As the industry continues its decline, a look back at how the Victorians valued their local news gathering operations.

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As the industry continues its decline, a look back at how the Victorians valued their local news gathering operations.
John Hickey as Hewitson. Photo: Gillian A Lawson.
Impact: From archive to stage in 7 weeks
In 2006 the Friends of Lancashire Archives bought the only known diaries of a provincial Victorian journalist, those of Anthony Hewitson (1836-1912). These have now been transcribed by Pauline Wainwright, Margaret Dickinson and me, with proof-reading by volunteer members of the Friends of Lancashire Archives, all with a view to publication.
As October 2012 approached, Margaret (Hewitson’s great great niece) and I (an ex-journalist who used the diaries in my PhD) wanted to mark the centenary of Hewitson’s death. In early September I approached an actor friend, John Hickey, about an evening of dramatized readings from the diaries. John was very enthusiastic, and it all began to get out of hand, in a very enjoyable way.
John contacted a playwright friend, Derek Martin and I passed on chunks of the more dramatic parts of the diaries to Derek, who miraculously wove a story out of the disconnected diary entries. Another friend, the excellent pianist Malcolm Sim, was roped in to provide musical accompaniment, and I created some slides to project above the stage, showing dates, biographical information, and family photographs, kindly lent by members of Hewitson’s family. A servant (the high turnover of servants became a running gag) was ably played by Cristina Neacsu.
Seven weeks after I had put the idea to John in the pub, some 80 people squeezed into a theatre at UCLAN for a superbly acted, moving and entertaining hour of drama, followed by a Q&A with Margaret and me. The show sold out, as it did when we put it on again in January.
I feel very lucky that we could honour Hewitson’s life in such a powerful way. The whole thing worked with the minimum of stress because I’m lucky enough to know a group of people who are creative, experienced and reliable, with big can-do ratings and small egos, and who were gripped by the history and drama contained in those old diaries. We are also grateful to Lancashire Archives for allowing us to use the diaries in this way. It was great fun.
Andrew Hobbs
This article first appeared in Lancashire Archives’ News From The Archives newsletter
BlogPreston.co.uk review and more photographs.
Citizens as journalists in the Victorian local press
Paper presented at Communities of Communication II conference, 10 September 2015
Abstract
The local newspaper was one of the most popular types of publication in Victorian England. Most of the content was written by full-time journalists, but between a quarter and a third of editorial texts were produced by a hidden army of district correspondents, campaigners, experts in regional history and topography, poets, inveterate letter-writers and dialect aficionados, and officers of clubs, societies and local institutions. The uniform columns of print disguise the number and variety of amateur authors, comprising men, women and children from all classes. Their writings and their lives take us beyond the canonical fraction’ (Moretti 2000) of journalism and literature, requiring us to rethink questions of professionalism, authorship, place, the nature of the newspaper and of citizenship itself.
A focus on amateur writers allows us to reassess post-Habermas debates about the rise and fall, re-emergence and limitations of the public sphere. It forces us, at least, to consider the uneven development of a space in which private citizens could join public debate. ‘The process of professionalisation … requires the “invention of amateurism”’ (Taylor 1995). Journalists failed to establish themselves as a profession (Hampton 1999), and therefore failed to differentiate themselves from amateurs, dilettantes and dabblers. This may explain the scholarly neglect of this penumbra of non-journalists who produced journalism.
This paper begins to recover and interrogate the hidden world of the amateur local newspaper contributor by examining these writers and their writing. Who were these amateur contributors and what did they write? Why did they write, and in what circumstances? Case studies of three types of contributor are discussed: the district correspondent, the social and political activist (a survival of Chalaby’s ‘publicist’) and the learned local expert. Some became ‘professional’ journalists and literary celebrities, most did not. They shared a sense of place, but were differentiated by class, gender, age, religion, politics and motivation. They were readers who wrote, forming ‘interpretive communities’ (Fish 1976) around each newspaper.
This paper aims to cast new light on debates about the professionalization of journalism and the chronology of the public sphere. It challenges conventional perceptions that the local newspaper was a minor part of Victorian print culture; that few non-professional writers were published; and that literary culture was situated largely in London. It redefines the local newspaper as a porous, culturally democratic and broadly inclusive publishing platform, encouraging popular participation the local hub of a geographically distributed, truly national print culture.
Speaking notes
470 people attended the gathering of contributors to the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle in 1891. These amateur journalists had responded to appeals for material like this one from the Lancaster Standard.
Amateur or non-journalist contributors have always supplied at least some of the material found in newspapers and magazines, ever since such publications were invented. Earlier in the century, a writer in the Saturday Magazine of 1836 had urged local gentry to ‘occasionally contribute to the enlightenment of those around them, and to the mutual amusement of each other, by employing their pens’ for the local paper. Here I want to focus on such contributors during the Victorian era, for the most widely read type of periodical publication, the local newspaper.
Background to the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle invitation
This was a populist, radical hybrid newspaper/magazine, of the type analysed by Graham Law in his superb study of serial fiction in local newspapers. The paper was edited by WE Adams, and old Chartist and republican, who embraced elements of the New Journalism in a similar style to the equally successful People’s Journal in Scotland. This event – a gathering of contributors – was unusual, but the number and variety of contributors was not.
Who were these amateur journalists?
All sorts: children, women, factory workers, auctioneers, shopkeepers, postmasters, architects, teachers, preachers, expats …
Why did they write for the local press, often unpaid?
One motivation was to get on the first rung up the ladder to a full-time journalistic job:
WT Stead was a Newcastle clerk when he wrote 18 leader columns, one review and one sketch for the Northern Echo in 1870
George Eliot wrote essays and reviews (not very good ones, apparently) for the Coventry Herald & Observer in 1846-47, her first published writing.
But they are the exceptions. Usually it was ordinary people/readers, motivated by ambition, support for a cause, money, pleasure, but especially by commitment to their place – local patriotism.
Definitions
Clarity is difficult, especially in differentiating these people from straightforward ‘professional’ journalists. Journalism failed, and continues to fail, to become a profession like law, medicine or academic history. Therefore it is hard to define its opposite, the amateur journalist.
Instead, we have continua:
What did they write?
Everything:
News
Commodity prices
Leader columns
Reviews
Essays
History, geography, dialect literature, architecture …
Poetry
Gossip
Reports of meetings, sermons, social events, sport, the weather
Etc.
They wrote huge quantities of these genres, and more – in so doing, they wove together a cultural public sphere.
It may assist to look at case studies of 3 types of contributor among many: the local correspondent, the activist and the historian.
1. The local correspondent
Edwin Butterworth, Oldham correspondent for Manchester newspapers in the 1830s and ‘40s; he was also registrar for births and deaths.
Robert Danson, schoolmaster of Ingleton, on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales in the 1840s and ‘50s: he was also the postmaster, debt collector and village correspondent for the Lancaster Gazette
John Wilson, the Ambleside correspondent for the Kendal Mercury from the 1860s to the 1890s, supplying ‘correspondence and literary matter’ for about 30 years, receiving an average of 5 shillings per column.
Local correspondents are still used today by local papers, and this was a first step on the ladder for many full-time journalists and reporters.
2. The activist
Activists writing for newspapers is a phenomenon as old as the newspaper. Working-class correspondents supplied reports of local political activity to the unstamped radical papers of the 1830s. Similarly, in the 1840s Chartists continued this tradition, with members of the movement writing for self-identified local and national Chartist publications, but also for the more ‘mainstream’ local press, in support of their cause.
Before Edwin Waugh found fame as a Lancashire dialect writer, he was employed by the Lancashire Public Schools Association in the 1850s, campaigning for secular education. He would often write reports of the meetings he had organised, and send them to Lancashire newspapers – many of the reports of local organisations, political, cultural, sporting, religious were submitted by those involved, not exactly detached, objective reporting.
Mary Smith, a working-class governess and teacher who settled in Carlisle from the 1850s to the 1880s, wrote a range of material for the local press:
Poetry and descriptions of local beauty spots
Letters against capital punishment, the Contagious Diseases Act, and in support of the Married Women’s Property Bill and votes for women. She lectured on the same topics, showing how her writing was part of a broader activism.
Reports of sermons by visiting preachers who were part of her radical Nonconformist network, e.g. for the Carlisle Express
Clandestine reports of two women-only lectures, from which reporters were barred, for the Carlisle Examiner •
Poems and letters supporting Liberal candidates during elections, adopting different personas. Here she was exercising citizenship and political power through the local press, even though she had no vote. She always wrote anonymously or pseudonymously, and was rarely paid.
3. The historian
See here for more details of this genre.
Nine out of ten of those attending the Newcastle contributors’ gathering were there because of their contributions to the paper’s ‘Notes and Queries’ column of local and regional history. They were shown around historic Newcastle sights by another contributor, John Roberts Boyle, who wrote for the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle on local and regional history, topography and ‘northern lore’. Boyle was born in Accrington and educated at Manchester Grammar School. He was ordained as a Swedenborgian minister and served in Hull and then Newcastle, during which time he wrote books on history and education, and joined most of Yorkshire’s learned societies. He was a popular lecturer on archaeology. He came to a bad end – whilst looking after Hull Corporation’s archives, he was caught trying to sell some manuscript letters of Andrew Marvell, the Elizabethan poet and politician, and served 12 months with hard labour, dying in Hull workhouse infirmary soon after his release.
So what?
I estimate these amateur contributors supplied between a quarter and a third of local press content. They certainly outnumbered staff journalists, yet are almost invisible in histories of the nineteenth-century press. If we do the sums, across all genres, e.g. poetry, they reveal the local press as a major Victorian publishing platform.
Two points in particular need emphasis: they are the flipside of journalism’s failure to make itself a profession, and they created a cultural public sphere.
Amateur v professional
In his study of more secure professions, Taylor argues that ‘the process of professionalization … requires the “invention of amateurism”’. But Hampton shows that the failure to professionalise journalism meant the failure to differentiate professionals from amateurs. Newspaper owners like this openness and porosity of journalism – it gave them a wider range of content to publish, at little or no cost. In contrast, full-time paid reporters saw amateurs as a threat, depressing their wages. Nonetheless, this is further evidence that, in the UK at least, journalism is something you do, not something you be.
Cultural public sphere
If we leave aside the obvious place to find a public sphere in provincial print, the letters column, the amateur contributions of the public and of experts can be interpreted through Habermas’s idea of the public sphere as a forum for cultural as well as political debate, showing that newspapers are much more than just political phenomena. The local press was an open, porous, culturally democratic space. These writers were creating culture, far from the metropolis, across class, gender, age and educational background.
