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Reviewed by:
  • The News of the World and the British Press, 1843–2011 eds. by Laurel Brake, Chandrika Kaul, and Mark W. Turner
  • Helena Goodwyn (bio)
Laurel Brake, Chandrika Kaul, and Mark W. Turner, editors, The News of the World and the British Press, 1843–2011 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. xiii + 311, $100 (cloth).

The News of the World and the British Press, 1843–2011, edited by Laurel Brake, Chandrika Kaul, and Mark W. Turner, is a timely and accomplished response to the demise of a periodical that was one of the oldest surviving British weekly newspapers and that at one time may have had “one of the largest circulations in the world” (6). The News of the World ended its nearly 170-year career in ignominy after revelations of the phone-hacking scandal proved too shocking even for those readers with a high threshold for the news-gathering tactics associated with sensationalist journalism. However, as the fifteen essays that make up this collection attest, the history of the News of the World is rich, spanning three centuries, some twenty-five or so editors, and three proprietary dynasties—the Bells, the Carrs, and the Murdochs. [End Page 254]

In the opening chapter, James Mussell considers the beginnings of the News of the World and argues that to understand the appeal of the newspaper when it first appeared in 1843 is to see it as the least shocking and most moderate of its cohort of Sunday papers. Mussell argues convincingly that the newspaper’s format and tone were born out of Bell’s various attempts to imitate other periodicals. The success of the News of the World was due to its moderate liberalism; its manifesto, which claimed cross-class relevance; and its title, which made a striking departure from the previous forty years of newspapers named after a specific person. This opening chapter debunks a myth about the paper that subsequent chapters go on to explore: whilst it has been argued previously that the News of the World was “radical,” many of the essays that make up this volume contend that in fact there was a certain blandness to the politics of the newspaper due to its direct and conscious attempt to “cultivate as wide a readership as possible” (18).

In “Imagining the Mass-Market Woman Reader: The News of the World, 1843–77,” Alexis Easley provides detailed and nuanced close readings of the ways in which the newspaper sought to draw in a female readership despite the fact that Bell did not openly acknowledge women as a target audience. Easley considers advertising as a telling sign of Bell’s desire to appeal to domestic needs as well as to women readers as commercially astute consumers. Easley’s attention to the language used in such advertisements as “Massacre of the Innocents”—promoting teething products for babies—demonstrates the knowing manipulation of sensational prose in the synergic relationship between newspaper and advertiser. In charting the subject matter of the pseudo-anonymous “Hampden” editorial column, Easley extends the established argument that the newspaper employed a carefully navigated position that, in its relation to women at this time at least, veered to the conservative.

Martin Conboy articulates a sense of the News of the World as residually radical, reinforcing the idea that the newspaper was somewhat apolitical. “Residual Radicalism as a Popular Commercial Strategy: Beginnings and Endings” argues that an anti-establishment tone, or a tone that consistently conveyed a suspicion of power in both political and economic terms, accounted for the continued success of the News of the World, connecting it to a tradition of dissent from the late eighteenth century onwards. With the transfer of ownership to Henry Lascelles Carr in 1891, the paper entered a period of sustained and successful growth, reaching two million sales per week by the outbreak of World War I. Conboy points to the paper’s combination of a “generality of news and a high degree of sporting expertise” as one of the reasons why it achieved success (124). Continuing into the twentieth century, Conboy explores the purchase of the newspaper by Murdoch in 1969 and the shift from Sunday paper to tabloid format [End Page...

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