Representation of journalists in
literature, film and TV 1900 present
Sarah Lonsdale
Module Introduction and basics
• After lecture sessions I will upload lecture notes onto
the module notes section of the Centreforjournalism
website (When I remember)
• As well as giving essay questions out as handouts,
these too will be uploaded onto module notes.
• The assessments consist of two coursework essays, the
first due start of week 6 (November 4) and the second
due start of week 9 (November 25). These are worth
22.5 per cent of your mark each and the exam in the
summer is 45 per cent. The other 10 per cent is based
on your contribution to class - general interested and
perceptive comments that you make in lectures.
Reading and Essays
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Your essays should be based on both PRIMARY and SECONDARY sources, like a
history essay. The Primary sources will be the novels, poems, plays and films we
look at throughout the term; also contemporary diaries, journals, letters etc.
Secondary sources will be things like histories, biographies, journal articles, books
of statistics etc (eg the 1938 PEP report – in the library) that will be used to
provide context for the fiction we study.
You will NOT be awarded more than a 2:2 (59 per cent) for any piece of work that
does not quote secondary sources
References: Please use the Harvard referencing system (Author, pub. Date: page
number) and a bibliography at the end. Eg: (Gibbs, 1909: 36); Bibliography entry:
Gibbs, Philip, The Street of Adventure, Heinemann, 1909). Please check with me if
you are not sure of the Harvard system.
Book titles, newspapers etc should be italicised
I will give you reading handouts before some classes; all the primary fiction and a
lot of the histories etc are available from the library. PLEASE USE IT!!
If you just quote from my lecture notes, I won’t be happy
If you like you can now read my PhD on the subject which is now in the library!!
Films
• Week 9 we will be looking at some American film
portrayals and covering:
• His Girl Friday (1940)
• Citizen Kane (1940)
• Philadelphia Story (1941)
• All the Presidents Men (1976)
• State of Play (2009)
• Blood Diamond (2006)
• Among others….All these are in the library; please
make sure you watch a few by week 9 so you know
what I’m talking about…enjoy
Overview: From this….
• ‘He was full of grim determination to wring the truth
from the renegade. In his hip pocket his revolver
pressed against his thigh. He was strung up for action
(p.342)
• ‘the pads of paper, the stylographic pens with the
special ink for hot countries which would not dry up or
corrode, his revolvers, riding-breeches, boots and
spurs, the Kodak, with spare films and light tight zinc
cases… (p.163)
• Introducing Harold Spence of the Daily Wire in When it
was dark, 1904. What is the image of the foreign
correspondent being portrayed here?
…To this…
• ‘The betrayers of language…and those who
had lied for hire; the perverts, the perverters
of language, the perverts…flies carrying news,
harpies dripping sh-t through the
air…monopolists, obstructers of knowledge,
obstructers of distribution…’
• Ezra Pound, Hell Cantos, 1924
…To this…
• ‘I could see for nearly three quarters of a mile
each way, and there were only two living beings
in all that length besides myself – two soldiers
with camouflaged helmets going slowly up the
edge of the street, their sten guns ready…I felt as
though I were a mark on a firing range. It
occurred to me that if something happened to
me in this street it might be many hours before I
was picked up: time for the flies to collect.’
(Graham Greene, The Quiet American, 1955)
To this…
Or from this…
…to this…
…to this…
Weeks one and two: 1900-1914
• Historical background
• The launch of the Daily Mail May 4 1896:
• single most important change in the British press since the
abolition of stamp duty in 1855. Even early Twentieth
Century commentators could see the importance of this
‘new’ way of writing and working, introduced first by the
Daily Mail (although pioneered by George Newnes and his
weekly gossip magazine Tit-Bits, launched in 1881), and
followed by the Daily Express in 1900 and the Daily Mirror
in 1903. The ‘new’ journalism is nicely described by
H.Simonis in Street of Ink, written in 1917: (next slide)
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H Simonis, Street of Ink (1917)
• ‘It seems to me now that one of the most striking differences
between what I may call the ‘old’ journalism and the new…that the
‘fine writing’ of the old high-priced dailies gave way to plainer
English more suited to the masses, to whom the newspapers with
great circulation appealed. As an illustration of what I mean, it was
said years ago that no writer on the Daily Telegraph would mention
a ‘fish.’ He would refer to it as a ‘finny denizen of the deep’…One
might compare the newspaper of twenty years ago and the
production of today with a sailing ship and a steamer. The modern
machine in either case calls for a combined degree of technical
ability and skill not required before, and the man occupying a
responsible position in each instance must be equipped mentally to
a corresponding degree.’
