INVESTIGATING VICTORIAN JOURNALISM

Transcription

1 INVESTIGATING VICTORIAN JOURNALISM

2 Investigating Victorian Journalism Edited by Laurel Brake Lecturer in Literature Birkbeck College, London Aled Jones Lecturer in History University College of Wales, Aberystwyth and Lionel Madden Keeper of Printed Books National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth M MACMILLAN

3 Laurel Brake, Aled Jones, Lionel Madden 1990 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1990 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended), or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 33-4 Alfred Place, London WC1E 7DP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1990 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world Filmset by Wearside Tradespools, Fulwell, Sunderland British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Investigating Victorian Journalism 1. Great Britain. Journalism, history I. Brake, Laurel II. Jones, Aled III. Madden, Lionel 072 ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI /

4 Contents List of Abbreviations Notes on the Contributors Introduction: Defining the Field vii viii xi Part I Theorising Journalism 1 Reading the Periodical Press: Text and Context Lyn Pykett 3 2 Towards a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre Margaret Beetham 19 3 Popular Narrative and Political Discourse in Reynolds's Weekly Newspaper Anne Humpherys 33 4 Newspapers and Periodicals in Historical Research Edward Royle 48 Part II The Diversity of Victorian Journalism 5 Local Journalism in Victorian Political Culture Aledfones 6 Welsh Periodicals: A Survey Brynley F. Roberts 7 Yr Amserau: The First Decade Philip Henry Jones v

5 VI Contents 8 London's Local Newspapers: Patterns of Change in the Victorian Period Michael Harris The Early Management of the Standard Dennis Griffiths The Growth of a National Press Lucy Brown 133 Part III Directions in Journalism Studies 11 Victorian Periodicals and Academic Discourse B.E. Maidment Sources for the Study of Newspapers Joel H. Wiener The Golden Stain of Time: Preserving Victorian Periodicals Scott Bennett Technology and the Periodical Press Deian Hopkin 184 Suggestions for Further Reading 198 Index 201

6 List of Abbreviations The following abbreviations are used in the references. DWB The Dictionary of Welsh Biography down to (London, 1959; supplement 1970) JNPH Journal of Newspaper and Periodical History Reynolds's Reynolds's Weekly Newspaper VPN Victorian Periodicals Newsletter VPR Victorian Periodicals Review WR Westminster Review vii

7 Notes on the Contributors Margaret Beetham is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and History at Manchester Polytechnic. She has published articles on the Manchester periodical press, and on feminist theory and practice in teaching. Her research interests are nineteenth-century periodicals and feminist theory and she is currently co-writing a book on women's magazines. Scott Bennett is Director of the Milton S. Eisenhower Library, Johns Hopkins University. He was previously Assistant University Librarian for Collection Management at Northwestern University. He has written widely on library matters, textual editing, bibliography and Victorian periodicals. The early nineteenth-century publisher Charles Knight is the focus of his recent work. Lucy Brown was Senior Lecturer in History at the London School of Economics from 1966 to 1982 and is now retired. She published Victorian News and Newspapers in Dennis Griffiths has worked in the regional and national press of Great Britain for 40 years and was Production Director of Express Newspapers, London. There he was also archivist of the Standard. He is a member of the Advisory Group of the British Library Newspaper Library. Michael Harris is Lecturer in History at Birkbeck College, University of London. He has written extensively on the history of the newspaper press and on the history of the English book trades. His recent publications include London Newspapers in the Age of Walpole, The Press in English Society (joint editor with Alan Lee, 1987), and The Economics of the British Booktrade (joint editor with Robin Myers, 1985). He is General Editor of the Journal of Newspaper and Periodical History. Deian Hopkin is Senior Lecturer in History in the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. He was founding editor of Llafur, viii

