National Identity in Great Britain and British North America, 1815–1851: The Role of Nineteenth-Century Periodicals by Linda E. Connors, Mary Lu MacDonald (review)

Linda E. Connors and Mary Lu MacDonald have impressive records of published scholarship on British and Canadian periodicals, both individually and as part of their longstanding and fruitful collaboration. This book is the result of their abiding interest in the transatlantic resonances and implications of their periodicals research. In tackling the ways in which periodicals shaped national identity in Great Britain and British North America in the early to mid-1800s, Connors and MacDonald have undertaken a daunting task. Given the complexities of British national identities and those of pre-Confederation Canada, and the vast range of periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic from which the authors had to select their study set, it is a wonder that the authors were able to complete the project at all. That they do not quite succeed in positing an original thesis is understandable. Yet while this book is unlikely to tell scholars of national identity or Victorian periodicals much that they don’t already know, National Identity in Great Britain and North America, 1815–1851 nevertheless provides a service in bringing the latter to bear on the former. Endeavoring to combine two vast fields, the authors indicate some ways in which political historians might enrich their work by reference to Victorian periodicals.

Connors and MacDonald’s book is heavily indebted to the standard works on British national identity, particularly Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983) and Linda Colley’s Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (1992). Connors and MacDonald extract from these works three defining features of national identity: the idea of a shared past, a transcendent or inclusive ideology, and an Other against whom the national identity can be constituted. These three features are then used to shape their own narrative. Some chapters focus more on matters of the past, some on ideology, and some on an exploration of self in opposition to an Other. The final chapter, “Lands of Hope and Glory,” basically reprises the introduction.

In terms of structuring an argument, these extracted characteristics of national identity unfortunately pose as many problems as they might be expected to solve. The notion of a shared past—seldom stable even in more focused studies of national identity—becomes particularly shaky when such a huge geopolitical construct is examined. The authors admit as much: “Whether in the United Kingdom or in North America, the basic problem was to bring differing European, English, Irish, Welsh, and Scots histories together into a single narrative,” they write, continuing that for “those of British descent in the Canadian colonies, there were three options: carrying with them their identity as Irish, Scots, Welsh, or English; attaching themselves to a broad British history; or, alternatively, starting a new shared history in a new land” (6). According to Connors and MacDonald, periodicals were key to creating that shared past, achieving the task either by explicitly addressing historical matters or by “attaching” the present to the past “in an attempt to create a sense of continuity” (8).

This claim seems fine so far as it goes, but a little further consideration raises some problems. While it is true that many periodicals of the time addressed matters of history and attempted to put contemporary events into a historical context, this did not necessarily result in a sense of a shared past. The sheer volume and diversity of publications issued during the first half of the nineteenth century makes it very difficult to guess (let alone pin down) what those publications’ multitudinous readers might have thought the past actually consisted of. Given that there were upwards of thirty-six hundred titles in circulation per annum during the study period (all increasingly varied in content, price, and audience), and nearly seventy-nine million newspaper readers...