Lecture 7
The New Journalism
One journalist of the era, J.A. Spender, described mid-Victorian journalists as:
“Men of great ability and high character (who) gave their best to what they
conceived to be a public service without seeking recognition or reward beyond a
very moderate emolument for their labour.”
The newspapers they produced could be very dull and worthy.
Dullness is, of course, in the eye of the beholder. But mid-Victorian newspapers were
heavy going. They published lengthy and often prolix leader columns. They routinely
contained acres of parliamentary speeches reprinted verbatim. The Times regularly
filled whole pages with them, in small print, interspersed only with plain headlines to
separate the contributions of different speakers. So, a headline would read “Mr
Gladstone said” or “Mr Cobden said.”
The Scotsman used its massive investment in telegraph technology to carry 30,000
words per night of parliamentary debate from Westminster to Edinburgh. When
parliament was not sitting reporters followed politicians around the country and
reported their constituency and campaign speeches instead.
Now speeches were important in the days before radio and television news. They
created a valuable connection between the governors and the governed and they
allowed the new middle-class electorate to follow and debate the development of
policy.
Of course verbatim reporting of parliament and politicians was expensive. So news
agencies often did this work rather than dedicated correspondents. The Press
Association suffered a £400 loss in revenue when Gladstone died.
But if that gives the impression that huge chunks of political speeches were
universally welcomed and avidly consumed by newspaper readers, it is not true. By
the late 1880s the news agencies offered a choice of verbatim, full and summary
reports and in the 1890s only the Prime Minister and a few very senior figures could
expect to receive full reports.
Pressures on space played a part in this drift away from parliamentary reporting.
Advertising was more profitable – and only a commitment to the virtue of reporting
affairs of state sustained newspaper interest. There was already evidence that other
subjects attracted more readers. Sport in particular.
The British affection for Sport had long been catered for, but the Blitz of Paper
witnessed rapid expansion of the dedicated sporting press. Sporting Life was
launched in 1863 and The Sporting Chronicle in 1871. Some of the longest and
therefore most expensive telegrams sent by newspaper correspondents in the 1890s
contained Australian cricket scores. Local evening newspapers launched special
football editions across the country.
Now other interests and a new style of journalism were to shake the Victorian liberal
faith in newspapers as virtuous educational entities.
I finished my last lecture by quoting a man called Fox Bourne, a Victorian Liberal
journalist and politician, who once held the profession in equally high esteem. .
You may recall that he remembered 1870 as the highpoint for British newspapers.
Seventeen years later, he was terribly disillusioned.
“…it may be thought indeed (he wrote) that in some newspaper enterprise of the
present day there is too much, rather than too little of the prosaic commercial sprit.
The community suffers…when a paper is worked for money-making purposes
alone, like a shop or a factory or a patent medicine.”
Mr Bourne disliked what is known as the New Journalism: a tacky, populist and lurid
style of reporting that bears close resemblance to the tabloid campaigning and tabloid
sensationalism we know today. He thought it was designed to sell newspapers, not to
perform the serious educational role campaigners against taxes on knowledge had
predicted for cheap newspapers.
He had a point. Victorian newspapers were never charitable institutions – but towards
the end of the century blatant commercialism played a bigger role in journalism than
before. One newspaper proprietor, Kennedy Jones, summarised the change in a
comment to a retired reporter.
“You left journalism a profession,” he said “we have made it a branch of
commerce”
Histories of the press often date the birth of this New Journalism to the launch in 1896
of the Daily Mail. It was hugely successful – as its continuing prominence on our
newsstands today tends to confirm. But it was not first to invent the New Journalism.
That phrase was first used in a column written nine years earlier, in 1887, by Matthew
Arnold, a poet and prominent cultural critic.
Arnold opined that:
“We have had opportunities of observing a new journalism which a clever and
energetic man has lately invented. It has much to recommend it; it is full of ability,
novelty, variety sensation, sympathy, generous instincts; its one great fault that it is
feather brained. It throws out assertions at a venture because it wishes them true;
does not correct either them or itself, if they are false; and to get at the state of
things as they really are seems to feel no concern whatever.”
The man Arnold referred to was William, or W.T. Stead.
