of the temperance movement, by 1871 there  were ­­fifteen ­­temperance periodicals in circulation, although not all were aimed at children (McAllister 2015: 42–66; Milton 2008: 87). A number of youth movements produced periodicals in support of their activities. This included B.B. (1895–­­1900), one of a number of periodicals linked to the Boy’s Brigade, and Friendly Leaves (1876– 1917), the magazine of the Girls’ Friendly Society. A broader array of charitable causes was also supported by periodicals, both directly from sales and indirectly via reader contributions. Earned revenue from both the Boy’s Own Paper and its female stablemate, the Girl’s Own Paper, went to support orphanages, ragged schools and overseas missionaries organised by the Religious Tract Society (Drotner 1988: 124). Of significance also was the Band of Kindness, which began as an animal welfare society carried by the Stockport Advertiser in 1882, before acrimoniously divorcing from its host to launch its own periodical, the Children’s Own Paper (1882–91 and 1893–5), and then refocusing towards charitable childcare (Mohr 1992: 42–8). More usually, charitable work took the form of making appeals for money or gift donations from their readers. These were relatively easy schemes to administer and provided a mode of maintaining reader interest. More broadly, they also offered affluent readers a means of easing consciences as they supported worthy causes to alleviate poverty or suffering of those less well off. Charitable work was not confined to ‘respectable’ publications and their readership. Despite their numerous detractors, readers of the Boys of England contributed to a lifeboat appeal, though not generously. It

678

frederick s. milton

took over ten years to raise the £350 needed to launch the resulting Boys of England and Edwin J. Brett Southend lifeboat in 1879 (Boys of England, 25 May 1867: 14; 5 December 1879: 60; Banham 2009: 69). One of the most popular fund-raising projects was to sponsor cashstrapped hospital children’s ‘cots’. Moruzi suggests that, for female readers, charitable work reinforced their feminine identity, and, for some, provided an opportunity to ‘escape the drawing room by employing a Christian ethic of charity towards others’ (Moruzi 2012: 3). In 1868 Aunt Judy’s began an appeal to raise £1,000 to endow a bed at Great Ormond Street Hospital. By 1876, aided by regular reports of suffering children, enough had been raised to sponsor two hospital beds and encourage other periodicals to follow suit (Moruzi 2017: 190–213). The published lists of cumulative donations, which acknowledged contributors and acted to prompt further offerings, provide useful insights into the economic status of readers. For example, the donations columns of the Boys of England fund extended only as far as shillings, whereas Aunt Judy’s also included a column to record much  larger, and regular, donations received in pounds (Boys of England, 25 May 1867: 14; Aunt Judy’s, 1 July 1869: 189–92). These appeals were not without their difficulties. After successfully funding a lifeboat and hospital cot, encouraged by readers, the Boy’s Own Paper in 1885 set about building the Boy’s Own Gordon Memorial Home of Rest for Poor Boys.  However,  readers appeared fatigued. The fund  was closed in 1888, falling well short of its objectives: the £574  collected was put towards a less ambitious appeal for a hospital  ward, with reader enthusiasm maintained via offers of prizes for  donations received (Boy’s  Own Paper, 25 April 1885: 479; 23 March 1889: 397–8;  30 March 1889:  414).  While admirable and worthy schemes in themselves, such projects should also be viewed as extensions of editorial interests in inculcating ‘a charitable awareness among middle class children’ (Dixon 1986: 143).  In  addition, there was also a large degree of self-congratulatory publicity, as publications arranged ­­well-received civic ceremonies for displays of gifts, or unveilings of their retrospective charitable gifts embossed with the publication title.

Conclusion The children’s periodical press of the early nineteenth century offered austere reading, dominated by the didactic and evangelical output of the Sunday Schools and Religious Tract Society. As the century progressed, there was a distinct shift away from content dominated

­

the children’s press

679

by moral issues to that shaped by commercial imperatives. Seeing the commercial potential of young readers, publishers launched a number of periodicals seeking to exploit such readers’ interests through ­­engaging fiction and specialist themes. This growth in children’s literature as the century progressed had been partially brought about by shifting cultural perceptions of the actual nature of childhood itself. As attitudes towards children gradually softened, they were overlaid with a nuanced concept of childhood that encouraged play and pleasure, which was also increasingly reflected in literature produced for them. Publications also moved towards establishing engaging relationships with their readers. The offerings to children widened further, with newspapers, the most commercial of all publications, launching columns and full pages devoted  to younger readers. This latter medium operated, at times, on a  more accessible level to periodicals, often addressing children directly, and reflecting and recording their hopes, fears and lives in ways that did not spare readers the realities of life. Newspaper sources founded children’s societies and clubs to bolster readership, and created spaces to feature children’s correspondence that further revealed their lives. Undoubtedly, for most titles, profitability was the primary concern for such press developments. Secondary to this, although not unrelated, was the emphasis of many such outlets on shaping the character and behaviour of young readers. For Eric Hopkins, ‘childhood was transformed’ during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as schooling, rather than employment, filled the days for pre-teenage children (Hopkins 1994: 231). This emphasis on education remained a constant within the children’s press, via articles and editorials, readers’ proactive compositional work or unconsciously by producing rousing fictional content that encouraged enthusiastic reading. Press proselytising extended to spiritual health emphasised in the religious press, or later periodicals seeking to mould manly boys into Victorian ideals of gentlemen, and the inculcation of charitable ideals and the social narratives addressing the dangers of pernicious reading, drink or animal cruelty. These diverse intents reflect the increasingly sophisticated content and range of periodicals and newspapers that the late nineteenthcentury child had access to, and how, although attitudes to children had shifted across the century, perceived perils to children’s moral well-being had remained relatively fixed. Despite these varied agendas, what is obvious is that the various large circulations and claimed readerships, albeit frequently contested, allied to the large memberships of the ‘press societies’ and their loyal correspondents, demonstrate a

680

siân pooley

very real demand for such literature. It can be stated with confidence that children derived a great deal of obvious pleasure from the multiplicity of child-focused newspaper columns and periodicals on offer. This appreciation of this ephemeral literature by its young readership remains unexplored, and, as the assessment of newspaper columns has shown, is itself a relatively new avenue of historical research within children’s literature still very much uncharted, with much to offer regarding the relationship between children and the British and Irish press.

Case Study 21: Children and the News Siân Pooley Children in the final decades of the nineteenth century grew up in a world that had never been so global, networked and highly literate. This chapter draws on research into children’s experiences and identities in Britain during the late nineteenth century to explore how children consumed the news. In this era of the mass-participatory press, how did young people learn about the world, and what did they consider newsworthy? As Chapter 24 explains, from the 1870s newspapers across the United Kingdom introduced columns for young readers. A minority of these children’s columns became highly participatory. In addition to adult-authored content aimed at an imagined child reader, these columns published letters, poems, stories, puzzles and drawings sent in by young readers and writers. This chapter looks at how child writers engaged with ‘the news’ in children’s columns published by nine weekly provincial newspapers, all of which included large amounts of material written by children.1 What emerges from this analysis is that children’s columns rarely encouraged young people to engage with news stories that dominated the rest of the adult-authored press. Instead, these novel participatory spaces allowed young writers to make public a quite different understanding of what was newsworthy. Each of these participatory children’s columns was run by an editor who was gendered as male through the use of an editorial pseudonym such as ‘Uncle Oldman’ or ‘Grandad Grey’. These avuncular identities encouraged children to imagine their relationship with the public column as an intimate familial bond. The masculine pseudonyms sought to appeal particularly to 1

The studied columns are: Burnley Gazette, Burnley, Lancashire; Manchester Weekly Times, Manchester; Cotton Factory Times, Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire; Birmingham Weekly Post, Birmingham; Bristol Times and Mirror, Bristol; Portsmouth Times, Portsmouth, Hampshire; Leeds Mercury, Leeds, Yorkshire; Northern Weekly Gazette, Middlesbrough, Yorkshire; Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, Newcastle upon Tyne.

­

case study 21 : children and the news

681

boys and their fathers, who were most likely to make decisions about which weekly penny newspaper to buy for the family. As newspapers grew in size in the decades before the First World War, and as the successful model of providing content for children was copied between publications, columns expanded to meet young writers’ enthusiasms. By the 1910s the Northern Weekly Gazette published the largest and most sophisticated child-focused column from its offices in Middlesbrough, in which children’s content filled up to six pages of the twenty-four-page weekly newspaper. Several hundred contributions from children were received each week, of which the editor, who called himself ‘Daddy’, was able to publish only about forty in each issue (Pooley 2015a). Most columns recorded the name, age and address of each child when publishing their submission. This contrasted with the practice of anonymity that was common in adult-authored content and makes it possible to trace  named writers to their familial circumstances as recorded in the decennial  censuses.  Analysis of sample material suggests that the majority of writing  children’s parents were working class, employed in semi-skilled manual  work or as  skilled workers. Teenaged correspondents were more likely to be female  and to have  fathers who worked in lower-middle-class occupations. Participatory columns had a distinctive geography. The columns were most long-lasting, sophisticated and popular in industrial districts in northern England. These regions were dominated by working-class populations who earned relatively reliable and adequate weekly wages, and it was to these readers that an increasingly commercialised penny provincial press responded. As a result, this novel engagement of the youngest, and thus most long-lasting readers, with the public sphere of journalism was neither a national nor a universal phenomenon. It made readers out of a particular group of children in particular places. Evidence from children’s contributions suggests that working-class children rarely independently read newspapers before the advent of children’s columns. Child writers across England expressed similar sentiments to Harry Taylor from Stockport, who wrote in 1894, ‘What I want to tell you about is this. We have been taking the Factory Times in a long while, but I did not take much notice of it till I saw the “Children’s Corner.” I now read it every week, and I think the tales have been very nice so far’ (Cotton Factory Times, 30 March 1894). Of course, such transformative stories were what the editors of the children’s column wanted to print. Children’s lack of interest in articles beyond their own column is supported, however, by the testimonies of teenage readers who were learning adult gendered patterns of press consumption. Until the age of twelve, boys and girls were equally represented as writers, but the majority of boys stopped writing to the children’s column once they started

682

siân pooley

full-time work. Those wage-earning teenage boys who – exceptionally – did continue to write represented themselves as serious, independent readers of the whole newspaper. George Robert Kay, for example, the son of a County Durham colliery engineman, who by the age of seventeen was working as a colliery blacksmith, underlined his status as a discerning, mature consumer in his contribution to the Northern Weekly Gazette: For some time I have been going to write to you complimenting you on your great achievement in publishing such a splendid paper as the ‘Northern Weekly Gazette.’ I think it is the best and cheapest paper out. Before your paper was published I was very fond of reading ‘penny novels.’ When a friend asked me to have a look at your new paper just out I took one, and was so delighted with it that I ordered it weekly, and I think it is the best self-educating paper published. It is the largest and most interesting penny paper. I am only 13 years of age, and a very great reader; but I think that your paper is as good as any published. (Northern Weekly Gazette, 30 May 1896) He used the unusual greetings of ‘Sir’ and ‘Yours truly’, presumably learned through a training in penmanship outside of the column, which contrasted with the typical greetings of ‘My dear’ and ‘Your loving’ used by female and younger male writers. As boys learned to perform adult masculine models of consumer citizenship, they also learned to read and write differently. For the vast majority of juvenile writers, however, when their local newspaper introduced children’s columns, sheets of paper that had been primarily part of their father’s leisure time suddenly became of interest. It is a fair assumption to make from the letters published that most workingclass children learned little about the news from reading whole newspapers. Nor did young readers learn much about party-political and international news from the children’s columns themselves. Many columns explicitly banned controversial content. Children were often assured that content that was considered ‘unsuitable for publication’ was treasured, and many editors claimed to keep albums of unpublishable items. In 1891 a Leeds boy wrote to the local Mercury because ‘I heard papa talking the other day upon Home Rule for Ireland, and I wandered [sic] what Home Rule for Ireland meant. We hear so much talk about it at present …’ The editor offered a brief description to Arthur, but explained, It will not do to make the ‘Children’s Column’ a place for politics. There is room in it for nearly everything save that … there are two sides to the question, and until there is only one side to it, it had better be left out of a column whose readers belong to all parties. (Leeds Mercury, 7 March 1891)

­

case study 21 : children and the news

683

The Home Rule controversy was thrust on the Mercury by its young readers, who sought to understand for themselves what they had heard ‘so much talk about’. Most of the successful children’s columns appeared in liberal newspapers that championed individual conscience and sought to avoid the inculcation of political views. As Arthur’s letter suggests, a partisan political education was instead routinely offered to the young by fathers, and children’s letters reveal their efforts to make sense of these lessons independently. The stepdaughter of a Yorkshire bricklayer, Gertie Stoker, a fifteen-year-old pupil teacher living near Pontefract, wrote to a Leeds editor in 1892 to ask about the famine that killed half a million Russian people. She explained that she had read the column ‘for a long time’, but that she had only now been prompted to write because she had ‘heard a little about a famine in Russia, and pity the poor people very much’ (Leeds Mercury, 9 April 1892). Children’s access to party-political and international news was mediated through – and intensified by – the fragments of family discussions that they ‘heard’. As a result, in spite of attempts to maintain the uncontroversial and apolitical character of the public sphere, politics did creep into columns. Even for these writing children who interacted most closely with newspapers, news was not primarily encountered by reading print, but was aural and overheard through talking, listening and living with family, especially their fathers. What this relatively blank slate in terms of published adult news agendas meant, however, was that child writers had the power to establish their own priorities for what was newsworthy for children. This enables us to expand the definition of news in line with what the young understood to be novel, surprising and worth discussing in the public sphere. The most common way in which children learned about things they considered newsworthy was through their families’ stories. These anecdotes from the ‘world unvisited’ were proudly recounted, especially when they originated from fathers (Rose 2001: 321). Stories told by male relatives were retold far more frequently than stories that originated with female relatives. It is impossible to know whether their mothers spoke less of their experiences or their tales were thought less interesting. Una Addy, the eight-year-old daughter of a railway timetable editor and his wife from Salford, wrote to the Manchester Weekly Times in 1890 because ‘My father has returned from Egypt, and I will tell you something about his journey’. She presented a long description of the sights he had told her of in Egypt before concluding, ‘If you were here I would tell you everything, and show you the beautiful photographs he has brought home’ (Manchester Weekly Times, 15 March 1890). Boys and girls alike expected these masculine adventure stories to appeal to other readers and the male editor, presumably partly because of the glamour and frequency of their retelling at home.

684

siân pooley

Haphazard and decontextualised encounters with an unknown world also prompted children to write to the editors to ask for help. In 1881 Freddie T., for example, sought assistance from the editor of the Leeds Mercury for the following: I bought some pea-nuts the other day. I cannot say that I liked the taste of them; but, as I have noticed that children’s questions are sometimes replied to ‘through the letter-box,’ I thought I would write and ask to be told something about this kind of fruit. When I bought the pea-nuts I asked the greengrocery man where he got them. He said, ‘At the market.’ ‘But,’ I said, ‘where did the market men get them?’ He then told me he did not know, but he thought it very likely they came from America. Now, I have an uncle who is mate on a steamer. His name is Ben, and he has been to see us. I showed him some of the pea-nuts, and he told me that he saw lots of them in Africa, and that he believed they grew here, but that he never saw them growing. I would like to know for certain where they do grow. (Leeds Mercury, 24 September 1881) Encounters with people, goods and ideas from across the world became ever more frequent in the later nineteenth century, but working-class children seldom had sources of information to explain the phenomena that surrounded them. The columns grew to be a source of trusted information for a generation who had acquired literacy but continued to lack books and adult relatives who might satisfy the intellectual curiosity sparked by becoming ‘at home with the empire’ (Hall and Rose 2006). Children’s most intense engagement with the world beyond their home towns was at times of war, most notably during the Second Boer War of 1899–1902. However, even then, children learned of the battles of the far-off war predominantly through intimate experiences – from stories narrated by children whose fathers or brothers were serving, from correspondents whose families had migrated to South Africa, and from experiencing the war through local fundraising initiatives and street celebrations (Pooley 2015b). The intimate public of the column circles were shaped by the values and economy of the particular town on which it was centred. The Portsmouth children’s columns, whose readers mostly lived in and around the town that depended on its naval dockyards, articulated a sustained and profound engagement with war. Children made the Boer War into a permanent, loved feature of their homes through the naming of pets after war heroes. In 1900 many Portsmouth cats were named after celebrated British generals, while an unlucky Birmingham guinea pig was named Kruger, after the defeated President of the South African Republic (Portsmouth Times, 17 November 1900; Birmingham Weekly Post, 10 November 1900). These local celebrations contrasted with the increasingly pacifist column in the Burnley Gazette. When only one in eight letters in the

­

case study 21 : children and the news

685

week’s postbag related to the imperial conflict, the editor praised young readers for their lack of interest in the war as there was ‘rather too much of it’ in the rest of the newspaper (Burnley Gazette, 13 January 1900). Children’s engagement with the intimate effects of war contrasts, however, with their interactions with national politics. It was rare for working-class children to name pets after politicians. One exception was one of the most elite and educated correspondents published in the Leeds Mercury, the thirteen-year-old daughter of John Capper, the assistant editor of the Times. She described the sixteen birds in their London aviary, including a pair of greenfinches who ‘go by the name of “Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone”‘ (Leeds Mercury, 28 June 1890). Children whose families were less politically and journalistically aware rarely took party politics into their home in this way. For most children, Westminster felt too distant to be worth commemorating through one’s pets. Thus, when young writers articulated what they found novel about the wider world, they made the military, imperial and exotic significant not by its distance but by the ease with which it could be made intimate. Children also conceptualised what was newsworthy in spatial terms. Young writers constructed geographical boundaries that differentiated the unremarkable from the newsworthy. Most writers lived in or around the large town or city in which their weekly paper was published. However, the weekly news­papers were also posted on to migrant families who had moved to other parts of Britain or the globe. This child diaspora wrote frequently to articulate who they were in relation to the ‘old town’, knowing their migrant lives would be considered newsworthy by the geographically focused readership of the column. Even for non-migrant families, cheap train travel made the young increasingly mobile. Holidays and day trips were a favourite subject that children understood to be newsworthy – they were sufficiently rare occasions among the predominantly working-class readership that they merited being recorded. For instance, in the 1890s a favourite day out for many East Lancashire families during the textile mills’ holidays was to travel by train to the port city of Liverpool. Children who described such trips articulated a similar set of impressions, focusing on the inexplicable contrast between the grandeur of the urban landscape and the unfamiliar poverty of the people encountered there. When ten-year-old Seth Clough, who lived in four rooms with his widowed mother and five older brothers and sisters, all of whom worked in Burnley’s weaving mills, went to Liverpool he reported: You would be surprised to see the children with bare feet and hanging in rags up and down the streets, the women, also barefooted, carrying baskets on their heads, trying to sell the things they have in, so they might get a living. I got stalled [sic] of the great noise of the city. We inquired our way to the station, and arrived home at Burnley about ten o’clock. It

686

siân pooley

seemed very lonely to the great noise, [sic] and very lowly to the great buildings of the city. (Burnley Gazette, 19 July 1890) Two months later Annie Hall, a twelve-year-old weaver and daughter of a plumber, wrote a similar account, including a thrilling story of the injury and arrest of a six-year-old ‘little girl’ pickpocket (Burnley Gazette, 6 September 1890). For such children and their imagined local readership, the nearby city was distinctly exotic and newsworthy. It was through this process of defining the strange and the familiar in writing that regional identities became increasingly and powerfully articulated in the latter part of the century. Finally, some children made themselves into news. This was most overtly the case in the charitable campaigns on behalf of neglected, poor or ill children (Nic Congáil 2011). This activism allowed children to make their own lives newsworthy; while philanthropic efforts were usually instigated by adult editors, their ideas were translated into campaigns through children’s enthusiastic fundraising, organisation and writing. This philanthropic activism gained political meanings, even when columns discouraged overt party politics. Publications such as the Cotton Factory Times used vivid illustrations of child suffering and kindness to publicise socialist and democratic messages. Sometimes these were articulated playfully through young writers’ responses to jokes or to fairy stories (Sumpter 2008). For instance, in a retelling of the Jack the Giant Killer story, the Giant was compared to exploitative slum landlords and mill owners who paid children inadequate wages (Cotton Factory Times, 30 March 1894). Older boys and girls sent in more serious reports. One such account by fourteen-year-old Robert Spencer described pessimistically to ‘Uncle Jack’ how: At present the trade is bad and unsettled. There has been a great agitation lately about having two day’s holiday in September or ‘running short time.’ I am a weaver myself, and take an interest in it. In my opinion we shall get neither three days a week nor two days holiday. (Burnley Gazette, 8 September 1889) Adult editors offered children spaces to articulate their views to the reading public. It was young writers in certain localities, however, who made sure that the everyday, sometimes politicised, realities of their lives were made newsworthy. Three broader insights into the nineteenth-century press emerge from this exploration of children and the news. First, the advent of children’s columns had a direct and immediate impact on some people’s lives. The expanding press opened up new opportunities for children who aspired to write or draw. One frequent correspondent with the Northern Weekly Gazette was Frances Linskill. As the daughter of a London builder and carpenter, she wrote and

­

case study 21 : children and the news

687

drew frequently for the Yorkshire press throughout her teenage years. By the age of twenty-five in 1911, Frances was a professional illustrator in Liverpool. Children’s columns offered working-class young people new spaces in which to hone the skills and dreams that might enable them to enter into professional worlds of journalism, draughtsmanship or illustration. For the vast majority of young authors, however, this unique period of childhood engagement with the press had a quite different, more indirect, social impact. It is striking how rarely young people from across England engaged with the priorities of adult-authored news and how seldom they responded to the articles that we know surrounded the children’s column. Instead of reading ‘the news’, children constructed their own model of what was newsworthy. They engaged with the world beyond their own experiences when it was brought into their own homes – through familial conversations, through encounters in an increasingly mobile British world, and through everyday experiences of activism on the streets of their own communities. Children understood the press to be a place for reporting the novel and exciting, but the spatial and temporal boundaries of their worlds were different to those of adult journalists. The exotic only had significance to them when it had also been brought home. Finally, this underlines the distinctiveness of the nineteenth-century press. Participatory children’s columns became part of the intellectual life of particular Victorian and Edwardian localities, principally across northern and industrial England. The capacity to communicate ideas in print strengthened distinctive provincial cultures and new social norms, including the more literate younger generation’s active, democratic engagement with the press. These participatory columns in weekly family newspapers variously fizzled out after the First World War, as specialist adult-authored magazines for children multiplied and a higher proportion of parents could afford to buy these targeted publications for their children. As a result, after 1918, fewer spaces existed for making public – to adult and child readers alike – the priorities of workingclass children. Across the previous forty years, however, the flourishing of the commercial provincial press had created a participatory moment in which working-class children played a part in defining what the news was.

Chapter Twenty-Five

THE WOMEN’S PRESS Kathryn Ledbetter

T

he women’s press both created and resisted the ideology that determined the terms of its existence, and sheer necessity to survive market demands produced a response to shifting notions of womanhood. Because magazines and newspapers are composite, commodified expressions of labour, art, intellect, industry, talent and social conversation, they offer a record of social and political desire during an important moment of the historic drive towards women’s equality and independence, and an increasing number of studies in recent decades have explored these points in some depth (Adburgham 1972; Beetham 1996; Fraser, Green and Johnston 2003; Palmegiano 1976; White 1970). A study of women’s spaces in the nineteenth-century press opens a window onto an exciting intersection of industrialisation and domesticity, where women editors, authors, readers, correspondents, proprietors, illustrators, needlework designers, columnists and a host of silent female workers in print production participated in the expansion of the women’s press, as well as the larger press throughout Britain. Laurel Brake argues that ‘most if not all space in the nineteenthcentury press was gendered; that is, it was either directed at male, female, or “family” readers. Little or no space was gender neutral. The male reader represented the default position’ (Brake 1995: 104). However, the idea of a woman’s space need not be understood as the wholesale restriction of women writers or women’s interests to special gendered categories or genres. Most periodicals and newspapers featured articles with women as a topic: of seventy-four titles surveyed in E. M. Palmegiano’s Women and British Periodicals, 1832–1867: A Bibliography, 1,631 articles published in a thirty-five-year span are about women (Palmegiano 1976). The record of accomplished 688

­

the women’s press

689

professional women writers such as Harriet Martineau, George Eliot and Margaret Oliphant also demonstrates how the mainstream press integrated women as contributors and editors. The practice of anonymity further destabilises gender determinants: many women ­writers assumed a masculine identity and discourse in the press, resulting in a ‘radical refusal of the limits of Victorian identity politics’ (Fraser, Green and Johnston 2003: 17). Because of anonymity and pseudonymity, we will be unable to write a definitive history of gender politics in the press. Nevertheless, nineteenth-century gender expectations did define a separate sphere for women in the press, and industrial-era economic expansion enabled publishers to meet these ideologic, commercial demands as women were ‘written in’ rather than ‘written out’ of the press as ‘editorial policy as a discourse more frequently catered for women than otherwise and many journals seemed to pride themselves on consulting the wants of both sexes’ (Fraser, Green and Johnston 2003: 90). Thus, from the eighteenth century onwards, publishers invested more deeply into the women’s press, and editors of mainstream nineteenth-century journals and newspapers created increasingly more gendered spaces for women as part of a larger process of writing women in. The development of a women’s press in London and in provincial regions chronologically parallels the establishment and growth of all British periodicals and newspapers after the Restoration. Bookseller John Dunton issued the first British women’s paper, the Ladies’ Mercury, on 27 February 1693. When a spate of newspapers and intellectual journals such as the Tatler and the Spectator surged into the fertile marketplace for print in eighteenth-century London, publishers also tested the field with several short-lived periodicals for women, such as Mary de la Rivière Manley’s Female Tatler (1709–10), the weekly Ladies’ Journal, launched in Dublin in 1727, and the monthly Female Spectator (1744–6), produced by the author, actress and publisher Eliza Haywood. The Scottish author Charlotte Lennox edited and wrote much of the monthly Lady’s Museum (1760–1), ‘the last of the “essay-periodicals”’, according to Cynthia L. White, who notes that Lennox ‘reached a high standard due to her considerable literary talent’ (White 1970: 30). The Irish women’s periodical titled The Parlour Window (1795–6) demonstrated an interest in Irish themes in poetry, short fiction and essays. Its first issue featured an essay articulating the difficulties of being a female author. ‘Q’ complains that ‘People of CONTRACTED Minds, judge hardly of them and consider every drop of Ink that flows from the Pen of a Woman, as so many blots on her Character’ (Q. 1795: 1–2). By the end of the eighteenth

690

kathryn ledbetter

century women’s magazines demonstrated increasingly more professionalism, which ‘differentiates these magazines from the idiosyncratic journals which preceded them’, according to White (White 1970: 31). The engagement of women editors and authors in these early projects is a testament to their intellectual vibrancy and viability as a marketing tool; male publishers had the financial power and entrepreneurial spirit to invest in the women’s press, but women provided the industry and identity.

1800–1840: Ladies, Leisure and Literature The most successful and longest-running of early women’s periodicals was the sixpenny monthly Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832). The basic recipe for the Lady’s Magazine set the standard for most middle- to upper-class women’s periodicals during the first half of the nineteenth century: instruction in geography, or botany; advice about children, marriage, health, appearance, philanthropy, religious observances and proper social custom; creative hobbies and home activities such as crafts, needlework or word games; intellectual entertainment in essays, short fiction and poetry; and correspondence columns or feature stories about society women. The Lady’s Magazine also featured illustrations of fashion, upper-class women, needlework patterns and story pictures. A notable competitor of the Lady’s Magazine was La Belle Assemblée, or Bell’s Court & Fashionable Magazine (1806–32), established by the circulating library proprietor and Morning Post publisher John Bell. The magazine’s titular modification of Bell’s name reflects the periodical’s focus on upper-class fascination with French fashions and culture. Bell raised the standard for periodical publishing with La Belle Assemblée because of its display of fine engravings, royal octavo size and expanded content (Adburgham 1972: 219–20). Margaret Beetham observes that La Belle Assemblée ‘consolidated the tradition of elegantly produced fashion magazines for an all-female readership which has culminated in today’s glossies’ (Beetham 1996: 34). The coloured fashion plates were unmatched in elegance for the time, and literary supplements printed extracts from new books (Ledbetter 2009). Poetry appears in women’s periodicals of all types for all classes of readers to the end of the Victorian period, and it gets displayed in an immense variety of textual formats, from traditional columns of poetry to elaborate artistic illustration, anecdotal references, quotations, epigraphs and page fillers. A sentimental style is common, whether the poem is a short lyric, ballad, sonnet or narrative verse, for

­

the women’s press

691

nineteenth-century readers valued literature that produced moral feeling and improvement. Traditional notions of femininity dictated the women’s press, and La Belle Assemblée demonstrates the importance of training young women in good personal hygiene, proper behaviour and the latest fashion. ‘Maxims and Rules for the Conduct of Women’ (1806) by the Countess de Boufflers guides readers into proper moral health: ‘Avoid giving advice’, ‘Sacrifice every thing [sic] to peace of mind’, ‘Never indulge in any but innocent raillery, which is not injurious to principles, nor painful to persons’, and ‘Deserve respect’ (Boufflers 1806: 15). Once clothed in cleanliness and purity, the reader of La Belle Assemblée may also be interested in a fancywork pattern for use during leisure hours. The formula was a financial success, as suggested by the series of monthly supplements and advertising sheets dedicated to matching reader interests with the latest commodities for women. The 1806 volume advertises books, assorted alcoholic beverages, and cement to repair household items, and by 1820 the selection of objects and services expands to corsets, medicinal lozenges, dressmakers and haircolouring products. The June 1822 issue advertises the ‘Cylindrichord’, a mechanical instrument that provides music without the musician: ‘by the aid of the Cylindrichord, a person totally unacquainted with music, a child or servant, may perform in the very best and most correct style, Quadrilles, Waltzes, Minuets, Country Dances, Marches, Songs, Overtures, Sonatas, Choruses, or indeed any piece of Music however difficult’ (‘Universal Advertising’, 1822: 1). Book reviews in La Belle Assemblée informed women readers about the latest literary productions, such as the fashionable literary annuals that began to take over the marketplace for print during the 1820s. The annuals began as elegantly bound and printed gift books for the Christmas season. Fiction, poetry, light essays, and steel-plate engravings of beautiful women and story pictures provided their staple fare. Descendants of eighteenth-century ladies’ pocket books and almanacs, the annuals quickly dominated the print market for women readers in Britain and the United States after Rudolph Ackermann issued the first title in 1823, the Forget Me Not (Boyle 1967; Faxon 1912; Harris 2015). Few publishers could resist putting out at least one new seasonal title during the height of their fashion. A very lyrical, twenty-page review of the 1832 annuals published in the November 1831 issue of La Belle Assemblée, hints at the enormous influence of literary annuals. The most successful of eleven annuals reviewed in this essay include the Winter’s Wreath, the Humourist, a Companion for the Christmas Fireside (1828–32); Friendship’s Offering (1824–44); the Forget Me

692

kathryn ledbetter

Not (1823–47); Ackermann’s Juvenile Forget Me Not (1829–37); the Literary Souvenir (1825–35); the Amulet (1826–37); and Comic Offering; or Ladies’ Melange of Literary Mirth (1831–5). Many other literary annuals were crowding into the market by that time, including the longest-running title, the Keepsake (1828–57). At least sixty-three literary annuals were on the market within ten years of the Forget Me Not’s inaugural appearance (Faxon 1912: xi). Louisa Henrietta Sheridan’s annual, The Comic Offering, is notable because it was the first British humour publication to be written, edited and illustrated by a woman (Hunt 1996: 95), and one of the few women’s periodicals focused on humour, usually consisting of puns, odd stories and poems that lightly satirise society and gender roles. Annuals editors often enlisted authors to write text to illustrate the more expensive engraving, but Sheridan’s illustrations stand alone. Each of the five volumes of the Comic Offering contain more than sixty engravings, ‘most of which were designed by Louisa Sheridan herself and engraved by a professional artist’ (ibid.). Critics attacked Sheridan for stepping outside traditional gendered space for humour. However, the annuals reviewer in La Belle Assemblée praises the embellishments and sketches created by Sheridan in her 1832 volume as ‘some of the very best pieces in the volume’, adding: ‘The humour of many of the designs is racy and piquant in the extreme’ (‘Annuals’, 1831: 203–4). After quoting favourite prose and verse for two pages, the reviewer adds that the Comic Offering is an ‘elegant, and splendidly-bound volume’ (ibid.: 205). Most periodicals and newspapers during the 1820s and 1830s reviewed literary annuals (often extensively), but some reviewers complained about insipid and poorly written contents. Nevertheless, annuals threatened to slow the growth of La Belle Assemblée and Ackermann’s own Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashion, and Politics (1809–29), before other periodicals such as the Mirror of Literature (1823–47) and the World of Fashion (1824–51) eventually won the field as the annuals fashion waned. By the late 1830s sheer numbers of annuals titles caused the genre to outstretch its market capacity. Only the Keepsake limped on for twenty years after the fashion in literary annuals peaked. The annuals mark a point in literary history that focused the entire publishing community for a time, and the genre provided a place for poetry in the print trade during a depression that ended or threatened the careers of more than a few publishers. More importantly for the purpose of this chapter, literary annuals provided opportunities for many women to enter the literary profession and develop careers as poets, novelists, essayists, editors,

­

the women’s press

693

journalists, illustrators and workers in the women’s press, as well as in general readership newspapers and periodicals.1 Some women’s periodicals competitively demonstrated characteristics of literary annuals, combining imaginative literature with engravings of beautiful women or story pictures with earlier fashion magazine models set by the Lady’s Magazine and La Belle Assemblée. Examples include the Ladies’ Cabinet (1832–70), the Ladies’ Companion (1849– 70) and the New Monthly Belle Assemblée (1834–70, unrelated to the earlier title).2 The New Monthly Belle Assemblée featured monthly hand-coloured fashion plates in a layout similar to that of La Belle Assemblée, sometimes in a two-page display (see Plate 10). Fashion continued to be a feature of most middle- to upper-class women’s periodicals, but after the 1830s the women’s press began to reach out to readers who could little afford to purchase or make the dresses illustrated in such journals.

1840–1870: Domesticity, Social Consciousness and the Rise of Feminism Increased literacy, improved printing technology, industrial prosperity, the railway boom and removal of taxes on print enabled publishers to realise the potential of a wider demographic after the 1830s. Titles such as Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal (1832–56) (discussed elsewhere in this volume) and the Penny Magazine (1832–45) inaugurated the weekly penny press, which represented women’s spaces because the ‘new journals located their readership in the privatised sphere of the women-centred family which middle-class discourse had defined’ (Beetham 1996: 46). Many women authors with names familiar to readers of literary annuals easily made the transition to authorship in the mainstream press through the penny weeklies and monthlies. Contributors to early issues of Chambers’s include Mary Howitt, Agnes Strickland, Mary Russell Mitford, Dinah Mulock Craik, Amelia Opie, Anna Maria Hall and Camilla Toulmin (‘Some Early Contributors’, 1

Some of their names may be unfamiliar to all but scholars busily exhuming their histories, but a list includes: Maria Abdy, Grace Aguilar, Lucy Aikin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Eliza Cook, Anna Maria Hall, Mary Howitt, Dinah Maria Mulock (later Craik), Amelia Opie, Jane Porter, Agnes Strickland, Emmeline Stuart-Wortley, Camilla Toulmin (Mrs Newton Crosland), Mrs Cornwall Baron Wilson and Ellen Wood (Mrs Henry Wood). Other women writers who were already well known sustained their careers by editing or writing for the annuals: Marguerite Blessington, Felicia Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L.E.L.), Jane Loudon, Mary Russell Mitford and Mary Shelley. 2 Adburgham (1972) and Palmegiano (1976) claim that these three volumes had identical content after 1852, but I am unable to confirm this claim.

694

kathryn ledbetter

1897: 708). Just as with all literary professionals, women sought publication wherever they could find it, and expansion of the press benefited them, as well as the burgeoning population of middle-class women readers. Alexis Easley discusses three popular magazines that encouraged the success of middle- to working-class women writers: Howitt’s Journal (1850–3), Eliza Cook’s Journal (1849–54) and the WorkingMan’s Friend and Family Instructor (1950–3) (Easley 2015). Monthly magazines had become characteristic of the nineteenthcentury press after inauguration of the New Monthly Magazine in 1814, and proprietors of monthly magazines targeted new middle-class readerships, including women. Many new family magazines also appeared after 1830, including Henry Fraser and William Maginn’s miscellany, Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country (1830–82); the Scottish radical publisher William Tait’s monthly Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, edited at different times by Christian Isobel Johnstone and Eliza Cook (1832–61); the shilling family magazine Macmillan’s (1859–1907); the Scottish publisher Alexander Strahan’s illustrated Good Words (1860–1911); and the most popular of the shilling monthly magazines, the Cornhill (1860–1975). According to Jennifer Phegley, family literary magazines such as the Cornhill targeted women as the primary consumers of literature and the disseminators of culture within the home … Largely because they included women, family literary magazines stood apart from and outsold the weighty political and critical quarterly reviews, which had been the primary venue for respectable literary opinions in Great Britain since the eighteenth century. (Phegley 2004: 6) Further, Janice Harris claims that between 1860 and 1900, women writers contributed about 20 per cent of contents in the Cornhill, and 60 to 70 per cent during its height of popularity in the 1860s and 1870s (Harris 1986: 385). The presence of women authors, and new features to meet interests of women readers, demonstrates the greater social and economic importance of women as writers, readers and subjects. Titles of women’s periodicals of the 1840s and 1850s conflate the words ‘lady’ and ‘domestic’ and reflect a dominant middle-class discourse of domesticity, religion and social mobility. Examples include the Magazine of Domestic Economy (1835–44) and the Domestic Economist (1850). The 1849 weekly Domestic Journal (see Figure 25.1) was a short-lived cheap publication with a promising goal to enhance women’s education, which usually meant articles about domestic management, fiction, poetry, new books and travel. Unfortunately,

­

the women’s press

695

Figure 25.1  Title page of the weekly Domestic Journal and Home Miscellany of Instruction and Amusement, 30 June 1849 (Courtesy of Kathryn Ledbetter)

even though the editor initiated a heavy marketing ploy to sell the first 20,000 copies of the new journal for a halfpenny before charging its normal cost of three halfpence, the Domestic Journal did not survive its first volume.3 New women’s periodicals in provincial areas included  the  first Welsh women’s journal, Y Gymraes (The Welshwoman, 1850–2), followed by Y Frythones (The British Woman, 1879–91), edited by schoolteacher and founder of the Temperance Union of the Women of South Wales, Sarah Jane Rees. Women’s periodicals published in Edinburgh during the 1840s include the short-lived Edinburgh Ladies’ Magazine (1843), with essays, poetry, biography, fiction and book reviews for literary-minded women. 3

I have easily found copies of the Domestic Journal for sale at book dealers, which makes me wonder if its proprietor printed 20,000 copies but was unable to sell them.

696

kathryn ledbetter

New shilling monthlies focused on motherhood and Christianity proliferated during the 1830s and 1840s, with titles such as the Christian Lady’s Friend and Family Repository (1832–3), the Christian Lady’s Magazine (1834–49), the Christian Mothers’ Magazine (1844–5) and The Mother’s Friend (1848–59; n.s. 1860–87). These papers displayed an evangelical Christian concentration on women as saviours of civilisation, influencing the belief that women must be educated to perform their role in the world. Charlotte Elizabeth Phelan (later Tonna), founder and editor of the Christian Lady’s Magazine from 1834 until her death in 1846, claims that her periodical will avoid topics about the Church, ‘the discussion of which we consider better adapted to periodicals of a more masculine stamp’ (Tonna 1834: i–ii), although the contents of her first volume in 1834 includes articles on topics not usually published in women’s periodicals of the 1830s, such as geology, politics and theology. A letter to the editor ‘From an Old Blue-Stocking’ comments on the changes in reading habits for women: What an age is the present! Ladies writing upon theology, science, metaphysics … Time was, when a Lady’s Magazine was only a miscellany of fashion and foppery; and if it was of any use at all, could only be of use to the female whose bread was earned by the tasteful combination of silks and tiffanies. (‘To the Editor’, 1834: 24) The comment implies that the woman’s role is now much more serious (and important) than it was in the early days of the Lady’s Magazine and La Belle Assemblée because she must also acquire an education and use it for God’s work while keeping her place in the home. F. Elizabeth Gray observes that ‘This publication reveals the effort that went into defining and charting the nebulous limit between strong feminine woman and masculinised pseudo-intellectual, between pious woman and egregious overstepper’ (Gray 2004: 265). Ironically, attempts to explore intellectual topics in a Christian, domestic periodical for women destabilises its ideology because philanthropy and missionary zeal lure women out of the home into the world, the antithesis of the domestic. Charles Dance, editor of the fourteen-page sixpenny illustrated weekly Lady’s Newspaper (1847–63), attempted to define the place of news for women, but his debut address in 1847 does not suggest a revolutionary change: We shall make you acquainted with all the leading events of the day, without fatiguing or disgusting you with lengthy disquisitions. We can tell you that a battle has been won or lost, without shocking your sensibilities by its painful details. (Dance 1847: 2)

­

the women’s press

697

He promises and delivers articles on needlework, cookery, botany, popular science, painting and drawing, domestic economy and travel. His paper will be an ‘omnibus of information’ that will take the reader, ‘freighted with knowledge’, to the ultimate destination: ‘the hearths and homes of our inestimable English wives, mothers, and daughters’ (Dance 1847: 2). However, some contents in the Lady’s Newspaper contradict his promise and seem well outside the woman’s sphere. Articles describing violent rebellions abroad, international trade, colonial politics, military campaigns, local and national politics, and civic concerns appear adjacent to large needlework patterns and descriptions of fashion. Illustrations of tribal men and women bloodied by weapons of violent tribal natives in Africa take up half of the front page of the 6 February 1847 issue (Figure 25.2). Readers learn that, after her son died from a full day of drinking and dancing, a queen from the African coastal village of Calabar ordered a violent sacrificial revenge upon thirty female slaves, forty male slaves and twenty-nine Creoles in spite of desperate pleas from missionaries to stop. Some readers were shocked, but only by the first-page illustration. The paper’s tendency towards sensationalism was evidently too

Figure 25.2  Illustration of violence at the ‘Massacre at Calabar’ from the front page of the Lady’s Newspaper, 6 February 1847 (Courtesy of Kathryn Ledbetter)

698

kathryn ledbetter

attractive to resist, especially when the subject is a over the death of her son. Perhaps the most significant development in the century women’s press was Samuel O. Beeton’s Domestic Magazine (1852–79). According to Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine

mother grieving mid-nineteenth-­ Englishwoman’s Beetham, the

marked a watershed between the exclusive ladies’ magazines and the popular women’s domestic journals which were to become the staple of the genre from the 1890s. It assumed that women wanted fiction and fashion but it also dealt with the dailiness of readers’ lives. Unlike the mothers’ magazines, however, it secularised those lives, offering the way to domestic happiness rather than salvation. (Beetham 1996: 59) Sales expanded from 5,000 to 25,000 copies a month within two years after its inaugural publication in 1852. Circulation grew to 50,000 by 1860, just before a new six-shilling series began, featuring supplements for fashion, dress patterns and needlework designs. Beeton’s wife, Isabella, helped to edit the magazine from 1856 until her death in 1865, at the age of twenty-nine. The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine focused on women’s interests in the home with a miscellany of ingredients, as indicated by the list of intended topics promised in the address to the first issue in 1852: poetry, short fiction, anecdotal histories of celebrated women, pet care, medicinal tips, hygiene and personal care, gardening, and, of course, the latest fashions and needlework of all kinds. According to Beetham, the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine ‘reactivated the meaning of domestic management as skilled labour and so remade the domestic as a site of work and of “woman” as the leader of an enterprise’ (Beetham 1996: 68). A correspondence feature of the 1850s and 1860s addressed fledgling amateur reader/contributor questions, beginning with ‘Cupid’s Letter-Bag’ for love problems. In 1855 the journal initiated ‘Englishwoman’s Conversazione’, aimed at answering questions about sewing, cooking and personal hygiene. Samuel Beeton also ran writing competitions, and offered instruction in essay writing for his readers. Isabella Beeton attended Paris fashion shows and employed French illustrators to produce hand-tinted fashion plates that appeared in each issue, which also included brightly coloured lithographs of patchwork and Berlin wool patterns (Plate 11). Beeton’s extravagance and entrepreneurial ventures eventually led to bankruptcy, but not before he had ‘thoroughly transformed the middle-class woman’s magazine, begun to re-work the conventions of

­

the women’s press

699

the expensive ladies’ illustrated paper and pioneered the magazine for young women’ (Beetham 1996: 60). One example of Beeton’s extravagance (and his brilliance) is his remarkably successful upper-class weekly newspaper titled the Queen (1861–7). The Queen was to be a profitable paper, addressed to educated society women designated as members of the ‘upper ten thousand’. Unfortunately, its lacklustre reception became a factor in Beeton’s bankruptcy after only six months. New owners continued with his ideas and revived it by merging it with the Lady’s Newspaper in 1863. The editor from 1862 to 1894, Helen Lowe, proved a legendary professional writer and editor, credited with giving the Queen its popular substance. Each folio issue contained twenty pages of society news, fashions, needlework and other articles of interest to society women. Its large size (11 x 17 inches), offered enhanced space to display a profuse range of illustrations featuring women from Britain and the Empire. The Queen included separate departments of news, such as ‘Causerie de Paris’ (society news from Paris), ‘Court Chronicle’ (personal news items about Queen Victoria and her entourage), ‘Pastimes’ (word games, puzzles, card game rules, and so on), ‘Notes and Queries’ from readers, ‘Music and Musicians’, ‘Dress and Fashion’ to accompany two-page fashion displays and coloured fashion plates, ‘The Library’ (book reviews), ‘Gazette des Dames’ (reprinted news items of interest to readers), ‘The Boudoir, Charity, Society’ (news of balls and London social events), ‘The Tourist’ (news about travel destinations), ‘The Housewife’ (with suggestions for household management) and ‘Etiquette’. ‘The Work Table’ had a correspondence section to answer questions about patterns or locations of bazaars where one might purchase handmade items. The section accompanied and described at least two or more pages of illustrated patterns, sometimes with elaborate pull-out designs. The variety and size of needlework patterns in the Queen are unrivalled in comparison to similar features in contemporary Victorian women’s periodicals or needlework guides. Figure 25.3 shows an advertising page section, exclusively for ‘The Work Table’ section, marketing needlework supplies required for the patterns and designs illustrated in the column. Profuse advertisements of other items targeted at women readers appear at the end of each issue in increasing number with the passing years. Needlework sections became one of the first and most common separate spaces for women in the press after the 1840s, and nearly all women’s periodicals offered some amount of needlework instruction. Most women did handwork out of need, adherence to feminine expectation, or sheer pleasure. When a female character in fiction

700

kathryn ledbetter

Figure 25.3  Advertising accompanying the ‘Work Table’ needlework section in the Queen, 1875 (Courtesy of Kathryn Ledbetter)

busies herself with her ‘work’, she is usually depicted performing some kind of crochet, embroidery, knitting, Berlin wool work or plain sewing. Women’s periodicals focused almost exclusively on needlework began to appear after Berlin wool work and crochet caught on in the 1840s. These included titles such as the Worktable Magazine (1847), the Ladies’ Needlework Penny Magazine (1848–9), the Lady’s Album of Fancy Work (1849–50) and Leach’s Penny Knitter (1892). A brisk market in needlework provided steady income for many talented female needlework artists, who established a degree of celebrity in the women’s press as pattern makers, shop owners and guidebook authors. Columns in women’s periodicals written by needlework divas such as Cornelia Mee, Eléonore Riego de la Branchardière, Matilda Marian Pullan and Eliza Warren Francis successfully commodified their needlework talents by using the celebrity status gained by publication in periodicals such as the Ladies’ Treasury, the Lady’s Newspaper, the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine and the Queen, to sell products, needlework guidebooks, and instruction, sometimes in their privately owned shops (Ledbetter 2012; Van Remoortel 2015). These examples

­

the women’s press

701

of creative industry demonstrate ways that women’s periodicals enabled further opportunities for female authors who could combine professionalism in the women’s press with traditionally feminine skills. An essay on ‘Literary Women of the Nineteenth Century’, published in the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine in 1859, declares that ‘Any attempt to mention even the names of the principal female writers of this nineteenth century would be utterly useless in a short paper like this: their name is legion. Two-thirds of “Chambers’s Journal” is written by women’ (‘Literary’, 1859: 342). As consumers, women readers purchased the notion that womanhood meant Christian duty, propriety, traditional feminine accomplishments and domestic bliss as wives, mothers and household managers. But examples set by women professionally engaged with the press suggested other options, and the ‘woman question’ of the 1850s became a frequent topic in women’s periodicals from the 1830s on. In this atmosphere, the first British feminist periodical was launched in 1858 with the explicit intention of promoting the employment of women in the wider public sphere. The monthly English Woman’s Journal (1858–64) translated the moral discourse of feminine purity inherited from the women’s press of earlier decades into a discourse of educated female activism. A group of women called the Langham Place Circle produced the early issues of the journal. The collective efforts of Bessie Rayner Parkes, Matilda Hays, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Emily Davies set the standard for early feminist periodicals. The English Woman’s Journal fulfilled reader expectations for poetry and short fiction, but otherwise displayed strikingly different contents during the years of its existence. After its inception, the journal ‘offered something new to readers of the 1860s: a serious, informed and intellectually engaged publication that discussed the social position of women in Britain in relation to other major reform issues of the day, but without promoting a total inversion of gendered roles’ (Fraser, Green and Johnston 2003: 155). Issues of the English Woman’s Journal printed news about women’s employment, marriage and divorce reform, as well as biographies of independent professional women, reviews of books by women, news about their Society for Promoting the Employment of Women, training schools for servants, juvenile reform, insanity, medical education, emigration and philanthropy. Their projects were self-funded, and circulation was low, but commercial success was not the goal, as Philippa Levine explains: ‘Bessie Rayner Parkes … was convinced that setting commercial targets for such an enterprise would be to court not only financial disaster but ideological dilution, and abandonment of the central tenets of feminist journalism’ (Levine 1990:

702

kathryn ledbetter

299). Although the English Woman’s Journal had a relatively long run of six years, it eventually merged with the Alexandra Magazine for a short time (1864–5), until Jessie Boucherett continued the publication as the more successful Englishwoman’s Review (1866–1910). Emily Faithfull’s Victoria Magazine (1863–80), completely written and produced by women of Faithfull’s Victoria Press, was modelled after the English Woman’s Journal. According to Michelle Elizabeth Tusan, the Victoria Press inspired other feminist experiments in Dublin and Edinburgh (Tusan 2005: 43). The charitable woman-run Caledonian Press in Edinburgh produced the Rose, the Shamrock, and the Thistle Magazine (May 1862–March 1865). It was edited by Mary Anne Thompson, head of the National Institution for Promoting the Employment of Women in the Art of Printing. Like its model, The Victoria Press, the Scottish organization’s goal was to promote women’s employment, and it sought to train women printers. By 1863 the press employed fourteen women to produce the magazine (Howard-Hill 2007: 45). The Rose followed the pattern set by the English Woman’s Journal and claimed its audience as ‘the Fair Daughters of Great Britain and Ireland’. However, Michelle Tusan writes that ‘little is known of the Dublin enterprise’. The Caledonian Press and its magazine folded in 1865 because of economic problems (Tusan 2005: 45). Collectively, these examples of early feminist periodicals expanded and redefined the women’s press for new readerships throughout Britain. As recent studies have shown, they also prepared the ground for difficult battles for suffrage and legal reforms waged by generations of women after the 1880s (Fraser, Green and Johnston 2003; Frawley 1998; Herstein 1993 and 1985; Hirsch 1998; Nestor 1982; Onslow 2000; Rendall 1987; Robinson 1996; Schroeder 2002; Stone 1994). Within a decade after publication of the English Woman’s Journal, most periodicals, from intellectual journals targeted at educated men to traditional, conservatively feminine women’s papers, had incorporated women’s rights issues in some form or other into their pages: by 1868, for example, the Westminster Review, not exactly a bastion of radical thought, could be found featuring the following commentary in its pages: It is plain that the public mind is ripening toward a radical change in the social and civil position of woman. The salient and impressive fact underlying and overlying the whole discussion – one which Conservatism cannot argue out of it – is this, that the most educated and intelligent women of the present day are profoundly dissatisfied with the present relations of law and society to their

­

the women’s press

703

sex. All experience warns us that such dissatisfaction cannot continue unproductive. (Conway 1868: 437) According to Fraser, Green and Johnston, that ‘the issue of women’s rights received so much attention, both positive and negative, from male and female writers within the pages of diverse, even rival, magazines suggests the importance of the press, both as a space for the contestation and elaboration of gendered discourses and as a vehicle for social change’ (Fraser, Green and Johnston 2003: 145). Controversy about the ‘woman question’ during the 1860s evolved into debates about the ‘New Woman’ by the fin de siècle.

