The Old New Journalism?

ORBIT-OnlineRepository ofBirkbeckInstitutionalTheses Enabling Open Access to Birkbeck’s Research Degree output The development and impact of campaigning journalism in Britain, 1840-1875 : the old new journalism? https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/40128/ Version: Full Version Citation: Score, Melissa Jean (2015) The development and impact of campaigning journalism in Britain, 1840-1875 : the old new journalism? [Thesis] (Unpublished) c 2020 The Author(s) All material available through ORBIT is protected by intellectual property law, including copy- right law. Any use made of the contents should comply with the relevant law. Deposit Guide Contact: email Birkbeck, University of London The Development and Impact of Campaigning Journalism in Britain, 1840–1875: The Old New Journalism? Melissa Jean Score Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy November 2014 2 Declaration I, Melissa Jean Score, declare that this thesis is all my own work. Signed declaration_________________________________________ Date_____________________ 3 Abstract This thesis examines the development of campaigning writing in newspapers and periodicals between 1840 and 1875 and its relationship to concepts of Old and New Journalism. Campaigning is often regarded as characteristic of the New Journalism of the fin de siècle, particularly in the form associated with W. T. Stead at the Pall Mall Gazette in the 1880s. New Journalism was persuasive, opinionated, and sensational. It displayed characteristics of the American mass-circulation press, including eye-catching headlines on newspaper front pages. The period covered by this thesis begins in 1840, with the Chartist Northern Star as the hub of a campaign on behalf of the leaders of the Newport rising of November 1839. It ends in 1875, on the cusp of the New Journalism, a year before Stead published his reports condemning Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria in the regional daily, the Northern Echo. I argue that characteristics of New Journalism, such as persuasive writing and sensational revelations, were evident before 1875, particularly in the development of campaigning journalism in this period. Chapter 1 examines the context and definitions of campaigning journalism in relation to Old and New Journalism. Chapter 2 focuses on the genre of investigative writing, examining techniques such as interviewing and undercover reporting and their impact on New Journalism. Chapter 3 considers ways in which campaigning ideas were communicated through networks. Chapter 4 interrogates concepts of ‘popular’, ‘radical’, and ‘commercial’ by analysing three popular Sunday newspapers — the News of the World, Lloyd’s Weekly News, and Reynolds’s Newspaper — and their selection of campaigns. Chapter 5 examines how the press presented the second phase of the movement to repeal the ‘Taxes on Knowledge’, between 1849 and 1869, a campaign that was directly relevant to the economic and regulatory framework in which books, newspapers, and periodicals were produced. 4 Table of Contents Abstract 3 List of Illustrations 6 Acknowledgements 7 Introduction 8 Chapter 1: Context and Definitions of Nineteenth-Century Journalism 26 1.1. Journalism Networks 40 1.2. Campaigning Journalism and Genre 50 1.3. New Journalism and Other Novelties 53 1.4. Methodology 63 Chapter 2: Investigation as a Component of Campaigning Journalism 68 2.1. Frances Trollope: Serialized Fiction and the Gendered Investigator 80 2.2. The Interview as a Means of Information-Gathering 89 2.3. The ‘Eyewitness’ 95 2.4. Investigation and Human Interest: Household Words and All the Year Round 101 2.5. Investigation and Disguise: the Exposé 105 Chapter 3: Campaigning Networks and the Press 121 3.1. Introduction 121 3.2. The Northern Star as a Campaign Hub: Newport and its Aftermath 132 3.3. The Morning Star: Religious and Political Networks and Transatlantic Journalism 149 Chapter 4: Campaigning Journalism in the Popular Sunday Press: 1842–1875 180 4.1. Introduction: Genre and Context 180 4.2 The News of the World and Campaigns for Children, 1843–1875 213 4.3 Lloyd’s and Trade Unions: ‘Workmen and Wages’, 1853–1854 221 4.4 Reynolds’s and Crises in France 225 5 Chapter 5: ‘Taxes on Knowledge’ and Press Regulation, 1849–1869 237 5.1. Introduction 237 5.2. The 1851 Select Committee Report as a Campaigning Text 249 5.3. Prosecuting a Test Case: Cassell, Dickens, and Ambiguity 256 5.4. The Leader and Radical Networks 263 5.5. Newspapers and the Stamp: the Daily News 269 5.6. Bradlaugh’s Secular National Reformer and Registration 275 Conclusion 280 Bibliography 304 Appendix: Writers and Editors Cited, with Dates 326 6 List of Illustrations Figure 1: Pamphlet Reprint of ‘A Night in a Workhouse’ (1866) 108 Figure 2: ‘A Step in Reform. Suggested to Mr. John Bright, while he is About It’ 156 Figure 3: Morning Star, Detail of Report Printed on 19 July 1862, p. 2 168 Figure 4: Morning Star, Position of the Report on the Page 169 Figure 5: ‘Telegraphic Intelligence’, Daily News, 19 July 1862, p. 5 171 Figure 6: Masthead of the Illustrated London