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  • Bernard Shaw, W. T. Stead, and the New Journalism: Whitechapel, Parnell, Titanic, and the Great War by Nelson O'Ceallaigh Ritschel
  • Helena Goodwyn (bio)
Nelson O'Ceallaigh Ritschel, Bernard Shaw, W. T. Stead, and the New Journalism: Whitechapel, Parnell, Titanic, and the Great War ( Basing-stoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. xi+248, $99.99 cloth.

Nelson O'Ceallaigh Ritschel's Bernard Shaw, W. T. Stead, and the New Journalism: Whitechapel, Parnell, Titanic, and the Great War is the latest addition to the "Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries" Palgrave Macmillan series edited by O'Ceallaigh Ritschel and Peter Gahan. O'Ceallaigh Ritschel's background as a Shaw scholar heavily informs the subject matter of this book, which uses W. T. Stead as a foil to define Shaw's journalism in opposition to the New Journalism. Shaw is presented to the reader as a voice of reason and rationalism, a man who fights bravely against the tide of his sensationalizing, sex-obsessed contemporaries.

In his introduction, O'Ceallaigh Ritschel makes the bold claim that Shaw's journalism from the 1880s to the Great War included "some of the most powerful and socially relevant journalism the Western world has experienced" (1). Quantifying such a claim would be difficult indeed, and this book certainly does not do so. But what it does establish, mostly through quotation, is that Shaw, like many of his contemporaries, felt an ambivalence towards journalism as a profession yet a compelling desire to engage with it nonetheless. Shaw's belief in journalism as the domain of the "young man" who is trained to state a problem "with an air that is the next best thing to solving it," but who never will solve it because he "wouldn't get paid any more for the solution if he had the time," demonstrates the outward contempt he held for the figure of the journalist (George Bernard Shaw, Sixteen Self Sketches [London: Constable, 1949], 53). But Shaw's interactions with the press, including his financial assistance for the founding [End Page 199] of the New Statesman in 1913, tell a different story to such pronouncements. This book, whilst not engaging with Shaw's various inconsistencies, does much to draw the story out.

The controversy surrounding Shaw's article "Common Sense about the War"—and his other war journalism—is examined in detail, successfully conveying to the reader a sense of the shockwaves Shaw created with his anti-war stance. Published in the New Statesman in November 1914, "Common Sense about the War" is described by O'Ceallaigh Ritschel as "perhaps the finest journalism ever composed" (7). Such value judgements, occurring regularly throughout the book, detract from its potential to contribute to current debates as one of the first studies to focus substantially on Shaw's journalism. Articles, letters, and reviews published by Shaw in a range of periodicals, including the Daily Chronicle, New Statesman, Pall Mall Gazette, Saturday Review, and Star, are the dominant objects of analysis here whilst references to Shaw's dramatic works are woven throughout, most often as supporting evidence for claims that they were "product[s] of his journalistic experience" (41).

The central argument that the book sets out to prove—that everywhere in Shaw's journalism he sought to inspire "common sense" reactions in the reading public—is a problematic premise if only because the term itself is given no critical framework or analysis of the prejudices it seems to rely upon. Throughout Bernard Shaw, W. T. Stead, and the New Journalism, O'Ceallaigh Ritschel maintains that Shaw dedicated himself to "countering […] the process that led an ignorant public to be fired up by an increasingly irresponsible and sensationalizing press that induced general hysteria (particularly amongst the bourgeoisie)" (19). The problem that the book is unable to overcome, therefore, is that it is almost impossible to substantiate the success with which O'Ceallaigh Ritschel is determined to credit Shaw: if indeed Shaw's principal motivation was opposing the New Journalism.

The book is divided into four chapters. The first, entitled "Stead and the Whitechapel Frenzy," revisits well-known press coverage of the Whitechapel murders from the Illustrated London News, Pall Mall Gazette, Star, and Times reached...

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