Stead, the son of a non-conformist minister from Newcastle, first came to prominence
in the 1870s as editor of the Northern Echo. He was a puritan, social reformer who
believed in the press as:
“…the greatest agency for influencing public opinion in the world" and "the true
and only lever by which thrones and governments could be shaken and the masses
of the people raised.”
Under his editorship the Northern Echo supported causes including universal
education, votes for women, Irish Home Rule and, of course, the Liberal Party.
He moved to London in 1880 and got a job as a journalist on the Pall Mall Gazette, an
evening newspaper launched in 1865. In 1883 Stead was appointed editor and he
seized the chance to develop some very clear ideas about journalism.
His Pall Mall Gazette used a variety of innovations including bold, banner headlines
and short paragraphs written in simple, accessible English. There were pictures and
diagrams to break up the text and, perhaps most noticeable of all, lots of human
interest stories and campaigns.
Stead’s ideal story was a human interest tale that could be used to promote a liberal,
reforming cause. In his first year as editor he identified a belter – child prostitution.
The Pall Mall Gazette published a series of articles exposing the white slave trade.
Then, in July 1885, Stead went a step too far. For £5 he bought Eliza Armstrong, the
thirteen year old daughter of a chimney sweep, to prove how deplorably easy it was to
procure teenage prostitutes. He wrote about the issue in Pall Mall Gazette in an essay
called Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.
His campaign succeeded. Parliament raised the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen
and strengthened laws on prostitution. But Mr Stead was charged with kidnapping a
minor, found guilty and jailed for three months. With characteristic zeal he continued
editing his newspaper from his cell in Holloway Gaol.
From the nature of this campaign – and others in which Stead involved his newspaper
including support for the trade union movement, opposition to the injustices of the
poor law and early backing for women’s rights (he was the first editor to hire women
at the same pay rates as men) – one thing is clear about W.T. Stead.
His use of populist techniques to make his newspaper more accessible was not driven
by commercial motives alone. Clearer writing and attractive design did help to sell the
Pall Mall Gazette. But Stead used these devices to promote causes.
He described his ambition as “Government by Journalism” and he used his newspaper
as an extra-parliamentary pressure group. His journalists interpreted the will of their
readers and promoted their opinions. It was radical and populist in a country in which
the majority were still denied the right to vote, but was it really different from the
fourth estate liberal ideal of journalism as the hinge of democracy?
The novelty of Stead’s approach certainly offended more staid and traditional
journalists. But they were surely confusing form with substance. Stead was arrogant.
He said that journalists should “reproduce in a paper the ideal of God” But in using
Pall Mall Gazette in that way he was essentially pursuing his own version of the
Victorian ideal – i.e. treating journalism as a means by which public opinion could be
educated to accept wisdom and enlightenment.
The next step in the New Journalism involved editors and proprietors casting off this
millstone of public service and abandoning an elevated commitment to the public
interest in favour of more profitable commitment to reporting what the public was
interested in.
Now – it would be nonsense to suggest that scandal, crime and gossip had not
featured in newspapers before this time. Even before the abolition of stamp duty pious
people complained that newspapers were morbid and packed with poor jokes and
maudlin sentimentality.
Radical newspapers of the 1830s such as Weekly Police Gazette and the London
Dispatch had learned to popularise their brand of political radicalism by including
human interest news and entertainment as well as campaigning ideology.
Executions were great circulation boosters in the early and mid-nineteenth century. In
My Trade Andrew Marr quotes an example from June 1818 – a short piece published
in the Post.
“Yesterday morning, J. Dennett, the miserable and decrepit old man, who was
convicted on Friday of the wilful murder of Jane Rogers, was executied…He
seemed much agitated when he came upon the scaffold: and continued to tremble
violently until he was turned off, when his hands clasped together and he seemed to
die without the least struggle. After hanging the usual time, his body was delivered
over to the surgeons for dissection.”
Judicial murder made good copy and newspapers were very concerned when, in 1868,
public hangings were abolished in favour of carrying out capital punishment behind
prison walls. (We will take a look at the coverage of executions in a separate seminar)
Long before that society gossip, lurid crime reporting and intemperate opinions had
taken space in stamped and unstamped newspapers alike. But these were limited
circulation titles – not newspapers equipped to take advantage of mechanised printing,
railway distribution and spreading literacy.
