The Listener Historical Archive 1929–1991 (review)

Two years ago, when for the first time in my professional life I was offered the services of a research assistant, I knew exactly how I had to make use of her time: I paid for a tank of gas, sent her up to Chapel Hill, set her up in a hotel room, and put her to work paging through issues of the Listener, searching, scanning, and making pdf files at my direction. This felt both like a fabulous luxury and like doing one’s courting through an intermediary—symptomatic of the furtive and piecemeal relations that most researchers in the United States have had to have with many of those British periodicals most salient and intriguing for modernist cultural studies. Now, with the advent of the digitized and searchable Listener Historical Archive, made available by the BBC through arrangement with Gale, most of what my assistant so assiduously accomplished can be duplicated in an afternoon.

Work on the Listener, the weekly journal published by the BBC from 1929 until 1991, has until recently either used it as “context,” cherry-picked its content to focus on its most overtly “modernist” subject matter and contributors, or treated it as a transparent delivery system for broadcast materials. The first two problems, of course, have been endemic to and beyond modernist studies—they are the reasons the JMPS needed to be founded. The third is specific to the Listener, and perhaps accounts for the absence of this important publication from every major reference book on periodicals, modernist and otherwise, including both Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker’s Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines and Alvin Sullivan’s otherwise encyclopedic British Literary Magazines—which does include such peer publications as the New Statesman and the Spectator.

To some extent this absence is understandable. The contested conditions of the Listener’s founding, under protest by the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association and other press groups who objected to the further intrusion of BBC operations into print media, inaugurated a long history of resistance to accepting the Listener as a periodical. Deputations to the Postmaster General and Prime Minister, expressions of outrage in the leader columns, and some canny negotiation by BBC Director General John Reith resulted in a gentleman’s agreement whereby the journal was restricted to the publication of only 10 percent original material not related to broadcasting, and only as much advertising as “necessary.” Despite much evidence from internal records that the journal was from the outset conceived by at least some within the BBC as establishing an independent presence, it was carefully labeled and introduced as an adjunct to the educational mission of broadcasting.

If, then, as Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman have argued in Modernism in the Magazines, the taxonomizing of periodicals is a complex and fraught endeavor, it’s doubly so for the Listener, for which (as press groups argued) the backing of a public utility changed the basis for almost all decisions. The Listener could, and did, operate at a loss; it could significantly underprice the journals it identified as its competitors, although, of course, to do so was itself a problematic act of self-labeling. Almost all of the data categories Scholes and Wulfman mention in chapter 3 as useful for analysis point, in the Listener’s case, in opposite directions, making the resulting picture as self-contradictory as the term used within the BBC when the journal was being developed: “a twopenny Spectator.” In fact, the story of the Listener is in large part the story of how those contradictions were in turns disguised, exploited, denied, and negotiated by turns across a shifting media landscape. Over time, changes in broadcasting itself (such as the segmentation of listenership with the 1946 creation of the Third Programme) altered further both the symbolic and the material conditions of exchange between the journal and its parent Corporation.

The Listener Historical Archive, simply by making available the full run of the journal in searchable form, makes it possible to trace, to some extent, the course of this exchange...