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Changes in newspaper readership
• Massive changes in the British Press which followed the launch of
Alfred Harmsworth’s Daily Mail, and which started the huge rise in
circulation, and proliferation of newspapers in Britain.
• In 1887, for example the Telegraph claimed the largest circulation of
any newspaper in the world, at close to 250,000 copies a day.
• With the arrival of the Daily Mail there followed a huge rise in
newspaper readership over the following three decades – by 1902
the Daily Mail was selling 1.2 million copies a day – what
Harmsworth himself then felt was the ‘limit of circulation.’
• There is an excellent resource in the library, Report on the British
Press by PEP, 1938 which provides an overview of newspaper
consumption in early C20
Large rise in journalistic personnel
• Numbers of people employed by newspapers more
than doubled over just a couple of decades
• In the 1891 Census, 8269 people described themselves
as belonging to the occupation category ‘authors,
editors, journalists, reporters, shorthand writers’. By
1901 this figure had risen to 10,663 and by 1911, to
nearly 14,000.
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Not just the Oxbridge educated leader writers for the
Times, but from the lower middle class ‘white collar’
classes, who thanks to C19 education acts could now
read and write
From Philip Gibbs’s autobiography
Adventures in Fleet Street (1923)
• In the first chapter of his autobiography Adventures in Journalism Gibbs
describes how Harmsworth’s Mail changed British journalism forever, and
gave birth to the first populist news reporters:
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• ‘Formerly ‘news’ was limited in the imagination of English editors to
verbatim reports of political speeches, the daily record of police courts,
and the hard facts of contemporary history, recorded in humdrum style.
Harmsworth changed all that. ‘News’, to him, meant anything which had a
touch of human interest for the great mass of folk, any happening or idea
which affected the life, clothes, customs, food, health, and amusements of
middle-class England. Under his direction, the Daily Mail, closely imitated
by many others, regarded life as a variety show. No ‘turn’ must be long or
dull. Whether it dealt with tragedy or comedy, high politics or other kinds
of crime, it was admitted, not because of its importance to the nation or
the world, but because it made a good ‘story’ for the breakfast table.’
William Heinemann Ltd, London 1923
Technology
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• The ‘new’ methods of newspaper production (thanks to the
Linotype machine in Fleet Street composing rooms during
the late 1890s which allowed for machine setting six times
faster than the old hand setting method, and the rotary
printing machine, which increased the speed of production
from six thousand copies and hour to 30,000) newsdesks’
treatment of journalists and how reporters were expected
to write and the new kinds of stories they were sent to
cover are referred to throughout early novels.
• Other technological advances: telephones, typewriters,
wireless telegraph, photographs: all made early C20
newspapers cutting edge products
From Guy Thorne’s When it was Dark
(1903)
• ‘On the writing-table was a mahogany stand
about a foot square. A circle was described on it,
and all round the circle, like the figures on the
face of a clock, were little ivory tablets an inch
long, with a name printed on each. In the centre
of the circle a vulcanite handle moved a steel bar
working on a pivot. Ommaney turned the handle
till the end of the bar rested over the tablet
marked ‘Composing Room’. He picked up the
receiver and transmitter of a portable telephone
and asked one or two questions.’(Thorne, 1903:
p.151)
From Alphonse Courlander’s Mightier
than the Sword
• ‘Their machines were almost human. They
touched the keys as if they were typewriting,
and little brass letters slipped down into a line,
and then mechanically an iron hand gripped
the line, plunged it into a box of molten
lead…(p.85).