Conclusions
Above is a composite photo of many of the contributors who attended the Newcastle gathering. These were non-journalists who produced journalism. They were readers who wrote, part of Stanley Fish’s ‘interpretive communities’ clustered around each local paper. Contradicting James Vernon, this is evidence that the local press encouraged popular participation. Provincial newspapers were local hubs of geographically distributed public spheres, both local and national.
Our article in the special issue of Victorian Poetry, summarising the quantitative findings of the project.
Unfortunately you can only read it if you or your university subscribes to the journal. But send your email address and I'll see what I can do.
Daily Sporting Bell, Saturday 28 Oct 1871 Manchester-based sports/racing paper, est. 1863. Four-page paper with news of Newmarket, tips for races, events calendar, reports of other sports including rabbit coursing, wrestling and running ('pedestrianism'). Advertisements for suspicious-sounding pills, racing tip circulars and Manchester sporting pubs and music halls.
Newspaper trains
I wanted to add to Stephen Colclough's DNCJ entry on this subject, and tried to publish the article below on Wikipedia. I was impressed by the rigour of Wikipedia's quality control process for new articles, not least because they rejected this on the following grounds: "This submission reads more like an essay than an encyclopedia article. Submissions should summarise information in secondary, reliable sources and not contain opinions or original research. Please write about the topic from a neutral point of view in an encyclopedic manner." I have no argument with this. However, I have found no secondary sources, apart from the DNCJ article. So I'll publish it here! Newspaper trains: Special trains used only for the distribution of newspapers, often with facilities for sorting, packing and distributing newspapers during transit. History Newspapers are perishable items, so speedy distribution is essential. London has always been Britain’s main newspaper publishing centre, but is distant from many centres of population. Newspaper trains ran specifically to speed newspapers from London to markets around the British Isles. By 1847, railway companies were scheduling early-morning trains from their London stations to fit in with newspaper publishing timetables, for example the London and North Western Railway’s newspaper train left Euston Square station at 6.15am, delivering papers to Manchester at 1.50pm and Liverpool at 2.12pm, while the Great Western Railway’s newspaper train left Paddington at 6am. [1] [2] These trains usually connected with other services, enabling deliveries to towns and villages on branch lines. Important news stories occasionally prompted the wholesale newsagent WH Smith to charter his own newspaper train, for delivery of special editions of newspapers. Smith first did this in the autumn of 1847, leaving Euston station in London at 5.03am, reaching Manchester at 10am and Liverpool at 10.30am. A second one was chartered by Smith on 19 February 1848, to distribute special editions of newspapers reporting a Budget announcement of a rise in income tax.[3] Competition from these London morning papers distributed by train probably discouraged provincial publishers from launching daily papers before 1855. This situation changed with the abolition of Newspaper Stamp Duty in 1855, when morning papers began to be published in provincial cities, taking market share from the London titles which arrived by train hours after local dailies had been published. In 1872 the Scotsman, printed in Edinburgh, chartered its own train to deliver copies to Glasgow, 70 minutes away. This was the first time a newspaper had chartered its own train. Another innovation was the on-train sorting and bundling of copies into separate parcels for each newsagent, with some thrown from the moving train at relevant stations, and the remainder ready for delivery to individual shops in Glasgow as soon as the train arrived.[4] On 16 February 1875 the Times copied the Scotsman’s method, chartering its own train from Euston to Liverpool via Birmingham, leaving London at 4.55am, more than an hour earlier than the railway company’s train, and reaching Birmingham at 7.30am, two hours earlier than by the scheduled service. As in Scotland, the papers were sorted and bundled on the train and thrown onto station platforms along the way.[5] Rival London papers responded by pressurising the railway companies to bring forward the departure times of their scheduled newspaper trains, and within a fortnight the Great Northern Railway moved its newspaper train departure time from King’s Cross from 6.15am to 5.515am; a month later it began to depart even earlier; [6] [7] by June the Great Western, the Great Eastern, the Midland and the Great Northern had all re-scheduled their newspaper trains. The Times discontinued its specially chartered train. The newspaper train captured the imagination of metropolitan writers, who saw it as a symbol of the influence of London newspapers: "that centrifugal action by which London flings abroad the tidings and thoughts which had reached it since he last went to bed. The newspaper trains start at five o’clock for their daily sowing of the land with type, handfuls of which are hurled out at stations far and near …"[8] However, there is little evidence that these newspaper trains increased sales of London dailies in provincial markets served by locally published dailies, such as the East Anglian Daily Times (Norwich), the Bristol Mercury, Birmingham Daily Post, Manchester Examiner, Liverpool Daily Post or Newcastle Chronicle. There were two reasons for this: • provincial dailies went to press later than London papers, and so contained more recent news, which could be quickly distributed across relatively small circulation areas • provincial dailies, and especially weeklies, contained much more local and regional content (editorial and advertising) than the London papers, and readers preferred to read about their own areas; their local dailies also included national and international news. As ‘national’ newspaper publishing began in Manchester and other regional centres, newspaper trains began to run from these provincial cities to their hinterlands. Newspaper trains continued into the late 20th century, when road distribution took over. References 1. Anon (3 Nov 1847). Standard. 2. Anon (16 March 1849). Daily News. 3. Acworth, W.M. (August 1892). "W.H.Smith and Son". English Illustrated Magazine: 796. 4. Colclough, Stephen (2009). 'Newspaper Trains', Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism. London: British Library. 5. Anon (16 Feb 1875). "A Special Newspaper Train". Pall Mall Gazette: 8. 6. Daily News. 1 March 1875. 7. Morning Post. 29 March 1875. 8. Anon (January 1896). "The Awakening of London". Cornhill Magazine.
Every place is local, every place is national: 19th-century newspaper and magazine distribution models -- syndication, editions, series, chains
I’ve been trying to make sense of the various publishing models used by 19th-century provincial newspapers and magazines. Look at almost any 19th-century newspaper or magazine which claims to be published outside London, and it will contain a mixture of local and non-local editorial content, while adverts (until the end of the century) are largely local. Where did the non-local content come from, and how did it get there? I’ve put some of these publishing methods in a diagram differentiating them along a continuum from centralised to dispersed editorial control, and along another continuum from local to national. The inadequacy of these categories (especially the local-national continuum) is evident – most of the different methods cluster together near the middle. Let’s take them chronologically. Scissors and paste journalism Since the 18th century at least, ‘Newspapers were the basic news sources for newspapers’ (Heyd, p10). This ‘scissors and paste’ journalism enabled content produced elsewhere to be locally selected and mediated. Nowadays we call it curation, of course. This technique was used by all newspapers and magazines, with editorial control in the same hands as the pair of scissors and the paste brush. Town and country/county editions From the early 19th century, metropolitan and local newspapers often produced more than one edition, with identical date and number on the front page. For London papers: The reason multiple editions existed was to accommodate the time it took to distribute printed matter to readers around the country. The practice of issuing town and country editions was fairly common in the daily and weekly press. (ncse) The ‘town’ edition carried more recent news because it was published more recently -- because it was only distributed within London and environs, while the ‘country’ edition was published earlier, so that it could reach provincial readers at the same time as the London readers received their more up-to-date edition. This was a way to distribute the paper or magazine ‘nationally’. On a smaller scale, local and regional newspapers did the same thing, for example with a ‘county’ edition going out first to far-flung subscribers, followed by a later ‘town’ or ‘market’ edition (containing the day’s foodstuff prices at the local market) for sale close to the newspaper office. This distribution is local – although the Northern Star was published nationally from a provincial city, Leeds, for most of its life.
Berrow's Worcester Journal, 16 July 1853
London Dispatch and People's Political and Social Reformer, 6 November 1836 Both models feature central editorial control of all editions. Partly printed sheets Alaric Watts was one of the first to hit on this method, printing political articles, London and foreign news and non-news content such as poetry and jokes, and sending parcels of these pages from London to provincial printers, who added outer pages featuring local news and advertising and gave the finished product a local name. It was a more formalised, London-controlled version of scissors and paste journalism. Watts established or helped to establish nearly 20 provincial Tory newspapers, subsidised with £10,000 from an anonymous party donor. He was described as a ‘wholesale … manufacturer of newspapers’ (Andrews), and as ‘head nurse of a hospital of rickety newspaperlings, which breathe but to die', in a scurrilous 1835 Fraser’s Magazine article that prompted him to sue for libel. However, individual accounts of the establishment of some of these newspapers emphasise their local genesis, even naming the original ‘projectors’ of the titles, and how they raised their capital. It doesn’t have to be either/or – Watts’s system could only work if there were local Conservatives prepared to fund a new paper, and a local printer ready to take the work. Both provincial and metropolitan -- but national? ‘Country papers’ for which Watts supplied pre-printed pages included: - Dover Telegraph (1833-1927) - Oxford Conservative (1834-35) - Surrey Standard (1835-?) - Blackburn Standard (1835-1909) - Bridgwater Alfred (1831-34) - Gloucestershire Chronicle (1833-1928) - Worcestershire Guardian (1834-46) - Leicester Herald (1834?-42) - West Kent Guardian (1834-56) - West Devon Conservative (1836-?) - Sussex Agricultural Express (1837-1938). Others tried the same technique, including Charles Knight in 1855-56. Titles included: - Brecon Journal & Charles Knight's Town & Country Newspaper - Yarmouth Free Press & Charles Knight's Town & Country Newspaper - Cambridge Free Press & Charles Knight's Town & Country Newspaper - Three Towns Mercury & Charles Knight's Town And Country Newspaper (Plymouth) and a Kettering edition, no doubt among many others.