Titles including the Pall Mall Gazette and the Daily Telegraph first recognised the
value of news and profited by replacing serious minded opinion and commentary with
news. The electronic telegraph had made this easier to achieve, but early critics of
new journalism considered it a disgrace example of what we might term dumbingdown.
Where traditional establishment ‘papers such as the Times had traditionally published
lengthy, analytical leader columns designed to explain and persuade, the new
competitors packed their pages with short, informative items from home and abroad.
Traditionalists complained that these “snippets” were published without the guidance
necessary to help readers understand them.
W.T. Stead pioneered the use of American innovations such as the interview. In 1889
the words “Stop Press” first appeared, indicating the publication of news that had
arrived so late and was so important that the presses had been halted to remake the
newspaper to include it.
Another new title – brasher and more radical than the Pall Mall Gazette was the Star,
edited and launched by T.P. O’Connor – an Irishman who had learned about
newspapers as a sub-editor on the Daily Telegraph during the Franco-Prussian War of
187-1871 and then moved on to the London office of the New York Herald.
O’Connor’s Star was a radical newspaper committed to judge all policy from the
radical standpoint. But if its politics put it outside the Victorian liberal consensus its
contents were still more distinctive.
In his first issue, published on 17 January 1888, O’Connor explained:
“We believe that the reader of the daily journal longs for more than mere politics;
and we shall present him with plenty of entirely unpolitical literature – sometimes
humorous, sometimes pathetic; anecdotal, statistical, the craze for fashions and the
arts of housekeeping and now and then, a short, dramatic and picturesque tale. In
our reporting columns we shall do away with the hackneyed style of obsolete
journalism; and the men and women that figure in the forum or the pulpit or the
law court shall be presented as they are – living, breathing, in blushes or in tears –
and not merely by the dead words that they utter. Our ideal is to leave no event
unrecorded; to be earliest in the field with every item of news; to be thorough and
unmistakable in our meaning; to be animated, readable and stirring.” (Quoted in
Griffiths P. 124)
The Star sold 142,600 copies on launch day – a world record at the time. To a reader
with modern tastes it is not hard to see why it was so popular. O’Connor used
headlines to grab attention – the murder of a woman in London was headed ‘Bullets
for Mother.’ A man who cut his throat while fleeing the police was ‘A Scarlet
Runner.’
A.J. Lee writes that:
“The relationship between paper and reader was thus being changed from the ideal
one of a tutorial and intellectual nature, to one of a market character. Both
qualities had always been there, of course, but there does seem to have been a
change in the balance of the two.”
Now the opportunity arose for financially ambitious newspaper proprietors to go
further by using design, writing and marketing techniques pioneered by titles such as
the Daily Telegraph and the Pall Mall Gazette, and advanced still further by
O’Connor’s Star, to remove all the dullness and severity from newspapers and see
how commercially successful a truly populist editorial agenda might be.
The clearest, most successful and enduring example of this new commercial ethic was
the Daily Mail launched in 1896 by another Irishman, Alfred Charles William
Harmsworth.
Harmsworth had learned a bit about journalism as a teenager doing what we would
call work-experience on the local newspaper closest to his family home in Hampstead,
North London, the Hampstead and Highgate Express. He soon graduated to writing
short stories for other London newspapers including St James’s Gazette and the
Morning Post.
His first commercial success came in 1888 when he launched a magazine called
Answers to Correspondents (many of the answers were researched by his sister,
Geraldine, in the British Museum.) Answers published a mix of interviews with
famous people, simple competitions and short stories. It achieved a circulation of
50,000.
Other profitable titles followed including Comic Cuts (“Amusing without being
vulgar”) and soon Alfred and his brother Harold – the financial director of the
publishing team they called Amalgamated Press – were making profits large enough
to finance a national daily newspaper.
The Mail described itself as “A Penny Newspaper for a Halfpenny.” It first appeared
on Monday 4 May 1896 and achieved an immediate success with a circulation of
nearly 400,000 copies. The achievement was no accident. With a meticulous attention
to detail that persists at the newspaper today Harmsworth had financed the printing of
fifty dummy issues at a cost of £40,000 before he was satisfied that the Mail was
ready to meet its public.
