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

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