William Eglington of Aldersgate Street, London, published partly printed sheets for provincial papers from 1855 to at least 1865, and Cassell & Co offered the same service in the same period – Cassell sold ‘Tory, Whig and Radical leading articles to suit the tastes of their various clientele’, with predicatable consequences when the wrong leader was sent. Graham Law found that more than half of more than 100 new English papers founded 1854-56 (and the ‘overwhelming majority of those serving smaller communities’) were produced with ‘insides’ syndicated from London (Law p53). Many histories of long-running local papers reveal that they started in this way. This service appears to have continued into the 20th century. These six newspapers below are all using partly printed sheets. The top three pages are identical, apart from the title of the newspaper; the bottom three are identical, too, but slightly different to the top row. One row may be an earlier edition, from the same publisher, than the other row. A similar model was offered to provincial magazines, again by Cassell, and by other publishers. One example is the Comet magazines, flimsy, cheaply produced penny weeklies which appeared all over the country, with a white space left in the front-page masthead for the name of the local town or city to be inserted, in a typeface approximating the pre-printed ‘Comet’ title. Local publishers inserted their own pages in the middle. A search of the Waterloo Directory found 18 Comets in various towns launched in 1892-4, most lasting less than a year. So were papers dependent on partly printed sheets, produced in London, local or national? From Watts’s point of view, he was distributing Conservative material nationally – his pages were de facto national publications. From the point of view of the local publishers, it was their local paper, with the name of the town in the title, and the front and back pages full of local advertising, news and correspondence. They were both local and national, and so are near the mid-line on the diagram. Editorial control was shared – the London publisher controlled the content of the insides, the local publisher or printer controlled the content of the outsides. Newspaper series or chains These became more common as the century went on, with proprietors buying up neighbouring or rival papers, or launching editions in smaller towns near their publishing centre. Examples of large or successful series include George Bacon’s Lewes-based Sussex Advertiser titles (13 of them by 1870), another chain headquartered in Lewes, WE Baxter’s Sussex Agricultural Express series (24 titles by 1870), and Alexander Mackie’s Warrington Guardian series of seven papers, established in the 1850s. Titles usually shared some content between them, and produced their own unique local news in addition. Although each edition might have an editor, overall editorial control was exercised centrally by the proprietor. Charles Diamond used the same methods, but on a national scale, with his Catholic Herald series, launched in 1888. It was headquartered in London, and shared some content with dozens of local editions (42 separate titles across England and Scotland by his death in 1934), each with some unique local content – ‘a national publishing structure based on local variation’ (Allen). It is not known how much discretion was allowed to local editors, but Diamond’s commitment to a political programme including Irish nationalism probably meant limited local leeway on political matters. The Carnegie-Storey syndicate Backtracking to the early 1880s, the ‘Carnegie-Storey syndicate’ had a looser, more decentralised structure. It was the brainchild of the Scottish-born American millionaire Andrew Carnegie and the independent Radical MP for Sunderland, Samuel Storey, who felt that a series of halfpenny papers aimed at the working classes would help to further their radical republican programme. Carnegie, basically an unreconstructed Chartist, would fund the project while Storey, who already owned the Sunderland Echo and the Tyneside Echo in Newcastle, would be general manager.
Andrew Carnegie
The syndicate began in 1881, and soon included Hugh Gilzean-Reid and his Middlesbrough papers, and those of Wolverhampton merchant Thomas Graham. Each proprietor retained ownership of their respective titles. The syndicate bought and launched other papers, so that within two years they controlled eight dailies and ten weeklies: Under Storey’s control - Tyneside Daily Echo (Newcastle) - Sunderland Echo - Sunderland Weekly Echo - Northern Daily Mail (Hartlepool) - Evening News (Portsmouth) - Hampshire Telegraph (Portsmouth) Under Gilzean-Reid’s control - North-Eastern Daily Gazette (Middlesbrough) - North-Eastern Weekly Gazette (Middlesbrough) - Midland Echo (Birmingham) - Stockton Herald - Stockton Journal - South Durham Herald Under Graham’s control - Wolverhampton Chronicle - Midland Counties Express - Wolverhampton Evening Star - Wolverhampton Evening Express (the above two papers were amalgamated as the Express and Star in 1884) - Northampton Guardian - Free Press (Walsall) Under Edwards’s control Echo (London) The biggest prize was Passmore Edwards’s London Echo, of which Carnegie purchased two-thirds control. Wall says that, apart from the London Echo: 'the newly acquired papers were remarkably alike in editorial tone. Their calls for the abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords and the disestablishment of the Church of England were consistent and strident. Frequently the same editorial would appear in two or three of the syndicate's papers at the same time(Wall, p433). More content analysis is needed to ascertain the amount of shared content -- and to assess the papers’ contribution to the New Journalism. A house ad in the Tyneside Echo (a halfpenny evening paper) of 3 May 1882 suggests these papers were progressive in format as well as politics: “THE TYNESIDE ECHO” THE PAPER FOR THE PEOPLE SMART ARTICLES! NOTES FROM LONDON! POPULAR MOVEMENTS! LOCAL COMMENTS! NEWS IN BRIEF! Everything is short, and everything is to the point. Nothing is spun out, and nothing is missed. Carnegie wanted to merge all the titles into one national paper. In a letter of 1884 he confided: We would be a strong power were all of our papers merged into one, and could then strike as a thunderbolt, whereas we are now merely showering the enemy with small darts none of which are strong enough to pierce their armour. Even the London "Echo" should be merged. (cited in Wall, p434) However, he was dissuaded from this plan. By the end of 1885, with a British republic no nearer, disharmony among the partners and losses on some papers (mainly the Midlands titles), the syndicate fell apart. The final example comes in 1900, when the four-year-old Daily Mail opened a printing plant in Manchester. Most of the content was identical to that published in London, and was wired to Manchester. However, a growing proportion of Manchester-only content was produced in the north, as different editions were added. Was the Northern edition of the Daily Mail a provincial newspaper? It was published in Manchester, with a minority of exclusively northern content, while the majority of content was produced in London. The proportions of content published from London and from a provincial location were similar for ‘local’ weekly papers relying on partly printed sheets, or early evening papers depending mainly on Press Association and Reuters telegrams. Were those newspapers provincial or metropolitan, local or national? Or local editions of national papers? The Daily Mail became the first truly national newspaper in our 21st-century sense only by becoming more regional. So, the category of ‘national’ is not very useful when applied to newspaper publishing (I know I keep going on about this). It’s too Platonic and abstract to apply to something as material as a newspaper, which was printed in one (or two!) places, and then distributed to many places. True, as the number of local places with which a particular publication is associated rises, the more claim it has to be a national publication. But all of those places have meaning, and all of them are both national and local places. Further reading Allen, Joan. ‘Catholic Herald’. Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism [online edition] 2012. Andrew Hobbs. ‘Watts, Alaric Alexander’. Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism [online edition] 2013. Hendrick, Burton J. The Life of Andrew Carnegie. London: Heinemann, 1933. Heyd, Uriel. Reading Newspapers: Press and Public in Eighteenth-Century Britain and America. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2012. Hobbs, Andrew. ‘When the Provincial Press Was the National Press (c.1836-c.1900)’. International Journal of Regional and Local Studies 5.1 (2009): 16–43. Law, Graham. Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000. ‘Multiple editions and nineteenth-century print culture’, nineteenth-century serials edition North, John S (ed). The Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800-1900. 2003. Wall, Joseph Frazier. Andrew Carnegie. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.
Why was Marx’s prediction about the Victorian local press correct?
Karl Marx’s predictions were not always correct -- he thought world revolution would begin in Preston. But his throw-away assessment of the differential impact of the 1855 abolition of newspaper Stamp Duty on the London and provincial press was spot-on. After listing the new London papers ready to take advantage of the new tax regime, he writes: What is more significant, though, is the revolution in the provincial press caused by the abolition of stamp duty. In Glasgow alone four new daily penny papers are to appear. In Liverpool and Manchester the papers that have hitherto only appeared weekly or twice weekly are to turn into dailies at 3d., 2d., and 1d. The emancipation from London of the provincial press, the decentralisation of journalism was, in fact, the main aim of the Manchester School in their fierce and protracted campaign against stamp duty. Marx’s prediction came true, and while new London papers such as the Daily Telegraph were launched, total sales of provincial papers soon overtook their metropolitan counterparts, they spawned new publishing formats and became a dynamic de facto ‘national press’ for the majority of the population living outside London, until the 1930s. But why were post-1855 provincial newspapers far more successful than London papers? Few people have asked this question, about one of the most significant developments in 19th-century print culture, and even fewer have suggested answers. • Was it the growth of Victorian localism, expressed in newly incorporated boroughs, neo-classical town halls and associational culture? Perhaps, but those trends began decades before 1855, and a strong interest in local news was constant throughout the century. • Was it a differential growth in literacy, with the provinces catching up on London (see Vincent 1989, p41 for example)? Perhaps, if that factor is combined with a preference for local content. • Was it the faster news service that local papers could provide, thanks to the shorter distances between publishing office and reader, in each local market, compared to the distance between London publishing offices and provincial readers? Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb and Roger Barton argue persuasively for the impact of the nationalised telegraphs and their preferential rates, the Press Association news agency and its favourable terms with Reuters which disadvantaged the London press – but this only took effect from 1870, when the provincial press was already in the ascendant. Here I've put together some important developments in the chronology below, and tried to tease out the differential impact on London and provincial newspapers. Magazines are another matter. 1836: Founding of Provincial Newspaper Society Provincial impact: Powerful, effective, united lobby group influenced government policy London impact: No equivalent, although publishers/journalists of major titles were close to leading politicians
1836: Newspaper Stamp Duty reduced to 1d Provincial impact: Makes newspapers cheaper, more popular, more profitable. New titles launched. Reduced cost of postal distribution for papers with wide circulation areas London impact: Ditto + now much cheaper to distribute London papers by post to provinces; postal distribution more useful to London papers as most local papers more likely to use other methods
1840s onwards: Growth of railways Provincial impact: Cheaper, faster distribution of local papers Cheaper, faster receipt of news from London, including partly printed sheets – improves non-local content and reduces production costs of local papers London impact: Cheaper, faster distribution of London papers (London to Lancashire cut from 19 to 6 hours) -- bigger impact than for local press Cheaper, faster receipt of provincial news – improves provincial content of London papers
1840s onwards: Growth of telegraphy Provincial impact: Cheaper, faster receipt of news from London and rest of world -- improves non-local content and reduces production costs of local papers Local press able to publish and distribute telegraphed news to local readers faster than London press London impact: Cheaper, faster receipt of news from provinces and rest of world Wealthier big London titles can afford high-quality telegraphed news service which is too expensive for provincial papers, and had more advantageous arrangements with telegraph companies
1853 Abolition of advertising duty Provincial impact: Made newspapers more profitable, esp in provinces, where papers carried more ads? Improved cashflow (advertisers paid infrequently, but the tax had to be paid on publication), allowing publishers with less capital to launch new titles London impact: Made newspapers more profitable, esp those carrying more ads, e.g. Times Ditto re cashflow and new titles 1855 Abolition of Newspaper Stamp duty Provincial impact: Made newspapers more profitable, allowed lower cover prices, made papers more affordable, increased sales, more ads – led to many new titles, and higher sales of established titles London impact: Ditto + ended cheap postal distribution of London papers in provinces, which was a more common distribution method for London titles than for prov titles 1861 Abolition of Paper duty Provincial impact: Made newspapers cheaper and more profitable London impact: Ditto
1870 Nationalisation of telegraphs Provincial impact: Cheaper, more efficient telegraphed news service Provincial Newspaper Society successfully lobbied for favourable charges, launched a successful national news agency (Press Association) and negotiated favourable arrangement with Reuters – better non-local content and more profits London impact: Cheaper, more efficient telegraphed news service But Post Office charges, and PA arrangement with Reuters, made telegraphed news more expensive for London papers than prov papers
Above: Announcement in Lancaster Gazette, 1 May 1852, from the Gazette publisher, who also sold newspapers. Below: One of a series of images of the newspaper train, The Graphic, 15 May 1875.