Fleet Street was an exciting place to
work
• ‘The Press is the pulse of the moment, the incarnate
vitality of to-day and those who once experience the
thrill of being the tiniest particle in that great living
force, find all things else a dead and silent world…From
the incalculable staff of the Times to the short
paragraphist in some trivial penny weekly, there is the
electric sense of being behind the scenes in the world’s
drama, of knowing how the machinery works.’ From
Dolf Wyllarde, The Pathway of the Pioneer, 1906 (1914:
35 – 36)
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• ‘…as he reached the bottom step, the grey
building shivered and trembled, as if in agony,
and there came up from its very roots of its
being a deep roar, at first irregular, and
menacing, but gradually settling down to a
steady, rhythmical beat, like the throbbing of
thousands of human hearts.’ (Alphonse
Courlander, Mightier than the Sword, 1912:87)
Novels and stories of the pre WW1
period
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Philip Gibbs’s Street of Adventure, (1909),
C E Montague’s A Hind Let Loose (1910),
Alphonse Courlander’s Mightier than the Sword (1912)
Kipling’s The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat (1913)
PG Wodehouse’s Psmith Journalist(1909)
Guy Thorne’s When it was Dark (1903)
Edgar Wallace’s The Four Just Men (1905)
Authors were either newspaper staffers or freelancers: Guy Thorne (the
pseudonym of Cyril Ranger Gull) had freelanced for The Saturday Review,
London Life and The Echo before taking a staff job in the early days of the
Daily Mail. Philip Gibbs was appointed literary editor of the Daily Mail in
1902 and subsequently worked as a reporter, and then editor on other
London papers including The Daily Express, Daily Chronicle and The
Tribune. P.G. Wodehouse was a very successful freelance journalist until he
became a novelist.
Street of Adventure, Chapter 3
• Read the handout. What is the image of early
C20 Fleet Street the author is trying to
convey?
Guy Thorne, When it was Dark (1903)
• ‘It was obvious that the windows had not
been as freely opened as their wont. A litter of
theatre programmes lay on one chair. On
another was a programme of a Covent Garden
ball and a girl’s shoe of white satin, into which
a fading bouquet of hothouse flowers had
been wantonly crushed. The table was
covered with debris of a supper, a pate, some
long-necked bottles which had held
Neirsteiner…’ (p.241)
Power of the presses
• The Street of Adventure: ‘The great roller
went round, steel rods plunged to and fro with
beautiful rhythm, a frame rose and fell with
perfect regularity, and at each heart-beat, as it
were, of those mighty organisms a batch of
complete newspapers was ready for the
world.’ (The Street of Adventure, p. 48)
Journalism and literature
• Frank Luttrell appreciates that some of his
journalist training will inevitably aid his fiction
work: ‘He must get to the heart of life before
he could become a man of letters. He must
know and see and suffer before he could be a
truth-teller.’ (p.96) So journalism is not just
about earning money to pay for one’s ‘art’: it
helps one become a better artist by showing
what real life is all about.
Quain’s attitude
• Towards the end of Mightier than the Sword
Humphrey gives up his fiancée Elizabeth because
she wants him to stop being a reporter and settle
down in a cottage in the country and write books
but he cannot leave ‘the Street’: ‘I’ve seen men
eat their heart out in a year after they’ve left the
Street light heartedly,’(p.327) he tells her, before
leaving.
• This turns the traditional idea, of journalism
being a means to an end – literature – on its
head…
From Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s
prose poem Aurora Leigh 1853-56
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‘The midnight oil
Would stink sometimes; there came some vulgar needs:
I had to live therefore I might work,
And, being but poor, I was constrained, for life,
To work with one hand for the booksellers
While working with the other for myself
And art: you swim with feet as well as hands,
Or make small way. I apprehended this,In England no one lives by verse that lives;
And, apprehending, I resolved by prose
To make a space to sphere my living verse.
I wrote for cyclopaedias, magazines,
And weekly papers, holding up my name
To keep it from the mud…
what you do
For bread will taste of common grain, not grapes…
(handout: What does this poem mean?)