He worked flat out for forty-eight hours to produce the first edition – actively editing
the newspaper in a style that every successive editor of the Daily Mail has emulated.
That means that he planned pages, tasted news, supervised make-up and wrote
headlines.
The leader column in the first edition explained:
“…the note of the Daily Mail is not so much economy of price as concise and
compactness. It is essentially the busy man’s paper. It is no secret that remarkable
new inventions have just come to the help of the press. Our type is set by machinery,
we can produce 20,000 copies per hour, cut, folded and, if necessary, with the pages
pasted together! Our stereotyping arrangements, engines and machines are of the
latest English and American construction, and it is the use of these inventions on a
scale unprecedented in any English newspaper office that enables the Daily Mail to
effect a saving of from 30 to 50 percent, and be sold at half the price of its
contemporaries.”
But neither price nor technical sophistication can fully explain the Mail’s appeal.
Harmsworth’s winning formula (NB: he is more often referred to as Northcliffe, the
title he took when he was elevated to the peerage ) was a newspaper quite superbly
calculated to appeal to late Victorian Britain’s expanding class of literate, lower
middle-class readers.
Lord Northcliffe – as he became – recognised that the development of the economy in
the nineteenth century had created a large number of what we might call junior white
collar workers. Clerks, civil servants, teachers, secretaries, nurses and accountants
were everywhere. He spotted an additional market opportunity: female readers. The
Daily Mail then as now was invented to appeal to women as much as men.
For a brief but helpful overview of mid-Victorian economic growth I recommend Pp
69-71 of The Challenge of Democracy by Hugh Cunningham. He shows how,
following the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, Britain became a global leader in
manufacturing, trading and the service industries.
By the 1870s this country produced two-thirds of the world’s coal, half of its iron, and
five-sevenths of its steel. Britain was similarly dominant in the manufacture of cotton
cloth and hardware. Though much of what was produced was consumed at home, the
development of steamships had a similar effect internationally to that of the railways
at home. Exports boomed.
The picture was patchy and wealth was unevenly distributed, but real national income
per head rose by 46 per cent between 185 and 1873 and there was a sustained boom
between 1869 and 1873.
Northcliffe’s target readers were not rich. Nor were they highly educated according to
the standards of the time. These were not the elite, classically trained products of
public schools and the ancient universities, comfortable with Latin and Greek and
schooled in formal rhetoric. Such people read the Times and adored it. Northcliffe
intended to appeal to beneficiaries of the newly expanded elementary schools –
upwardly mobile people, who could read and who had enough leisure time and
spending power to indulge their curiosity about the world around them.
Many years later, looking back on the phenomenal success the Daily Mail had
become, he explained what he considered to be its unique selling points:
“You could search the Victorian papers in vain for any reference to changing
fashions, for instance. You could not find in them anything that would help you to
understand the personalities of public men. We cannot get from them a clear and
complete picture of the times in which they were published, as one could from the
Daily Mail. Before that was published, journalism dealt only with a few aspects of
life. What we did was to extend its purview to life as a whole.” (Quoted in
Northcliffe’s Legacy by Colin Seymour-Ure, Aspects of the British Popular Press
1896-1996 P 12)
It is a neatly condensed and slightly boastful summary of what the Mail did: boastful
in the sense that, as we have seen, Northcliffe was not really the first to experiment
with New Journalism. In addition to W.T. Stead and T.P. O’Connor his predecessors
included George Newnes who had founded Tit-Bits, a magazine full of trivia, in 1881
and C. Arthur Pearson who, having learned his craft at Tit-Bits, went on to found the
Daily Express in 1900 (As Professor Seymour-Ure reminds us, the Express was the
first newspaper to put news on the front page)
As we will also see – many of the ideas about style, content and presentation that
helped to make the Daily Mail were imported from America. Northcliffe actually
imported his business manager – the splendidly named Pomeroy Burton – from the
New York World. We will take a look at American journalism next week, but make a
mental note in advance: Shows such as Friends and The Simpsons, Sex and the City
and Scrubs are not the first US media to influence our culture. Nor were MASH and
Dallas before them.