1875 onwards:Newspaper trains delivering London papers to provinces earlier Provincial impact: Provincial dailies still available before London dailies; earlier print times of London dailies enabled prov dailies to provide more recent news; local distribution costs remained low London impact: London dailies available slightly earlier in provinces, but increased distribution costs and older news (forced by earlier print times)
1900: Daily Mail printed simultaneously in London and Manchester Provincial impact: London dailies available at same time as provincial dailies – may have reduced prov sales; took some advertising income from prov dailies London impact: Increased sales of dailies, and increased advertising income Some of these factors need elaboration: In 1836 a group of publishers formed the Provincial Newspaper Society, partly to lobby against the planned reduction of Stamp Duty taxation of newspapers from 4d per copy to 1d. They believed that the reduction would threaten their livelihood by opening the market to cheaper papers. The Times was also against the change, rightly believing that it was driven by Radicals keen to end the Times’s virtual monopoly. However, they were both wrong. The penny stamp led to lower cover prices but increased sales, and new titles did not harm established ones. The most significant impact was via the Newspaper Stamp’s other function – to pay for postal distribution. Far from harming the Times, it enabled a huge increase in provincial sales of London papers, which could now be sent all over the UK for a penny. Provincial papers with wide circulation areas also benefited from this cheap postal distribution. Although railways from London to provincial markets helped to distribute metropolitan papers, the penny Stamp was probably more significant in increasing provincial sales of London papers. The use of the telegraph by newspapers probably helped local papers more than London ones, because they could distribute the same news to their local readers faster than London papers, which had to travel hundreds of miles to reach the same readers. More work is needed on the impact of the 1853 abolition of advertising duty (1/6 on each advert), but there is some evidence that local papers carried more advertising than London papers (with a few exceptions such as the Times), and so stood to benefit more. The evidence is conflicting –advertising income for the Windsor and Eton Express was four times that from newspaper sales in the 1820s (Bennett, 14), but the official historian of the Provincial Newspaper Society says that, in the 1830s, ‘the profits of a provincial "weekly" ... depended to a large extent upon the sale’ rather than advertising (Whorlow 1886: 50). The abolition of the penny Newspaper Stamp in 1855 benefited provincial titles more because it ended cheap postal distribution of London papers, leading to a significant decline in their provincial circulation. During the 1860s, some commentators believed that the whole future of the provincial press was threatened by growing sales of London papers. ‘The country newspaper is essentially a thing of the past,’ newspaper editor Mortimer Collins wrote in 1863. ‘We suspect that the days will soon arrive when there will, with an exception or two, be no country newspapers in England; when London will supply all the journalism of the kingdom.’ In the same year, an anonymous writer described 'the dream ... of enthusiastic persons, that some three or four leviathan London, Manchester, or Dublin prints, sold at a penny, will be carried everywhere by rail and steamboat, to the final extinguishment of local journalism’ (Anon, 1863: 371). These fears (probably unfounded) assisted the Provincial Newspaper Society in its lobbying for the nationalisation of the telegraphs, which came into effect in 1870. That, and the launch of the Press Association, a co-operative venture organised by the Society’s members, has been referred to above. The advent of slightly earlier ‘newspaper trains’ from London in the 1870s was a favourite topic for journalists at the time, but had little impact on London newspaper sales in the regions. So the factors in the table that particularly benefited the provincial press after 1855 were the ending of cheap postal distribution for London papers in the provinces, and cheaper telegraphed news favouring local papers from 1870. Are these enough to explain the provincial explosion? Probably not. The chronology above focuses on events and rapid processes, but continuities and changes of longer duration were probably important, too. These might include the rapid growth in literacy and expanding populations, which may have had more impact in the provinces, where reading ability caught up with London, and where growing populations created newly viable local and regional newspaper markets. There was continuity in the demand for local content, an unmet demand which could only be answered when cover prices fell to a penny or a halfpenny after 1855. So the provincial press expanded more than the metropolitan after 1855 for many reasons, which combined in complex and often unforeseen ways. All these factors -- pricing, distribution methods and costs, news costs, print times, proportion of income from advertising versus copy sales, distance between publishing office and market, size of market, literacy, disposable income and a constant thirst for publications which reflected readers’ local lives – deserve more study. A study of newspaper publishing and reading spanning 1836 to 1880 might answer many of these questions. The chronology also shows the value of differentiating provincial and metropolitan publications – place is a valuable category in the study of print culture. References Anon. “The British Newspaper: The Penny Theory and Its Solution.” Dublin University Magazine 61, no. 363, March (1863): 359–376. ———. “The Modern Newspaper.” British Quarterly Review 110, no. April (1872): 348–380. Barton, Roger Neil. “New Media: The Birth of Telegraphic News in Britain 1847-1868.” Media History 16, no. 4 (2010): 379–406. Bennett, Scott. “Victorian Newspaper Advertising: Counting What Counts.” Publishing History 8 (1980): 5–18. Collins, Mortimer. “Country Newspapers.” Temple Bar 10, no. December (1863). Marx, Karl. “Prince Albert’s Toast.— The Stamp Duty on Newspapers.” Neue Oder-Zeitung, June 21, 1855. Silberstein-Loeb, Jonathan. “The Structure of the News Market in Britain, 1870-1914.” Business History Review 83, no. 4 (2009): 759–788. Vincent, David. Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1750-1914. Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture ; 19. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Wadsworth, Alfred Powell. “Newspaper Circulations, 1800-1954.” Transactions of the Manchester Statistical Society 9 March (1955): 1–40. Whorlow, H. The Provincial Newspaper Society. 1836-1886. A Jubilee Retrospect. London: Page, Pratt & Co, 1886.
The bards of Blackburn and the centrality of local newspapers to Victorian poetry
Paper given at North West Long Nineteenth Century Seminar, Manchester Metropolitan University, 6 November 2013
Introduction
Most Victorian poetry was probably published and read in local newspapers, the most popular type of Victorian newspaper. In the region of four or five million poems were published in this way during the nineteenth century. This means that Victorian poetry, in terms of writing it and reading it, is overwhelmingly about magazines and newspapers, particularly local papers – rather than books.
In this talk I will explain how we calculated the huge amount of local newspaper poetry, and then home in on the circumstances in which local poetry was produced, in the Lancashire textile town of Blackburn. I hope to demonstrate that poetry was not an elite activity millions of people indulged in what Laporte calls ‘Victorian poetic behaviour’. As a writer in Blackwood’s noted in 1859, ‘an immense number of people, with little practice and no skill, are trying to compose, are ambitious to appear in print, are pluming their feathers for a flight. The people, in fact, are writing for themselves.’ I will also argue for the importance of the local press in stimulating this huge amount of poetic production, part of its wider cultural role.
The scale of poetry publishing in the local press
Provincial papers typically published one poem per issue at mid-century, rising to two per issue from 1860 onwards (Fig 1).
Fig. 1.
There were thousands of local papers published during the nineteenth century, some daily, some bi- or tri-weekly, some weekly, with many more provincial titles than London titles (Fig. 2).
Fig. 2
Clare Januszewski and I looked at the 51 provincial titles in the 19th Century British Library Newspapers digal collection, and found that only two of the 51 newspapers did not have a regular poetry column at one time or another. We then counted how many poems were published in a sample of five papers from around England, the Blackburn Standard, Manchester Times, Bristol Mercury, Hampshire Telegraph (published in Portsmouth) and the North-Eastern Daily Gazette (published in Middlesbrough). We searched systematically every 20 years from 1800 to 1900. In each sample year, every issue of the weekly papers was examined; every other issue of the bi-weekly, alternating editions each week, and once per week in dailies (a different day each week – Monday in week 1, Tuesday in week 2 and so on).
To gain a sense of poetry publishing nationally, I extrapolated from the five sample papers to all papers published in the same sample years, using conservative figures at every step. I multiplied the average number of poems published per issue in that year, by the number of local papers published, by the number of issues per year for weeklies, bi-weeklies and dailies, to produce approximate figures for each year. So, for example, 0.7 poems were published per issue in 1800, when there were 100 newspapers published, all of them weekly, producing a total of 52 issues per year per title. This gave a total number of poems published nationally of 3,640. Adding the years together gives a conservative total of 5,549,000.
The amount of poetry published in provincial newspapers increased almost every year of the century (Fig. 3), simply because more newspaper titles were published. This finding challenges the narrative of decline in poetry publishing based on poetry issued in book form.
Fig 3.
We gathered bibliographical details of more than 1800 poems from the sample papers in the sample years, available here.
We analysed these poems in terms of topics, how much was reprinted, how much original, the proportion of anonymous or pseudonymous poetry (for all five papers, 40% of poems had an author, 45% were anonymous and 15% pseudonymous) and the gender of poets where known (see Figs 4 and 5 for Blackburn).
Fig 4. All poems in 1900 were written by the same author, Henry Yates (‘Tansy Tuft’). Female-authored poems in 1840 included nine by Felicia Hemans and two by Caroline Norton.
Fig. 5
Local poetry
The most significant function of the local newspaper for Victorian poetry was its ability to deliver verse about local places, people and events, by local poets, to a local audience. Poems on local topics put humble localities on the same map as Mount Parnassus, home of the muses. We found that between a third and a half of poetry published in the local press was local, rather than reprinted from magazines, other newspapers or books. These included many poems of place, such as ‘The Lads of Ribblesdale’ by Thomas Chippendale (excerpted below):
THE LADS OF RIBBLESDALE.
How oft I've heard of Tiber's stream where Rome's fair city stands,
And oft I've heard of the glorious Rhine, away in foreign lands;
While Beranger and Lamartine can many a 'soul inspire
With songs of vine-clad mountains on the banks of Rhone and Loire.
For years proud London's mighty arms have hugged old Father Thames,
And Shakespeare left sweet Avon's banks wreathed with eternal gems;
While Falconer praised Killarney's Falls, Sam Lover and Tom Moore
Immortalised the many streams that grace old Erin's shore.
Some climb the hills and castles in the pleasant vale of Wye,
And by the Tweed some think of wars oft fought in days gone by;
While other hearts with rapture throb to nature's purest tune
Sung by the Prince of Scottish Bards along the banks of Doon.
Still Craven lads, lift up your heads, there's yet another stream
You've played beside in infancy and seen in midnight dream;
Where gallant men from Cæsar's land deserted beauteous Rome,
And on the Ribble's fertile banks were proud to make a home.
