The late-Victorian and Edwardian press occupies an odd scholarly location. On the one hand, few doubt its centrality as a medium of mass communication, and for that reason, even scholars who do not identify themselves primarily as “press historians” turn to newspapers and periodicals of the period for clues to prevailing ideologies, opinions, and social practices.Footnote ¹ In addition, political historians often look to the personal papers of important editors and newspaper proprietors as valuable sources for their study. As Stephen Koss showed in detail, journalists of the “quality press” were deeply connected with politicians between 1850 and 1950.Footnote ²

On the other hand, the press of this period is rarely studied at a synthetic level. Given the press's importance and accessibility, it has not surprisingly attracted numerous specialist scholars, particularly among historians and literature critics. Indeed, this area constitutes a growth industry with an institutional base in conferences and journals. This scholarship tends, however, to focus on narrow case studies, so that we mostly learn a great deal about specific periodicals and individual journalists. In many cases, studies presented as “press history” or “media history” turn out to consist of content analyses rather than any sustained investigation of the press as an institution or medium. Given these limitations, the press history of this period often lacks the “big picture” debates common to other historiographies, including those of party politics, class, gender, or nation. In fact, much press scholarship is written in virtual isolation from wider social, political, and intellectual history. Consequently, historians of other topics in search of general information and interpretations of the Victorian and Edwardian press most often turn to three books published between 1976 and 1985.Footnote ³

This scholarship's often narrow emphasis contrasts with scholarship focused on both earlier and later periods. Because the press was an object of such overt contention before 1855, scholars of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have studied the press within a deep political context, focusing, for example, on censorship, “Old Corruption,” and radical politics.Footnote ⁴ Similarly, the period after 1950 is well marked by synthetic interpretations and lively debate on questions of the press's ownership, readership, political and cultural significance, and its relationship to electronic media.Footnote ⁵

Two questions deserve a more prominent role in framing the scholarship concerning the “New Journalism,” and in structuring any synthetic interpretations of the field. First, how did the periodical press interact with other media, from the platform and other aspects of oral culture to the cinema and radio?Footnote ⁶ Second, what was the relationship of the press, as an institution, to important changes in the structures of politics and society during the period after 1880, a period increasingly seen as deeply transformative in the passage to our contemporary world?Footnote ⁷ By contrast, to take just one example, scholars of the French Revolution have seen the proliferation of books as an important factor in the “desacralization” of the monarchy on the eve of the Revolution. The analogous links between the rapid expansion of the British press between 1850 and 1930 and both the “strange death of Liberal England” and the making of a mass consumer society have not been examined with the same rigor.Footnote ⁸

A third question has attracted greater attention among press historians: the question of continuity and rupture in press history of the late nineteenth century. From the time that Matthew Arnold famously christened the “feather-brained” “New Journalism” in 1887, rupture was the predominant interpretation of the emergence of a popular daily press. Such scholars as R. C. K. Ensor, F. R. Leavis, and Alan Lee solidified this view: the popular press after 1880 was different in kind from what had gone before, the promising beginnings after the 1855 repeal of the stamp tax had been betrayed, and henceforth the popular and quality presses would develop in categorically different directions. In the past generation, this view has come under revisionist challenge, but no new synthesis has emerged.Footnote ⁹

Two recent books, Jean Chalaby's The Invention of Journalism and Martin Conboy's The Press and Popular Culture, offer just such a synthesis of the modern press, both from a sociology of media perspective, based mostly on secondary literature. Both grapple with the relevance of the press to wider political and social processes, and for both the later nineteenth century is a key period. Of the two, Chalaby's book asserts more of a cataclysmic thesis, whereas Conboy's argues more for a gradualist approach to understanding transformations in the modern British press.

Chalaby's argument is deceptively simple. According to Chalaby, the repeal of the “taxes on knowledge” between 1853 and 1861, particularly the repeal of the Stamp Tax in 1855, marked a decisive break in nineteenth-century press history. Indeed, this sudden change in the press's commercial environment led to the creation of a distinct journalistic field of discourse. At its most ambitious, therefore, Chalaby's argument is that journalism, dating to the second half of the nineteenth century, “is a more recent invention than most authors have acknowledged so far” (p. 1).