1870–1900: The New Woman, Commodity and Celebrity Writing in the Fortnightly Review in 1894, Evelyn March-Phillips offered a retrospective look at early nineteenth-century women’s periodicals to assess the career, claims and character of the ‘irrepressible she’, a phrase borrowed from Eliza Lynn Linton’s spoof of lady journalists in a recent issue of Punch magazine (Linton 1894: 52): It is curious to turn over a pile of those which existed thirty years ago. Earlier still, in the days of our grandmothers, the Repository, or the Ladies’ Companion, made its monthly appearance, adorned with a few coloured woodcuts, some bold descriptive remarks of what were believed to be Paris fashions, and supplied with inchsquare patterns of new dress materials, pinned between the pages of a keepsake poem, a sentimental tale, or a receipt for distilling lavender water … Inadequate as we should now think it, it [sic] was all that was needed for a long time. (March-Phillips 1894: 661) A sense of amused disdain for the past might be justified from her perspective; the women’s press required a new seriousness of purpose as it moved into the modern period. Making her list would be a significant accomplishment for any publication, considering the highly competitive market for women: forty-eight new women’s titles were published between 1880 and 1900 alone (White 1970: 58). March-Phillips ­singles out twenty titles that are ‘very much alive’, and she praises four papers that ‘exist to advance a special purpose’ (March-Phillips 1894: 662). These are relatively small, but very important feminist journals: Florence Fenwick-Miller’s Woman’s Signal (1894–9), Shafts (1892–9), edited by Margaret Shurmer Sibthorp, Women’s Gazette (1888) and the Women’s Herald (1891–3), a continuation of the Women’s Penny Paper (1888–90).

704

kathryn ledbetter

By the 1880s an active feminist movement firmly dedicated to women’s issues promoted more flexible gender roles, better working conditions, voting rights, moral freedoms, professional employment and education, and further reforms in marriage and divorce such as the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882, as well as a host of other moral issues, including temperance, vegetarianism, spiritualism, socialism and anti-vivisectionism. Women’s groups often used the Langham Place model: they formed organisations, published weekly and monthly magazines and newspapers written by and for women, and sought opportunities to become politically involved. Their activism was often associated with the ‘New Woman’, a type of modern woman articulated by Sarah Grand in a series of articles published in 1894. The New Woman was intelligent, independent and socially progressive, with little patience for outmoded moral systems, sometimes including marriage. However, she was also the target of scorn or satire. In Judy: The London Serio-Comic Journal, the New Woman is one of the ‘Dangerous Classes’: She has been expressly manufactured by the eccentric and newly established firm of Sarah Grand and Co. (Limited), retail, wholesale, and for exportation; and there are many who fervently pray that this New Invention may be principally manufactured for the last-named purpose only. But, of course, they – unlike the present writer – do not speak utterly without prejudice. (‘New Woman’ 1894: 42) Figure 25.4 shows an illustration by George du Maurier of ‘The New Woman’ published in Punch magazine on 15 June 1895; the man at the door is going to the servants’ quarter for tea instead of joining the two women in the parlour, because he wants female society. The implication is that these women cannot satisfy his needs because they are no longer feminine; the woman on the right is smoking a cigarette as she languishes cross-legged in the chair in her fashionable masculine dress and manly tie, and a stack of books on the table in front of the woman on the left suggests an intellectual threat to the man’s desire for female society. The image reflects male fears that the New Woman no longer cares about her feminine, domestic role. Expansion of penny papers encouraged publishers to invest in lower-middle- and working-class women’s titles, such as the British Workwoman (1863–96), and the successful penny weekly Bow Bells (1862–97), which reflected middle- to lower-class women’s interests in sensation fiction, cooking recipes and household information. It also published supplements of parlour games and weekly columns focusing

­

the women’s press

705

Figure 25.4  ‘The New Woman’, Punch, or the London Charivari, 15 June 1895 (Courtesy of Kathryn Ledbetter)

on women’s entertainment. From July 1871 to January 1872, Bow Bells featured ‘Out-Door Pastimes for Ladies’, and its first column on 12 July promises guides to angling (fresh and salt water); aquariums (fresh and salt water); archery (indoor and out); beekeeping; boating and sailing; botany (hedge and wood); botany (seaside); calisthenics; croquet (lawn and drawing-room); ferneries; gardening; ditto (window and town); hawking; lawn charades; lawn dancing; picnics; photography; wayside geology; zoology of hedge and wood; zoology of seaside. (‘Out-Door Pastimes’, 1871) The activities would be shared with families, but the column is directed to women. Late-century penny papers included Alfred Harmsworth’s penny magazines for women Forget-Me-Not (1891–1918), Home Sweet Home (1893–1901) and Home Chat (1895–1958). However, the majority of periodicals marked off by March-Phillips as symbols of advancement in the women’s press are popular commercial middle- to upper-class fashion magazines, because ‘dress is of far more importance to women in general. Appearance is more constantly dwelt upon and its influence is more widely recognised.

706

kathryn ledbetter

Even those who excel in other ways, cannot afford to neglect cultivating the art of dressing well’ (March-Phillips 1894: 662). She credits the Queen as a ‘spirited and novel departure compared to its predecessors’, but she marks a divide by listing titles and publication dates of rival periodicals published since the Queen in 1861 (March-Phillips 1894: 662).  Magazines included in this category include the monthly (later weekly) illustrated Lady’s Pictorial (1880– 1921), which featured regular articles on expanding opportunities for women and employed  women authors, such as Rhoda Broughton, Marie Corelli, Violet Hunt and Margaret Oliphant. Another magazine on the list of superiors is Lady’s World (1886–7), mostly known for being a predecessor to Woman’s World (1887–90), famously edited by Oscar Wilde for its first eighteen months. His plan was to enlist the best women to produce diverse contents that would attract and define the modern woman. He acquired celebrity contributors, including Olive Schreiner, Emily Faithfull, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Mathilde Blind, Amy Levy, Dinah Mulock Craik, Violet Fane, A. Mary F. Robinson, Ella Hepworth Dixon, Constance Naden, Ouida, Marie Corelli and Anne Thackeray. The first volume demonstrates Wilde’s intent to address sophisticated modern women with features on foreign artists, women’s history, recently published literary works of quality, fashion and needlework history, colleges and professions for women, and illustrated travel narratives. Amy Levy’s review of Christina Rossetti’s poetry in February 1888 is accompanied by a reproduction of a crayon drawing of the poet by her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Publication of the Rossetti print exemplifies a fascination with female literary celebrities that continues with the film stars of today. Contributors to early days of women’s periodicals were often anonymous, but in the competitive world of the late-century women’s press, added name value was important to periodicals such as Woman’s World and the Lady’s Pictorial. As noted by Alexis Easley, the woman author seized the public limelight in ways that would have been unimaginable earlier in the century. The depiction of her domestic life and writing habits, revealed to the public through photographs and personal interviews, promised to demystify the life of the woman author and illustrate the compatibility of work and domestic responsibilities. (Easley 2011: 138) The monthly Woman’s Herald (1891–3) featured interviews with named authors, and the Lady’s Realm (1896–1915) heavily illustrated its literary contents with photographs of authors in their homes and reproductions of their autographs and letters (see Figures 25.5 and

­

the women’s press

707

Figure 25.5  Front page of the first issue of the Woman’s Herald showing interview feature with the feminist Emmeline Pankhurst, 7 February 1891 (Courtesy of Kathryn Ledbetter)

25.6). The extravagant display of women’s bodies allowed viewers to purchase elegance, thereby solidifying their relationship to the magazine. This feature was yet another example of woman’s presence in the press; celebrity features like those found in the Lady’s Realm also appeared in illustrated periodicals for general reading, such as the Strand (1891–50) and Windsor Magazine (1895–1939). The lady journalist became a familiar subject in periodicals of the fin de siècle, and celebrity status also helped to publicise opportunities for work. The presence of women journalists in the press would also increase the pressure for suffrage and self-determination that would be possible in the next century. What is most clear upon concluding this study is that every page of the nineteenth-century women’s press exhibits a strain of resistance:

708

kathryn ledbetter

Figure 25.6  Illustration of a handwritten letter by the feminist Sarah Grand published in the Lady’s Realm, 1897 (Courtesy of Kathryn Ledbetter)

the false security provided by gender failed to hold. Literacy and the desire for information powered industrial and cultural revolution, and women entered the print industry in all phases of its production. Although anonymity and pseudonymity conspire against a complete history of the women’s press, building a solid record of engagement by women authors and editors, readers and workers, continues to be a vital project that broadens our understanding of the struggles faced by everyday women and begs for patience and empathy for women who sought the safety of gendered spaces.

Chapter Twenty-Six

THE PROVINCIAL, LOCAL AND REGIONAL PRESS Andrew J. H. Jackson

Introduction The significance and potential of provincial newspapers as historical sources are well recognised, and they continue to give rise to the production of targeted local and regional studies (e.g., in more recent years, Hobbs 2009a; Jackson 2010 and 2018; Storey 2015; Walker: 2006b and 2018). These have offered case-specific micro-historical investigations intended to highlight broader aspects of the nature and development of provincial, regional and local newspapers throughout the nineteenth century. They have also extended understanding of the range and detail of press content and its style. Such studies have identified similarities in, and differences between, provincial news­ papers across Britain and Ireland, and have explored the complex and dynamic processes through which the press played a role in identity formation and place promotion. This overview of the history of the provincial, local and regional press considers factors influencing its development, composition and geographical character, and its diverse array of political, economic, social and cultural functions. The chapter refers to a number of individual and regional examples that reflect the contribution of publications to the life of localities or broader spatial areas across England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland.

Development and Format Provincial press production expanded rapidly through the nineteenth century. This body of print media grew and developed alongside the publication of London-based ‘national’ or ‘British’ newspapers. Historians studying the provincial press now consider a broader 709

710

andrew j. h. jackson

spectrum of output as components of this ‘other’ press existing outside of London, thus embracing Scots, Welsh and Irish, county or other region-related publications, and city, town and urban district news­ papers. This wide range of press outputs would meet reader demand both for locally or provincially distilled versions of national, international or general news, as well as for summaries of what was considered newsworthy or of material interest across the regions and localities that such publications were associated with and represented. Terminology is not unproblematic, in particular the notion of there being a clear division between what constituted the ‘provincial’ and the metropolitan-based ‘national’ press. The former, in content and circulation, in effect functioned as the latter for many readers and indeed was read by a larger proportion of the population. The balance between ‘national’ and ‘local’ news varied considerably depending on the status and reach of a publication. The range and character of publications in this ‘category’ confound precise definition or taxonomy, such that McAllister and Hobbs suggested almost a decade ago that what is more important is simply greater and wider scholarly attention: there is evidently ‘a strong case for the importance of studying these types of publication, whether we nominate them as local, regional, provincial, or indeed any other term’ (McAllister and Hobbs 2009: 12). Hobbs also went further in proposing that the press, provincial and metropolitan, is more appropriately viewed as a single entity, one of overlapping systems and networks. A function of provincial newspapers, Hobbs noted, was to provide ‘local’ news to other provincial and also metropolitan publications; while press agencies, based in London and provincially, disseminated news broadly for newspaper businesses (Hobbs 2009a). ‘Provincial’, as a term, is additionally problematic in the Welsh, Scots and Irish contexts. Here the ‘centre’ being looked to was not necessarily London. Moreover, the treatment of English and British news, and that of the Empire, was checked and challenged by shifts in the demand among the readership, whether for the representation of provincial historical and cultural difference and distinctiveness, or of emerging nationalistic or separatist expression (Cowan 1946; Jones 1993: 6; Legg 1999; Maume 2012). At the opening of the nineteenth century, there were approximately 100 newspapers produced in the provinces, and half of that figure in London. As the century closed there were around 1,500 provincial publications, compared to just over a quarter (400) that were London based (Hobbs 2016: 222–3). A number of factors stimulated the expansion of provincial newspaper production (Cowan 1946; Golby 1997: 98–100; Jones 1993: 239; Law 2016; Murphy 1991: 5–6; Peters

­

the provincial, local and regional press

711

2016: 194–200; Read 1961; Smith 2016; Walker 2006b: 376–9; West 1983: 224–36; Williams 2010: 116–18). Firstly, the reduction of stamp duties in 1836 and their abolition in 1855 constituted both a symbolic act and a commercial incentive, opening up opportunity for the rapid development of a cheaper and more accessible press. These acts were accompanied by the withdrawal of advertising and paper taxes. Secondly, press publication and distribution was further facilitated by technological and logistical advances in communication, printing and transportation. Thirdly, readership numbers grew as literacy levels increased through the nineteenth century. Fourthly, the growth of local democracy, political representation and structures of government and administration created a role for the provincial media in articulating and reflecting viewpoint and opinion. Finally, the regional and local press expressed, and were expressions of, contemporary change, progress and ambition across rural and urban localities and regions – political, economic, societal and cultural. The provincial press had established itself before the nineteenth century. Thus, some of its conventions and practices continued to shape the functional and cultural expectations of such media among publishers and readers alike as the century progressed (Cowan 1946: 1–32, 409–10; Gardner 2016; Jackson 1971: 3–15; Jones 1993: 1–2; Legg 1999: 29–50; Newton and Smith 1999; Walker 2006b: 375–6; West 1983: 225–36; Wiles 1965; Wilson 1986). The start of the provincial press dates back to the late seventeenth century, with the launch of a small number of provincial newspapers in key commercial centres, such as the Worcester Post Man from 1690 (subsequently Berrow’s Worcester Journal) and the Stamford Mercury, claiming origins back to 1695. A larger number appeared in the eighteenth century, with early examples being the Norwich Post from 1701 and the Bristol Post Boy, 1702; the Edinburgh-based Scots Courant from 1710 and the Edinburgh Evening Courant from 1718; Holyhead’s Tlysau yr Hen Oesoedd of 1735; and the Belfast News-Letter from 1737. Early press launches generally in the south of England were followed by new publications started in the north of England in the second half of the century – such as the Hull Courant and Liverpool Advertiser, from 1746 and 1756 respectively. Similar spatial shifts were evident elsewhere. In Scotland, for example, the monopoly of Edinburgh was firmly challenged from the mid-eighteenth century by Glasgow- and Aberdeen-based publications. By 1800 a large number of provincial newspapers had emerged, but it would be the subsequent century that would bring the demographic growth, economic development, political consciousness and cultural practices that would support a second

712

andrew j. h. jackson

and far more dynamic and expansive phase. In the early decades of the nineteenth century duties pushed up the cost of copies. However, this was offset somewhat at this date in that business start-up costs and the acquisition of presses were less of a disincentive while the scale of production remained relatively small. Moreover, the appeal of establishing a paper as a political project was a strong one at this time, and copies passed through many hands in reading rooms, newsrooms and other public establishments (Jackson 1971: 6–11; Legg 1999: 58–71; Read 1961: 74–107; Walker 2006b: 376–9). Provincial newspaper production grew through the nineteenth century and was at its most rapid through later decades of the century (Cowan 1946: 409–10, 416–9; Golby 1997: 98–100; Hobbs 2016: 222–5; Jones 1993: 2; Legg 1999: 30, 77; Walker 2006b: 376–83; West 1984: 224–36; Williams 2010: 116–18). Towns with populations in the 5,000s were starting to publish their first newspapers. It became possible to see four or five publications available at any one time in the larger towns, printed on different weekdays, and in the big cities there could be many more in existence concurrently. Some newspapers from this period outlasted the 1880s. However, the lifespan of such newspapers was more typically of a few years or perhaps of a decade or so, after which they ceased to exist as publications, were reorganised or amalgamated, or their proprietorship changed. Such circumstances generally resulted in alterations to their title and circulation. Through the second half of the nineteenth century growth in output, along with increased demand, saw the development of journalism as a profession, covered more fully in Chapter 5 of this volume. The rise in numbers of daily and evening newspapers on sale, at the cost of more established weeklies, saw with it a similar demand for greater numbers of local reporters to report on daily events. The development of the provincial press industry as a larger-scale and more capital-intensive undertaking led to a shift from smaller-scale and localised proprietorship towards the multi-title empires that became more predominant in the twentieth century. Indeed, by the end of the nineteenth century there were in place the factors that would bring a contraction in the provincial press over the following one hundred years, in particular competition from national dailies, and the amalgamation, rationalisation and centralisation of businesses and production. As the twentieth century dawned, the competition between multiple rival titles and drive for influence in local politics did not entirely subside, but these dimensions were losing their earlier force (Jackson 1971: 7–15; Packer 2006: 415–16; Taylor 2006: 410). While there was some variation in format, composition and style of

­

the provincial, local and regional press

713

provincial newspapers, most press scholars identify a broad similarity of approach to news reporting among provincial press outputs (Cowan 1946: 23–32, 410; Hobbs 2016; Jackson 1971: 3–15; Jones 1993: 10–60; Murphy 1991: 7–12; Read 1961; Walker 2006b: 376–82; Walker 2018; West 1983: 228–36). Moreover, the regional and local press assumed and developed upon content and themes that became established in the London-based ‘national’ press. The gathering and presentation of national and international news continued as a leading feature, alongside increasingly expanding news-print space encompassing: correspondence pieces, accounts of events, the reports of local bodies and authorities, notices of bankruptcy and sale, personal announcements, readers’ letters, literary and scientific reviews and articles, and partworks. In addition, editorial opinion featured more prominently, and advertising space expanded. Publications – and particularly in larger centres where a number competed for custom – varied in their leaning in content and tone. Front-cover-banner titles and subtitles declared circulation and constituency, but also any emphasis in attention in terms of political, social or economic interests. Equally, a balance was struck in attention given to international, national and provincial news. Furthermore, and in common with the national press, they balanced the objective relating of information with sensational and speculative reporting and juxtaposed the representation of conventional or authorised opinion with alternative, critical or dissenting viewpoints.

Agency, Influence and Discourse The rapid and expansive growth of provincial newspaper production through the nineteenth century brought a considerable increase in the number of publications representing individual towns, cities and regions, reporting on the development of their host centres and districts, and reflecting how place, community and ‘national’ identities were evolving. The function of the provincial press was correspondingly diverse and sophisticated in terms of spatial, political, economic, social and cultural functions. In this regard, the provincial press can be positioned in the context of the press and the media more broadly in society, whose development influenced and was influenced by general trends in the growth of liberal democracy, the surge of radicalism and extension of mass consumerism (Curran 2010); or can be situated in the context of the development of national consciousness, and, as dimensions of this, ‘imagined-community’ construction and the role of ‘print-capitalist-languages-of-power’ (Anderson 2006: 33–6, 45–6). Provincial newspapers were neither merely passive reporters

714

andrew j. h. jackson

of received news nor one-way relayers of factual information. They were formed by and were formers of localities and areas. Provincial newspapers were active agents in dynamic local and regional processes, and engaged in various modes of place formation and identity construction. This agency included the marking out of geographical catchments and areas of circulation, the shaping of spheres of political influence and activity, the fostering of commercial networks and interests, the accounting for, and reporting on, individuals, institutions and organisations, and the cultivation of local, regional and national senses of place and cultural expression (Gardner 2016: 1–2; Hobbs 2009a; Hobbs 2016: 230; Legg 1999: 174; Jackson 2010; Jackson 2018: 70–1; Jones 1993: 239; Lester 2009; McAllister and Hobbs 2009; Walker 2006b: 374). The press played a key role in shaping these domains, whether as critic or as promoter. The multi-dimensional role of the provincial press was far-reaching, and they form an essential primary source today. Recent research and scholarship recognises the theoretical significance of provincial newspapers and opportunities for further enquiry in the present. Indeed, their appreciation was established among an earlier generation of local and regional historians and urban historians. For Briggs (1963: 12) they ‘provide an indispensable record of contemporary opinions’. Hoskins (1984: 32–9) observed that they provide an essential point of reference for completing a holistic reconstruction of the ‘old’ community and its sense of itself that existed before 1914, one that subsequently underwent disintegration, either through rapid growth and change, or through decline and stagnation. For West, certain qualities stand provincial newspapers apart as a main source type: ‘There is no source of local history as evocative of the atmosphere of any nineteenth-century town as its local newspaper. There is certainly no contemporary document more redolent of local identity and municipal pride’ (West 1983: 224). The purpose and influence of the provincial press was shaped by the manner of press discourse and factual content offered to local ­readers. Regional press editorials and commentary could be both critical as well as promotional in language (Briggs 1963: 47–8; Jackson 2015; Stobart 2003: 167–74). But provincial newspapers were more generally enthusiastic supporters of the places and areas that they represented and sought to foster a positive sense of identity. Indeed, their commercial success depended to a great extent upon this. The writing of press content frequently drew upon ‘boosterism’, a mode of literary discourse associated with and accompanying the growth of towns and cities, and the competition existing between them, through the nineteenth and

­

the provincial, local and regional press

715

early twentieth centuries. Boosterist writing was necessarily biased and emphasised the presence of harmonious and progressive politics, municipal enterprise and civic ambition, economic innovation and prowess, social development and well-being, and cultural vitality and excellence. Boosterists, including newspaper editors, would typically glory in aspects of the past, celebrate the noteworthy in the present, and champion a greater future ahead. This said, newspapers could, where appropriate, convey a distinctly negative impression of a local place and its identity. Paralleling civic boosterism, and in sharp contrast to it, was the more critical ‘muckraking’ literary tradition of the period. This took a far more condemnatory view of town and city life and would also feature in press comment and editorial. For the rapidly growing Middlesbrough, for example, the pronouncements of the press on local civic culture and progress, boosterist or critical, can be traced through the coverage of the Liberal Middlesbrough Weekly News and Cleveland Advertiser, the Conservative Weekly Exchange and other newspapers published for the town during the Victorian period. The Weekly Press was notable in pressing for forward thinking and bolder measures in municipal action (Briggs 1963: 262–74). Jackson, comparing publications of the nineteenth century with the twentieth, observes that ‘In general, the hortatory editorial postures … have given way, with few exceptions, to more gently persuasive modes of argument’ (Jackson 1971: 8–9). By the end of the nineteenth century there was a trend towards the easing of party affiliation and the raison d’être of provincial publications as political projects, a response to competition from cheaper daily metropolitan titles, and a developing trend towards a neutral or less partisan stance (Briggs 1963: 45; Packer 2006: 415–16; Walker 2006b: 384). The later part of the nineteenth century also witnessed the spread of ‘New Journalism’, associated with US-influenced models of press discourse, throughout provincial newspapers and the press more generally. This further mode of discourse was more populist in tone, aimed at providing stories that could raise circulation and foster sharper competition, and is discussed more fully in Chapter 5.2. The New Journalist style sought to appeal to its consumers through evocative, morally charged and sensationalist language. Such journalism might turn to events or circumstances of little direct bearing on the lives of readers, present newspapers as taking the role of interventionist agents, and seek to articulate the people’s voice and the community interest, if not necessarily secure political influence (Goldsworthy 2006; Matthews 2017: 85–110; Taylor 2006).

716

andrew j. h. jackson

Geography, Space and Place Provincial newspapers shaped, and were shaped by, spatial patterns and processes. Such publications were grounded in recognisable and tangible local geographical areas, whether in urban districts, towns, cities, rural districts, counties, or in regional areas of Scotland, Ireland and Wales (Cowan 1946; Hobbs 2016: 230; Jackson 2010; Jones 1993; Lester 2009; Legg: 1999; Maume 2012; Peters 2016: 194–200; Read 1961). The provincial press sought to meet the demands of discernible readership catchment areas and, in so doing, created or reinforced popular and official understandings of places and spaces and their associated identities. Newspapers served long-standing and historical centres and areas, and also came into being and flourished hand in hand with newly emerging and expanding localities. Levels of spatial affiliation in terms of material content varied, with small town and borough newspapers, such as the Leigh Journal & Times and the Preston Herald, offering more local ‘home’ news than big-city papers such as the Nottinghamshire Guardian and the Sheffield Weekly Telegraph (Hobbs 2009b: 24–5). West notes a tendency in the Midlands and northern England towards the creation and persistence of single-place-based news­ papers, strongly associated with growing industrial towns and cities, and with those newly gaining borough status (West 1983: 228). In the south, by contrast, where ‘municipal pride and independence … and urban atmospheric pressure’ were relatively lower, there was a leaning towards county titles. In some of the ‘metropolitan’ counties, town papers were steadily taken over by regional publications (noticeably in Kent), while some town-based presses adopted a county title from the outset (for example Winchester’s Hampshire Chronicle and Courier). The proliferation of new individual town- and city-based papers was a feature outside of England. For Scotland, for example, this was a phenomenon through to the 1860s. Thereafter, Edinburgh- and Glasgowbased dailies posed a greater challenge to country and other weekly and bi-weekly publications (Cowan 1946: 168–9, 409–10). In Wales, papers in the English and Welsh languages appeared simultaneously towards the north and south of the country, while some publications intended for readers in Wales were printed in Liverpool (Jones 1993: 2–5). In Ireland, some publications saw a more modest extension in their reach as the market for the provincial press expanded, such as the mutation of the Skibbereen and West Carbury Eagle of 1858 into the Eagle and County Cork Advertiser of 1891. At the other end of  the spectrum, some titles sought out readers from the Irish diaspora, in north-west

­

the provincial, local and regional press

717

England in particular, but also globally. Armagh’s Standard claimed an ‘Armagh and District’ circulation, while the Armagh Guardian attempted an appeal as far as ‘the Canadas; and the United States’ (Legg 1999: 18, 43–4, 178). The titles of newspapers were an immediate declaration of the catchment areas that they sought to represent. They were symbolic in terms of connecting with relevant political and administrative units, areas and centres of population, as well as linking to spheres of economic influence and of cultural activity. Territorial association frequently changed as newspapers grew in circulation, sought to compete with rival titles, and, simultaneously, reach an expanding and evolving constituency of readers. In many instances, local publications were clearly affiliated with a particular place, but also aimed to achieve a wider regional or hinterland reach. Stamford’s long-standing Mercury continued to stake a claim to a broad regional readership, taking into the nineteenth century its extended title of Lincoln, Rutland & Stamford Mercury (Newton and Smith 1999: 285–6; Wilson 1986). Dudley published its first newspaper, the Dudley Weekly Times, in 1856, but in its subtitle sought a wider appeal as also the South Staffordshire & East Worcestershire Advertiser (West 1983: 233–4). Some local London newspapers had complex mastheads proclaiming a wide-reaching community coverage, as, for example, the Borough of West Ham and Stratford Express, whose masthead subtitle also included ‘Leyton, Leytonstone, Wanstead, Woodford, & Walthamstow News’ (Lester 2009: 55). In some instances, newspaper businesses relocated to establish new local identities and affiliations, such as the move of the Lincoln Herald to become the Boston Herald (Walker 2006b: 379). For spa and resort towns, coastal or inland, the local press had a hand in cultivating place identity and promoting the status and reputation of these centres, reporting on the qualities and facilities of their host places, and reaching out to cover the wider visitor hinterland and its attractions (Jackson 2010: 102; Travis 1993). One of the earliest newspapers founded in the resort town of Ilfracombe, for example, incorporated this touristic function in its title, Bright’s Intelligencer and Arrival List for Ilfracombe, Lynton, and Lynmouth. It barely lasted a year, but its successor was similarly ranging in its circulation aim, taking as its masthead title the Ilfracombe Chronicle, North Devon News and Visitors’ List. In the ‘non-English’ spheres of Scotland, Ireland and Wales, ‘national’ news content could also combine with a sense of the ‘nationalised’, where they were seeking to offer a representative voice to a  national people; and that of the ‘nationalistic’, where they articulated a more

718

andrew j. h. jackson

forceful representation of their ‘national’ interest (Hobbs 2009b: 19–20; Maume 2012). In Scotland, Edinburgh papers of varying lifespans declared differing spatial and cultural reach, such as the city’s Advertiser, its Correspondent and its Daily Express; the Scotsman and the True Scotsman; the Caledonian Mercury; and its North Briton (Cowan 1946: 416–19). In Ireland, the periodical and newspaper press overlapped in their endeavours to promote a Gaelic revivalism and nationalism (Legg 1999: 21–8, 93–108). In the case of Wales, its press typically appealed to the nationalistic or indigenous, and this complicates clear differentiation between the local, provincial and national. The larger towns in the north and, even more so the cities and towns of the more populous south of Wales, produced various publications through the nineteenth century which in different ways sought to meet the demands of local, regional, provincial and national readerships, and related political and cultural, and class and religion-based, interests (Jones 1993: 6; Peters 2016: 194–200). The titles of Welsh publications are an interesting indicator of content, perspective and ambition. The words used incorporated the title of a town or city, or a county or sub-regional district; or reflected a wider regional or subnational sphere, or even national or cross-national context. Moreover, spatial dimensions intersected with the linguistic, with titles in English or Welsh. A conspicuous feature of newspapers in Wales in the early nineteenth century is the proliferation of titles, if short-lived ones, in the Welsh language (Jones 1993: 294–5; Peters 2016: 194–200; West 1983: 243–66) (A point addressed more fully in Chapter 10 of this volume.) Indeed, many of the places publishing newspapers in the first half of the 1800s began with a title in the Welsh language. In Swansea, for example, there appeared Y Cyclchgrawn (The Journal) and Seren (The Star). For the north-west, in Caenarvon, there came into being the Papyr Newydd Cymraeg (New Welsh Paper) and the Cylchgrawn Rhyddid (The Journal of Freedom). Through the middle and later decades of the nineteenth century, titles in Welsh continued to have a place, but alongside a greater number of anglicised names. The naming of newspapers was particularly creative in signalling the extent of their intended geographical and cultural scope. Merthyr Tydfil saw the establishment of the place-specific-sounding Merthyr Tydfil Telegraph and the short-lived Merthyr Tydfil and Cardiff Chronicle, as well as the broader South Wales Reporter, Western Observer and Star of the West. Cardiff, meanwhile, possessed at different times its Times, Mercury and Chronicle, as well as its Western Mail and the Red Dragon. In North Wales publication titles also proclaimed various senses of

­

the provincial, local and regional press

719

local, regional or national appeal. The town of Caernarvon published a North Wales Press and North Wales Express, together with a Herald Cymraeg (Welsh Herald) and the Cymru (Wales). Some Welsh towns and cities located nearer to the border with England also published titles that suggested an eastward reach with their circulations. Cardiff, if for 1880 only, produced a Cardiff Free Press with West of England Observer, while Monmouth printed a Monmouth Chronicle with West of England Observer. Equally, the titles of some of the newspapers printed in Welsh border towns in England indicated an intent to competitively extend their circulation into Wales. Chester, for example, established a Chester Courant and Anglo-Welsh Gazette, which became the Chester Courant and Advertiser for North Wales; Shrewsbury produced a Shrewsbury News and Cambrian Reporter, and a Shropshire and North Wales Standard; and Liverpool printed the Welsh-language Yr Amserau (The Times).

Politics and Partisanship Corresponding with such territorial associations were related political functions (Cowan 1946: 410–9; Jackson 1971: 6–14; Jones 1993: 124–41; Matthews 2017: 57–83; Maume 2012; Read 1961; Stokes 2006; Taylor 2006: 410; Walker 2006b: 377–84). The provincial press reflected the interests of, and activities within, spatially defined units of government, administration and representation: boroughs, county boroughs, counties, and ‘countries’. Newspapers captured senses of regional and local political identities, with publications conveying the viewpoints of established individuals, structures, cultures and power elites, or presenting popular or dissenting opinion. Proprietors and editors were frequently agents in pressing for the strengthening of local political self-determination and government (such as through municipal incorporation), calling for the replacement of established but weak administrative structures, and campaigning for wider legislative and parliamentary reforms. According to John West (1983: 277–8), a great outpouring of new provincial newspapers in England and Wales occurred between two significant Acts of Parliament. The Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 confirmed the worth of many places with historic incorporation as reformed boroughs and allowed a further set to seek incorporated-­ borough status. The Local Government Act of 1888, meanwhile, brought county and county-borough and councils into being. It is apparent that the launch of many local newspapers coincided with or was spurred on by the granting of new borough status in many

720

andrew j. h. jackson

localities. The newspaper for the borough became both an expression of civic and community pride, and a guide to and watch upon new municipal structures, policies and activities. Thus, for example, the rapid development of resort centres often placed great strain on service infrastructures, and editors of local newspapers were quick to suggest ways to address such issues (May 1983; Travis 1993, 157–8; Walton 1983: 133). In Ilfracombe, for example, in the early 1860s, the editor of Ilfracombe’s Intelligencer was an open critic of the local Board of Health, and used its pages to maintain an aggressive campaign against the council to agree to the formation of a local corporation (Jackson 2010: 105–6). More generally, the agency of newspapers could be traced to the local activism of individual journalists (e.g., in Wales, Jones 1993: 159–60). For Scotland, burgh reform was a basis for much provincial press coverage, although this was set in the context of much broader political debate, including the widening of the franchise, and the growing influence and representation of trade unionist, Chartist and nationalist sentiment (Cowan 1946: 33–86). Politics was often to be found at the centre of the origins, aims and substance of publications (Briggs 1963: 262–74; Gardner 2016: 59–83; Jackson 1971: 6–15; Jones 1993: 124–41; Packer 2006: 415–16; Read 1961; Shinner 2007; Stokes 2006; Taylor 2006: 410; Walker 2006b: 378–80). Frequently competing political interests would launch individual titles to represent party views, appeal to particular class or sector interests, influence local opinion, and in some instances seek to persuade opposing readers to switch allegiances and sides. In Stamford, its Champion of the East was founded in 1830 to represent farming interests, with a series of swift title changes reflecting its campaigning intent: it was renamed the Stamford Champion & Midland Counties Farmers’ Journal in 1831, and then the Stamford Champion, Newark Times & Boston Patriot in 1832. Later in the century, Conservative interests in the area would be served by the Lincolnshire Express & Rutland, Stamford, Peterborough and Huntingdonshire Reporter from 1862 (which merged with the Lincolnshire Chronicle two years later), while Liberal Party interests would find representation in the Stamford & Rutland Guardian of 1875 (Newton and Smith 1999: 293–5) (see Figures 26.1 and 26.2). In certain northern English cities, meanwhile, middle-class reformist newspapers such as the Manchester Guardian, Sheffield Independent and Leeds Mercury sought in their focus to differentiate from the more radical and working-class press of the areas represented by examples such as the Leeds Patriot, Manchester Observer and Manchester and Salford Advertiser (Jackson 1971: 7–10; Read 1961: 108–200).

­

the provincial, local and regional press

721

Figure 26.1  Lincolnshire Chronicle, 12 March 1896, advertisement (Courtesy of the Lincolnshire Libraries Local Collection)

In Scotland, ‘provincial’ press handling of political issues was especially complex (Cowan 1946). Matters of ‘international’ significance exposed partialities, such as in the Glasgow papers over slavery. Equally, ‘national’ politics involved persuasion across competing publications, for example with regard to nationalist rights. Furthermore, more ‘province-specific’ issues gave rise to contrasting sympathies, as in debates over sabbatarianism, temperance and the clearance of the Highlands. In Wales, Conservative and Liberal rivalries and political positions continued to be served by an expanding and partisan provincial press, while the labour movement brought readership-targeted publications into print, such as the Merthyr Star and the Amddiffynydd y Gweithiwr (Workman’s Advocate) (Jones 1993: 138). In Ireland, political representation through the provincial press was particularly rich and emphatic, especially as the heat of debate mounted over issues such as the land question and tenant rights, and nationalism and

722

andrew j. h. jackson

Figure 26.2  Lincolnshire Chronicle, 24 March 1896, advertisement (Courtesy of the Lincolnshire Libraries Local Collection)

Home Rule. Political position was frequently expressed in the choice of title, such as the use of ‘Independent’, ‘Democrat’, ‘Conservative’, ‘People’ and ‘Vindicator’. Furthermore, allegiance consolidated, sharpened and swayed through the second half of the nineteenth century. In Londonderry, its Journal shifted from a Liberal to a nationalist stance, while its Standard transformed from a Conservative organ to a Liberal Unionist one (Legg 1999: 18­­–19, 147, 203–4). Through the 1890s the allegiances of a number of leading Dublin-based publications were finely attuned to the turbulent course of political factionalism, and the representation of related and shifting religious, class and commercial, as well as nationalist and separatist interests (Maume 2012). The rapidly expanding industrial centres in the Midlands and the north of England supported much growth and dynamism in newspaper production, as well as sharp competition and rivalries between titles and publishing businesses. The development of newspapers for Sunderland is a story of shifts and turns in politics, power and patronage (Milne 1982; Storey 2015; West 1983: 266). The

­

the provincial, local and regional press

723

fortunes of local newspapers and political parties were intertwined. The press was closely dependent upon, and served, partisan interests, and vice versa. Moreover, success and failure could often be traced to the lives of individuals, and their political and commercial allegiances. The Sunderland Herald, Shields and Stockton Observer and General Advertiser was established as a Liberal newspaper in 1831 and swiftly took over the neutral but financially struggling Sunderland and Durham General Shipping Gazette. One of two long-lasting papers, it survived a series of other early attempts to found other Liberal-aligned publications: the Sunderland News and North of England Advertiser, which was founded by a later MP for the town but failed to build sufficient advertising revenue during its four years of life, 1851–5, and the Sunderland Examiner of 1852, which became the Newcastle Examiner in 1854 and moved to Newcastle. The Conservatives, to parallel and challenge the Liberal interest, established the Sunderland Beacon in 1838. It would become the Northern Times in 1839 and the Sunderland Times in 1843. This publication also survived the emergence of another Conservative competitor, the Sunderland Mirror (1839–40). The third quarter of the nineteenth century saw much change in proprietorship, businesses, publication title and loyalties. The Tory Sunderland Times was sold to a former Chartist and became a more radical Liberal rival to the Herald, while a younger and more progressive set of radicals established the Sunderland Penny Weekly News (1865–­­8) and subsequently the Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette in 1873. The Conservatives made three attempts to establish a rival paper: the Sunderland Telegraph (1858), the Sunderland Sentinel (1867–78) and the Sunderland Evening Chronicle (1870–1). The final quarter of the century brought a further set of shifts and also amalgamations. The two more radical-leaning papers, the Times and the Echo, became the Sunderland Weekly Echo and Times in 1881, serving Liberal and Nonconformist interests. Meanwhile a more determined endeavour by Sunderland politicians to set up a Conservative paper gained a foothold in 1876 with the Sunderland Daily Post, and more surely in 1881, when it acquired the formerly more moderate Liberal Herald.

Economic and Commercial Life The provincial press contributed further to the construction of spaceand-place identities through their ‘boosterist’ function within and across economic zones and business networks. Newspapers discussed, analysed and promoted economic progress, commercial identities and local sector interests, and challenged competitor centres and districts

724

andrew j. h. jackson

(Gardner 2016; Shinner 2007: 486–97; Stokes 2006; Wilson 1986). The representation by, and agency of, local newspapers would typically feature, for example, in arguments put forward for the denial or welcoming of the arrival of the railway, such as in Grimsby (Shinner 2007: 490–7). Newspaper publications were of course themselves commercial concerns, often commencing and operating as part of jobbing printing, publishing or other related enterprises (Jones 1993: 114). The economic dynamism and success of their locale or region was to their own advantage as reporters, advertisers and publishers (Gardner 2016). For example, two separate Ilfracombe firms, Banfield and Bright, incorporated newspaper publishing alongside bookselling, private library subscription and stationery supply (Jackson 2010: 110–11). Moreover, commercial patronage and proprietorship of newspapers by a particular sector could also build specific and vested interests into a publication. On a practical level, provincial newspapers provided business news, reporting on formations, reorganisations and amalgamations, and transfers or closures of local firms and enterprises. Articles also relayed news of industrial or commercial discoveries, creations, innovations and advances. Advertising was also an essential dimension of provincial newspapers as agents for both financial and cultural reasons. It provided an income stream to help cover print costs, and offered important spaces for promoting commercial enterprises and wares targeted at the interests of local and regional readers. The number of entries by the provincial press in the Newspaper Press Directory indicates the primary concerns of individual publications – economic, political and social – in order to inform the targeting of potential advertisers. In the case of Ireland, for many newspapers, economic concerns intersected with political allegiances. The Nenagh Guardian of 1851, for example, declared its interests to be in agriculture, functioned as a ‘literary and political journal of considerable reputation and attached to the Church of England’, and had the patronage of the ‘aristocracy, merchants and shopkeepers’. The Newry Examiner and Louth Advertiser of 1851, meanwhile, advocated tenant rights, free trade, the agricultural interest, along with Liberal sentiment; and by 1886 had extended to embrace both the mercantile interest and nationalism (Legg 1999: 177, 207–8). The economic preoccupations of some newspapers were explicitly expressed in their banners. It was typical to claim an advertising reach well beyond the city or town in which a publication was based, as

­

the provincial, local and regional press

725

could be seen in the titles of publications such as the Sheffield Mercury and Hallamshire Advertiser, or the Montgomery County Times and Shropshire and Mid-Wales Advertiser. Such extended mastheads were used by provincial publications to signal the range of regions or localities that they sought to represent, or to specifically promote, for example: the North Shields and Northumberland Advertiser and Agricultural, Shipping and Commercial Journal; Stoke-on-Trent’s Staffordshire Potteries Telegraph, Potteries Free Press and Potteries Times (West 1983: 224, 264 and 266); the Glasgow Railway and Shipping Journal and the Edinburgh, Leith, Glasgow and North British Advertiser (Cowan 1946: 418); and the Weekly Express and Advertising Medium for Chudleigh, Newton, Teignmouth, Dawlish, Shaldon, Torquay, St Mary Church, Ashburton, Totnes, Bovey-Tracey, Moreton-hampstead, Christow, and Adjacent Parishes (Black 2001: 193). ‘Arrivals Lists’ were a common extension in the titles of resort newspapers, and a function that the local press played in these specialised centres. Resort publications listed, scheduled and advertised the various facilities, events and services that were available for visitors and residents. Furthermore, an early function of resort publications was to list the names of the visitors taking up residence for the season (Brown and Brown 2003: 87–92; Walton and McGloin 1979: 324–7). Newspapers provided a practical reference point for consumers, while the number and range of advertisements gave a ready sense of the scale, character and status of a place or area. As provincial newspaper production expanded, and the readership base grew and widened, advertisements sought to appeal to a more diverse consumer base. In Herefordshire and Worcestershire, two provincial newspapers played an instrumental role in local and regional economic development (Toplis 2009). The county centres had established regional papers by the mid-nineteenth century, namely Berrow’s Worcester Journal (from 1709) and the Hereford Journal (from 1773). Both served agricultural areas hinterlands as well the cities themselves, with their respective range of trades; and both faced certain economic challenges. Advertising occupied up to 50 per cent of press space. However, prior to the reduction and then lifting of stamp duties, placing advertising was costly and therefore more exclusive. Although expensive, the newspapers’ influence was spreading. They would often pass through many hands, be made available in public places, and their content also communicated indirectly by word of mouth. By the midnineteenth century, exclusivity and respectability in advertising was showing some retreat, with the appearance of adverts by competing drapers seeking to appeal to larger working-class markets. The adverts

726

andrew j. h. jackson

began to be placed more regularly and more expansively, stressing quantity of choice and price, and utilising what might be considered ‘vulgar’ techniques. Various ploys were employed in advert content, including the availability of a wide stock of ready-made items, popular rhyming verse, sale for ‘ready money’ only, goods in exchange, and words of direct appeal to the service classes. Furthermore, the importing of the ‘London made’ or ‘London fashion’ gave way to the preference for, and promotion of, the local or indigenous ‘home made’ or of ‘original’ manufactory.

Society and Culture A primary and early function of provincial newspapers was to comment upon and support the establishment and development of social and cultural institutions, groups and networks (Jackson 1971: 5–6), and their role in bringing about social provision and cohesion, the fulfilment of collective and creative expression, and the fostering of identity and pride. Newspapers reported upon and celebrated the creation of new public buildings and facilities, and the hosting of events and other activities. They commented positively, or if necessary critically, on developments relating to public health, religion worship, education and schooling, law and order, popular entertainment, sporting activities and the arts. The press was often at the forefront of campaigns to support the development of civic institutions such as libraries, religious buildings, public bathhouses, public parks, technical institutes, museums and galleries. Equally, they were swift in expressing pride in the way such institutions represented modernity, progress and status, helping set the place or region apart in terms of cultural and civic improvement and achievement (Briggs 1963: 262–74; Hoskins 1984: 250; Jackson 1971: 5–6; McTominey 2017: 26–37; Murphy 1991: 23; Shinner 2007: 497–502; Stokes 2006: 432). Provincial newspapers were receptive to the inclusion of articles, reports and correspondence on history, customs and practices, including news from local and regional societies, reminiscences, folklore and dialect, and original writing (Hobbs 2016). Outside England, this contributed to broader national and Celtic revivalism, with the expansion of the press coinciding with other cultural processes, such as the founding of learned historical and literary societies (Legg 1999: 93–4). Regional and local publications were mindful of their role in promoting leisure and tourism, and accordingly celebrated scenes and sights and provided practical information on location, travel and access. In resort and spa centres, the press sought to influence a place’s sense of itself

­

the provincial, local and regional press

727

in status terms, setting expectations in relation to cultural provision, attitudes and behaviour. Furthermore, it could find itself mediating between, or adjudicating over, conflicting interests, such as between landowners, residents and visitors, and types of visitors. Newspapers like Bright’s Intelligencer and Arrival List sought to define collective custom, determine standards, and set tone. Ilfracombe’s Intelligencer, like other resort newspapers, sought to boost the appeal of its host place, emphasising, and even exaggerating, the standard of local facilities and the character of climate and landscape (Jackson 2010; Jackson et al. 2015) (see Plate 12). Social and cultural coverage and representation also extended to serving particular categories of readers ranging in age, class, gender, occupation and so forth. The final quarter of the nineteenth century saw something of a social and cultural turn in the content of provincial newspapers. Gains achieved through reform and legislation allowed for an easing of the political and campaigning force that had brought many publications into being through the early and middle decades of the century. Newspaper content had long featured aspects of local society and culture, but there was a relative drift towards discussion of the likes of sport, crime and other ‘human interest’ stories (Jackson 1971: 5, 15; Walker 2006b: 384–5). Equally, the level of competition from the national press was still at a level that allowed the local press to assert itself as the leading voice on social and cultural life. In this context, provincial publishers could produce specials of particular appeal that could hold a place in the market alongside national specialist interest periodicals. Provincial newspapers were featuring content aimed at appealing to children, for example, taking cognisance of the popularity of periodicals intended for young readers, and often extracting material from the latter to fill relevant columns. Early children’s columns included the ‘Children’s’ Hour’ in the Aberdeen Journal, the ‘Corner for Children’ in the Belfast News-Letter and the ‘Something for Young Folks’ in the Paddington Times (Milton 2009: 104). Further in-depth analysis of this aspect of press production is covered in Chapter 24 and Case Study 21. The development of the game of football was a conspicuous feature of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century life in Britain. The appearance of new teams was a reflection of many aspects of evolving social and cultural life, including the expansion of centres, the growth of large new working-class populations and communities, the creation of mass leisure practices, and the expression of civic pride. Local newspapers both supported and were supported by football and its reporting. By the 1890s interest in football coverage was demanding

728

andrew j. h. jackson

more press space and indeed special publications, a trend that continued up to 1914. The development of the game in the north of England and the Midlands, and the dominance of the league by teams in this region, was a particular basis for football press publications to legitimately claim authority over metropolitan media sources. Northern and Midlands cities produced some of the earliest sporting ‘specials’, such as Birmingham’s Saturday Night, the Saturday night edition of the Wolverhampton Express and Star, Manchester’s Sporting Chronicle and Bolton’s Football Field and Sports Telegram (Mason 1986: 177–8). Provincial newspaper production in Sheffield has attracted particular interest, given its reflection of the growth, diversification, rivalry and partisanship of this industry more broadly (Read 1961; Walker 2006b: 377–2). Moreover, the development of football reporting in Sheffield up to 1900 reflects not only the expansion of the game, but also the more general features of the operation and dynamism of the provincial press at this time (Jackson 2009). In the city the Conservative Sheffield Daily Telegraph was accompanied by the evening Yorkshire Telegraph and Star and the Weekly Telegraph, devoted to fiction serialisation and special articles, as a combined business concern. Through the 1880s and 1890s the Monday morning edition of the Sheffield Daily Telegraph steadily expanded its coverage of football, with dedicated editorial opinion, while the Saturday evening edition of the Yorkshire Telegraph and Star built upon its reporting of the game. The demand and the stakes climbed as the city’s teams, Wednesday and United, joined the Football League in 1892, and, a few years later, the rival Liberal publisher of the Sheffield Independent introduced a Football and Cricket World. The Telegraph responded with the publication of a Football Echo, and into the new century, with its Football and Sports Special. In the domain of football reporting, the practical factors of detailed eyewitness reporting, quick publication and circulation, and more broadly the locus of the game in northern England, meant that its content could fairly claim primacy over that which could be published in the metropolis.

Conclusion By the end of the nineteenth century the scale of provincial-press publishing was vast, its coverage considerable, and its composition diverse. It encompassed town, city and county publications, the localdistrict newspapers of the major cities, and the regional/national press of Scotland, Ireland and Wales. There was much to be found in common in terms of purpose, impact and style. Equally, at the level

­

case study 22 : the london letter

729

of individual publications, there was much that was distinctive and particular in terms of their evolution and persuasion. The history of the provincial press in Britain has justifiably attracted fuller interest, appreciation and scholarship among historians in recent decades, a trend that can be located within an expanding acknowledgement of the significance of Victorian print culture more broadly (Hobbs 2009a and 2016; Jackson 2010: 103–4; King, Easley and Morton 2016; Matthews 2017; Walker 2006b). Furthermore, the ongoing development of studies of non-metropolitan urban history, and of local and regional history, has also provided a particular incentive for the use of provincial newspapers as a primary source. In addition, work on cataloguing and indexing newspapers, and advances in digitisation and electronic publication, has assisted in facilitating access and analysis. Studying the growth and composition of provincial newspapers as a phenomenon informs reflection on major changes in society throughout the nineteenth century, while their content offers a rich place-and-spacespecific record of an evolving Britain during this period. Moreover, a specific and now better-recognised quality of the provincial press as a primary source is its evoking of, and therefore potential for, exploring identities: of people and place, of communities and countries; and of their changing senses of themselves over time (Hoskins 1984: 86–9; Jones 1993: 240; Jackson 2010; 2018: 70–1; Legg 1999: 174–5; Lester 2009; McAllister and Hobbs 2009; Murphy 1991; Walker 2006b: 374; West 1983: 224–71).

Case Study 22: The Provincial Nature of the London Letter Andrew Hobbs The London Letter, a gossipy column of news from the metropolitan worlds of politics, high society and the arts, was a popular genre in local newspapers for most of the nineteenth century. The history and influence of this feature reveal the complicated power relations between the metropolis and the provinces, changing ideas about what a newspaper was or was not, the ways in which journalistic genres moved between publications, and the interconnected ecologies of regional and metropolitan newspapers and magazines. The impulse behind the London Letter – to transmit news from the political and cultural centre to the periphery – was an old one, and not unique to England. There were letters from Washington, DC, in American papers (Wiener 2011: 138), ‘Edinburgh Jottings’ in Scottish papers (e.g. Peterhead Sentinel, 7 September 1860), and from Stockholm in provincial Swedish papers (Edoff 2018). Before the invention of the newspaper, professional newsletter writers

730

andrew hobbs

had sent handwritten news from London to aristocratic provincial subscribers (Cooper 2014: 405). The contents of these manuscript newsletters and of the official London Gazette were reprinted in the first provincial newspapers of the early eighteenth century. In 1715 the Stamford Mercury usually quoted from ‘Fox’s Letter’, for example, while the Kentish Post relayed news ‘from a written London letter’ in the 1720s (Roberts 1920). Indeed, the Kentish Post commemorated these forerunners in its subtitle, the Canterbury Newsletter. By the early nineteenth century most of the editorial content of provincial newspapers still came from London, via the capital’s newspapers and in letters by every London stagecoach, from professional correspondents who combined news and gossip from many sources. Provincial printers paid them for their work of selecting and synthesising the London news, and also for allegedly exclusive snippets not to be found in the London papers, hence their descriptions as ‘private letters’ or ‘original correspondence’. These miscellaneous accounts were usually headed with the date they arrived from London, for example ‘Monday’s Post’ in Berrow’s Worcester Journal of 1 March 1810 (3). This included gossip about Napoleon’s next wife after Josephine, ‘from a respectable gentleman who left Paris on the 16th inst. and arrived in town yesterday’, plus news from America, London criminal court cases, parliamentary news and announcements from the London Gazette. Ten years later more advanced papers such as the Liverpool Mercury had expanded in size, so that similar columns of London-sourced material as before were now outnumbered by columns of local news. Different types of content were increasingly allotted to their own sections of the newspaper, such as ‘Parliamentary Compendium’ and ‘News, Foreign & Domestic’. Some of the compilers of news and gossip from the capital almost certainly wrote for scurrilous London papers such as the Age and the Satirist, which operated on the borders between gossip, satire and blackmail. More distinctive than their content was their tone, full of the knowingness of the insider (Latané 2007: 57). These connections can be seen in the later career of Shirley Brooks, best known for his association with Punch, who edited the Age from 1843 to 1845 and wrote London Letters for provincial papers. In the early 1820s William Jerdan, editor of the Literary Gazette, wrote for the North Staffordshire Pottery Gazette and Chelmsford Chronicle among other provincial papers (Schneller 2004), while William Maginn of Blackwood’s and Fraser’s magazine fame briefly edited a Liverpool paper, the Lancashire Herald, in 1838–9 (Latané 2013: 276–8). Another figure who connected the literary world of London and the newspapers of the provinces was aspiring litterateur Alaric Watts. Watts edited the Leeds Intelligencer from 1822 to 1825 and then launched the Manchester Courier, before returning to London full-time. There he helped to launch up to twenty small Tory ‘country’ papers, printing part of them in London for provincial printers to complete with local advertisements and small amounts

­

case study 22 : the london letter

731

of local editorial content. For literary and stage news, Watts used the same techniques as the disreputable London papers, inserting puff paragraphs on behalf of publishers and theatrical agents (Hobbs 2013). Staid provincial weeklies welcomed the gossip of the London demi-monde. It provided attractive, relatively cheap material for provincial newspapers, and was a growing source of income for London’s hungry hack writers. In the first issue of the Manchester Courier Watts promised LETTERS FROM LONDON, detailing the gossip of the metropolitan, literary, and fashionable circles, names of the authors of new books, political rumours, anecdotes of distinguished living persons, &c &c &c. Having obtained promise of an occasional communication, from a gentleman in London, who mixes in the highest literary circles, this article can hardly fail of proving of very considerable interest to our readers. (Manchester Courier, 1 January 1825) The gentleman was almost certainly Watts, while the promised content was mildly scandalous – the naming of authors at a time when anonymity was the norm, and when personal anecdotes about living individuals were considered bad manners. The gentlemen who wrote these London Letters for provincial papers had poor reputations. The Chester Courant described two types, freelance ‘PrivateIntelligence-Mongers’ with ‘little else than their inventive faculties and their wits to depend upon’, and the ‘more respectable … young men who are employed in the subordinate departments of the London Press, and have good salaries’. Both types ‘laugh in their sleeves at the gullibility’ of provincial papers such as the Courant’s rival, the Chester Chronicle, as they paraphrase the evening papers and fabricate a rumour (Chester Courant, 20 December 1825: 3). Similar commentary on the London Letter throughout the century suggests that readers may have approached it with some sophistication, differentiating it from more easily verified local news. As with the London gossip papers of the 1820s and 1830s, ‘all facts … were understood to be suspect’ (Latané 2007: 44). In Thackeray’s Pendennis, the fictional London correspondent Charles Archer is a boastful fantasist, and in 1870 the Saturday Review mocked such writers who gather their news from a servant while describing him as ‘a gentleman moving in the highest circles, whose authority I believe unimpeachable’ (Saturday Review, 30 April 1870: 574). An anonymous London Letter writer admitted in 1893 that ‘the material at my disposal is, as a rule, rather limited, but I make the most of it, artistically’ (Anon. 1893: 350).1 The format gradually became more discursive, gossipy and personal in its address, until it achieved its mature style in the 1840s, changing little until the My thanks to Dr Bob Nicholson for this reference.