News, 21 May 1842 200 Figure 7: Masthead of Lloyd’s London News, 27 November 1842 201 Figure 8: Advertisement in Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 11 April 1852, p. 6 205 Figure 9: Masthead of Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 11 April 1852 206 Figure 10: Masthead of Lloyd’s, 18 April 1852 206 Figure 11: ‘A Form of Petition’, Reynolds’s Newspaper, 30 June 1850, p. 1 212 Figure 12: ‘Death and the Drawing Room’, Illuminated Magazine (1843) 218 Figure 13: ‘Saturday Morning’s Edition’, Reynolds’s, 19 May 1850, p. 4 229 Figure 14: ‘Map of the Seat of War’, Reynolds’s, 14 August 1870, p. 8 231 Figure 15: ‘War Map of Paris’, Reynolds’s, 18 September 1870, p. 8 231 Figure 16: ‘The Affghan [sic] Difficulty’, Northern Echo, 4 October 1878, p. 4. 233 Figure 17: ‘Taxes on Knowledge’, Democratic and Social Almanack 1850 245 Figure 1 is reproduced by permission of the Peter Higginbotham Collection/Mary Evans Picture Library and Figures 2–11 and 13–16 by permission of the British Library Board. 7 Acknowledgements Firstly, I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Laurel Brake, for her constant encouragement and expertise during the writing of this thesis. I would also like to thank my fellow interns on 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, Emma Curry and David Gillott, for numerous editorial discussions about the MHRA Style Guide, especially their advice on referencing. I would also like to thank Dr Christine Corton for her unflagging encouragement and for drawing my attention to Thornton’s comment about clean chimney regulations in Mrs Gaskell’s North and South. I am grateful to the librarians and archivists at St Bride’s Printing Library, Bishopsgate Library, Conway Hall, the British Library staff at Colindale and St. Pancras, and the London School of Economics archive. My partner David Seddon and sons, Alex and Tom Seddon, deserve sincere thanks for their patience during the researching and writing of this thesis. My late parents, Robert and Paddy (Joan) Score, must take credit for indirectly inspiring a thesis about campaigning journalism since they were active supporters of many campaigns throughout their lives. This thesis is dedicated to them. 8 Introduction This thesis seeks to interrogate notions of New and Old journalism by examining the development of campaigning writing between 1840 and 1875. Campaigning journalism is a genre that exists to persuade the reader to support a cause, is opinionated rather than objective, and utilizes various techniques to achieve its aims. However, newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets, and serialized stories of this period also had to be as aware of commercial realities — advertising, investment, and circulation — as publishing is today. The marketplace and the regulatory framework underwent several phases of development and change that influenced periodical and newspaper writing, especially related to campaigning, in the late decades of the century. Two journalists, best-known for their investigative reporting, demonstrate the complicated relationships between writers, campaigning, and serial publication. Henry Mayhew (1812– 1887) helped to instigate the Morning Chronicle’s investigation into the lives of the labouring poor in 1849, a series which brought considerable kudos to the daily newspaper (and to Mayhew himself) but also controversy. The Chronicle dispensed with Mayhew in 1850 after he publicly criticized one of the paper’s major advertisers, a London firm of tailors H.J. and D. Nicoll.1 Nearly forty years later, in 1885, W. T. Stead (1849–1912), editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, published an exposé of child prostitution entitled ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ that temporarily drove up circulation, but shocked the paper’s upper middle-class readers and deterred advertisers. Though it helped to secure the passage of legislation on the age of consent, it led to Stead’s imprisonment for his involvement in a ‘sting’ operation involving the sale of a young girl to a brothel. ‘The Maiden Tribute’ ultimately contributed to Stead’s resignation from the paper in 1889, despite a series of successful campaigns, including slum clearance and child welfare reforms. 1 Anne Humpherys, Travels Into the Poor Man’s Country: The Work of Henry Mayhew (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977), p. 21. 9 Mayhew was a freelance writer who embodied the fluidity of Old journalism, that is, journalism produced before the 1880s and 1890s. He wrote for a range of publications and genres of literature. Stead embodied the later nineteenth-century ‘New’ professional journalist. He began his career writing for, and then editing, a regional paper before being appointed assistant editor on the PMG, a daily evening paper. He wrote about his theories of journalism and his sense of its mission, as well as practising it. Whereas Mayhew clearly identified himself and his publication to his interviewees, Stead developed the model of the undercover reporter.

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