ABSTRACT
The dilemma of the artist forced by financial exigencies to sell their work in the popular marketplace is a familiar theme of nineteenth- and twentieth-century fictions. Potent symbols of the new mass culture, the newspaper and journalism, are themes widely explored by interwar writers. Having grown in just a few years from the low-circulation 'party press' of the Victorian years to, by 1938, a mass medium selling nineteen million copies a day, the press and its influence on readers' tastes for other forms of literature was a source of concern for cultural producers. The dual attack against intellectual snobbery and an increasingly invasive popular press is continued in her novel Crewe Train (1926). Daisy is trapped by her need to earn money, in a 'cage of print'. People's understanding of language and society is controlled by newspapermen, 'the masters, never the slaves, of language'. Macaulay's thoughts on the influence of the press in her novels are profound, wide-ranging and controversial.