Anyway, Northcliffe’s Daily Mail was special. Professor Seymour-Ure writes that:
“It reported the news – wars (an important selling point) the Empire, politics, crime,
accidents, sport. But it was also full of chat and gossip, regaling readers with trivia
about the great and famous, and thereby creating a spurious sense of knowingness
and intimacy. A story in the first issue about ‘our cycling MPs’ gave a nudge that,
in the saddle, ‘public men’ were plain folks like the rest of us. One headline ‘VERY
ORDINARY PEOPLE OFTEN MISTAKEN FOR ROYALTY’ took this idea to the
extreme. Not only were royalty ordinary human beings: they were literally
indistinguishable from the rest of us. In every Daily Mail reader lurked a prince or
princess.”
I agree with that. But I would add another factor. The Mail was selling escapism, the
dream that from their humdrum life of nine to five, watching the pennies and doing as
they were told by their bosses, the readers might one day escape to something better.
After all, if the rich, glamorous and powerful were not so very different from other
people, might it not one day be possible to join their ranks and emulate their tastes
and manners?
(It has since become more confident. Now it asserts that a certain set of middle class
values – as defined by P. Dacre and before him by D. English – is superior to more
elevated tastes and asserts the moral, political and social primacy of Middle England.
Hmm. Politicians on both sides of the House of Commons appear to agree.)
But Northcliffe’s claim that the Daily Mail gave its readers ‘life as a whole’ was not
true. It gave them news about Britain and the world and leavened the mix with items
about cookery and dressmaking and with extended human-interest features and
interviews, but it did not offer a ‘clear and complete picture of the times.’ Professor
Seymour-Ure writes that:
“The newspaper’s world view, then as now, was an artificial construct, following
rules of selection and presentation tacitly agreed between papers and readers. But
Northcliffe’s view was more exciting, entertaining and expansive than anyone else
had offered, day in day out.”
It was an immediate success. On the morning the first edition was published
Northcliffe’s business partner, Kennedy Jones, walked home to sleep after twenty
hours in the office, with the printing presses pounding away behind him. He returned
in the afternoon and asked his colleague how things were going.
Northcliffe replied “Orders still pouring in. We have struck a goldmine.”
Lord Salisbury, the aristocratic arch-Conservative Prime Minister then heading his
government from the House of Lords – the last British PM ever to do so – dismissed
the Daily Mail as “A newspaper for office boys written by office boys.” His Liberal
predecessor, William Gladstone, was less haughty. He said “The Daily Mail appears
to be a most interesting experiment to which I give my heartiest good wishes.”
That is a little ironic given the modern day Mail’s hostility to modern day liberalism.
But, as we have seen, nineteenth century liberalism was more akin to modern day
conservatism than to today’s Liberal Democrats.
Anyway, Northcliffe was spot on. He had hit a goldmine. Circulation increased to
500,000 in 1899 and by 1902 the Mail was selling more than one million copies per
day – the largest circulation in the world.
The New Journalism was clearly popular. Northcliffe later offered his own
explanation as to why the Mail worked. For a start, he said, existing newspaper were
complacent about the appeal of new journalism.
“The Times went on its own mysterious way in the island of Printing House Square;
the Daily Telegraph continued its gentle rivalry with the Standard; the Morning
Post was aloof; the Daily News political and literary, was the leading radical organ;
and the Daily Chronicle…was the most brilliant and enterprising of all. Their lack
of initiative…and their subservience to Party were a direct invitation to the assault
administered by the Daily Mail.”
One consequence of Northcliffe’s success was early and formidable competition. Just
less than four years after the launch of the Daily Mail C. Arthur Pearson responded
with the Daily Express, the first copy of which appeared on 24 April 1900. Like its
rival the new title was an eight page broadsheet. In his opening leader Pearson
declared that:
“The Daily Express will be the organ of no political party nor the instrument of any
social clique…Its editorial policy will be that of an honest Cabinet Minister…Our
policy is patriotic, our policy is the British Empire.”
The declaration of political independence is important. The broadening of the
electorate in Victorian England and the development of party politics had prompted
an incestuous level of proximity between some newspapers and the politicians they
supported.
The increased number of voters meant that ‘public opinion’ involved too many people
for politicians to hope to address them all at meetings. The political class soon
realised that it had to win newspaper support in order to get its messages heard.