…
Local poetry could also be used to add emotional power to wider topics, as in ‘The Voice of Want’, about the Lancashire cotton famine, by David Little or ‘Eh! This War!’ by ‘Tansy Tuft’ (Henry Yates), about the Boer War. Local personalities were celebrated or condemned, as in this rhyme about a miserly grocer, ‘The Steam Engine Coffee Grinder’ by Joseph Hodgson:
THE STEAM-ENGINE COFFEE GRINDER.
He grinds his coffee now with steam,
To shew the world how he can scheme,
And how he buys with ready cash,
Because his credit's gone to smash.
His shop is painted neat and new,
With angels, flying, painted blue,
With golden trumps and golden wings,
And all such bright and pretty things.
Instead of cherubs, to compound
He should have devils wheeling round,
To shew his black, deceitful heart,
And how he failed and paid a part.
This local poetry raises many questions, including the identity of the pseudonymous and anonymous writers, and in particular why so much poetry was written by local poets, and published by local papers. Some answers can be found in the newspapers themselves, but to understand the identities and circumstances of many unknown poets, we need to use other evidence, including biographies and autobiographies, useful introductory material in volumes of poetry, more general local histories, and archival sources such as poets’ scrapbooks. In the case of Blackburn, these sources enable us to create a case study of the local literary and poetic culture that fed into the newspaper poetry of the town. Blackburn’s unusually vibrant working-class poetic culture meant that the town ‘produced more weavers of calico and of verse than any other town in the United Kingdom’, according to John Walker, Blackburn poet and journalist.
Blackburn is a cotton town created by the Industrial Revolution, 200 miles north of London and 30 miles north of Manchester. Its literary and poetic culture were part of a broader local self-improvement network, including a Mechanics’ Institute, discussion classes, informal schools and debating societies. Local papers reported on these activities and encouraged them. For most of the nineteenth century there was at least one, usually two, rival newspapers published in the town.
Leading figures in Blackburn’s poetry culture
One of the most influential figures was not actually a poet (apart from some juvenile verse). William Abram (1835-94) was a Lancashire printer who had worked in London and had had a youthful penchant for verse before taking charge of Blackburn’s newly opened free library in 1860, and then becoming editor of the Blackburn Times in 1867. Abram was a keen promoter of local literary talent; 'he loved Literature and taught others to love it'. He liked to read aloud the poetry of Tennyson, Wordsworth, Byron and Swinburne (but never Browning aloud), and the Elizabethan and Cavalier poets, he co-edited the complete works of the Cavalier poet Robert Herrick (1591-1674), was a founder of the Blackburn Literary Club and ‘donned wig and gown, in 1861, as Counsel in the famous (mock) trial, "Bardell versus Pickwick"’.
William Abram
One of the earliest Blackburn poets was handloom weaver Joseph Hodgson (d. 1856), whose verse was published in the Blackburn Mail and the Blackburn Standard. His obituary notes that he left a library of 800 volumes.
Richard Dugdale (1790-1875), soldier, engraver and self-proclaimed ‘Bard of Ribblesdale’ ( many Blackburn poets took or were given these honorifics); he claimed to have met a relative of Burns, of whom he was a great admirer. Burns’s class, his rootedness and his proud use of his own language, gave legitimacy to writers of working-class dialect poetry in Lancashire and across Britain.
John Critchley Prince (1808-66) from Wigan, a member of the Manchester Sun Inn group of writers, lived in Blackburn for some years, and associated with the town’s poets, who venerated him greatly.
John Critchley Prince
John Baron (1823-80), another cotton operative, was known as the ‘Grimshaw Park Poet’; weaver Henry Yates (b. 1841), named the ‘Bard of Islington’ by his neighbours in that district of the town, was a prolific writer of prose and verse for Blackburn and Preston papers and for Ben Brierley's Journal, Cassell's Saturday Journal and others. Some of his lyrics set to music by a local organist and composer.
Foundry worker John T Baron (1856-1921, no relation), had many poems published in the local Dick Snowdrop’s Comic Journal and went on to write some 1,800 dialect poems for the Blackburn Times under his dialect nom de plume, Jack o’Ann’s.
But the most popular Blackburn poet was mill worker William Billington (1825-84), whose verse appeared in the Blackburn Standard, Blackburn Times and other local papers. He was depicted as 'William Bentley' in William Westall's novel Red Ryvington and published two volumes, at his own expense, with Abram offering editorial help for the first.
William Billington (1825-84), ‘Bard of Blackburn’
Most of these writers were proficient in both standard English and Lancashire dialect. There were many more – George Hull’s anthology, The Poets and Poetry of Blackburn (1903) includes more than 50.
Poets in pubs
Blackburn’s poets had their regular haunts. There was the Black Horse on Northgate, 'the rendezvous of lawyers, auctioneers, agents, reporters, local poets, and literatteurs', run by Will Durham, known as ‘the Blackburn chronologist’. Journalist and poet William Whittaker recalled a visit with another reporter in the 1850s or 1860s, where they found John Boothman of the Blackburn Weekly Times and 'on the other side sat the burly bard of Ribblesdale, Dugdale, and two other poets -- Billington and Baron, and snoring in the chimney corner sat John C Prince ...'
Billington himself became a pub landlord across the same street, at the Nag’s Head, although 'the descent from Parnassus to the beer-cellar ... from Helicon to Dutton's brewery ...' seemed wrong to some of his friends. Abram describes one night when about 20 members of the Literary Club went for a drink at Billington’s pub. ‘Among the party were poets, chief of them the host himself; excellent elocutionists, singers, journalists, and literary critics… Recitation, criticism, song, discussion, comical story, and bandied “chaff,” succeeded each other’ until a passing policeman reported them all for drinking after hours; the chief constable quietly let the matter drop.
Billington named his next place, a beerhouse in Bradshaw Street, ‘Poet’s Corner’, and from 1875 until his death in 1885 it was an important centre of working-class literary and educational activity, with Sunday evening debates (‘Wordsworth v. Byron’, for example), lectures and poetry readings.
These meeting places were overwhelmingly male – in Manchester, Isabella Varley had to hide behind a curtain at the Sun Inn to hear one of her own poems being read. For such women, the local press was essential in bringing together writers and readers who could not easily meet in person.
Like any community, Blackburn’s poetic community was not always harmonious. There were disputes in pubs, in the street, and in print, often conducted in rhyme. In 1887, for example, Abram moved from editing the Liberal Blackburn Times to editing a new Conservative paper, the Blackburn Express, because he no longer agreed with Gladstone’s politics. This caused outrage among Liberals, poets included, leading to a notorious poetic hoax. A poem was submitted, allegedly from a teenage girl, Mary Richardson, to Abram, praising his new paper. However, it was a hoax, containing an acrostic insult, spelled out in the first letter of each line:
Poetic behaviour and bardic communities
There are two useful ideas in understanding Blackburn’s poetic culture: Brian Maidment’s concept of the bardic community, and Charles LaPorte’s concept of ‘poetic behaviour’. Maidment argues that working-class espousal of the Romantic idea of the bard encouraged the idea that ‘all individuals possessed the sensibility, if not the skill or linguistic resources, to be poets.' Some of the poetry published – and unpublished -- in the local press suggests that many people believed lack of skill was no barrier, that everyone had the right to express themselves in verse, to indulge in what Laporte calls ‘poetic behaviour’. According to Maidment, these local groups of working-class poets functioned as ‘bardic communities’, with the self-educated poet seen as a ‘slightly more articulate neighbour’. Romantic poets, especially Wordsworth and Shelley, had raised the status of the bardic identity -- associated with 'unlettered' poetry, 'spontaneous talent' -- making it very attractive to provincial self-educated writers who were excluded geographically and culturally from the centres of literary power.
In my view, Robert Burns was particularly important – because of his class, use of non-Standard English language, and his ordinary, everyday subject matter.
Maidment identifies four characteristics of bardic groups, based on a study of Manchester’s mid-century poetic culture, all of which were also present in Blackburn:
1. dedicatory poems to fellow poets,
2. group anthologies,
3. the linking of poetry with local pride,
4. use of an expanding range of places and publications for performance and publication, especially local newspapers and periodicals.
Dedicatory poems to fellow poets
A huge amount of poems were dedicated to local writers, for example when John Baron’s former teacher Charles Tiplady was 60 and Baron 50, ‘an exchange of reminiscences in verse took place between the teacher and scholar’, with poems such as Tiplady’s ‘Answer to John Baron’s Retrospective Stanzas’. The 1882 William Billington poem, ‘Where Are The Blackburn Poets Gone?’ names 26 local poets:
I met an acquaintance a day or two since,
A friend of the reedmaker poet, JOHN PRINCE,
A man whose acquaintance with men and with books
Hath seldom been rivalled, 'twas Mr. CHARLES ROOKS,
The "Junius of Blackburn" named, once on a time,
A master of prose and a critic of rhyme;
Whilst a tear and a tribute were paid to old John,
He asked,—Where the poets of Blackburn had gone?
My answer was ready, if time for a walk
Were at his disposal, the toil by the talk
Would be doubly repaid; he endorsed the remark,
Took my arm, and we sauntered along through the Park.
This scene was once rural and rugged enough,
A quaint rustic valley called Pemberton Clough,
Where "Ribblesdale's" gooseberry garden once shone,
But alas! both the "bard" and the garden are gone.
The time had been short but the changes were vast,
Our thoughts and our sympathies turned to the past,
And, with fond recollection, flew back to those days
When we loitered up Longshaw, or strolled through Damheys
With a posse of poets, though local in name,
Whose merit might match some of national fame—
Some are dead, some have fled, some have ceased to sing on,
But the most of the poets of Blackburn are gone!
Since HODGSON, and BARON, and DUGDALE are dead;
Since CHADBURN, and WALKDEN, and DALY are fled;
Since CLEMESHA, BRADLEY, and STEWART, and HUGHES
Have vanished; since SALISBURY deserted the muse;
Since ABRAM, and WALKER, and RAWCLIFFE, and YATES
Seem to rest on their laurels, defying the fates,
There's JARDINE, there's WHITAKER, WALSH, LITTLE JOHN—
Why, why are these silent, and where have those gone?
I replied, being queried, which did I like best,
The singing of GRAHAM, the silence of WEST,
The language of LITTLETON, least understood,
Or CHIP'S single song, and his "goose"?—which was good,
Don't hide in a napkin your talent, like WEST,
Nor scruple to sing, lest you should not sing best:
The steps to the heavens that glitter up yon,
Each rests on one lower, and all upon one.
