ABSTRACT
In the annals of modernism, the years 1920-22 are best known for the tortuous, drawnout, but ultimately successful efforts to publish Ulysses and The Waste Land: their arrival, in a manner that assured notoriety, would mark modernism’s “transition from a literature of an exiguous elite to a position of prestigious dominance,” in Lawrence Rainey’s terms (91). But while a small army of patrons, publishers, and cheerleaders for experimental writing was shepherding these works towards glory, the cultural issue occupying most British intellectuals was the crisis in journalism. While jeremiads about the press had been mainstays of the intellectual weekly, monthly, and quarterly journals since the 1880s, the two years preceding Northcliffe’s death, on 14 August 1922, saw a cluster of such commentaries. From 1920-22, the New Statesman, the Nation and Athenaeum, the Fortnightly, the Spectator, Life and Letters To-day, and Time and Tide published 27 essays on the state of the British press.
