The Journalistic Imagination

Literary Journalists from Defoe to Capote and Carter

Richard Keeble, Sharon Wheeler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134115044
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Focusing on the neglected journalism of writers more famous for their novels or plays, this new book explores the specific functions of journalism within the public sphere, and celebrate the literary qualities of journalism as a genre.

Key features include:

• an international focus taking in writers from the UK, the USA and France
• essays featuring a range of extremely popular writers (such as Dickens, Orwell, Angela Carter, Truman Capote) and approaches them from distinctly original angles.

Each chapter begins with a concise biography to help contextualise the the journalist in question and includes references and suggested further reading for students. Any student or teacher of journalism or media studies will want to add this book to their reading list.

Chapter 1

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Defoe’s The Storm as a model for contemporary reporting

Jenny McKay

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Daniel Foe was born into the family of a successful tradesman in 1660. As a young man he went into business too, dealing at various times in meat, hosiery, wine, tobacco, perfume, horses and bricks, often with disastrous results such as bankruptcy and imprisonment in 1692 and 1703. Defoe married in 1684 and was the father of at least six children, one of whom became a journalist, although without notable success. Foe added the prefix De to his name in 1695, perhaps, as some have speculated, to enhance his social standing by the adoption of a title that sounded more aristocratic (Richetti 2005: 19). He was educated at the Nonconformist Morton’s Academy, renowned for its forward-thinking approach to education which stressed science, economics and modern rather than classical languages. Defoe acquired a strong interest in politics and social affairs as well as religion, at a time when deep divisions separated Catholic from Protestant in all aspects of life, including the accession to the throne. Along with his business activities Defoe held public office, but by the 1690s he was establishing himself as an energetic and eloquent writer of political, religious and moral polemic and satire. As a result he was condemned by the authorities and for a punishment he was made to stand in the pillory. From the early years of the eighteenth century, Defoe depended on high-level patronage for his livelihood and was employed as a propagandist and a secret agent charged with setting up an intelligence network, most notably for Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, MP, Speaker of the House of Commons, a Secretary of State ‘and prime minister in all but name’ (Downie 1979: 2). Defoe developed his extraordinary facility with words to become a writer of astounding productivity and invention. He is widely credited with a role in the foundation of at least two genres – journalism and the novel, although his most famous fiction, Robinson Crusoe, was not written until Defoe was nearly 60. He died in 1731, alone and impoverished. For someone who wrote so much there is surprisingly little known about his personal and domestic life.

Most people know Daniel Defoe as the writer of the novels Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722). His renown as a novelist has long overshadowed his reputation as a journalist even though he was successful, prolific and innovative as a writer of factual as well as fictional narratives. When his journalism is considered by scholars it tends to be the polemical pieces about religion, morals, economics and politics that receive attention. Or the journalism is used as a source of information by historians, especially those interested in politics or social issues. Much less often is it studied in its own right as a subject for literary and textual analysis.

Why, then, is so little of Defoe’s journalism read today, even though it forms such a large proportion of his huge output? The most obvious reason is that journalism is considered ephemeral: it is, by definition, about current affairs. When Defoe was writing about the political and religious controversies of his time he could assume his audience knew the background and cared about the debate. Today’s readers need specialized knowledge of the period to be gripped by some of Defoe’s arguments. A second reason is that the quality and popularity of Defoe’s novels mean readers may not think of looking beyond them. Then there is the question of canon-formation, of who gets to decide what is worthy of being read, studied or published. The English literature establishment is reluctant to accord literary status to journalistic writing, while much of the journalism establishment is equally reluctant to celebrate journalism for its literary merit. A kind of snobbery is partly to blame for this, which means that those who write for a living are looked down on as mere hacks and compared unfavourably with those whose motivation is thought to be the higher calling of the creative arts. Lastly, and partly for the reasons I have listed, there is the problem of access: the journalism of Defoe, like that of many other great writers, is not easy to find for readers who are not members of academic libraries.

Yet this neglect of Defoe’s journalism is all the more surprising given the establishment in the academy in the UK over the past 30 years – and in the United States over more than a century – of the field of journalism studies. Here you might expect to find at least some of his vast journalistic output being read by students and lecturers keen to examine early examples of their own practices. In fact this hardly happens. This is to miss a great deal.¹

Defoe’s vast journalistic range

In addition to politics, Defoe wrote on a vast range of topics. A ‘veritable writing machine’, one recent biographer, John Richetti, calls him (2005: ix). Defoe wrote, argued, reported, and he edited. He founded his own magazine, the Review, and wrote it more or less single-handedly from 1704 to 1713, publishing three editions a week – an undertaking that included separate editions for Scotland where he was based for some of that period. For the Review he was a reporter, a political commentator, an agony uncle, a leader writer, a critic, a gossip columnist (or scandalmonger as the term then was), and, under the pen name Mr Review, he was the precursor of the growing legions of writers of opinion columns. ‘For sheer fluency and day-to-day pertinence and insight, there is nothing else in English political writing then or since quite like this extended and unflagging performance,’ writes Richetti (ibid.: 97).