8 Notes on the Contributors ix the journal of the Welsh Labour History Society, and has written extensively on British labour history and the early socialist press. In 1986 he was a founding member of the Association for History and Computing and edited (with Peter Denley) History and Computing (1987). He is currently working on a history of the Labour Party in Wales. Anne Humpherys is Professor of English and Dean of Arts and Humanities at Lehman College, City University of New York. She has written two books on the work of Henry Mayhew, and published articles on Dickens, Reynolds, and the history of the press. She is currently working on a book on the relationship between the press, the stage and the early Victorian novel. Philip Henry Jones is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Information and Library Studies, University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. He has undertaken research into the nineteenthcentury Welsh publisher Thomas Gee, and is currently investigating the Welsh-language press of the 1840s and 1850s as a preliminary to a detailed study of Gee's newspaper, Baner ac Amserau Cymru. In addition to articles in Welsh on the Welsh periodical press he was responsible for compiling the recentlypublished third edition of the standard Bibliography of the History of Wales. B.E. Maidment. After holding teaching posts in Leicester and Aberystwyth he has worked at Manchester Polytechnic since He currently teaches Art History and English. He has written and lectured widely on Victorian literature, popular culture, and publishing history. His critical anthology of writing by and about Victorian artisan authors, The Poorhouse Fugitives, was published in His current research is centred on popular wood-block illustration. Lyn Pykett teaches in the English Department of the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. She is the author of a number of articles on Victorian fiction and on the periodical press, and has just completed a book on Emily Bronte. Brynley F. Roberts has been Librarian of the National Library of Wales since He was previously Professor of Welsh Language

9 X Notes on the Contributors and Literature at University College of Swansea. His main research interests are in medieval literature and seventeenth-century virtuosi. He has worked on Welsh library history, printers and binders, and on the history of Welsh scholarship in the nineteenth century. He recently completed a short study of Prince Louis-Lucien Bonaparte. Edward Royle is Senior Lecturer in History and Head of the Department of History at the University of York to which he first came in He was previously Lecturer in History at Selwyn College, Cambridge. His publications include two studies of radical freethought - Victorian Infidels (1974) and Radicals, Secularists and Republicans (1980); two short seminar studies - Radical Politics, (1971) and Chartism (1980); and two text books- English Radicals and Reformers, (with James Walvin, 1982) and Modern Britain: A Social History, (1987). Joel H. Wiener is Professor of History at City University of New York. His books include The War of the Unstamped (1969), A Descriptive Finding-List of Unstamped Periodicals, (1970), Radicalism and Freethought in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Life of Richard Carlile (1983) and William Lovett (1989). He has edited Innovators and Preachers: The Role of the Editor in Victorian England (1985) and Papers for the Millions: The New Journalism in Britain, 1850s to 1914 (1988).

10 Introduction: Defining the Field This new work on print journalism contributes to three broad areas of scholarship, namely the teaching of communications, the study of discourse, and press history. It is aimed principally at readers of journalism, and teachers and students in history, media, cultural studies, English literature and librarianship. Each discipline offers particular insights into different aspects of the press, but combined they have the potential to transform our understanding of British journalism. These essays, then, are investigative in two senses: they interrogate the practices and study of journalism, and they explore the possibilities of interdisciplinary work. The political and social uses to which British journalism has been put have long been matters of public concern. One former editor of The Times argued in the late 1930s that 'a free Press, conducted in a spirit of responsible citizenship, may be at once the central problem and the main safeguard of modem democracy'. 1 The ambivalent role performed by journalism in society is a subject of this book, and a number of the essays set out to analyse the central, if complex, relationships established between the newspaper and periodical press and areas of British political and cultural life. However, understanding the functions of journalism depends on the ability to construct and utilise adequate critical methods of research. The book attempts to develop such methods and, in the process of initiating a discourse which theorises journalism, it also presents a critique of current practice and proposes new directions for the study of media. With the aim of fostering discussion of method, the editors organised a conference of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals on press production, bibliography and theory. Although some of the material here had its origin in that occasion, we have attempted to focus this collection more precisely. Bibliography generally is absent, while theoretical questions - such as definition of the genre, and the common valuation of categories such as the local, metropolitan and provincial press - are to the xi