1

732

andrew hobbs

twentieth century. The most celebrated London Letter writer of the 1840s (and reputedly the most highly paid) was E. B. Neill (c.1813–86), who wrote a weekly two-column ‘Metropolitan Gossip’ feature for the Liverpool Albion from 1846 to 1863. The column was reprinted widely, particularly by Irish papers, as much for its witty, alliterative and conversational style as for its exclusive gossip about politics and the upper classes (Foggo 2014).2 Perhaps the publishers and editors of larger papers like the Albion or the Manchester Guardian were more familiar with London’s literary world, able to pay better writers and therefore less likely to be supplied with second-hand and fabricated stories. In the 1840s the Guardian paid James Wilson, founder of the Economist, £300 a year to write their ‘London correspondence’. He continued to do this after he became an MP in 1847 and then a junior minister, occasionally writing about himself in the third person. This serious political news was supplemented by a separate ‘Letter from London’, similar to other London Letters, from 1848 (Ayerst 1971: 104–5). In the 1850s this fundamentally provincial genre began to appear in metropolitan papers, beginning with Angus Reach’s signed column, ‘Town Talk and Table Talk for the Week’, in the Illustrated London News in 1850–1. A well-written example from March 1850 begins with an atmospheric sketch of the West End preparing for the social season, a parliamentary sketch, gossip about books and plays, an anecdote picked up in Reach’s club, a letter from the California gold rush, and stories about a Scottish painter and the composer Berlioz. Reach was originally from Inverness, where his father had owned the Inverness Courier. The younger Reach wrote for the Morning Chronicle, Punch, Era and Sunday Times, and took over the London Letter of the Inverness paper after his father’s death in 1853 (Edwards 2004). The success of Reach’s Illustrated London News column may have inspired Edmund Yates to write literary and artistic gossip for the Weekly Chronicle, a Sunday paper, in 1855, followed by his celebrated ‘Lounger at the Clubs’ column for the Illustrated London News’s cheaper rival, the Illustrated Times, from 1855 to 1863. (Another metropolitan bohemian journalist, George Sala, wrote the similar ‘Echoes of the Week’ gossip column for the Illustrated London News from 1860 to 1886.) Yates claimed in his memoir that his commentary on ‘the social, literary, and dramatic events of the day’ was ‘the commencement of that style of “personal” journalism which is so very much to be deprecated and so enormously popular’ (Yates 1884: 278). But this column had clear precedents in the work of Neill and Reach. Like the more obscure writers of earlier decades, Yates combined gossip-writing for the London press with similar columns for provincial papers such as the Inverness Courier and the Belfast Northern Whig. Yates took over the Inverness column from Shirley Brooks 2

I am grateful to Dr Foggo for further information on Neill.

­

case study 22 : the london letter

733

of Punch fame, who had taken it over from Reach, and in addition to work already mentioned also wrote a column for the Bristol Times & Mirror in 1865 (Layard 1907: 235). These writers, like their more anonymous fellow London Letter writers, had one foot in the London literary/journalistic world and the other in provincial newspapers. The presence or absence of a London Letter in different types of newspaper reveals some of the unwritten rules of Victorian journalism and its genres. From the 1830s to the 1860s London dailies did not publish gossip: it was beneath them. In the words of Henry Lucy, ‘no well-regulated London morning paper would display in its columns small New Journalism wares of that kind’ (Lucy 1921: 194). But provincial dailies did, particularly those established after the end of compulsory stamp duty in 1855. When the Manchester Guardian switched from bi-weekly to daily, it continued its London Letter, ‘From a Private Correspondent’, and by 1858, if not before, the Newcastle Daily Chronicle had its ‘From our London Correspondent’ column and the Sheffield Daily Telegraph had its ‘City Article, by our London Correspondent’. These papers modelled themselves on the Times, but they mixed the genres of the London daily and the provincial weekly, and the latter had always blurred the boundaries between newspaper and magazine, carrying more non-news editorial material than a London daily. It was no coincidence that the first London daily to include a London Letter, the Morning Star, set itself apart from other metropolitan papers by its political roots in the ‘Manchester School’, its greater proportion of non-­ metropolitan news and its personnel, drawn equally from provincial papers and the London press. In 1864, nearly ten years after provincial dailies had begun to print gossip columns, Edmund Yates’s ‘Le Flaneur’ appeared in the Morning Star, continuing until 1867. The 1860s saw a huge expansion in the provincial press, in numbers of titles, editions and pages, and the popularity of the London letter encouraged mass production for smaller local papers unable to afford exclusive arrangements with a London journalist. Yates wrote one for the London book wholesalers Simpkin, Marshall & Co (this may have been tied in to advertisements for books in the same local papers), while Edward Spender wrote one for the Central Press news agency (Layard 1907: 466; Hunt 1887: 67). The same topics, tone of voice and writers began to appear in weekly London publications dedicated largely to gossip from the late 1860s, with no discernible impact on one of their inspirations, the London Letters of provincial papers. Notable titles included Vanity Fair (1868–1929), a ‘smart and cruel weekly’ noted for its full-colour caricatures, the London Figaro (1870–98), the World (1874–1920), founded by Yates, who proudly noted that its critics likened it to the Regency scandal sheets, the Whitehall Review (1876–­­1912), Truth (1877–1957) and Mayfair (1877–9) (Fox Bourne 1887: 302; Yates

734

andrew hobbs

1885: 461–5). Yet the same material gained an additional meaning when published in local papers alongside local news – particularly for London Letters written exclusively for a provincial title, which made a feature of relating metropolitan gossip to local events, personalities and places. The London Letter has some features in common with picaresque fiction, written as though by an outsider who mediates between the corrupt, ridiculous metropolis and the simpler, purer provinces. The reader gains prurient enjoyment and moral superiority from gossip about their social betters. The distance was not only social, but also geographical. While Yates and Lucy were part of the slightly disreputable London bohemia, a new breed of more serious London correspondents appeared in the 1870s who were full-time paid staff of their provincial papers. While they focused on politics, specialist freelancers provided paragraphs about fashion, literature and theatre. Journalists such as Thomas Wemyss Reid of the Leeds Mercury and Alfred Robbins of the Birmingham Daily Post raised the quality and status of the London Letter, and helped to originate ‘lobby journalism’ (based on off-the-record briefings from MPs and ministers, in the Lobby of the House of Commons), in response to their exclusion from the press gallery (Reid 1987: 63–4). Some newspaper owners who were also MPs, such as Joseph Cowen of the Newcastle Daily Chronicle, wrote London Letters. Lobby journalism produced exclusive news not available in London papers, so that stories originated by the Glasgow Herald, Manchester Guardian and other provincial papers appeared a day later in the London dailies. Commentators believed that provincial readers found the London Letter the most attractive item in the whole newspaper (Anon. 1893: 350). Eventually, in the late 1880s, the London Letter began to appear in London morning and evening newspapers, with ‘London Day by Day’ in the Daily Telegraph, ‘This Morning’s News’ in the Daily News and similar columns in evening papers the Globe, the Star and the Westminster Gazette. The Telegraph’s two-column ‘London Day by Day’ for 9 March 1889, next to ‘Paris Day by Day’, included bland gossip about royalty and aristocracy, Parliamentary news (written straight as verbatim reports on debates), diplomatic gossip, snippets of business news, Church news, court cases involving middle-class defendants, and horse-racing results. This lowly journalistic genre had become almost extinct in London, but had been incubated and nurtured in the provinces, until London journalism took it back to its bosom. Its gossipy style became identified with the New Journalism of the 1880s and later, but its history challenges some New Journalism narratives, revealing them to be based on a very small part of the nineteenth-century press, the London dailies. The complex changes at the end of the century, perhaps better described as the ‘magazinification’ of the London newspaper, to use Margaret Beetham’s term, are more easily

­

case study 23 : saunders and the supply of news 735

explained when we include the majority of the press – magazines and provincial newspapers – in which different currents were moving. The London Letter is an example of how innovations often travel from the periphery to the core, confirming Matthew Arnold’s fears of the harm that could be done by provincial culture if not directed from the centre. It reveals the complex geography of cultural power differentials – some London hacks set out to fool the hicks in the sticks, while some provincial readers took the London Letter with a pinch of salt. Writers colluded with readers to resist the cultural hegemony of the metropolis, encouraging a feeling of provincial ­superiority – yet the very existence of the London Letter was evidence of the capital’s dominance. The letter’s distinctive, gossipy address made provincial outsiders feel like insiders, sniggering at the follies of the rich and powerful. Readers of local newspapers, like people on any cultural periphery, knew two things  – their own culture and the dominant culture – while those at the centre knew only one, the dominant culture. For newspaper historians, the London Letter emphasises that local papers were not inferior versions of a London ideal, they were a distinctive type of publication, different in form, content and purpose.

Case Study 23: William Saunders and the Industrial Supply of News in the Late Nineteenth Century Andrew Hobbs The news distribution activities of William Saunders (1823–95) (see Figure 26.3) reveal the networked nature of the nineteenth-century provincial press, both local and national, and the industrialised production, distribution and sale of news. Journalists resisted the reality of news as a commodity, as it clashed with ideas of journalism as a literary and political activity, while publishers hid the mass-produced origins of newspapers’ editorial content beneath a veneer of local patriotism. Saunders made his money in corn milling and quarrying (Isambard Kingdom Brunel used his stone to build part of the Great Western Railway), before joining with his brother-in-law, Edward Spender, to launch the first daily newspaper in England’s South-West, the Western Morning News (1860-present), in Plymouth. The region’s rapidly expanding railway network helped to put the paper on breakfast tables across Devon and Cornwall while London papers containing the same news only arrived in the afternoon (Manning 2005: 47). The paper was a success, assisted by the notorious ‘Road Murder’ case and other big local stories (Hunt 1887: 62). The new penny morning papers in the provinces, made possible by the abolition of compulsory Stamp Duty in 1855, were attractive to readers because of their local and regional news and advertisements, but publishers

736

andrew hobbs

Figure 26.3  Saunders caricature in Judy, 3 May 1893, p. 213 (© British Library Board) like Saunders and Spender were keen to beat the London papers on general news and features, too. They could do this by providing later news, at an earlier time. However, this took a great deal of staff time in subediting and typesetting, on top of payments to agents or freelances in London, who sent news­papers and other news in manuscript form from London in the morning to arrive at Plymouth in the evening, ready for insertion in the following morning’s paper. Saunders and Spender moved the subediting and typesetting of non-local news entirely to London in 1862, supervised by Spender, and in 1863 they began to offer this service to other provincial dailies, setting up the Central Press news agency. The Central Press soon became the best-known news agency, although it was not the first (similar functions had been fulfilled by London advertising agents such as William Tayler since the 1780s, by partly printed newspapers since the 1820s, before William Ruff’s sporting news agency began in the 1840s and Reuters in 1851 [Times staff list 1847; Gardner 2016: 60; Lambie 2010: 7]). The Central Press used a technique pioneered by Samuel Harrison of the Sheffield Times in 1858, who offered a news agency service with stereotyped columns of type sent to local newspapers around the country (Law 2000: 56; Wilson and Southward 1880: 22–3).

­

case study 23 : saunders and the supply of news 737

A Central Press promotional circular, aimed specifically at the growing genre of provincial morning papers, explained the service offered from London, ‘which is the centre of news’. Taking advantage of ‘the perfection which has been attained in producing casts of type in stereotype’, the Central Press offered eight columns daily, comprising a news summary, digests of news from ‘London, foreign, and colonial newspapers’, a synthesis of leading articles from the London papers (‘The Spirit of the Press’), an exclusive finance article, agricultural market prices, court cases, a leading article, a weekly London Letter, a Paris Letter once or twice a week, parliamentary sketches,  reviews of magazines and books and literary and religious news (Hunt 1887: 73–5). The stereotyped printing plates were cast in single-column format (23 inches long and 16 ems wide) so they could be cut to fit varying page sizes, or to the editorial tastes of the paper (‘it will be always easy for the local editor to alter or omit any remarks that he may not approve’), and to be placed alongside locally produced columns. Besides stereotype plates, the Central Press was soon offering ‘duplicate flimsy’ reports (handwritten carbon copies) from trials and other London events that day, and partly printed sheets. This material would be dispatched by train in the late afternoon, arriving in time to feature in the following morning’s paper (Anon. 1880: 529, 531). The circular promised to supply only one paper in any town, so that the syndicated material was exclusive to that local market. It argued that ‘the London daily papers, which are actually in competition [with each other], combine to obtain reports’, so why shouldn’t provincial papers – who were not in competition with those in other towns – do the same? This rather defensive tone hints at resistance to such methods. The opposition to centrally produced content appearing simultaneously in a number of provincial daily newspapers reveals differences of status between dailies and weeklies, and (among journalists) a romantic refusal to acknowledge the industrial nature of newspaper production at mid-century. Despite the fact that the syndicated London Letter (discussed more fully in Chapter 26.1) was written by Spender himself, one of the finest exponents of the art, Henry Fox Bourne, editor of the Weekly Dispatch, disparaged this and other Central Press material as of necessity … colourless in its politics, and … only adapted for a rude stage in journalistic progress. Repudiated from the first by the more enterprising and independent conductors of country newspapers, it was very useful to less ambitious or less capable members of the craft. (Fox Bourne 1887: 259) News agencies, he explained in his history of the British press, ‘though very serviceable to small and struggling papers, were not much cared for by those

738

andrew hobbs

provincial dailies who could afford to obtain what they wanted in more independent ways’ (Fox Bourne 1887: 277). The unwritten rules were complex: syndicated material was acceptable in a small local weekly, or in a daily if it was foreign news, but otherwise a provincial daily should mimic the Times and, in modern parlance, ‘curate’ its own general news and produce its own ‘original matter’ (Anon. 1862: 52). Original matter, such as leader columns and other essays, reviews and ‘paragraphs’ (gossip and anecdote), was distinct from the majority of editorial material, which was, by definition, unoriginal – news stories containing the same facts as appeared elsewhere, reprinted news and features from other papers, extracts from books and magazines, and some syndicated material. Original material was not the default, and therefore needed to be named. Resistance grew when Saunders and Spender took their next step, launching or buying provincial dailies to create customers for the Central Press. This was a last resort, taken after visiting many towns and cities and failing to persuade publishers of weeklies to go daily. In 1864 they launched the Eastern Morning News in Hull: its 6 a.m. first edition contained all the London news that only appeared in the second editions of papers in other towns, Press News noted (‘Journalism in Hull’, 1871: 20). When a rival, the Hull Daily Mail, was eventually launched in 1885, it distanced itself from Saunders’s methods, boasting that ‘Our columns will be entirely set up and printed in Hull’. It refused to supply readers with column upon column of news, leading articles, and literary extracts that the same day fulfil their humble and ignoble duty in a score of different newspapers, in a score of different counties … We think that the public prefer an article of home manufacture, and that it will read with more interest and pleasure what is written and printed expressly for it, than what is produced for the world at large by unknown and irresponsible persons – aliens alike to Hull life and Hull thought. Our columns, then, will be absolutely free from ‘stereo’. Our opinions, whatever they may be worth, will at any rate be our own, and our readers may rely on our leading articles having been written on the spot … and on their not having been purchased from a London manufactory at so many pence per foot. (Hull Daily Mail, 1885: 2) In 1865 Saunders bought the Newcastle Northern Daily Express. Its then editor, James Macdonnell, was horrified at Saunders’s methods: He has a manufactory in London, at which the news of the day is prepared and leaders written. The matter is then set up, and stereotyped three, four or five times. Then the stereotype blocks are sent, by evening trains, to the papers belonging to the firm, and to others with which they

­

case study 23 : saunders and the supply of news 739 have an arrangement for the supply of matter. Eight columns would reach us daily, including the leader! Yes, the leader! Our politics would come down from London daily, sir, by train, packed in a box. Charming, isn’t it? (Macdonnell in Nicoll 1890: 112)

In nearby South Shields, another provincial daily, the Shields Gazette, relished the spectacle of a prestigious daily in a great city resorting to methods previously used only by struggling small-town weeklies. The new owners of the Northern Daily Express were described as a stereotyping firm in London, who manufacture provincial papers wholesale at a ‘Central Press,’ and supply country places like Newcastle with so many yards of leading articles, summary, and general news in ­stereotype … Newcastle to be thought a fit place for such an operation; how are the mighty fallen! (Shields Gazette, 6 May 1865: 2) (Saunders also bought the Caledonian Mercury in Edinburgh in 1866 and the Birmingham Daily News in 1873, but failed to make either of them pay.) Saunders’s critics repeatedly used the same vocabulary, of ‘manufacture’, as they defended the status of provincial daily newspapers modelled on the Times, invoking the newly invented tradition of the provincial daily, less than a decade old (see also Anon. 1880: 531). The brute industrial materiality of the stereotyped metal columns horrified journalists more than carbon-copy flimsies or even piles of partly printed newspaper pages, although they operated on the same principle. Yet their fastidious rejection of Saunders’s methods highlights the growing mass production, specialisation and reliance on transport infrastructure that came to characterise daily newspapers in the late nineteenth century. Commentators’ insults track these changes from craft to industry: early nineteenthcentury editors were accused of ‘writing with scissors’ as they cut and pasted material from other newspapers. Now, as compositors trimmed stereotyped columns, they were said to ‘edit their papers with a saw’ (Kubler 1941: 320). Saunders was involved in the creation of Britain’s most successful news agency, the Press Association, although his own Central Press offered telegraphic news first. Earlier, in 1865, the three private telegraph companies, the Electric Telegraph Company, the English & Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company and the British Telegraph Company, had merged their ‘intelligence departments’ to offer a more attractive news service to newspapers. But their supply of news was slow, expensive, inadequate and inaccurate, so provincial daily newspapers began to plan their own agency, to be owned and run cooperatively. Daily and weekly newspaper publishers (the latter represented by the Provincial Newspaper Society) persuaded the government to nationalise the telegraph companies, leading to the Telegraph Acts of 1868 and 1869. Between the passing of this legislation and its enactment in January 1870,

740

andrew hobbs

Saunders worked with other newspaper proprietors to plan the structure and operations of the Press Association. He declared a conflict of interest as the owner of a potential rival, the Central Press, but was asked to remain as a director and member of the management committee of PA, which was initially based in the same building as the Central Press, at 112 Strand (Whorlow 1886: 146). In September 1868, immediately after the details of the Press Association’s operations had been agreed (with Saunders’s involvement), he added telegraphic news to the Central Press’s services (which by now included the Central Press, ‘a Newspaper for Newspaper Proprietors’, a printed version of the day’s news, sent by train to subscribing newspapers every afternoon or evening [Hunt 1887: 141, 146; Printers’ Register 1871: 19]). The heading ‘Central Press Telegrams’ soon became a familiar feature of the news pages. The Franco-Prussian War (1870–1) convinced Saunders that telegraphic news was the future. The Central Press continued after the launch of the Press Association in January 1870, but the Press Association refused to sell its news to Saunders, to prevent him reselling it to London papers, and this evidence of direct competition appears to have led to Saunders’s exit from the management of the Press Association (Hunt 1887: 146–7). Like the Press Association, the Central Press benefited from the demand for war news, some of it supplied by their own ‘special correspondents’. After the war, the sensational trial of the Tichborne Claimant in the summer of 1871 provided a continued boost. In August 1871 Saunders, a confirmed radical, sold the reporting and stereotyping side of his business, with plant and goodwill, plus the Central Press ‘newspaper’ and the copyright to the Sun evening newspaper, to a group of Conservatives, for £6,000 (Yorkshire Post, 15 March 1873: 8). The agreement included an option to buy the telegraphic side of the business for a further £8,000, revealing the relative values of the new and old methods of news distribution (Western Morning News, 10 May 1873: 4). This political intervention may have been prompted by the belief that the Press Association’s news was biased, as it was controlled by predominantly Liberal provincial newspapers (although the Press Association worked hard to make its news neutral and therefore more saleable). Under the agreement, Saunders continued to manage this side of the business on behalf of the new owners, at 112 Strand, while retaining ownership of the telegraphic news department, now named Central News, and based at 2 Telegraph St (the former home of the telegraph companies’ intelligence department). Initially, Central News bought its news from Central Press and distributed it by telegraph (Bolton Evening News, 1873: 4). By early 1873 Saunders, finding the Central Press news supply too expensive, had begun building up his own network of reporters again. The new owners of the Central Press sued, claiming Saunders was in breach of the 1871 agreement and had set up in competition to the business he had sold. An injunction was briefly placed on

­

case study 23 : saunders and the supply of news 741

him in June 1873, but this was overturned on appeal after less than a month.3 The Central Press continued under Conservative ownership, supplying news in stereotype, by telegraph or as partly printed sheets to provincial Conservative papers. By 1880 it was supplying half-hourly parliamentary summaries to London clubs, and a weekly ‘Editor’s Handy-sheet’ of leader columns, news and comment, exclusively for editors of small Conservative provincial papers (Anon. 1880: 529–30; Hunt 1887: 204–5; Koss 1981: 205; Lee 1976: 153). Saunders’s Central News continued as Britain’s second domestic news agency, while branching out into international news, and maintained its founder’s record of technical innovation. In 1872 Saunders installed a telegraph wire in the gallery of St Paul’s Cathedral, for a service celebrating the Prince of Wales’s recovery from typhoid fever; in 1883 the ‘American innovation’ of central heating was installed in its New Bridge St offices; it was the first London news organisation to use a typewriter (a Remington) and employed two women subeditors during Saunders’s lifetime. In 1889–90 the agency patented a ‘column printer’ or ‘column ticker’, a teleprinter that rendered telegrams in columns rather than on continuous tape, making them more manageable and therefore faster to process (Bone 1929: 29; Central News Diamond Jubilee Souvenir: 22). Saunders’s series of minor technical and organisational improvements are similar to those identified by Dallas Liddle in the early history of the Times, reminding us of the physical, material constraints under which journalism was produced, sometimes forgotten in literary approaches to its history (Liddle 2017: 157). Central News was eventually merged into the Press Association in the 1930s (Silberstein-Loeb 2014: 125). Saunders maintained his news publishing interests alongside a political career in later life. In 1884 he helped Michael Davitt and Helen Taylor found the radical Democrat newspaper in support of land reform in Britain and Ireland (Lee 1976: 138). He became MP for East Hull in 1885 but lost his seat the following year. In 1889 he became a founder member of the London County Council, representing Walworth, which was probably the stimulus for his unsuccessful attempt at a London-wide local daily newspaper, the Circle (Hatton 1882; Morris 2004).4 In 1892 he became an MP again, this time for Walworth, until his death in 1895. This account differs from many at the time, and in recent historiography. It is based on contemporary court reports, announcements of the new name (for example, ‘The “Central News”’, Dublin Evening Mail, 30 October 1871: 3), and on a search of the British Newspaper Archive database, which reveals a leap in hits for the search phrase ‘central news’, in 1871, confirming that Saunders used this name for his independent telegraphic service immediately after selling the Central Press (Yorkshire Post, 15 March 1873; ‘The “Central Press Company” v Saunders’, Bolton Evening News, 10 May 1873; ‘Law Intelligence’, Daily News, 10 May 1873; Western Morning News, 14 July 1873: 4). 4 Most of Morris’s ODNB section on the Central Press is contradicted by numerous newspaper reports of evidence given under oath. 3

742

mark o’brien

As an outsider to journalism, Saunders was able to see news as a commodity, and to recognise potential improvements in the speed and efficiency of its production, processing and distribution. However, his advanced Liberal principles meant that he was also interested in journalism as a force for ­­ change. He entered journalism at a dynamic time, as the abolition of newspaper taxes led to the expansion and development of the industry. With the Central Press, he developed an improved model for the news agency in Britain, which had a significant influence on this country’s dominant domestic agency,  the Press Association. His role in the Press Association’s successful launch has been underplayed because of his subsequent split with its other directors. Stereotype and cliché, the English and French terms for the same printing process used by Saunders, are now better known for their metaphorical meanings: a fixed, oversimplified image and an unoriginal phrase or opinion. These were the very opposites of the ‘original matter’, the unique, bespoke, locally apposite editorial content so prized by Saunders’s critics. Bland, syndicated material sent from the metropolitan centre went against local patriotism, a sentiment that was promoted by the prestigious new morning newspapers springing up around Britain. These aspired to be the equal of the great London dailies, prized for their original matter, and Saunders had broken an unwritten rule by offering the same type of stereotyped material, sent by train, as was used by humble local weeklies. Both sides had a point – Saunders launched the Central Press at a time of uncertainty over the future of the provincial press, when some commentators thought that newspaper trains speeding the penny London dailies to the provinces would do away with the need for local and regional papers (Collins 1863: 141). On the other hand, Saunders argued that London papers already shared their news, so provincial papers, in order to survive, needed to share other content. But members of newspapers’ ‘literary departments’ were offended by Saunders’s unabashedly industrial approach to journalism. The ensuing struggles over such innovations reveal the tensions and energies at the heart of nineteenth-century journalism, where literary art met industrial organisation.

Case Study 24: The Irish Times: ‘The Protestant and Conservative daily newspaper’ Mark O’Brien The appearance of the Irish Times in March 1859 was a dramatic intervention in Ireland’s newspaper market. Coming at a time of unprecedented growth in the newspaper industry following the repeal of the ‘taxes on knowledge’,

­

case study 24 : the irish times

743

and aimed at Dublin’s mercantile and administrative class, which was predominantly Protestant and Unionist, it articulated a viewpoint firmly grounded in the belief that Ireland functioned best as part of the British Empire. The title was established by Lawrence E. Knox – ‘a member of Ireland’s Protestant Ascendency caste’ (Brown 2015: 5) – who would, in 1868, be elected as an MP, to represent, as his obituary put it, ‘the Conservative interest’ (Irish Times, 27 January 1873). Its first leading article noted that there existed ‘a larger and larger proportion of our population indifferent to the manoeuvres of faction, disgusted at the arts of the demagogue and sincerely desirous of laying aside their mutual prejudices and labouring together for the good of their common country’. And, while it observed that people were ‘anxious for good government, but care little in whose hands the government may be placed’, it was a prerequisite that such governance come from London. It noted that it was ‘as Irishmen we shall think and speak; but it shall be as Irishmen loyal to the British connection, and proud to share in the destinies of the only first-rate Power in Europe that has known how to combine social order with individual freedom’ (Irish Times, 29 March 1859). On the pressing issues of the day it observed that nothing was more important than land reform: it noted that ‘the fact that so many distinguished members on different sides of the House have brought forward Bills on the subject is a sufficient proof that some further security than now exists is needed to induce the tenant to invest his capital in the improvement of his farm’ (Irish Times, 29 March 1859). Initially a tri-weekly newspaper, it became a daily title in June 1859, and in the 1860 edition of the Newspaper Gazetteer described itself as ‘the Protestant  and Conservative daily newspaper’ (O’Brien 2008: 18). Circulation-wise, daily sales rose from 8,720 in February 1860 to 11,372 in December 1860, and it claimed ‘the largest circulation ever before attained by any newspaper in Ireland and with four exceptions in the United Kingdom’. Twelve months later daily sales stood at 16,085, and in June 1862 it claimed daily sales of 16,988 (O’Brien 2008: 20). Such was its success that in 1869 it installed a new printing plant that allowed it to double its size from four to eight pages. These increases in circulation most likely resulted from a demand for news of the political turmoil then occurring in Ireland. The year of the Irish Times’s establishment had also witnessed the formation of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), the aim of which was to establish an Irish republic through rebellion. When, in March 1867, that insurrection occurred and was quickly crushed, the paper condemned the movement but also noted  that poor economic conditions, insecure employment and lack of imperial investment in Ireland had all played a part in propelling certain classes of people towards rebellion. It declared that, while those in ‘constant occupation had a stake in the quietude and order of the country’, those who were not so occupied

744

mark o’brien

had not the influence of work or intelligence to preoccupy his mind; he was open to the insidious arguments of designing men, and therefore it was that the Fenian hordes counted almost solely of ragged youths, labourers out of work, and dissipated outcasts of the cities. It thus called on the government to establish ‘dockyards and naval arsenals in Ireland, to be at once centres of employment and examples of progress and of industry’, and believed that the expenditure on such endeavours would ‘be less in amount than the cost of periodically crushing attempts at insurrection’ (Irish Times, 14 March 1867). This, decades before the phrase was coined, constituted a policy of killing Home Rule with kindness. Following Knox’s death in 1873, the Irish Times was purchased by Sir John Arnott, a Scottish businessman and philanthropist. That same year the paper devoted substantial space to reporting the Home Rule conference held in Dublin under the auspices of Isaac Butt’s Home Rule Association. Surprisingly perhaps, given its deep attachment to the Union, its leading article noted that, while the conference was characterised by ‘a constant spirit of constitutionalism, decorum and sincerity’, the debates were characterised by a ‘display of dialectic talent, of self-control, of mutual concession, and of patriotism, which would have done credit to many a National Assembly more strictly representative in character’ (Irish Times, 22 November 1873). It was similarly sympathetic to the issue of land reform. When Charles Stewart Parnell became president the Land League in October 1879, it observed that for decades ‘the dissatisfaction of the Irish farming classes has lay at the root of all popular movements’. While the IRB had ‘held out the ownership of the soil as their chief bait to those whom they sought to convert to their views’ so too had O’Connell’s Repeal Association, and the Home Rule Association believed ‘that a native Parliament would give effect to their hopes in a somewhat kindred way’. Thus, it supported land reform and declared that the object of the Land League, as affirmed by resolution, are – firstly, to bring about the end of rack rents, and, secondly, to facilitate occupiers in obtaining the ownership of the soil. Both objects, considered per se, are fair and desirable. (Irish Times, 22 October 1879) There was, it concluded, nothing ‘announced by the promoters of the Land League at which the public, or any section of the public, need be shocked or frightened’ (ibid.). In a similar vein, it welcomed William Gladstone’s Land Act of 1881 as ‘a confession on the part of Government that in the agrarian condition of the people of Ireland there exist grave and real grievances’ (Irish Times, 22 August 1881). Such reform could be supported within the context of Ireland being governed from London. However, home rule for Ireland was, for the paper, beyond the

­

case study 24 : the irish times

745

pale. When, after the 1885 general election Parnell’s Irish Home Rule Party held the balance of power, and it became clear that Gladstone would consider Home Rule in return for Parnell’s support, the paper warned loyalists ‘that their interests are already betrayed as far as Mr Gladstone can betray them, and that there is not a day to lose in declaring their obstinate resistance to the betrayal’ (Irish Times, 19 December 1885). When Gladstone’s Bill was defeated after one-third of his own MPs voted against it, the paper observed that it would ‘be as idle for the loyalists to indulge in jubilant and extravagant shouts of victory as it would be for the nationalists to deny the right of a majority to determine the Imperial policy’ (Irish Times, 8 June 1886). No such equanimity attached itself to the fall of Charles Stewart Parnell. As the Kitty O’Shea divorce case cast a shadow on Parnell and split the Home Rule Party, the paper noted that the formulaic nature of the proceedings ‘did not at all justify the absorbing interest which the general public has all along seemed to take in the case’. It was, in fact, ‘one of the most unsensational suits ever brought before the courts, outside, of course, the personality of the distinguished co-respondent of the suit’ (Irish Times, 17 November 1890). The case was, it observed, ‘a mean and miserable story, which from beginning to end is a narrative of paltry deceit’. Parnell, it concluded, was ‘himself responsible for the depreciation of his character, and if condemned by the public for a lapse of honour and of honesty that have irretrievably wrecked the reputations of smaller men, he has only himself to blame’ (Irish Times, 18 November 1890). But while Parnell may have faded from public life, the spectre of Home Rule continued to haunt politics. When in 1892 Gladstone introduced a second Home Rule Bill, the paper correctly predicted that the House of Lords would do ‘a duty to the Empire’ and kill the Bill. The campaigns for and against Home Rule had, it contended, ‘arrested business, occupied men’s minds to the damage of enterprise, caused bitterness and poisoned society’. ‘It would be best for Ireland’, it concluded, ‘that we never heard more of the Home Rule Bill’ (Irish Times, 9 September 1893). As the century drew to a close, this refrain – that ‘much of the energy which could have been profitably applied to the development of the country’s material interests has been expended in a vain and unpractical pursuit of the ignis fatuus of Home Rule’ – was constant (Irish Times, 6 January 1900), and was to define the paper in the early decades of the twentieth century.

KEY PRESS AND PERIODICAL EVENTS TIMELINE, 1800–1900

1800–1809 1800 Invention of Earl Stanhope’s press made of iron with lever and screw motion Irish Act of Union passed 1801 (May) Launch of the English-language daily Gibraltar Chronicle 1802 Founding of the Edinburgh Review, a Whig quarterly edited by Francis Jeffrey, by Jeffrey, Francis Horner, Henry Brougham and Sydney Smith Launch of William Cobbett’s weekly Political Register New List of Publications relaunched as Bent’s Monthly Literary Advertiser 1804 Start of the weekly Cambria in Swansea, first newspaper in Wales

746

­

timeline

747

1806 Production of the ‘1st practical power-driven printing machine’ by Frederick Koenig John Bell founds La Belle Assemblée, important early nineteenth-­ century fashion magazine for upper-class women First illustration published in the Times 1807 (Apr.) Launch of the Monthly Repertory of English Literature 1808 Launch of the weekly Examiner, edited by Leigh Hunt Launch of the Bangor-based weekly North Wales Gazette, first news­ paper in North Wales 1809 The Tory-focused Quarterly Review is established in London with William Gifford as editor

1810–1819 1812 Koenig’s first cylinder printing machine built 1813 Pierce Egan begins to publish Boxiana; or, Ancient and Modern Pugilism, the most comprehensive history of boxing to appear up to then 1814 John Walter II introduces steam-power printing at The Times using Koenig’s cylinder machine Launch by Henry Colburn of the Conservative monthly New Monthly Magazine and Universal Register Founding of Swansea weekly Welsh-language newspaper Seren Gomer

748

timeline

(July) Start of the daily Galignani’s Messenger, The Spirit of the English Journals (extant until 1895) 1815 Newspaper stamp duty increases to 4d per sheet 1816 Koenig & Bauer builds its first perfecting machine Edward Cowper develops idea of curved stereotype plates made by plaster process for use as a printing surface Launch of Cobbett’s twopenny Political Register George Clymer invents the Columbian press in Philadelphia 1817 (Jan.) T. J. Wooler founds radical working-class satirical journal the Black Dwarf (Jan.) Scotsman established (Oct.) Relaunch of influential Tory Blackwood’s Edinburgh Monthly Magazine (published until 1980) 1818 (Apr.) John Wilson Croker pens famously savage review of John Keats’s poem Endymion in the Quarterly Review 1819 British government institutes ‘Six Acts’ or ‘Gagging Acts’, designed to control blasphemous and seditious libels, and provide a tighter definition of newspapers for taxation purposes

1820–1829 1820 (Jan.) Launch of the monthly London Magazine, whose attacks against Blackwood’s Magazine will lead to the editor’s death in a duel in 1821 (Dec.) Launch of the Tory-based weekly John Bull

­

timeline

749

1821 Reform paper published in wake of Peterloo and the Six Acts, with their extension of newspaper taxes (Jan.) Relaunch of the New Monthly Magazine, which will be very popular in the 1820s and 1830s: reviewers include Edward Bulwer Lytton and Letitia Landon (Feb.) Launch of the weekly Sunday paper New Observer, which became the Sunday Times in 1822 (May) Manchester Guardian established (Dec.) W. H. Smith opens a ‘new reading room’ for periodicals at 192 Strand, London 1822 Albion press invented by R. W. Cope Start of John Limbird’s popular twopenny weekly Mirror of Literature (Mar.) Launch of weekly Bell’s Life in London, and Sporting Chronicle, first journal specifically dedicated to sport 1823 Steel engraving overtakes copperplate engraving as illustrative process Rudolph Ackermann publishes the first literary annual, the Forget-MeNot, marketed during the holiday season as a gift, with substantial editing by and contributions from women Launch of the illustrated popular science weekly Mechanic’s Magazine Development of the weekly medical journal Lancet, edited by Thomas Wakley First publication of the long-lived monthly fashion magazine World of Fashion 1824 (Jan.) First publication of the quarterly Westminster Review, established by prominent Utilitarians Jeremy Bentham and James Mill 1827 Applegath & Cowper builds four-sheet feeder for the Times, substantially increasing press production pace Establishment of the Evening Standard

750

timeline

1828 (Jan.) Founding of the weekly review journal the Athenaeum; under Charles Wentworth Dilke’s ownership from 1830, it will be a champion of anonymous journalism (July) Founding of the long-lived weekly review journal the Spectator (eventually merged with the New Statesman) 1829 Roman Catholic Relief Act passes, the culmination of the process of Catholic Emancipation throughout the United Kingdom (May) The first issue of An Teachdaire Gae’lach published in Glasgow, the first sustained attempt at producing a Scottish Gaelic periodical

1830–1839 1830 Introduction of David Napier’s double-feeder power platen, used for book work/quality printing Founding of the lively monthly Fraser’s Magazine, under the editorship of William Maginn 1831 First publication of Hetherington’s radical, unstamped London onepenny weekly Poor Man’s Guardian, best-known and most important of the illegal unstamped press of the period (Dec.) Thomas Carlyle famously comments on the pervasiveness of periodical literature in his essay ‘Characteristics’ for the Edinburgh Review (Dec.) Gilbert à Beckett founds Figaro in London, which establishes the model for subsequent comic newspapers 1832 Penny Magazine established Founding of Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine as a Liberal alternative monthly to Blackwood’s, under the editorship of Christian Isobel Johnstone, Britain’s first woman editor of a significant journal

­

timeline

751

Le Charivari, an illustrated magazine first published in Paris, France. It was influential on the visual and satirical elements of Punch Magazine (Feb.) First publication of the popular weekly Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal 1833 Advertisement duty halved from 3s 6d to 1s 9d Founding of the Dublin University Magazine (published until 1882) 1834 Publication of the Mother’s Magazine, introducing a trend of midnineteenth-century periodicals focused on mothers and motherhood, instructing middle-class women on moral matters and new social roles created by the industrial era First issuing of Weekly Police Gazette, influential though short-lived, illustrated, unstamped one-penny paper 1835 Chambers’s Information for the People first published as a weekly tract 1836 Stamp duty reduced from 4d to 1d Founding of the Provincial Newspaper Society; from 1889 known as the Newspaper Society Founding of Catholic theological quarterly Dublin Review 1837 George Baxter’s colour-printing process introduced into the marketplace (May) First electric commercial telegraph patented by Wheatstone and Cooke Launch of Publishers’ Circular Founding of the Leeds- then London-based weekly Northern Star, the longest-lived Chartist paper (published until 1852)

752

timeline

1838 Bruce type-casting machine introduced Earliest known photograph taken by Louis Daguerre Founding of the Era, Sunday miscellany trade broadsheet supported by the Licensed Victuallers (Jan.) Northern Star first published (May) People’s Charter published (Sept.) London–Birmingham railway opened 1839 Moritz von Jaconi (St Petersburg) and Thomas Spencer (Liverpool) invent electrotype process Launch of the fine-art journal Art-Union, A Monthly Journal of the Fine Arts (July) First publication of the Manzari Shark or Oriental Observer (Smyrna), issued three times a month, extant until 1841

1840–1849 1840 Parliamentary Papers Act exempts printers and publishers of parliamentary documents from libel actions Penny Post introduced throughout Britain and Ireland Establishment of the weekly and later fortnightly Provincial, Medical and Surgical Journal, which would become the British Medical Journal in 1857 Launch of the Tablet, London-based Catholic weekly newspaper (Feb.) The weekly Malta Times launched, remaining in circulation until 1927 (Mar.) Cuairtear nan Gleann established, a periodical initially aimed at promoting emigrant destinations, and which over its three-year run saw an international network of Gaelic readers and writers emerging Cuairtear nan Coillte, first Gaelic periodical to appear in Canada, ­published in Kingston, Ontario 1841 E. Palmer takes out patent for producing metallic plates with raised printing surfaces

­

timeline

753

First railway station bookstall opens in Fenchurch Street railway ­station, London Founding of the fortnightly (later weekly) Jewish Chronicle, which would become the most robust and longest lived of many British Jewish-interest titles (July) Henry Mayhew and others found Punch, the influential and long-lived comic newspaper 1842 First two-volume bound versions of Chambers’s Information for the People published (May) Illustrated London News first published (Dec.) Publication of the penny fiction weekly Family Herald Establishment of the penny weekly architectural journal the Builder, a specialist magazine that would emerge as the best-known architectural journal of the century 1843 Illuminated Magazine, 64-page monthly issue established by Douglas Jerrold, later edited by W. J. Linton (Jan.) Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper first published (Aug.) Royal Assent is granted to Lord Campbell’s Libel Act, which allows news­papers to claim ‘justification’, permitting them to avoid prosecution for libel if printed information is true and for the public benefit (Oct.) Weekly Sunday paper News of the World first published 1844 J. M. Kronheim patents method of making moulds for casting curved stereotype plates (Aug.) First use of telegraph to report news (the birth of Prince Alfred to Queen Victoria) in the Times 1845 Glass tax abolished Founding of the British Quarterly Review by Nonconformists: it would become a respected periodical (published until 1886)

754

timeline

John Blackwood becomes an influential publisher/editor of Blackwood’s Magazine and remains in the role until his death in 1879 Founding of the Liberal reformist political and arts monthly Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine Illuminated Magazine, 64-page monthly issue edited by W. J. Linton, ceases publication 1846 James Dallagana sets up factory for making curved stereotype plates Hoe four-cylinder rotary press launched in Philadelphia Daily News established, edited for a short time by Dickens Mitchell’s Newspaper Press Directory first appears, providing comprehensive listings of titles available within which advertisers could place notices Illustrated penny weekly Reynolds’s Magazine launched, renamed after its fifth issue Reynolds’s Miscellany, founded by G. W. M. Reynolds 1847 Ten Hour Act limiting factory labour passed (Jan.) Lady’s Newspaper and Pictorial Times begins circulation as the first illustrated weekly newspaper for women, later merging with Queen (Oct.) Weekly English-language Roman Advertiser (Italy) launched; it would close in April 1849 1848 Applegath vertical cylinder eight-feeder press at the Times First W. H. Smith railway bookstall established at Euston station, London ‘Young Ireland’ revolt 1849 Poet Eliza Cook established Eliza Cook’s Journal, which became an outlet for many middle-class and working-class women writers

­

timeline

755

1850–1859 1850 Public Libraries Act empowers local authorities to create public libraries (Mar.) Household Words first published 1851 Paul Julius Reuter begins to send financial information by telegraph between London and the Continent; by 1865, Reuter opens Reuter’s Telegram Company in London to gather and exchange news 1852 Marian Evans, later the novelist ‘George Eliot’, becomes de facto editor of the Westminster Review (until 1854), and publishes significant essays therein (1851–7) Launch of the Levant Herald (Constantinople), bilingual weekly English and French title; it ceases publication in 1915 (Feb.) Leisure Hour first published (May) First publication of Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, Samuel and Isabelle Beeton’s general illustrated monthly, featuring domestic skills for middle-class women readers, and whose circulation would exceed 50,000 by 1857 (Dec.) Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper first published 1853 Advertisement tax repealed The first issue of the Field, or Country Gentleman’s Newspaper (Dec.) Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper first issued, lavishly illustrated broadsheet penny fiction weekly, edited initially by John Tillotson 1854 Margaret Oliphant begins a prolific reviewing career with Blackwood’s  Magazine (and others) that would end only with her death in 1897

756

timeline

1855 Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper established in New York by British wood-engraver turned entrepreneur Henry Carter, who used ‘Frank Leslie’ as his professional pseudonym while on staff at  the  Illustrated London News, before emigrating to the United States Dellagana perfects system for casting hollow, lighter and more costeffective stereotype plates for press use (June) Daily Telegraph first published, becoming a penny newspaper in 1856 (June) Newspaper stamp tax abolished (July) Sunday Trading Bill riots in London protesting against Sabbatarian legislation (Nov.) Founding of the weekly Saturday Review, whose sharp and sometimes pungent reviews gain it the nickname the ‘Saturday Reviler’ 1856 Hoe horizontal cylinder machine used to print Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper Joint Stock Companies Act implemented Establishment of the Irish Ecclesiastical Gazette; or, Monthly Repertory of Miscellaneous Church News by Samuel B. Oldham of Dublin 1857 Indian Press Act Robert Hattersley composing machine introduced to the marketplace Obscene Publications Act implemented E. S. Dallas begins his career as a prolific reviewer for the Times (until 1866) (Feb.) An Teachdaire Gaidhealach is published in Hobart, the only Gaelic periodical to be published in Australia or New Zealand in the nineteenth century 1858 Wharfedale introduces revolutionary flat-bed stop cylinder press for trade use (Jan.) Launch of the Bookseller

­

timeline

757

(Mar.) Bessie Rayner Parkes and Matilda Hays launch the English Woman’s Journal, the first British periodical devoted to feminist issues 1859 Good Words first published The first issue of the Sporting Life, the most successful sporting journal of the second half of the nineteenth century (Apr.) All the Year Round first published (July) Once a Week first published Founding of Macmillan’s Magazine, the first periodical to adopt a policy of signature First edition of the Irish Times published in Dublin

1860–1869 1860 Monthly Cornhill Magazine established by publishers Smith, Elder, initially edited by Thackeray, then by Leslie Stephen First issue of Baily’s Magazine of Sports and Pastimes, and Racing Register, an influential monthly Launch of the religious weekly Good Words, later (1861) to become a monthly 1861 Paper duties repealed Richard Holt Hutton becomes editor and proprietor of the Spectator, roles that would end only with his death in 1897 Samuel O. Beeton began publication of the Queen as an upper-class alternative to the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine (Sept.) founding of Fun (1861–1901), a Liberal comic weekly and the closest competitor of Punch, purchased in 1870 by the Dalziel brothers 1862 Companies Act passed into law (Sept.) The weekly Smyrna Mail established, extant until May 1864

758

timeline

1863 Dellagana is using curved casting box to produce convex plates that can be fitted directly to rotary press cylinders, increasing production rates Establishment of the weekly literary and scientific review The Reader Founding by William Saunders of the Central Press Agency (from 1873 the Central News Agency), national news agency that would become a rival of the later-established Press Association 1864 Launch of the Month, illustrated monthly covering literature, science and art from a Jesuit perspective First issue of the Illustrated Police News, a weekly one-penny illustrated newspaper specialising in crime news John Wisden, a professional cricketer, founds The Cricketer’s Almanack (‘Wisden’) 1865 Founding of the Fortnightly Review, which soon became monthly First issue of the Sportsman, providing extensive coverage of football and cricket, as well as racing Launch of the Sporting Times, long-lived weekly covering sport and other topics Successful laying of Atlantic telegraphic cable, facilitating news communication between Britain and North America Introduction of the William Bullock rotary press Meisenbach of Munich popularise the halftone process, developed by a Leamington firm of photographers, by placing a cross-ruled screen in front of the sensitive plate in the camera (Feb.) The Pall Mall Gazette first published (Mar.) The English Mechanic first published 1866 Significant technological innovations in printing introduced to the marketplace, including the Walter rotary press, a fully automatic web-fed perfector, and the Minerva platen press, in which the forme is held in the vertical position (known in Britain as a ‘Franklin press’)

­

timeline

759

(July) Permanent transatlantic telegraph cable opened Founding of the broad-church high-culture monthly the Contemporary Review 1867 The Irish Republican Brotherhood (Fenians) launches an unsuccessful insurrection in parts of Ireland (May) Judy, or, The London Serio-Comic Journal (1867–1907) founded, quickly becoming the most successful Conservative comic news­ paper, bought by the Dalziel brothers in 1874 (May) Arthur à Beckett launches the Tomahawk, a short-lived but widely admired comic paper noted for the quality of its (colour) illustrations and sharp political commentary 1868 Press Association founded following passage of the Telegraph Bill, the latter empowering the government to acquire the telegraph system Launch of Whitaker’s Almanack (May) Exchange and Mart first published (Nov.) Vanity Fair first published 1869 Charles Kastenbein composing machine launched Newspapers, Printers and Reading Rooms Repeal Act removes requirement that all newspaper owners register with the State, making it difficult to identity whom to sue in cases of libel Launch of the general scientific weekly Nature, initially edited by Norman Lockyer, former scientific editor of the Reader Establishment of the weekly Graphic, rival to the Illustrated London News Publication of the Cardiff-based, Conservative daily Western Mail Founding of the monthly literary review The Academy, which becomes a weekly by 1874 Matthew Arnold’s influential critique of society, Culture and Anarchy, is published

760

timeline

1870–1879 1870 Peace Preservation Act Reel-fed rotary press becomes dominant in British and Irish press trade, displacing sheet-fed machines in production processes over the following decade W. E. Forster’s Education Act implemented in England and Wales; a similar Act implemented in Scotland in 1871 George Ashley Wilson’s ‘Victory’ machine, a combined folder with printing machine, used for first time in Scotland to print the Glasgow Weekly Mail (July) Day’s Doings first published Launch of the Nice Times, A Weekly Fashionable Newspaper (France), which remained in circulation until 1927 1871 August bank holiday introduced Hoe web-fed rotary introduced into London trade Little Folks first published W. T. Stead becomes editor of the Northern Echo Edward Hilton publishes the first issue of the Sporting Chronicle (June) An Gàidheal is the first Gaelic periodical to be published after a twenty-year hiatus in Gaelic periodical publishing 1872 Launch of the Cardiff-based South Wales Daily News, Liberal alternative to the Western Mail 1873 Start of Tillotson’s Newspaper Literature Syndicate, specialising in syndicating fiction in newspapers at home and abroad throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century (May) The Inverness-based weekly Highlander launched, the first Scottish newspaper to publish a regular Gaelic column

­

timeline

761

1875 First issue of the Athletic News and Cyclists Journal (July) The World first published 1876 Launch of Mind, influential quarterly review of psychology and philosophy The Sportsman begins to publish a popular daily edition 1877 Founding by James Knowles of intellectual heavyweight review the Nineteenth Century, which practises signature (Jan.) Truth first published (Aug.) The Referee first published 1878 Vernacular Press Act First publication of the monthly Magazine of Art, an upmarket and richly illustrated fine-art magazine 1879 Incandescent light bulb invented (Jan.) Launch of the children’s weekly Boy’s Own Paper by the Religious Tract Society Dublin launch of Pat (1879–1883), a relatively short-lived yet influential comic weekly published during a critical period in the development of Irish nationalist politics and journalism

1880–1889 1880 Thorne composing machine patented in the United States Founding of the Cricket Reporting Agency (Jan.) Founding of Bon-Accord, a long-running comic and illustrated weekly aimed at Scottish readers

762

timeline

(Jan.) Founding of the weekly one-penny Girl’s Own Paper, an important model for subsequent titles aimed at young girls Establishment of St James’ Gazette, daily one-penny evening paper edited by Frederick Greenwood as a Tory rival to the Pall Mall Gazette (Sept.) Alfred Gibbons publishes the first monthly issue of the longrunning, illustrated fashion and society magazine the Lady’s Pictorial (Oct.) Launch of the weekly the Italian Gazette, extant until 1915 1881 (Aug.) Parnell launches the weekly United Ireland newspaper, with William O’Brien as editor (July) Launch of the Evening News, London’s first popular evening daily, later purchased in 1894 by the Harmsworth brothers as their first newspaper venture (Aug.) The Newspaper Libel and Registration Act receives Royal Assent; it privileges newspaper reporting of public meetings, protecting them from libel claims in such reports, and reinstates the requirement that newspaper owners register with the State (Oct.) Tit-Bits, George Newnes’s popular penny paper, first published 1883 The Press Association commences its well-known sports service 1884 (May) Launch of Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday, a working-class comic paper whose eponymous hero (first appearing in Judy in 1867) is the first recurring comic character Issue of London’s first financial daily, Financial and Mining News (later the Financial News) National Association of Journalists founded (renamed the Institute of Journalists in 1890) 1885 Edmund Yates imprisoned for criminal libel published in the World (July) ‘Maiden Tribute of Babylon’ articles published in Pall Mall Gazette result in three-month imprisonment of W. T. Stead

­

timeline

763

1886 Gladstone’s first Home Rule Bill is defeated in the House of Commons Ottmar Mergenthaler develops the Linotype casting machine, first used in the New York Tribune 1887 Criminal Law and Procedure Act 1888 Women’s rights advocates Henrietta B. Muller and Florence FenwickMiller begin editing a series of important feminist journals, including the weekly Women’s Penny Paper, to publicise women’s issues and educate women about feminist activism (Jan.) Launch of T. P. O’Connor’s the Star newspaper (Jan.) First issue of the Financial Times, initially as the London Financial Guide three times per week during its first month, then changing title and moving to six days per week; printed on pink paper from 1893 (June) Answers to Correspondents first published (Oct.) Launch of the Algerian Advertiser, published weekly and seasonally until 1915 (Nov.) The Conservative-focused Scots Observer launched, initially as a weekly quarto newspaper edited by W. E. Henley; renamed the National Observer in 1890 (Dec.) Law of Libel Amendment Bill receives Royal Assent, clarifying newspaper privilege in reporting on public meetings and court ­proceedings; it is the last major newspaper libel law of the Victorian era 1889 Indecent Advertisements Act implemented Prevention of Corruption Act implemented Official Secrets Act implemented

764

timeline

1890–1900 1890 Institute of Journalists gains its Royal Charter (Jan.) W. T. Stead’s monthly Review of Reviews launched, featuring reviews of and excerpts from the previous month’s press, and original material from Stead (Jan.) Launch of the Daily Graphic, Britain’s first daily illustrated newspaper (1890–1926) (May) First issue of Comic Cuts, illustrated weekly comic paper produced from the Harmsworth press stable (6 Dec.) The Parnell ‘split’ in the Irish Home Rule Party. The Freeman’s Journal, the main nationalist daily newspaper in Dublin, initially supported Parnell but later switched sides (September 1891) 1891 (Jan.) Launch of the monthly illustrated Strand Magazine, which publishes short fiction and notably features the long-running series of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories (Jan.) Launch of the weekly Tenerife News (Spain) (Mar.) Anti-Parnellites launch a new daily newspaper, the National Press (Oct.) The long-lived, sixpenny literary monthly Bookman first ­published, initially edited by Robertson Nicoll (Oct.) Charles Stewart Parnell dies 1892 Irish Education Act supporting compulsory primary school education implemented (May) Mac-Talla, the first weekly Gaelic newspaper ever to be published, launched in Sydney, Cape Breton (July) First issue of the Atlas, a seasonal English-language weekly ­published in Algiers 1893 Gladstone’s Second Home Rule Bill is defeated in the House of Lords Society of Women Journalists founded by Joseph Snell Wood, editor of the Gentlewoman

­

timeline

765

(Jan.) Launch of the daily evening one-penny newspaper the Westminster Gazette, printed on green paper (Feb.) Start of the illustrated New Journalism–influenced weekly Sketch edited by C. K. Shorter 1896 (May) Launch of the Daily Mail by the Harmsworth brothers 1900 (Apr.) Launch of the Daily Express by Arthur Pearson

BIBLIOGRAPHY

‘A Plea for Tittle-Tattle’ (1884), Pall Mall Gazette, 3 April, 1. ‘A Sufferer’, To the Editor of the Times [Letter to the Editor] (1882), The Times, 12 April, 10. ‘Advertisement’ (1805), Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, January, 1­­–6. ‘Advertisements’ (1805), Times, 1 January, 1. ‘Advertisements’ (1852), Nottinghamshire Guardian, 12 August, 1. ‘The American Medical Editors’ Association’ (1893), British Medical Journal, 1 July, 19–21. ‘The Annuals for 1832’ (1831), La Belle Assemblée: or Court and Fashionable Magazine, 14, 83, 192–212. ‘Answers Examinations’ (1892), Answers, 14 May, 449. ‘Associated Press Caught Again: Grubbed False News and Transmitted It without Investigation’ (1895), New York Times, 25 September. ‘Aunt Judy’s Correspondence’ (1869), Aunt Judy’s, XXIX, 1 July, 189–92. ‘The Boy’s Own Gordon Memorial’ (1889), Boy’s Own Paper, 533, 30 March, 414. ‘The “Boy’s Own” Gordon Memorial Fund’ (1885), Boy’s Own Paper, 328, 25 April, 479. ‘British Medical Journal: Saturday, January 4th, 1896’ (1896), British Medical Journal, 4 January, 33–41. ‘The British Press: Its Growth, Liberty, and Power’ (1859), North British Review, 30 May, 367–402. ‘Catalogue of Scientific Papers’ (1868), Athenaeum, 6 June, 790–1. ‘THE CENTRAL PRESS, a Newspaper for NEWSPAPER PROPRIETORS’ (1871), Printers’ Register, 6 January, 19. ‘The “Central Press Company” v Saunders’ (1873), Bolton Evening News, 10 May, 4. ‘Cheap Literature’ (1859), British Quarterly Review, 29 April, 313–45. ‘Children’s Circle’ (1894), Northern Weekly Leader, 30 June. ‘Children’s Corner’, Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, 30 July 1887; 5 October 1889; 5 July 1890; 4 March 1893; 5 August 1893; 5 December 1896. ‘Children’s Corner’, Stockport Advertiser, 10 February 1882; 17 February 1882. ‘Children’s Guild’ (1908), South Durham & Auckland Chronicle, 1 June. ‘Coimín, Dáithí (1854–1907)’, Ainm.ie, http://www.ainm.ie/Bio.aspx?ID=131. ‘The Commercial History of a Penny Magazine – No. II’ (1833), Penny Magazine, 26 October, 101, 417–24.

