Abstract
In Thomas Carlyle’s thunderous satire Sartor Resartus, the fictional Professor of Philosophy Herr Teufelsdröckh, mocks the British print media in terms which anticipate W.T. Stead’s later assertions of the power of the press:
The Journalists are now the true Kings and Clergy: henceforth Historians, unless they are fools, must write not of Bourbon Dynasties, and Tudors and Hapsburgs; but of stamped Broad-sheet Dynasties, and quite new successive Names, according as this or the other Able Editor, or Combination of Able Editors gains the world’s ear. Of the British Newspaper Press, perhaps the most important of all, and wonderful enough in its secret constitution and procedure, a valuable descriptive history already exists, in that language, under the title of Satan’s Invisible World Displayed.1
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Notes
Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (London: Chapman and Hall, 1833), 30.
Gibbons Merle, ‘Review: Du Journalisme,’ Westminster Review, 18:35 (January 1833), 195–208.
‘Those poor bits of rag-paper with black ink on them; — from the Daily Newspaper to the Sacred Hebrew BOOK, what have they not done, what are they not doing!’ Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (New York and London: Macmillan, 1905), 220.
Alan J. Lee, The Origins of the Popular Press in England (London: Croom Helm, 1976), 88.
Lucy Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 217.
For more on the role of female journalists Barbara Onslow’s Women of the Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000) is an essential source; for those interested in the broad history of the war correspondent,
Philip Knightley’s The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq (London: André Deutsch, 2003 [1975]) is a fine starting point;
Simon Potter’s News and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial Press System, 1876–1922 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003) provides a richly detailed discussion of news networks in the period.
J.A. Hobson, The Psychology of Jingoism (London: Grant Richards, 1901), 11.
Rudyard Kipling, The Light That Failed (London and New York: Macmillan and Co., 1891), 70.
Ben Shephard, ‘Showbiz Imperialism: The Case of Peter Lobengula,’ in MacKenzie, ed., Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 94.
W.F. Butler, ‘The War Campaign and the War Correspondent,’ Macmillan’s Magazine, 37:221 (March 1878), 398.
P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688–2000, 2nd edition (Harlow: Longman, 2001), 47.
G.W. Steevens, With Kitchener to Khartum (1898; London: Darf, 1987), 43.
Roger T. Stearn, ‘Russell, Sir William Howard (1820–1907),’ in H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, ed., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), online.
A. Forbes, ‘How I Became a War Correspondent,’ English Illustrated Magazine, 7 (April 1884), 450.
M. Laing Meason, ‘A Narrow Escape,’ Macmillan’s Magazine, 37:218 (December 1877), 141.
E.F. Howard, ‘A Special Correspondent,’ English Illustrated Magazine, 174 (March 1898), 630.
G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 190.
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© 2015 Andrew Griffiths
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Griffiths, A. (2015). Most Extraordinary Careers: Special Correspondents and the News Narrative. In: The New Journalism, the New Imperialism and the Fiction of Empire, 1870–1900. Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137454386_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137454386_2
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