Andrew Marr observes that “Lord Palmerston worked so closely with supportive
newspapers he was widely suspected of writing their articles about him.” Benjamin
Disraeli cajoled, bullied and cultivated journalists as if his hopes of obtaining or
remaining in power depended on it. Gladstone blamed his defeat in 1874 on the Daily
News, a liberal title that declined to back him when he most needed its support.
When W.T. Stead spoke of “government by journalism” he did not mean cosy
arrangements that tied individual titles to individual parties. His approach was a
reaction against that style of journalism. He believed that newspapers were more
powerful than politicians.
In 1886 Stead said:
“I am but a comparatively young journalist, but I have seen Cabinets upset,
Ministers driven into retirement, laws repealed, great social reforms initiated, Bills
transformed, estimates remodelled, programmes modified, Acts passed, generals
nominated, governors appointed, armies sent hither and thither , war proclaimed
and war averted, by the agency of newspapers.”
If, by the end of the nineteenth century, that was a slight exaggeration, it was only
slight. Stead had proved – in campaign after campaign – that he could influence
government policy at home and abroad. The men he inspired, Lord Northcliffe and C.
Arthur Pearson prominent among them, believed it absolutely.
This growing awareness of journalism’s power to influence political opinion was to
lead to a dangerous proximity between newspapers and political power. Before and
during the First World War it had damaging consequences. The origins of the naïve
jingoism that characterised coverage of that conflict lie in the late nineteenth century
and the ideological tone of the New Journalism.
When the Daily Express launched with that stirring declaration that its policy was one
of patriotism and Empire it was not risking controversy. The Daily Mail had likewise
announced, at its inception, that it would champion “the power, the supremacy and
the greatness of the British Empire.” Lord Northcliffe was a passionate imperialist.
He wanted Britain to be formidable, revered and adored as the centre of a global
Empire. His newspaper reflected his opinions.
In her essay, Popular Press and Empire: Northcliffe, India and the Daily Mail, Dr
Chandrika Kaul of St. Andrew’s University writes:
“The appearance of Alfred Harmsworth’s Daily Mail in 1896 coincided with the
high point of nineteenth-century imperialism. In the last thirty years of the century
the British Empire increased enormously in size, covering by 1900 one fifth of the
world’s land surface. Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations provoked
Beatrice Webb to note in her diary in June 1897: ‘Imperialism in the air – all
classes drunk with sight-seeing and hysterical loyalty.”
So great was Northcliffe’s enthusiasm that, in 1904, he launched an overseas edition
of the Daily Mail to create “a newspaper connection between the Old country and
the scattered hundred of thousands of Britons in the four corners of the world” who,
the newspaper proudly announced, were “bearing the White Man’s burden across
the seas.”
Press coverage promoted Empire partly because newspaper proprietors realised that
imperial adventure, imperial drama and imperial pomp and ceremony sold copies. But
there was ideological commitment too. Many editors including H.A. Gwynne of the
Morning Post, C.P. Scott of the Guardian, J. St Loe Strachey of The Spectator and
JL Garvin of the Observer were dedicated imperialists.
Successive editors of the Times followed a similarly pro-imperial line. And, when the
Empire faced challenges – such as during the Boer War of 1899-1902, it became clear
that colonial conflicts were profitable and opposing them was not.
The Mail’s circulation soared during that conflict on the back of a relentlessly pro-war
editorial line. At the same time W.T. Stead – by this time editor of the Review of
Reviews - lost advertising revenue and sales by opposing the war. Even newspapers
that supported the newly formed Labour Party (e.g. Reynold’s News) noticed which
way the wind was blowing and backed the armed forces of the empire when they
became involved in imperial conflict.
Dr Kaul writes that
“Fleet Street ran imperial campaigns and exerted pressure on government to
varying degrees throughout the second half of Victoria’s reign. A vivid example was
Lord Esher’s use of the Pall Mall Gazette to press Gladstone into sending Gordon
to the Sudan in 1883, a cry taken up by other papers.”
This move away from critical, analytical journalism to brash, patriotic cheerleading is
among the reasons why Liberals began to criticise the late Victorian press. Attractive,
well-presented, concise reporting does not have to be populist and simplistic. But too
much of the New Journalism was simple minded and intellectually crude.
The New Journalism sold newspapers. It advanced their design and it expanded and
professionalised journalism as a trade or profession - so much so that in 1906 the
National Union of Journalists was founded to fight for better wages and conditions for
the new generation of reporters.