Edwardian journalists are heroes…
• In The Street of Adventure:
• Brandon, the crime reporter prevents a potential miscarriage of
justice through his investigative powers, finding a vital clue in a
criminal trial, that the police have overlooked;
• Edmund Grattan, the fearless foreign correspondent still found
time to comfort dying soldiers on the ‘bloody battlefields of South
Africa’ as well as championing the causes of Women’s Suffrage and
the unemployed while back in England;
• Margaret Hubbard, one of the first ‘lady’ journalists, the daughter
of a penniless army officer was sacked from a paper ‘ for refusing to
puff a poisonous wretch who called herself a ‘beauty doctor’ and
who spent large sums in advertisements…’ (P.120).
Why do Edwardian writers portray
fictional journalists as heroes?
P G Wodehouse’s Over Seventy
• ‘As I surveyed the literary scene, everything looked
pretty smooth to me, for the early years of the
twentieth century in were fine for an industrious young
hack who asked no more than to pick up the occasional
half guinea…There were so many morning papers and
evening papers and weekly papers and monthly
magazines that you were practically sure of landing
your whimsical article on ‘The Language of Flowers’ or
your parody of Omar Khayyam somewhere or other
after abut say thirty five shots…I left the bank in
September and by the end of the year found that I had
made £65 6s 7d.’
Psmith Journalist
• ‘We must chronicle the live events of the day, murders,
fires and the like in a manner which will make our readers’
spines thrill. Above all we must be the guardians of the
People’s rights. We must be a searchlight, showing up the
dark spot in the souls of those who would endeavour in any
way to do the PEOPLE in the eye. We must detect the
wrong doer and deliver him such a series of resentful biffs
that he will abandon his little games and become a model
citizen’ (p.33)
• What does Wodehouse here suggest that the role of the
press is in society?
• This attitude is reflected in commentaries of the time…
Edward Dicey, Fortnightly Review,
1905, Vol 77 pp904-918
• ‘It is all very well to decry the love of sport, but the
papers which represent the ‘horny handed sons of toil’
derive a very large portion of their profits from the
cricket and football editions which appeal to the
masses…so long as the new electorate desire a sound
wholesome article for the gratification of their
journalistic appetites, there can be nothing wrong in
the state of our Press. Moreover it is pleasing to me to
notice that scientific discourses, reports of new
inventions and descriptions of novel manufacturing
processes find ready access into the columns of our
halfpenny press.’
• Why could this be seen as a revolutionary statement?
The period 1896-1914 was unique in
the history of the press
• Historians identify the later part of the nineteenth century, and early C20
as the ‘Golden Age’ of British newspapers. (eg Startt, 1991, p1).
• A thriving and growing popular press providing reading matter for the
lower classes; older established newspapers still enjoying respectability
and decent sales.
• Soon older papers which failed to stand up to the new halfpenny press
would close but in 1904 readers could choose from a wide selection
including the Westminster Gazette, the Morning Post, The Times, the Daily
Telegraph, Daily Chronicle, Morning Leader, St James’s Gazette, the Globe,
the Echo, the Pall Mall Gazette, Evening News, Evening Standard, Morning
Advertiser, Daily Mirror, the Sun, Daily Graphic, Manchester Guardian,
Daily News and Daily Mail, Daily Express, the Standard and Star.
• It was this richness and diversity that convinced Edwardian Liberals that
the new popular press was a welcome addition rather than a downwards
trend that would force out many old, upmarket papers
• Gibbs, Courlander, Wallace and Thorne, men of modest backgrounds,
believed that the new halfpenny press spoke for the people. The
novels lovingly illuminate the lives of these early professional
reporters, their lowly backgrounds, their precarious existence of men
given the chance to wear a collar and tie thanks to their Board School
educations. In The Street of Adventure, the fate of the progressive
newspaper The Liberal is entwined with that of the reporters who
work for it:
• ‘The month following the issue of the notices to the staff of The Liberal
was a strain upon the nerves of the most hardened journalist of that
paper…the sight of them filing into the proprietor’s room made Luttrell
feel curiously sick and faint for a moment. It made him realise with a
sharp sense of tragedy that upon the answer to these men would
depend the happiness of many little homes, and of many women and
children…’(Gibbs, 1909: 262 &268)
Alan Lee Origins of the Popular Press
• Lee (1976, pp130-160) shows how the LiberalConservative balance of the press changed from
being dominated by Liberal-supporters from the
1870s until 1900, then being roughly in balance,
with Liberals having a slight edge during the first
years of the Twentieth Century, to Conservativedominated press after about 1910. From the
launch of the Daily Mail to the outbreak of WW1,
it could be argued that the national press was
broadly on the side of the forces of progress,
which was a source of pride for these writers.
