Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T03:27:58.441Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Rethinking the “New Journalism,” 1850s–1930s - The Invention of Journalism. By Jean Chalaby. London: Macmillan, 1998. Pp. x+212. $69.95 (cloth). - The Press and Popular Culture. By Martin Conboy. London, Thousand Oaks, Calif., and New Delhi: Sage, 2002. Pp. xii+194. $83.00 (cloth); $27.95 (paper). - George Newnes and the New Journalism in Britain, 1880–1910: Culture and Profit. By Kate Jackson. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. Pp. xii+293. $79.95 (cloth). - Jack the Ripper and the London Press. By L. Perry Curtis, Jr. New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2001. Pp. viii+354. $35.00 (cloth).

Review products

The Invention of Journalism. By Jean Chalaby. London: Macmillan, 1998. Pp. x+212. $69.95 (cloth).
The Press and Popular Culture. By Martin Conboy. London, Thousand Oaks, Calif., and New Delhi: Sage, 2002. Pp. xii+194. $83.00 (cloth); $27.95 (paper).
George Newnes and the New Journalism in Britain, 1880–1910: Culture and Profit. By Kate Jackson. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. Pp. xii+293. $79.95 (cloth).

Show more reviewed productsShow more reviewed products

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Mark Hampton
Mark Hampton
Affiliation:
Wesleyan College
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Reviews
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 43 , Issue 2 , April 2004 , pp. 278 - 290
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2004

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 When done well, this approach can be very illuminating. See, e.g., Boyd, Kelly's excellent Manliness and the Boys’ Story Paper in Britain: A Cultural History, 1855–1940 (London, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which uses periodicals aimed at young boys to draw new perspectives on scholarly debates on masculinity.

2 Koss, Stephen, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1981, 1984)Google Scholar.

3 Lee, Alan J., The Origins of the Popular Press in England (London, 1976)Google Scholar; Koss, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press; Brown, Lucy, Victorian News and Newspapers (Oxford, 1985)Google Scholar. For an important more recent interpretation of the press's role in Victorian society, see Jones, Aled, Powers of the Press: Newspapers, Power and the Public in Nineteenth-Century England (Aldershot, 1996)Google Scholar.

4 For an excellent overview, see Barker, Hannah, Newspapers, Politics and English Society, 1695–1855 (London, 2000)Google Scholar. In addition, see Wiener, Joel H., The War of the Unstamped: The Movement to Repeal the British Newspaper Tax, 1830–1836 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1969)Google Scholar; Hollis, Patricia, The Pauper Press: A Study in Working-Class Radicalism in the 1830s (Oxford, 1970)Google Scholar; Anderson, Patricia, The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture (Oxford, 1994)Google Scholar; Gilmartin, Kevin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1996)Google Scholar; McCalman, Ian, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Cambridge, 1988)Google Scholar.

5 For just three examples of many, see Seymour-Ure, Colin, The British Press and Broadcasting since 1945, 2d ed. (London, 1996)Google Scholar; Tunstall, Jeremy, Newspaper Power: The New National Press in Britain (Oxford, 1996)Google Scholar; O’Malley, Tom and Soley, Clive, Regulating the Press (London, 2000)Google Scholar.

6 Such questions have not been neglected entirely. For the periodical press's relationship to books, photography, and radio, respectively, see Brake, Laurel, Print in Transition, 1850–1910: Studies in Media and Book History (London, 2001), esp. pp. 3–26Google Scholar; Twaites, Peter, “Circles of Confusion and Sharp Vision: British News Photography, 1919–1939,” in Northcliffe's Legacy: Aspects of the British Popular Press, 1896–1996, ed. Catterall, Peter, Seymour-Ure, Colin, and Smith, Adrian (London, 2000), pp. 97–120Google Scholar; Siân Nicholas, “All the News That's Fit to Broadcast: The Popular Press versus the BBC, 1922–1945,” in ibid., pp. 121–48. More broadly, the relationships among various media, in a European and global context, is a prominent theme in Briggs, Asa and Burke, Peter, A Social History of the Mass Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet (Cambridge, 2002)Google Scholar.