There was, as yet, no formal training, but reporters learned to judge the sort of stories
that would appeal to mass readerships and to tell them in compelling prose. Now this
learning process had been going on throughout the century – as Mr Marr
entertainingly records in the chapter of My Trade entitled What is News – but it
reached a new level with Northcliffe’s meticulous attention to style.
Andrew Marr cites the report of a house fire in the Mail of 1896. Under the headline
“appalling Fire” the reporter writes:
One of the most thrilling scenes in this story of human suffering and destruction
was when a bootmaker named Moore, aged twenty-nine, was seen to appear at front
window of the second floor, with his clothes all alight. The room was at the time
one dense mass of flame, and escape was impossible. In the fierce light spectators
plainly perceived the awful look of despair written on the poor fellow’s face. Only
one moment did he stand at the window, and then he threw himself into the street
below. A sickening feeling passed through the crowd when it was seen that Moore
had miscalculated his distance, and that his body was literally impaled on the metal
spear-heads of the railings in front of the house. He was heard to murmur, I tried
to save them and then I jumped.”
I have my doubts about the accuracy of that final quote. Did he really say that?
Impaled on a spike and dying in agony I suspect he did not. This is conjecture – it
cannot be anything else. But I suspect the reporter may have gilded the lily somewhat
to create a heroic narrative. Mr Moore’s wife and children died in the fire. And a
father leaping to his death after risking life and limb in a forlorn attempt to save his
family makes a more sympathetic and tear jerking tale than a man leaping simply to
escape the flames.
Whether the colourful account was entirely accurate or not – and I stress that we
cannot know for certain – it was certainly Daily Mail style. So is this example – again
quoted in Andrew Marr’s excellent book – from the newspaper’s edition of 13
September 1896
“The officer met Collins, his hands and clothes stained with blood, walking calmly
out through the farm gateway, carrying in one hand the BOWL CONTAINING A
HUMAN HEAD and in the other the double barrelled gun and some dead chickens.
Cook asked him what he had been doing, to which Collins replied that he had been
killing a sheep…and handed the constable the bowl with its ghastly contents. Cook
cried out ‘Why, you have committed murder! ’Collins, in a dazed style, replied
‘Have I? I am sorry. Let me kiss you,’ and suiting the action to the word, the
murderer stooped down to embrace the policeman.”
That report was headlined “Murder by a Maniac” and told the story of a farmer who
decapitated one of his employees in what appears to have been a fit of violent sexual
jealousy.
The Mail was well written, as was much New Journalism. But it was only
occasionally significant. Northcliffe and his competitors realised that sensation sells.
Fear, moral panic, celebrity gossip and deliberately provocative opinion sell too.
Offering financial prizes is a pretty effective sales mechanism as well.
As Britain left the Victorian era and became Edwardian moral panic and populist
simplicity had established themselves in the mass newspaper market. Their tone was
oceans apart from the calm, educational approach Liberal idealists had hoped to see.
Instead of instructing the newly literate, the newspapers seemed content to entertain
them.
Liberals were disillusioned. It should be noted that they were also often out of power.
The main beneficiaries of the expanded electorate in the 1880s and 1890s were the
conservatives who held office for much of this period under first Benjamin Disraeli
and then Lord Salisbury.
Part of the Liberal problem was that they no longer liked where democracy appeared
to be leading. They had hoped to see enlightenment and sophistication spread through
the masses as a result of a free press, universal education and social reform. Instead
they began to fear that intelligence would be swamped by ignorance. Liberals were
disunited. Their morale suffered.
Meanwhile Conservatives, who discovered that they could attract votes from every
section of the community, were happily converted to the cause of democracy which
they had traditionally feared. Their enthusiasm for popular politics was boosted by the
support of a press which, though originally liberal, now included several powerful and
popular conservative newspapers.
Reading Note.
In preparation for next lecture please read Chapter 10 of Hugh Cunningham’s the
Challenge of Democracy – Britain at War 1914 – 1918 which starts on page 227.
Link to W T Stead's Investigation into teenage prostitution "The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon I: the Report or our Secret Commission"
http://www.attackingthedevil.co.uk/pmg/tribute/mt1.php
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