Epilogue

Abstract

The Epilogue summarizes Shaw’s role in London’s New Journalism and reiterates the never before fully considered importance of Shaw’s journalistic writing. This study’s contextualization of Shaw’s journalism reveals that his work, like so much of London’s journalism during the modernizing period, emerged specifically from the period of the Whitechapel murders and, most importantly, the popular press’ coverage of those murders. The Whitechapel press coverage changed London and Western journalism forever. Shaw, too, was a product of that time and, in turn, impacted the journalism that grew from that 1888 summer and autumn of blood. The Epilogue reminds us not only of the colossal power of Shaw’s journalism, but also the importance of his role in developing questioning and criticizing as democratic journalistic techniques, even within a war, as the basis of free societies and the ideals he sought to promote. Shaw’s journalism defined and represented the highest ideals of the New Journalism.