766

­

bibliography

767

‘Correspondence’ (1880), Boy’s Own Paper, II, 72, 29 May, 560. ‘The Cossar Story’ (1973), Printing World, 264, 270–1. ‘The Day’s Work’ (1903), The World’s Work, October, 477–87. ‘Dress: In Season and in Reason’ (1890), Girl’s Own Paper, XL, 526, 25 January, 264–6. ‘Editorial Chat’ (1892), Answers, 6 August, 193. ‘The Editor’s Address’ (1866), The Homoeopathic World, January, 1–2. ‘Guy’s Hospital’ (1828), Lancet, March, 959–60. ‘Health: A Weekly Journal of Sanitary Science’ (1883), Health, April, 1–2. ‘Henry Tibbats Stainton’ (1893), British Naturalist, 3, 18. ‘His Pa Licked Him’ (1895), Topeka State Journal, 21 May. ‘Hr af Forsells anteckningar om England’ (1835), Aftonbladet, 2 June, 2. ‘The “Hull Daily Mail”’ (1885), Hull Daily Mail, 29 September, 2. ‘Hunting Grounds of our Youth’ (1872), Aunt Judy’s, X, LXIX, 160–8. ‘Hunting the Gorilla’ (1867), Boys of England, II, 50, 2 November, 381–2. ‘The Indian Medical Congress’ (1894), The Times, 31 December, 5. ‘Introduction’ (1843), The British Journal of Homoeopathy, January, iii–vii. ‘Introduction’ (1894), First Aid, July, 1. ‘Introduction to the St James’s Gazette’ (1880), St James’s Gazette, May, i–ii. ‘Journalism in Hull’ (1871), Press News, 15 February. ‘Journalism and Oratory’ (1867), Pall Mall Gazette, 12 November, 10. ‘Journalists Sentenced for Publishing False News’ (1894), The Morning Post, 19 September. ‘The Lancet or the Property and Privileges of Lecturers, Hospitals and Medical Societies, Considered’ (1824), Medico-Chirurgical Review, March, 973–8. ‘The Lancet: Saturday, November 19th, 1887’ (1887), Lancet, 19 November, 1026–30. ‘The Late Mr L.E. Knox’, Irish Times, 27 January 1873. ‘Launch of the New Lifeboat’ (1879), Boys of England, 681, 5 December, 60. ‘Literary Women of the Nineteenth Century’ (1859), The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, 341–3. ‘The Literature of a Newspaper’ (1859), Galway Vindicator, 21 September, 2. ‘Little Contributors Column’ (1901), Hull Times, 7 September. ‘Local Affairs’ (1865), Shields Gazette, 6 May, 2. ‘London Coffee Houses, Past and Present’ (1863), The Leisure Hour: A Family Journal of Instruction and Recreation, 21 March, 183–8. ‘London Correspondence’ (1862), [Dublin] Daily Express, 19 February, 2. ‘London Editor’ (1909), Modern Journalism. A Guide for Beginners, London: Sidgwick & Jackson. ‘Lord Queensberry & His Son’ (1895), Bristol Mercury, 27 May. ‘The New Woman’ (1894), Judy: The London Serio-Comic Journal, July 25, 42. ‘Notices to Correspondents’ (1858), The London News, May 16, 2. ‘Notices to Correspondents’ (n.d.), The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, III, 30. ‘Occasional Notes’ (1887), Pall Mall Gazette, 3 May, 4. ‘On Reading as a Narcotic’ (1898), The Speaker : The Liberal Review, 19 November, 599–600. ‘Our Life Boat Corner’ (1867), Boys of England, 27, 25 May, 14. ‘Out-Door Pastimes’ (1871), Bow Bells, July 12, 593–4. ‘Outlines of the Week’ (1861), Athlone Sentinel, 20 February, 2. ‘Perils of a Naturalist’ (1867), Hardwicke’s Science-Gossip, 3, 15–16.

768

bibliography

‘The Playground’ (1909), Leeds Saturday Journal, 6 February. ‘Pléimionn, Donnchadh (1867–1900)’, Ainm.ie, http://www.ainm.ie/Bio.aspx?ID=39. ‘Political Tipstering’ (1884), World, 18 June, 5. ‘Preface’ (1816), The Monthly Gazette of Health, January, iii–iv. ‘Preface’ (1820), Medico-Chirurgical Review, June, i–ii. ‘Preface’ (1822), Medico-Chirurgical Review, i–ii. ‘Preface’ (1823), Lancet, 5 October, 1–2. ‘Preface’ (1855), Boy’s Own Magazine, 1, I, January. ‘Preface’ (1874), Hardwicke’s Science-Gossip, 10, i–ii. ‘Press of the Trades’ (1877), All the Year Round, 1 December, 387–9. ‘Prize Competitions’ (1879), Boy’s Own Paper, I, 36, 27 September, 587. ‘Queensberry’s Latest Fight’ (1895), New York World, 22 May. ‘Sanitary Reform’ (1848), British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review, n.s. 1, January, 1–34. ‘Science-Gossip’ (1866), Hardwicke’s Science-Gossip, 2, 1. ‘Selection of Journals’ (1855), Scottish Newspaper Directory and Guide to Advertisers, 2nd edn, Edinburgh: Jack; Glasgow: McNair; London: Blackwood, 46–52. ‘Some Early Contributors to “Chambers’s Journal”’ (1897), Chambers’s Journal, November 6, 708–11. ‘The Sunderland Accident’ (1883), The Times, 20 June. ‘The “Times” on the High Horse’ (1870), Supplement to the [Liverpool] Daily Post, 25 April, 1. ‘To the Editor of the Christian Lady’s Magazine. From an Old Blue-Stocking’ (1834), The Christian Lady’s Magazine, 1, 24–31. ‘The Trade Journal Indispensable’ (1893), The British Printer, 6 January–February, 53. ‘Trade Journals’ (1878), London, Provincial and Colonial News, 13 February, 22. ‘Trade Newspapers’ (1863), Chambers’s Journal, 20, 12 December, 369–71. ‘The Universal Advertising Sheet’ (1822), La Belle Assemblée: or Court and Fashionable Magazine, June 1, 1–4. ‘The Vice of Reading’ (1874), Temple Bar: A London Magazine for Town and Country Readers, September, 251–7. ‘Wanted – A Strong Pull and a Pull Together’ (1889), Boy’s Own Paper, 532, 23 March, 397–8. ‘W.H. Smith & Son’s’ (1892), The Ludgate Monthly, January, 161–9. ‘Why Do Entomologists Want a Weekly Newspaper’ (1856), Entomologist’s Weekly Intelligencer, 1, 1. [Bagehot, Walter] (1855), ‘The First Edinburgh Reviewers’, National Review, 1, 253–82. [Brougham, Henry] (1832), Om folkbildning: med anteckningar om de i England befintliga Handtverks-instituterna och Sällskapet för nyttiga kunskapers spridande: samlade under en resa i nämnde land, åren 1830–31, trans. Frans Anton Ewerlöf [translation of Henry Brougham’s Practical Observations on Popular Education], Stockholm. [Dallas, E. S.] (1859a), ‘Popular Literature – The Periodical Press’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 85, January, 96–112. [Dallas, E. S.] (1859b), ‘Popular Literature – The Periodical Press’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 85, February, 180–95. [Eccles, Charlotte O’Connor] (1893), ‘The Experiences of a Woman Journalist’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 153, June, 830–8.

­

bibliography

769

[Greg, W. R.] (1855), ‘The Newspaper Press’, Edinburgh Review, 102, October, 470–98. [Lewes, G. H.] (1847), ‘The Condition of Authors in England, Germany, and France’, Fraser’s Magazine, 35, March, 285–95. [Merle, Gibbons] (1833), ‘Journalism’, Westminster Review, 18, April, 195–208. [Stephen, James Fitzjames] (1862), ‘Journalism’, Cornhill Magazine, 6, July, 52–63. à Beckett, Arthur William (1903), The à Becketts of ‘Punch’: Memories of Father and Sons, New York: E. P. Dutton & Company. A Century of Service, 1878–1978 (1978), Glasgow: John Cossar. Abbas, Hyder (2014), ‘“A Fund of Entertaining and Useful Information”: Coffee Houses, Early Public Libraries, and the Print Trade in Eighteenth-Century Dublin’, Library and Information History, 30, 1, 41–61. Adams, Thomas R. and Nicolas Barker (1993), ‘A New Model for the Study of the Book’, in Thomas R. Adams (ed.), A Potencie of Life: Books in Society: The Clark Lectures 1986–1987, London: British Library, 1–39. Adamson, Glenn (2013), The Invention of Craft, London: Bloomsbury. Adburgham, Alison (1972), Women in Print: Writing Women and Women’s Magazines from the Restoration to the Accession of Victoria, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. Adelman, Joseph M. and Victoria E. M. Gardner (2015), ‘News in the Age of Revolution’, in Richard J. John and Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb (eds), Making News: The Political Economy of Journalism in Britain and America from the Glorious Revolution to the Internet, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 47–72. Advertisement for Lördags-magasinet (1836), Aftonbladet, 22 February, 4. Advertisers’ Guide to the Newspaper Press of the United Kingdom (1844), London: Lewis and Lowe. Akami, Tomoko (2012), Japan’s News Propaganda and Reuters’s News Empire in Northeast Asia, 1870–1934, Dordrecht: Republic of Letters Publishing. Akel, Regina (2016). Benjamin Disraeli and John Murray: The Politician, the Publisher, and the Representative, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Akenson, Donald Harman (1989), ‘Pre-University Education’, in W. E. Vaughan (ed.), A New History of Ireland: Volume V Ireland under the Union, I 1801–1870, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 523–37. Alborn, Timothy (2008), ‘The First Fund Managers: Life Insurance Bonuses in Victorian Britain’, in Nancy Henry and Cannon Schmitt (eds), Victorian Investments: New Perspectives on Finance and Culture, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 58–78. Alexander, Isabella (2010), Copyright Law and the Public Interest in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford: Bloomsbury. Alford, Bernard W. E. (1964), ‘Government Expenditure and the Growth of the Printing Industry in the Nineteenth Century’, Economic History Review, 17, 1, 96–112. Allen, David Elliston (1976), The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History, London: Allen Lane. Allen, Joan (2008), ‘“Keeping the Faith”: The Catholic Press and the Preservation of Celtic Identity in Britain in the Late-Nineteenth Century’, in Richard C. Allen and Stephen Regan (eds), Irelands of the Mind: Memory and Identity in Modern Irish Culture, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 32–49. Allen, Joan (2015), ‘Uneasy Transitions: Irish Nationalism, the Rise of Labour and the Catholic Herald, 1888–1914’, in Laurence Marley (ed.), The British Labour Party and Twentieth-Century Ireland: The Cause of Ireland, the Cause of Labour, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 35–54.

770

bibliography

Allen, Joan and Owen R. Ashton (2005), Papers for the People: A Study of the Chartist Press, London: Merlin Press. Allen, Richard C. (2018), ‘“Providing a Moral Compass for British People”: The Work of Joseph Tregelles Price, Evan Rees and the Herald of Peace’, Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society, 61, 1, 3–15. Allen, Richard C. and David Ceri Jones with Trystan Owain Hughes (eds) (2014), The Religious History of Wales: Religious Life and Practice in Wales from the Seventieth Century to the Present Day, Cardiff: Welsh Academic Press. Allison, William (1919), ‘My Kingdom for a Horse!’: Yorkshire, Rugby, Balliol, the Bar, Bloodstock and Journalistic Reflections, London: Grant Richards. Almeida Aguiar, Antonio S. (2002), ‘The Canary Islands Review (1903–1904)’, http:// mdc.ulpgc.es/cdm/ref/collection/coloquios/id/1435 (last accessed 9 June 2017). Altholz, Josef L. (1985), ‘The Redaction of Catholic Periodicals’, in Joel H. Wiener (ed.), Innovators and Preachers: The Role of the Editor in Victorian England. Westport: Greenwood Press, 143–60. Altholz, Josef L. (1989), The Religious Press in Britain, 1760–1900, New York: Greenwood Press. Altick, Richard D. (1951), ‘Cope’s Tobacco Plant: An Episode in Victorian Journalism’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 45, 333–50. Altick, Richard D. (1957, 1998), The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Altick, Richard D. (1997), Punch: The Lively Youth of a British Institution, 1841–1851, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Anderson, Benedict (1983, rev. edn 2006), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. Anderson, David (1891), ‘Studies in Illustrated Journalism: The Rise of the Comic Paper’, The Magazine of Art, January, 153–7. Anderson, Nancy Fix (1987), Woman against Women in Victorian England: A Life of Eliza Lynn Linton, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Anderson, Patricia J. (1987), ‘Pictures for the People: Knight’s “Penny Magazine”, an Early Venture into Popular Art Education’, Studies in Art Education, 28, 3, 133–40. Anderson, Patricia J. (1991), The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture, 1790–1860, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Anderson, Robert, Mark Freeman and Lindsay Patterson (eds) (2015), The Edinburgh History of Education in Scotland, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Andrews, Alexander (1859, reprinted 1968), The History of British Journalism. From the Foundation of the Newspaper Press in England to the Repeal of the Stamp Act in 1855 with Sketches of Press Celebrities, 2 vols, London: Bentley; rptd New York: Haskell House Publishers and Grosse Point: Scholarly Press. Andrews, Ann (2014), Newspapers and Newsmakers: The Dublin Nationalist Press in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Andrews, Helen, ‘Bourke, Ulick Joseph’, Dictionary of Irish Biography, online edn, http://dib.cambridge.org/viewReadPage.do?articleId=a0812. Andrews, Linton and H. A. Taylor (1970), Lords and Labourers of the Press: Men Who Fashioned the Modern British Newspaper, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. An Old Advertiser (1854), Handbook for Advertisers and Guide to Advertising Containing All the Facts Necessary to Enable All Persons to Advertise Most Efficiently, 6th edn, 1854, London: Effingham Wilson.

­

bibliography

771

An Old Journalist (1892), ‘In Correspondence: The Institute of Journalists’, National Review 20, October, 274–8. Anon. (n.d.), A Famous bookstore MDXX, Paris: The Galignani Library. Anon. (1841), The Indicator for Travellers on the continent/L’Indicateur européen ou livre de route des voyageurs sur le continent, London, Paris, Brussels and Florence: Imp. Félix Le Monnier. Anon. (1859), [list of newspaper stamps paid], The Stationer, 10 November, 6–7. Anon. (1862), ‘Journalism’, Cornhill Magazine, 6, 31, 52–63. Anon. (1870), In memoriam Mr James Pagan, editor of the Glasgow Herald, Glasgow: Privately Circulated. Anon. (1880), ‘Review of The Newspaper Press Directory and Advertiser’s Guide, 1880’, Quarterly Review, October. Anon. (1888), ‘Remarks on the Welsh Press’, Picton Castle Coll. MSS 4829, National Library of Wales. Anon. (1893), ‘How I Write My “London Letter”’, Tit-Bits, 18 February. Anon. (1895a), ‘According to Queensberry’, New York Herald, 22 May. Anon. (1895b), Daily Star and Herald, 15 June. Anon. (1895c), Le Figaro, 24 May. Anon. (1895d), Le Journal, 25 May. Anon. (1895e), Le Temps, 23 May. Anon. (1895f ), Le Temps, 24 May. Anon. (1895g), Paris Herald, 22 May. Anon. (1895h), Paris Herald, 23 May. Anon. (1895i), Paris Herald, 24 May. Anon. (1911), The Glasgow Herald: The Story of a Great Newspaper from 1783 to 1911, Glasgow: Outram. Anon. (1933), The Glasgow Herald – 150th Anniversary Supplement, Glasgow: Outram. Anon. (1958), The Glasgow Herald 1783–1958, Glasgow: Munro Press. Armstrong, W. A. (1972), ‘The Use of Information about Occupation’, in E. A. Wrigley (ed.), Nineteenth-Century Society: Essays in the use of Quantitative Methods for the Study of Social Data, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 191–283. Arnold, David (2000), The New Cambridge History of India, Part 3: Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Arnold, Matthew (1865), Essays in Criticism, London and Cambridge: Macmillan & Co. Arnold, Matthew (1869), Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism, London: Smith, Elder & Co. Arnold, Matthew (1887a), ‘From Easter to August’, Nineteenth Century, 127, 310–24. Arnold, Matthew (1887b), ‘Up to Easter’, Nineteenth Century, 123, 629–43. The Art of Bookselling (1907), London: W. H. Smith. Ashton, Owen (1991), W. E. Adams: Chartist, Radical and Journalist (1832–1906), Whitley Bay: Bewick Press. Aspden, Hartley (1929), Fifty Years a Journalist, Clitheroe: Advertiser and Times Printers. Aspinall, Arthur (1949), Politics and the Press c.1780­­–1850, London: Home & Van Thal. Aspinall, Arthur (1950), ‘Statistical Accounts of the London Newspapers, 1800–36’, English Historical Review, 65, 255, 222–34.

772

bibliography

Aspinall, Arthur (1956), ‘The Reporting and Publishing of the House of Commons’ Debates, 1771–1834’, in R. Pares and A. J. P. Taylor (eds), Essays Presented to Sir Lewis Namier, London: Macmillan, 227–57. Aspinwall, Bernard (1996), ‘A Long Journey: The Irish in Scotland’, in Patrick O’Sullivan (ed.), The Irish World Wide: History, Heritage, Identity, 6 vols, vol. 5: Religion and Identity, London: Leicester University Press. Asquith, Ivon (1975), ‘Advertising and the Press in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries: James Perry and the Morning Chronicle 1790–1821’, The Historical Journal, 18, 4, 703–24. Asquith, Ivon (1978), ‘The Structure, Ownership and Control of the Press, 1780–1855’, in David George Boyce, James Curran and Pauline Wingate (eds), Newspaper History: From the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day, London: Constable, 98–129. Awtrey, Hugh (1932), La Presse anglo-américaine de Paris, Paris: Grandguillot et Burri. Ayerst, David (1971), Guardian: Biography of a Newspaper, London: Collins. Babbage, Charles (1816), Letter to John F. W. Herschel, 20 July 1816. John Herschel Papers, Royal Society of London 2/65. Baggs, Chris (2005), ‘“In the Separate Reading Room for Ladies are Provided Those Publications Specially Interesting to Them”: Ladies’ Reading Rooms and British Public Libraries 1850–1914’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 38, 3, 280–306. Bailey, Isabel (2004), ‘Ingram, Herbert (1811–1860)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press; available online at: http://www.ox​f​or​ ​d​ d​nb.com/view/article/14416. Bailey, Peter (1998), Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bailey, Peter (2007), Leisure and Class in Victorian Britain: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1885, London: Routledge. Bailey, R. H. (1988), ‘Victorian Army Volunteer Periodicals: The Earwig (1864–1871)’, Journal of Newspaper and Periodical History, 4, 1, 35–9. Bailey, R. H. (1990), ‘Victorian Army Volunteer Periodicals – 2: The Camp Kettle (1868) and The Handspike (1867)’, Journal of Newspaper and Periodical History, 6, 1, 47–51. Baldwin, Melinda (2015), Making Nature: The History of a Scientific Journal, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Banham, Christopher Mark (2009), ‘Boys of England (1866–1899) and Edwin J. Brett, 1866–99’, PhD thesis, University of Leeds. Bannerman, Sara, International Copyright and Access to Knowledge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016 Banta, Martha (2011), Words at Work in Vanity Fair: Language Shifts in Crucial Times, 1914–1920, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Banville, Scott (2008), ‘Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday: The Geography of Class in LateVictorian Britain’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 41, 2, 150–67. Barber, Giles (1961), ‘Galignani’s and the Publication of English Books in France from 1800 to 1852’, The Library, 5, 16, 284–6. Barber, M. (1993), ‘The Friend: The First 50 Years’, The Friend, 151, 3. Barker, Hannah (2000), Newspapers, Politics and English Society, 1695–1855, Harlow: Pearson. Barker, Sara (2016), ‘Time in English Translations of Continental News’, in Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham (eds), News Networks in Early Modern Europe, Leiden: Brill, 328–49.

­

bibliography

773

Barker, Sheila (2016), ‘“Secret and Uncertain”: A History of Avvisi at the Court of the Medici Grand Dukes’, in Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham (eds), News Networks in Early Modern Europe, Leiden: Brill, 716–38. Barnes, James J. (1964), Free Trade in Books: A Study of the London Book Trade since 1800, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Barnhurst, Kevin G. and John Nerone (2001), The Form of News: A History, New York and London: Routledge and The Guildford Press. Barrell, John (1986), Poetry Language and Politics, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Barrès-Baker, Malcolm C. (2006), ‘An Introduction to the Early History of Newspaper Advertising’, Brent Museum and Archive Occasional Publications, No. 2. Barth, Volker (2014), ‘The Formation of Global News Agencies, 1859–1914’, in W. Rayward (ed.), Information beyond Borders: International Cultural and Intellectual Exchange in the Belle Époque, London: Ashgate Publishing, 35–47. Barton, Ruth (1998), ‘Just before ‘Nature’: The Purposes of Science and the Purposes of Popularization in Some English Popular Science Journals of the 1860s’, Annals of Science, 55, 1–33. Bartrip, Peter W. J. (1990), A Mirror of Medicine: A History of the British Medical Journal, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bashford, Christina (2012), ‘Hidden Agendas and the Creation of Community: The Violin Press in the Late Nineteenth Century’, in Bennett Zon (ed.), Music and Performance Culture in Nineteenth Century Britain, Aldershot: Ashgate. Bassett, T. M (1977), The Welsh Baptists, Swansea: Ilston House. Bassett, Troy J. and Christina M. Walter (2001), ‘Booksellers and Bestsellers: British Book Sales as Documented by The Bookman, 1891–1906’, Book History, 4, 205–36. Baylen, Joseph O. (1972), ‘The “New Journalism” in Late Victorian Britain’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 18, 367–85. Baylen, Joseph O. (2010), ‘Stead, William Thomas (1849–1912)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press; available online at: http:// www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/36258. Bayly, Christopher A. (1996), Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bazerman, Charles (1988), Shaping Written Knowledge, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Beals, Melodee H. (2011), Coin, Kirk, Class and Kin: Emigration, Social Change and Identity in Southern Scotland, Oxford: Peter Lang. Beals, Melodee H. (2016), ‘The Role of the Sydney Gazette in the Creation of Australia in the Scottish Public Sphere’, in John Hinks and Catherine Feely (eds), Historical Networks in the Book Trade, London: Routledge, 148–70. Beals, Melodee H. (2017), ‘Scissors and Paste: The Georgian Reprints, 1800–1837’, Journal of Open Humanities Data, 3. Bebbington, David W. (2012), Victorian Religious Revivals: Culture and Piety in Local and Global Contexts, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Beedham, R. J. (1948), Wood Engraving, London: Faber & Faber. Beegan, Gerry (2008), The Mass Image: A Social History of Photomechanical Reproduction in Victorian England, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Beetham, Margaret (1990), ‘Towards a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre’, in Laurel Brake, Aled Jones and Lionel Madden (eds), Investigating Victorian Journalism, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 19–32.

774

bibliography

Beetham, Margaret (1996), A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800–1914, London: Routledge. Beetham, Margaret (2000), ‘In Search of the Historical Reader’, Siegener Periodicum zur internationalen empirischen Literaturwissenschaft, 19, 89–104. Beetham, Margaret (2018), ‘The Body in the Archive: Reading the Working Woman’s Reading’, in Alexis Easley, Andrew King and John Morton (eds), Researching the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Case Studies, Abingdon: Routledge, 145–60. Belknap, Geoffrey (2016), From a Photography: Authenticity, Science and the Periodical Press, 1870–1890, London: Bloomsbury. Belo, André (2016), ‘News Exchange and Social Distinction’, in Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham (eds), News Networks in Early Modern Europe, Leiden: Brill, 375–93. Benjamin, Walter (2000), ‘The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in J. Thomas (ed.), Reading Images, London: Palgrave, 62–75. Bennett, Arnold E. (1898), Journalism for Women. A Practical Guide, John Lane: The Bodley Head. Bennett, Scott (1978), ‘The Bibliographic Control of Victorian Periodicals’, in J. Don Vann and Rosemary T. VanArsdel (eds), Victorian Periodicals and Victorian Society, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 21–51. Bennett, Scott (1982), ‘Revolutions in Thought: Serial Publications and the Mass Market for Reading’, in Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolfe (eds), The Victorian Press: Samplings and Soundings, Leicester: Leicester University Press, 225–57. Bennett, Scott (1982), ‘The Editorial Character and Readership of “The Penny Magazine”: An Analysis’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 17, 4, 127–14. Bennett, T. (1994), ‘The Exhibitionary Complex’, in Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley and Sherry B. Ortner (eds), Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 123–54. Bergin, Osborn [1970] (2003), ‘Bardic Poetry’, in David Greene and Fergus Kelly (eds), Irish Bardic Poetry: Texts and Translation, Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Berlioz, Hector (1881), Mémoires (1803–1863), vol. I, Paris: Calmann-Lévy. Berridge, Virginia (1978), ‘Popular Sunday Newspapers and Mid-Victorian Society’, in David George Boyce, James Curran and Pauline Wingate (eds), Newspaper History: From the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day, London: Constable, 247–64. Besant, Walter (1899), The Pen and the Book. London: Thomas Burleigh. Biagini, Eugenio (1992), Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–1880, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bingham, Adrian and Martin Conboy (2009), ‘The Daily Mirror and the Creation of a Commercial Popular Language’, Journalism Studies, 10, 5, 639–54. Bingham, Adrian and Martin Conboy (2015), Tabloid Century: The Popular Press in Britain 1896 to the Present, Oxford: Peter Lang. Black, Jeremy (2001), The English Press, 1621–1861, Stroud: Alan Sutton Publishing. Blair, Kirstie (2014), ‘“Let the Nightingales Alone”: Correspondence Columns, the Scottish Press, and the Making of the Working Class Poet’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 47, 2, 188–207. Blowitz, Henry (1893), ‘Journalism as a Profession’, Contemporary Review, 63, January, 37–46. Bolton Evening News (1873), ‘The “Central Press Company” v Saunders’, 10 May. Bone, F. D. (1929), ‘The History of the Central News. Some Famous Scoops’, World’s Press News, 6 June.

­

bibliography

775

Bonea, Amelia (2016), The News of Empire: Telegraphy, Journalism, and the Politics of Reporting in Colonial India, c. 1830–1900, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Booth, J. B. (1924), Old Pink ’Un Days, London: Grant Richards. Bostetter, Mary (1985), ‘The Journalism of Thomas Wakley’, in Joel H. Wiener (ed.), Innovators and Preachers: The Role of the Editor in Victorian England, Westport: Greenwood Press, 275–92. Boufflers, The Late Countess de (1806), ‘Maxims and Rules for the Conduct of Women’, La Belle Assemblée: or Court and Fashionable Magazine, 1, 1, 15. Bowen, B. P. (1952), ‘Dublin Humorous Periodicals of the Nineteenth Century’, Dublin Historical Record, 13, 2–11. Boyce, David George (1978), ‘The Fourth Estate: The Reappraisal of a Concept’, in David George Boyce, James Curran and Pauline Wingate (eds), Newspaper History: From the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day. London: Constable & Co. Ltd, 19–40. Boyce, David George (1985), ‘Ireland: From Ascendency to Democracy’, The Cambridge Historical Encyclopedia of Great Britain and Ireland, ed. Christopher Haigh, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 261–4. Boyce, David George (2005), Nineteenth-Century Ireland, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan. Boyce, David George, James Curran and Pauline Wingate (eds) (1978), Newspaper History from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day, London: Constable & Co. Ltd. Boyd, Kelly (2003), Manliness and the Boy’s Story Paper in Britain: A Cultural History, 1855­­–1940, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Boyle, Andrew (1967), An Index to the Annuals, 1820–1850, Worcester: Andrew Boyle. Boyle, Catherine (2013), ‘Percy Shelley, the Newspapers of 1819 and the Language of Poetry’, Gramma. Journal of Theory and Criticism, 21, 63–76. Boyle, Raymond (2006), Sports Journalism: Context and Issues, London: SAGE Publications. Boyle, Thomas F. (1983), ‘Dublin University Magazine’, in Alvin Sullivan (ed.), British Literary Magazines: The Romantic Age, 1789–1836, Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 119–23. Bradley, Simon (2016), The Railways: Nation, Network & People, London: Profile Books. Brake, Laurel (1994), Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender and Literature in the Nineteenth Century, New York: New York University Press. Brake, Laurel (1995), ‘Gendered Space and the British Press’, Studies in Newspaper and Periodical History, 3, 1–2, 99–110. Brake, Laurel (2001), Print in Transition, 1850–1910: Studies in Media and Book History, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Brake, Laurel (2009), ‘Sporting Life (1859–1998)’, in Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (eds), Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism, Ghent and London: Academia Press and British Library. Brake, Laurel (2015), ‘Nineteenth-Century Newspaper Press Directories: The National Gallery of the British Press’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 48, 4, 569–90. Brake, Laurel (2016), ‘Markets, Genres, Iterations’, in Andrew King, Alexis Easley and John Morton (eds), Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, Abingdon: Routledge, 237–48.

776

bibliography

Brake, Laurel and Sara Bannerman (2016), International Copyright and Access to Knowledge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brake, Laurel and Marysa Demoor (eds) (2009), Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland, Ghent and London: Academia Press and British Library. Brake, Laurel and Marysa Demoor (eds) (2009), The Lure of Illustration in the Nineteenth Century Press and Pictures, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Brake, Laurel, Bill Bell and David Finkelstein (2000), Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Brant, Clare (2006), Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Breathnach, Diarmuid and Máire Ní Mhurchú (1999), 1782–1881 Beathaisnéis, Dublin: An Clóchomhar Tta. Brewster, David (1830a), ‘Reflections on the Decline of Science in England’, Quarterly Review, 43, 305–42. Brewster, David (1830b), Letter to James D. Forbes, 11 February 1830, James David Forbes Papers 1/230, University of St Andrews Special Collections. Briggs, Asa (1963), Victorian Cities, London: Odhams Press. Briggs, Jo (2016), Novelty Fair: British Visual Culture between Chartism and the Great Exhibition, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bringéus, Nils-Arvid (1998), ‘Rafael för folket’, RIG – kulturhistorisk tidskrift, 81, 3, 129–39. Bristow, Joseph (2016), ‘The Blackmailer and the Sodomite: Oscar Wilde on Trial’, Feminist Theory, 17, 1, 41–62. Bristow, Joseph and Rebecca N. Mitchell (2015), Oscar Wilde’s Chatterton: Literary History, Romanticism, and the Art of Forgery, New Haven: Yale University Press. Broadberry, Stephen (2014), ‘The Rise of the Service Sector’, in Roderick Floud, Jane Humphries and Paul Johnson (eds), The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, vol. 2, 330–61. Brock, William H. (1980), ‘The Development of Commercial Science Journals in Victorian Britain’, in A. J. Meadows (ed.), The Development of Science Publishing in Europe, New York: Elsevier, 95–122. Brock, William H. (1984), ‘Brewster as a Scientific Journalist’, in A. Morrison-Low and J. Christie (eds), Martyr of Science: Sir David Brewster 1781–1868, Edinburgh: Royal Scottish Museum, 37–42. Brock, William H. (2008), William Crookes (1832–1919) and the Commercialization of Science, Aldershot: Ashgate. Brock, William H. and A. J. Meadows (1998), The Lamp of Learning: Two Centuries of Publishing at Taylor & Francis, London: Taylor & Francis. Brockliss, Laurence and Colin Jones (1997), The Medical World of Early Modern France, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Brogan, D. W. (1958), The Glasgow Herald, 1783–1958, Glasgow: Glasgow Herald. Broks, Peter (1997), Media Science before the Great War, Basingstoke: St. Martin’s Press. Broman, Thomas (1998), ‘The Habermasian Public Sphere and “Science in the Enlightenment”’, History of Science, 36, 123–49. Brougham, H. (1825), Practical Observations upon the Education of the People, Addressed to the Working Classes and Their Employers, London: R. Taylor. Brougham, Henry (1827), Letter to Frans Ewerlöf, 26 August, F. A. Ewerlöfs samling, Lund University Library.

­

bibliography

777

Brown, Callum (2000), The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000, London: Routledge. Brown, David (2001), ‘Compelling But Not Controlling?: Palmerston and the Press, 1846–1855’, History, 86, 281, 41–61. Brown, David (2010), ‘Morally Transforming the World or Spinning a Line?: Politicians and the Newspaper Press in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Historical Research, 83, 220, 321–42. Brown, Joshua (2002), Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Brown, Lucy (1985), Victorian News and Newspapers, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Brown, Michael (2014), ‘“Bats, Rats and Barristers”: The Lancet, Libel and the Radical Stylistics of Early Nineteenth-Century English Medicine’, Social History, 39, 2, 189–209. Brown, Philip S. and Dorothy N. Brown (2003), ‘Sick and Convalescent Visitors in a Victorian Seaside Resort: Western-super-Mare’, The Local Historian, 33, 2, 83–98. Brown, Terence (2015), The Irish Times: 150 Years of Influence, London: Bloomsbury. Browne, Janet (2014), ‘Corresponding Naturalists’, in Bernard Lightman and Michael S. Reidy (eds), The Age of Scientific Naturalism: Tyndall and His Contemporaries, London: Pickering & Chatto, 157–69. Brownlees, Nicholas (2016), ‘“Newes also came by Letters”: Functions and Features of Epistolary News in English News Publications of the Seventeenth Century’, in Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham (eds), News Networks in Early Modern Europe, Leiden: Brill, 394–419. Buchanan, Robert W. (1872), The Fleshly School of Poetry and Other Phenomena of the Day, London: Strachan. Buell, Emmett (1975), ‘Eccentrics or Gladiators? People Who Write about Politics in Letters-to-the-Editor’, Social Science Quarterly, 56, 3, 440–9. Buitenhuis, Peter (1987), The Great War of Words: Literature and Propaganda, 1914–1918 and After, London: B. T. Batsford Ltd. Burdett, Henry (1895), Letter to Thomas Henry Wakley, 12 November, no. 117 MS 5966, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Burnham, Lord (1955), Peterborough Court: The Story of the Daily Telegraph, London: Cassell and Co. Burnley Gazette correspondence (1867), applications for post of reporter and subeditor, March, Lancashire County Record Office DDX 1101/27/8. Burtsev, Vladimir (1897), Za sto let, London: Russian Free Press Fund. Bussey, H. Findlater (1906), Sixty Years of Journalism, Bristol: Arrowsmith. Butler, Marilyn (2006), ‘Culture’s Medium: The Role of the Review’, in Stuart Curran (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, 2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 127–52. Buttress, F. A. (1950), Agricultural Periodicals of the British Isles, 1681–1900, and Their Location, Cambridge: University of Cambridge. Bynum, William F. and Janice C. Wilson (1992), ‘Periodical Knowledge: Medical Journals and their Editors in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, in William F. Bynum, Roy Porter and Stephen Lock (eds), Medical Journals and Medical Knowledge: Historical Essays, Abingdon: Routledge, 29–48. Bynum, William F., Stephen Lock and Roy Porter (eds) (1992), Medical Journals and Medical Knowledge: Historical Essays, Abingdon: Routledge.

778

bibliography

Byrne, Edward [1898] (1991), Parnell: A Memoir, ed. Frank Callanan, Dublin: The Lilliput Press. Çaglar, Burhan (2017), ‘Brief History of an English-Language Journal in the Ottoman Empire: The Levant Herald and Constantinople Messenger (1859–1878)’, MA diss., University of Toronto. Cairns, John W. (2015), Law, Lawyers and Humanism: Selected Essays on the History of Scots Law, Volume 1, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Cameron, Alan and Roy Farndon (1984), Lloyd’s List 250th Anniversary Special Supplement, London: Lloyd’s List. Camlot, Jason (2008), Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic: Sincere Mannerisms, Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate. Campbell, John (1844), ‘Dedication’, Christian Witness, 1, i–x. Cannadine, David (2014), ‘Pictures across the Pond: Perspectives and Retrospectives’, in Inge Jackson Reist (ed.), British Models of Art Collecting and the American Response: Reflections across the Pond, Farnham: Ashgate, 9–26. Cantor, Geoffrey and Sally Shuttleworth (eds) (2004), Science Serialized: Repre­­ sentations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cantor, Geoffrey, Gowan Dawson and Graeme Gooday (eds) (2004), Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carr, J. A. (1895), The Life and Times of James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, London: Wells Gardner, Darton & Co. Carson Williams, Fionnuala, ‘White, John Davis’, in Dictionary of Irish Biography, online edition, available at: http://dib.cambridge.org/viewReadPage.do?articleId=a9004. Carter, Cynthia and Andrew Thompson (1997), ‘Negotiating the “Crisis” around Masculinity: An Historical Analysis of Discourses of Male Violence in the Western Mail, 1896’, in Michael Bromley and Tom O’Malley (eds), A Journalism Reader, London: Routledge, 28–49. Carter, Harold B. (1987), Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820): A Guide to Biographical and Bibliographical Sources, Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies. Cassar, Paul (1992), ‘The Gabinetto di Lettura or Reading Room in Nineteenth Century Malta (1834–1886)’, Proceedings of History Week, Valetta: The Malta History Society, 1–14. Cassell, Ronald D. (1997), Medical Charities, Medical Politics: The Irish Dispensary System and the Poor Law, 1836–1872, Woodbridge: Boydell. Cassidy, Rebecca (2002), The Sport of Kings: Kinship, Class, and Thoroughbred Breeding in Newmarket, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Catalogue (1857), The Art Treasures of the United Kingdom: Collected at Manchester 1957 (provisional), printed by Bradbury & Evans, London. Catling, Thomas (1911), My Life’s Pilgrimage, London: John Murray. Cavanagh, Allison (2013), ‘“Barbarous cruelty at the British Museum”: Mediatization, Authority, and Reputation in Nineteenth-Century England’, MedieKultur, 29, 54, 87–103. Cawood, Ian (2012), The Liberal Unionist Party: A History, London: I. B. Tauris. Ceadel, Martin (1996), The Origins of War Prevention: The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1730–1854, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Census: Tenth Decennial Census of the Population of Scotland (1892), Edinburgh: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.

­

bibliography

779

The Central News Diamond Jubilee Souvenir 1871–1931 (1931), London: Central News. Cesarani, David (1994), The Jewish Chronicle and Anglo-Jewry, 1841–1991, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chalaby, Jean K. (1996) ‘Journalism as an Anglo-American Invention: A Comparison of the Development of French and Anglo-American Journalism, 1830s–1920s’, European Journal of Communication, 11, 3, 303–26. Chalaby, Jean K. (1998), The Invention of Journalism, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Chalaby, Jean K. (2000), ‘Northcliffe: Proprietor as Journalist’, in Peter Catterall, Collin Seymour-Ure and Adrian Smith (eds), Northciffe’s Legacy: Aspects of the British Popular Press, 1896–1996, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 27–44. Chaney, D. (1983), ‘The Department Store as a Cultural Form’, Theory, Culture & Society, 1, 3, 22–31. Chapman, C. (1984), Russell of the Times: War Despatches and Diaries, London: Bell & Hyman. Chapman, Jane (2013), Gender, Citizenship and Newspapers: Historical and Transatlantic Perspectives, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Chase, Malcolm (2005), ‘Building Identity, Building Circulation: Engraved Portraiture and the Northern Star’, in Joan Allen and R. Owen (eds), Papers for the People: A Study of the Chartist Press, Ashton and London: Merlin, 25–53. Christie, William (2009), The Edinburgh Review and the Literary Culture of Romantic Britain: Mammoth and Megalonyx, London: Pickering & Chatto. Ciarlo, David (2011), Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ciugureanu, A. (2010), ‘Mediating between the Mass and the Individual: Punch Caricatures of the Great Exhibition of All Nations’, Gramma, 18, 99–117. Clair, Colin (1965), A History of Printing in Britain, London: Cassell. Clais-Girard, Jacqueline (2004), ‘The English Catholics and Irish Nationalism, 1865– 1890: A Tragedy in Five Acts’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 1, 178. Clark, Charles E. and Charles Wetherell (1989), ‘The Measure of Maturity: The Pennsylvania Gazette, 1728–1765’, William and Mary Quarterly, 46, 279–303. Clark, Sandra (2003), Women and Crime in the Street Literature of Early Modern England, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Clarke, Bob (2004), From Grub Street to Fleet Street: An Illustrated History of English Newspapers to 1899, Aldershot: Ashgate. Clarke, James F. (1874), Autobiographical Recollections of the Medical Profession, London: J. & A. Churchill. Claude Lorraine, Tintorello (1863), ‘English Journalism in France’, Saint James’s Magazine, 7, April–June, 230–9. Clowes, William Beaufoy (1953), Family Business, 1803–1953, London: William Clowes and Sons Ltd. Clyde, Tom (2003), Irish Literary Magazines: An Outline History and Descriptive Bibliography, Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Coates, Thomas (1831a), Letter to Frans Ewerlöf, 16 April, F. A. Ewerlöfs samling, Lund University Library. Coates, Thomas (1831b), ‘Sketch of the Origin and Progress of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (15 April 1831)’, Handwritten document sent to Frans Ewerlöf, 16 April, F. A. Ewerlöfs samling, Lund University Library.

780

bibliography

Coates, Thomas (1833), Letter to Frans Ewerlöf, 14 January, F. A. Ewerlöfs samling, Lund University Library. Coates, Thomas (1834), Letter to Frans Ewerlöf, 22 July, F. A. Ewerlöfs samling, Lund University Library. Cobbe, Frances P. (1888), The Scientific Spirit of the Age: And Other Pleas and Discussions, Boston: George H. Ellis. Cockburn, Henry (1852), The Life of Lord Jeffrey with a Selection from His Correspondence, 2 vols, Edinburgh: Adam & Charles Black. Cocks, H. G. (2012), ‘Reading Obscene Texts and Their Histories’, Media History, 18, 3–4, 275–88. Codell, Julie (1991), ‘The Aura of Mechanical Reproductions: Victorian Art and the Press’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 24, 1, 4–10. Codell, Julie (2006), ‘Imperial Difference and Culture Clashes in Victorian Periodicals’ Visuals: The Case of Punch’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 39, 4, 410–28. Cohen, Ed (1993), Talk on the Wilde Side: Toward a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities, New York: Routledge. Cohen, Monica Feinberg (1998), Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel: Women, Work and Home, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CoIG (2017a), website, at https://gazette.ireland.anglican.org/buy-a-subscription/. CoIG (2017b), website, at https://www.ireland.anglican.org/cmsfiles/pdf/AboutUs/ library/Archive/Aug13/Editors.pdf. Colclough, Stephen (2004), ‘“Purifying the Sources of Amusement and Information?” The Railway Book-Stalls of W. H. Smith & Son, 1855–1860’, Publishing History: The Social, Economic and Literary History of Book, Newspaper and Magazine Publishing, 56, 27–51. Colclough, Stephen (2007), ‘The Railways’, in Bill Bell (ed.), The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, Volume 3: Ambition and Industry 1800–1880, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 141–53. Colebrook, Frank (1931), ‘Our Founder – Some Early Notes’, in The Central News Diamond Jubilee Souvenir 1871–1931, 22–4. Coleman, D. C. (1958), The British Paper Industry, 1495–1860, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Colligan, C. (2016), ‘Oscar Wilde’s Sex Trials in Paris’ Expatriate Press’, Textus, 28, 1, 57–81. Collins, Edward John T. (2000), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. 7, 1850–1914, Part 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collins, Mortimer (1863), ‘Country Newspapers’, Temple Bar, 10, December. Collins, Tracy J. R. (2010), ‘Athletic Fashion, Punch, and the Creation of the New Woman’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 43, 3, 309–35. Collins, Wilkie (1858), ‘The Unknown Public’, Household Words, 21 August, XVIII, 217–22. Conboy, Martin (2004), Journalism: A Critical History, London: SAGE Publications. Conboy, Martin (2010), The Language of Newspapers: Socio-Historical Perspectives, London: Continuum Conway, J. (2016), ‘Nineteenth-century Wood Engraving: Its Commercial Decline’, Art Libraries Journal, 41, 4, 224–34. Conway, Mercure D. (1868), ‘The Suppressed Sex’, Westminster Review, n.s. 34, 437–62. Cook, Bernard A. (1994), ‘Agriculture’, in J. Don Vann and Rosemary T. VanArsdel (eds), Victorian Periodicals and Victorian Society, Aldershot: Scolar Press, 235–48.

­

bibliography

781

Cooney, Sondra Miley (1970), ‘Publishers for the People: W. & R. Chambers – The Early Years 1832–1850’, PhD diss., Ohio State University. Cooney, Sondra Miley (2004), ‘Chambers, William (1800–1883)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press; available online at: http:// www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/5084. Cooper, Elena (2016), ‘How Art Was Different: Researching the History of Artistic Copyright’, in Isabella Alexander and H. Tomás Gómez-Arostegui (eds), Research Handbook on the History of Copyright Law, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 158–73. Cooper, Ian (2014), ‘Provincial News Networks in Late Elizabethan Devon’, Historical Research, 87, 237, 404–22. Cooper-Richet, Diana (1999), Galignani, Paris: Galignani. Cooper-Richet, Diana (2002a), ‘Diffusion, distribution et circulation du Galignani’s Messenger (1815–1890), premier quotidien parisien en anglais’, in G. Feyel (ed.), La Distribution et la diffusion de la presse du XVIII° siècle au 3° millénaire, Paris: Éditions Panthéon-Assas, 121–33. Cooper-Richet, Diana (2002b), ‘L’imprimé en langues étrangères à Paris au XIXème siècle: lecteurs, éditeurs, supports’, Revue française du livre, 116–17, 203–35. Cooper-Richet, Diana (2003), ‘La redécouverte des éditions aldines au XIXème siècle. Antoine-Augustin Renouard, bibliophile, collectionneur et passeur de culture’, in Y. Portebois and N. Terpstra (eds), The Renaissance in the Nineteenth Century/ Le XIXème Siècle renaissant, Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 179–97. Cooper-Richet, Diana (2008a), ‘Le musée encyclopédique de Martin Bossange’, in P. Sorel and F. Leblanc (eds), Histoire de la librairie française, Paris: Cercle de la Librairie, 59–60. Cooper-Richet, Diana (2008b), ‘La presse britannique de Paris: modèle et vecteur de transferts culturels’, in J.-Y. Mollier, P. Régnier and A. Vaillant (eds), La Production de l’immatériel. Théories, représentations et pratiques de la culture au XIXème siècle, Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 115–29. Cooper-Richet, Diana (2010), ‘La diffusion du modèle victorien à travers le monde. Le rôle de la presse en anglais publiée en France au XIXème siècle’, in M.-E. Thérenty and A. Vaillant (eds), Presse, nations et mondialisation au XIXème siècle, Paris: Nouveau Monde éditions, 17–32. Cooper-Richet, Diana (2014), ‘Les périodiques anglo-parisiens de la première moitié du XIXème siècle: passeurs de culture et de modèles éditoriaux’, Études Epistémé. Revue de littérature et de civilisation (XVIème–XVIIIème siècle), 26, https://epis​ teme.revues.org/317 (last accessed 9 June 2017). Cooter, Roger and Stephen Pumfrey (1994), ‘Separate Spheres and Public Places: Reflections on the History of Science Popularization and Science in Popular Culture’, History of Science, 32, 237–67. Cordery, Gareth and Joseph S. Meisel (2014), The Humours of Parliament: Harry Furniss’s View of Late-Victorian Political Culture, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Corsi, Pietro (2016), ‘What Do You Mean by a Periodical? Forms and Functions’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 70, 325–41. Cosgrove, Richard A. (1994), ‘Law’, in J. Don Vann and Rosemary T. VanArsdel (eds), Victorian Periodicals and Victorian Society, Aldershot: Scolar Press, 11–21. Cotgreave, A. (1906), ‘Public Libraries without Newsrooms’, The Academy, 22 September, 290.

