Abstract
The origins of both mass media and mass market were inextricably bound together. It is one of the more persistent historical myths that the popular press was a response to the Education Act of 1870. A generation before the Act made provision for mass education, there was a reading public large enough to have supported a popular press of considerable size.1 The indigenous street literature of ballads and broadsheets supplemented by chapbooks, penny novels, Sunday newspapers and Saturday magazines all bear witness to this. Richard Altick, for example, looks to the early nineteenth century to identify a new mass reading public which included skilled workers, small shopkeepers, higher domestic servants, physicians, teachers and an increasing number of white-collar workers.2 To be sure, a mass press needed universal education, but, as Harold Perkin says, this is ‘a truism of egregious triviality’.3 The new literates were, in any case, often the poorest members of society and so could not afford to buy papers. Overcrowded housing, poor lighting, exhaustion from work, and the lack of spare money and spare time inhibited the growth of the popular press as much as illiteracy did. Only when the opportunities for leisure had been expanded would a popular press be feasible, and then, as with leisure in the new consumer society, it would have to be tailored to meet the needs of the emerging mass market.
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Notes
H.J. Perkin, ‘The origins of the popular press’, History Today, 7 (1957), p. 429.
Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A social history of the mass reading public, 1800–1900 (Chicago, 1957).
On the origins of the popular press, see Alan J. Lee, The Origins of the Popular Press in England 1855–1914 (London, 1976);
Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London, 1961), especially chapter 3, ‘The growth of the popular press’;
Raymond Williams, ‘The press and popular culture: an historical perspective’, in George Boyce, James Curran and Pauline Wingate (eds), Newspaper History: From the seventeenth century to the present day (London, 1978), pp. 41–50;
Francis Williams, Dangerous Estate: The anatomy of newspapers (London, 1957);
and G.A. Cranfield, The Press and Society: From Caxton to Northcliffe (London, 1978).
From Raymond Williams, Communications (3rd edition, Harmondsworth, 1976), p. 15.
Lady Bell, ‘Reading habits in Middlesbrough’, extract from At the Works, 1907, reprinted in Peter Keating (ed.), Into Unknown England, 1866–1913: Selections from the sociological explorers (London, 1976).
The figure comes from W. Hamish Fraser, The Coming of the Mass Market, 1850–1914 (London, 1981), p. 73. Raymond Williams emphasises the importance of Sunday reading, and Alan Lee writes of the new weeklies such as Tit-Bits, Pearson’s Weekly and Answers that ‘they were, indeed, more important, economically and culturally, than the more famous political weeklies’ (Lee, ‘The structure, ownership and control of the press, 1855–1914’, in Boyce et al., op. cit., p. 124).
Quoted in Q.D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London, 1965), p. 179.
For the new journalism, see Lee, Origins, op. cit., pp. 117–30; and Joel H. Wiener (ed.), Papers for the Millions: The new journalism in Britain, 1850 to 1914 (Westport, 1988). See also Leavis, op. cit., pp. 180–2;
J.O. Baylen, ‘Politics and the “new journalism”’, Victorian Periodicals Review, XX (1987), pp. 126–41; and
John Goodbody, ‘“The Star”: its role in the new journalism’, Victorian Periodicals Review, XX (1987), pp. 141–50.
Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff (eds), The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and soundings (Leicester, 1982), p. xv.
Sidney Dark, The Life of Sir Arthur Pearson (London, 1922), p. 6.
See Michael Rosenthal, The Character Factory: Baden-Powell and the origins of the Boy Scout movement (New York, 1986), pp. 81–7.
Barbara Quinn Schmidt, entry for Pearson’s Magazine in Alvin Sullivan (ed.), British Literary Magazines: The Victorian and Edwardian Age (London, 1984), pp. 310–13.
‘The prevalence of insanity’, Pearson’s Magazine, 1906, vol. 1, pp. 135–46; ‘The waste of infant life’, Pearson’s Magazine, 1906, vol. 1, pp. 2–15; Lord Roberts, ‘How to make a nation of marksmen’, Pearson’s Magazine, 1906, vol. 1, p. 479.
Quoted in Simon Nowell-Smith, The House of Cassell, 1848–1958 (London, 1958), p. 22.
Sydney Smith, Donald Macleod of Glasgow: A memoir and a study (London, 1926), p. 110.
Stanley Harrison, Poor Men’s Guardians: A record of the struggles for a democratic newspaper press, 1763–1973 (London, 1974), p. 171.
Alvar Ellegard, Darwin and the General Reader: The reception of Darwin’s theory of evolution in the British periodical press, 1859–1872 (Göteborg, 1958).
F.E. Baily, ‘The crushing of the middle class’, Pearson’s Magazine, 1912, vol. 2, pp. 382–91.
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© 1996 Peter Broks
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Broks, P. (1996). Popular Press. In: Media Science before the Great War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25043-1_2
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