He meets retribution, and merits it quite,
Who under a bushel obscureth his light;
The God-given talent should not be confined
To a circle of friends, when 'twas meant for mankind;
Go, lay out your money, in trade or in trust;
Machines when left idle will ruin and rust;
Or reckon all reasons, the pro and the con,
For singing we've many, for silence we've none.
The spink and the sparrow will twitter in spring,
The swift or the swallow in summer will sing;
The thickets with music in May will abound,
But the lark and the linnet sing all the year round.
Then why should the bards of my own humble sphere,
The gifted and good, whom I'm proud to revere,
Relinquish the lyre, while the least worthy one,
In sadness of heart singeth—"Where are they gone?"
We've climbed up the mountains and sailed on the sea;
On beauty we've banqueted, bounding and free,
Britannia's green valleys we've traversed by times,
Making many-voic'd echo give answer in rhymes;
And we read the sweet poets of many a land,
Ere Death and old Time had divided our band;
But soon the last scene will be closing upon
One more, to be gathered to where they are gone!
In fine, may the bards of this smoky old town
By their confluent gleams add a glow to its crown,
"Like stars in one sky let them mingle their blaze
Of light, nor be jealous of each other's rays";
Like flowers in one garden put forth their bright bloom,
Nor envy the fairest its tints or perfume;
The pipes of an organ all vary in tone,
Their sound must be several, their music is one.
Group anthologies
In Blackburn there was only one group anthology, –George Hull’s Poets And Poetry Of Blackburn (1903), featuring more than 50 writers, but published after the town’s peak of poetic production. Significantly, most of the featured poems were originally published in the local press.
Linking of poetry with local pride
This is seen in the introduction to Hull’s anthology, which presents Blackburn’s poets as a major part of the town’s history, and poetry as Blackburn’s pre-eminent art-form. It is also seen in the response from both public and other poets to the death of Billington, Blackburn’s best loved poet. There was a public appeal for funds towards a memorial for the poet; contributors included Blackburn Literary Club (£7, 3s), many local litterateurs, publishers of the two Blackburn weeklies (10/6 each) and the Dog and Otter Arms Friendly Discussion Club (8/1), among many others. The money paid for an ornate gravestone and a portrait which hung in the hall of the Free Library. One of Billington’s obituaries captured the sense of literary magic and prestige that poetry could impart to ordinary places:
he had felt the fresh breeze of Parnassus, the Muses had anointed his eyes until the grimy streets of Blackburn, the moorlands that hedge us in, and the people that move to and fro among our thoroughfares and mills became the themes of rhapsody and verse.
Growth of opportunities for performance and publication
This was related to public and official recognition of the bardic role. For example, in the 1850s ‘the Scotchmen of Blackburn gave a banquet to the "Bards of Blackburn”’; George Barton, a Blackburn Standard employee and choirmaster at St James’s church, set local poets’ work to music, including poems by Billington and John Baron. And John T Baron was given time off work from Livesey’s Greenbank Foundry to write his weekly verse for the Blackburn Times when he became well known as a poet. Perhaps his employer saw this as a civic duty, like time off for jury service.
There were other public duties expected of poets, who became local laureates, marking civic occasions, anniversaries and other special occasions. Below is a hymn sung by thousands of Sunday School children to mark the laying of the foundation-stone of Blackburn Infirmary on May 24th, 1858. It was composed by John Critchley Prince at the request of the committee of the ceremony:
Lord, on this bright, auspicious day,
We raise our glad and grateful lay;
And trust that Thy approving eye
Will watch us from the glorious sky.
For thou hast made men's hearts to feel,
And warmed them with a worthy zeal,
To soften sickness and distress;
To cheer, to succour, and to bless.
When the Blackburn Times reached its fiftieth anniversary in 1905, George Hull composed a poem to celebrate the occasion:
LINES FOR "THE TIMES."
(June 3rd, 1905.)
Hail to thy fiftieth birthday, Blackburn Times,
Thus friends at home, thus friends in far-off climes
Salute thee,—champion true, in time of need,
Of men oppressed, whate'er their class or creed.
Since Ernest King first toiled with voice and pen,
Thou ne'er hast lacked thy force of valiant men
For Liberty's dear cause to plead or fight,
Denouncing Wrong, upholding Truth and Right.
And as thou wert in years long passed away,
So art thou in thy vigorous prime to-day;
Fair to thy foes, and true to every friend:
Long may Prosperity thy faithful steps attend!
Significance of the local press for local literary cultures
All this poetic activity was amplified by the coverage and patronage of local newspapers and magazines, who added the prestige of print, the magic of seeing one’s scribbled words given the permanence of type in the public document of the newspaper. There was a multiplier effect: the prestige of print multiplied by the cultural capital of poetry made everyone involved – writers and readers - feel better about themselves and where they lived.
Local poetic cultures could flourish without the local press – but it helped, hugely. Publication in the local press, alongside public performance, was the main outlet for these poets – across England, millions of poems by local poets were published in this way. Newspapers boosted the status of poets through encouragement and reviewing, of publications and submitted amateur poetry – they took them seriously. The role of individual journalists with literary interests, such as Abram and John Walker in Blackburn, was very important.
Newspapers occasionally gave financial support to poets, although this was the exception. John Critchley Prince appears to have been paid a regular sum by the Preston Guardian from 1853, whilst living in Blackburn, judging by the quantity of his poetry published there. The arrangement probably began after he wrote to the editor:
I shall be happy to contribute now and then to your paper; and if you could afford to pay me two or three shillings a week, I will engage to supply you with lyrics (weekly), on moral, elevating, and cheerful subjects. They shall be written expressly for your journal… Can you set me a literary task? I will do the best I can.
There was also paid work for local poets at election times, writing political squibs in support of one or other party, or sometimes both. Below is one example, a parody of Thomas Hood’s ‘Song of the Shirt’, presumably written by John Baron, during the 1868 election, published in the Conservative Blackburn Standard:
Abram engineered the exposure of one pen for hire, John Baron, during the 1868 election:
Like the rest of the Blackburn “School” of Poets … “Jack” Baron … wrote election rhymes – squibs, satires, and panegyrics – charged with violent expletives …
Baron was a Tory, writing two or three pieces for the Standard and the Patriot each week during the 3 weeks of the election, while most poets were Liberal supporters, being paid by the candidates to write verses for the Liberal Times. Baron thought the Liberals paid more than the Tories, submitted an anti-Tory rhyme to the Times with accompanying pseudonym, but editor Abram ‘accidentally’ printed his real name beneath the poem. Baron was furious.
The local press was significant in linking linked poets to national literary cultures through the national networks and systems of the local press, enabling their verse to be reprinted in other papers around the country; for more accomplished writers, publication in local newspapers helped publication in metropolitan papers and magazines.
The local press connected readers to writers, giving them an outlet and a loyal following. Local writers were part of the same interpretive communities as their readers, who valued the local poetry of the local press. An obituary of Blackburn’s Billington claimed that
there are those amongst the rank and file of our Blackburn population to whom the homely rhymes of a Billington are more congenial and more dear than the stately and sustained splendours of a Byron, a Tennyson, or a Scott.
Some of the keener readers are revealed in a series of debates about the local press held at a Sunday-night debating club in Blackburn in 1888, in which the quality of poetry and other literary material is one of the criteria for judging newspapers. Many readers memorised local newspaper poetry or quoted it, inc preachers and speakers at public meetings, challenging received ideas about the ephemerality of newspapers – sometimes decades after it was written. Dialect poetry in particular was read and recited at local events and entertainments. As Kirstie Blair demonstrates in her study of Dundee newspaper poetry, knowledge of a local interpretive community is essential for a full understanding of how this verse was read – and used. The fact that these readers treasured and used such poetry, in ways we tend to reserve for only the ‘best’ poetry, challenges our judgments of poetic quality and the limitations of ‘bad art’.
The relatively open publishing platform of the local press encouraged readers to become writers. George Thomas Collins described the importance of the local paper in this autobiographical fragment in Hull’s anthology:
I began life as a brush maker, and am still following that occupation. — I came to Lancashire in 1868, and although I had written, in my childhood and youth, some rhymes that I did not consider fit for print, I don’t suppose I should have ventured to publish any had my esteemed friend, Mr. J. T. Baron, not persuaded me to send one piece to the “Blackburn Times” for publication. It was entitled “Memory and Hope,” and was accepted; as several others were afterwards. I consider it a praiseworthy feature of Blackburn journalism that it encourages and fosters local talent, especially among the workers in this very busy hive of industry. Since then I have had a great number of pieces published in other journals …
This encouragement of working-class poets by the local press may have been one factor in Blackburn’s unusually vibrant literary culture. Finally, the local press fostered a sense of poetic community, and preserved the memory of poets when they died, through obituaries, elegies, bioghraphies and the marking of anniversaries.
Conclusions
Reading and writing poetry was a common activity, for men, women and children of all classes. By providing a publishing platform for tens of thousands of local poets, producing millions of poems, the local paper encouraged ‘poetic behaviour’, treating poetry as a language available to all; they assisted this poetic behavior with public tuition in poetics, through comments on submitted verse and through reviews of poetry volumes, and by inviting contributions and offering prizes.
Local newspapers gave recognition to the more able local bards, shaping their public role as poets and providing a stepping stone to publication in higher-status settings, through their connections to the wider system of poetry publishing. These newspapers traded on the sense of place and local patriotism of their readers, and poetry’s emotional power and cultural capital could be harnessed to their project of giving significance to ordinary provincial places, far from the centres of cultural power, through the prestige of print.
Football match report in rhyme, 1910 To mark National Poetry Day 2013, here’s an example of newspaper poetry from the sports pages of the Barnsley Independent from February 1910. This is a match report in rhyme, describing Barnsley’s defeat of West Bromwich Albion in their 1910 FA Cup run, which took Barnsley to the final at Crystal Palace, only to be beaten by Newcastle United in a replay. Thanks to Dr Alexander Jackson of the National Football Museum for passing this on.
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Work in progress: a bibliographical database of poems published in a sample of 19th-century local newspapers. Last updated 19 August 2013.
Use the comments box below to add information about poems, poets, genres, details of publication etc.
What was the most popular type of Victorian reading matter?