Daily Mail covers the 1912 Miners’
Strike
• ‘those of us…who work in the coalmines were
hoisted to the surface eight or ten at a time in a
cage and breathing the free air of heaven, if the
atmosphere largely comprised of steam, smoke,
drizzle and coal dust at the pit head can so be
described…’ were given prime position on the
page 6 leader page.
• This is written by Mail reporter Charles Hands.
What is interesting about the way he writes this?
• ‘The miners’ desire for better wages and more
consistent earnings is human and intelligible.
The public has strong sympathy with these
men who toil under such disagreeable
conditions, away from the light of the sun in
circumstances of continual danger.’ (Daily
Mail, January 9, 1912, p6)
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• In an era characterised by excessive displays of wealth
by the rich on the one hand and the increasingly visible
poverty of the poor on the other the journalist in the
new press occupied a precarious position. In Street of
Adventure, hunger and homelessness are always just a
sacking away for the raggedy reporters on The Liberal.
Courlander’s role as a young Liberal journalist is to use
his experiences of journalism to expose in Mightier
than the Sword the injustice of poorly maintained coal
mines and the impoverished lives of the children living
in London’s East End.
• Journalism is a heroic vocation during this time.
Patrick MacGill, Children of the Dead
End (1914)
• The only escape the hero young Dermod Flynn
finds, is in literature and in the telling of
stories. After one blasting disaster which ends
in the death of a fellow navvy, Flynn, his eye
chancing on a newspaper ‘wrapped around a
chunk of mouldy beef’ decides to send his
account of the tragedy to that paper: ‘It was
the Dawn, a London halfpenny paper. I had
never heard of it before.’(p.228)
‘His Majesty’s Public Councillors’
• The paper the real-life MacGill had sent his story
to was in fact the Daily Express, edited by R D
Blumenfeld, a respected American journalist who
along with J A Spender of the Westminster
Gazette, A G Gardiner of the Daily News, J L
Garvin of the Observer and Robert Donald of the
Daily Chronicle formed, at the time an influential
and respected group of journalists at the top of
Fleet Street, leading to W T Stead’s bold claim for
them as being no less than ‘His majesty’s public
councillors’ .
• Although Flynn/MacGill’s stint on Fleet Street
was short-lived and discomfiting: ‘I had never
used a fork when eating…I wore my first collar
when setting out for London. It nearly choked
me…’(p.274) his great chance, to escape the
grinding hard work and terrible conditions of
navvying, was offered him by Fleet Street, his
editor only caring that he could express
himself eloquently with a pen.
The social upstart
• The novels of this period explore the contrast between the
low-born reporters and the subjects of their reports:
statesmen, Dukes and Royalty, perhaps for the first time
expressing the strange dual life of the reporter:
• ‘Those men in the reporters’ room, and the girl – Katherine
Halstead – seemed to him types of characters outside the
range of ordinary experience. Hardly a serious word had
escaped their lips while he had been listening to them. Yet
some of them had been onlookers during the day of the
serious business of life. One of them had been witness to a
dreadful tragedy. He had been struck by Brandon’s order
for tea and toast after his description of the girl condemned
to death…’(Gibbs, 1909: p.44)
The loveable rogue
• Another character ‘type’ in these novels is the ‘loveable
rogue’ – he or she does not quite play by the book, but they
are forgiven because they are
charming/brave/impoverished or all three. Here is Tommy,
the boy/girl hero/heroine of Jerome K Jerome’s novel
Tommy and Co (1904): she scoops the rest of Fleet Street,
getting an interview with a foreign prince (‘an ill-tempered
and savage old gentleman’ (p.25)) by climbing into his
moving train carriage via a signal box between Waterloo
and Southampton. The Prince, impressed, gives Tommy the
interview before sending her back to Waterloo in a first
class carriage and with a hearty supper and money for a
cab back to her offices.