Before the 1850s, argues Chalaby, the prevailing discourse in the British press was “political at heart and public in character” (p. 2). Purveyors of this discourse are thus better called “publicists” than “journalists.” Chalaby illustrates this argument through a discussion of the working-class unstamped press of the 1830s, claiming that observations drawn from these papers have a wider application. According to Chalaby, as an “ideal type,” a publicist represented a particular political group or organization, promoting that group's interests and articulating its political and economic ideologies. Publicists were combative and wrote in order to change society.

By transforming the commercial environment for the press, the repeal of taxes on the press not only undermined the radical press (an argument made a quarter-century ago by James Curran) but also more broadly transformed the character of press discourse into something that may properly be called “journalism.”Footnote ¹⁰ By making newspapers more affordable for readers, these repeals effectively created a new competitive market that would ultimately change not only the structure of press ownership but also the character of press discourse. Whereas Lee argued that these repeals produced a “golden age” for the sober, uplifting Liberal press, which was then undermined by the rise of the New Journalism, for Chalaby the great transformation was inherent in the introduction of new competitive pressures by the repeals themselves. For Chalaby, therefore, technological improvements and the expansion of literacy take a secondary position to commercial forces in the creation of a new type of journalism (or, in Chalaby's parlance, journalism itself). With the greater need to compete for market shares, press owners sought technological innovation that not only could support higher circulations but in turn required them, and production costs escalated; this industrialization of the press led to a more intensive concentration of ownership marked by the emerging “press barons.” These press barons, including George Newnes, Arthur Pearson, Lord Northcliffe, and Lord Camrose, served as transitional figures between precapitalist newspaper production and the twentieth-century global multimedia conglomerate.

In order to attract “readers”—as opposed to the “public” of the prerepeal press—journalists pursued several discursive strategies that collectively comprised what Chalaby calls the journalistic field. The British press became depoliticized, meaning both that the relative amount of space filled by politics waned and that politics itself was increasingly conveyed as entertainment, as spectacle, or in terms of personalities. Verbatim reports of speeches, prominently in the parliamentary column, gave way to predigested summaries. Readers’ interest trumped inherent political significance as the criteria for news selection. For Northcliffe, politics had no “divine right” to a newspaper's space but had to compete with other types of story. According to Chalaby, this simple shift tended to divorce news from history, as only the most recent events were likely to be deemed newsworthy.

Along with these changes in the role of politics in the press, Chalaby notes several discursive norms and strategies in journalism, many of which are familiar to students of the late nineteenth century: interviewing and reporting, objectivity as a norm, “crusadism” (e.g., in W. T. Stead's journalism), jingoism (in coverage of the Boer War and the Spanish-American War), and sensationalism. Finally, Chalaby credits the creation of the journalistic field with the polarization of the British press between quality and popular presses, and with the transformation of the popular press into a “magic mirror” that presents an idealized society instead of revealing society as it is. In this latter quality, the journalistic popular press deviates sharply from the prerepeal public press; whereas publicists often confronted their public's beliefs and values, journalists aimed at presenting a palatable (and hence marketable) version of the world.

This is masterful synthesis, and Chalaby's book deserves wide discussion. Many of his specific arguments, particularly concerning the commercialization and industrialization of the Victorian press, are not new but receive a concise and eloquent retelling. It seems unlikely, however, that press historians will accept Chalaby's assertion that the mid-nineteenth century saw the “invention of journalism.” Many of the “journalistic” qualities Chalaby has found in the post-1855 press have been equally located in the seventeenth century by C. John Sommerville, who has found, for example, “steady profits in the periodical publication of nothing more than the most ordinary information” and a de-emphasis on the past.Footnote ¹¹ Moreover, if commodified news was hardly new, neither did “publicity” disappear; rather, it relocated to other venues, including weekly political magazines, Hansard's Parliamentary Reports, and, eventually, the British Broadcasting Corporation. In this way, Chalaby's selective locations of discourse are problematic. Rather than a rupture in which “publicity” gave way to “journalism,” nineteenth- and twentieth-century press history was marked by renegotiations of genres, in which the daily newspaper at various times took on characteristics of political pamphlets, broadsides, almanacs, and oral storytelling. Chalaby's “magic mirror” argument has much to recommend it, but his account of nineteenth-century discursive transformations in the press achieves rhetorical clarity only at the cost of oversimplification.