11 xii Introduction fore. Two key issues were discussed at length and form the basis of the present volume. It seemed necessary to shift attention from journalism as a source for other studies and to treat it as a subject in its own right, and to develop a particular blend of analytical skills in order to effect the shift. Investigating journalism required an unambiguous commitment to interdisciplinarity. This particular form of cultural production, then, can be best understood if the disciplinary boundaries between bibliography, English literature, history and economics are dismantled. Although scholarly interest in journalism has increased in recent years, study of the press still tends to fracture under the pressures of institutional subject classificiation into component single disciplines. The implications of these diverse, if parallel, methods and writings, and considerations of ways in which they may be combined have given rise to this book. In short, our organising principle is that the study of journalism, past and present, demands the recognition of a discrete, interdisciplinary field. Anyone who turns to the newspapers and periodicals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will find in them numerous reflexive articles on the press, its ethics, its social and political functions and its history. It is only as academic specialisation developed that journalism was defined principally as a practice, the study of which fell outside history, economics and literature. If it was studied at all in higher education, it was by bibliographers (themselves at the margins of diverse disciplines), or by vocational students of librarianship or journalism. In consequence, the most prolific literary form of the nineteenth century, and the precursor of modern journalism, has largely been ignored by scholars and students in higher education. The recent popularity of media studies in schools and colleges is an encouraging development, but the tendency to focus on twentieth-century forms of communication is artificially constrained. Work on nineteenth-century journalism provides a valuable counterbalance to the overemphasis on contemporary institutions in such courses. The essays are divided into three parts. Part I explores broad theoretical questions pertaining to journalism. Looking at the field as constituted by some recent theoretical models, Lyn Pykett considers the kinds of evidence which periodicals produce, what is context and what text in a variety of theoretical frameworks, and defines the text as 'the object of a freshly constituted interdiscipli-

12 Introduction xiii narity'. Tensions within a hypothetically identifiable genre occupy Margaret Beetham. Rhythms of continuity of the run and closure of the single issue, and the combination of single and collective voices in a single periodical are gauged and related to readership. Anne Humpherys looks at the implication of one discourse with others, the ways news stories rely on popular structures of melodrama and romance to produce meaning. Edward Royle, like Lyn Pykett, addresses modern research; he examines its appropriation of historical 'information' from the press, and argues that journalism as an historical source should be approached with caution and sensitivity. Together these writers dislodge premises, such as transparency of narrative and models of reflection or influence, which commonly underlie raids on the press by colonisers from other disciplines, and suggest methods which a new, discrete field might adopt. Part II draws attention to the rich diversity of Victorian journalism. The nineteenth-century press enjoyed a relationship with society and politics quite different from that of its more centralised modern equivalent. Aled Jones argues that the history of journalism should begin at the local level, by investigating links between titles and their producers, correspondents and readers in and outside London. Four local case studies from the contrasting areas of Wales and London illustrate these connections. Brynley F. Roberts surveys the growth of the Welsh periodical press, while Philip Henry Jones studies the first nine years of Yr Amserau ('The Times'), the first commercially successful Welsh-language newspaper. Similarly, Michael Harris surveys the London locals, analysing the structure of their development, and Dennis Griffiths traces the early management of the Standard between 1827 and Finally, Lucy Brown outlines the growth of the national press which had grown to dominate British journalism by the 1890s. Part III looks to some future directions in journalism studies. B.E. Maidment takes on the limited accommodation of the Victorian press by twentieth-century academic journals, and argues for attention to Victorian journalism as such, while Joel H. Wiener suggests materials for undertaking this in a piece on sources for the study of newspapers. Scott Bennett raises the urgent matter of the physical preservation of Victorian periodicals, and Deian Hopkin considers the extent to which electronic journalism is likely to replace print journalism in future.

13 xiv Introduction These investigative essays are designed to open new avenues of research, and to stimulate further work on ways in which nineteenth-century journalism may be read, and its histories written. LAUREL BRAKE ALEDJONES LIONEL MADDEN Note 1. Henry Wickham Steed, The Press (Harmondsworth, 1938) p. 3.