The early press baron in two plays
• The Earth by James Bernard Fagan (1909)
• What the Public Wants by Arnold Bennett (1909)
portray this new figure in British society as brutal,
brilliant, recently knighted .
• In The Earth he is Sir Felix Janion is:
• ‘a man over fifty, of huge burly frame. ..His face is
enormously powerful, and his mouth shuts like a steel
trap... His movements are quick and resolute…
• In What the Public Wants he is Sir Charles Worgan:
• ‘Brusque. Accustomed to power. With rare flashes of
humour and of charm. Well dressed, but not too
carefully. Strong frame. Decided gestures. Age 40 .’
• The stage direction for Worgan is at odds with
Bennett’s first impression of Alfred Harmsworth, when
he sees him at a theatre on October 17 1896 and
describes him thus in his Journal:
• ‘Harmsworth (director of 14 weeklies reaching
3,300,000 copies, and three daily papers) with the
head of a poet and thinker; blond hair; quiet, acute,
self-contained; a distinguished look about him. One
would take him for a …young lion of the peopledespising kind, a contemner of popular taste and of
everything that caught the public fancy. Never did a
man’s appearance so belie his true character…One felt
that it would be good to talk to him.’
• Bennett’s diaries in the early part of the twentieth
century reveal a gleeful interest in high profile criminal
and libel cases he reads in the popular press until a
distaste for sensationalism emerges in May 1908, just
before he starts work on What the Public Wants:
• yesterday’s storm blew down two kilometres of
telegraph poles on the other side of Melun. Not a word
… in the Continental Daily Mail, of course. It was full of
its third anniversary and of the horrible agonies of a
man in USA who died slowly of hydrophobia.
• Questioning news values of the popular press
• The plays examine the issue of large circulations and the
concentration of power to manipulate public opinion into
the hands of one man, specifically a man who pays little
heed to ideas of social justice that both writers supported.
In The Earth Janion uses his power to try to destroy a
Liberal Cabinet Minister’s Wages Bill that would end
sweated labour for women and children. Janion is opposed
to it as he feels it would curtail Britain’s industrial
expansion:
• ‘The circulation of my morning papers alone is close on four
million a day; and its going to be more. I disapprove of your
Bill. I’ll smash it if I can.’
• Fagan, The Earth, p46
Elitist/highbrow anxieties
• Although we must not forget Lord Salisbury’s dismissive comments about
the Daily Mail when it was launched, a paper written by office boys for
office boys
• ‘Class’ papers disparage the new upstart halfpenny press. They are given
short shrift by the novelists who wrote for the popular papers: In Edgar
Wallace’s thriller The Four Just Men, older ‘serious’ newspapers such as
the Telegram can only look on and snipe as the Daily Megaphone,
modelled on the Daily Mail, clinches scoop after scoop on the story:
• ‘It is not so easy to understand,’ said the Telegram, ‘why having the
miscreants in their hands, certain journalists connected with a sensational
halfpenny contemporary allowed them to go free to work their evil
designs...unfortunately in these days of cheap journalism every story
emanating from the sanctum sanctorum of sensation-loving sheets is not
to be accepted on its pretensions…’ (Wallace, 1905: p.46)
• How does Wallace ‘send up’ the language of the posh press?
New Papers’ subject matter
• In Mightier than the Sword by Alphonse Courlander, an
Express reporter, two of the characters in the novel die
in the course of their duties.
• Wratten gets pneumonia and dies after reporting from
the scene of a mining disaster, where a mine explodes
and lots of men are killed
• Humphrey Quain dies covering a French farmers’ riot
over the price of grapes: As he takes his last breath, ‘an
odd, whimsical idea twisted his lips into a smile as he
thought: “What a ripping story this will make for The
Day”’
• What do you note about the subjects of these stories?
• Today we may think nothing of that, but back
in 1912 this was nothing short of
revolutionary, that the working classes’ lives
and struggles were worth recording in a
newspaper.
