ABSTRACT
English newspapers and literature lived happily together for 200 years, and their marriage arguably produced the idea of a civil society ruled by rationality and free speech. So closely tied were literature and journalism that the distinction between them would have made no sense to writers from Daniel DeFoe, the “fi rst professional journalist,” to Matthew Arnold, who strove in his periodical writing to produce criticism of lasting value, with “the authority of literature” (Brake, “Old” 1).1 Arnold coined the term “New Journalism” in 1887 to distinguish what he saw as the dangerously radical and intellectually frivolous work of W.T. Stead from serious and purportedly disinterested journalism like his own. Even in the midst of his campaign to delineate New Journalism and assign it to the bottom of the cultural hierarchy, Arnold’s terms made it clear that he and his audiences saw journalism and literature as compatible, even symbiotic, categories. He wrote to former Pall Mall Gazette editor John Morley in 1888, “Under your friend Stead, the P.M.G., whatever its merits, is fast ceasing to be literature” (qtd in Brake, “Old” 16). The clear implication is that quality periodicals remain a site for the production of literature.
