Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850-1950 (review)

Studies of Victorian periodicals have multiplied rapidly in the last decade, but many have been narrowly focused. Mark Hampton's book provides a framework for comprehending the press by considering contemporaries' perceptions of its purposes. While Hampton does not specify the segments of the press to which his title refers, internal evidence indicates that his concern is newspapers. Integrating the methodologies of history, literature, and media scholars, Hampton organizes the seemingly disparate directions that nineteenth-century journalism took and lays a foundation for understanding its course in the twentieth century. In so doing, he relates interpretations of social control, gender, socialism, and empire to the press and summarizes the work of recent historians on it. Further, by citing Victorian journalists, he reminds modern investigators of the value of this constituency as a resource.

Although the volume addresses the period 1850–1950, it concentrates on the Victorians. After a brief survey of serials in those years, Hampton devotes three of the book's five chapters to ideas expressed between 1850 and 1914 before concluding with an assessment of views from World War I until the Royal Commission on the Press, 1947–49. Using memoirs, novels, parliamentary debates, unpublished papers, and periodicals, he postulates that the Victorians had two principal "visions" of the press: educational and representative. The first, he suggests, was dominant from 1850 to 1880, waning thereafter but never disappearing. The second, emerging concurrently with the so-called New Journalism, was increasingly important until 1914. As he recognizes, these conceptualizations were never absolute but often blurred as personnel and events caused attitudinal shifts.

Hampton defines the "educational ideal" as one that sought to inform and influence readers. It assumed that humans could discover truth rationally if given sufficient data and different explications of that data. This construct, based on the work of Alan J. Lee, was appropriate for the Victorian "high noon" when the paradigm of a free marketplace was popular. It also accorded with the predilection for self-help and the belief that public communication at home should be consonant with Britain's international preeminence. Because the emphasis on elevating the otherwise untutored permitted manipulation of minds through news selection and orientation of leading articles, however, these factors require a fuller analysis than Hampton's book offers.

The Victorian discourse in the 1850s on the taxes adversely affecting newspapers affirmed the value of the press as a forum but diverged on the implications of cheaper papers. While Hampton fails to explore in depth the impact of abolition, he does notice that it generated competition. The result was a slow shift from journalism for public citizenship to that for private fortune. As he demonstrates, the erosion of the educational vision began about the time the first generation of graduates of the national schools matured. The research of Joel Wiener, which Hampton notes, has shown that the New Journalism of the 1880s was not so novel. Nonetheless, its facts were more homogenized—because of the resort to news agencies—abbreviated, or dramatized for readers imagined to be less deliberative. Buttressing this supposition and further undermining the educational rationale was the fin-de-siècle awareness of psychology, particularly of collective mentality.

The intersection of these circumstances catalyzed, according to Hampton, the prioritization of the "representative ideal." He explains that its goal was not to sway readers but to convey their views. This aim was logical in a milieu where buyers liked trivia, owners raced to sell papers, and intellectuals underscored the non-rational aspects of humanity. Yet many proponents of education persisted. Hampton, struggling to reconcile the discordance of his sources, has some difficulty distinguishing the representative prototype from its predecessor. Thus, he asserts that the representative ideal served both to "mirror" opinion (108) and to "decide what the people's interests really were" (126). Clearly, the second function opens the representative press to the same charge of configuration as the educational, while the first overlooks that education-oriented gazettes...