B Ifor Evans, Fortnightly Review 1930,
vol 127
• ‘Delane understood his world and mastered it,
but it was a small, circumscribed world…the
circulation of The Times when he became editor
was 10,000 copies…it was the sphere of the men
who governed…Meanwhile outside those welllighted windows behind which Delane gossiped
and dined…there stood a vast mass of men and
women whom the Education Act had endowed
with a power to read but who could find nothing
in contemporary journalism that they could
understand…
Things did not turn out the way he had
hoped though…
• ‘In retrospect one can realise that the decade
in which the new journalism appeared was
one fraught with enormous possibilities, the
opportunity of turning a merely literate
democracy into an enquiring and cultured
democracy lay before the country. We still
suffer from the tragedy that it was never
accomplished…’ (Evans)
Coverage of the Boer War (1899-1902)
• Much of how journalists are viewed by writers is
dictated by how papers covered WW1, which we
will look at in week 2/3. To give some context, it’s
worth spending some time seeing how journalists
covered the previous great conflict, the Boer War
in South Africa.
• the sieges of Mafeking, Ladysmith and Kimberley
were covered with the help and consent of the
army, whose telegraphic facilities were often
needed by reporters away from the commercial
centres.
• Knightley describes the period 1865-1914 as the
‘golden age’ of the war correspondent, with
many of the battles reported on not directly
concerning the future of the country: ‘Thrilling
accounts of battles, slaughter and bravery could
be reported from both sides with no danger of
the reader’s identifying himself with anyone
except the intrepid war correspondent, who, as a
result, rapidly became the hero of his own story’
(Knightley, 2004, p44).
Boer War coverage
• “In a second, in a twinkling of an eye, the
searchlights of the Boers fell broad and clear on
the doomed Highlanders…The Highlanders reeled
from the shock, like trees before the tempest.
The best, the bravest fell in that wild hail of
lead…Once again the pipes peeled out and
‘Lochaber no More’ cut through the stillness like
a cry of pain, until one could almost hear the
widow in her Highland home moaning for the
soldier that she would welcome back no more.”
(Daily News, January 9, 1900, p.3)
• The war correspondents became celebrities, like Archibald
Forbes of the Daily News and G W Steevens of the Daily
Mail.
• Harold Spence with his pistol and special ink for hot
countries is in that mould. This swashbuckling image lasted
right up until WW1, as is clear from Gibbs’s autobiography:
• Goes to Serbia to cover the Balkan Wars (1912-13) and
meets Frederic Villiers, ‘FV had a wonderful kit, with a
glorious leather coat, and looked a romantic old figure. His
pencil, his pocket knife, his compass were fastened to his
waistbelt by steel chains. He still played the part of the war
correspondent familiar in romantic melodrama…’
Newspapers and dissent
• The Liberal press at the turn of the century was split over the rights
and wrongs of the Boer War, with the Morning Leader, Pall Mall
Gazette and the Daily News taking anti imperialist stances and the
Daily Chronicle changing tack to becoming imperialist during
proceedings (van Wky Smith, 1978, pp125-130). As a result, anti
war poets and writers had plenty of mainstream press, as well as
pacifist periodicals in which to air their views, unlike the First World
War, when dissent was virtually absent from the papers. During the
Boer War Liberal papers published prose and poetry which, as well
as their own correspondents’ despatches presented death
unvarnished. This poem, published in the Daily Chronicle on
October 20 1899, for example: ‘A lung and a Mauser bullet; pink
froth and half-choked cry…A burning throat that each gasping note
scrapes raw like a broken shell…’ presages Robert Graves’s A Dead
Boche (1917) that I discuss in week 3
Writers v the press?
• The difference is that in the Boer War this
vivid depiction of bloody and painful death in
battle was published in the daily newspapers,
obviating the pressing desire felt amongst First
World War poets to publish what has now
been called a ‘literature of correction’, much
of it aimed against the newspapers
Why bother with writers of fiction at
all?
• In his book about Edwardian literature, The
Haunted Study, Keating (1989) says that the
new journalism, started by W T Stead in the
1880s, and refined by correspondents like
Steevens, ‘proved to be journalism’s most
forceful challenge to fictional realism’
Steevens’ Boer War despatches
• (handout)
Why do we need poets and novelists
when journalists can turn out this?