782

bibliography

Cottrell, C. Robert (2010), Icons of American Popular Culture: From P. T. Barnum to Jennifer Lopez, New York: M. E. Sharpe. Cowan, Robert M. W. (1946), The Newspaper in Scotland: A Study of Its First Expansion, 1815–60, Glasgow: George Outram & Co. Cox, Howard and Simon Mowatt (2015), Revolutions from Grub Street: A History of Magazine Publishing in Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coyer, Megan (2017), Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1817–1858, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Craig, David M. (2010), ‘“High Politics” and the “New Political History”’, The Historical Journal, 53, 2, 453–75. Cranfield, Geoffrey Alan (1978), The Press and Society from Caxton to Northcliffe, London: Longman. Crawford, Emily (1893), ‘Journalism as a Profession for Women’, Contemporary Review, 64, September, 362­­–71. Crewe, Tom (2015), ‘Political Leaders, Communication and Celebrity in Britain, c. 1880–1900’, unpublished PhD diss., Cambridge University. Crouthamel, L. James (1989), Bennett’s New York Herald and the Rise of the Popular Press, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Crouzet, François (1982), The Victorian Economy, trans. A. S. Forster, London: Methuen. Crum, Walter (1855), ‘Sketch of the Life and Labours of Dr. Thomas Thomson’, Proceedings of the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow, 3, 250–64. Crystal, David (1998), ‘Isaac Pitman: The Linguistic Legacy’, English Today, 14, 3, 12–19. Csiszar, Alex (2010), ‘Seriality and the Search for Order: Scientific Print and Its Problems during the Late Nineteenth Century’, History of Science, 48, 161, 399–434. Csiszar, Alex (2017), ‘How Lives Became Lists and Scientific Papers Became Data: Cataloguing Authorship during the Nineteenth Century’, British Journal for the History of Science, 50, 23–60. Csiszar, Alex (2018), The Scientific Journal: Authorship and the Politics of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cullen, L. M (1989), Eason & Son: A History, Dublin: Eason & Son. Curran, David (2010), ‘Media and the Making of British Society, c. 1700–2000’, Media History, 8, 2, 136–54. Curran, James (1978), ‘The Press as an Agency of Social Control’, in David George Boyce, James Curran and Pauline Wingate (eds), Newspaper History: From the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day, London: Constable, 51–75. Curran, James [1977] (1989), ‘Capitalism and the Control of the Press, 1800–1975’, in James Curran, Michael Gurevitch and Janet Woollacott (eds), Mass Communication and Society, London: Edward Arnold, 195–230. Curran, James and Jean Seaton (1991), Power without Responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain, 4th edn, London: Routledge. Curtis, L. Perry Jr. (1997), Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature, rev. edn, Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Curtis, L. Perry Jr. (2001), Jack the Ripper and the London Press, New Haven and London: Yale University Press Cuthell, Lieut-Colonel (1887), ‘Practical Hints on Taxidermy’, Boy’s Own Paper, 3 December, 464, 155–6.

­

bibliography

783

Cziernecki, Ludwig (ed.) (1863), Desiatiletie Vol’noi Russkoi tipografii v Londone, London: Vol’naia Russkaia Tipoografiia. Dagnall, Harry (1994), Creating a Good Impression: Three Hundred Years of the Stamp Office and Stamp Duties, London: HMSO. Dahl, Christopher C. (1981), ‘James Fitzjames Stephen, Charles Dickens, and Double Reviewing’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 14, 2, 51–8. Daly, Ann (2008), ‘The Dublin Medical Press and Medical Authority in Ireland, 1850– 1890’, PhD diss., The National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Daly, Mary and David Dickson (eds) (1990), The Origins of Popular Literacy in Ireland: Language, Change and Educational Development, 1700–1900, Dublin: University College Dublin. Dalziel, G. and Dalziel E. (1901), The Brothers Dalziel: A Record of Fifty Years Work, 1840–1890, London: Methuen and Co. Dance, Charles (1847), ‘Good News for the Ladies!’, The Lady’s Newspaper, 1, 2. Darnton, Robert (1982), ‘What is the History of Books?’, Daedalus, 111, 3, 65–83. DaRosa, Marc (1997), ‘Henry James, Anonymity, and the Press: Journalistic Modernity and the Decline of the Author’, Modern Fiction Studies, 43, 4, 826–59. Darton, F. J. Harvey (1982), Children’s Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Darwin, Charles (1860), ‘On the Fertilization of British Orchids by Insect Agency’, Entomologist’s Weekly Intelligencer, 8, 93–4. Darwin, Charles (1993), ‘To H. T. Stainton 20 June [1860]’, in Charles Darwin, Correspondence of Charles Darwin, ed. Frederick Burkhardt, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, vol. 8, 263. Dauphin, Cécile (1997), ‘Letter-Writing Manuals in the Nineteenth Century’, in Roger Chartier, Alain Boureau and Cécile Dauphin (eds), Correspondence: Models of LetterWriting from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, trans. Christopher Woodall, Cambridge: Polity Press, 112–57. Davies, Ebenezer T. (1981), A New History of Wales: Religion and Society in the Nineteenth Century, Llandybie: Christopher Davies. Davies, Grahame (ed.) (2002), The Chosen People: Wales and the Jews, Bridgend: Seren. Davis, Peter (1998), ‘Sir William Jardine’s Account of the Formation of the Ray Society’, Archives of Natural History, 25, 25–8. Dawson, Carl and John Pfordresher (1979), Matthew Arnold: The Critical Heritage, Prose Writings, vol. 1, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Dawson, Gowan (2004a), ‘The Cornhill Magazine and Shilling Monthlies in MidVictorian Britain’, in Geoffrey Cantor, Gowan Dawson and Graeme Gooday (eds), Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 123–50. Dawson, Gowan (2004b), ‘The Review of Reviews and the New Journalism in LateVictorian Britain’, in Geoffrey Cantor, Gowan Dawson and Graeme Gooday (eds), Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 172–95. Dawson, Gowan (2012), ‘Paleontology in Parts: Richard Owen, William John Broderip, and the Serialization of Science in Early Victorian Britain’, Isis, 103, 4, 637–67. Dawson, Gowan, Richard Noakes and Jonathan R. Topham (2004), ‘Introduction’, in Geoffrey Cantor, Gowan Dawson and Graeme Gooday (eds), Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1–34.

784

bibliography

Dawson, Janis (2013), ‘“Not for girls alone, but for anyone who can relish really good literature”: L. T. Meade, Atalanta, and the Family Literary Magazine’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 46, 4, 475–98. Dawson, John (1885), Practical Journalism. How to Enter Thereon and Succeed. London: Upcott Gill. Previously published in The Bazaar 1884. De Freitas, L. J. (1986), ‘Commercial Engraving on Wood in England, 1700–1880’, PhD diss., Royal College of Art, London. De hÍde, Dubhghlas (1939), Mise agus an Connradh, Dublin: Conradh na Gaeilge. De la Beche, Henry (1834), Letter to George Greenough, 10 November, George Greenough Papers, University College London, Add/7918/1/44. De Maré, Eric S. (1980), The Victorian Wood-block Illustrators, London: Gordon Fraser. de Nie, Michael (2004), The Eternal Paddy: Irish Identity and the British Press, 1798–1882, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. De Ridder, Jolein (2010), ‘What? How? Why? Broadening the Mind with the Treasury of Literature (1868–1875), Supplement to the Ladies’ Treasury (1857–1895)’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 43, 174–95. de Vries, Leonard and Laver, James (1968), Victorian Advertisements, London: John Murray. de Waard, Marco and Matthew Tildesley (2009), ‘Professional Journals’, in Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (eds), Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism, Ghent and London: Academia Press and British Library, 509–10. Deacon’s Newspaper Handbook and Advertiser’s Guide (1877–94), London: Samuel Deacon. Deane, Phyllis (1965), The First Industrial Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Della Paolera, Geraldo and Alan M. Taylor (2001), Straining at the Anchor: The Argentine Currency Board and the Search for Macroeconomic Stability, 1880–1935, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Demoor, Marysa (2000), Their Fair Share: Women, Power and Criticism in the Athenaeum, from Millicent Garrett Fawcett to Katherine Mansfield, 1870–1920, Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate. Dennis, Ronald D. (ed. and trans.) (2001), Zion’s Trumpet: 1849 Welsh Mormon Periodical, Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University. Dennis, Ronald D. (2014), ‘The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints (Mormons)’, in Richard C. Allen and David Ceri Jones (eds), The Religious History of Wales: A Survey of Religious Life and Practice from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day, Cardiff: Welsh Academic Press, 167–9. Denvir, John (1910), The Life Story of an Old Rebel, Dublin: Sealy, Bryers & Walker. Desbordes, Rhoda (2008) ‘Representing “Informal Empire” in the Nineteenth Century’, Media History, 14, 2, 121–39. Devoy, John (1929), Recollections of an Irish Rebel, New York: Charles P. Young & Co. Dickens, Charles (1837), ‘Full report of the first meeting of the Mudfog Association for the Advancement of Everything’, Bentley’s Miscellany, 2, 397–413. Dickens, Charles (1977), Letters of Charles Dickens, 1844–1846, ed. Kathleen Tillotson, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dickson, P. G. M. (1960), The Sun Insurance Office, 1710–1960: The History of Two and a Half Centuries of British Insurance, London: Oxford University Press.

­

bibliography

785

Dillon, Virginia (2016), ‘From Vienna, Prague or Poland? The Effects of Changing Reporting Patterns on the Ceremonial News of Transylvania, 1619–58’, in Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham (eds), News Networks in Early Modern Europe, Leiden: Brill, 824–48. Dixon, Diana (1986a), ‘Children and the Press, 1866–1914’, in Michael Harris and Alan Lee (eds), The Press in English Society from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries, London: Associated University Presses, 133–48. Dixon, Diana (1986b), ‘From Instruction to Amusement: Attitudes of Authority in Children’s Periodicals Before 1914’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 19, 2, 63–7. Dixon, Diana (1989), ‘The Two Faces of Death: Children’s Magazines and their Treatment of Death in the Nineteenth Century’, in Ralph Houlbrooke (ed.), Death, Ritual, and Bereavement, London: Routledge, 136–50. Dixon, Diana (2001a), ‘Children’s Magazines and Science in the Nineteenth Century’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 34, 3, 228–38. Dixon, Diana (2001b), ‘New Town, New Newspapers: The Development of the Newspaper Press in Nineteenth-Century Middlesbrough’, in Peter Isaac and Barry McKay (eds), The Moving Market: Continuity and Change in the Book Trade, New Castle: Oak Knoll, 107–16. Donaldson, William (1986), Popular Literature in Victorian Scotland: Language, Fiction and the Press, Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Doran, Amanda-Jane (1991), ‘The Development of the Full-Page Wood Engraving in Punch’, Journal of Newspaper and Periodical History, 7, 2, 48–63. Dowling, Vincent (1846), Fistiana; or, the Oracle of the Ring, 6th edn, London: William Clement, Junior. Drotner, Kirsten (1988), English Children and Their Magazines, 1751–1945, New Haven: Yale University Press. Drucker, Johanna and Emily McVarish (2009), Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide, Upper Saddle River: Pearson Education. Duffy, Charles Gavan (1880), Young Ireland: A Fragment of Irish History, London: Cassell, Peter, Galpin & Co. Duffy, Charles Gavan (1890), Thomas Davis: The Memoirs of an Irish Patriot, 1840–1846, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Dunae, Patrick A. (1976), ‘Boy’s Own Paper: Origins and Editorial Policies’, Private Library (Journal of the Private Libraries Association), 9, 4, 122–58. Dunae, Patrick A. (1979), ‘Penny Dreadfuls: Late Nineteenth Century Boys’ Literature and Crime’, Victorian Studies, 22, 2, 133–50. Dunbar, Robert (2019), ‘Gaelic Periodicals and the Maintenance and Creation of Networks: Evidence from the Eastern Canadian Gàidhealtachd’, in Michael Byrne and Sheila M. Kidd (eds), Lìontan Lìonmhor: Local, National and Global Gaelic Networks from the 18th to the 20th Century, Glasgow: Celtic and Gaelic, University of Glasgow, 108–52. Easley, Alexis (2004), First-Person Anonymous: Women Writers and Victorian Print Media, 1830–1870, Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate. Easley, Alexis (2011), Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authorship, 1850–1914, Newark: University of Delaware Press. Easley, Alexis (2015), ‘Making a Debut’, in Linda H. Peterson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Writing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 15–28. Eason & Son Limited, 1886–1936 (1936), Dublin: Eason & Son.

786

bibliography

Ecclesiastical Gazette, or Monthly Register of the Affairs of the Church of England, and of Its Religious Societies and Institutions (1839), vol. 1. Edelman, Maurice (1966), The Mirror – A Political History, London: Hamish Hamilton. Edinburgh Typographical Society (1902), Scales of Prices Agreed to by the Employers and Journeymen Printers of Edinburgh, Edinburgh: Edinburgh Typographical Society. Edoff, Erik (2018), ‘Stockholm Mot Landsorten: Stockholmsbrev Och 1800-Talets Landsortspress Som Nätverk’ [Stockholm versus the Province: Stockholm Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Provincial Press as a Network], in Alf Arvidsson (ed.), Perspektiv På Kulturpolitik [Perspectives on Cultural Policies], Stockholm. Edwards, Owen Dudley (1979), ‘The Catholic Press in Scotland since the Restoration of the Hierarchy’, in David McRoberts (ed.), Modern Scottish Catholicism, 1878–1978, Glasgow: Burns and Sons, 156–82. Edwards, Owen Dudley and Patricia Storey (1985), ‘The Irish Press in Victorian Britain’, in Sheridan Gilley and Roger Swift (eds), The Irish in the Victorian City, London: Croom Helm, 158–78. Edwards, P. D. (2004), ‘Reach, Angus Bethune (1821–1856)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press; available online at: http:// www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/23213. Edwards, Ruth Dudley (1993), The Pursuit of Reason: The Economist, 1843–1993, London: Hamish Hamilton. Egoff, Sheila A. (1951), Children’s Periodicals of the Nineteenth Century: A Survey and Bibliography, Library Association Pamphlet No. 8, London: Library Association. Eliot, George [1859] (1960), Adam Bede, New York: New American Library. Eliot, Simon (1994), Some Patterns and Trends in British Publishing, 1800–1919, Occasional Papers Number 8, London: The Bibliographical Society. Eliot, Simon and John Sutherland (1988), The Publishers’ Circular, 1837–1900: Guide to the Microfiche Edition, Cambridge: Chadwyck Healey. Ellegard, Alvar (1957), The Readership of the Periodical Press in Mid-Victorian Britain, Stockholm: Goteborg Press. Ellis, Markman (2004), The Coffee-House: A Cultural History, London: Phoenix. Elson, George (1900), The Last of the Climbing Boys, London: Long. ‘Emergence of a Feminist Critical Tradition’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 29, 2, 159–72. Endres, Kathleen (1994), Trade, Industrial and Professional Periodicals of the United States, Westport: Greenwood Press. Engel, Matthew (1996), Tickle the Public: One Hundred Years of the Popular Press, London: Gollancz. Epps, John (1845), The Rejected Cases; with a Letter to Thomas Wakley on the Scientific Character of Homoeopathy, London: Sherwood & Company. Epstein, James, A. (1994), Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790–1850, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Erber, Nancy (1996), ‘The French Trials of Oscar Wilde’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 6, 4, 549–88. Escott, T. H. S. (1875), ‘Old and New in the Daily Press’, Quarterly Review, 227, 368. Escott, T. H. S. (1879), Pillars of the Empire: Sketches of Living Indian and Colonial Statesmen, Celebrities and Officials, London: Chapman & Hall. Evans, W. G. (1992), ‘Introduction’, in John C. L. Gibson [1891], The Emancipation of Women, 2nd edn, Llandysul: Gomer Press, 7–55.

­

bibliography

787

Ewerlöf, Frans Anton (1833), ‘A Short Account of the State of Education in Norway’ (1833), Quarterly Journal of Education, 5, 9, 234–44. Ewerlöf, Frans (July 1834), Draft letter to Thomas Coates, F. A. Ewerlöfs samling, Lund University Library. Fawcett, T. (1986), ‘Graphic versus Photographic in the Nineteenth Century Reproduction’, Art History, 9, 2, 185–212. Faxon, Frederick W. (1973), Literary Annuals and Gift Books: A Bibliography, 1823– 1903 (1912), Boston: Private Libraries Association. Feeley, Catherine (2014). ‘“What say you to free trade in literature?” The Thief and the Politics of Piracy in the 1830s’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 19, 4, 497–506. Finch, Alan (1965), Pens & Ems in Australia, Adelaide: Rigby Ltd. Findlater, A. (ed.) (1868), Chambers’s Encyclopaedia: A Dictionary of Universal Knowledge, Edinburgh: W. & R. Chambers. Finkelstein, David (2002), The House of Blackwood: Author–Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era, University Park: Pennsylvania University Press. Finkelstein, David (2016), ‘Periodicals in Scotland’, in Andrew King, Alexis Easley and John Morton (eds), The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century Periodicals and Newspapers, London: Routledge, 185–93. Finkelstein, David (2018), Movable Types: Roving Creative Printers of the Victorian World, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Finkelstein, David and Douglas M. Peers (2000), ‘A Great System of Circulation’, in David Finkelstein and Douglas M. Peers (eds), Negotiating India in the NineteenthCentury Media, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1–22. Fleck, Ludwik (1979), Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fleming Neil C. and Alan O’Day (2005), The Longman Handbook of Modern Irish History since 1800, Harlow: Pearson Longman. Flint, Kate (1995), The Woman Reader, 1837–1914, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Flynn, Michael J. (2016), ‘E. S. Dallas, Mid-Victorian Individualism, and the Form of the Book Review’, Nineteenth-Century Prose, 43, 1/2, 49–64. Foggo, Nick (2014), ‘Liverpool Albion (1825–87)’, in Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (eds),  Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism.  Online edition, in C19: The Nineteenth Century Index, ProQuest. Foreman-Peck, James (1989), ‘Competition, Co-operation and Nationalisation in the Nineteenth-Century Telegraph System’, Business History, 31, 3, 81–101 Forsell, Carl af (1832), Letter to Frans Ewerlöf, 6 December, F. A. Ewerlöfs samling, Lund University Library. Forsell, Carl af (1833), Letter to Frans Ewerlöf, 14 February, F. A. Ewerlöfs samling, Lund University Library. Forsell, Carl af (1833), Letter to Frans Ewerlöf, 4 March, F. A. Ewerlöfs samling, Lund University Library. Forsell, Carl af (1835), Letter to Frans Ewerlöf, 17 March, F. A. Ewerlöfs samling, Lund University Library. Forsell, Carl af (1835a), Anteckningar i anledning af en resa till England i slutet af ­sommaren år 1834, Stockholm: Hörberg. Forsell, Carl af (1835b), ‘A Short Account of the State of Education in Sweden’ (1835), Quarterly Journal of Education, 10, 19, 33–53. Foster, Roy (1987), ‘Anglo-Irish Literature, Gaelic Nationalism and Irish Politics in the 1890s’, Ireland after the Union: Proceedings of the Second Joint Meeting of the Royal

788

bibliography

Irish Academy and the British Academy, London, 1986, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foster, Roy F. (1989), Modern Ireland, 1600–1972, London: Penguin Books. Foster, W. D. (1984), Pathology as a Profession in Great Britain and the Early History of the Royal College of Pathologists, London: Royal College of Pathologists. Fox Bourne, Henry Richard (1887), English Newspapers. Chapters in the History of Journalism, 2 vols, London: Chatto & Windus. Reprinted London: Routledge/ Thoemmes Press, https://archive.org/details/englishnewspaper02bouriala. Frampton, Sally (2016), ‘Honour and Subsistence: Invention, Credit and Surgery in the Nineteenth Century’, British Journal for the History of Science, 49, 4, 561–76. Francou, Jean-Benoît (1999), ‘Baudry, un éditeur pirate du XIXème siècle ou l’histoire de la Librairie européenne (1815–1852)’, MA diss., University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. Fraser, Hilary, Stephanie Green and Judith Johnston (2003), Gender and the Victorian Periodical, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fraser, W. Hamish (1996), ‘Alexander Campbell’ and ‘Alexander Campbell and Some “Lost” Unstamped Newspapers’, Scottish Labour History Journal, 31, 35–50. Frawley, Maria (1998), ‘The Editor as Advocate: Emily Faithfull and the Victoria Magazine’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 31, 87–104. Frendo, Henry (2004), ‘The Press and Media in Malta’, Arbeitshefte internationaler Journalismus/Working Papers in International Journalism, 4. Friedrichs, Hulda (1911), The Life of Sir George Newnes, London: Hodder & Stoughton. Frost, Mark R. (2004), ‘Asia’s Maritime Networks and the Colonial Public Sphere, 1840–1920’, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, 6, 2, 63–94. Frost, Thomas (1888), Reminiscences of a Country Journalist, London: Ward & Downey. F.R.S. (1869), ‘Catalogue of Scientific Papers’, Athenaeum, 16 January, 99–100. Furlong, Claire (2016), ‘Health Advice in Popular Periodicals: Reynold’s Miscellany, the Family Herald, and their Correspondents’, Victorian Periodicals Review 49, 1, 28–48. Fyfe, Aileen (2004), Science and Salvation: Evangelical Popular Science Publishing in Victorian Britain, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fyfe, Aileen (2012), Steam-Powered Knowledge: William Chambers and the Business of Publishing, 1820–1860, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fyfe, Aileen and Noah Moxham (2016), ‘Making Public Ahead of Print: Meetings and Publications at the Royal Society, 1752–1892’, Notes and Records, 70, 361–79. Fyfe, Gordon J. (1985), ‘Art and Reproduction: Some Aspects of the Relations between Painters and Engravers in London, 1760–1850’, Media, Culture and Society 7, 4, 399–425. Fyfe, Henry Hamilton (1949), Sixty Years of Fleet Street, London: W. H. Allen. Galignani, Giovanni Antonio (1818), ‘Preface’, The Monthly Repertory, vol. XXIV. Galtung, Johan and Mari H. Ruge (1965), ‘The Structure of Foreign News’, Journal of Peace Research, 2, 1, 64–91. Gardner, Victoria E. M. (2016), The Business of News in England, 1760–1820, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Garland, Nicholas (1988), ‘Political Cartooning’, in John Durant and Jonathan Miller (eds), Laughing Matters: A Serious Look at Humour, London: Longman, 75–89. Garrett, Delia (2003), ‘Primitive Methodist Circuits in the English and Welsh Borderland’, Rural History: Economy, Society, Culture, 14, 1, 39–80.

­

bibliography

789

Garrigan, Kristine O. (1989), ‘Bearding the Competition: John Ruskin’s Academy Notes’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 22, 4, 148–56. Garvey, Ellen Gruber (2013), ‘Scissorizing and Scrapbooks: Nineteenth-Century Reading, Remaking, and Recirculating’, in Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree (eds), New Media, 1740–1915, London: MIT Press, 207–28. Garvin, Tom (1987), Nationalist Revolutionaries in Ireland, 1858­­–1928, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gascoigne, Robert Mortimer (1985), A Historical Catalogue of Scientific Periodicals, 1665–1900: With a Survey of Their Development, New York: Garland. Gaskell, Beth (2017), ‘Bibliographic Issues: Titles, Numbers, Frequencies’, in Alexis Easley, Andrew King and John Morton (eds), Researching the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Case Studies, Abingdon: Routledge, 46–59. Gaskell, Elizabeth (1994), Cranford, London: Penguin Books. Gaskell, Philip (1972), A New Introduction to Bibliography, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gaskell, S. Martin (1983), Building Control: National Legislation and the Introduction of Local Bye-Laws in Victorian England, London: British Association for Local History. Gelber, Steven M. (1999), Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America, New York: Columbia University Press. Gifford, Denis (1976), Victorian Comics, London: George Allen & Unwin. Gilmartin, Kevin (1996), Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Glasgow, Eric (1954), ‘The Establishment of the Northern Star Newspaper’, History, February and June, 54–67. Gliddon, Paul (2003), ‘The Political Importance of the Provincial Newspapers, 1903– 1945: The Rowntrees and the Liberal Press’, Twentieth Century British History, 14, 1, 24–42. Goddard, Nicholas (1983), ‘The Development and Influence of Agricultural Periodicals and Newspapers, 1780­­–1880’, The Agricultural History Review, 31, 116–31. Golby, John (1997), ‘Newspapers’, in Michael Drake and Ruth Finnegan (eds), Studying Family and Community History: 19th and 20th Centuries, Volume 4: Sources and Methods for Family and Community Historians: A Handbook, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press/The Open University. Goldgar, Bertrand A. (1994) ‘Fact, Fiction and Letters to the Editor in Fielding’s EssayJournals’, in Michael Harris (ed.), Studies in Newspaper and Periodical History, Westport: Greenwood Press, 19–26. Goldman, Lawrence (2002), Science, Reform and Politics in Victorian Britain: The Social Science Association, 1857–1886, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goldsworthy, Simon (2006), ‘English Nonconformity and the Pioneering of the Modern Newspaper Campaign’, Journalism Studies, 7, 3, 387–402. Gooday, Graeme (2004), ‘Profit and Prophecy: Electricity in the Late-Victorian Periodical’, in Geoffrey Cantor, Gowan Dawson and Graeme Gooday (eds), Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 238–54. Goodlad, Lauren (2003), Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

790

bibliography

Graham, Charles Irvine [n.d.], website, at http://prabook.com/web/person-view. html?profileId=1392719 (accessed 23 August 2018). Grant, James (1871), The Newspaper Press: Its Origin, Progress and Present Position, 2 vols, London: Tinsley Brothers. Gratton, Charles J. (1860), The Gallery. A Sketch of the History of Parliamentary Reporting and Reporter, London: Pitman. Gray, Donald (1972), ‘A List of Comic Periodicals Published in Great Britain, 1800– 1900, with a Prefatory Essay’, Victorian Periodicals Newsletter, 5, 1, 2–39. Gray, F. Elizabeth (2004), ‘Beatification through Beautification: Poetry in The Christian Lady’s Magazine, 1834–1849’, Victorian Poetry, 42, 3, 261–82. Gray, Valerie (2006), Charles Knight: Educator, Publisher, Writer, Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate. Green, H. M. (1936), ‘Australia’s First Newspaper and Its Founder’, in J. A. Ferguson, A. G. Foster and H. M. Green (eds), The Howes and Their Press, Sydney: Sunnybrook Press, 93–100. Green, S. (1930), The Making of an Editor: W. L. Courtney, 1850–1928, London: Macmillan & Co. Gretton, Tom (2000), ‘Difference and Competition: The Imitation and Reproduction of Fine Art in a Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Weekly News Magazine’, Oxford Art Journal, 23, 2, 145–62. Gretton, Tom (2015), ‘Waterloo in Richard Caton Woodville’s “Battles of the British Army” Series for the Illustrated London News, 1893–99’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 48, 4, 531–56. Griffiths, Dennis (1992), ‘Stead, William Thomas (1849–1912)’, in D. Griffiths (ed.), The Encyclopaedia of the British Press, 1422–1992, London: Macmillan, 532. Griffiths, Dennis (1996), Plant Here the Standard, London: Macmillan. Grigg, John (1993), The History of the Times: The Thomson Years, 1966–1981, London: Times Books. Gross, John (1969), The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Groves, J. B. ‘Rambling Recollections and Modern Thoughts by an Old Engraver’, Incomplete Manuscript (London: Punch Archive, 1915). Gurney, P. (2001), ‘An Appropriated Space: The Great Exhibition, the Crystal Palace and the Working Class’, in L. Purbrick (ed.), The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 114–45. Hadjiafxendi, Kyriaki and Patricia Zakreski (eds) (2013), Crafting the Woman Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century, Aldershot: Ashgate. Haffemayer, Stéphane (2016), ‘Public and Secret Networks of News: The Declaration  of  War of the Turks against the Empire in 1683’, in Joad Raymond and  Noah Moxham (eds), News Networks in Early Modern Europe, Leiden: Brill, 805–23. Hagglund, Betty (2013), ‘Quakers and Print Culture’, in Stephen W. Angell and Pink Dandelion (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Quaker Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 477–91. Hahn, H. Hazel (2009), Scenes of Parisian Modernity: Culture and Consumption in the Nineteenth Century, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hall, Catherine and Sonya Rose (eds) (2006), At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

­

bibliography

791

Hall, Stuart (1973), ‘The Determinations of News Photographs’, in Stanley Cohen and Jock Young (eds), The Manufacture of News: Social Problems, Deviance and the Mass Media, London: Constable, 176–90. Hamilton, John Maxwell (2004), ‘Redefining Foreign Correspondence’, Journalism, 5, 3, 301–21. Hammond’s List of London and Provincial Newspapers, Periodicals, &c. (1850), London: Hammond. Hampton, Mark (2004a), ‘Liberalism, the Press and the Construction of the Public Sphere: Theories of the Press in Britain’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 37, 1, 72–92. Hampton, Mark (2004b), Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Harcup, Tony and Deirdre O’Neill (2001), ‘What Is News? Galtung and Ruge Revisited’, Journalism Studies, 2, 2, 261–80. Harris, Bob (2005), ‘Scotland’s Newspapers, the French Revolution and Domestic Radicalism (c. 1789–1794)’, The Scottish Historical Review, 84, 217, 38–62. Harris, Janice H. (1986), ‘Not Suffering and Not Still: Women Writers at the Cornhill Magazine, 1860–1900’, Modern Language Quarterly, 47, 4, 382–92. Harris, Jose (1972), Unemployment and Politics: A Study in English Social Policy, 1886–1914, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Harris, Jose (1993), Private Lives, Public Spirit: A Social History of Britain, 1870–1914, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harris, Katherine D. (2015), Forget Me Not: The Rise of the British Literary Annual, 1823–1835, Athens: Ohio University Press. Harris, Michael (1983), ‘Journalism as a Profession or Trade in the Eighteenth Century’, in R. Myers and M. Harris (eds), Author/Publisher Relations during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Press, 37–62. Harris, Michael (1990), ‘London’s Local Newspapers: Patterns of Change in the Victorian Period’, in Laurel Brake, Aled Jones and Lionel Madden, Investigating Victorian Journalism, London: Macmillan, 104–19. Harris, Michael and Alan J. Lee (1978), The Press in English Society from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century, London and Toronto: Associated University Presses. Harrison, Debbie (2009), ‘All the Lancet’s Men. Reactionary Gentleman Physicians v. Radical General Practitioners in the Lancet, 1823–1832’, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 5, 2, Summer, available online at: http://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue52/ harrison.htm. Harrison, Mark (1992), ‘Tropical Medicine in Nineteenth-Century India’, British Journal for the History of Science, 25, 3, 299–318. Hart-Davies, Duff (1990), The House the Berrys Built: Inside the Telegraph, 1928–1986, London: Hodder & Stoughton. Hartley, Harold (1939), Eighty-Eight Not Out: A Record of Happy Memories, London: Frederick Muller. Harvey, Ross (2002), ‘Bringing the News to New Zealand: The Supply and Control of Overseas News in the Nineteenth Century’, Media History, 8, 1, 21–34. Haskins, Katherine (2016), The Art-Journal and Fine Art Publishing in Victorian England, 1850–1880, London: Routledge. Haslam, J. H. (1906), The Press and the People: An Estimate of Reading in WorkingClass Districts, Manchester: Manchester City News. Hatch, H. B. and A. A. Steward (1918), Electrotyping and Stereotyping, Chicago: United Typothetae of America. 

792

bibliography

Hatton, Joseph (1882), Journalistic London: Being a Series of Sketches of Famous Pens and Papers of the Day; Chapters in the History of British Journalism, vol. 5, London: Routledge/Thoemmes. Havighurst, Alfred F. (1994), Radical Journalist: H. W. Massingham (1860–1924), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hawkins, Angus (2015), Victorian Political Culture: ‘Habits of Heart and Mind’, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hawkins, Richard (2009), ‘Philip Barron’, in James McGuire and James Quinn (eds), Dictionary of Irish Biography, vol. 1, Dublin: Royal Irish Academy/New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 317. Hayes, J. C. (1989), ‘Guide to Tipperary Newspapers (1770–1989)’, Tipperary Historical Journal, 1–16. Hazlitt, William (1823), ‘The Periodical Press’, in Hazlitt, The Complete Works. Centenary Edition, ed. P. P. Howe, vol. 16, London: Dent, 1930–4. H.C.F. (1890), ‘To Members of Bands’, Band of Mercy, 133, 2. Healey, R.M. (1993), ‘The People’s Friend’, in Sam G. Riley (ed.), Consumer Magazines of the British Isles, Westport: Greenwood Press, 139–45. Hempton, David (1985), Methodism and Politics in British Society, 1750–1850, London: Hutchinson Press. Henderson, Robert (2009), ‘International Collaboration in the Persecution of Russian Political Émigrés: The European Pursuit of Vladimir Burtsev’, Revolutionary Russia, 22, 1, 21–36. Hendrick, Harry (1997), Children, Childhood and English Society, 1880–1990, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hendrix, Richard (1976), ‘Popular Humor and “The Black Dwarf ”’, Journal of British Studies, 16, 1, 108–28. Henry, Neil (2007), American Carnival: Journalism under Siege in an Age of New Media, Berkeley: University of California Press. Henson, Louise et al. (eds) (2004), Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Media, Aldershot: Ashgate. Herbert, John R. (1972), ‘Piracy of Reputation’ [Letter to the Editor], The Times, 19 December, 3. Herschel, John F. W. (1816), Letter to Charles Babbage, 14 July, John Herschel Papers, Royal Society of London, 2/64. Herstein, Sheila (1985), A Mid-Victorian Feminist, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, New Haven: Yale University Press. Herstein, Sheila (1993), ‘The Langham Place Circle and Feminist Periodicals of the 1860s’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 26, 24–7. Herzen, Alexander [Aleksandr Ivanovich Gertsen] (1954–65), Pol’noe sobranie sochinenii v 30-kh tomakh, Moscow: Akademiia Nauk. Herzen, Alexander (1968), My Past and Thoughts, 4 vols, trans. Constance Garnett, revised Humphrey Higgens, London: Chatto & Windus. Hewitt, Martin (2015), The Dawn of the Cheap Press in Victorian Britain: The End of the ‘Taxes on Knowledge’, 1849–1869, London: Bloomsbury. Heyd, Uriel (2012), Reading Newspapers: Press and Public in Eighteenth-Century Britain and America, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hickox, Mike (2013), ‘The Political Background to The Death of Chatterton by Henry Wallis’, The Victorian Web, http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/wallis/paintings/ hickox.html (accessed 11 April 2017).

­

bibliography

793

Hickox, Mike (2014), ‘The Stonebreaker by Henry Wallis’, The Victorian Web, http:// www.victorianweb.org/painting/wallis/paintings/hickox3.html (accessed 11 April 2017). Higginbottom, Frederick (1934), The Vivid Life: A Journalist’s Career, London: Simpkin Marshall. Hilton, Boyd (2006), A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People? England, 1783–1846, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hilton, Matthew (2012), ‘Consumer Movements’, in Frank Trentmann (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 505–20. Hindle, Wilfred (1937), The Morning Post, 1772–1937: Portrait of a Newspaper, London: Routledge. Hirsch, Pam (1998), Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, 1827–1891: Feminist, Artist and Rebel, New York: Chatto & Windus. Hirschmann, Edwin (2008), Robert Knight: Reforming Editor in Victorian India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Hobbs, Andrew (ed.) (2009a), ‘Local and Regional Newspapers’, special issue of International Journal of Regional and Local Studies, 5, 1, 1–120. Hobbs, Andrew (2009b), ‘When the Provincial Press Was the National Press (c.1836– c.1900)’, International Journal of Regional and Local History, 5, 1, 16–43. Hobbs, Andrew (2012), ‘London’s Late Adoption of the New Journalism, and What It Tells Us about the Structure of the Victorian Press’, paper presented at the W. T. Stead centenary conference held at the British Library, 16–17 April. Hobbs, Andrew (2013a), ‘The Deleterious Dominance of The Times in NineteenthCentury Scholarship’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 18, 4, 472–97. Hobbs, Andrew (2013b), ‘Watts, Alaric Alexander’, in Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism, Chadwyck-Healey, available online at: http://c19index.chadwyck.co.uk/ home.do (last accessed 23 August 2018). Hobbs, Andrew (2016), ‘Provincial Periodicals’, in Andrew King, Alexis Easley and John Morton (eds), The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, London: Routledge, 221–33. Hodacs, Hanna (2003), Converging World Views: The European Expansion and Early-Nineteenth-Century Anglo-Swedish Contacts, Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Hodgskin, Thomas (1824), ‘Apology and Preface’, The Chemist, 1, v–viii. Hodgson, William (1884), Sketches Personal and Pensive, Edinburgh: David Douglas. Hofmeyr, Isabel (2013), Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Hogg, J. (1833), ‘Emigration’, in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 68. Höjer, Henrik (2007), Sveriges argaste liberal: Carl af Forsell, officer, statistiker och filantrop, Stockholm: Norstedts. Holdridge, Christopher (2010), ‘Circulating the African Journal: The Colonial Press and Trans-Imperial Britishness in the Mid Nineteenth-Century Cape’, South African Historical Journal, 62, 3, 487–513. Hollis, Patricia (1970), The Pauper Press: A Study in Working Class Radicalism of the 1830s, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hooper, David (1988), Official Secrets: The Use and Abuse of the Act, London: Coronet Books. Hopkin, David (1970), ‘Domestic Censorship in the First World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 5, 4, 151–69.

794

bibliography

Hopkins, Eric (1994), Childhood Transformed: Working-Class Children in NineteenthCentury England, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hoppen, K. Theodore (1984), Elections, Politics and Society in Ireland, 1832–1885, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hoppen, K. Theodore (1998), The Mid-Victorian Generation, 1846–1886, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Horgan, John (2001), Irish Media: A Critical History since 1922, London and New York: Routledge. Horn, Pamela (1995), Children’s Work and Welfare, 1780–1890, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hoskins, William George (1984), Local History in England, 3rd edn, London: Longman. Houston, Fiona (2000), ‘Nineteenth-Century Wood Engraving in Scotland’, MA diss., University of St Andrews. Howard-Hill, Trevor (2007), ‘Printing’, in Bill Bell (ed.), The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 33–49. Howe, Anthony (1997), Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846–1946, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Howe, Daniel Walker (2007), What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Huett, L. (2005), ‘Among the Unknown Public: Household Words, All the Year Round and the Mass-Market Weekly Periodical in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 38, 1, 61–82. Hughes, Kathryn (2005), The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton, London: Fourth Estate. Hughes, Linda K. (2014), ‘SIDEWAYS!: Navigating the Material(ity) of Print Culture’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 47, 1, 1–30. Humpherys, Anne (2009), ‘Answers’, in Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (eds), Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland, Ghent and London: Academia Press and the British Library, 19–20. Humphreys, E. Morgan (1945), Y Wasg Gymraeg, Liverpool: Hugh Evans a’i Feibion. Hunt, Frederick Knight (1850), The Fourth Estate, 2 vols, London: Bogue. Hunt, Tamara L. (1996), ‘Louisa Henrietta Sheridan’s Comic Offering and the Critics: Gender and Humor in the Early Victorian Era’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 29, 2, 95–115. Hunt, William (1887), Then and Now: Or, Fifty Years of Newspaper Work, London: Hamilton Adams & Co. Huntzicker, William E. (1989), ‘Frank Leslie (Henry Carter)’, Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 79, Ann Arbor: Gale, 209–21. Huxley, Leonard (ed.) (1900), Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, vol. 1, London: Macmillan & Co. Huysmans, Joris-Karl [1884] (1977), À rebours, Paris: Gallimard. Inglis, Kenneth S. (1963), Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Innes, Joanna and Arthur Burns (2007), ‘Introduction’, in Arthur Burns and Joanna Innes (eds), Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain, 1780–1850, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1–70. Innis, Harold A. (1951), The Bias of Communication, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

­

bibliography

795

Irish Masonic History (2017), http://www.irishmasonichistory.com/victoria-lodge-noiv-past-masters-jewel-1939.html (last accessed 23 August 2018). Isaacs, George A. (1931), The Story of the Newspaper Press, London: Co-operative Printing Society. Ishii, Kanji (1994), Jōhō tsūshin no shakaishi: Kindai Nihon no jōhōka to shijōka [The Social History of Information and Telecommunications: The Information Society and Marketization in Modern Japan], Tokyo: Yūhikaku. Ives, Keith (2011), Voice of Nonconformity: William Robertson Nicoll and the British Weekly, London: Lutterworth Press. Ivins, Jr., William M. (1953, 1969), Prints and Visual Communication, Da Capo Press Series in Graphic Art, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jackson, Alexander (2009), ‘Football Coverage in the Papers of the Sheffield Telegraph, c.1890–1915’, in Andrew Hobbs (ed.), ‘Local and Regional Newspapers’, special issue of International Journal of Regional and Local Studies, 5, 1, 63–84. Jackson, Andrew J. H. (2010), ‘Provincial Newspapers and the Development of Local Communities: The Creation of a Seaside Resort Newspaper for Ilfracombe, Devon, 1860–1’, Family & Community History, 13, 2, 101–13. Jackson, Andrew J. H. (2015), ‘Civic Identity, Municipal Governance and Provincial Newspapers: The Lincoln of Bernard Gilbert, Poet, Critic and “Booster”, 1914’, Urban History, 42, 1, 113–29. Jackson, Andrew J. H. (2018), ‘REF, TEF, and KEF; and the “Research-Informed” Teaching and Co-production Traditions in Local History: Analysing Provincial Newspapers’, International Journal of Regional and Local History, 13, 1, 68–85. Jackson, Andrew J. H., Arran Hart, Tracey Jones and Rachel Maxey (2015), ‘Cultural Conflict in Ilfracombe: Fern-Collecting and the Cottage Garden Society’s Prizegiving Controversy of 1860’, The Devon Historian, 84, 117–25. Jackson, Ian (1971), The Provincial Press and the Community, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Jackson, J. and W. A. Chatto (1861), A Treatise on Wood Engraving: Historical and Practical, with Upwards of 300 Illustrations Engraved on Wood, London: Bohn. Jackson, Kate (2000), ‘George Newnes and the “Loyal Tit-Bitites”: Editorial Identity and Textual Interaction in Tit-Bits’, in Laurel Brake, Bill Bell and David Finkelstein (eds), Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 11–26. Jackson, Kate (2001), George Newnes and the New Journalism in Britain, 1880–1910: Culture and Profit, Aldershot: Ashgate. Jackson, Mason (1885), The Pictorial Press: Its Origins and Progress, London: Hurst & Blackett. James, Frank A. J. L. (2004), ‘Reporting Royal Institution Lectures, 1826–1867’, in Geoffrey Cantor and S. Shuttleworth (eds), Science Serialized: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 67–79. James, Henry (1881), Washington Square, The Pension Beaurepas, A Bundle of Letters, London: Macmillan. James, Louis (ed.) (1976), Print and the People, 1819–1851, London: Allen Lane. James, Louis (2004), ‘Reynolds, George William MacArthur (1814–1879)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press; available online at: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/23414. James, Louis (2009), “‘Now Inhale the Gas”: Interactive Readership in Two Victorian Periodicals’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 42, 1, 64–80.

796

bibliography

Jardine, Nick (2004), ‘Etics and Emics (Not to Mention Anemics and Emetics) in the History of the Sciences’, History of Science, 42, 261–78. Jeffreys, James B. (1954), Retail Trading in Britain, 1850–1950, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jeffries, R. (1873), Reporting; Editing and Authorship. Practical Hints for Beginners in Literature, London: John Snow. Jevons, William Stanley (1881), ‘The Rationale of Free Public Libraries’, The Contemporary Review, March, 385–402. Jevons, William Stanley (1977), Papers and Correspondence of William Stanley Jevons, Correspondence, 1873–1878, ed. R. D. Collison Black, vol. 4, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Johannesson, Lena (1982), Xylografi och pressbild: bidrag till trägravyrens och till den svenska bildjournalistikens historia, Stockholm: Nordiska museets handlingar 97. John, Richard J. and Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb (2015), ‘Making News’, in Richard J. John and Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb (eds), Making News: The Political Economy of Journalism in Britain and America from the Glorious Revolution to the Internet, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1–18. Johnes, Martin (2005), ‘United Kingdom’, in David Levinsen and Karen Christensen (eds), Berkshire Encyclopaedia of World Sport, Great Barrington: Berkshire Publishing. Johnson, Jamie W. (2002), ‘The Changing Representation of the Art Public in “Punch”, 1841–1896’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 35, 3, 272–94. Johnson, P. (1988), ‘Conspicuous Consumption and Working-Class Culture in LateVictorian and Edwardian Britain’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 38, 27–42. Johnson, Paul (2010), Making the Market: Victorian Origins of Corporate Capitalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, Samuel (1775), ‘Advertising’, in A Dictionary of the English Language … Abstracted from the Folio Edition, by the author Samuel Johnson, 5th edn, London: W. Strahan. Johnston, Judith with Monica Anderson (eds) (2005), Australia Imagined: Views from the British Periodical Press 1800–1900, Perth: University of Western Australia Press. Jones, Aled Gruffydd (1993), Press, Politics and Society: A History of Journalism in Wales, Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Jones, Aled Gruffydd (1994), ‘Sir John Gibson and the Cambrian News’, Ceredigion: Journal of the Cardiganshire Antiquarians Society, 12, 2, 57–83. Jones, Aled Gruffydd (1996), Powers of the Press: Newspapers, Power and the Public in Nineteenth-Century England, Aldershot: Scolar Press. Jones, Aled Gruffydd (2000a), ‘The Nineteenth-Century Media and Welsh Identity’, in Laurel Brake, Bill Bell and David Finkelstein (eds), Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 310–25. Jones, Aled Gruffydd (2000b), ‘The Welsh Language and Journalism’, in Geraint H. Jenkins (ed.), The Welsh Language and Its Social Domains, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 81–92. Jones, Aled Gruffydd (2002), ‘Print, Language and Identity: Newspapers in Wales since 1804’, 68th IFLA Council and General Conference, 18–24 August 2002, available at: https://archive.ifla.org/IV/ifla68/papers/048-127e.pdf. Jones, Evan Rowland (1885), The Life and Speeches of Joseph Cowen, MP, London: Marston.

­

bibliography

797

Jones, Kimberly Morse (2016), Elizabeth Robins Pennell, Nineteenth-Century Pioneer of Modern Art Criticism, Abingdon: Routledge. Jones, Leonard A. (1888), An Index to Legal Periodical Literature, Boston, MA: The Boston Book Company. Jones, R. Tudur (2004), Congregationalism in Wales, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 176–7. Joshi, Priti (2017), ‘Scissors-and-Paste: Ephemerality and Memorialization in the Archive of Indian Newspapers’, Amodern 7, 1–15. Joyce, James [1922] (1961), Ulysses, New York: Random House. Joyce, James [1914] (1963), ‘Grace’, in Harry Levin (ed.), The Essential James Joyce, London: Penguin. Joyce, James (1966), Letters of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellman, New York: Viking Press. Joyce, Patrick (2013), The State of Freedom: A Social History of the British State since 1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kamper, David Scott (2004), ‘Popular Sunday Newspapers, Respectability and Working Class Culture in Late Victorian Britain’, in Mike Huggins and J. A. Mangan (eds), Disreputable Pleasures: Less Virtuous Victorians at Play, London: Frank Cass, 83–102. Kaukiainen, Yrjö (2001), ‘Shrinking the World: Improvements in the Speed of Information Transmission, c. 1820–1870’, European Review of Economic History, 5, 1–28. Kaul, Chandrika (2003), Reporting the Raj: The British Press and India, c. 1880–1922, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kaul, Chandrika (2013), ‘Media, India and the Raj’, in Andrew S. Thompson (ed.), Writing Imperial Histories, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 188–215. Kelly, Laura (2013), Irish Women in Medicine, c.1880s–1920s: Origins, Education and Careers, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kelly, Thomas (1973), A History of Public Libraries in Great Britain, 1845–1965, London: The Library Association. Kennedy, Thomas C. (2001), British Quakerism, 1860–1920: The Transformation of a Religious Community, New York: Oxford University Press. Kidd, Sheila M. (2010), ‘“A thaghdairean Gaedhealach”: Early Gaelic Electioneering’, in K. E. Nilsen (ed.), Rannsachadh na Gàidhlig 5: Fifth Scottish Gaelic Research Conference, Sydney, Cape Breton: Cape Breton University Press, 116–33. Kidd, Sheila M. (2013), ‘Early Gaelic Periodicals: Knowledge Transfer and Impact’, in C. Ó Baoill and N. R. McGuire (eds), Rannsachadh na Gàidhlig 6, Aberdeen: An Clò Gàidhealach, 177–206. Kidd, Sheila M. (ed.) (2016), Còmhraidhean nan Cnoc: The Nineteenth-Century Gaelic Prose Dialogue, Glasgow: Scottish Gaelic Texts Society. Kidd, Sheila M. (2017), ‘Kangaroos and Cockatoos: Gaelic Literature in the NineteenthCentury Antipodes’, Scottish Literary Review, 9, 2, 1–18. Kihlberg, Leif (1968), Lars Hierta i helfigur, Stockholm: Bonnier. King, Andrew (2004), The London Journal, 1845–1883: Periodicals, Production, and Gender, Aldershot: Ashgate. King, Andrew (2008), ‘Reynolds’ Miscellany, 1846–1849: Advertising Networks and Politics’, in Anne Humpherys and Louis James (eds), G. M. W. Reynolds: NineteenthCentury Fiction, Politics, and the Press, Aldershot: Ashgate, 53–74.

798

bibliography

King, Andrew (2009a), ‘“Army, Navy, Medicine, Law, / Church, Nobility, Nothing at All”: Towards the Study of Gender, the Professions and the Press in the Nineteenth Century’, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 5.2, available at: http://www.ncgs journal.com/issue52/king.htm King, Andrew (2009b), ‘Financial and Commercial Record’, in Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (eds), Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland, Ghent and London: Academia Press and the British Library, 219. King, Andrew (2009c), ‘Financial Journals’, in Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (eds), Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland, Ghent and London: Academia Press and the British Library, 219. King, Andrew (2009d), ‘Nursing Press’, in Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (eds), Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland, Ghent and London: Academia Press and the British Library, 462–4. King, Andrew (2009e), ‘Professions and the Press,’ in Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (eds), Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland, Ghent and London: Academia Press and the British Library, 510–11. King, Andrew (2009f ), ‘Trade Press’, in Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (eds), Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland, Ghent and London: Academia Press and the British Library, 634–5. King, Andrew (2009g), ‘Financial Journals’, in Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (eds), Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland, Ghent and London: Academia Press and the British Library, 219–20. King, Andrew (2009h), ‘Medicine and Journalism’, in Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (eds), Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland, Ghent and London: Academia Press and the British Library, 407–8. King, Andrew (2009i), ‘The Newsagents and Advertisers’ Record’, in Laurel Brake and  Marysa Demoor (eds), Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great  Britain and Ireland, Ghent and London: Academia Press and the British Library, 452. King, Andrew and John Plunkett (eds) (2004), Popular Print Media, 1820–1900, vol. 2, London: Routledge. King, Andrew and John Plunkett (eds) (2005), Victorian Print Media: A Reader, Oxford: Oxford University Press. King, Andrew and Marysa Demoor (eds) (2009), Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 5.2, available at: http://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue52/issue52.htm. King, Andrew, Alexis Easley and John Morton (eds) (2016), Routledge Handbook to British Periodicals and Newspapers, Abingdon: Routledge. King, Peter (2007), ‘Newspaper Reporting and Attitudes to Crime and Justice in LateEighteenth- and Early-Nineteenth-Century London’, Continuity and Change, 22, 1, 73–112. Kingsley, Charles (1855), Glaucus; or, the Wonders of the Shore, Cambridge: Macmillan. Kingsley Martin, Basil (1924), The Triumph of Lord Palmerston: A Study of Public Opinion in England before the Crimean War, London: Allen & Unwin. Kinraide, Rebecca (2006), ‘The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and the Democratization of Learning in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain’, PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison.