Assuming that there were four or five readers per copy, Andrew King convincingly argues that, in the early to mid-1850s, half the British population read the four main penny weekly miscellanies featuring serial fiction, the London Journal (est. 1845), Family Herald (est. 1842), Cassell’s Illustrated Family Newspaper (est. 1853) or Reynolds’s Miscellany (est. 1846) [1]. This is probably a higher proportion than the readership of local newspapers in that period. A survey in January 1854 found that penny miscellanies such as the London Journal and weekly parts of ‘penny dreadful’ novels such as Reynolds’s Mysteries of the Court of London sold more than 4,000 copies per week from two bookshops in the Lancashire town of Preston alone, about equal to the combined local sale of Preston’s three newspapers – suggesting that these penny weeklies were far more popular. [2] However, the local papers were read widely in pubs and public news rooms and reading rooms at this time, so may have had more readers per copy than their cheaper penny rivals. The situation probably changed after the mid-1850s, when many new local papers were launched, prices fell to a penny or (from the late 1860s) to a halfpenny for some papers, and sales increased sharply. Journalist John Nodal and wholesale newsagent Abel Heywood told the Manchester Literary Club in 1874 that Manchester morning and evening newspapers outsold penny miscellanies such as the Family Herald by a factor of ten to one; if sales of the more popular weekly local papers were included, the balance would swing further in favour of local newspapers. [3] The inclusion of serial fiction in English local papers from the 1870s further boosted their popularity, at the expense of cheap metropolitan weeklies – as Graham Law has established, local papers were the main publisher of new fiction during most of the 1870s and 1880s. [4] So the evidence suggests that, for most of the 1840s and 1850s, cheap penny miscellanies and penny novel serials were the most popular reading matter, shifting to local newspapers from the early 1860s (probably until the 1930s, when they were overtaken by London newspapers). Notes 1. Andrew King, The London Journal, 1845-1883 : Periodicals, Production, and Gender (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 88-89. 2. Letter from John Clay to Lord Stanley, 25 Jan 1854, in W.L.Clay, The Prison Chaplain: a Memoir of the Rev. John Clay, B. D.,...With Selections From His Reports and Correspondence, and a Sketch of Prison Discipline in England (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1861). 3. John H Nodal, ‘Newspapers and Periodicals: Their Circulation in Manchester, I’, Manchester Literary Club Papers II (1876): 33–38; Abel Heywood, ‘Newspapers and Periodicals: Their Circulation in Manchester, II’, Manchester Literary Club Papers II (1876): 39–58. 4. Graham Law, Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000).
Pictures of London daily newspaper offices, 1890s, from Henry William Massingham, The London Daily Press (London: Leisure Hour Library, 1892). From top: Pall Mall Gazette Daily Telegraph, Fleet St -- Advertisement office, Standard Standard, Shoe Lane -- Daily News, Bouverie St Times, Printing House Square -- Daily News office For commentary on the iconography of British newspaper office architecture, see Carole O'Reilly, 'newspaper office architecture', Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism, online edition
Metropolitan metrics
The rationale I’m revising a journal article, arguing that historians’ over-use of The Times has had a deleterious effect on nineteenth-century historiography. This was based on a hunch I developed whilst doing my PhD, which found that most newspaper readers in the second half of the nineteenth century preferred local and regional newspapers to London ones. I found plenty of evidence for this over-use in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century journalism histories (less so in more recent books), and in broader nineteenth-century historiography; I also found it in undergraduate textbooks. However, it was unclear whether this deleterious dominance of The Times was a historical phenomenon, that had now passed – especially since the digitisation of about 50 provincial newspapers by the British Library. So, to test whether historians and literary scholars had now overcome their obsession with one very unrepresentative newspaper, I decided to do a quick survey of a few academic journals, searching for citations of newspapers. I used journals as an index for broader scholarship, standing in for books and conference papers. Method I found a list of top-ranking history journals in the Times Higher Education, selected those with a British focus, and added a few others, to make a total of nine. There is a bias to cultural history, but also some journals that cover political and social history, and literature (Table 1). Table 1: Journals analysed
To make it manageable, I sampled the journals only from 1980 onwards, and analysed only the first article in each year which covered a nineteenth-century topic and cited any newspaper. I found relevant articles by using the search term ‘newspaper’ within each journal. I realise I may have missed many other articles that also used newspapers as historical sources, but my method seems fair, manageable and transparent. If there was no article from the relevant period, I went on to the next year. This produced a total of 152 articles from 257 volumes (there were no articles citing newspapers in 105 of the volumes searched). I skimmed each article, searching for citations of newspapers. These were counted and classified as either: • The Times • other London newspapers – both daily and weekly, including Cobbett’s Political Register, Illustrated London News, Graphic, Spectator, Examiner, Leader but excluding financial newspapers and weekly reviews such as the Saturday Review • provincial papers – both daily and weekly, including Scottish, Irish and Welsh papers, London local papers and titles that launched in the provinces even if they later transferred to London, such as the Economist and the Northern Star. Results: Total citations This exercise produced the total newspaper citations in Table 2: Table 2: Total citations by type of newspaper
The tens of thousands of provincial newspaper titles published across the nineteenth century were cited more than twice as often as The Times , with citations of the few hundred other London titles in an intermediate position. So The Times was probably the single most cited newspaper title (with the Northern Star likely as a distant second). No surprise there – The Times was the highest-selling, most influential title. However, Table 2 felt misleading after my trawl of 152 articles. This is because high numbers of provincial newspaper citations appeared in a handful of articles, usually local case studies or essays on Chartism, which tend to rely heavily on the movement’s press, particularly the Northern Star. In fact, closer analysis showed that more than half the provincial citations (897) were found in just 12 journal articles. Refined results: Counting journal articles rather than newspaper citations So I tried counting in a different way. Rather than counting citations, I counted journal articles citing at least one newspaper, and noted whether they cited The Times , other London papers or a provincial paper – regardless of how many citations each journal article contained (this means that the same article appears more than once, if it cites more than one type of paper). This gives a significantly different picture (Table 3 below): Table 3: Total articles citing newspapers, by type of newspaper cited
From this, I can say that more journal articles cited The Times than all the provincial press put together, with other London papers being cited in the most articles. This seems to support my hunch. Next, I tested the idea that over-reliance on The Times is a thing of the past. Results: Change over time First, I needed to control for the varying number of journals searched in any one year. As Table 1 shows, Media History began publication in 1993, as Studies in Newspaper and Periodical History, did not publish in 1996 and 1997, and reappeared as Media History in 1998. The Journal of Victorian Culture began publication in 1996, and Albion ceased publication in 2003, when it merged with the Journal of British Studies. To ‘control’ for this variation in the number of journals analysed, I factored in the number of journals available in each year, dividing my results (the number of journal articles citing a newspaper) by the sample journals published that year. This gave me Table 4: Table 4: Number of journal articles citing newspapers, by type of newspaper cited, 1980-2012
I prefer graphs to tables for detecting patterns in numbers, so Fig 1 below expresses the last three columns of Table 4:
Fig. 1. When we look at newspaper citation trends over time, the number of journal articles citing newspapers (expressed as a proportion of the journal volumes examined in this survey) is on the increase, but beyond that, no obvious chronological trend emerges, particularly in relation to newspaper digitisation. Confusingly, use of The Times appears to decline after the launch of its digital archive in 2003 – or is the spike in 2008 evidence of scholarship based on the digitised Times, with a five-year lag from availability of the resource to publication of resource based on it? There is little sign yet of increased use of searchable digitised provincial papers after the launch of 19th Century British Library Newspapers Part I in late 2007 (containing 29 provincial titles), followed by a further 20 provincial titles in Part II, published in Spring 2010. Again, it may be too soon for the research to have been published yet. Bob Nicholson is more optimistic, arguing that: whilst researchers may once have chosen to privilege the voices of national papers, keyword searches carry fewer prejudices and return results from the Whitstable Times and the Hampshire Telegraph ahead of their London namesakes… Keen observers will already have noticed these publications … cropping up in the footnotes of an increasing number of academic articles. (1) But not in the eight journals surveyed here. The small number of articles examined each year explains the wild fluctuations in Fig 1. To even out these fluctuations, we can average the normalised newspaper-citing articles across each decade, as in Fig 2 below:
Fig. 2. The trendline shows increasing use of newspapers as sources in the selected journals. As for decreased use of The Times , there is some slight evidence for this, but only in the first three years of the current decade – too soon to be confident. Finally, I tried another tack, comparing usage statistics for digitised newspapers. Cengage have recently started releasing these figures to subscribers, but I have only managed to obtain comparable statistics for two institutions, for the third and fourth quarters of 2012 – July-Sept, when presumably postgraduate and staff users will predominate, and Oct-Dec, when new undergraduates may be the main users. Table 5: Usage statistics, two British universities, 2012
Source: Cengage The Times Digital Archive runs from 1785 to 2006, and so will be searched for twentieth-century material as well as other periods, for which there are fewers digitised newspapers available. The two resources containing nineteenth-century provincial papers for which we have usage figures, are 19th Century British Library Newspapers, and the larger database, British Newspapers 1600-1900, which combines the BL nineteenth-century papers with the Burney Collection (these also include some London papers). However, the differing chronological spread of the three resources, and the relative lack of other twentieth-century digitised papers besides The Times, means that we are not comparing like with like. Nevertheless, the scale of the disproportionate use of The Times is captured by the search activity of the larger University A, where there are almost 20 searches on the Times Digital Archive for every one on the two provincial newspaper databases combined, in the third quarter of last year. (The ratio is much higher, 70:1, in the fourth quarter, but we can dismiss this as representing the searches of inexperienced users.) At University B there is far less disparity, roughly a 2:3 ratio in favour of The Times. Interpretation To recap, I found more journal articles citing The Times than articles citing the tens of thousands of provincial newspaper titles put together. I am not for a minute saying that historians and literary scholars should stop using The Times . It is an obvious and superb source for many topics, such as Westminster politics, particularly for studies of parties, politicians and diplomats who were close to The Times . For the Reform movement of the 1830s, or any question of high politics in the 1840s and 1850s, it is a necessary source – alongside many others, including other newspapers, if only for verification. Equally, if a campaigner chose the letters page of The Times as a platform, then a focus on this newspaper is appropriate. It was an innovative news organisation, and so studies of media developments such as growing independence from political subsidy, or the development of journalistic genres such as the leading article, will naturally involve The Times . Pre-digitisation, the local press was used for local case studies, very rarely for ‘national’ topics. Digitisation now makes the construction of the national from the local easy. The Times is an inadequate source – especially if it is the only newspaper consulted – for contemporary press comment, public opinion or the majority of court cases. Explicit justification is needed if material taken from The Times is also available in other papers. The full list of articles analysed can be seen here:
A comparison of the sampled journals (Table 6), each with their own personality and specialisms, gives some clues as to how The Times is used, and how it should be used. Table 6: Type(s) of newspaper cited in journal articles, by journal, 1980-2012
All journals except one, History Workshop Journal, focus on metropolitan topics, with JVC, Victorian Studies, Media History and Nineteenth Century Literature showing a particular preference for the capital. The distinctive content of HWJ, related to its egalitarian tradition of history from below, may explain why its articles use The Times significantly less often than it uses provincial papers. It may also be related to the specificity of social history, which – apparently – happens in a particular place, unlike political history and some types of cultural history, which seem to hover above place -- but in reality, is tethered to London or the South-East. Perhaps too much ‘national’ political and cultural history is in fact regional. Or even provincial, if we use that word to mean a lack of awareness of the wider world? Did most Victorian politics, life and culture really happen in London and South-East England? If history is more than the study of the exercise of power within traditional central political institutions, then there are more newspapers than The Times. (1) Bob Nicholson, review of Lisa Peters, Politics, Publishing and Personalities: Wrexham Newspapers, 1848-1914, in North American Journal of Welsh Studies (forthcoming). This is work in progress –please comment.
