George Newnes and the New Journalism in Britain, 1880–1910

Culture and Profit

Kate Jackson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351933940
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

This is a study of the noted newspaper proprietor, publisher and editor, George Newnes and his involvement in the so-called New Journalism in Britain from 1880 to 1910. The author examines seven of Newnes's most successful periodicals - Tit-Bits (1881), The Strand Magazine (1891), The Million (1892), The Westminster Gazette (1893), The Wide World Magazine (1898), The Ladies' Field (1898) and The Captain (1899) - from a biographical, journalistic and broader cultural perspective. Newnes assumed a pioneering role in the creation of the penny miscellany paper, the short-story magazine, the true-story magazine and the respectable boys' paper, in the development of colour printing, magazine illustration and photographic reproduction, and in the redefinition of both political and sporting journalism. His publications were shaped by his own distinctive brand of paternalism, his professional progression within the field of journalism, his liberal-democratic and imperialist beliefs, and his particular skill as an entrepreneur. This innovative periodical publisher utilised the techniques of personalised journalism, commercial promotion and audience targeting to establish an interactive relationship and a strong bond of identification with his many readers. Kate Jackson employs an interdisciplinary approach, building on recent scholarship in the field of periodical research, to demonstrate that Newnes balanced and synthesised various potentially conflicting imperatives to create a kind of synergy between business and benevolence, popular and quality journalism, old and new journalism and, ultimately, culture and profit.

PART I
The New Journalism: A Liberal Profession or a Branch of Business?

Introduction to Part I

George Newnes embarked upon Tit-Bits and The Million in a late Victorian atmosphere that Paul Ferris has so evocatively recreated in his study of the House of Northcliffe, spurred on by ‘the glowing prospects of the coming age’:

Those morning commuters in their black coats and top hats, pouring into the smoky vale of London by steam train and horse bus, were a new generation of educated citizens. Their children would read, learn, grow, multiply, and cover the face of the earth with literate Britons. More and more of them would live in cities, in rows of pink and yellow houses with net curtains on the windows. A sense of people, of gathering millions with names, voices, votes, desires, and money, was in the air .... The mass market for everything was trembling on the edge of being born. Beecham’s Pills were making a fortune for Mr Beecham. Railway companies competed to take working men and their families to the seaside. Mr Lever was selling four hundred tons of soap a week .... Leisure would percolate the masses as thoroughly as Fry’s Cocoa and Will’s Woodbines. They would have time, the commodity that only the rich had had before.¹

The ‘gathering millions’ were members of the expanding lower middle class: a commuting, educated, urban, increasingly enfranchised and consumerist public, with access to leisure time. To George Newnes, with the advantage of commercial training and a knowledge of the tastes of the lower middle classes, they represented a vast pool of potential periodical readers. And he sought to appeal to their desires with two penny weekly papers: Tit-Bits and The Million. Thus Reginald Pound observed that Tit-Bits ‘quickened life for a vast mass of lower-middle class readers of all ages’.²

The late Victorian and Edwardian middle class, as defined by Chiozza Money, was composed of taxpaying families with an income of between £160 (the income tax threshold in 1905) and £700 a year. At the lower end, the middle class included shopkeepers, schoolteachers, clerks and white-collar workers, often struggling to maintain middle-class status on insufficient incomes. Professional society, spanning the upper ranks of the middle class, was on the rise in the late nineteenth century, its growth stimulated by the rapid expansion of the service occupations, and its interests defended by a range of newly formed collective associations. At the upper end, the middle class included senior civil servants, clergymen, lawyers, doctors, local manufacturers and wholesalers, university vice-chancellors, public-school headmasters and national newspaper and periodical editors. At this level, the middle class could merge with the fringes of ‘Society’. ‘Society’, or ‘the upper ten thousand’ as The Queen and Karl Marx labelled this set, was comprised of rich and powerful landowners and businessmen, together with some very successful lawyers, engineers, architects, authors, artists, judges, fashionable physicians, editors and university men. By the time The Strand was established in 1891, Newnes had risen from the ranks of the lower middle class to become a wealthy publisher and a Liberal MP, and, during the next decade, acquired all the trappings of a ‘Society’ man: a yacht, a car, a country house, an influential political paper (The Westminster Gazette) and a positive plethora of other successful publications, various domestic and foreign business concerns, a substantial fortune, a wide circle of well-connected friends and a baronetcy. He was thus ideally placed to create the kind of publication that would appeal to this class. The Strand, a sixpenny illustrated monthly magazine, was just such a publication.

