The industrialization of the press

During the half-century following the repeal of the ‘taxes on knowledge’, a number of radical newspapers closed down or were eventually incorporated into the mainstream of popular Liberal journalism. Militant journalism survived only in the etiolated form of small-circulation national periodicals1 and struggling local weeklies. Yet this decline occurred during a period of rapid press expansion, when local daily papers were established in all the major urban centres of Britain and a new generation of predominantly right-wing national newspapers came into being. These included newspapers such as the People (1881), Daily Mail (1896), Daily Express (1900) andDaily Mirror (1903), which have played a prominent role in British journalism ever since. Most historians, on the left as well as on the right, attribute the decline of

radical journalism to a change in the climate of public opinion. The collapse of Chartism in the early 1850s produced a wave of disillusion. Some radical activists were absorbed into the Liberal Party, particularly after the upper strata of the working class gained the vote in 1867. Trade unions also became more inward looking, seeking to improve wages and working conditions rather than to restructure society. These changes were reinforced by the winning of significant social reforms and, above all, by the relative success of the British economy: most workers in employment became substantially better off during the second half of the nineteenth century. Intensive proselytization of the working class through schools, churches, youth clubs, and other socializing agencies such as the Volunteer Force also contributed to the spread of anti-socialist views. These developments undoubtedly diminished the market for radical jour-

nalism. They also had another consequence, which has tended to be overlooked. The reduction of support for the left made it more difficult to raise money within the working-class movement for new publishing ventures. As the Trades Union Congress debates in the early part of the twentieth century make clear, many Liberal and Lib-Lab trade unionists were reluctant to invest their members’ money in setting up new socialist publications, because they had become reconciled to the commercial press. However, while this Zeitgeist interpretation partly accounts for the fall of

the radical press it is an incomplete explanation. It is often based on the

over-simplistic assumption that journalists are influenced by the prevailing political culture of the time, and are forced to respond in a competitive market to the demands of the sovereign consumer. Consequently the press ventriloquizes, it is claimed, the views of the public. In fact the evidence shows that there was no close correspondence between

the climate of opinion in the country and the political character of the press. What may be broadly defined as the radical press was still a force in popular journalism in 1860 when the working-class movement was divided and defeated. In sharp contrast, the radical press was dwarfed by its rivals fifty years later, when the radical movement was gathering momentum.2 The steady growth of general trade unionism, the radicalization of skilled workers, the spread of socialist and Labourist ideas, the rise of the suffragette movement and the revival of industrial militancy did not give rise to a powerful radical press in the early twentieth century, although it produced a few notable publications. The absence of a close correlation between press and public opinion is underlined further by voting figures. In the 1918 general election, for instance, the Labour Party gained 22 per cent of the vote but did not win the unreserved support of a single national daily or Sunday newspaper. Lucy Brown has advanced a supplementary explanation for the decline of

‘critical vigour’ in the Victorian press. She shows that the political élite devoted more time and skill to cultivating the press, and became increasingly dominant as sources and definers of news. However, while this helps to explain the rightward drift of part of the commercial press, it still does not account for the eclipse of radical journalism. The militant press’s adversarial style effectively inoculated it against the gentler arts of press management described by Brown. The defeat of the radical press was more fundamental: it was eclipsed rather than seduced. Virginia Berridge has advanced a more compelling, if also incomplete,

explanation of the decline of committed journalism.3 This was due, she argues, to the ‘commercialization’ of the popular press. New popular papers came into being which were primarily business ventures, relying on sensationalist manipulation of popular sentiment rather than on what she calls the ‘genuine arousal’ of militant journalism. In other words, they concentrated on entertainment rather than on taxing political analysis, and consequently secured a much larger audience than politically committed papers. Berridge’s pioneering analysis focuses attention upon a significant change

within part of the radical press. Its circulation during the 1840s was swollen by the emergence of the News of the World and Lloyds Weekly, both commercial papers whose initial radicalism was the product more of commercial expediency than of political commitment. As the News of the World frankly stated in its first issue (1 October 1843). ‘It is only by a very extensive circulation that the proprietors can be compensated for the outlay of a large capital in this novel and original undertaking.’ Although the same issue contained an

impassioned attack on conditions in some poor-houses, where inmates were forced to wear prison clothes, the paper also made clear that its general orientation was to please as many people as possible by serving ‘the general utility of all classes’. This led to the adoption of consensual views, and the growth of entertainment at the expense of political news. Yet, not very surprisingly, Sunday papers in the News of the World mould, with a professionally processed combination of news, sport, human interest stories and political commentary, proved more appealing than the didactic journals that were the principal organs of the left in late Victorian Britain. This explanation is persuasive as far as it goes. But it glosses over one

striking feature of the development of the radical press. During the first half of the nineteenth century left-wing papers evolved from being journals of opinion, based on a quarto format, into broadsheet newspapers carrying news as well as commentary. This change was particularly marked during the 1830s, and was accompanied by a significant broadening of news content. Some of these radical papers began to develop a wide audience appeal by drawing upon the popular street literature tradition of chapbooks, broadsheets, gallowsheets and almanacs. Indeed, Cleave’s Weekly Police Gazette, the London Dispatch and the early militant Reynolds News were important partly because they started to rework this popular tradition in ways that projected a radical ideology through human interest news and entertainment as well as through political coverage. Why, then, did the committed radical press retreat increasingly in the

second half of the nineteenth century into the ghetto of narrowly politicized journalism? Why did it leave the field of popular news coverage and entertainment to the commercial press? Thus the question that needs to be asked is not why Victorian working people should have preferred the News of the World to rather arid socialist journals such as Justice and Commonweal, but why the radical press should have failed to live up to its early promise (or, in Berridge’s terms, to its early indications of debasement). Her analysis is a historical version of a standard critique of mass culture.

This assumes that communication processed commercially as a commodity for the mass market is inevitably impoverished because it relies on the manipulation of public tastes and attitudes for profit. This is based on fundamentalist assumptions that are open to question. In the context of Victorian Britain, it also obscures under the general heading of ‘commercialization’ the complex system of controls institutionalized by the industrialization of the Victorian press.