Five Million Poems, or the Local Press as Poetry Publisher, 1800-1900
A version of this article was published in Victorian Periodicals Review 45:4, Winter 2012. Poetry is now accepted as a ubiquitous part of the Victorian periodical thanks to the work of Linda K. Hughes, Kathryn Ledbetter, Alison Chapman, and Natalie Houston [1]. My small research project, The Local Press as Poetry Publisher, 1800-1900, aims to join the debate by saying, as I often do, “Don’t forget about newspapers, especially the local paper.” Throughout the Victorian era, local newspapers were widely-read publications, reaching a broader readership than London newspapers, magazines, and reviews, let alone part-works or books. Most issues of local newspapers regularly published one or two short poems, which were often located in sections specifically dedicated to poetry. It seems high time, therefore, to examine the local newspaper as a poetry publishing platform. My aim is to foreground the nineteenth-century local newspaper as a venue for poetry by estimating the number of poems published in local newspapers and by exploring case studies of particular newspaper titles and poets as well as local literary cultures and their links to national networks. The British Library’s digitization of more than one hundred nineteenth-century local newspapers made such a project manageable. I was especially grateful for the help of a paid graduate intern, Claire Januszewski, who spent the summer finding, reading, and classifying more than 1,800 poems, most of them mediocre to poor. Claire consulted 1,066 individual newspaper issues, finding an average of two poems per week in the five weeklies sampled, five poems per week in one morning paper sampled, and one poem every nine days in the sampled evening paper. About 70 percent of issues contained at least one poem, sometimes as many as ten. Extrapolating from this research, I estimate that there were five million individual poems published in the English provincial press during the nineteenth century, give or take a million. This is how I did the sums. In 1801 there were ninety-nine provincial weekly papers publishing an average of two poems per week, multiplied by fifty-two weeks per year, making a total of around 10,000 poems published in that year’s provincial press alone. I added the estimated total for each year of the century, using the same total of newspaper titles as a multiplier for the following twenty years (this greatly underestimates the total of newspapers for nineteen out of every twenty years, which was, of course, constantly increasing). Similar calculations were made for daily papers in later sample years. A surprisingly small percentage of poems appeared in more than one paper. To make my research project manageable, I chose five titles: • The Blackburn Standard, a small-town Lancashire Tory weekly. • The Manchester Times, a big-city radical weekly that became a magazine-style weekly miscellany of Liberal and then Tory politics. • The Hampshire Telegraph, a Radical then Liberal weekly covering an entire county from Portsmouth. • The Bristol Mercury, another Radical big-city weekly which produced a Liberal morning offshoot. • The Middlesbrough Evening Gazette, an advanced Liberal evening paper. I realise that social science terms like “sampling” are an anathema to literary scholars, so it may be best to refer to them as case studies. The biggest weakness of the case study titles is their bias to Liberal/Radical politics, which seems to affect the political flavour of the verse but not the quantity. Claire looked at every issue of the weekly papers and one in eight issues of the dailies (ensuring coverage of every publication day across the week) in the years 1800, 1820, 1840, 1860, 1880, and 1900. The poetry published in newspapers was a mixture of reprinted and original verse. The reprinted poetry includes canonical writers such as Tennyson, Shakespeare, and Keats as well other writers who were hugely popular at the time, including Felicia Hemans, Georgiana Bennett, and radical poets like John Critchley Prince. The poems of more obscure writers, whose work often commented on contemporary events, were lifted from other newspapers and periodicals. Many American poems appeared towards the end of the century. We know less about the original poetry, for obvious reasons, I hope to research a small sample of poets and re-create the local contexts within which poetry was submitted, selected, edited, mediated, and published by local newspapers. Obituaries and autobiographies (such as those in the Archive of Working-Class Writing based at Liverpool John Moores University [2]) are useful resources for conducting this research. We are also looking for evidence of people actually reading these poems--for example, through readers’ letters, reply poems, commonplace books, and scrapbooks. Claire and I have recorded the details [3] of each poem on an Excel spreadsheet, which is available on this Tumblr research blog I am using to record the progress of the project. As one might expect, this exercise has already suggested many topics to pursue. I hope to ascertain which “known” poets and poems were most popular, to gather biographical information about poets with a strictly local reputation, and to investigate the local literary cultures of which the newspapers were part. I am also interested in how local and national literary networks were connected. For example, by chance we chose the Blackburn Standard, a newspaper which was produced with central Tory party funding, one of more than twenty around the country “edited” in London by Alaric Watts, a journalist and poet best known for his poetry annual the Literary Souvenir. The digitization of newspapers enables word-searching to find information on poets, editors, and the circumstances in which poetry was published and received. And, as with the conventional newspaper research, whilst searching for something else I accidentally gathered much useful information: obituaries of poets, poetic tricks played on editors, arguments between poets and readers over the importance of poetry, and poems written about editorial rejection and criticism (some cruel, some kind). If I can convince a few scholars of the significance of the local press as a publishing platform for “literary” material, I hope those with more literary expertise than I will do more with this material in the future. The topic of working-class poets has been well covered elsewhere, particularly by Brian Maidment, and my initial research on Blackburn’s poets confirms his insightful analysis of these writers as “bards … slightly more articulate neighbour[s].” [4] However there is still plenty of room for research in this and other areas. Other assorted findings I may or may not pursue include the high proportion of poetry from the United States and the large number of poems about the Boer War. It may also be interesting to investigate the way in which the local press re-published content from metropolitan publications such as Punch and other weekly and monthly magazines, increasing their influence enormously. I am keenly interested in print culture and local identities, including dialect poetry, so it has been gratifying to see the local flavour of many poems, even those selected from London publications. What has struck me the most is evidence that poetry was not seen as an exclusively literary genre. It was also a journalistic genre used widely to comment on the news, and even more broadly, it was a newspaper genre, appearing in advertisements for clothes, beer, and sausages. In fact, judging by the quality of some of the poems accepted and the editorial comments about the submissions that were rejected, poetry was a method of communication or way of thinking that was open even to those with little or no poetic ability. It was imagined as just another style of talking or writing. I am conducting research on this project in a public forum via my research blog in the hope of reaching beyond academia as an experiment in “crowd scholarship.” The digitized newspapers I am using are widely available in British universities and public libraries as well as through university libraries in other parts of the world. I am eager to benefit from the expertise of those who know far more about nineteenth-century newspapers and poetry than I do. I am hoping that others might be willing to look at my bibliographical spreadsheet [5] and help in one of the following ways: • Identify poetic forms and genres. • Add a comment that we can incorporate into the spreadsheet. • Identify poets’ names or the originals of parodies. • Identify the authors of anonymous or unattributed poems. • Spot any patterns, absences, trends, or anomalies. By asking for your help, I am hoping to take advantage of the possibilities of digital and online collaboration. (Or it may just be a cheeky request for help with my research project!) In return, I will make the raw “data” and scraps of information I have gathered available to all. The experience of writing a research blog has been useful, providing an incentive to complete each step of research, but the pace has slowed now that my teaching responsibilities have resumed. I am hoping The Local Press as Poetry Publisher, 1800-1900 in a small way complements the two existing useful online databases of Victorian periodical poetry: the Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry and the Periodical Poetry Index. My contribution to this field is part of a wider putative project which aims to examine the huge quantity of writing in the local press that was not written by full-time reporters or editors, a secret army of Victorian citizen-journalists who connected newspapers to their communities. NOTES 1. Linda K. Hughes, “What the Wellesley Index Left Out: Why Poetry Matters to Periodical Studies,” Victorian Periodicals Review 40, no. 2 (2007): 91-125; Kathryn Ledbetter, Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals: Commodities in Context (Farnham, Ashgate, 2007); Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony H. Harrison, A Companion to Victorian Poetry (Oxford, Blackwell-Wiley, 2002); Natalie Houston, “Newspaper Poems,” Victorian Studies 50, no. 2 (2008): 233-42. 2. Liverpool John Moores University, Archive of Working-Class Writing, http://www.ljmu.ac.uk/HSS/122820.htm. 3. For each poem, Claire has recorded the title; first line, newspaper; date; page number; number of lines; author, if known; poetic genre and topic; and source, if acknowledged. 4. Brian Maidment, “Class and Cultural Production in the Industrial City: Poetry in Victorian Manchester,” in City, Class and Culture: Studies of Cultural Production and Social Policy in Victorian Manchester, ed. by A. J. Kidd and K. Roberts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 148-66. 5. Bibliographic spreadsheet, The Local Press as Poetry Publisher, 1800-1900, http://hobbb.tumblr.com/post/26860269393/bibliographical-listing-of-poems-in-19th-century-local
One-man show based on 19th-century journalist's diaries
Slightly tangential to newspaper poetry -- although Anthony Hewitson (1836-1912), the subject of the show, did publish 1-2 poems every week in his paper, the Preston Chronicle. His diaries also record meeting an amateur poet, whose work he occasionally published.
I have been transcribing Hewitson's diaries with his great-great niece, Margaret Dickinson, with a view to publishing a scholarly edition. They are the only known diaries of a 19th-century provincial journalist, and are held by the Lancashire Archives.
Hewitson went from printing apprentice to reporter and then to editor and publisher of his own paper. He was a local correspondent for The Times and the Manchester Guardian, and was also a loving father and husband. Some of the most moving passages of the diaries concern his children.
A first performance was timed to coincide with the centenary of Hewitson's death on 26 October 1912. That one sold out, so we're doing it again on January 18. See some of the very positive audience comments here.
‘The Hewitson Diaries: A journalist’s life in Victorian Preston’
Friday 18 January 2013 at 7.30pm
Theatre 1, the Media Factory, University of Central Lancashire, Preston
The performance is followed by a Q&A with Andrew Hobbs and Margaret Dickinson.
Admission by ticket only (£10), from Preston Visitor Information Centre, Lancaster Rd, tel: 01772 253731.