• For a while, poets did not react with envy. In
fact Edwardian poets like John Davidson wrote
poems about the thrill of Fleet Street.
• But less than a decade later, another poet,
Richard Aldington would write: ‘newspapers
have spoiled our sense of poetry’.
A bit of politics…
• Conservative Administration failed in December 1905 and Liberals
asked to form a Government; in the election the following year, the
Liberals won a huge landslide.
• The spirit of the great Victorian reformers – men like John Ruskin
and William Morris – was alive in young Liberals at the century’s
turn, and their responses to the social problems of their time were
strenuous and indignant and seemed to promise that a liberal
government, when it came, would be a reforming government
• Series of reports into the poor of Britain, including L G Chiozza
Money’s Riches and Poverty (1905), Rowntree’s Poverty: A study of
Town Life (1901) and Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s Minority Report
of the Poor Law Commission (1909)
• Poor felt that they were being listened to and that they had a voice
A bit of literature…
• Since the Renaissance the minute and accurate
depiction of the world had remained the primary
mode of the literary and visual arts.
• This method of presenting the world in literature
is known as Realism. Writers wrote about what
they saw. Realist writers of late C19, early C20
were influenced much by journalists such as
Steevens whose journalistic style has been
described as cinematographic.
Journalism and literature
• The vivid realistic correspondence, now
arriving from far flung places within days,
sometimes hours of its happening, presented
realist literature’s greatest challenge and is
possibly a reason why writers from the early
C20 onwards starting experimenting with
points of view, internal monologues and other
disorientating techniques…
Bit more literature…
• literature and the visual arts in the early twentieth
century are strikingly characterised by a departure
from the conventions and assumptions of realism in
the sense of verisimilitude used as a means of
understanding. Think surrealism, dadaism, cubism etc
• While this change had certainly begun before the First
World War, it wasn’t until the Great War overturned all
the old certainties, in all walks of life that writers
consciously started experimenting with form, narrative
technique and multiple viewpoints that contribute to
the new movement that was to be called Modernism
In the run-up to WW1…
• Some writers departed from the ‘journalists
are heroes and journalism is great’ theme of
the previous decade
CE Montague, A Hind Let Loose (1910)
• C.E. Montague’s A Hind Let Loose, first published
in 1910 deals almost entirely with the
responsibility of journalists and editors in the
new age of mass readership.
• The story is set against a backdrop of imminent
change as the result of the launch of a new
halfpenny paper, The Paper, under a local
entrepreneur named Roads ‘who was going to
send them all to the workhouse (p.155)’ and who
is not beholden to any political party and who has
made his fortune in racing papers.
The power of the big circulation
• The new paper, ‘undoubtedly gave you a more poignant first sense
of the appalling or intoxicating character of yesterday than any of
the older journals offered for double the money. You might think,
from the way those niggards fobbed off their customers that
nothing seismic or cataclysmic at all had happened for twenty four
hours (P.163). Like Ferrol of The Day, Roads takes full advantage of
new technology to feed his readers’ appetite for news: ‘the lusts of
New York and the homicides of California enriched for the first time
the sacred home life of English families at their next morning’s
breakfast.’ (P.163 – 164).
• A Liberal intellectual, who objected to the Daily Mail’s jingoism, in A
Hind Let Loose CE Montague expresses his own quandary: how can
a populist press with a mass readership exercise its power
responsibly?
A Turning point…
• In The Public Life Spender writes: ‘Perhaps the
wonder is, as we look back on this period, that it
lasted so long, and that the proprietors of the
great newspapers – let alone the editors and
writers – were so slow in discovering the
possibilities of the power that lay in their
hands…With few exceptions they were the
servants and not the masters of the politicians
and did their bidding without any thought of any
interest of their own which might conflict with
it…(1926)
The Village
• Rudyard Kipling’s short story ‘The Village that
Voted the Earth Was Flat’ identifies the potent
dark side of a powerful press run by
irresponsible journalists and proprietors. Who
are the real baddies of the story?
• The journalists?
• Thomas Ingell?
• The villagers?
• The Irish?