­

bibliography

799

Kirby, Ray G. and Musson, A. E. (1975), The Voice of the People, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kirkpatrick, Robert J. (2013), From the Penny Dreadful to the Ha’penny Dreadfuller: A Bibliographic History of the Boys’ Periodical in Britain, 1762–1950, London: British Library. Klancher, Jon P. (1987), The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Knight, Charles (1854), The Old Printer and the Modern Press, London: John Murray. Knight, Charles (1865), Passages of a Working Life during half a century, London: Bradbury & Evans. Knight, Charles A. (2009), A Political Biography of Richard Steele, London: Pickering & Chatto. Knight, Mark (2016), ‘Periodicals and Religion’, in Andrew King, Alexis Easley and John Morton (eds), The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, Abingdon: Routledge, 355–64 Knightley, P. (1989), The First Casualty. From the Crimea to the Falklands: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Myth Maker, London: Pan. Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen (2017), ‘Illustration’, in Joanne Shattock (ed.), Journalism and the Periodical Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 104–25. Korda, A. (2015), Printing and Painting the News in Victorian London: The Graphic and Social Realism, 1869–1881, Farnham: Ashgate. Koss, Stephen (1981, 1984, 1990), The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain, vols 1 and 2, London: Hamish Hamilton/Fontana Press. Kostal, Rande W. (1994), Law and English Railway Capitalism, 1825–1875, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kronick, David A. (1994), ‘Medical “Publishing Societies” in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Bulletin of the Medical Library Association, 82, 3, 277–82. Kubler, George A. (1941), A New History of Stereotyping, New York: J. J. Little & Ives, available at: http://archive.org/details/newhistoryofster00kubl (accessed 23 August 2018). Kunzle, David (1983), ‘Between Broadsheet Caricature and Punch: Cheap Newspaper Cuts for the Lower Classes in the 1830s’, Art Journal, 43, 4, 339–46. Kynaston, David (1988), The Financial Times: A Centenary History, London: Penguin. Kynaston, David (1994), The City of London: A World of Its Own, 1815–1890, London: Chatto & Windus. Laidlaw, Zoë (2005), Colonial Connections, 1815–45: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Laing, Calum (2013), An t-Urramach Iain MacRuairidh: A Bheatha agus na Sgrìobhaidhean aige, Inverness: Clàr. Lake, Brian (1984), British Newspapers: A History and Guide for Collectors, London: Sheppard Press. Lalor, J. F. (1847a), ‘A New Nation’, Nation, 24 April. Lalor, J. F. (1847b), ‘Tenants’ Right and Landlord Law’, Nation, 24 April. Lalor, J. F. (1847c), Nation, 15 May. Lamb, Margaret (1993), ‘Writing Up the Eastern Question in 1835–6’, International History Review, 15, 2, 239–68. Lambie, James (2010), The Story of Your Life: A History of The Sporting Life Newspaper, Leicester: Matador.

800

bibliography

Lampe, Markus and Florian Ploecki (2014), ‘Spanning the Globe: The Rise of Global Communications Systems and the First Globalisation’, Australian Economic History Review, 54, 3, 242–61. Landers, James (2008), ‘Dow Jones and Company’, in Stephen L. Vaughan (ed.), Encyclopaedia of American News Journalism, New York: Routledge, 145–6. Lang, Andrew (1897), The Life and Letters of John Gibson Lockhart, 2 vols, London: John C. Nimmo. Lang, Marjorie (1980), ‘Childhood’s Champions: Mid-Victorian Children’s Periodicals and the Critics’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 13, 1/2, 17–31. Langley, Leanne (1990), ‘The Musical Press in Nineteenth-Century England’, Notes, 46, 583–92. Langley, Leanne (1994), ‘Music’, in J. Don Vann and Rosemary T. VanArsdel (eds), Victorian Periodicals and Victorian Society, Aldershot: Scolar Press, 99–106. Lansdall-Welfare, Thomas, Saatviga Sudhahara, James Thompson, Justin Lewis, The FindMyPast Newspaper Team and Nello Cristiani (2017), ‘Content Analysis of 150 Years of British Periodicals’, Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, 111, 4, E457–E465. Larkin, Felix M. (2007), ‘Mrs Jellyby’s Daughter: Caroline Agnes Gray (1848–1927) and the Freeman’s Journal’, in Felix M. Larkin (ed.), Librarians, Poets and Scholars: A Festschrift for Dónall Ó Luanaigh, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 121–39. Larkin, Felix M. (2009), ‘Martin Thomas Fitzgerald’, in James McGuire and James Quinn (eds), Dictionary of Irish Biography, 9 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Larkin, Felix M. (2010), ‘Two Gentlemen of the Freeman: Thomas Sexton, W. H. Brayden and the Freeman’s Journal, 1892–1916’, in Ciara Breathnach and Catherine Lawless (eds), Visual, Material and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 210–22. Larkin, Felix M. (2013a), ‘Double Helix: Two Elites in Politics and Journalism in Ireland, 1870–1918’, in Ciaran O’Neill (ed.), Irish Elites in the Nineteenth Century, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 125–36. Larkin, Felix M. (2013b), ‘Parnell, Politics and the Press in Ireland’, in Donal McCartney and Pauric Travers (eds), Parnell Reconsidered, Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 76–91. Larkin, Felix M. (2014), ‘Green Shoots of the New Journalism in the Freeman’s Journal, 1877–1890’, in Karen Steele and Michael de Nie (eds), Ireland and the New Journalism, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 35–58. Larkin, Felix M. and Mark O’Brien (eds) (2014), Periodicals and Journalism in Twentieth Century Ireland, Dublin: Four Courts Press. Larousse, Pierre (1872), Grand dictionnaire universel du XIX° siècle, Paris, Administration du Grand dictionnaire du XIX° siècle, vol. VIII. Larsen, Timothy (2011), A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latané, David E. (2007), ‘Charles Molloy Westmacott and the Spirit of the Age’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 40, 1, 44–72. Latané, David E. (2013), William Maginn and the British Press: A Critical Biography, Abingdon: Ashgate. Lauster, Martina (2007), Sketches of the Nineteenth Century: European Journalism and Its Physiologies, 1830–50, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

­

bibliography

801

Lauterbach, Edward Stewart (1961), ‘Fun and Its Contributors: The Literary History of a Victorian Humor Magazine’, PhD diss., University of Illinois. Law, Graham (2000), Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Law, Graham (2016), ‘Distribution’, in Andrew King, Alexis Easley and John Morton (eds), The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, London: Routledge, 42–59. Law, Graham and Robert L. Patten (2009), ‘The Serial Revolution’, in David McKitterick (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. VI. 1830–1914, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 144–71. Lawrence, Jon (1998), Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics in England, 1867–1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lawrence, Jon (2009), Electing Our Masters: The Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth to Blair, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Layard, G. Somes (1901), ‘A Lower-Middle Class Budget’, Cornhill Magazine, X, 656–66. Layard, George Somes (1907), A Great ‘Punch’ Editor, Being the Life, Letters, and Diaries of Shirley Brooks, London: Pitman. Layton’s Handy Newspaper List (1895–1916), London: Charles and Edwin Layton. Leary, Patrick (1994), ‘Fraser’s Magazine and the Literary Life 1830–1847’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 27, 2, Summer, 105–26. Leary, Patrick (2010), The Punch Brotherhood: Table Talk and Print Culture in MidVictorian London, London: The British Library. Leckie, B. (2015), ‘On Print Culture: Mediation, Practice, Politics, Knowledge’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 43, 4, 895–907. Ledbetter, Kathryn (2009), British Victorian Women’s Periodicals: Beauty, Civilization and Poetry, New York: Palgrave. Ledbetter, Kathryn (2015), Victorian Needlework, Santa Barbara: Praeger. Lee, Alan J. (1973), ‘The Management of a Victorian Local Newspaper’, Business History, 15, 2, 131–48. Lee, Alan J. (1976), The Origins of the Popular Press, 1855–1914, London: Croom Helm. Lee, Alan J. (1978), ‘The Structure, Ownership and Control of the Press, 1855–1914’, in George Boyce, James Curran and Pauline Wingate (eds), Newspaper History: From the 17th Century to the Present Day, London: Constable, 117–29. Lee, Robert (2007), The Church of England and the Durham Coalfield, 1918–1926, Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer. Lefanu, W. R. (1937a), ‘British Periodicals of Medicine: A Chronological List’, Bulletin of The Institute of the History of Medicine 5, 8, 735–61. Lefanu, W. R. (1937b), ‘British Periodicals of Medicine: A Chronological List’, Bulletin of The Institute of the History of Medicine, 5, 9, 827–46. Lefanu, W. R. (1938), ‘British Periodicals of Medicine: A Chronological List’, Bulletin of The Institute of the History of Medicine, 6, 6, 614–48. Léger-St-Jean, Marie (2016), ‘Serialization and Story-Telling Illustrations: R. L. Stevenson Window-Shopping for Penny Dreadfuls’, in Paul Raphael Rooney and Anna Gasperini (eds), Media and Print Culture Consumption in NineteenthCentury Britain: The Victorian Reading Experience, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 111–30. Legg, Marie Louise (1999), Newspapers and Nationalism: The Irish Provincial Press, 1850–1892, Dublin: Four Courts Press.

802

bibliography

Lester, Alan (2006), Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain, London: Routledge. Lester, Mary (2009), ‘Local Newspapers and the Shaping of Local Identity in North-East London c. 1885–1925’, in Andrew Hobbs (ed.), ‘Local and Regional Newspapers’, special issue of International Journal of Regional and Local Studies, 5, 1, 44–62. Leventhal, F. M. (1985), The Last Dissenter: H. N. Brailsford and His World, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Leveson, Lord Justice (2012), An Inquiry into the Culture, Practices and Ethics of the Press. Volume 1, London: The Stationery Office. Levey, David (2008), Language Change and Variation in Gibraltar, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Levine, Philippa (1986), The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838–1886, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levine, Philippa (1990), ‘The “Humanising Influences of Five O’Clock Tea”: Victorian Feminist Periodicals’, Victorian Studies, 33, 2, 293–306. Liddle, Dallas (1997), ‘Salesmen, Sportsmen, Mentors: Anonymity in Mid-Victorian Theories of Journalism’, Victorian Studies, 41, 1, 31–58. Liddle, Dallas (2009), The Dynamics of Genre: Journalism and the Practice of Literature in Mid-Victorian Britain, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Liddle, Dallas (2017), ‘The News Machine: Textual Form and Information Function in the London Times, 1785–1885’, Book History 19, 1, 132–68. Lightman, Bernard (2007), Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lindley, Kenneth (1970), The Woodblock Engravers, Newton Abbot: David & Charles. Linebaugh, Peter (1993), The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century, London: Penguin. Linton, David (1987), ‘Mitchell’s, May’s and Sell’s: Newspaper Directories of the Victorian Era’, Journal of Newspaper and Periodical History, 3, 2, 20–8. Linton, Eliza Lynn (1894), ‘The Irrepressible She’, Punch, or the London Charivari, 3 February, 52–3. Linton, William J. (1879), ‘Art in Engraving in Wood’, Atlantic Monthly, June, 705–15. Liveing, Edward (1954), Adventure in Publishing: The House of Ward Lock, 1854–1954, London: Ward Lock. Lobban, Michael (2007), ‘“Old wine in new bottles”: The Concept and Practice of Law Reform, c 1780–1830’, in Arthur Burns and Joanna Innes (eds), Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain, 1780–1850, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 114–35. Lobban, Michael (2008), ‘Brougham, Henry Peter, First Baron Brougham and Vaux (1778–1868)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press; available online at: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/3581. Lobban, Michael (2010), ‘Joint Stock Companies’, in W. Cornish, S. Anderson, R. Cocks, M. Lobban, P. Polden and K. Smith (eds), The Oxford History of the Laws of England. Volume XII 1820–1914: Private Law, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 613–73. Lobban, Michael (2014), ‘Law, Government and Society in Nineteenth-Century England’, London Institute of Historical Research, Podcast available at: http:// www.history.ac.uk/podcasts/franco-british-history-external/law-government-andsociety-nineteenth-century-england (last accessed 24 August 2017).

­

bibliography

803

Loughlin, James (1991), ‘Constructing the Political Spectacle: Parnell, the Press and National Leadership, 1879–86’, in George Boyce and Alan O’Day (eds), Parnell in Perspective, London: Routledge. Louttit, Chris (2014), ‘“A Favour on the Million”: The Household Edition, the Cheap Reprint, and the Posthumous Illustration and Reception of Charles Dickens’, Book History, 17, 321–64. Lovelace, C (1978), ‘British Press Censorship during the First World War’, in George Boyce, James Curran and Pauline Wingate (eds), Newspaper History: From the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day, London: Constable, 307–19. Lowndes, Walter (1980), The Quakers of Fritchley, 1863–1980, Fritchley: Friends Meeting House. Lucy, Henry (1921), Lords and Commoners, London: T. Fisher Unwin. Mac Cana, Proinsias (1969), ‘Irish Literary Tradition’, in Brian Ó Cuív (ed.), A View of the Irish Language, Dublin: Rialtas na hÉireann, 37–8. Mac Congáil, Nollaig (2011), ‘Saothrú na Gaeilge ar nuachtáin náisiúnta Bhéarla na haoise seo caite: Sop nó solamar?’, in R. Ó Muireadhaigh (ed.), Féilscríbhinn Anraí Mhic Giolla Chomhaill, Dublin: Coiscéim, 112–91. Mac Mathúna, Liam (2007), Béarla sa Ghaeilge: cabhair choigríche: an códmheascadh Gaeilge/Béarla i litríocht na Gaeilge 1600–1900, Conamara: An Clóchomhar Tta. Mac Mathúna, Liam and Regina Uí Chollatáin (2016), Saothrú na Gaeilge Scríofa i Suímh Uirbeacha na hÉireann 1700–1850, Dublin: National University of Ireland. McAleer, Joseph (1992), Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain, 1914–1950, Oxford: Clarendon Press. McAllister, Annemarie and Andrew Hobbs (2009), ‘Introduction’, in Andrew Hobbs (ed.), ‘Local and Regional Newspapers’, special issue of International Journal of Regional and Local Studies, 5, 1, 5–15. McAllister, Annemarie (2015), ‘Onward: How a Regional Temperance Magazine for Children Survived and Flourished in the Victorian Marketplace’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 48, 1, 42–66. McBride, Terence (2006), The Experience of Irish Migrants to Glasgow, Scotland, 1863–1891: A New Way of Being Irish, Lampeter: Edwin Mellen. McCartney, Donal (2006), ‘Parnell and the American Connection’, in Donal McCartney and Pauric Travers (eds), The Ivy Leaf: The Parnells Remembered, Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 38–55. McCord, Norman (1968), The Anti-Corn Law League, London: Allen & Unwin. McCord, Norman and Bill Purdue (eds) (2007), British History, 1815–1914, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Macdonald, Simon (2013), ‘English Language Newspapers in Revolutionary France’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 6, 1, 17–33. McDonald, Terry (1999), ‘Come to Canada While You Have a Chance: A Cautionary Tale of English Emigrant Letters in Upper Canada’, Ontario History, 91, 2, 111–30. McEldowney, Dennis (1991), ‘Publishing, Patronage, Little Magazines’, in Terry Sturm (ed.), The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English, Auckland: Oxford University Press, 545–600. McEwen, J. M. (1978), ‘The Press and the Fall of Asquith’, Historical Journal, 21, 4, 863–83. McGregor, O. R. (1981), Social History and Law Reform, London: Stevens & Sons. McIntire, Matthew (2008), ‘Odds, Intelligence, and Prophecies: Racing News in the Penny Press, 1855–1914’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 41, 4, Winter, 352–73.

804

bibliography

Mackay, Mackintosh (1846), Do luchd-leughaidh na Fianuis, Glascho. McKendry, Virginia (1994), ‘The Illustrated London News and the Invention of Tradition’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 27, 1, 1–24. Mackenzie, Alice (1994), Newsplan: Report of the NEWSPLAN Project in Scotland, September 1994, London: British Library; Scottish Library & Information Council; National Library of Scotland. McKibbin, Ross (1990), The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain, 1880–1950, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mackie, John Beveridge (1894), Modern Journalism: A Handbook of Instruction and Counsel for the Young Journalist, London: Crosby Lockwood. McKitterick, David (2009), ‘Publishing for Trades and Professions’, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. VI 1830–1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 500–30. McKivigan, John R. (2008), Forgotten Firebrand: James Redpath and the Making of Nineteenth-Century America, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. MacLean Sinclair, Alexander (ed.) (1881), Clarsach na Coille: A Collection of Gaelic Poetry, Glasgow: Archibald Sinclair. Macleod, Dianne Sachko (1987), ‘Art Collecting and Victorian Middle-Class Taste’, Art History, 10, 3, 328–50. MacLeod, John N. (1898), Memorials of the Rev. Norman MacLeod (Senr), Edinburgh: David Douglas. McLeod, Wilson, Rob Dunbar and Anja Gunderloch (2016), Cànan & Cultar (Language and Culture): Rannsachadh na Gàidhlig 8, Edinburgh: Dunedin Academic Press. McLuhan, Marshall (1964), Understanding Media: The Extension of Man, New York, Toronto, London: McGraw-Hill Book Company. McMahon, Timothy G. (2008), Grand Opportunity: The Gaelic Revival and Irish Society, 1893–1910, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. McNair, Brian (2006), Cultural Chaos: Journalism, News and Power in a Globalized World, London and New York: Routledge. McNees, Eleanor (2004), ‘Punch and the Pope: Three Decades of Anti-Catholic Caricature’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 37, 1, 18–45. McNeill, Mary (1960), The Life and Times of Mary Ann McCracken, 1770–1866: A Belfast Panorama, Dublin: Allen Figgis & Co., Ltd. MacNeill, Nigel (1892), The Literature of the Highlanders, Inverness: John Noble. Macourt, M. (2008), Counting the People of God? The Census of Population and the Church of Ireland, Dublin: Church of Ireland Publishing. McTominey, Andrew (2017), ‘Bad Neighbours? Water Supply and the Civic Rivalry of Leeds and Bradford, c.1850–1887’, International Journal of Regional and Local History, 12, 1, 24–41. McWilliam, Rohan (2004), ‘Lloyd, Edward (1815–1890)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press; available online at: http://www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/16831. Magee, Gary Bryan (1997), Productivity and Performance in the Paper Industry: Labour, Capital and Technology in Britain and America, 1860–1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maidment, Brian (2000), ‘“Penny” Wise, “Penny” Foolish?: Popular Periodicals and the “March of Intellect” in the 1820s and 1830s’, in Laurel Brake, Bill Bell and David Finkelstein (eds), Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 104–21.

­

bibliography

805

Maidment, Brian (2009), ‘The Illuminated Magazine and the Triumph of Wood Engraving’, in Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (eds), The Lure of Illustration in the Nineteenth Century – Picture and Press, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 17–39. Maidment, Brian (2010), ‘Dinner or Desserts?: Miscellaneity, Illustration, and the Periodical Press, 1820–1840’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 43, 4, 357–87. Maltby, Josephine and Janette Rutterford (2006), ‘“She possessed her own fortune”: Women Investors from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Early Twentieth Century’, Business History, 48, 2, 220–53. Mann, Michael (2017), Writing the Nation: Telecommunication, Newspaper-Reportage, and Nation Building in British India, 1850–1930, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Manning, Stephen (2005), ‘Foreign News Gathering and Reporting in the London and Devon Press ­­– the Anglo-Zulu War, 1879, a Case Study’, PhD diss., University of Exeter. March-Phillipps, Evelyn (1894), ‘Women’s Newspapers’, Fortnightly Review, 56, 661–70. March-Phillipps, Evelyn (1895), ‘The New Journalism’, New Review, 13, 75, 182–9. Markovits, Stefanie (2008), ‘Rushing into Print: “Participatory Journalism” during the Crimean War’, Victorian Studies, 50, 4, 559–86. Marnane, Denis G. (1994), ‘John Davis White of Cashel (1820–1893)’, Tipperary Historical Journal, 97–104. Martel, Michael (2018), ‘Participatory Government by Journalism: Class Periodicals and the Local State, 1880–1914’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 51, 1, Spring, 18–47. Mason, Nicholas (2002), ‘Building Brand Byron: Early Nineteenth Century Advertising  and the Marketing of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’, MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly, 63, 4, 411–40. Mason, Nicholas (2005), ‘“The Quack Has Become God”: Puffery, Print, and the Death of Literature in Romantic-Era Britain’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 60, 1, 1–31. Mason, Tony (1986), ‘Sporting News, 1860–1914’, in Michael Harris and Alan J. Lee (eds), The Press in English Society from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries, London: Associated University Presses, 168–86. Masterson, Margery (2014), ‘Bombay Graveyards and British Beaches: The Tale of a Victorian Imperial Scandal’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 19, 3, 295–313. Matheson, Donald (2000), ‘The Birth of News Discourse: Changes in News Language in British Newspapers, 1880–1930’, Media, Culture & Society, 22, 557–73. Matthew, Henry Colin Gray (1987), ‘Rhetoric and Politics in Britain, 1860–1950’, in Philip J. Waller (ed.), Politics and Social Change in Modern Britain: Essays Presented to A. F. Thompson, Brighton: Harvester Press. Matthews, Rachel (2017), The History of the Provincial Press in England, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Maume, Patrick (2012), ‘Parnellite Politics and the Origins of Independent Newspapers’, in Mark O’Brien and Kevin Rafters (eds), Independent Newspapers: A History, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1–13. Maurer, O. (1948), ‘Anonymity vs. Signature in Victorian Reviewing’, Studies in English, 27, 1, 1–27. Maxwell, James Clerk (1882), ‘Essays at Cambridge – 1853 to 1856’, in The Life of James Clerk Maxwell, London, 223–46. May, F. B. (1983), ‘Victorian and Edwardian Ilfracombe’, in John K. Walton and John Walvin (eds), Leisure in Britain, 1780–1939, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 187–206.

806

bibliography

Mayer, Henry (1964), The Press in Australia, Melbourne: Lansdowne. Mayhew, Henry and George Cruikshank (1851), 1851: or the Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Cursty Sandboys, London: D. Bogue. May’s British and Irish Press Guide (1874–89), London: May; continued as Willing’s. May’s London Press Directory and Advertiser’s Handbook (1871), London: Fredrick May. Meadows, A. J. (2008), Science and Controversy: A Biography of Sir Norman Lockyer, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Mee, John (2016), Print, Publicity, and Popular Radicalism in the 1790s: The Laurel of Liberty, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meredith, George (1903), An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit (first published in New Quarterly Magazine (April 1877)), Westminster: Archibald Constable and Company. Merry, Tom (1884), The Rake’s Progress after Hogarth, London: The Conservative Press Company. Middleton, Iris (1997), ‘Fox Hunting Traditions: Fact or Fantasy?’, Sport History Review, 28, 1, 19–33. Milbourne, Paul (2003), ‘The Complexities of Hunting in Rural England and Wales’, Sociologia Ruralis, 18, 3, 289–309. Miller, Henry (2007), ‘The Problem with Punch’, Historical Research, 82, 216, 285–302. Miller, Henry (2009), ‘John Leech and the Shaping of the Victorian Cartoon: The Context of Respectability’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 42, 3, 267–91. Miller, Henry (2015), Politics Personified: Portraiture, Caricature and Visual Culture in Britain, c.1830–80, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Milne, Maurice (1982), ‘Survival of the Fittest? Sunderland Newspapers in the Nineteenth Century’, in Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff (eds), The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings, Leicester: Leicester University Press, 193–224. Milton, Frederick S. (2008), ‘Taking the Pledge: A Study of Children’s Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Birds and Animals in Britain, c. 1870–1914’, PhD diss., Newcastle University. Milton, Frederick S. (2009a), ‘Newspaper Rivalry in Newcastle upon Tyne, 1876–1919: “Dicky Birds” and “Golden Circle”’, Northern History, 46, 2, 277–91. Milton, Frederick S. (2009b), ‘Uncle Toby’s Legacy: Children’s Columns in the Provincial Newspaper Press, 1873–1914’, The International Journal of Regional and Local Studies, 5, 1, 104–20. Milton, Frederick S. (2010), ‘Gone Home: Newspaper Epitaphs of Late-NineteenthCentury Children’, Leeds Working Papers in Victorian Studies, 11, 118–30. Milton, Frederick S. (2011), ‘Tiny Humanitarians? Children as Proactive Nature Conservationists in Late-Nineteenth Century Britain’, in Laurence Talairach-Vielmas (ed.), Science in the Nursery: The Popularisation of Science in Britain and France, 1761–1901, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 91–107. Mitch, David (1992), The Rise of Popular Literacy in Victorian England: The Influence of Private Choice and Public Policy, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Mitchell’s Newspaper Press Directory (1846–1900), London: Mitchell’s. Mohr, Peter D. (1992), ‘Gilbert Kirlew and the Development of Crippled Children’s Societies in Victorian Manchester and Salford’, Manchester Regional History Review, 6, 42–8.

­

bibliography

807

Montgomery, Fiona A. (1980), ‘The Unstamped Press: The Contribution of Glasgow, 1831–1836’, The Scottish Historical Review, 59, 168, Part Two, October, 154–70. Moran, Gerard (1999), ‘Nationalists in exile: The National Brotherhood of St Patrick in Lancashire, 1861–5’, in Sheridan Gilley and Roger Swift (eds), The Irish in Victorian Britain: The Local Dimension, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 212–35. Moran, James (1978), Printing Presses: History and Development from the Fifteenth Century to Modern Times, Berkeley: University of California Press. Morash, Chris (2010), A History of the Media in Ireland, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moreman, Timothy Robert (2000), ‘The Army in India and the Military Periodical Press, 1830–1898’, in David Finkelstein and Douglas M. Peers (eds), Negotiating India in the Nineteenth-Century Media, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 216–29. Morgan-Guy, John (2013), ‘Trials and Shadows: Bishop Charles John Ellicott ­(1819–1905) and “angry controversies” in the Church of England’, in Stewart Brown, Frances Knight and John Morgan-Guy (eds), Religion, Identity and Conflict in  Britain: From the Restoration to the Twentieth Century, Farnham: Ashgate, 137–56. Morley, John (1867), ‘Anonymous Journalism’, Fortnightly Review, n.s. 2, 287–92. Morrell, Jack and Arnold Thackray (1981), Gentlemen of Science: Early Years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Morris, Andrew James Anthony (2004), ‘Saunders, William (1823–1895), Newspaper Proprietor and Politician’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press; available online at: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/24706. Morris, Andrew James Anthony (2004), ‘Newnes, Sir George, First Baronet (1951–1910)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press; available online at: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/35218. Morris, Robert M. (2006), ‘“Crime does not pay”: Thinking Again about Detectives in the First Century of the Metropolitan Police’, in Clive Emsley and Haia Shpayer-Makov (eds), Police Detectives in History, 1750–1950, Aldershot: Ashgate, 79–102. Morris, William (1877), ‘The Lesser Arts’, in William Morris (1919 edn), Hopes and Fears for Art, London: Longmans, Green. Morton, Vanessa (1993), ‘The Launch of The Friend, 1843: Two Celebrations or One?’, The Friend, 151. Moruzi, Kristine (2012), Constructing Girlhood through the Periodical Press, 1850– 1915, Farnham: Ashgate. Moruzi, Kristine (2016), ‘Children’s Periodicals’, in Andrew King, Alexis Easley and John Morton (eds), The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, London: Routledge, 301–16. Moruzi, Kristine (2017), “‘Donations need not be large to be acceptable”: Children, Charity and the Great Ormond Street Hospital in Aunt Judy’s Magazine 1868–1885’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 50, 1, 190–213. Mosher, Marion Dix (1932), More Toasts: Jokes, Stories and Quotations, New York: H. W. Wilson. Moss, David and Chris Hosgood (1994), ‘The Financial and Trade Press’, in J. Don Vann and Rosemary T. VanArsdel (eds), Victorian Periodicals and Victorian Society, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 199–217. Mountjoy, Peter Roger (1978), ‘The Working-Class Press and Working-Class Conservatism’, in George Boyce, James Curran and Pauline Wingate (eds), Newspaper

808

bibliography

History from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day, London: Constable and Co. Ltd., 265–80. Moxham, Noah and Aileen Fyfe (2017), ‘The Royal Society and the Prehistory of Peer Review, 1665–1965’, The Historical Journal, 61, 4, 863–89. MSS D/KT/22 (1878), Clwyd Archives, Hawarden, 24 January. Murphy, Michael (1991), Newspapers and Local History, Chichester: Phillimore/ British Association for Local History. Murphy, Paul Thomas (1994), Towards a Working-Class Canon: Literary Criticism in British Working-Class Periodicals, 1816–1858, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Mussell, James (2006), ‘“This is ours and for us”: The Mechanic’s Magazine and Low Scientific Culture in Regency London’, in D. Clifford et al. (eds), Repositioning Victorian Sciences: Shifting Centres in Nineteenth-Century Scientific Thinking, London: Anthem Press, 107–17. Mussell, James (2007), Science, Time and Space in the Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Movable Types, Aldershot: Ashgate. Mussell, James (2016), ‘The Foundation and Early Years of the News of the World: “Capacious Double Sheets”’, in Laurel Brake, Chandrika Kaul and Mark W. Turner (eds), The News of the World and the British Press, 1843–2011: Journalism for the Rich, Journalism for the Poor, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 11–26. Musson, A. E. (1958), ‘Newspaper Printing in the Industrial Revolution’, Economic History Review, n.s. 10, 3, 411–26. Nall, Joshua (2017), ‘Constructing Canals on Mars: Event Astronomy and the Transmission of International Telegraphic News’, Isis, 108, 280–306. Nash, David (2004), ‘Reconnecting Religion with Social and Cultural History: Secularization’s Failure as a Master Narrative’, Cultural and Social History, 1, 3, 302–25. Nash, Sarah (2010), ‘What’s in a Name? Signature, Criticism, and Authority in the Fortnightly Review’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 43, 1, 57–82. National Records of Scotland: reference CS318/25/92, John Cossar’s Sequestration. National Trust for Scotland (2016), Robert Smail’s Printing Works, Peebles: National Trust for Scotland. Nestor, Pauline A. (1982), ‘A New Departure in Women’s Publishing: The English Woman’s Journal and The Victoria Magazine’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 15, 3, 93–107. Nevett, Terry (1986), ‘Advertising and Editorial Integrity in the Nineteenth Century’, in Michael Harris and Alan J. Lee (eds), The Press in English Society from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries, London: Associated University Presses, 149–67. Newell, L. F. (1952), Stereotyping and Electrotyping, London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons Ltd. Newman, Edward (1843), ‘Preface’, Zoologist, 1, v–vi. Newman, Edward (1844), ‘Preface’, Phytologist, 1, v–vi. Newspaper Press of the Present Day: Its Birth and Growth throughout the United Kingdom and British Islands, from 1665; Including the Young Cheap Press and the Metropolitan and Suburban District Papers (1860), London: Saunders & Otley. Newton, David and Martin Smith (1999), Stamford Mercury: Three Centuries of Newspaper Publishing, Stamford: Paul Watkins Publishing. Ní Mhuiríosa, Máirín (1978), Réamhchonraitheoirí, Dublin: Clódhanna Teoranta.

­

bibliography

809

Ní Mhunghaile, Lesa (2009), ‘O’Growney, Eugene (Ó Gramhnaigh, Eoghan)’, Dictionary of Irish Biography, Dublin: Royal Irish Academy/New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; available online at: http://dib.cambridge. org/viewReadPage.do?articleId=a6774. Nic Congáil, Ríona (2011), ‘Young Ireland and The Nation: Nationalist Children’s Culture in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Éire-Ireland, 46, 3–4, 37–62. Nic Pháidín, Caoilfhionn (1998), Fáinne an Lae agus an Athbheochan 1898–1900, Dublin: Cois Life. Nichol, Andrew, Gavin Millar and Andrew Sharland (2009), Media Law and Human Rights, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nicholson, William (1797), ‘Preface’, Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry and the Arts, 1, iii–iv. Nicoll, W. Robertson (1890), James Macdonnell, Journalist, London: Hodder & Stoughton. Nicolle, Margaret (2001), William Allen, Quaker Friend of Lindfield 1770–1843, Lindfield: privately published by author. Nikitenko, A. V. (1975), The Diary of a Russian Censor, abridged, ed. and trans. H. S. Jackson, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Nilsen, Kenneth E. (2002), ‘Some Notes on Pre-Mac-Talla Gaelic Publishing in Nova Scotia (with references to early Gaelic publishing in Prince Edward Island, Quebec and Ontario)’, in C. Ó Baoill and N. R. McGuire (eds), Rannsachadh na Gàidhlig 2000, Aberdeen: An Clò Gàidhealach, 127–40. Nimrod [Charles James Apperley] (1927), My Life and Times, ed. E. D. Corning, Edinburgh: W. Blackwood and Sons. Nisbet-Smith, D. (1992), ‘The Newspaper Society’, in Dennis Griffiths (ed.), The Encyclopaedia of the British Press, 1422–1992, London: Macmillan, 666–8. Noakes, Richard (2004), ‘Punch and Comic Journalism in Mid-Victorian Britain’, in Geoffrey Cantor, Gowan Dawson and Graeme Gooday (eds), Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 91–122. Noble, John (1902), Miscellanea Invernessiana: With a Bibliography of Inverness Newspapers and Periodicals, Stirling: E. Mackay. Nockles, Peter B. (2008), ‘The Oxford Movement as Religious Revival and Resurgence’, in Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory (eds), Revival and Resurgence in Christian History, Studies in Church History 44, Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 214–24. Nord, David (1995), ‘Reading the Newspaper; Strategies and Politics of Reader Response, Chicago 1912–1917’, Journal of Communication, 45, 3, 63–93. Nord, David Paul (2015), ‘The Victorian City and the Urban Newspaper’, in Richard J. John and Jonathan Silberstein Loeb (eds), Making News: The Political Economy of Journalism in Britain and America from the Glorious Revolution to the Internet, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 73–106. North, John S. (ed.) (1986–), Waterloo Directory of Irish Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800–1900, Waterloo: North Waterloo Academic Press. North, John S. (ed.) (1989–), Waterloo Directory of Scottish Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800–1900, Waterloo: North Waterloo Academic Press. North, John S. (ed.) (1997–), Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800–1900, Waterloo: North Waterloo Academic Press. Nowell-Smith, Simon (1958), The House of Cassell, 1848–1958, London: Cassell.

810

bibliography

Ó Buachalla, Breandán (1991–2), ‘Seacaibíteachas Thaidhg Uí Neachtain’, Studia Hibernica, 26. Ó Ciosáin, Niall (2004–6), ‘Print and Irish 1570–1900: An Exception among the Celtic Languages?’, Radharc, 5, 7, 73–106. Ó Fearaíl, Pádraig (1975), The Story of Conradh na Gaeilge, Dublin: Conradh na Gaeilge. Ó Háinle, Cathal (2009), ‘Tadhg Ó Neachtain’, in James McGuire and James Quinn (eds), Dictionary of Irish Biography, vol. 7, Dublin: Royal Irish Academy/New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 732. Ó Murchú, Máirtín (2001), Cumann Buan-Choimeádta na Gaeilge: tús an athréimnithe, Dublin: Cois Life. O’Brien, Mark (2008), The Irish Times: A History, Dublin: Four Courts Press. O’Brien, R. Barry (1899), The Life of Charles Stewart Parnell, 2 vols, London: Smith, Elder & Co. O’Brien, William (1905), Recollections, London: Macmillan. O’Brien, William [1887] (2010), Christmas on the Galtees, ed. Liam Cusack and Justine Finn, Mitchelstown, Co. Cork: Liam Cusack. O’Connor, Peter (2010), The English-Language Press Networks of East Asia, 1918–1945, Folkestone: Global Oriental. O’Connor, T. P. (1889), ‘The New Journalism’, New Review, 1, 5, 423–34. O’Connor, T. P. (1894), ‘Journalism as a Career’, Sell’s Dictionary of the World’s Press, London: H. Sell, 17–24. O’Leary, John (1896), Recollections of Fenians and Fenianism, 2 vols, London: Downey & Co. O’Malley, Patrick Terence (1975), ‘The Politics of Defamation: The State, Press Interests and English Libel Laws’, PhD diss., University of London. O’Malley, Thomas (1982), ‘“Defying the Powers and Tempering the Spirit”: A Review of Quaker Control over Their Publications 1672–89’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 33, 1, 72–88. O’Malley, Thomas (2014), ‘The Regulation of the Press’, in Martin Conboy and John Steel (eds), The Routledge Companion to British Media History, Abingdon: Routledge, 228–38. O’Malley, Thomas and Clive Soley (2000), Regulating the Press, London: Pluto. Ogan, C. et al. (1975), ‘The Changing Front Page of the New York Times, 1900–1970’, Journalism Quarterly, 52, 2, 340–4. Oldcastle, John (1880), Journals and Journalism. With a Guide for Literary Beginners, London: Field & Tuer. Oliver, L. (2006), ‘Henry Wallis (1830–1916): Chatterton 1855–6’, in Alexander Sturgis, Rupert Christiansen, Lois Oliver and Michael Wilson (eds), Rebels and Martyrs: The Image of the Artist in the Nineteenth Century, London: National Gallery, 84. Onslow, Barbara (2000), Women of the Press in Nineteenth Century Britain, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Ott, John (2014), Manufacturing the Modern Patron in Victorian California: Cultural Philanthropy, Industrial Capital, and Social Authority, Farnham: Ashgate. Owen, George H. M. (1887), MSS Memo, 11 November, Picton Castle Coll, 4829 National Library of Wales. Packer, Ian (2006), ‘A Curious Exception: The Lincolnshire Chronicle and the Starmer Group’, Journalism Studies, 7, 3, 415–26.

­

bibliography

811

Paget, John (1839), Hungary and Transylvania with Remarks on their Condition, Social, Political and Economical, vol. 1, London: John Murray. Palmegiano, Eugenia M. (1976), Women and British Periodicals, 1832–1867: A Bibliography, New York: Garland. Palmer, Bernard (1991), Gadfly for God: A History of the Church Times, London: Hodder & Stoughton. Palmer, John E. C. and Harold W. Paar (1994), ‘Transport’, in J. Don Vann and Rosemary T. VanArsdel (eds), Victorian Periodicals and Victorian Society, Aldershot: Scolar Press, 178–98. Parry, Jonathan (1993), The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain, New Haven: Yale University Press. Parsons, Gerald (ed.) (1988), Religion in Victorian Britain, 4 vols, vol. I: Traditions, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Parsons, Wayne (1989), The Power of the Financial Press: Journalism and Economic Opinion in Britain and America, Aldershot: Edward Elgar. Patrick, D. (ed.) (1888–92), Chambers’s Encyclopaedia: A Dictionary of Universal Knowledge, 2nd edn, Edinburgh: W. & R. Chambers. Patten, Robert L. (2017), Charles Dickens and His Publishers, 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Patten, Robert L. and David Finkelstein (2006), ‘Editing Blackwood’s: or, What Do Editors Do?’ in David Finkelstein (ed.), Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition, 1805–1930, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 146–83. Peacey, Jason (2013), Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peacey, Jason (2016), ‘“My Friend the Gazetier”: Diplomacy and News in SeventeenthCentury Europe’, in Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham (eds), News Networks in Early Modern Europe, Leiden: Brill, 420–42. Peers, Douglas M. (1995), Between Mars and Mammon: Colonial Armies and the Garrison State in India, 1819–1835, London: Tauris Academic Studies. Pendleton, John (1890), Newspaper Reporting in Olden Times and To-day, London: Elliot Stock. Pendleton, John (1902), How to Succeed as a Journalist, London: Grant Richards. Penner, Elizabeth (2014), “‘The Squire of Boyhood”: G. A. Hutchison and the Boy’s Own Paper’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 47, 4, 631–47. Pentland, Gordon (2008), Radicalism, Reform and National Identity in Scotland, 1820–1833, Martlesham: Boydell & Brewer. Péréon, Yves-Marie (2011), L’Image de la France dans la presse américaine 1936–1947, Brussels: P.E.L. Peter Lang. Pergam, E. A. (2011), The Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857: Entrepreneurs, Connoisseurs and the Public, Farnham: Ashgate. Peters, Lisa (2016), ‘Welsh Periodicals and Newspapers’, in Andrew King, Alexis Easley and John Morton (eds), The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, London: Routledge, 194–207. Peterson, Linda (2009), Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Peterson, M. Jeanne (1979), ‘Specialist Journals and Professional Rivalries in Victorian Medicine’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 12, 1, 25–32. Petitjean, Johann (2016), ‘The Papal Network: How the Roman Curia Was Informed about South-Eastern Europe, the Ottoman Empire and the Mediterranean

812

bibliography

(1645–1669)’, in Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham (eds), News Networks in Early Modern Europe, Leiden: Brill, 178–92. Pettitt, Clare (2014), ‘Sherlock Holmes the Throwaway Detective’, in Alex Werner (ed.), Sherlock Holmes: The Man that Never Lived and Will Never Die, London: Ebury Press, 174–97. Phegley, Jennifer (2004), Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Magazines and the Cultural Health of the Nation, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Phillips, David (2011), The German Example: English Interest in Educational Provision in Germany Since 1800, London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Phillips, Ernest (1895), How to Become a Journalist. A Practical Guide to Newspaper Work, London: Sampson Low, Marston. Piatt, Donn (1985), Cois life fadó agus ábhair eile, Dublin: Foilseachain Naisiunta Teoranta. Pickering, Paul and Alex Tyrell (2000), The People’s Bread: A History of the Anti-Corn Law League, Leicester: Leicester University Press. Pluvinage, Danièle (1968), ‘Galignani’s Messenger: An English Newspaper Issued in Paris’, MA diss., Faculté des lettres et sciences humaines de Paris. Pocklington, G. R. (1921), The Story of W.H. Smith, London: W.H. Smith. Political and Economic Planning (1938), Report on the British Press. A Survey of Its Current Operations and Problems with Special Reference to National Newspapers and their Part in Public Affairs, London: Political and Economic Planning. Ponemone, S. (2013), ‘New School Wood Engravers: Forgotten Nineteenth-Century Celebrities’, Artist blog posted 3 July 2013, http://www.scottponemone.com/newschool-wood-engravers-forgotton-nineteenth-century-celebrities/ (last accessed 1 May 2018). Pooley, Siân (2015a), ‘Children’s Writing and the Popular Press in England, 1876–1914’, History Workshop Journal, 80, 1, 75–98. Pooley, Siân (2015b), ‘“Leagues of Love” and “Column Comrades”: Children’s Responses to War in Late Victorian and Edwardian England’, in Lissa Paul, Rosemary Ross Johnston and Emma Short (eds), Children’s Literature and the Culture of the First World War, London: Routledge, 301–18. Pope, Robert (2001), Religion and National Identity: Scotland and Wales, c. 1700–2000, Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Porlock, D. (1992), ‘Newspaper Publishers Association’, in Dennis Griffiths (ed.), The Encyclopaedia of the British Press, 1422–1992, London: Macmillan, 663–5. Porter, Dilwyn (2004), ‘Leng, Sir John (1828–1906)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press; available online at: http://www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/34494. Post Office Directories: http://digital.nls.uk/directories/ Potter, Simon J. (2003), News and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial Press System, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Potter, Simon J. (2004), ‘Empire and the English Press, c.1857–1914’, in Simon J. Potter (ed.), Newspapers and Empire in Ireland and Britain: Reporting the British Empire c. 1857–1921, Portland: Four Courts Press, 39–61. Potter, Simon (ed.) (2005), Imperial Communication: Australia, Britain and the British Empire, c. 1830–50, London: Menzies Centre for Australian Studies and University of London.

­

bibliography

813

Potter, Simon J. (2007), ‘Webs, Networks, and Systems: Globalization and the Mass Media in the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British Empire’, North America Conference on British Studies, 46, 3, 621–46. Pound, Reginald (1966), The Strand Magazine, 1891–1950, London: Heinemann. Powell, Christopher G. (1996), The British Building Industry since 1800: An Economic History, London: Spon Press. Powell, Michael and Terry Wyke (2009), ‘Manchester Men and Manchester Magazines: Publishing Periodicals in the Provinces in the Nineteenth Century’, in John Hinks, Catherine Armstrong and Matthew Day (eds), Periodicals and Publishers: The Newspaper and Journal Trade, 1750–1914, London: British Library, 161–84. Prance, Claude A. (1984), ‘The Bookman’, in Alvin Sullivan (ed.), British Literary Magazines: The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837–1913, Westport: Greenwood Press, 43–9. Prettejohn, E. (1997), ‘Aesthetic Value and the Professionalization of Victorian Art Criticism, 1837–78’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 2, 1, 71­­–94. Prévost, Stéphanie (2014), ‘La presse en langue anglaise en Anatolie et en Thrace orientale et la presse anglaise des exilés anatoliens; regards croisés (1840–1923)’, Transfopress Seminar, Bibliothèque nationale de France, 28 October. Price, K. (2016), Medical Negligence in Victorian Britain: The Crisis of Care under the English Poor Law, c.1834–1900, London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Price, Leah (2012), How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Printers’ Collection at Marx Memorial Library (2009), London: Marx Memorial Library. Putnis, Peter (2007), ‘The British Transoceanic Steamship Press in NineteenthCentury India and Australia: An Overview’, Journal of Australian Studies, 31, 91, 69–79. Pykett, Lyn (1982), ‘The Real Versus the Ideal: Theories of Fiction in Periodicals, 1850–1870’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 15, 2, 63–74. Q. (1795), ‘The Apology’, The Parlour Window, 1, 1, 1–2. Quilter, Harry (1888), ‘Some Graphic Artists’, The Universal Review, 2, 5, September, 102. Rantanen, Terhi (1997), ‘The Globalisation of Electronic News in the Nineteenth Century’, Media Culture & Society, 19, 605–20. Rantanen, Terhi (2003), ‘The New Sense of Place in Nineteenth-Century News’, Media, Culture & Society, 25, 435–49. Rauch, Alan (2001), Useful Knowledge: The Victorians, Morality, and the March of Intellect, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Reach, Angus R. (1844), ‘The Coffee Houses of Library’, New Parley Library, 13 July, 293–4. Read, Donald (1961), Press and the People, 1790–1850, London: Edward Arnold. Read, Donald (1992, 1999), The Power of News: The History of Reuters, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reade, A. Arthur (1885), Literary Success: Being a Guide to Practical Journalism, London: Wyman & Sons. Reader, William J. (1981), Bowater: A History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reed, David (1997), The Popular Magazine in Britain and the United States, 1880– 1960, London: British Library. Reich, Zvi (2010), ‘Constrained Authors: Bylines and Authorship in News Reporting’, Journalism, 11, 6, 707–25.

814

bibliography

Reid, John (1832), Bibliotheca Scoto-Celtica; or, an account of all the books which have been printed in the Gaelic language, Glasgow: John Reid & Co. Reid, Thomas Wemyss (1897), ‘Some Reminiscences of English Journalism’, Nineteenth Century, XLII, July–December, 55–66. Rendall, Jane (1987), ‘“A Moral Engine”? Feminism, Liberalism and the English Woman’s Journal’, in Jane Rendall (ed.), Equal or Different: Women’s Politics, 1800– 1914, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 112–38. Report of the Executive Committee (1859), Exhibition of Art Treasures of the United Kingdom held at Manchester in 1857, Manchester: George Sims. Returns: A Return of the Number of Stamps issued to the various newspapers from January to June 1841 (1841), London: House of Commons. Richards, Thomas (1990), The Commodity Culture of Victorian England, Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Richardson, Ruth and Robert Thorne (1994), ‘Introduction’, in The Builder Illustrations Index 1842–1883, London: Builder Group and Hutton, 1–36. Richet, Isabelle (2014), ‘The English-Language Press in Italy. Identification and Attempt at a Typology’, available at: https://www.academia.edu/7608885/The_ English-speaking_press_in_Italy. Richet, Isabelle (2016), ‘Locais, redes, espaçios: a impresa anglofona na Italia’, Escritos, X, 10, 125–48. Richet, Isabelle (2018a), ‘The English-Language Press in Italy as Community Builder and Bridge Toward the Host Society’, in Juan Antonio Garcia Galindo and Laura Lopez Romero (eds), Los medios en lengua extranjera. Diversidad cultural e integración, Grenada: Comares, 105–12. Richet, Isabelle (2018b), ‘Publishing beyond Borders: The Roman Advertiser, the Tuscan Athenaeum, and the Creation of a Transnational Liberal Space’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 51, 3, 464–82. Rivers, Isabel (2007), ‘The First Evangelical Tract Societies’, Historical Journal, 50, 1–22. Roberts, Stephen and Roger Ward (2014), Mocking Men of Power: Comic Art in Birmingham, 1861–1911, Birmingham: Birmingham Biographies. Roberts, W. (1920), ‘Our London Letter’, Notes and Queries, 12, 122, 128. Robertson, Charles (1987), The International Herald Tribune: The First Hundred Years, New York: Columbia University Press. Robertson Scott, J. W. (1889), ‘The “New Journalism”’, in Sell’s Dictionary of the World’s Press and Advertisers’ Reference Book, ed. Henry Sell, London: Sell’s Advertising Agency, 48–59. Robey, Ethan (2010), ‘The Steady Supporters of Order: American Mechanics’ Institute Fairs as Icons of Bourgeois Culture’, in Sven Beckert and Julia B. Rosenbaum (eds), The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 119–34. Robinson, Greg (2015), ‘Whispers of the Unspeakable: New York and Montreal Newspaper Coverage of the Oscar Wilde Trials in 1895’, Journal of Transnational American Studies, 6, 1, 1–18. Robinson, Howard (1964), Carrying British Mail Overseas, London: Allen & Unwin. Robinson, Solveig C. (1996), ‘“Amazed at our Success”: The Langham Place Editors and the Emergence of a Feminist Critical Tradition’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 29, 2, Summer, 159–72.

­

bibliography

815

Robson, John (1891), ‘Editorial’, British Naturalist, I. Robson, John (1995), Marriage or Celibacy? The Daily Telegraph on a Victorian Dilemma, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Rodrick, Anne (2017), ‘Melodrama and Natural Science: Reading the “Greenwich Murder” in the Mid-Century Periodical Press’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 50, 1, 66–99. Roibu, Iuliana (2011), ‘The Ordinary Reader in the History of Business Newspapers: A Misunderstanding’, Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Rolfe, Kirsty (2016), ‘“It is No Time Now to Enquire of Forraine Occurrents”: Plague, War, and Rumour in the Letters of Joseph Mead, 1625’, in Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham (eds), News Networks in Early Modern Europe, Leiden: Brill, 563–82. Rolleston, T. W. (1886), ‘Notes of the Month’, The Dublin University Review, June. Rooney, Paul Raphael (2014), ‘Readers and the Steamship Press: Home News for India, China, and the Colonies and the Serialization of Arthur Griffiths’s Fast and Loose, 1883–84’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 47, 1, 31–49. Rose, Jonathan (2001), The Intellectual Life of the British Working Class, London: Yale University Press. Rose, R. N. (1953), The Field, 1853–1953, London: Michael Joseph. Rosenbaum, Julia B. (2010), ‘Ordering the Social Sphere: Public Art and Boston’s Bourgeoisie’, in Sven Beckert and Julia B. Rosenbaum (eds), The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 193–208. Rota, Anthony (1998), Apart from the Text, New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press. Rotunno, Laura (2013), Postal Plots in British Fiction, 1840–1898: Readdressing Correspondence in Victorian Culture, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Royal Commission on Land in Wales, Report of the (1896), vol. ii. Rubery, Matt (2009), ‘Interviews’, in Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (eds), Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism, Ghent and London: Academia Press and the British Library, 308. Rubinstein, David (1986), Before the Suffragettes: Women’s Emancipation in the 1890s, Brighton: Harvester Press. Ruskin, J. [1856] (1904), ‘Academy Notes, 1856’, in The Complete Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn, London: George Allen. Russell, Colin A. with Noel G. Coley and Gerrylynn K. Roberts (1977), Chemists by Profession: The Origins and Rise of the Royal Institute of Chemistry, Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Ruth, Jennifer (1999), ‘“Gross Humbug” or “The Language of Truth”? The Case of the “Zoist”’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 32, 4, 299–323. Ruth, Jennifer (2006), Novel Professions: Interested Disinterest and the Making of the Professional in the Victorian Novel, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Salmon, Edward (1888), Juvenile Literature As It Is, London: Drane. Salmon, Richard (2015), The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sampson, H. (1874), A History of Advertising from the Earliest Times Illustrated by Anecdotes, Curious Specimens, and Biographical Notes, London: Chatto & Windus. Samuel, Raphael (1985), ‘The Roman Catholic Church and the Irish Poor’, in Sheridan Gilley and Roger Swift (eds), The Irish in the Victorian City, London: Croom Helm, 267–99.

