ABSTRACT
What this book has explored, both through its newspaper analyses and its exploration of various party-political archives, represents a significant period of history within British politics and the British press. This period of history saw the rise and consolidation of a new daily mass press which, as Chapters 2 and 3 detailed, represented election news in ways that helped place politics firmly within mass-popular culture, and thus within many of the lived experiences of an imagined ‘man in the street’. Elections were reported as dramatic, accessible aspects of day-to-day experiences, in ways that heightened both the power of an archetypal, mass lower-middle-class voter and made political information into digestible, engaging content consumed by millions. Through this, the new dailies were a vibrant and hugely significant addition to this political culture; they were a potent and multi-faceted new form of mass political communication that, as this book has emphasised, spoke particularly to much the same imagined ‘man in the street’ sought across the Long Edwardian political spectrum.
