SILS - Spring 2020
HI307
MEDIA HISTORY:
Four Modern Revolutions Graham Law
Periodicalism (2): Authorship & Readership
Structure of today’s presentation
Periodical Authorship – Anonymity & Personality
– Words
– Numbers
– Professionalization
Periodical Readership – Communities & Citizens
– Local identifications in titles
– Some major genres of class journals
Periodical Authorship (1):
Anonymity & Personality
GL: “Inherited from the miscellanies of the previous century, impersonality
remained the rule of journalism well into the Victorian period. But by the turn
of the 20th century, editorial personality had become a valued discursive device
and commercial commodity, so that signature already represented the norm.”
GL: “The first-person plural (‘WE’) was defended for its dependence on
collective authority and encouragement of judicial impartiality; the first-person
singular (‘I’) for its promotion of critical honesty and reliance on individual
integrity.”
GL: “the transition from anonymous to signed authorship in periodicals was
fiercely contested throughout the Victorian period. … But as the century wore
on, and the practices of print capitalism became prevalent, commercial
pressures began to dominate. Thus, while adding a surplus value to the practice
of writing regularly for magazines and newspapers, the cultivation of editorial
personality helped to construct periodicals as articles of mass consumption.”
*GL = G. Law, “Periodicalism,” The Victorian World, ed. M. Hewitt, Routledge, 2012.
Periodical Authorship (2):
Words: Oxford English Dictionary
‘journalist’ (= contributor to periodicals, generally)
– from late 17th century
‘journalism’ (= the profession of such writers)
– 1833, ‘Journalism’, Westminster Review, Gibbons Merle
– “the inter-communication of opinion and intelligence”
more specialist functions of writers for the press
– from turn of 19th century (post Industrial Revolution)
• ‘reporter’ (from 1797)
• ‘sub-editor’ (from 1834)
• ‘(war) correspondent’ (from 1844)
• ‘leader-writer’ (from 1882)
Periodical Authorship (3): Numbers
Dallas – the practice of writing for publication is “fast ceasing to be a peculiar
profession, and is becoming an ordinary accomplishment”
Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals (1824-1900) – professional affiliation of identified contributors:
• the Church = 12%; the Law = (6%); Science (5%)
• women = 13%; professional journalists = 5%
– but two most prolific contributors are professional female journalists
• 568 entries: Christie Johnstone (1781-1857), Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine
• 697 entries: Margaret Oliphant (1828-97), Blackwood’s & nine others
Census returns – those reporting themselves as “journalists, authors, editors, reporters”
• 1851: 2751 (of which 106 women, or 3.9 per cent)
• 1911: 13786 (of which 1756 women, or 12.7 per cent)
• overall increase of around 500% over 60 years
Periodical Authorship (4): Professionalization
J.A. Roebuck (1835): “Those who are regularly connected with the Newspaper
Press are for the most part excluded from what is, in the widest extension of the
term, called good society … Men of birth, refinement and sensitive pride will
not enter into an occupation which lowers their social position, and if any such
engage in it, the illicit connexion is carefully kept secret ”
Lucy Brown (1985): Unlike lawyers, clergymen, and physicians, 19th-century
journalists, had “none of the characteristics (paper qualifications, or
membership of a self-governing body regulating admission) which are used to
define a profession”
GL (2011): “despite the fact that the exponential growth in periodical
publications both reflected and encouraged new forms of civil association …
British authors in general and journalists in particular were rather slow to
incorporate or otherwise organize themselves”
– Incorporated Society of Authors, 1884; organ = Author (1890)
– Chartered Institute of Journalists,1890; organ = Journalist and Newspaper Proprietor
– National Union of Journalists, 1907
Periodical Readership (1):
Communities/Citizens
Affiliation & Association through periodicals Alexis de Tocqueville (1830s): a journal “can only exist on condition that it
reproduce a doctrine or sentiment common to many men … it thus represents an
association of which its habitual readers are the members”
GL: “Though the flourishing of newspapers under print capitalism has been
seen by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities as a major factor behind
the rise of nationalism, the growth of periodicals both reflects and generates a far
wider range of affiliations, whether regional or international, political or civil.”
Dialogic function of periodicals – reader contributions to “class” periodicals & newspapers
• “open platform” & “symposium” in modern reviews
• “Leaders & Letters” sections in newspapers
GL: “These examples thus support Dallas’s contention that the mid-Victorian
bourgeois press served as ‘a second representation of the third estate’.”
Periodical Readership (2):
Local Identifications in Titles
Waterloo Directory
– of 50,000 British Newspapers & Periodical titles over C19th
Civic (city) affiliations
– Glasgow (& Glaswegian etc.) = 8 titles; Edinburgh etc. = 28 titles
– Birmingham etc. =116; Manchester etc. =159; London etc. =389 titles
Sub-national (regional) affiliations
– Irish etc. =30 titles; Scottish etc. =52 titles; English etc. =101 titles
National affiliations
– National etc. = 138 titles; British etc. = 364 titles
Supra-national affiliations
– together Global, International & Universal etc. =107 titles
Altogether these titles represent only around 3% of the total
Periodical Readership (3):
Some major genres of class journal
missionary press – among papers with religious affiliations, specifically evangelical journals
supporting Christian missions both abroad and at home, e.g. Christian
Observer (1802-)
scholarly society transactions – a public declaration of the principles and an official record of the activities
of learned associations, e.g. Photographic Society Transactions (1851-)
factional political journals – forming a regional or national focus for a party, group or movement wanting
political reform or revolution, e.g. Chartist Northern Star (1837-)
trade periodicals – representing the commercial interests of, and creating collective identity
among, the purveyors of specific goods and services, e.g. the Ironmonger
(1859) & Grocer (1862)
Discussion Session
Over to You
Questions & Comments