Defoe argued vigorously in favour of educating women. He wrote about the 1707 Act of Union with Scotland, about road maintenance, about insurance schemes and against the idea that there is any such thing as a pure-bred Englishman. The press, magic, family life, the servant problem, religion, usury, ghosts, language and diplomacy were other subjects he tackled. He offered practical advice to anyone who might be willing to listen: for example, when, in 1721, it seemed likely that the plague was again about to cross the Channel from Europe he sought to influence the thinking of officials about how such a crisis could best be prepared for and dealt with. In this case, typically, he produced articles as well as two books out of his material: the overtly didactic Due Preparations for the Plague in 1722 and a month later the work which would now be classed as a historical fiction, A Journal of the Plague Year.

This book has long been acclaimed for its sympathetic and dramatic reconstruction of the outbreak of plague in 1665 in London. Written with the cool objectivity of an observer, the narrative is convincing in its realism and it has, like Robinson Crusoe which was published three years earlier, acquired the significance of a literary archetype.² A Journal of the Plague Year is the moving study of an individual and a society going through a period of intense crisis both tangible, in the disease, and intangible, in the moral dilemmas the outbreak poses. (La Peste, of 1947, by the French novelist and journalist Albert Camus, is perhaps the best-known successor fiction.) However, the weight that this seriousness implies is not burdensome. The novel is richly textured, warm and humane, and shows a compassion for the suffering of the poor.

Unlike a significant proportion of Defoe’s writing, A Journal of the Plague Year leaves no doubt as to whether he was the author.³ This is not true of all the works which have been attributed to him but even if you count only those texts about which his authorship is not in question, the range of his curiosity, the breadth of his knowledge, and his unflagging need to communicate with as many people as possible using language they could understand are remarkable. He was a fluent, opinionated, well-informed and versatile writer. These attributes are also, of course, a suitable description of those who would be most employable in the newsrooms of today, and this may help to explain the strength of his appeal for journalists of our time such as his biographer, Richard West, and the BBC’s former political editor, Andrew Marr. According to West, Defoe was ‘a great and not just a good reporter’ (1997: 87). And for Marr, he was a ‘writer of genuine genius’ who created ‘a journalistic style that lasted’. He wrote ‘excellent, clear, uncluttered, reporterly English full of relatively short sentences of plain description’ (2004: 8).

The Storm: landmark text in the development of British journalism

Fortunately some of Defoe’s journalism and other non-fiction writing is now in print, most notably one of his earliest works, The Storm. For modern readers this provides a welcoming route into the journalistic writing of ‘one of the most significant figures in the history of print journalism’ (Ellison 2006: 91). It does not depend on much background knowledge as it is about a severe weather event, which readers can relate to their own experience. As a nation the British are known for their obsession with the weather and with disastrous-weather stories in particular: they like to hear about the physical damage to cities and countryside, about destruction, miraculous escapes, tragic deaths, about acts of bravery contrasted with acts of calculating cruelty. They like to apportion blame for what has gone wrong.⁴ All of these are tropes with which modern journalists and their readers are familiar. And Defoe’s The Storm offers all of them in a book which, by virtue of its publication date, can be seen as a landmark text in the development of British journalism and the writing of popular narrative.

It was written at a time when what we would now call journalism (but for which there was then no single collective term) was flourishing. After a period of tight government control over what was published, in 1695 the Licensing Act was allowed to lapse in England and this unleashed a torrent of news publishing in new forms and by new writers (Smith 1979: 45–7, 56). The first women’s magazine, the Ladies’ Mercury, was launched as a monthly from 1693, the first recognizable newspaper, the Daily Courant, appeared in 1702, and many other titles were to follow in the first decades of the eighteenth century. By the 1690s Defoe was already gaining a reputation, notoriety even, as a pamphleteer, and as his business activities became more calamitous he found himself poised to play a full part in what Ellison describes as ‘a proliferation of texts and the expansion of … communication systems’ unique in the history of the media (2006: 2).

