New Journalism & New Imperialism

AS PART OF Palgrave’s “Studies in the History of the Media,” Griffiths’s book looks at the close relationship between fiction and journalism at the end of the nineteenth century and argues that the correlation between the tropes and rhetoric of New Journalism and those of imperial adventure fiction was crucial to the prevalence and form of imperial discourse at its most jingoistic. Griffiths sees the waning years of the nineteenth century, with the spread of mass journalism and the speed of news transmission via telegraph, as the golden age of the special correspondent: a new type of adventure-hero- ournalist hybrid who reported on events from the front lines of Britain’s imperial exploits for the edification and titillation of audiences back home. Yet in their style of writing—a medley of nonfiction, sensationalism, and personal experience—journalists such as Henry M. Stanley had much in common with fiction writers such as H. Rider Haggard. Together, writers such as these helped to create the populist politics that fueled the New Imperialism. By the early twentieth century, however, as empire’s liabilities became increasingly hard to ignore and its wars (such as the Boer War and the Siege of Khartoum) became ever more brutal, the idea of imperial adventure, whether dressed up as fiction or as fact, lost its appeal and the synergy between journalism, romances, and imperial hubris faded away.

While there has been a growing focus in Victorian and empire studies on journalism and periodicals, much work remains to be done on the relationship between journalistic and novelistic form in the late-Victorian period and the ways in which they both competed with and informed one another. For instance, Griffiths is able to reframe the James/Stevenson debate about the relative merits of romance and realism by showing how writers on either side of it defined their work against the New Journalism both because it could be considered too realistic (in its fidelity to grim detail) and too sensationalistic (in its focus on scandal, celebrity, and excess). His book also shows how the nexus of fiction and journalism was inseparable from the populist imperialism of this moment; though they saw each other as rivals, novelists and journalists were engaged in the same project of producing empire as an adventure narrative in order to champion its cause and win over a larger share of the reading market. For what was new about the New Imperialism, Griffiths contends, was not simply growing support for empire but, more significantly, the “appearance of popular support … or alternatively, support for a popular image of empire” (57). His analysis of the career of W. T. Stead—who was centrally identified with the New Journalism and the New Imperialism, and in dialogue with key writers of the period such as Haggard and Stanley—is particularly effective in knitting together the three strands of his investigation.

Less effective are some of the ways in which Griffiths positions his work in relation to other criticism. For example, he argues that “The scarcity of recent volume-length critical works on Haggard suggests that Arnoldian value judgments on popular literature still hold sway in academic circles” (92). Since the 1990s, however, there has in fact been a significant quantity of work on popular literature in Victorian studies that has treated, among other topics and genres, the sensation novel, Gothic fiction, science fiction, working-class literature, children’s literature, and periodicals as well as the imperial romance. The dearth of full-length works on Haggard, then, is more likely because of the fact that single-author works have fallen out of favor due both to constraints on academic publishing and critical trends that favor context and concept over biography as frames for research.

His positioning of postcolonial theory as a foil for aspects of his argument is similarly tendentious. Citing the “overly post-colonial approach” of much Haggard criticism, he claims, for instance, that “(i)t is important to ‘recover’ Haggard’s work...