7 For the broader transformations of the period, see Harris, Jose, Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain, 1870–1914 (London, 1993)Google Scholar. This book has suggested a paradigm for understanding the period that press historians would do well to consider.

8 Dangerfield, George, The Strange Death of Liberal England (New York, 1961)Google Scholar. For a recent review of scholarship on the wider affects of media, and a call for a new synthesis of British media history, see Curran, James, “Media and the Making of British Society, c. 1700–2000,” Media History 8 (December 2002): 135–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It is instructive that few of Curran's examples of relevant scholarship concern the press of the era of the “New Journalism.”

9 Arnold, Matthew, “Up to Easter,” Nineteenth Century 21 (May 1887): 638Google Scholar; Leavis, F. R., Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture (Cambridge, 1930)Google Scholar; Ensor, R. C. K., England, 1870–1914 (Oxford, 1936)Google Scholar; Lee, Origins. For challenges to this once orthodox view of the New Journalism, see Wiener, Joel H., “How New Was the New Journalism?” in Papers for the Millions: The New Journalism in Britain, 1850s–1914, ed. Wiener, Joel H. (New York, 1988), pp. 47–72Google Scholar; Brake, Laurel, Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Literature, and Gender in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1994), pp. 83–103CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Raymond Williams articulated this continuity thesis in 1961; see The Long Revolution (London, 1961), pp. 215–29Google Scholar. For recent arguments for a greater rupture in late nineteenth-century journalism, see Matheson, Donald, “The Birth of News Discourse: Changes in News Language in British Newspapers, 1880–1930, Media, Culture and Society 22, no. 5 (2000): 557–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Salmon, Richard, “‘A Simulacrum of Power’: Intimacy and Abstraction in the Rhetoric of the New Journalism,” in Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities, ed. Brake, Laurel, Bell, Bill, and Finkelstein, David (London, 2000), pp. 27–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an argument that many innovations in British journalism were in fact borrowings from the United States, see Wiener, Joel H., “The Americanization of the British Press, 1830–1914,” in Studies in Newspaper and Periodical History 1994 Annual, ed. Harris, Michael and O’Malley, Tom (Westport, Conn., 1996), pp. 61–74Google Scholar.

10 Curran, James, “Press History,” in Curran, James and Seaton, Jean, Power without Responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain, 5th ed. (London, 1997), pp. 5–108Google Scholar.

11 Sommerville, C. John, The News Revolution in England: Cultural Dynamics of Daily Information (New York, 1996), p. 168Google Scholar.

12 For a recent example of this reading of the New Journalism, see Engel, Matthew, Tickle the Public: One Hundred Years of the Popular Press (London, 1996)Google Scholar.

13 It bears mentioning that Conboy's book contains an unusual number of spelling and bibliographic errors. Among other errors, Anne Humpherys becomes “Humphreys,” Virginia Berridge becomes “Victoria,” George Boyce is credited in the bibliography with an article by Anthony Smith, and Curran's important article, “The Press as an Agency of Social Control: An Historical Perspective,” in Newspaper History: From the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day, ed. Boyce, George, Curran, James, and Wingate, Pauline (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1978)Google Scholar, becomes a book in the bibliography.

14 See Corner, John, “‘Influence’: The Contested Core of Media Research,” in Mass Media and Society, ed. Curran, James and Gurevitch, Michael, 3d ed. (London, 2000), pp. 376–97Google Scholar.

15 See Hampton, Mark, “‘Understanding Media’: Theories of the Press in Britain, 1850–1914,” Media, Culture and Society 23 (March 2001): 213–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a more detailed elaboration of this intellectual context, see my forthcoming study, provisionally entitled Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950 (Urbana, Ill., 2004)Google Scholar.

16 One bizarre error in Jackson's book deserves mentioning: most of the words on pp. 28–29, comprising most of five paragraphs, are repeated verbatim on pp. 263–65.

17 Hall, Stuart, Critcher, Chas, Jefferson, Tony, Clarke, John, and Roberts, Brian, eds., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (New York, 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chibnall, Steve, Law-and-Order News: An Analysis of Crime Reporting in the British Press (London, 1977)Google Scholar.

18 Sommerville, The News Revolution in England, pp. 3–16.