Martin Conboy's book is, in the first instance, an intervention in contemporary debates about the relationship between press and people; his examination of more than two centuries of this relationship is intended chiefly as a means of understanding the present. Drawing on several theorists, most notably Antonio Gramsci and Mikhail Bakhtin, Conboy argues that the popular press constitutes a nexus between the economic structure and popular culture. In his words, “Successful popular newspapers, like their popular print predecessors, have always managed to articulate a real relationship between the reader and the commercial enterprise and at their most effective involved the reader symbolically in that venture” (p. 1). For this reason, studies that posit a top-down, producer-to-consumer direction of influence miss the very real sense in which press and people engage in a constant dialogue. Indeed, for Conboy, the “whole theme” of the past two centuries comprises the “movement of the content of the popular press towards the daily experiences of the ordinary people” (p. 2). Similarly, Conboy is impatient with assertions of the dichotomy between a supposedly “authentic” popular culture and consumerism; he asserts that even Rupert Murdoch's Sun is unambiguously a manifestation of popular culture, despite its production by an international media company.

Above all, Conboy argues against the “dumbing down” and “depoliticization” theses, which see developments since the late nineteenth century as decline.Footnote ¹² Rather, the press continues through its rhetoric to articulate the authentic voice of the people. To be sure, this rhetoric has fluctuated at times between a primarily political emphasis and a primarily consumerist emphasis, but Conboy insists that these different focuses have rarely been mutually exclusive. Several chronological chapters, covering early-modern print culture, and the U.S. and English press since the nineteenth century (the former in a single chapter), demonstrate continuities between such journalists as John Wilkes, Thomas Paine, William Cobbett, Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, W. T. Stead, and Lord Northcliffe and the twentieth-century tabloid. Despite differences from one generation to the next, each period's popular press is fundamentally unified by its rhetorical articulation of popular culture, political as well as consumerist. Throughout these two centuries, these journalists spoke for the many, often using the idea of an inclusive nation. Where Cobbett attacked the elite who plundered the “industrious Many” even while they called it the “swinish multitude,” the Daily Mirror more than a century later, at the end of World War II, demanded “efficient local government” instead of bureaucracy. Both spoke, moreover, in accessible language. The most important innovation occurred during the era of the New Journalism—which Conboy lengthens to include the period from the 1880s to the 1930s—when the political qualities of the radical unstamped press of the 1830s merged with the entertainment qualities of the midcentury Sunday press.

Conboy argues that by favoring “market segmentation, fragmentation and volatility rather than the homogenization of modernity's mass culture,” postmodernity “poses a challenge to a popular press's attempts to articulate popular sentiments to a mass-profitable audience” (p. 138). With its audience fragmenting, the postmodern popular press relies even more heavily, therefore, on rhetoric to maintain its authenticity as popular culture. Conboy cites several examples of the Sun, Daily Mirror, and Daily Mail since the late 1990s to show that even these most commercialized newspapers continue to speak in a popular voice. Moreover, despite the slant towards entertainment, they continue to articulate a popular political voice, for example, in opposition to the European Union.

This argument is bold and fertile, but not entirely satisfying. Conboy's claim that the popular press speaks the authentic voice of the people rests unconvincingly on circulation figures. This is problematic, particularly as he does not engage at all with reader response. Respondents more than half a century ago told Mass-Observation that they read their newspaper despite its politics, in order not to be excluded from conversations with their friends; more recently, the largest single reason given for newspaper purchase is in order to know what is on television. Such motivations hardly support the idea that circulation equals authenticity. In addition, Conboy could explain more clearly the relationships between newspapers’ popular rhetoric across the past two centuries and the prevailing commercial structure of the press. He acknowledges in several cases that authentic rhetoric did not necessarily mean challenging the elite power structure; this is, after all, the meaning of “hegemony.” This being true, it is not entirely clear to what extent Conboy's argument represents an advance on Curran's thesis that the late nineteenth-century commercialization of the press entailed depoliticization and the incorporation of the radical press into the elite power structure.Footnote ¹³