Conditions of reception and distribution were integral to the success of Newnes’s magazines. In the second half of the nineteenth century, as Gareth Stedman Jones has shown, the work-centred artisan culture that had prevailed amongst the upper-working class in the first half of the century gradually yielded to a culture oriented towards the family and home, as working hours were reduced, and workers who had lived in the immediate vicinity of their work began to live further away.³ The increase in the number of family papers like Tit-Bits and The Million, designed to appeal to a varied reading community, was intimately related to such a cultural climate. W.H. Smith had established his first railway bookstall on Euston Station in November 1848, and in the same year, Routledge had launched its ‘Railway Library’ to meet the needs of a growing travelling public. By the following year, Smith had established 144 shops on stations or station approaches. The rapid and comprehensive development of a country-wide network of railway bookstalls was crucial to the expansion of periodical publishing. And Tit-Bits, distributed through such outlets, consisting of brief, easily digestible portions, and popularising the notion that every copy constituted a railway insurance policy for readers, was intimately linked to the commuting phenomenon.⁴ It appeared on Thursday, and was designed to provide reading matter for the weekend and ensuing week. The Strand, too, a best-seller at all the main-line bookstalls and throughout the empire, was a favourite amongst the travelling public.

Many critics have commented that Tit-Bits ‘revolutionised’ popular journalism, and that Newnes was the founder of modern journalistic practice.⁵ Whilst Newnes’s paper did not cause the kind of complete historical break associated with the term ‘revolution’, it initiated and reflected many changes in the world of journalism, and was integral to the New Journalism emergent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1880s, English journalism was transformed by technological innovation (the introduction of the telegraph, telephone, typewriter, high-speed rotary press and half-tone photographic block), commercialisation (substantial profits, through large sales and advertising becoming a major objective of newspaper proprietors) and a shift in the market for journalism. ‘In readership terms’, Joel Wiener has suggested, ‘classlessness edged past class as the circulation of papers soared into the millions.’⁶

In May 1887, Matthew Arnold unleashed a cultural debate on the state of journalism, in which he and W.T. Stead were to be two of the greatest protagonists. Arnold represented the traditionalist arbiter of culture, fearful of the effects of the ‘new democracy’. ‘New Journalism’ was, in fact, a term Arnold coined, in a derisory (and much-quoted) article in The Nineteenth Century (May 1887). ‘We have had opportunities of observing a new journalism which a clever and energetic man has lately invented’, wrote Arnold. He was referring to Stead, then editor of the Pall Mall Gazette:

It has much to recommend it; it is full of ability, novelty, variety, sensation, sympathy, generous instincts; its one great fault is that it is feather-brained .... Well, the democracy, with abundance of life, sympathy, good instincts, is disposed to be, like this journalism, feather-brained.⁷

Arnold criticised the features which he saw as characteristic of the ‘New Journalism’: a ‘popular’ tone, an excessively dramatic reporting style, a lack of editorial responsibility and the transparent pursuit of profit.

Stead, on the other hand, was determined to transform journalism into something which gave expression to the democratic culture of the time. He expatiated continually on the illimitable range of the editor’s powers and responsibilities. In an article on ‘Government by Journalism’, published in 1886, he argued that the newspaper editor was ‘the uncrowned king of an educated democracy’, receiving a daily mandate from his people, who re-elected him every time they bought his paper. Through his paper, the editor could inform and represent the public, conduct social missions, expose abuses, judge grievances and right wrongs. The press was the ‘engine of reform’, the ‘Chamber of Initiative’, the ‘voice of democracy’, the ‘apostle of fraternity’ and the ‘phonograph of the world’.⁸ Stead, a school friend of George Newnes, might almost have been invoking the language of Tit-Bits.