The Storm: or, a Collection of the most remarkable Casualties and Disasters which happen’d in the Late Dreadful Tempest, both by Sea and Land, to give its full title, is one example of his activities. The book was published in 1704 and ‘printed for G. Sawbridge and sold by J. Nutt’ (Hamblyn 2003:1). It commemorated what remains the worst tempest ever recorded in the British Isles. The wind had swept across southern England for a week in late November 1703, destroying thousands of buildings, felling millions of trees, as well as killing thousands of people, including a fifth of the sailors in the British Navy. Little wonder that the monarch, Queen Anne, described it as ‘a Calamity so Dreadful and Astonishing, that the like hath not been Seen or Felt in the Memory of any Person Living in this our Kingdom’ (ibid.: xxxix). It is also likely that Defoe, who had recently emerged from debtors’ prison and who had a family to support, recognized in the event a way of earning some much-needed money by using his writing skills. For most of his adult life until this storm, Defoe had earned his living from commerce, although during the 1690s he was also forging a career as a writer of poetry, journalism and polemical pamphlets.

The Storm is not a novel. Its first-person authorial voice states that it is based on true accounts of what happened during and just after the hurricane, eyewitness accounts solicited from all over the country by means of advertisements in the London Gazette, which was founded in 1666 as an official government newspaper carrying mainly foreign news, and the Daily Courant. Here is part of the advertisement:

To preserve the Remembrance of the late Dreadful Tempest, an exact and faithful Collection is preparing of the most remarkable Disasters which happened on that Occasion, with the Places where, and Persons concern’d whether at Sea or on Shore. For the perfecting so good a Work, ’tis humbly recommended by the Author to all Gentlemen of the Clergy, or others, who have made any Observations of this Calamity, that they would transmit as distinct an Account as possible, of what they have observed.

(London Gazette 3975, 13–16 December 1703)

The advertisements can still be viewed in newspaper archives, as can other documents such as Philosophical Transactions, the journal of the Royal Society (the learned society of scientists founded in 1660), on which Defoe drew for some of his research and from which he quotes in The Storm.⁵ He refers to other traceable documents, as well as to the letters his advertisement elicited from clergymen, gentlemen, ‘honest countrymen’, an apothecary, sailors and even one woman who were scattered throughout the large area of England devastated by the storm. By this means Defoe seeks to establish the authenticity of the events and scenes he describes.⁶ He developed this technique in his later narrative writing even when he was not composing a factual account. A Journal of the Plague Year is one example where he makes extensive use of documents, such as the Bills ofMortality (lists of the names of those who died and the causes of death) from London churches, to help verify what he describes within a fictional account of an event which had, in fact, taken place.

Like A Journal of the Plague Year, The Storm describes a society in the grip of catastrophic events which will have lasting effects both physical and psychological on the people who witness them. The order of magnitude may be different (the 1703 storm left around 8,000 dead, the plague in 1665 around 97,000) but a reading of both suggests a connection between the way the narratives were conceived by Defoe: it is hard to believe that his fictional account of London’s plague would have been written in the same way if The Storm, a largely factual account, had not appeared first. The Storm was Defoe’s first full-length book and in it we see him experimenting with ways of writing about experience which are later developed in his fictional narratives. One example is the use of eyewitness accounts. For The Storm these are gathered from the author’s correspondents and contacts, to use the journalists’ jargon of today. In his novels such as A Journal of the Plague Year the viewpoints of imagined ‘eyewitnesses’ are regularly used to narrate events, although it is probable that he had heard accounts direct from people who lived through the plague in London in 1665.

The Storm, then, is worth reading both for its own sake and for its significance as a founding text for both journalism and the novel. The journalist and biographer of Defoe, Richard West, argues that as a piece of reporting The Storm is ‘a masterpiece, which puts to shame all modern accounts of disaster whether in books, newspapers, radio or television’ (1997: 86). During what turned out to be ‘the golden age of journalism’ in the early eighteenth century, Defoe was ‘the first master, if not the inventor, of almost every feature of modern newspapers’ (ibid.: xiii). One of Defoe’s main strengths, in West’s eyes, was that ‘he excelled in the art of telling a story’, just as Richard Hamblyn, editor of the modern edition of The Storm, praises Defoe for his ‘narrative instinct’ (2003: xxvii).

Early master of modern journalism

West’s suggestion that Defoe was an early master of modern journalism is easy for us to test, as the daily round of hard news production in ou...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Introduction: On Journalism, Creativity and the Imagination
• Chapter 1: Defoe’s The Storm as a Model for Contemporary Reporting
• Chapter 2: William Hazlitt
• Chapter 3: The Personal is the Political
• Chapter 4: Charles Dickens and the Voices of Journalism
• Chapter 5: ‘A Work and a Purpose’
• Chapter 6: ‘The Dangerous Third Martini’
• Chapter 7: The Lasting in the Ephemeral
• Chapter 8: An Unscathed Tourist of Wars
• Chapter 9: Cold-Blooded Journalism
• Chapter 10: The Journalist as Philosopher and Cultural Critic