While Chalaby and Conboy offer ambitious overviews, Kate Jackson and L. Perry Curtis, Jr., offer more concrete studies of particular events and individuals. Despite its title, Jackson's George Newnes and the New Journalism in Britain focuses less on Newnes's career as a journalist and more on the contents and audiences of his numerous periodicals. Through six discrete studies of seven of Newnes's journals, Jackson sheds valuable light on ways in which the press interacted with and contributed to high culture, the imperial imagination, gender roles, and parliamentary politics. Taken collectively, they offer a significant perspective on the changing conditions of journalism in the 1880s and 1890s. Given Newnes's importance as a practitioner of the New Journalism, such a study is long overdue.

Newnes's various periodicals, argues Jackson, lend support to those historians who have questioned the distinctions between “old” and “new” journalism, or between “popular” and “quality.” As captured in Jackson's subtitle, Newnes's mission was to reconcile “culture and profit,” or to combine entrepreneurship with ideology. To be sure, the balance between the two differed from one journal to the next. In Tit-Bits, one of the papers most associated with the New Journalism, the commercial imperative was greater; even with this paper, however, Newnes attempted to educate as well as entertain his readers. Moreover, both Tit-Bits and its imitator, the Million, constituted interactive media that created communities of discussion and responsibility. For Newnes, writes Jackson, the “written word became a vehicle and a symptom of democracy” (p. 83), a political site in alternative to Parliament. The decontextualized “snippets” available in Tit-Bits were often cited as evidence of the decay of journalism, but Jackson insists that they actually raised the tone of popular journalism from its midcentury level. Newnes effectively combined “giving the public what it wants” and guiding the “superficial” reader toward “higher forms” (p. 85). Similarly, the daily Westminster Gazette, although targeting an elite audience and concentrating on more conventionally defined parliamentary politics, equally juggled commercial and political motivations. Though fitting within the more sober traditions of Victorian political journalism, this journal, founded in 1893 as a liberal replacement for the Pall Mall Gazette when that journal was bought by Conservatives, borrowed freely from the emerging conventions of the New Journalism. Alongside editor J. A. Spender's political leaders, more personal sketches were featured, such as “A Day in the Life of a Cabinet Minister.” Even in his elite daily newspaper, Newnes used illustrations and introduced sports and other features. These concessions to the new journalistic trends did not prevent the Westminster Gazette from sustaining losses. Both the Gazette and Tit-Bits, however, demonstrate that the line between popular and quality in the era of the New Journalism was a lot thinner than is sometimes appreciated.

Jackson points out that while periodicals are often treated as reflective evidence of the cultures they mirror, more nuanced scholarship has recently treated them rather as a “central component” of such cultures (p. 10). She demonstrates this insight through each of her case studies, in part by examining the distinctive editorial voice maintained by each periodical. Whereas Tit-Bits established an interactive relationship with lower-middle-class and upper-working-class readers through editorials, correspondence, and competitions, the Strand was more clearly reflective of its upper- and middle-class readers’ mind-sets, generally eschewing reformism or controversy. This offers an interesting answer to the recurring question of whether media shape reality or report it; they can do both, and Jackson argues that the balance varied from one periodical to another. This point is not entirely convincing, however. Jackson does not clearly demonstrate her criteria for assessing how “reflective” a periodical is. Interactivity can be seen more as a convention borrowed from oral culture than an attempt necessarily to influence an audience and is thus not incompatible with the “reflection” thesis. At the same time, it is not entirely clear that a less overtly interactive approach indicates reflection; it may, rather, simply indicate that upper- and middle-class audiences did not appreciate that tone, and Newnes understood this well. Much more evidence from reader response would be necessary in order to untangle these questions. To be fair, debates about influence and reflection remain unresolved for scholars of the contemporary media, and so we probably should not expect historians to solve this problem.Footnote ¹⁴

Other chapters explore the Wide World Magazine, the Ladies’ Field, and the Captain, which Jackson impressively links to popular imperialism, the tension between the new woman and a commodified femininity, and widespread fears about spread of juvenile delinquency, respectively. In each of these cases, Jackson convincingly portrays periodical writers’ overt efforts toward social control, indicating that even if elite discourse had retreated from attributing influence to the press, practitioners continued to assume that such influence was possible.Footnote ¹⁵ In addition, these efforts reiterate that even for a famously commercially motivated proprietor like Newnes, ideological motives continued to compete with commercial imperatives.