The editor was accorded increasing social and professional status in the Victorian period.⁹ Thus, the editorial voice was a major factor in the method by which Tit-Bits (in particular), The Million and The Strand connected with readers. Yet the journalist, associated with a form of writing seen as ephemeral, unfinished and uncrafted by contrast with authentic ‘literature’, and identified with a Bohemian way of life, faced something of a crisis of respectability. In the discourse of the developing journalistic profession, the distinction between the socially respectable ‘amateur’ and the ‘professional’ journalist was rigidly preserved. By the 1880s, however, professionalism was acquiring positive connotations as Britain developed into a professional society. Periodical writers had struggled throughout the century with the nomenclature of their craft. They had generally opted to nourish their associations with literature and ‘higher journalism’, but they now began to extract value from their status as ‘professionals’. This process was integral to the success of The Strand.

The so-called New Journalism has been comprehensively defined within the historiography of periodical research. It was heavily influenced by American journalism. And it was increasingly dependent on visual innovation, featuring novelties of typography and make-up: banner headlines, news and parliamentary reports spread across unbroken columns; attractive display advertising; and a range of illustrations, some of them produced by new techniques. Late nineteenth-century journals featured a brighter, clearer style of writing, devoted less space to leaders and cultivated a more standardised style of reporting news, influenced by news agencies such as Reuters. In content, there was a shift from parliamentary and political news to sport, crime, gossip and sexual matters. Published excerpts such as those printed in Tit-Bits proliferated. And there was an increase in the number of columns catering to readers’ specific tastes (women’s pages, children’s pages, comic strips), and in the publication of correspondence pages and serialised popular fiction. The press became increasingly commercialised, and vast increases in circulation and advertising, aided by prize competitions and insurance schemes, guaranteed substantial profits for proprietors. In the context of these transformations in the business and style of journalism, George Newnes established his place alongside other leading New Journalists such as Stead, O’Connor, Pearson and Harmsworth as an innovator whose contributions were critical to the formation of the modern press.

The main point of difference between the New Journalism and the old, according to T.P. O’Connor, was ‘the more personal tone of the modern methods’.¹⁰ Newnes certainly employed such a tone in his early publications. Anonymity gradually lost ground in the 1870s and the New Journalism employed correspondence columns, signed articles and personal detail extensively. In this way, it substituted pluralism - the explicit identification of many authors and spokespeople - for a notion of single authority implicit in Victorian journalism. Interviews and investigative stories, modelled on American examples, were pioneered by journalists such as Stead and O’Connor. (Stead’s series exposing juvenile prostitution, entitled ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, attracted extensive publicity, especially when the campaign leader was imprisoned in fighting for the cause. It has generally been viewed as a crucial episode in the development of the New Journalism.) The interview, in fact, became one of the chief journalistic forms of the period.¹¹

The rhetoric of personality and individual responsibility transformed the field of journalistic production. The success of Tit-Bits thus relied upon Newnes’s ability as editor to create and maintain a bond of sympathetic intimacy with his readers. This paper contained many correspondence columns. The Million offered hundreds of biographical sketches. And The Strand was famous for its interview series. And all three of these publications relied heavily on editorials. It is curious to note the contradiction between the rhetoric of ‘personalised journalism’ and the developing structure of the modern press: heavily capitalised and syndicated, hierarchically organised and technically complex.

Yet the New Journalism was not entirely new. Many of the changes that seemed to usher in a modern press were anticipated by the old journalism. And the old journalism was itself affected by developments in the radical and popular press of the 1830s, by the success of the Sunday papers from the 1840s onwards, by the influence of sub-literary forms (chapbooks, almanacs, broadsheets) and of cheap fiction upon popular culture, and by a general expansion in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Introduction
• Part 1 The New Journalism: A Liberal Profession or a Branch of Business?
• Part 2 Liberalism and Imperialism: Developing Formats and Expanding Horizons
• Part 3 Specialisation and Diversification: Targeting Niche Audiences and Exploiting a Segmented Market
• Conclusion
• George Newnes: Biographical Summary
• Select Bibliography
• Index