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

For at least a century, histories of the newspaper press have focused on either the journalists themselves or particular papers. In the last several years, press scholars have taken up certain press movements: Joel Wiener on New Journalism and the unstamped press, for example, and Aled Jones and Stephen Koss on the political press. Twenty years ago Lucy Brown contributed an admirable history of the Victorian newspaper press in Victorian News and Newspapers. But until now a definitive intellectual history of the newspaper press, thoroughly contextualized within its culture, has not been attempted. In Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850-1950, Mark Hampton has succeeded in presenting a critical study both of "how the press was discussed and understood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries" (2), and of how the press's role changed over that period from educator of the "people" to representative voice of the "people" to entertainer and propagandiser of the "people."

Hampton leans on the press as well as a variety of other cultural sources-cartoons, fictions, speeches, pamphlets, and a variety of other (mostly liberal) political movements-to flesh out the place of newspapers within the culture of Britain in the century under discussion. Around the mid-nineteenth century, Whig support of compulsory elementary education culminating with the Education Reform Bill of 1870 became wedded with the larger concept of transmitting "beliefs and virtue from betters to inferiors" (53)-that is, educating and civilizing the so-called popular classes, preparing them to accept enthusiastically their place in a proper and just society. Hampton marshals source after contemporary source that claimed that the proper role of the press was to improve its readers by providing instruction in political and social issues and, not so incidentally, a forum for discussing those issues, all in a disinterested, nonpolitical context. A succession of mid-century articles in a wide range of periodicals, including Blackwoods, Household Words, the Economist, and other newspapers and magazines; speeches by Gladstone, Samuel Warren, and Baldwin Brown; and cartoons in Punch, all regularly described the degraded, uncivilized nature of the lower classes and the necessity for education-especially education as provided by the newspaper press-to raise them out of their ignorance. Thus, according to Hampton, the dominant culture in mid-nineteenth-century Britain seems to have accepted that the role of the press in society was to provide instruction (especially political instruction) to all classes, and further, to provide a forum for informed argument out of which would, inevitably, emerge the truth. Out of this apparent cultural compact grew the myth of a golden age of journalism, focused on truth rather than mere profit, fair and balanced in its reporting, and serious in its role as instructor to the people.

Toward the end of the century, the newspaper press moved from being primarily a purveyor of political debates to a purveyor of news. Opinion, which had been the heart of the newspapers' educational mission, was to be "relegated to the leading articles and in no way supported by the presentation of the news," says Hampton, summarizing the views of Economist editor Francis Hirst and others (81). New Journalism, emphasizing news, human interest, entertainment, and sensationalism, replaced "high journalism." Some saw journalism's new role as to provide a voice for the people. Others, who now perceived the people as neither rational nor educable, argued that the press's primary role was to provide the people with benevolent leadership. Still others clung to the by now traditional role of educating the people. But Hampton draws on a variety of sources to point out that the prevailing view in the bridge years between the old Victorian press and the new press that would dominate the twentieth century-the years of the New Journalism-thoroughly deemphasized the press's instructional role; those who believed in the value of the press at the turn of the twentieth century, says Hampton, had "to reconfigure the press's role so that it was...