This is an original and important study.Footnote ¹⁶ Not only do all of the individual chapters illuminate distinct themes of late-Victorian and Edwardian culture, but taken together they also confirm both latitudinal and longitudinal continuities between old and new journalisms. This point reaffirms that elite critiques of the New Journalism said more about their proponents’ own social anxieties than they did about actual changes in the character of the press. Despite revealing important continuities, however, this book also does much to demonstrate the emergence of late-Victorian narrowcasting. While distinctions between elite and popular audiences had existed for centuries, Newnes's journalistic empire contributed to an intensification of audience definition. In topic matter, rhetorical voice, and physical format, Newnes very precisely distinguished between various audiences, creating distinct communities of readers.

Where Jackson offers a survey of several different periodicals unified by their proprietor, Curtis looks more narrowly at press coverage of a single media “event,” the Whitechapel serial killings of 1888. For Curtis, this press coverage constitutes a synecdoche through which to examine various aspects of Victorian cultural history, including images of race, class, gender, and, more germane to the present essay, Victorian journalism.

Although offered primarily as a contribution to an ever-burgeoning “Ripperature,” Curtis's Jack the Ripper and the London Press has significant implications for press and cultural historians. According to Curtis, “Ripperature” consists primarily of two discrete schools, each of whose practitioners have generally ignored the other. The one group, chiefly men, proffers a never-ending stream of guesses as to the identity of the killer, while the other group, more often women, tends to interpret the period of the killings as a key episode in a metahistorical misogynistic culture. Although occasionally engaging with these two schools—not, however, hazarding a theory as to the killer's identity—Curtis instead examines the London press's coverage of the Ripper.

Early chapters provide a brief chronicle of the murders followed by contextual chapters, based largely on secondary literature, on prevailing images of the East End, the “theory and practice of Victorian journalism,” sensation news, and murder news. Drawing on cultural studies approaches to journalism, most prominently Steve Chibnall's study of crime news in the London press from the late 1960s to early 1970s and Stuart Hall et al.'s Policing the Crisis, Curtis argues that the Victorian press, like its later counterpart, constructed “law-and-order” narratives that effectively delineated between civilization and deviancy.Footnote ¹⁷ Specifically, with the exception of East End newspapers, the London press projected the East End as a dangerous place, occupied by racialized “others,” where such murders indeed took place. In doing so, the press both created a moral panic and reaffirmed English civilization in the face of this danger from outsiders.

The press did not speak with a single voice, however, even though papers borrowed freely from each other (often without acknowledgement). Curtis's study draws on fourteen papers, comprising conservative, liberal, and radical; morning, evening, and weekly; and elite and popular. Not surprisingly, different kinds of newspapers framed their stories differently. Liberal and radical papers often used the killings as opportunities to examine the social and economic conditions that drove women to prostitution, and the lack of any progress on the case as evidence that the militaristic Scotland Yard needed reforming. Conservative papers, by contrast, were more likely to find in the killings a morality tale, in which prostitutes met the wages of sin, and to call for more resources for the police.

Given that the killings began little more than a year after Arnold's “feather-brained” “New Journalism”remark, one might expect coverage of the Whitechapel murders to illustrate the emergence of the new popular press and its divergence from elite papers. Curtis shows, however, that the sensationalistic press accounts had ample precedent. “As early as the 1650s, the Perfect Diurnall was publishing short but dramatic accounts of murder and mayhem that boosted sales, and after the Restoration, broadsides and pamphlets often celebrated the lives and deaths of highwaymen, thieves, and other criminals” (p. 67). The Newgate Calendar in the eighteenth century, the “penny dreadfuls” and “shilling shockers” of the 1840s, and weekly illustrated magazines in the 1850s and after all brought sensational crime news to readers long before the 1880s. In this aspect, Curtis lends support to those scholars who have argued for continuity rather than rupture in the nineteenth-century press. Moreover, although different newspapers differed in the amount of space they gave to Ripper news and in their language, elite papers like The Times offered just as many sensationalistic details as more popular evening and Sunday papers.