816

bibliography

Sankhdher, Brijendra Mohan (1984), Press, Politics and Public Opinion in India: Dynamics of Modernization and Social Transformation, New Delhi: Deep and Deep. Sato, Takahiro (2012), ‘Economic Relations between India and Japan’, Eurasian Geography and Economics, 53, 4, 457–78. Saunders, David (1983), ‘Vladimir Burtsev and the Revolutionary Emigration, 1888– 1905’, European Studies Review, 13, 1, 39–62. Savory, Jerold J. (1984), ‘An Uncommon Comic Collection: Humorous Victorian Periodicals in the Newberry Library’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 17, 3, 94–102. Sayle, C. (1916/2014), A Catalogue of the Bradshaw Collection of Irish Books in the University Library, Cambridge, vol. 2, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schneller, Beverly E. (2004), ‘Jerdan, William (1782–1869), Journalist and Antiquary’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; available online at: http://www.oxforddnb. com/view/article/. Schobesberger, Nikolaus (2016), ‘Mapping the Fuggerzeitungen: The Geographical Issues of an Information Network’, in Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham (eds), News Networks in Early Modern Europe, Leiden: Brill, 216–42. Schoenfield, Mark (2009), British Periodicals and Romantic Identity: The ‘Literary Lower Empire’, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Schrock, N. C. (1976), American Wood Engraving: A Victorian History by William J. Linton, Watkins Glen: American Life Foundation and Study Institute. Schroeder, Janice (2002), ‘“Better Arguments”: The English Woman’s Journal and the Game of Public Opinion’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 35, 3, 243–71. Schudson, Michael (1996), The Power of News, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Schudson, Michael (2008), Why Democracies Need an Unlovable Press, Cambridge: Polity Press. Schweizer, Karl L. (2006), ‘Introduction’, in K. L. Schweizer (ed.), Parliament and the Press 1689–c.1939, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1–8. Scola, Roger (1992), Feeding the Victorian City: The Food Supply of Manchester, 1770–1870, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Scott, George (1968), Reporter Anonymous: The Story of the Press Association, London: Hutchinson. Scott, J. M. (1972), Extel 100: The Centenary History of the Exchange Telegraph, London: Ernest Benn Ltd. Scott, Keith (2011), Dear Dot, I Must Tell You: A Personal History of Young New Zealanders, Auckland: Activity Press. Scott, Peter and James Walker (2008), ‘Advertising, Promotion, and the Competitive Advantage of Interwar British Department Stores’, CIBH Working Paper No. 2008056, Business School, University of Reading. Scottish Book Trade Index; available online at: https://www.nls.uk/catalogues/ scottish-book-trade-index. Searle, Geoffrey Russell (2004), A New England? Peace and War, 1886­­–1918, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Secord, Anne (1994), ‘Science in the Pub: Artisan Botanists in Early NineteenthCentury Lancashire’, History of Science, 32, 269–315. Secord, James (2000), Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

­

bibliography

817

Secord, James (2007), ‘How Scientific Conversation Became Shop Talk’, in Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman (eds), Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 23–59. Secord, James (2009), ‘Science, Technology and Mathematics’, in D. McKitterick (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, volume 6: 1830–1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 443–74. Secord, James (2014), Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sedgwick, Adam (1830), ‘President’s Address at the Annual General Meeting (19 February 1830)’, Philosophical Magazine, 7, 289–315. Seed, John (2014), ‘Secular and Religious: Historical Perspectives’, Social History, 39, 1, 3–13. Segal, Zef (2014), ‘Communication and State Construction: The Postal Service in German States, 1815–1866’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 44, 4, 452–73. Seiberling, Grace, with Carolyn Bloore (1986), Amateurs, Photography, and the MidVictorian Imagination, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sell’s Dictionary of the World’s Press (1883–1921), London: H. Sell. Senese, Donald (1984), ‘Felix Volkhovsky in London, 1890–1914’, in John Slatter (ed.), From the Other Shore: Russian Political Emigrants in Britain, 1880–1917, London: Frank Cass, 67–78. Seville, Catherine (2011), Literary Copyright Reform in Early Victorian England: The Framing of the 1842 Copyright Act, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seymour-Ure, Colin (2000), ‘Northcliffe’s Legacy’, in Peter Catterall, Colin SeymourUre and Adrian Smith (eds), Northcliffe’s Legacy: Aspects of the British Popular Press, 1896–1996, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 9–25. Shadwell, Arthur (1898), ‘Journalism as a Profession’, National Review, 31, August, 845–55. Sharpe, Richard (2016a), ‘Manuscript and Print in Gaelic Scotland and Ireland 1689–1832’, Cànan & Cultar. Language & Culture. Rannsachadh na Gàidhlig, 8, 33–55. Sharpe, Richard (2016b), ‘Irish Poetry in Print in Cox’s Irish Magazine 1808–1810’, Journal of Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, 121, 64–80. Shattock, Joanne (1989), Politics and Reviewers: The Edinburgh and the Quarterly in the Early Victorian Age, London: Leicester University Press. Shattock, Joanne (ed.) (1999), Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature Volume 4 1800–1900, 3rd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shattock, Joanne (2002), ‘Reviewing Generations: Professionalism and the MidVictorian Reviewer’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 35, 4, 384–400. Shattock, Joanne (ed.) (2017), Journalism and the Periodical Press in NineteenthCentury Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shaw, Christine (1985), ‘George Newnes’, in J. D. Jeremy and Christine Shaw (eds), Dictionary of Business Biography, vol. 4, London: Butterworths, 436–9. Sheets-Pyenson, Susan (1985), ‘Popular Science Periodicals in Paris and London: The Emergence of a Low Scientific Culture, 1820–1875’, Annals of Science, 42, 6, 549–72. Shinner, P. J. (2007), ‘Pocket Borough to County Borough: Power Relations, Elites and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Grimsby’, Urban History, 34, 3, 481–503.

818

bibliography

Shteir, Ann B. (1996), Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760–1860, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Shteir, Ann B. (2004), ‘Green-stocking or Blue? Science in Three Women’s Magazines, 1800–50’, in L. Henson et al. (eds), Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Media, Aldershot: Ashgate, 3–14. Shulman, Peter A. (2015), ‘Ben Franklin’s Ghost: World Peace, American Slavery, and the Global Politics of Information before the Universal Postal Union’, Journal of Global History, 10, 212–34. Shuttleworth, Sally, Gowan Dawson and Richard Noakes (2001), ‘Women, Science and Culture: Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical’, Women: A Cultural Review, 12, 57–70. Siebert, F. S. [1952] (1965), Freedom of the Press in England, 1476–1776: The Rise and Decline of Government Control, Urbana: University Illinois of Press. Silberstein-Loeb, Jonathan (2009), ‘The Structure of the News Market in Britain, 1870–1914’, Business History Review, 83, 4, 759–88. Silberstein-Loeb, Jonathan (2014), The International Distribution of News: The Associated Press, Press Association, and Reuters, 1848–1947, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Simmonds, P. L. (1841), ‘Statistics of Newspapers in Various Countries’, Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 6, 2, 111–36. Simonis, H. (1917), The Street of Ink: An Intimate History of Journalism, London: Cassell & Co. Simons, Judy (2009), ‘Gender Roles in Children’s Fiction’, in M. O. Grenby and Andrea Immel (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 143–58. Sindall, Robert (1990), Street Violence in the Nineteenth Century, Leicester: Leicester University Press. Sinnema, Peter (1998), The Dynamics of the Printed Page: Representing the Nation in the Illustrated London News, Aldershot and Brookfield: Ashgate. Slatter, John (1984), ‘Jaakoff Prelooker and The Anglo-Russian’, in John Slatter (ed.), From the Other Shore: Russian Political Emigrants in Britain, 1880–1917, London: Frank Cass, 49–66. Slauter, Will (2012), ‘The Paragraph as Information Technology: How News Travelled in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World’, Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 67, 253–78. Slauter, Will (2019), Who Owns the News? A History of Copyright, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Small, Ian (1991), Conditions for Criticism: Authority, Knowledge, and Literature in the Late Nineteenth Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, K. (2010a), ‘Public Morality and Social Control: Prostitution, Gambling and Obscenity’, in W. Cornish, S. Anderson, R. Cocks, M. Lobban, P. Polden and K. Smith (eds), The Oxford History of the Laws of England. Volume XIII 1820–1914: Fields of Development, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 352–73. Smith, K. (2010b), ‘Securing the State: The Institution of Government and Maintaining Public Order’, in W. Cornish, S. Anderson, R. Cocks, M. Lobban, P. Polden and K. Smith (eds), The Oxford History of the Laws of England. Volume XIII 1820–1914: Fields of Development, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 334–51. Smith, Martin J. (1979), ‘English Radical Newspapers in the French Revolutionary Era, 1790–1803’, PhD diss., University of London.

­

bibliography

819

Smith, Olivia (1984), The Politics of Language, 1719–1819, Oxford: Clarendon. Smith, Shannon Rose (2016), ‘Technologies of Production’, in Andrew King, Alexis Easley and John Morton (eds), The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, London: Routledge, 29–41. Smith, William Tyler (1853), ‘The Rank of the Medical Press’, Lancet, 25 June, 586. Snowden, David (2013), Writing the Prizefighter: Pierce Egan’s Boxiana World, Bern: Peter Lang. Society of Women Journalists (1897–8), Fourth Annual Report of the Society of Women Journalists. Sörbom, Per (1972), Läsning för folket: studier i tidig svensk folkbildningshistoria, Stockholm: P. A. Norstedt & Söner. Southward, John (1897), Progress in Printing and the Graphic Arts during the Victorian Era, London: Simpkin Marshall Hamilton Kerr & Co. Spalding, F. (1978), Magnificent Dreams: Burne-Jones and the Late Victorians, Oxford: Phaidon. Sparrow, Andrew (2003), Obscure Scribblers: A History of Parliamentary Journalism, London: Politico’s Publishing Ltd. Special Correspondent (1889), Letters from Wales: A Republication by Permission, of a Series of Letters in the Times dealing with the state of Wales in especial relation to the land, the Church and the Tithe, London: W. H. Allen. Spencer, D. R. (2007), The Yellow Journalism: The Press and America’s Emergence as a World Power, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Spielmann, M. H. (1891), ‘Punch and His Artists’, Contemporary Review, 60, 52–69. Spielmann, M. H. (1895a), ‘The Rivals of “Punch”’, National Review, 25, 654–66. Spielmann, M. H. (1895b), The History of ‘Punch’, London: Cassell & Company. Spring H. L. (1867), Lady Cambria, London. Springfield, Lincoln (1924), Some Piquant People, London: T. Fisher Unwin. Springhall, John (1990), ‘“A Life Story for the People”? Edwin J. Brett and the London “Low-Life” Penny-Dreadfuls of the 1860s’, Victorian Studies, 33, 223–46. Springhall, John (1994), ‘“Disseminating Impure Literature”: The “Penny Dreadful” Publishing Business since 1860’, Economic History Review, 47, 3, 567–84. Springhall, John (2006), Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics: Penny Gaffs to Gangsta Rap, 1830–1996, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Stack, David (1998), Nature and Artifice: The Life and Thought of Thomas Hodgskin (1787–1869), London: Royal Historical Society. Stainton, Henry Tibbats (1857), ‘New Works on Entomology’, Entomologist’s Annual for 1857, 166–81. Standage, Tom (1999), The Victorian Internet, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Stead, W. T. (1886a), ‘Government by Journalism’, Contemporary Review, 49, 653–74. Stead, W. T. (1886b), ‘The Future of Journalism’, Contemporary Review, 50, 663–79. Stebbins, Robert A. (1992), Amateurs, Professionals, and Serious Leisure, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Stedman Jones, Gareth (1983), Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History, 1832–1982, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steele, David (1985), ‘Gladstone and Palmerston, 1855–65’, in Peter J. Jagger (ed.), Gladstone, Politics and Religion: A Collection of Founder’s Day Lectures Delivered at St Deniol’s Library, Hawarden, 1967–83, London: Macmillan. Stendhal (1982), Œuvres intimes: Journal 1818–1842, Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

820

bibliography

Stephens, George (1835–6), ‘On the Statistics of Sweden’, Quarterly Journal of Agriculture, 6, June 1835–March 1836, 92–103. Sterling, D. (2009), ‘Business News’, Encyclopedia of Journalism, Los Angeles: SAGE. Sterry, Lorraine (2009), Victorian Women Travellers in Meiji Japan: Discovering a ‘New’ Land, Folkestone: Global Oriental. Stevens, Bethan (2017), ‘Wood Engraving as Ghostwriting: The Dalziel Brothers, Losing One’s Name, and Other Hazards of the Trade’, Textual Practice, 31 August, Routledge Open Access, https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2017.1365756. Stevenson, Nick (2003), Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitan Questions, Maidenhead: Open University Press. Stewart, David (2011), Romantic Magazines and Metropolitan Literary Culture, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Stobart, Jon (2003), ‘Identity, Competition and Place Promotion in the Five Towns’, Urban History, 30, 2, 163–82. Stokes, George G. (1848), Letter to William Thomson, 21 August, The Correspondence between Sir George Gabriel Stokes and Sir William Thomson, vol. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 50–1. Stokes, Winifred (2006), ‘The Rise and Fall of an Enterprising Provincial Paper: The Gateshead Observer, 1837–1886’, Journalism Studies, 7, 3, 427–36. Stone, James S. (1994), Emily Faithfull: Victorian Champion of Women’s Rights, Toronto: P. D. Meany. Storey, Patricia (2015), ‘Newspapers’, in Gillian Cookson (ed.), A History of the County of Durham, Volume 5: Sunderland, London: Institute of Historical Research/Boydell & Brewer, 297–300. Strachan, Hew (1980), ‘The Early Victorian Army and the Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Government’, English Historical Review, 377, 782–809. Strachan, Hew (1984), Wellington’s Legacy: The Reform of the British Army, 1830–54, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Strickland, Hugh E. (1848), ‘Preface’, in Bibliographia Zoologiae et Geologiae, vol. 1, London: Ray Society, v–xii. Sumpter, Caroline (2008), The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Tasker, Meg (n.d.), Francis Adams, Victorian Fiction Research Guides, Series 6, No. 24, available at: https://victorianfictionresearchguides.org/francis-adams/. Tate, Stephen (2007), ‘The Professionalisation of Sports Journalism c.1850 to 1939, with Particular Reference to the Career of James Catton’, PhD diss., University of Central Lancashire. Tate, Stephen (2009), ‘Edward Hulton and Sports Journalism in Late Victorian Manchester’, Manchester Region History Review 20, 46–67. Tate, Stephen (2016), ‘Charles Town Fowler’, in Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (eds), Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland, Ghent and London: Academia Press and the British Library; online edition, ProQuest C19, available at: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat =xri:c19index&rft_dat=xri:c19index:DNCJ:1777. Taunton, Matthew (2009), ‘Penny Magazine (1832–1845)’; ‘Knight’s Penny Magazine (1846)’, in Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (eds), The Dictionary of NineteenthCentury Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland, Ghent and London: Academia Press and the British Library, 486–7.

­

bibliography

821

Taylor, Barry (ed.) (2002), Foreign-Language Printing in London, 1500–1900, Boston Spa and London: British Library. Taylor, Charles (2007), A Secular Age, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Taylor, Jane (2006), ‘“Town” versus “Gown”: The Establishment of the Cambridge Daily News as a Modern Newspaper at the End of the Nineteenth Century’, Journalism Studies, 7, 3, 403–14. Taylor, Miles (1995), The Decline of British Radicalism, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Taylor, Richard (1838), Testimony in First Report from the Select Committee on Postage Together with the Minutes of Evidence, London: House of Commons, 314–29. Taylor, S. J. (1996), The Great Outsiders: Northcliffe, Rothermere and the ‘Daily Mail’, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Tedeschi, M. (2005), ‘“Where the picture cannot go, the engravings penetrate”: Prints and the Victorian Art Market’, Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, 31, 1, 8–19, 89–90. Tener, Robert H. and Malcolm Woodfield (eds) (1989), A Victorian Spectator: Uncollected Writings of R. H. Hutton, Bristol: Bristol Press. Thackeray, William Makepeace (1849), Vanity Fair. A Novel without a Hero, Paris: Baudry/Galignani, vol. II. Thackeray, William Makepeace [1848] (2003), Vanity Fair, London: Penguin. Thomas, Frederick Moy (ed.) (1904), Fifty Years of Fleet Street. Being the Life and Reflections of Sir John R Robinson, London: Macmillan. Thomas, W. L. (1888), ‘The Making of the Graphic’, Universal Review, 2, 5, 80. Thomas, William (1979), The Philosophic Radicals: Nine Studies in Theory and Practice, 1817–41, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Thompson, Andrew S. (2000), Imperial Britain: The Empire in British Politics, c. 1880–1932, Harlow: Pearson. Thompson, Edward P. (1968), The Making of the English Working Class, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Thompson, Edward P. (1980), Sir, Writing by Candlelight, London: Merlin. Thompson, Francis Michael Longstreth (1968), Chartered Surveyors: The Growth of a Profession, London: Routledge Kegan Paul. Thompson, Francis Michael Longstreth (1988), The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830–1900, London: Fontana. Thompson, James (2007), ‘“Pictorial lies”?: Posters and Politics in Britain, 1880–1914’, Past and Present, 197, 1, 177–210. Thompson, James (2011), ‘Printed Statistics and the Public Sphere: Numeracy, Electoral Politics and the Visual Culture of Numbers, 1880–1914’, in Glen O’Hara and Tom Crook (eds), Statistics and the Public Sphere in Modern Britain: Numbers and the People, c.1750–c.1950, London: Routledge, 121–43. Thompson, James (2013), British Political Culture and the Idea of ‘Public Opinion’, 1867–1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thompson, James (2017), ‘“The Lights of the Electric Octopus Have Been Switched Off ”: Visual and Political Culture in Edwardian London’, Twentieth Century British History, 29, 3, 1, September, 331–65. Thomson, William (1848), Letter to G. G. Stokes, 23 August, in The Correspondence between Sir George Gabriel Stokes and Sir William Thomson, vol. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1990), 52–3.

822

bibliography

Thornton, Brian (2007), ‘Subterranean Days of Rage: How Magazine Letters to the Editor in 1952 Foretold a Generation of Revolution’, American Journalism, 24, 1, 59–88 Tibbits, Charles J. (1904), ‘Newspapers as Detectives’, The London. A Magazine of Human Interest, October, 278–83. Tilley, Elizabeth (2009), ‘National Enterprise and Domestic Periodicals in NineteenthCentury Ireland’, in John Hinks, Catherine Armstrong and Matthew Day (eds), Periodicals and Publishers: The Newspaper and Journal Trade, 1750–1914, London: British Library, 185–202. Tilley, Elizabeth (2011), ‘The Royal Irish Academy and Antiquarianism’, in James Murphy (ed.), The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Vol. 4: The Irish Book in English, 1800–1891, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 463–76. Tilley, Elizabeth (2016), ‘Periodicals in Ireland’, in Andrew King, Alexis Easley and John Morton (eds), The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, London: Routledge, 208–20. Times (1847), Staff list, Walter Papers WP/314, News International Archive. Times (1947), The History of the Times: The Twentieth Century Test 1884–1912, London: Times Publishing Company. Times Past: The Past and Present of the Newspaper, Published since 1785 at Printing House Square [1959], London: The Times. Timperley, Charles H. [1838] (1965), The Printers’ Manual: containing instructions to learners […]. London: H. Johnston etc., repr. London: Gregg Press. Todd, Nigel (1991), The Militant Democracy: Joseph Cowen and Victorian Radicalism, Whitley Bay: Bewick Press. Toffler, Alvin (1980), The Third Wave, New York: Bantam Books. Tombs, Robert (2014), The English and Their History, London: Allen Lane. Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth (1834), ‘Preface’, The Christian Lady’s Magazine, 1, i–iii. Topham, Jonathan R. (2000), ‘Scientific Publishing and the Reading of Science in Nineteenth-Century Britain: A Historiographical Survey and Guide to Sources’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 31, 559–612. Topham, Jonathan R. (2005), ‘John Limbird, Thomas Byerley, and the Production of Cheap Periodicals in the 1820s’, Book History, 8, 75–106. Topham, Jonathan R. (2006), ‘The Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine and Religious Monthlies in Early-Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Nineteenth Century Literature Criticism, 160. Topham, Jonathan R. (2007), ‘Publishing “Popular Science” in Early NineteenthCentury Britain’, in Ayleen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman (eds), Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 135–68. Topham, Jonathan R. (2009), ‘Rethinking the History of Science Popularization/ Popular Science’, in Faidra Papanelopoulou, Agusti Neito-Galan and Enrique Perdiguero (eds), Popularizing Science and Technology in the European Periphery, 1800–2000, Farnham: Ashgate, 1–20. Topham, Jonathan R. (2013), ‘Anthologizing the Book of Nature: The Circulation of Knowledge and the Origins of the Scientific Journal in Late Georgian Britain’, in B. Lightman, G. McOuat and L. Stewart (eds), The Circulation of Knowledge between Britain, India, and China: The Early-Modern World to the Twentieth Century, Boston: Brill, 119–52.

­

bibliography

823

Topham, Jonathan R. (2016), ‘The Scientific, the Literary and the Popular: Commerce and the Reimagining of the Scientific Journal in Britain, 1813–1825’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 70, 305–24. Toplis, Alison (2009), ‘Ready-Made Clothing Advertisements in Two Provincial Newspapers, 1800–1850’, in Andrew Hobbs (ed.), ‘Local and Regional Newspapers’, special issue of International Journal of Regional and Local Studies, 5, 1, 85–103. Travis, John (1993), The Rise of the Devon Seaside Resorts, 1750–1900, Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Trentmann, Frank (2009), Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption, and Civil Society in Modern Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Trentmann, Frank and Vanessa Taylor (2006), ‘From Users to Consumers: Water Politics in Nineteenth-Century London’, in Frank Trentmann (ed.), The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World, Oxford: Berg, 53–80. Trinder, Barrie (1982), Victorian Banbury, Chichester: Phillimore. Trodd, Colin (2000), ‘Academic Cultures: The Royal Academy and the Commerce of Discourse in Victorian Britain’, in Rafael Cardoso Denis and Colin Trodd (eds), Art and the Academy in the Nineteenth Century, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 179–93. Trollope, Anthony (1865), ‘On Anonymous Literature’, The Fortnightly Review, 1, 491–8. Tsukahara, Togo (2013), ‘Chūgoku de no eiji shimbun ni keisai sareta 19-seiki no kishō kiroku’ [Nineteenth-Century Chinese Coastal Meteorology: Climate Reconstruction Based on Historical Records in English Newspapers], Rekishichirigaku, 55, 5, 69–81. Tucker, Albert (1994), ‘Military’, in J. Don Vann and Rosemary T. VanArsdel (eds), Victorian Periodicals and Victorian Society, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 62–80. Tumber, Howard and Marina Prentoulis (2005), ‘Journalism and the Making of a Profession’, in Hugo de Burgh (ed.), Making Journalists, London and New York: Routledge, 58–76. Turgenev, Ivan (1950), Fathers and Sons, New York: Random House, The Modern Library. Turner, Ernest Sackville (1965, 1968), The Shocking History of Advertising, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Turner, Ernest Sackville (1975), Boys Will Be Boys, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Turner, Frank M. (1980), ‘Public Science in Britain, 1880–1919’, Isis, 71, 589–608. Turner, Mark W. (2009), ‘Divorce News’, in L. Brake and M. Demoor (eds), Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland, Ghent: Academia Press, 172. Turner, Michael J. (2003), ‘Revolutionary Connection: “The Incorruptible” Maximilian Robespierre and the “Schoolmaster of Chartism” Bronterre O’Brien’, The Historian, 75, 2, 237–61. Tusan, Michelle Elizabeth (2005), Women Making News: Gender and Journalism in Modern Britain, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Tutt, James William (1890), Entomologist’s Record and Journal of Variation, 1, i–ii. Twain, Mark (1879), The Innocents Abroad or the new Pilgrim’s Progress, Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz.

824

bibliography

Twyman, Michael (1970, 1998), Printing, 1770–1970: An Illustrated History of Its Development and Uses in England, London: Eyre & Spottiswoode and British Library. Uglow, Jenny (2006), Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick, London: Faber & Faber. Uí Chollatáin, Regina (2004), An Claidheamh Soluis agus Fáinne an Lae, 1899–1932, Dublin: Cois Life. Uí Chollatáin, Regina (2011), ‘Newspapers, Journals and the Irish Revival’, in Kevin Rafter (ed.), More a Disease Than a Profession: Irish Journalism before Independence, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 160–73. Uí Chollatáin, Regina (2012), ‘Trasnú Teorainneacha agus Náisiún in Iriseoireacht na Gaeilge sa naoú haois déag’, in Fionntán de Brún and Séamus Mac Mathúna (eds), Teanga agus Litríocht na Gaeilge i gCúige Uladh sa Naoú hAois déag, Belfast: Ollscoil Uladh, 134–52. Uí Chollatáin, Regina (2014), ‘Deisceabail agus soiscéalta. Ceannródaithe athbheochana agus fóram na hiriseoireachta’, Léachtaí Cholm Cille, 44, 22–45. Uí Chollatáin, Regina (2016a), ‘Language Shift and Language Revival in Ireland’, in Raymond Hickey (ed.), Sociolinguistics in Ireland, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 176–97. Uí Chollatáin, Regina (2016b), ‘“Thall is Abhus” 1860–1930: The Revival Process and the Journalistic Web between Ireland and North America’, in Vera Regan, Chloe Diskin and Jennifer Martin (eds), Language, Identity and Migration, London and New York: Peter Lang, 353–79. Uí Fhaoláin, Aoife (2014), ‘The Irish Independent agus ábhar Gaeilge 1905–1922: Peirspictíocht stairiúil ar theanga agus ar chultúr na hÉireann i gcomhthéacs idéeolaíocht “Irish-Ireland” agus athbheochan na Gaeilge’, PhD diss., Dublin: University College Dublin. UK Census (1831), ‘Demography of London’ summary table based on London Through Time, dynamic website produced by Great Britain GIS, https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Demography_of_London (accessed 20 May 2018). Underwood, C. (1992), ‘Institute of Journalists’, in D. Griffiths (ed.), The Encyclopaedia of the British Press, 1422–1992, London: Macmillan, 646–7. Van Remoortel, Marianne (2015), Women, Work and the Victorian Periodical: Living by the Press, New York: Palgrave. van Wesemael, P. (2001), Architecture of Instruction and Delight: A Socio-historical Analysis of World Exhibitions as a Didactic Phenomenon (1798–1851–1970), Rotterdam: 010 Publishers. Vann, J. Don. (1994), ‘Comic Periodicals,’ in Victorian Periodicals and Victorian Society, ed. J. Don Vann and Rosemary T. VanArsdel, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 278–89. Vann, J. Don and Rosemary T. VanArsdel (eds) (1994), Victorian Periodicals and Victorian Society, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Vernon, James (1996), Re-reading the Constitution: New Narratives in the Political History of England’s Long Nineteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vincent, David (1989, 1993), Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1750–1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vincent, James Edmund (1888–9), ‘The Vernacular Press of Wales’, National Review, xii.

­

bibliography

825

Vincent, John (1966), The Formation of the Liberal Party, 1858­­–1868, London: Constable. Vizetelly, Ernest (2012), From Cyprus to Zanzibar by the Egyptian Delta, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. W. & R. Chambers archives on deposit at National Library of Scotland (WRC) Dep 341–415: 90 Account book with projected expenses for different publication projects. W. & R. Chambers archives on deposit at National Library of Scotland (WRC) Dep ­341–416: 109 Account book with projected expenses for different publication projects. W. & R. Chambers archives on deposit at National Library of Scotland (WRC) Dep 341–378. Receipts for payment of artwork for illustration under G entries in first edition, Chambers’s Encyclopaedia (1862), 31 October. Wahl-Jorgensen, Karin (2007), Journalists and the Public: Newsroom Culture, Letters to the Editor and Democracy, New York: Hampton Press. Wakeman, Geoffrey (1973), Victorian Book Illustration: The Technical Revolution, Newton Abbot: David & Charles. Walker, Andrew (2006a), ‘Reporting Play: The Local Newspaper and Sports Journalism, c. 1870–1914’, Journalism Studies, 7, 3, 452–62. Walker, Andrew (2006b), ‘The Development of the Provincial Press in England c. 1780–1914: An Overview’, Journalism Studies, 7, 3, 373–86. Walker, Andrew (2018), ‘Rough Music, Community Protest and the Local Press in Nineteenth-Century England’, International Journal of Regional and Local History, 13, 1, 86–104. Walker, R. (1884), ‘John Tenniel and Caricature Art’, Good Words, 25, 815–22. Wallace, S. (2016), Personal communication via email, 12 April. Walsh, Michael J. (1990), The Tablet: A Commemorative History, London: The Tablet. Walsh, Michael J. (1999), ‘Catholics, Society and Popular Culture’, in V. Alan McClelland and Michael Hodgetts (eds), From Without the Flaminian Gate: 150 Years of Roman Catholicism in England and Wales, 1850–2000, London: Darton, Longman & Todd Ltd, 346–70. Walton, John K. (1983), The English Seaside Resort: A Social History, 1750–1914, Leicester: Leicester University Press. Walton, John K. and P. R. McGloine (1979), ‘Holiday Resorts and Their Visitors: Some Sources for the Local Historian’, The Local Historian, 13, 6, 323–31. Warren, Lynne (2000), ‘“Women in Conference”: Reading the Correspondence Columns in Woman 1890–1910’, in Laurel Brake, Bill Bell and David Finkelstein (eds), Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 122–34. Wasson, Ellis Archer (2006), ‘The Whigs and the Press, 1800–50’, in K. W. Schweizer (ed.), Parliament and the Press, 1689–c.1939, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 68–87. Waters, Mary A. (2004), British Women Writers and the Profession of Criticism, 1789–1832, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Watson, Alfred E. T. (1918), A Sporting and Dramatic Career, London: Macmillan. Watson, Robert Patrick (1899), Memoirs: A Journalist’s Experience of Mixed Society, London: Smith Ainslie. Watts, Iain (2014), ‘“We want no authors”: William Nicholson and the Contested Role of the Scientific Journal in Britain, 1797–1813’, British Journal for the History of Science, 47, 1–23.

826

bibliography

Watts, Iain (2015), ‘Philosophical Intelligence: Letters, Print and Experiment during Napoleon’s Continental Blockade’, Isis, 106, 749–70. Webb, Sidney and Beatrice Webb (1897), Industrial Democracy, new edn, London: Longman, Green & Co. Webby, Elizabeth (2000), ‘Colonial Writers and Readers’, in Webby (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 50–73. Weedon, Alexis (2003), Victorian Publishing: The Economics of Book Production for a Mass Market, 1836–1916, London: Ashgate. Weisz, George (2003), ‘The Emergence of Medical Specialization in the Nineteenth Century’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 77, 3, 536–75. Weller, Toni (2008), ‘Preserving Knowledge through Popular Victorian Periodicals: An Examination of The Penny Magazine and the Illustrated London News, 1842–1843’, Library History, 24, 3, 200–7. Wellsman, Walter (1895), ‘The Newspaper Press Directory, Its History and Progress, 1846–1895’, Mitchell’s Newspaper Press Directory, 9–12. Wenzlhuemer, Roland (2012), Connecting the Nineteenth-Century World: The Telegraph and Globalization, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. West, John (1983), Town Records, Chichester: Phillimore. Whatley, Christopher A. (2000), Scottish Society, 1707–1830: Beyond Jacobitism, towards Industrialization, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Whelan, Aoife (2012), ‘“Irish-Ireland” and the Irish Independent, 1905–1922’, in Mark O’Brien and Kevin Rafter (eds), Independent Newspapers: A History, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 67–80. Whetton, Harry (ed.) (1946), Practical Printing and Binding: A Complete Guide to the Latest Developments in All Branches of the Printers’ Craft, London: Odhams. While, Jack (1931), Fifty Years of Fire Fighting in London, London: Hutchinson. White, Cynthia L. (1970), Women’s Magazines, 1693–1968, London: Michael Joseph. White, Paul (2002), ‘Cross-Cultural Encounters: The Co-production of Science and Literature in Mid-Victorian Periodicals’, in R. Luckhurst and J. McDonagh (eds), Transactions and Encounters: Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 75–95. Whorlow, H. (1886), The Provincial Newspaper Society, 1836–1886. A Jubilee Retrospect, London: Page, Pratt & Co. Wickwar, W. H. (1928), The Struggle for the Freedom of the Press, 1819–1832, London: G. Allen & Unwin Ltd. Wiener, Joel H. (1969), The War of the Unstamped: The Movement to Repeal the British Newspaper Tax, 1830–1836, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Wiener, Joel H. (1988), ‘How New Was the New Journalism?’, in Joel H. Wiener (ed.), Papers for the Millions: The New Journalism in Britain, 1850s to 1914, Westport: Greenwood Press, 47–71. Wiener, Joel H. (2011), The Americanization of the British Press, 1830s–1914: Speed in the Age of Transatlantic Journalism, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Wigley, John (1980), The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Sunday, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Wiles, R. M. (1965), Freshest Advices: Early Provincial Newspapers in England, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Wilkes, Joanne (2010), Women Reviewing Women in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Critical Reception of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot, Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate.

­

bibliography

827

Williams, Francis (1959), Dangerous Estate: The Anatomy of Newspapers, London: Arrow Books. Williams, Helen S. (1998), ‘Russian-Language Periodical Publishing by the Radical Emigration, 1855–1900’, Solanus, n.s. 2, 12–32. Williams, Helen S. (2000), ‘“Vesti i slukhi”: The Russian Émigré Press to 1905’, Revolutionary Russia, 13, 2, December, 45–61. Williams, Kevin (2010), Read All About It: A History of the British Newspaper, London: Routledge. Williams, Rhiannon Heledd (2013), ‘Whose Friend from the Old Country? The Welsh-Language American Press and National Identity in the Nineteenth Century’, in Michael Newton (ed.), Celts in the Americas, Sydney, Nova Scotia: Cape Breton University Press, 270–82. Willing’s British and Irish Press Guide (1890–), London: James Willing. Wilson, Charles (1965), ‘Economy and Society in Late Victorian Britain’, Economic History Review, 18, 1, 183–98. Wilson, Charles (1985), First with the News: The History of W.H. Smith, 1792–1972, London: Jonathan Cape. Wilson, Frederick J. F. and John Southward (1880), Stereotyping and Electrotyping, London: Wyman & Sons. Wilson, Richard (1986), ‘Newspapers and Industry: The Export of Wool Controversy in the 1780s’, in Michael Harris and Alan Lee (eds), The Press in English Society from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries, London: Associated University Presses, 80–112. Winder, Robert (2013), The Little Wonder: The Remarkable History of Wisden, London: Wisden. Windscheffel, Alex (2007), Popular Conservatism in Imperial London, 1868–1906, London: Royal Historical Society. Winseck, Dwayne R. and Robert M. Pike (2007), Communication and Empire: Media, Markets and Globalization, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Wohl, Anthony (1995), ‘“Dizzi-Ben-Dizzi”: Disraeli as Alien’, Journal of British Studies, 34, 3, 375–411. Wohl, Anthony (1996), ‘“Ben JuJu”: Representations of Disraeli’s Jewishness in the Victorian Political Cartoon’, Jewish History, 10, 89–134. Wolff, Michael and Celina Fox (1973), ‘Pictures from the Magazines’, in H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff (eds), The Victorian City: Images and Realities, vol. 2, London and Boston, MA: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 559–82. Wood, Christopher (1976), Victorian Panorama: Paintings of Victorian Life, London: Faber & Faber. Woods, Oliver and James Bishop (1985), The Story of The Times: Bicentenary Edition 1785–1985, London: Michael Joseph. Woolf, Virginia (1995), Interviews and Recollections, ed. J. H. Stape, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Worboys, Michael (2011), ‘Practice and the Science of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century’, Isis, 102, 1, 109–15. Wraxall, Lascelles (1866), ‘Swans, Herons, and Falcons’, Boy’s Own Magazine, 47, 325–30. Wright, Charles and Ernest Fayle (1928), A History of Lloyd’s from the Founding of Lloyd’s Coffee House to the Present Day, London: Macmillan & Co. Wynne, Deborah (2001), The Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family Magazine, Basingstoke: Palgrave.

828

bibliography

Wynter, Andrew (1861), ‘Who is Mr Reuter?’, Once a Week, 4, 23 February, 243–6. Yates, Edmund (1865), The Business of Pleasure, 2 vols, London: Chapman & Hall. Yates, Edmund Hodgson (1884, 1885), Edmund Yates: His Recollections and Experiences … 1st edn; 4th edn, London: R. Bentley & Son. Yates, Nigel (1999), Anglican Ritualism in Victorian Britain, 1830–1910, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yeo, Richard (1993), Defining Science: William Whewell, Natural Knowledge, and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Young, Alan R. (2007), Punch and Shakespeare in the Victorian Era, Oxford: Peter Lang. Young, Robert M. (1985), Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

INDEX

Academy, 167, 310, 759 Ackermann, Rudolph, 691, 749 Adams, Thomas R., 150 Addington, Henry, 36 advertising, 9–10, 57–61, 133–4, 449–51, 499, 564–5, 751, 755 in French press, 224, 227, 239 illustrated, 22, 61, 619 ‘puffs’, 208 revenue from, 27, 55, 57–8, 238 targeting, 9, 568, 691 taxes on, 9, 36–40, 47, 51, 59, 618, 724 use of typography, 59 advice columns, 450–1 age of consent, 214 agricultural press, 566, 573, 583–4 Ainsworth, W. H., 306 Akami, Tomoko, 278 Albion press, 749 albumen process, 117 Alcock, Charles W., 636, 638 Alfred, Prince, 284 All the Year Round, 131, 147, 616, 756 Allen, William, 386 Allison, William, 634 Ally Sloper, 21, 415, 415–17, 417, 422–3, 429–30, 433–4, 604, 605, 762 Altholz, Josef, 377 Altick, Richard, 129, 200, 406 American Civil War, 503, 547 American press, 61, 73, 75, 103, 108, 228, 262–8 Ancient Ireland, 358, 365 Anderson, Benedict, 314 Anderson, David, 407 Anderson, Elizabeth Garrett, 701

Anderson, Patricia, 114–15 Andrews, Alexander, 174 Anglican Church, 384–6, 519 Anglo-Catholicism, 383–4 Annals of Natural History, 463 Annals of Philosophy, 460 Anning, Mary, 471 Annual Register, 68 annuals, 379, 691–3, 749 anonymity and pseudonyms, 156–7, 170–3, 188–92, 341, 343, 442, 450, 452, 465, 602, 681, 731, 750 in reviews, 17, 302–6, 308–9, 312 in writing for and by women, 17, 191, 305, 689, 706, 708 Answers, 128, 132–4, 147, 148 Answers to Correspondents, 181, 608, 762 Anti-Jacobin Review, 423 anti-Semitism, 388 Anti-Vaccinator, 25 Apollo Belvedere, 105–6, 106 Apperley, Charles James, 623, 624 Applegarth, Augustus, 2, 69, 72, 749, 754 Archambault, Gaston Hanet, 228 armed services press, 578, 590–5 Armstrong, Isobel, 308 Army and Navy Gazette, 578, 593 Arnold, Matthew, 176–7, 180, 302, 309, 319–21, 335, 735, 759 arrivals lists, 717, 725, 727 art collecting, 618 galleries, 619–20 as a hobby, 613 journalism, 22, 620 reproductions, 616–17, 620–1

829

830

index

Ashes, the, 633, 640, 651–2 Ashley, Charles Hitchen, 634–5 Aspinall, Arthur, 200, 528, 530 Asquith, Ivon, 527–8 Associated Press, 263 astronomy, 343, 466, 476 Athenaeum, 25, 146, 303, 308–10, 473–4, 476, 750 science reporting, 468–70 Athletic News, 55, 635, 639, 760 attribution, 246–51, 258–9 Aunt Judy’s Magazine, 658, 663–4, 678 Austen, Jane, 1, 298, 309 Australia, 247–8 impact of telegraph network, 253–6 press, 254–6, 311–12; Gaelic-language, 349, 352 Aytoun, W. E., 307 Babbage, Charles, 464–5 Baby, 451–2 ‘baby-farming’, 444 Baden-Powell, Robert, 289 badminton, 629–30 Bagehot, Walter, 296, 541 Baggs, Chris, 145 Bailey, Peter, 608 Baillie, Joanna, 297 Baily’s Monthly Magazine, 628, 629 Baird, George Husband, 339 Baldwin, Robert, 460 Ballin, Ada, 451 Band of Hope, 676–7 Baner ac Amserau Cymru, 325, 330 Bank Charter Act (1844), 489 bank holidays, 759 Bank of England, 206, 488–9, 490 Bank of Scotland, 488 banking system, 488–9, 491 Banks, Joseph, 465 Banville, Scott, 415 Barbauld, Anna Letitia, 297 Baring Brothers & Co., 497 Barker, Hannah, 540 Barker, Nicolas, 150 Barnes, Thomas, 38 Barnum, P. T., 103 Barratt, Elizabeth, 300 Barratt, Thomas J., 619 Barrell, John, 564 Barron, Philip, 358, 363 Bauer, Andreas, 68–9 Baxter, William Giles, 433 Bayley, Frederick, 46

Bazerman, Charles, 563 Beardsley, Aubrey, 415 Becker, Lydia, 543 Beckett, Gilbert à, 406, 424–5, 750 Beetham, Margaret, 127, 148, 182, 690, 698 Beeton, Isabella, 53, 698, 755 Beeton, Samuel, 53, 659, 698–9, 757 bankruptcy, 699 Belfast News-Letter, 664, 711, 727 Bell, John, 47, 182, 623, 690, 747 Bell, W. J., 328 La Belle Assemblée, 690–3, 696, 747 Bell’s Life in London, 23, 184, 424, 605, 622–7, 632, 635, 637, 640, 646, 749 Bell’s Weekly Messenger, 43, 623, 646 Bennett, Arnold, 164–5 Bennett, James Gordon Jr., 227, 264 Bensley, Thomas, 68 Bent, William, 586 Bentham, Jeremy, 514, 749 Bentley, John James, 639 Bentley, Richard, 299, 304 Bent’s Monthly Literary Advertiser, 585–8, 746 Bergin, Osborn, 361 Berlioz, Hector, 226 Bernasconi, George Henry, 435 Besant, Walter, 157–8, 162, 167–9 Bewick, Thomas, 80, 91, 95–6, 95, 100, 104, 106, 108 Bibliographia Zoologiae et Geologia, 474 Biggs, George, 45–6 Biggs and Co., 583 bilingual press, 229, 235–7 Bingham, Adrian, 60 Binstead, Arthur, 633 bitumen process, 117 Black Dwarf, 31, 201, 421, 423, 513–15, 522, 748 Blackie, John Stuart, 190 Blackwood, William, 153, 589 Blackwood’s, 146, 153, 156, 164–5, 167, 173, 299–300, 305, 593, 602, 730, 748, 753, 755 Blair, Kirstie, 184, 307 Blathwayt, Sarah, 666 Bleakley, Edward, 54 Blind, Mathilde, 706 Blowitz, Henri, 163, 192 Bly, Nelly, 192–3 Bodichon, Barbara, 543, 701 Boer War, Second (1899-1902), 684 Bolg an tSolair, 363–4, 368

­

index

Bolton, Thomas, 118 Bombay Times and Standard, 279 book trade press, 573–4, 585–90 Bookseller, 402–3, 585, 588–90 bookstalls, 134–7, 140; see also newsagents boosterism, 713–14, 722 Boots Booklovers’ Library, 145 Boucheret, Jessie, 703 Bouisson, Charles, 237 Bourke, Ulick J., 365–6 Bow Bells, 704, 705 Bowles, Thomas Gibson, 602 boxing, 624–7, 627, 632, 648–9 Boy’s Brigade, 677 Boy’s Journal, 659 Boys of England, 658–9, 677–8 Boy’s Own Magazine, 53, 659–60 Boy’s Own Paper, 379, 616, 660–2, 668, 671–2, 675, 677, 760 Bradbury, William, 422 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, 167 Brake, Laurel, 127, 182, 191, 688 Brande, William Thomas, 460 Brandt, Laurids, 77 Branston, Allen Robert, 97, 100 Brett, Edwina, 659 Brewster, David, 460, 464, 465 bribery, 198, 200 Briggs, Asa, 713 British Association for the Advancement of Science, 469–70, 471 British Medical Journal, 25, 443–4, 449, 455–6, 561, 752 British Quarterly Review, 298, 753 Brogan, Denis, 545 Brooke, Charlotte, 364 Brooks, Reginald Shirley, 633 Brooks, Shirley, 16, 285, 730, 732–3 Brougham, Henry, 45, 206, 294, 746 Broughton, Rhoda, 706 Brown, Lucy, 530 Brown, Michael, 442 Browning, Robert, 309 Bruce, David, 77 Brunel, Isambard Kingdom, 735 Buchanan, Robert, 307–8 Builder, 561, 620, 753 bull baiting, 646, 649 Bullock, Walter, 75 Bullock, William, 758 Bulmer, William, 458 Bulwer, Edward, 301, 749 Bunter, Billy (comic character), 663

831

Burdett, Henry, 452, 454 Burgess, William, 71 Burney, Fanny, 300 Burns, Robert, 307 Burtsev, Vladimir, 291 business journalism, 26, 485–506 Butler, Josephine, 543 Butler, Marilyn, 295–6, 298 bylines, 188–93, 260 Byron, Lord, 1, 225, 295, 307 Calcutta Englishman, 594 Caldecott, Randolph, 109 Caledonian Mercury, 248, 252, 353, 501 Camlot, Jason, 300 Campbell, Alexander, 522 Campbell, John, 6–7 Campbell, Lady Colin, 166 Campbell, Thomas, 295 Canada, Gaelic-language press, 343–4, 347–8, 350–3 Canaries, 222, 233 Captain, 661, 668 Caraid nan Gael, 344 Cardiff Times, 323–5, 330–1, 666, 718 caricatures, 99, 100, 401, 421, 426, 423, 534 Carlile, Richard, 44, 466, 513–14, 516, 520 Carlyle, Thomas, 158, 301 Carnegie, Andrew, 119 Carpenter, William, 43, 517, 518 cartoons, 20, 100, 101, 120, 419, 423–7, 432n, 435–6, 446, 534, 542, 603 Cartwright, John, 512 Casey, Patrick and Joseph, 226 Caslon type foundry, 77 Cassell, John, 53–4, 57, 131 Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper, 131, 602, 755 Catholic emancipation, 39, 42, 523 Catholic Herald, 378, 392–3 Catholic press, 20, 377–8, 383, 389–94 anti-Irish, 391–2 Catholic Relief Act (1829), 387, 750 Catholicism, 390–2, 541 Catling, Thomas, 188 Cato Street Conspiracy, 509–10, 516 Catton, James, 639 celebrities, 603, 707 censorship, 6, 197 census returns, 129, 337 Central Press (news agency), 736–42 Cesarani, David, 388

832

index

Chalaby, Jean K., 508 Chamberlain, Joseph, 537 Chambers, Robert, 89 Chambers, William, 44, 72, 89–90, 115–16, 131, 462 Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 44–5, 72, 88, 90, 131, 306, 405, 462, 560, 597, 655, 693, 701, 751 Chambers’s Encyclopaedia, 98–9, 98, 106, 108, 116 Chambers’s Information for the People, 88–91, 88, 92, 113, 122 chapbooks, 80 Chapman, John, 298, 588 Chapman & Hall, 52 charitable work, 677–8 Le Charivari, 100, 406, 426 Charles, James, 398 Chartism, 40, 44, 88, 131, 306, 315, 518–21, 524–5, 528, 541–2 Chemist, 462–3, 466, 561, 564 Chertkov, Vladimir, 291 chess, 611, 633 Chester Courant and Anglo-Welsh Gazette, 719, 731 children child labour, 672 child prostitution, 214 favourite reads, 655 news sources, 680–7 as readers, 113, 655 Children’s Own Paper, 668, 677 children’s press, 28–9, 379, 655–87 for adolescents, 663 children’s columns in newspapers, 29, 664–6, 680–7, 727 death notices, 673–5 denominational, 382 gender-specific, 658–60, 662–3 letters to the editor, 682 mastheads, 669–71 moralisation in, 657, 662–4, 676–7 naming of columnists, 668–9 post-1850, 657–64 quality of illustrations, 657 readership, 675–6 ‘safe’ public sphere, 671 sense of reader ownership, 667–8, 680 specialist and hobby publications, 661–2 temperance publication, 676–7 for the working class, 658, 663 Child’s Companion, 379, 656–7 China, 16, 278, 284

Chisholm, Caroline, 551 Christian press, 19–20, 305, 696; see also Catholic press; religious press Christie, William, 296, 301 chromolithography, 93 Church, William, 78 Church of Ireland, 379, 395–400 Church of Scotland, schism in, 345, 379 Church Times, 378, 384–5 Churchill, Winston, 618 Civil Service, 575, 577 An Claidheamh Soluis agus Fáinne an Lae, 374–5 Clarion, 542, 609 Cleave, John, 518–19, 521 Clerk, Archbald, 346 Cleveland Advertiser, 714 Clowes, William, 2, 45 Clymer, George, 68 Coates, Thomas, 271, 273–4, 277 Cobbe, Frances Power, 214–15 Cobbett, William, 37, 201, 423, 442, 512–16, 512, 520 Cockburn, Henry, 307 cockfighting, 631, 646, 649 coffee houses, 142–3, 143, 485, 491 Colburn, Henry, 38, 303, 747 Colclough, Stephen, 135 Coleridge, John Taylor, 153 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 295 collecting, 614–15, 661 collectivism, 519 Colligan, Colette, 231 Collins, Henry, 503 Collins, Wilkie, 139–40 Colman, Jeremiah, 618 colonial press, 174, 203–4, 278–89, 311, 593 The Comic Offering, 692 comic press, 20–1, 421–2 for women, 692 Commonsense (Paine), 514 competitions, 56, 148–9 Conboy, Martin, 155–6, 170, 182 Constable, Archibald, 154, 294 Constantinople, 222, 228, 234–5 Contagious Diseases Acts, 543 Contemporary Review, 163, 165, 303, 421, 758 contraception, 210 Cook, Eliza, 694, 754 Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph system, 252 Cooper, Astley, 442

­

index

Cooper, Bransby, 442 copperplate engraving, 80 copyright, 6, 620 Corelli, Marie, 706 Corlett, John, 633, 634 Corn Laws, 39–40, 512, 520, 540–1 1846 repeal, 38, 492 Cornhill Magazine, 100, 141, 146, 156, 159, 165, 167, 172, 303–4, 319, 470, 471, 601–2, 694, 756 Cossar, John and family, 82–5 Cotton Factory Times, 686 cotton trade, 280 Course of the Exchange, 490 Cowan, Joseph, 537, 734 Cowan, Robert, 528 Cowen, Joshua, 290 Cowper, Edward, 2, 69, 72, 274, 748 crafts, 613, 699–700 Craigie, Pearl, 166 Craik, Dinah Mulock, 305, 693, 706 Crane, Walter, 109, 542 Crawford, Emily, 165, 603 Crewdson, Isaac, 386 Crewe, Tom, 534 cricket, 622, 633, 636–7, 650–2 crime reporting, 188, 212–14, 520 Crimean War, 112, 592 Croker, John Wilson, 2, 295, 302, 748 Crompton, Thomas, 54 Crouzet, Francois, 488–9 Croydon Brotherhood Church, 291 Cruikshank, George, 626 Cruikshank, Robert, 424 Cuairtear ‘nan Coillte, 347–8, 752 Cuairtear ‘nan Gleann, 342–5, 752 Cullen, Louis, 138 Curll, Edmund, 210 Curran, James, 204, 216 Curtis, L. Perry, 181 Curwen, John, 612 Cymreigyddion Society, 316–17 Cyprus, 222, 237 Cziernecki, Ludwig, 289 Daguerrotype process, 227, 751 Dahl, Christopher C., 304 Daily Express, 24, 57, 639, 764 Daily Mail, 24, 57, 60, 191, 532, 639, 643, 764 Daily Mirror, 191–2 Daily News, 497, 538, 640, 753 Daily Telegraph, 51, 155, 181, 498–9, 640–1, 755

833

Dallagana, James, 753 Dallas, E. S., 170–2, 303, 305, 306 d’Alton, Richard, 358, 366 Daly, Mary, 363 Dalziel Brothers, 96–7, 110, 112, 119, 415, 429, 433 dame schools, 130 Dance, Charles, 696–7 Darnton, Robert, 150 Darton, F. J. Harvey, 663 Darwin (Australia), 253 Darwin, Charles, 470–1, 480–2 Dauphin, Cécile, 183 Davies, Emily, 701 Davies, Windsor, 192 Davis, James, 226 Davis, Thomas, 554, 556 Davitt, Michael, 741 Dawson, John, 158 Dawson, William, 70 Day’s Doings, 604, 606 De Freitas, Leo John, 109–10, 112–13 De la Beche, Henry, 467 de Mattos, Katherine, 309 de Quincey, Thomas, 301 death, 672 Delcambre, Adrien, 78 Dellagana, James, 73, 755, 757 Demoor, Marysa, 310 Denison, William, 631 denominational press see religious press Diamond, Charles, 392–3 Dickens, Charles, 46, 158, 175, 202, 304, 309, 469, 616, 626, 753 Bleak House, 551 Hard Times, 130 illustrations of his work, 408, 414–15 Our Mutual Friend, 601 Dicky Bird Society, 667, 669, 673–5 death notices, 673–4 dictionaries, 346 Dilke, Charles Wentworth, 303, 309, 750 Dilke, Emilia, 310 Dillon, John Blake, 554 Disraeli, Benjamin, 1–2, 154, 306, 539, 547 Dissent see Nonconformism distribution systems, 42, 47–51, 134–40, 136, 225, 241–7 divorce, 206, 214, 704 Dixon, Ella Hepworth, 706 Dixon, William Hepworth, 309 Docquois, Georges, 267 Doherty, John, 524

