ABSTRACT
On the evening of 27 January 1837, Isaac Arrowsmith, radical printer, erstwhile leader of the Worcester Political Union and founder of the Worcester Typographical Society, issued a furious broadside to his 'Fellow-Citizens' denying that he had abandoned his 'Political Principles for the sake of obtaining a situation on the Worcestershire Guardian'. He confessed that he obtained better wages at his new post, and that he contributed articles to the paper, but went on to insist that it had been agreed at the time of his appointment that he would not be required to share the Tory politics of the newspaper's editor and proprietors. 1 Isaac Arrowsmith, publicly and in print, was here announcing his right to the autonomy of his beliefs within the newspaper as workplace. In so doing, he also acknowledged and articulated the intensely politicised nature of newspaper work. Few artisan or professional occupations were so openly demarcated by local or national political loyalties, and few were so wedded to the notion of a collective political voice. By contesting that homogeneity in the way that he did, with recourse to the broadside rather than the newspaper, Arrowsmith was confirming the power of that editorial voice. Yet, at the same time, he also drew attention to the problematic nature of the idea of a political newspaper press. For the political voices with which newspapers actually spoke to their readers involved more than editorial posturing in leading articles. Complex negotiations were necessary in the formation of the remainder of the text, both editorial and advertising, and editors were themselves aware of a gap that separated the proclaimed political position of a paper from the material that was actually printed in its pages. Given that their function was to select from 'a thousand topics which day by day present themselves', editors could not 'dare look for a universal agreement among their readers and their contributors in all that they touch upon or put forward' .2 Until effective sub-editing smoothed out the ideological
and grammatical irregularities in material submitted for publication by the contributors, the catholicity of the actual content of newspapers was often at odds with the notion of the unitary political voice. Editors remained hostages to their sources long after the days when the unrepentant radical Isaac Arrowsmith could insert his own articles in the conservative Worcestershire Guardian. The practice of split-printing with news agency stereotype, for example, effectively removed editorial control from an entire half of many mid-Victorian newspapers. In short, editorial political identity was complicated by the multiplicity of discourses embodied in the text of the newspaper.