While newspapers gave details of the murders that would not appear in today's tabloids—an observation that qualifies the assumption often made of a steadily deteriorating modern press—it is also true that they resorted to euphemism in many cases. For Curtis, these silences and elisions offer a window into “criteria of decency and indecency used by editors” (p. 217). Although graphic detail of violence was a well-established tradition in the nineteenth-century press, the Whitechapel murders posed a new set of journalistic problems because they involved the mutilation of genitalia. Discussing the inquest of one of the victims, Mary Ann (Polly) Nichols, Curtis shows the very graphic language used by doctors to describe the throat-slitting murder and reported in The Times; once the inquest turned to the euphemistically named “abdominal” injuries, however, The Times's language grew much more vague (p. 219). Press coverage of other inquests showed similar elisions, illustrating Curtis's argument that “editors knew that ‘good’ murders sold papers, and they must have sensed that images of violence aroused much less guilt or shame than those of sex” (p. 216). Again, the press's coverage was not uniform. Some papers made no mention of missing reproductive organs, not even euphemistically, while others “carried sensation-horror stories about wombs being used for magical or ritual purposes” in Central and Eastern Europe and Russia (p. 235). In particular, Russian thieves made candles from boiled wombs in order to lull householders to sleep, so that the thieves could escape detection. Other stories built on the myth that Orthodox Jewish men had to perform ritual murder of any gentile sexual partner in order to purify themselves. Such stories helped to reaffirm English civilization by reiterating the widespread view that no Englishman could be capable of performing such acts.

Other chapters concern editors’ attempts to build circulations on the backs of the victims, as well as readers’ responses manifested in letters to the editor. As Sommerville has argued, the invention of “daily news” imposes a particular periodicity on our understanding of the world.Footnote ¹⁸ Regardless of what “real events” occur, a daily newspaper has to report something; it cannot simply announce “there was no news today.” In the case of the Whitechapel murders, editors ran against the difficulty that the murderer sometimes allowed many days or weeks to elapse between killings. Curtis shows that enterprising editors pursued numerous angles in order to keep Jack the Ripper in the news (and sales comfortably high). On a daily basis, newspapers warned of crime waves, speculated on the killer's identity (was he, e.g., a surgeon looking for female reproductive parts on which to experiment?), and recommended methods of capturing the killer (such as the use of bloodhounds). Other angles included speculating on the killer's motives (was he a Jekyll and Hyde figure?) and reporting on the petitions of ordinary citizens to the Queen.

One may question the stridency with which Curtis proclaims the relevance of later cultural studies models to the Victorian press when he asserts, for example, that “tales about crime and social unrest always appeal to respectable readers regardless of their class, sex, ethnicity, or religious beliefs, because they live in a world of binary opposition between good and evil” (p. 51). That his thesis seems generally borne out by the evidence may be indicative not of its universal validity but of certain qualities of modernity shared by late-Victorian and late-industrial London. In addition, this account could benefit from more detailed and systematic accounting of the immediate journalistic context. What other stories competed with Jack the Ripper? How much space did the Whitechapel murders receive as a proportion of total editorial space, and how prominent was this space? What proportion of readers’ letters concerned the killings? Although this kind of information appears sporadically in Jack the Ripper, its absence at a more systematic level makes it difficult to assess the cultural importance of the serial killings. Certainly, murder coverage spiked sales, but this would reflect additional purchases by those who did not generally take a paper, did not generally take one daily, or did not generally take a second paper. One suspects that thousands of regular readers purchased newspapers in 1888 for the same reasons they had in 1885—not only for murder news but for job announcements, business news, international news, and features. Despite these caveats, however, this is an important study that provides a model for cultural and media historians.

Taken together, these four books suggest a way forward, Chalaby's and Conboy's in their chronological sweep and Jackson's and Curtis's in their carefully contextualized dissections of the practice of late-Victorian journalism. Chalaby and Conboy raise many important questions concerning the New Journalism's place in modern press history; all four books offer distinct and valuable windows into understanding the press's cultural meanings and effects. One hopes that other scholars of the New Journalism follow their lead.