834

index

Dolgorukov, Peter, 290 Domestic Journal, 694–5, 695 domestic sphere, 600 Donkin, Bryan, 68 Douglas, Lord Alfred, 262–3, 265–9 Dowling, Vincent and Frank, 626–7 Drennen, William, 524 Drotner, Kirsten, 657 Drysdale, John, 447 du Maurier, George, 100, 704 Dublin Review, 299, 389–90, 751 Dublin University Magazine, 299–300, 524, 555, 751 Duff, Grant, 288 Duffy, Charles Gavan, 554, 557 Duncan, Andrew, 439–40 Dundee Advertiser, 51, 53 Dunton, John, 689 Duval, Marie (Isabelle de Tessier), 415, 430 Easley, Alexis, 694, 706 Eason & Son, 12, 49, 128, 134, 138–9 Eaton, Daniel, 509 Ecclesiastical Gazette, 384, 567, 574 economics of publishing, 35–57 Economist, 490–3, 540–1, 561, 567, 732 Edgeworth, Maria, 297–8, 300 Edinburgh, 71, 89 Edinburgh Gazetteer, 201, 530 Edinburgh Journal of Science, 460, 464 Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, 439–40 Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, 460–1 Edinburgh Review, 16, 154, 169, 294–8, 304, 460, 464, 470, 487–8, 512, 521, 540, 746, 750 support for Whigs, 36 editor, role of, 244–7 education, 130, 133, 149, 403 as a tool of radicalism, 516 educational press, 271, 576 see also literacy Education Acts (1870 and 1871), 11–12, 658, 759 Ireland (1892), 12 Edward, Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII), 412, 608 Edwards, Owen Dudley, 390, 392 Egan, Pierce, 623, 747 Egypt, 225 Electric Telegraph Act (1869), 9, 50 Electric Telegraph Company (ETC), 50, 739

electrotyping, 80, 115–17, 752 Elgee, Francesca, 556 Eliot, George (Marian Evans), 298, 309, 590, 689, 755 Adam Bede, 596, 616 Romola, 471 Eliot, T. S., 601 Eliza Cook’s Journal, 694 Ellis, Markman, 142 Eltze, Frederick, 101 encyclopaedias, 98 Endres, Kathleen, 585 Engineer, 567, 576 English Civil War, 507 English language press overseas, 7, 13, 221–39 English Woman’s Journal, 701–2, 756 Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine (EDM), 53, 184, 698, 700–1, 755, 757 Entomologist’s Weekly Intelligencer, 26, 480–4, 481 entomology, periodicals, 480–1 epistolary networks, 241–2 Epps, John, 447 Erskine of Marr, Roderick, 355 Escott, T. H. S., 162, 286 Evans, David Morier, 491 Evans, Edmund, 109–10, 112–13 Evans, Frederick, 422 Evans, J. Young, 332–3 evening newspapers, 24, 42, 321–2, 641–2, 749 Ewerlöf, Frans, 271–4, 277 Examiner, 58, 160–1, 508, 512, 517, 540, 554 Exchange Telegraph Company (Extel), 641 FA Cup, 638–9 fact-checking, 263 Faithfull, Emily, 703, 706 false news, 260–8 Family Herald, 45–6, 78, 597–8, 753 famine Highland, 342 Irish, 39, 137, 365, 383, 391, 395 Russian, 683 Fane, Violet, 706 Faraday, Michael, 464 fashion press, 603, 690, 749 Fawcett, Millicent Garrett, 706 Feist, Henry M., 632

­

index

feminism, 131, 296–7, 305, 312, 543, 693, 701–4, 705, 756, 762 Fenianism, 131, 398 Fenwick-Miller, Florence, 703 fiction, 598, 609 children’s, 658, 663 serialised, 131, 147, 598 Field, 611, 627 Figaro in London, 406, 424–6, 425, 750 Fildes, Luke, 617, 620 Financial and Mining News, 495, 762 financial journalism, 26–7, 233–4, 486–506, 575–6, 583 in the regional press, 499–501 in the USA, 494–5 Financial News, 487, 489, 493, 496–7 Financial Times, 487, 489–90, 493, 496–7, 496, 561, 762 Finkelstein, David, 182, 560 First Aid, 453–4, 454 First World War, 394 Fleet Street, 37–8, 173 Flint, Kate, 131 Fonblanque, Albany, 540 football, 24, 622, 632, 637–9, 646, 650–1, 727–8 Football Association, 638–9 foreign-language press, 14, 17–19, 278 Forget Me Not, 691, 705 Forsel, Carl af, 271–2, 277 Forster, William, 130 Fortnightly Review, 156, 190, 303, 312, 602, 703, 757 Forwood, Arthur, 330 Foster, Joseph, 75 Foster, Thomas Campbell, 315 Foulis, Andrew, 114 Fourdrinier process, 45, 81–2 fourth estate, 38, 171–2, 197, 216 Fowler, Charles Town, 187 Fox, Richard K., 604 Fox Bourne, H. R., 161, 168, 173, 175, 737 fox hunting, 623–4, 628, 647 Fox’s Libel Act (1792), 201, 208 France, English language press, 222–5, 228, 231–3 Francis, Eliza Warren, 700 Fraser, Hilary, 703 Fraser’s Magazine, 154, 156, 299, 301, 593, 602, 694, 730, 750 Free Church of Scotland, 345–7 Freeman Hardy Willis, 581 Freeman’s Journal, 138, 212, 318, 548–9, 552–4, 631

835

French Revolution, 36, 509–11, 516, 521–4 French Wars, 198, 201 Froude, James Anthony, 311 Fun, 419, 429, 430, 604, 757 Funny Folks, 419, 428, 432–3 Fyfe, Aileen, 598 Fyfe, Hamilton, 192 Gaelic see Irish language; Scottish Gaelic Gaelic Journal/Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge, 371–2, 374 Gaelic Union, 371, 373 Gale, Frederick, 628 Gales, Joseph, 510 Galignani, Giovanni Antonio, 222, 227, 229–31, 238–9 Galignani’s Messenger, 13, 222–8, 223, 224, 233, 238, 748 Gallery of Comicalities, 424, 426–7 Galtung, Johan, 279–80 gambling, 55, 628 An Gaodhal, 369–71 gardening, 480–1, 613 Gardner, Victoria, 207 Garland, Nicholas, 421 Garvin, Tom, 363 Gascoigne, Robert Mortimer, 578 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 227 Ged, William, 114 Gee, Thomas, 316, 382 Gelber, Steven, 615 Gentleman’s Magazine, 57, 458–9, 508, 588, 602 Geological Society of London, 466–7 Germany, 155, 225 Gibraltar, 222, 237, 238, 746 Gibson, John, 214 Gibson, Thomas Milner, 602 Giffen, Robert, 493 Gifford, William, 304, 747 Gillray, James, 99–100, 427 Gilmartin, Kevin, 511 Girl’s Own Paper, 379, 616, 662–3, 677, 761 Gladstone, William, 41, 179, 322, 385, 430, 533–4, 538–9, 548, 744–5, 762–3 Glasgow, 522–3, 545–8 Glasgow Herald, 51, 536, 545–8, 546, 640 glass tax, 753 Godwin, William, 295 Good Words, 403–4, 421, 694, 756

836

index

Goode, William, 383 Gordon, Adam Lindsay, 312 Gore, Spencer, 628 gossip, 179, 260–8, 603 Gould, Carruthers, 534 Gould, Jay, 495 Govan Press, 84–5 government, local, 719–20 Grace, W. G., 637, 638 Graham, Leopold, 496 Graham, Philip, 361–2 Grand, Sarah, 704, 708 Grant, James, 174 Graphic, 52, 110, 122, 402, 412–13, 617, 619, 759 Gray, Edmund Dwyer, 548–54, 549 Gray, Edmund Dwyer Jr., 551–2 Gray, F. Elizabeth, 696 Gray, John, 551 Gray, William, 477–9, 484 Great Depression (1870s), 314 Great Disruption, 379, 383 Great Exhibition, 618–19 Great Reform Act (1832), 38–9 Green, Stephanie, 703 Greenway, Kate, 109 Greenwood, Charles, 640 Greenwood, Frederick, 53, 178 Greg, Stephen W. R., 160, 170–2 Gregory, Barnard, 605 Gretton, Tom, 411–12 Griffith, John, 320 Griffiths, Arthur, 285, 287 Grimsby, 723 Gross, John, 175 Grosvenor Gallery, 620 Groves, J. B., 109, 112 Gurney, Joseph John, 386 Guy’s Hospital, 442 gynaecology, 449 Habeas Corpus, suspension of, 513 Habermas, Jürgen, 476 Hahnemann, Samuel, 447 Haiti, 65, 242, 251 Haldane, Alexander, 383–4 halftone process, 119, 121 Hall, Anna Maria, 693 Hall, Newman, 318 Hall, Owen, 226 Hall, Stuart, 280, 284 Hammond’s, 8, 568, 569, 570, 571 Hampden Club, 512–13 Harcup, Tony, 280

Hardwicke, Robert, 478 Hardwick’s Science-Gossip, 472, 478–80 Hardy, Thomas (shoemaker), 511 Harmsworth, Alfred, 56–7, 128, 132, 149, 434, 608, 642, 705, 763 Harper’s, 56, 655 Harrington, T. C., 550 Harris, Bob, 199 Harris, Frank, 642 Harris, Janice, 694 Harris, Joseph, 316 Hart, Ernest, 444 Harvey, William, 91, 95, 96, 98 Haslam, J. H., 140 Hattersley, Robert, 78, 756 Havas, 486, 502 Hawick, Lord Douglas of, fight with father, 260, 262–8 Hays, Matilda, 701, 756 Hazlitt, William, 6, 169, 225, 300–1, 302 Health, 25, 454–5 Healy, T. M., 550 Hearst, William Randolph, 192 Heber, Reginald, 295 Hebrew Intelligencer, 387 Heenan, John C., 627, 632 Herbert, Edward James, Earl of Powis, 317 Herbert, J. R., 184 Herschel, Caroline, 471 Herschel, John, 464–5, 471 Herzen, Alexander, 14, 289 Hetherington, Henry, 43, 88, 91–2, 517–19, 521, 525 Hierta, Lars John, 274–5 Highland diaspora, 337 Highlander, 354, 760 Highlands, 351–4 hobbies, 610–16, 699–700 Hobbs, Andrew, 646, 710 hobby press, 21–2 Hobson, Joshua, 44, 519 Hodgskin, Thomas, 461 Hoe, Richard, 70, 75 Hogarth, William, 99–100, 427 Holdridge, Chris, 248 Holl, Frank, 617, 620 Hollis, Patricia, 513, 516, 518–20 Holloway, Thomas, 617 Home News for India, China and the Colonies, 16, 285–8 homeopathy, 25, 438, 447–8 Hone, William, 513 Hong Kong, 225

­

index

Hood, Gordon Phillip, 434 Hood, Thomas, 408, 626 Hooker, Joseph, 469 Horgan, John, 368 Horner, Francis, 294, 746 horse racing, 23, 624, 626, 634–5, 644, 647–8 Hosgood, Chris, 486, 488 Hoskins, William George, 713 Hospital, 25, 451–5 Household Words, 46, 131, 139, 202, 754 Houston, Fiona, 111 Howarth, Mary, 192 Howitt, Mary, 693 Hudson, William Elliot, 365 Hughes, Linda, 146 Hughes, Spencer Leigh, 643 Hulton, Edward, 54–5, 631, 635 Hunt, Frederick Knight, 173, 443 Hunt, Leigh, 58, 295, 302, 512, 747 Hunt, Violet, 706 Hunter, Samuel, 546–7 Hutchinson, George, 660–1 Hutton, Richard Holt, 308–9, 757 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 464, 471–2 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 227 Hyde, Douglas, 368 Ilfracombe, 717, 724, 727 illegal/illicit publications, 43, 87–8 Illuminated Magazine, 96–7, 97 Illustrated London News, 46, 53, 86, 102–3, 146, 408–13, 424, 732, 753, 759 covers and masthead, 104, 121, 410 illustrations, 11, 80, 102–3, 113, 410–12, 490, 494, 619, 620 news coverage, 402, 410–11 ‘sanitized’ view of London, 412 illustrations, 86–124, 601 albumen and bitumen processes, 117 botanical, 112 caricatures, 99, 100, 401, 421, 426, 423, 534 cartoons, 20, 100, 101, 120, 419, 423–7, 432n, 435–6, 446, 534, 542, 603 copperplate engraving, 80, 97 cost of printing, 94, 116 early, 747 electrotyping, 80, 752 halftone process, 119, 121 indicating class of readership, 404 intaglio, 93–4

837

lithography, 81, 93 planographic printing, 93–4 relief printing, 412 reproducing, 10–11 satirical, 419–37 stereotyping, 38, 113–14, 748 in time of political turmoil, 402 vignettes, 406–7 wood engraving, 10, 38, 80, 86, 91, 93–124, 404, 407, 424, 463 woodcut blocks, 80, 93–5, 94–5, 103–5, 105, 119, 404 see also photography; printing imperialism, 278–84, 315 India, 16, 203, 225, 253, 444, 555, 593 press reporting about Japan, 278–84 Industrial Democracy (Webb and Webb), 7 industrialisation, 37, 115–16, 522 Infant Life Protection Act (1872), 444 Ingram, Herbert, 46 Ingram, John Kells, 556 Innis, Harold, 278 insurance, 575–6, 583 intaglio, 93–4 Inverness Courier, 501, 548 Ireland, 54, 202–3, 206, 248 Act of Union, 746 Home Rule movement, 391–4, 399–400, 551, 554, 682–3, 744–5, 762–3 radicalism, 39, 523–4 Republicanism and nationalism, 203, 367–8, 375, 554, 743 Unionism, 524, 528 Irish Coercion Bill, 518 Irish Daily Independent, 375, 548–54 Irish Ecclesiastical Gazette, 395–400, 396, 756 Irish Independent, 369, 373, 554 Irish language, 357–76 and political identity, 358–9 press, 19, 357–76 Revival movement, 359–60, 369–75; role of clergy in, 358–9, 366–7 role of the file, 360–3 Irish press, 42, 138–9, 177, 528, 531, 710 in Britain, 391–2 Chartist, 541 Irish-language columns and publications, 19, 357–76 nationalist, 367–8, 375, 391 political, 537, 548–54, 721–2, 724, 743 Protestant, 389, 395–400, 743

838

index

Irish press (cont.) reflecting local areas, 716–17 satirical or comic, 435–6 sports journalism, 630–1 for women, 689 Irish Times, 138, 395, 742–5, 756 Irish Tribune, 392 Italy, 222, 225, 228, 233 Ivanhoe (Scott), 655 Ivins, William Mills, 123 J. & R. M. Woods, 111 Jack, William, 547 Jack the Ripper, 188 Jackson, Ian, 714 Jackson, John, 91, 95, 112, 132 Jackson, Kate, 127 Jackson, Mason, 405 Jacobins, 510–11, 524 Jamaica, 250–1 James, Henry, 227, 309 Jameson, Robert, 460 Japan, 16, 278–84 Jardine, William, 473 Jefferson, Thomas, 249 Jeffrey, Francis, 154, 294–5, 307, 746 Jenson, Thomas, 491 Jerome, Jerome K., 609 Jerrold, Douglas, 175, 406–7, 428, 753 Jevons, W. Stanley, 145 Jewish Chronicle, 378, 388–9, 752 Jewish press, 19–20, 235, 378, 387–9 Jewsbury, Geraldine, 309 John, Richard R., 35 John Bull, 181, 327, 748 Johnes, Martin, 650 Johnson, James, 440 Johnson, Paul, 560 Johnson, Samuel, 42, 58, 612 Johnston, Judith, 703 Johnstone, Christian Isobel, 300, 694, 750 Jones, Aled, 530 Jones, John, 317 Jones, Kennedy, 57, 642 Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, and the Arts, 459, 461, 465 Journal of Science and the Arts, 460, 464 journalism advice for newcomers to, 157–69 amateur, 167, 259 anonymous, 172, 188–93, 303–5, 320, 452, 689

bylines, 188–93 foreign correspondents, 245–6 impact of telegraph network, 252–8 New Journalism, 13, 29–30, 52, 142, 176–80, 437, 486, 493, 505, 539, 552–3, 608–9, 714, 733–4 partisanship, 528–9, 536–9 payment for, 166–9, 187, 465 as political debate, 508–9 professionalisation of, 12–13, 122–3, 153–76 radical, 507–25 reporters, 168–9, 185–8 specialist, 157 sports reporting, 23–4, 54–5, 622–54 training and qualifications for, 159–4 unions and professional associations, 161, 163–4, 208, 762 women in, 13, 164–6, 699–707 Joyce, James, 552, 604, 609 Judy, 21, 401, 415, 419, 429, 433, 604, 704, 758 Jump, John, 308 Kastenbein, Charles, 78, 759 Kaukiainen, Yrkö, 240 Keats, John, 295, 302–3, 307, 748 Keene, Charles Samuel, 100 Kelly, Mary, 556 King, Andrew, 127, 170, 485–6 Kingsley, Charles, 298, 309, 478 Kipling, Rudyard, 312 Kirk, Robert Simpson, 435 Klancher, Jon P., 299 Knight, Charles, 44–5, 81, 89, 91, 122, 188, 274, 278, 379, 405, 412, 462 Knight, Robert, 594 Knowles, James, 602 Knox, Lawrence E., 743–4 Koenig, Friedrich, 68–9, 747–8 Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen, 414 Korea, 281 Koss, Stephen, 31, 170, 526–8, 530–3 Kronheim, J. M., 753 Kropotkin, Peter, 291 Kynaston, David, 493, 583 Labouchère, Henry, 178, 603 labour movement, press, 533 Labour Party, 539 Lady’s Magazine, 690, 696 Lady’s Newspaper, 696–7, 699 ‘Massacre at Calabar’, 697 Lafayette, Marquis de, 225

­

index

Lalor, James Fintan, 557 Lamb, Charles, 301, 302, 304 Lancet, 25, 441–7, 449, 455–6, 462, 561, 564, 567, 577, 749 Landells, Ebenezer, 95–8 Landon, Letitia Elizabeth, 301 Lane, Ralph, 228 Langham Place Circle, 543, 701, 704 Larousse, Pierre, 222–3 Lavrov, Peter, 290 law, newspapers and the, 5–6, 197–217 Law Amendment Society, 206 Lawson, Louisa, 312 Lawson, William Ramage, 496 layouts, 92, 122 Le Fanu, Sheridan, 299, 415 Leach, John, 628 Leary, Patrick, 154, 407 Lecaros, Cecilia Wadsö, 405 Lee, Alan, 202–3, 209–10, 385, 527 Leech, John, 100, 426, 626 Leeds City Art Gallery, 620 Leeds Mercury, 38, 40, 44, 160, 685, 720, 734 Lefanu, W. R., 578 legal press, 577 Legg, Marie Louise, 531–2 Leighton, Marie Connor and Frederick, 147 leisure and industrialisation, 596 press, 21–2, 596–621; for women, 700 ‘serious’, 610–16 Leisure Hour, 403, 598, 599 Lennox, Charlotte, 689 Leslie, Frank, 102–4, 104 letters, 242–4, 249 to children’s newspaper columns, 682 to the editor, 12, 180–5 Leung, John, 52–3 Levant Herald, 228, 235–6, 236, 238, 755 Lever, Charles, 299 Levine, Philippa, 702 Levy, Amy, 706 Levy, Joseph Moses, 51 Lewes, George Henry, 154–5, 157, 159, 166, 302, 472 libel, 21, 37, 198–201, 208–11, 215, 423, 509, 515, 608, 752–3, 761–2 Liberal Party, 179, 529, 533, 536, 538, 546 Liberalism, 327–8 libraries, 12, 144–5, 619, 726, 754

839

Licensing Act, 197–8 Lidderdale, William, 497 Liddle, Dallas, 189, 741 Liebling, A. J., 625 Lillywhite brothers, 636 Limbird, John, 38, 749 Lincolnshire Chronicle, 721–2 Linnean Society, 466–7 Linotype system, 79–80, 79 Linskill, Frances, 686–7 Linton, Eliza Lynn, 304, 703 Linton, William James, 97–8, 106–8, 112 Lipton’s, 581 literacy, 10, 128–34, 338, 597, 658 Literary Gazette, 38, 468, 730 literary journalism, 16–17, 90, 294–312 reporting on scientific news, 468–9 literature, as a profession, 154–8 lithography, 81, 93 Little Folks, 663, 675, 759 Liverpool, 685–6 Liverpool Daily Post, 75, 178 Liverpool Mercury, 60, 500, 503, 730 Livingstone, David, 189 Llais y Wlad, 322–4 Lloyd, Edward, 46–7, 600 Lloyd’s Illustrated London Newspaper, 404 Lloyd’s List, 490–2, 581 Lloyd’s Weekly, 212, 600, 631, 639, 643, 753, 755 Lobban, Michael, 206 local government, 206, 208 Local Government Act (1888), 719 Lockhart, John Gibson, 1, 153–4, 295 Lockyer, Norman, 475 London Corresponding Society, 511–12 London County Council, 532, 540 London Gazette, 491, 497–8, 730 London Journal, 46, 131, 598 London Journal of Arts and Sciences, 463, 614 London Letter, 729–35, 737 London local newspapers, 717 London Magazine, 299, 300–1, 748 London Medical and Surgical Journal, 442–3 London press, 29, 37–8 London School of Journalism, 164 London Society, 167 London Stock Exchange, 489, 493, 494, 498 London Working Men’s Society, 88 Lördags-magasinet, 274, 275

840

index

Lowe, Helen, 699–700 Lowndes, Marie Belloc, 166 Lucas, Frederick, 390 Lucy, Henry, 733–4 Lynch, Patrick, 364 McAllister, Annemarie, 710 Mac Cana, Proinsias, 361–2 McCann, M. J., 556 McCarthy, Justin, 550 McCoan, James Carlile, 235 Macdonald, John, 287 McDonnell, James, 738 MacGregor, Alexander, 343 MacGregor, Robert, 341 Mackay, Rob Donn, 346 MacKechnie, Donald, 342, 351, 355 McKibbin, Ross, 610 MacKinnon, Donald, 350 McKitterick, David, 562 MacLean, Lachlan, 341 McLeod, Gilbert, 522 MacLeod, Norman, 339–42, 355 McLuhan, Marshall, 362 mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, Alasdair, 339 Macmillan (publisher), 52, 116, 156 Macmillan’s, 303, 311, 470, 602, 694, 756 MacNeill, Eoin, 363, 374 McNeill, Mary, 364 MacPherson, Mary, 355 MacPhilpin, John, 366–7 Macrae, Douglas Gordon, 496 Mac-Talla, 18, 352, 763 Magazine of Art, 310, 760 Magazine of Domestic Economy, 694 Magazine of Natural History, 463, 583 magazines, 6, 52, 299–302 closures of, 166–7 expansion of industry, 52, 58 Maginn, William, 1–2, 301, 730 Maidment, Brian, 402, 407 Malta, 222, 225, 236–7 Manchester, 55 Manchester Courier, 500, 503, 730 Manchester Evening Chronicle, 24, 635 Manchester Guardian, 38, 40, 50–1, 54, 67, 500, 503, 640, 720, 732–3, 749 printing technology, 72, 76 use of mechanical typesetting, 78–9 Manchester Observer, 514–15, 522, 720 Manchester Sporting Chronicle and Prophetic Bell, 55 Mangan, James Clarence, 556

Manley, Mary de la Rivière, 689 March-Phillips, Evelyn, 703, 705–6 Maré, Eric de, 123 Marinoni, 72, 75 Markovits, Stefanie, 245 Marks, Harry Harland, 494–5 marriage, 206, 214–15, 704 Married Women’s Property Act (1882), 704 Marryat, Captain, 306 Marryat, Florence, 167 Marshall, Andrew, 201 Martel, Michael, 561 Martin, Arthur Patchett, 312 Martineau, Harriet, 174–5, 300, 306, 689 Marvel, 663 Marxism, 523, 610 Mason, Nicholas, 302 Masson, David, 298, 307 mastheads, 77, 92, 93, 103, 104, 171, 397, 417, 496, 660, 717, 725 mathematics, 473 Matthew, Colin, 533 Matthew, H. C. G., 538 Maurer, O., 190 Maxwell, James Clerk, 474 Mayhew, Henry, 406, 414, 424, 752 Mechanics’ Magazine, 461, 463, 466, 474, 614, 749 Medical Act (1858), 443 medical press, 25, 438–56, 446, 577, 583 alternative medicine, 447–8 campaigning by, 443–4 journals of medical societies, 439 for laypeople, 25, 440, 450–1 nursing journals, 452–3 pharmaceutical journals, 453 presentation of patients’ cases, 445–6 as a resource for doctors, 441 specialisation, 449–50 Medical Register, 443 Medical Times, 443, 447, 577 Medico-Chirurgical Journal, 440–1, 445 Medusa: or Penny Politician, 514 Mee, Cornelia, 700 Meisenbach, George, 119 Menzies, John, 12, 49, 128, 134 Meredith, George, 420, 547 Mergenthaler, Ottmar, 79 Merle, Gibbons, 169, 175, 514 mesmerism, 438, 447 Methodism, 379, 382 Methodist Times, 178

­

index

Meynell, Alice, 166 Miall, Edward, 385 Mill, James, 169, 171, 298, 749 Millais, John Everett Cherry Ripe, 617 A Child’s World (Bubbles), 619 Milman, H. H., 295 Milne, A. A., 663 Milton, John, 509 Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction, 38, 692 Mitch, David, 129 Mitchell, Joseph, 388 Mitchell’s Newspaper Directory, 52, 568, 571, 577, 753 Mitford, Mary Russell, 693 Mizzi, Lewis, 235 Montgomery, James, 510 Monthly Gazette of Health, 440–1 Monthly Repertory of English Language, 229–30 Moonshine, 431, 431 Moore, Thomas, 295 Morash, Chris, 3 Morgan, Osborne, 321–2 Morley, John, 303, 307–8 Mormon Church, 382 Morning Chronicle, 414, 521, 524, 539 Morning Post, 54, 566 Morning Star, 177, 498, 538 Morris, Mowbray, 502 Morris, William, 620 Morse system, 252 Moruzi, Kristine, 678 Moss, David, 486, 488 Mudie, Charles, 144 Mudie’s Select Library, 590 Muller, Henrietta B., 762 Municipal Corporations Act (1835), 719 Murphy, Paul Thomas, 306 Murphy, William Martin, 553–4 Murray, John, 1–2, 153–4, 295, 460 Murray, Thomas, 49 museums, 619 music, 579, 691 hobby press, 611–12 Mynn, Alfred, 640 Naden, Constance, 706 Nall, Joshua, 476 Napier, David, 70, 750 Napoleonic Wars, 37–8, 42, 460, 512, 516, 522, 591 Nation, 365–6, 391, 554–7

841

National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, 206 National Association of Journalists, 208 National Union of Journalists, 163, 208 natural history press, 463–4, 472, 477–84 for children, 661 Natural History Review, 467–8, 472 Nature, 469, 472, 475–6, 577, 759 Naval and Military Gazette, 578, 591–2 needlework, 615, 699–700 Neill, E. B., 732 Neilson, Samuel, 363, 523–4 Nelson, Admiral, 43 Nelson, Thomas, 74–5 New Journalism, 13, 29–30, 52, 142, 176–80, 437, 486, 493, 505, 539, 552–3, 608–9, 714, 733–4 New Monthly Magazine, 156, 299–301, 303, 694, 749 New York newspapers, 87, 165, 227, 627 New Zealand, 311 Newman, John Henry, 383 Newnes, George, 55–7, 128, 132, 149, 608–9 news agencies, 9, 48, 736, 739 News of the World, 47, 643, 753 newsagents, 128, 139–40 Newspaper Press Directory, 724 Newspaper Proprieters’ Association, 211 Nicholson, Angus, 350–2 Nicholson, Isaac, 96 Nicholson, William, 68, 459, 461, 465 Nicoll, W. Robertson, 307, 385 Nightingale, Florence, 189, 452 Nineteenth Century, 156, 303, 324, 602, 760 Nonconformism, 199, 315, 327–8, 379–80, 381, 384–5 North, Christopher (John Wilson), 153 North, John, 8, 599 Northanger Abbey (Austen), 298 Northcliffe, Lord, 60, 191 Northern Chronicle, 352, 354 Northern Echo, 500, 553, 759 Northern Star, 39–40, 44, 57, 306, 363, 365, 500, 521, 530, 541–2, 751–2 Northern Weekly Gazette, 665, 682 Northumberland, Duke of, 225 Norway, 15 Norwich, 510–11 novels, 297–8, 306

842

index

nursing journals, 452–3 professional status, 452 O’Brien, James ‘Bronterre’, 518, 524 O’Brien, William, 537, 550, 552–3 Obscene Publications Act (1857), 210, 756 obscenity, 6, 210 O’Connell, Daniel, 39, 381, 389, 391, 554–6, 744 O’Connor, Emmet and Arthur, 524 O’Connor, Feargus, 40, 44, 524, 541–2 O’Connor, Peter, 278 O’Connor, T. P., 178, 186, 550, 610, 762 O’Connor Eccles, Charlotte, 165–6 O’Curry, Eugene, 555 O’Donovan, John, 555 Official Secrets Act (1889), 210 O’Growney, Eoghan, 363, 366–7, 371 O’Kelly, J. J., 550 Oliphant, Margaret, 175, 302, 305, 689, 706, 755 Oliphant, W. H., 312 Once a Week, 100, 147, 756 O’Neill, Deirdre, 280 Opie, Amelia, 693 opthalmology, 449 Orr, W. S., 44 Otley, 70–1, 74 Ottoman Empire, 222, 228, 234–5 Owen, David, 381 Owen, George H. M., 328 Owen, Robert, 519–20, 523–4 Oxford Movement, 383–4 Oxford University, 163 pacifism, 684 Pae, David, 53 Paine, Thomas, 509, 513–14, 521, 523 Pall Mall Gazette, 57, 159, 165, 176, 178–80, 186, 214, 319, 495, 540, 553, 758 Palmegiano, E. M., 688 Palmer, George Josiah, 384 Palmerston, Lord, 9, 40, 539 pamphlets, 509, 515 Pankhurst, Emmeline, 707 paper acquisition of mills by publishers, 46–7 cost of, 657 papermaking processes, 81–2 raw materials, 82 tax on, 41, 47, 87

Pardon, Charles F., 641 Parfitt, Edward, 481–2 Paris American, 228 Paris Herald, 264–6 Paris Mercury and Continental Chronicle, 229, 230 Paris Universal Exhibition, 283, 412 Parkes, Bessie Rayner, 305, 701, 756 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 399–400, 435, 548–51, 744–5, 761, 763 named in O’Shea divorce, 538, 745 Parsons, Wayne, 561 Partick and Maryhill Press, 84–5 Paternoster Row, 440 Pattison, Mark, 310 Payne, David, 70 The Peace Society, 386 Pears soap, 619 Pearson, Arthur, 56–7, 178, 764 Peel, Robert, 40 Pelcoq, Jules, 412–13 Penny Cyclopaedia, 271–3, 277 Penny Magazine, 44–5, 80, 88–91, 88, 122, 271–7, 276, 379, 405, 409, 424, 462, 597, 693, 750 Penrhyn, Lord, 326, 328, 334 People’s Journal, 52, 666 Perry, Sampson, 509 Peter Parley’s Magazine, 657 Peterloo ‘massacre’, 6, 37, 38, 223, 423, 514, 749 Peterson, M. Jeanne, 578 Petrie, George, 365, 405, 555 Petter & Galpin, 54 pharmaceutical journals, 453 Phegley, Jennifer, 131, 694 Phelan, Charlotte Elizabeth, 696 philanthropy, 386 Philipon, Charles, 406 Philippart, John, 591 Phillips, Thomas, 317 Philosophical Magazine, 459, 461, 463–6 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 439, 458, 578 Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne), 408, 414, 628 photography, 11, 56, 80, 102, 118–19, 123, 227, 414, 611, 751; see also illustrations photogravure, 80–1 phrenology, 447 Pierce Egan’s Life in London, 424, 623–5, 646 pigeons, 613–14

­

index

Pillars of the Empire, 286–7 Pitt, William the Younger, 36 Place, Francis, 514 plagiarism, 249 planographic printing, 93–4 Playfair, William, 226 Plunkett, John, 170 poetry criticism, 295, 307–8 Pole Star, 289–90 police reporting, 520, 604 Polish community, 289 political press, 30–1, 131, 172, 248, 306, 526–57 political subsidising of, 198, 200, 435 satirical, 419–23 Political Register, 37, 201–2, 423, 442, 512–13, 515, 748 political representation, 511, 520 Pooley, Sian, 669 Poor Man’s Guardian, 43, 88, 88, 92, 93, 315, 517–18, 524, 750 Post Office Acts (1885 and 1889), 210 postal system, 12, 36, 48, 254–6, 752 international, 241 poultry, 613 Pre-Raphaelites, 414 Presbyterianism, 379, 383 Press Agency, 168 Press Association, 9, 48, 253, 257, 641, 739–40, 757, 761 printing compositors, 66, 76–7 costs, 66, 87, 116–17 cylindrical presses, 45, 66, 68–74, 69, 113–14, 747 electrotyping, 115–17, 118 halftone process, 119, 121 illustrations, 93, 616–17, 620–1 iron-framed presses, 67–8, 81 letterpress, 43, 65 linotype, 762 logographic, 77 overseas, 7, 245 and urbanisation, 7, 245 speeds, 67–72 steam-powered presses, 2, 45, 68–70, 747 stereotype plates, 73, 113–14, 117, 118 technological developments in, 45, 65–83, 71, 748–53, 755–9 trade publications about, 573–4 type casting, 77 unionisation, 11, 66 from a web, 74–5

843

women working in, 702 see also typesetting Proctor, John, 432 professional press, 26–7, 171, 558–85 categorising, 568–80 professional status, 564 propaganda, 508 prostitution, 214 Provincial Newspaper Society, 51 provincial press, 38, 42, 51, 178, 211, 248, 408, 414, 531, 628, 709–45 extended reach and lengthy titles, 717, 724–5 London Letter, 729–35, 737 political affiliations, 714 and political reform, 720 pre-1900, 711 radicalism, 510 rapid expansion of, 710–13 reflecting local areas, 714–19 role in local culture and society, 726–8 sports coverage, 727–8 Prowse, Jeff, 640 public health movement, 449–51 Publications Act, 37 Publishers’ Circular, 585, 587–8, 751 Puleston, John, 331 Pulitzer, Joseph, 192, 643–4 Pullan, Matilda Marian, 700 Punch, 21, 80, 96, 99, 101, 109, 122, 401, 406–8, 409, 446, 471, 560, 592, 655, 703, 730, 752 Almanack, 427, 429, 432 editorial meetings, 427 as an Establishment publication, 429 family-friendly, 426 illustrations, 99–100, 99, 120 Irish coverage, 435–6 Pocket Book, 427 satire in, 419–20, 422–30 style of illustrations, 408–9 Pusey, E. B., 383 Putnis, Peter, 285 Pye, John, 617 Pykett, Lyn, 308 Quakers (Religious Society of Friends), 386–7 Quarterly Review, 1, 16, 153–4, 295–6, 460, 470, 488, 540, 747 support for Tories, 36 Queen, 53, 698, 700, 706, 757 Queensberry, Marquess of, 260–8 Queensberry Rules, 625, 636, 649

844

index

Quilter, Harry, 414 Quinn, Michael, 389 racism, 388, 392 radicalism, 36, 201, 507–25, 528, 713 Raikes, Cecil, 332 railways, 7, 141, 578, 581–2, 685, 723, 752 station bookstalls, 49, 134–7, 140 Ray Society, 473–4 Reach, Angus B., 143, 732 Reade, Charles, 304 readership, 127–50, 597 reading spaces, 141–50, 225 sense of ownership, 667 and social class, 566 working class, 38–9, 88, 91, 127, 130 see also literacy Rebecca Riots, 315–16 Record, 383–4 Redgrave, Richard, 408 Redmond, John, 551 Reece, Richard, 440 Rees, David, 381 Rees, Sarah Jane, 695 Reeve, Henry, 304 Reform Act (1832), 206, 306, 518, 531, 597 Reform Act (1867), 178 regional press see provincial press Reid, Thomas Wemyss, 734 Reid, Wemyss, 547 relief printing, 93–4 religious press, 19–20, 199, 271, 316, 377–400 aimed at clergy, 397 aimed at securing converts, 377 for children, 382 fundraising, 377 professional, 574–5 in Wales, 323–4, 379–80 for women, 696 Religious Tract Society, 28, 660, 677–8 reporting, 185–8 Representative, 153–4 reprints, and attribution, 246–51, 259 Republican, 514–15 republicanism, 327 retail trade press, 580–1, 583 Reuters, 9, 48, 50, 227, 252–3, 257, 284, 486, 501–4, 736, 754 review journalism, 294–312, 411 attribution and anonymity, 302–5 in newspapers, 305–7 by women, 305

Reynolds, George, 47, 600 Reynolds, John Hamilton, 303 Reynolds’s Miscellany, 46, 450, 598, 600–1, 754 The Rights of Man (Paine), 509, 514, 523 riots, 315–16 The Rise and Fall of the Political Press (Koss), 526–8 Robbins, Alfred, 734 Robertson, Joseph Clinton, 461 Robinson, Mary F., 706 Robinson Crusoe (Stevenson), 655 Robson, John, 182 Rogers, Samuel, 295 Roibu, Iuliana, 486 Rolleston, T. W., 368 Roman Advertiser, 234, 754 Roper, Derek, 296 Rose, Jonathan, 130 Rosenberg, Adolphus, 608 Ross, Charles H., 415, 430 Rossetti, Christina, 706 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 307, 706 Rothschild, Lionel and Anthony de, 388–9 rowing, 634, 650, 652–3 Rowlandson, Thomas, 401 Royal Academy of Art, annual exhibition, 616, 619–20 Royal Holloway College, 617 Royal Institution, 469 Royal Irish Society, 466 Royal Society of Edinburgh, 466 Royal Society of London, 458, 465–6, 474 Royal United Services Institution, 591–2 Rubinstein, David, 164 Ruff, William, 626, 736 rugby, 622, 628, 638, 646, 650, 651 Ruge, Mari H., 279–80 Ruskin, John, 227, 332, 619 Russell, John, 40, 539 Russell, W. H., 592 Russia, 227, 283 Russian émigré community, 289–93 Russian-language press, 14, 289–93 Ruth, Jennifer, 448 Sabbatarianism, 600 St James’s Gazette, 179, 761 St Paul’s Cathedral, 741 St Paul’s Magazine, 166

­

index

Sala, George Augustus, 175, 285, 732 Salmon, Edward, 655–6, 662 Salvation Army, 178 Sampson, Henry, 632 Sandow, Eugene, 608 satire, 210 and class, 429 political, 419–23 social, 423–4 satirical press, 20–1, 419–37 Satirist, 227, 421, 423, 425, 605 Saturday Magazine, 271, 379, 597 Saturday Night, 642, 728 Saturday Review, 159, 303–4, 308, 755 Saunders, George, 226 Saunders, William, 735–42, 736, 757 Schoenfield, Mark, 295 schools, 130 Schreiner, Olive, 706 Schutter, Mr, 226 Schweizer, Karl, 204 science, as a hobby, 614 science journalism, 25–6, 457–84, 577 for children, 661 in Continental Europe, 459–60, 467 illustrated, 467 learned society proceedings, 466–7 neglect of women scientists, 471 nomenclature, 473–4 for popular readership, 472 professional journals, 464, 475 referee systems, 468, 475 scientific societies, 466 SciPer project, 470 Scola, Roger, 560 Scotland, 54, 197n, 248, 521–3, 546 Scots Courant, 711 Scotsman, 51, 160, 248, 355, 500–1, 522, 718 Scott, Walter, 295, 297–8 Scottish Gaelic clergy speaking, 345 emigration of speakers, 342–4, 347–8, 350–1 literature, 338–9; see also Scottish press, Gaelic-language number of people speaking, 337–8 Scottish press, 294–5, 528, 710, 717–18 Catholic, 390, 392 Chartist, 541 financial journalism, 500–1 Gaelic-language, 337–56, 345–7, 718; financial viability of, 341, 354–5 political, 528, 536, 545–8

845

and political reform, 720 radical, 519 reflecting local areas, 716 religious, 383 satirical or comic, 435 sports journalism, 630 trade press, 584 sedition, 21, 37 Seditious Societies Act (1799), 511 Seed, John, 394 sensationalist literature, 47 Seren Gomer, 380–1, 747 Sexton, Thomas, 550 sexuality, 608 Seymour, Robert, 424 Shadwell, Arthur, 162–4 Sharp, William, 548 Shattock, Joanne, 307–8, 310 Shaw, George Bernard, 603 Sheffield, as a centre for political reform, 510–11 Sheffield Independent, 38, 720 Sheffield Iris, 510, 521, 541 Sheffield Register, 510–11 Shelley, Mary, 300 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 225, 295, 302, 307, 312 Sherer, John, 287 Sheridan, Louisa Henrietta, 692 Shiels, Patrick, 392 shipping, 578, 581–2 shipping networks, 242 Sibthorp, Margaret Shurmer, 703 Silberstein-Loeb, Jonathan, 35, 240 silk trade, 282 Silver, Henry, 407 Simpson, Richard, 298 Sino-Japanese War, 280 Six Acts, 514–15, 748–9 Six Points Charter, 521 slavery, 206, 721 Sloper, Ally, 401 Small, Ian, 310 Smith, George, 156 Smith, Jonah, 487 Smith, Sydney, 294–5, 746 Smith, William Henry, 48–50 Smith, William Tyler, 444 Smithies, Thomas Bywater, 677 Smurthwaite, Henry, 634–5 Smyrna, 222, 234–5, 757 Snopes, 266 socialism, 131, 314, 542–3, 704 societies, illegal or seditious, 511, 522

846

index

Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK), 14, 45, 89, 100, 316, 345, 378–9, 462, 597 and Swedish press, 270–7 Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK), 378–9, 405 Society of Authors, 157, 158–9 Society of United Irishmen, 523–4 sources, 243–5 South Africa, 248, 254–6 Irish diaspora, 373 mining boom, 495 South Shields, 739 South Suburban Press, 84–5 Southey, Robert, 295, 302 Southward, John, 65 Spectator, 160, 303, 308, 327, 508, 554, 689, 750, 757 Spence, Thomas, 509 Spencer, Herbert, 298 Spender, Edward, 735–8 Spielmann, M. H., 421 Sporting Chronicle, 631, 639, 728 Sporting Life, 23, 632–5, 756 Sporting Magazine, 623, 646 sporting rivalries, 640 Sporting Times, 606, 632–4, 641, 757 sports journalism, 23–4, 54–5, 622–54 spectating at, 644–5, 648 written rules, 636 Sportsman, 633–6, 641 Spring, H. L., 320 St James’s Gazette, 179, 761 St Paul’s Cathedral, 741 St Paul’s Magazine, 166 Stainton, Henry Tibbats, 480, 482–3 Stamford & Rutland Guardian, 720 Stamford Mercury, 711, 717, 730 stamp collecting, 615, 661 stamp duty, 40, 54, 87, 91, 159, 170, 199, 461, 533, 711, 717, 748 avoidance of, 316, 404 support for, 207, 211 reduction, 39, 43, 88, 520 repeal of, 9, 36, 47, 114, 155, 170, 498, 530, 733, 755 unstamped publications, 43–4, 202, 517, 519, 522 Standage, Tom, 240 Stanhope presses, 43, 67, 72, 746 Stanley, H. M., 189 Stannard, Mrs Arthur, 166 Star and Evening Advertiser, 42, 642

Star of the West, 718 stationery trade press, 573–4 Statist, 493, 496 Stead, W. T., 55, 57, 176–80, 495, 539–40, 552–3, 759, 763 campaign to raise the age of consent, 214 steamships, 15, 240, 255, 279, 343 steamship press, 284–9 Stebbins, Robert, 610 Steele, Flora Annie, 166 Steele, Richard, 188 Steinitz, William, 611 Stendhal, 225 Stephen, James Fitzjames, 159, 168, 172–3, 175, 302, 304 Stepniak-Kravchinskii, Sergei, 290–1 stereotyping, 113–14, 117, 742, 753 Stevens, Bethan, 101–2 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 122 Stewart, David, 300 Stiff, George, 46–7, 601 Stocqueler, J. H., 591, 593 Stoddart, James, 545, 547 Stokes, Georges, 470, 473 Strand Magazine, 139, 141, 146, 609, 707, 763 Strickland, Agnes, 693 Strickland, Hugh Edward, 474 suffrage, 442, 520, 543, 704 Sullivan, A. M., 391, 435 Sullivan, James Frank, 429 Sunday newspapers, 42–3, 47, 200, 208, 600–1, 749 sports coverage, 23 Sunderland local press, 722–3 Surtees, Robert S., 623 Swain, Joseph, 96, 101–2, 112 Sweden, 14–15, 270–7 Swift, Jonathan, 183 Swinburne, Walter, 307 Swiss Family Robinson (Wyss), 655 Switzerland, 225 Syme, David, 312 T. B. Brown (advertising agency), 55 Tablet, 378, 390, 392–3 tabloid press, 61 Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, 300, 383, 694, 750 Tate Gallery, 617 Tatler, 508, 689 taxes impact on sales, 200–2

­

index

on knowledge, 9, 35–41, 51, 58, 87, 91, 198, 202, 207, 215, 602, 658; see also stamp duty Taylor, Charles, 394 Taylor, Helen, 741 Taylor, Miles, 530 Taylor, Richard, 463, 466–7 Taylor, Robert, 229 An Teachdaire Gae’lach, 337–45, 338, 341, 348, 355, 750 An Teachdaire Ùr Gaidhealach, 341–2, 347 Teetotal Times, 53 telegraph network, 48, 50, 207, 226–7, 240–1, 250, 252–8, 254, 279, 486, 502–4, 641, 739, 753, 758 telephones, 227 temperance, 378, 381–2, 704 children’s publications, 676–7 Le Temps, 266 Ten Hour Act (1847), 754 Tener, Robert H., 308 Tenniel, John, 21, 100, 401, 426 tennis, 628, 645 Tennyson, Alfred, 307, 309, 312 Thackeray, Anne, 706 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 156, 215, 226, 428, 601 Vanity Fair, 227 theatre, 579, 612 Thelwall, John, 295 Thistlewood, Arthur, 516 Thomas, John, 334 Thomas, W. L., 412–13 Thomas, William Fletcher, 433 Thompson, E. P., 181, 515 Thompson, Mary Anne, 703 Thomson, Thomas, 460, 466 Thomson, William, 470, 473 Thurston, John, 97, 100 Tilloch, Alexander, 459, 465 Tillock, Alexander, 114 Timbs, John, 46 Times, 1, 141, 160, 303, 497–9, 566, 592 advocating for political reform, 38 criticises use of Welsh language, 313, 319–20 as a family business, 43 innovations in printing, 68–9, 75 launched as Daily Universal Register, 77 letters to the editor, 180–1

847

role of W. H. Smith in its successful distribution, 49–50 sports coverage, 24, 643–54 Times of India, 279, 282, 594 Tinsley’s Magazine, 167 Tit-Bits, 55–6, 128, 132, 139–41, 148, 178, 181–2, 434, 608–9, 761 Tkachev, Peter, 290 Tlysau yr Hen Oesoedd, 711 tobacco, 133 Toffler, Alvin, 148 Tomahawk, 412–13, 422, 758 Tone, Wolf, 523–4 Topham, Jonathan, 563 Tory publications, 546 Toulmin, Camilla, 693 tourism, 717, 720 Tractarianism, 383–4 Tracts for the Times, 383–4 trade press, 8, 26–8, 558–85, 559 categorising, 568–80 provincial, 584 transport, 12, 136 public, 128 transatlantic, 240–1 transvestism, 601 Tregear, Edward, 311 Trollope, Anthony, 166, 190, 303, 305, 309 Troup, George, 383 True Briton, 508, 514–16 Trysorfa Gwybodaeth neu Eurgrawn Gymraeg, 315–16 Tsukahara, Togo, 278 Tuam News, 366–7, 369, 371 Turgenev, Ivan, 227 Tusan, Michelle Elizabeth, 703 Tutt, James William, 483 Twain, Mark, 235 Twyman, Michael, 114, 117, 120 Tyndall, John, 471–2 typesetting, 76–80 mechanical, 78–80 typewriters, 741 typography, 59 unionisation, 11, 13, 535 Unitarianism, 382 United Services Gazette, 578, 591, 593 United States, 225, 257 illustrated papers, 413 telegraph network, 253 Universe, 378, 390 universities, 310

848

index

University College London, 89 unstamped publications, 88, 111 urbanisation, 522 Utilitarianism, 297, 514, 540, 749 Vallentine, Isaac, 388 VanArsdel, Rosemary T., 561–3 Vanderbilt, William H., 495 Vanity Fair, 602–3, 733, 758 Vann, J. Don, 561–3 vegetarianism, 704 Venezuela, 251 vernacular press, 314 Indian, 328 suppression of, 326–9 in Wales, 323, 336 Verne, Jules, 661 Vickers, George, 46 Victoria, Queen, 96 Victoria Press, 703 Victory printing machines, 75–6 Vincent, David, 129 Vincent, James Edmund, 326–32 violin playing, 612 Vivian Grey (Disraeli), 2 vivisection, 704 Vogel, Julius, 311 Vyse, F. Howard, 280 W. H. Smith & Son, 12, 47–50, 128, 134–40, 135, 142, 150, 749, 754 Wade, John, 514 Wahl-Jorgensen, Karin, 181, 185 Wakley, Thomas, 441–3, 445, 447, 749 Wales, 248 Walker, Daniel, 240 Wall Street Journal, 504 Wallace, Mackenzie, 192 Wallis, Henry, Death of Chatterton, 616 Wallis, John, 390 Walpole, Horace, 507 Walsh, John Henry, 628 Walter, John, 43, 67, 181 Walter, John II, 68 Ward, Marcus J., 370 Ward Lock, 53–4, 57 Washington Post, 362 Waterloo Directory, 485, 567, 571, 599–600, 604, 611 Waters, Mary A., 296 Watson, Alfred E. T., 630 Watson, James, 518 Watts, Alaric, 730–1 Watts, George Frederick, 408

Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, 7 Weedon, Alexis, 116 Weekly Dispatch, 161, 173, 175, 643, 737 Weekly Freeman, 373, 435 A Weekly Journal of Instruction and Jokes, 132–3 Weekly Times, 600, 639 Wellington, Duke of, 591 Wells, H. G., 609 Welsh, Charles, 655 Welsh language defence of, 318 diaspora and emigrant publications, 359, 382 fears of sedition, 327–9 hostility towards use of, 313, 315–21, 332–3 publications translated into, 318 speakers encouraged to learn English, 317–18 Welsh nationalism, 335 Welsh press, 17–18, 316, 313–36, 710–11, 716–19, 746–7 political activism and partisanship, 544, 721 religious press, 380–2 satirical or comic, 435 Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, 378, 380 West, John, 713, 719 West Highland Free Press, 355 West Indies, 250–1 Westminster Gazette, 57, 529, 764 Westminster Review, 16, 127, 160, 298, 472, 488, 540, 702, 734, 749, 755 Whately, Richard, 295, 298 Whig publications, 295, 539 Whitaker, Edgar, 235 Whitaker, Joseph, 588–9 Whitakers’ Almanack, 758 White, Cynthia L., 689–90 White, John Davis, 367 White Dwarf, 514 Whyte, Henry, 355 Wicks, Frederick, 78 Wiener, Joel H., 240, 517, 605, 644, 651 Wilde, Oscar, 15, 191, 706 sex trials, 260–1, 267 Wilkes, John, 508 Williams, Hugh, 315 Williams, Rhiannon Heledd, 359 Wilson, Andrew, 450 Wilson, H. W., 594 Wilson, James, 732 Wilson, John, 300

­ Wimbledon Open Lawn Tennis Championship, 628 Wisden, 637, 640–1, 653, 757 Wise, Bernhard, 311 Wiseman, Nicholas, 389–90 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 296–7 Woman’s Herald, 706, 707 women, 9, 431 as critics and reviewers, 296–7, 305, 309 as editors, 300, 750 as journalists/writers, 13, 164–6, 191–2, 300, 305, 689, 693–4, 699–707, 764 legal status, 214 the ‘New Woman’, 704 political activism, 543, 762 as professionals, 452 in public libraries, 145 as readers, 53, 145–6, 191, 286, 688–708 in science, 471, 478 violence against, 214–15 Women’s Penny Paper, 703, 762 women’s press, 22–3, 165, 191, 615, 688–708, 754 coverage of news, 697 coverage of science, 471, 696–7 humorous, 692 and notions of femininity, 691 political, 543 Women’s Suffrage Journal, 543 wood engraving, 10, 38, 80, 86–7, 91, 93–109, 95, 404, 407, 424, 463

index

849

as a factory system, 109–15 freelancers, 111, 120 ‘London School’, 97 as a profession, 109–11, 115 specialisms, 112 Woodfield, Malcolm, 308 Woodville, Richard Caton, 411 Wooler, Thomas, 201, 423, 513, 748 Woolf, Virginia, 609 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 304 Wordsworth, William, 295, 309 working class ownership of publications, 523 and religion, 384–5 radicalism, 516–17, 520 readership, 38–9, 88, 91, 127, 130, 184, 305–7, 405, 462, 516–17, 520–1, 601, 682 working hours, 754 Working Man’s Friend, 54, 131, 518, 694 World: A Journal for Men and Women, 603 Wynne, Deborah, 147 Y Cylchgrawn Cynmraeg, 315, 380, 718 Y Genedl Gymeig, 325, 326, 330 yachting, 628 Yates, Edmund, 167, 178–80, 603, 616, 733–4, 762 Young, James, 78 Young, Robert M., 475 Young Irelander Rebellion, 556–7 Zoological Society of London, 467