Abstract
The Indian Mutiny of 1857–581 was relayed to the British parliament, press and people through a modernising communications network that brought Indian affairs to the imperial metropole more rapidly than ever before. This network, and the information that flowed through it, was constituted by a mixture of public and private investment, expertise and knowledge. The imperial governing authorities had developed the newly instituted Indian telegraph system, enabling the very latest information to be transmitted to Britain in a matter of hours, whilst private shipping companies had developed an ‘overland’ route that enabled mails carrying private correspondence and official documents to reach Britain in little more than a month, information that fleshed out the skeletal details provided via the wires. Although the means of transmitting news from India was either recently implemented or improved, much of the material constituting it thus remained of a largely similar character to the period preceding these innovations.2
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Notes
D. Peers and D. Finkelstein, ‘“A Great System of Circulation”: Introducing India to the Nineteenth Century Media’, in D. Peers and D. Finkelstein (eds.), Negotiating India in the Nineteenth Century Media, (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 7.
G. Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 86–8.
K. T. Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation 1846–1886 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 167–94.
See E. Palmegiano, ‘The Indian Mutiny and the Mid-Victorian Press’, Journal of Newspaper and Periodical History, 7 (London, 1991): 3–11; L. Peters, ‘“Double-dyed Traitors and Infernal Villains”: Illustrated London News, Household Words, Charles Dickens and the Indian Rebellion’, in Peers and Finkelstein (eds.), Negotiating India, pp. 110–34.
T. R. Metcalf, The Aftermath of Revolt: India, 1857–1870 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), pp. 72–3.
M. Finn, After Chartism: Nation and Class in English Radical Politics, 1848–1874 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 137–41.
Christopher Hill, ‘The Norman Yoke’, in his Puritans and Revolutionaries: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (London: Panther, 1968), pp. 58–125.
B. Porter, The Refugee Question in Mid-Victorian Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
M. Taylor, Ernest Jones, Chartism, and the Romance of Politics 1819–69 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 181–3.
Peter Mandler has recently identified a reckless analysis of texts without careful consideration of their reception, or ‘throw’, as a major ‘problem’ with what has been termed ‘the New Cultural History’. P. Mandler, ‘The Problem with Cultural History’, Cultural and Social History, 1 (London: Arnold, 2004), pp. 94–117.
M. Beetham, ‘Towards a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre’, and A. Humphreys, ‘Popular Narrative and Political Discourse in Reynolds Weekly Newspaper’, both in L. Brake, A. Jones and L. Madden (eds.), Investigating Victorian Journalism (London: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 19–32 and pp. 33–47.
Andrew Barry, ‘Lines of Communication and Spaces of Rule’, in Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (eds.), Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of Government (London: UCL Press, 1996), p. 131.
J. Belchem and J. Epstein, ‘The Nineteeenth-Century Gentleman Leader Revisited’, Social History, 22 (London: Routledge, 1997): 174–93.
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© 2006 Tim Pratt
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Pratt, T. (2006). Ernest Jones’ Mutiny: The People’s Paper, English Popular Politics and the Indian Rebellion 1857–58. In: Kaul, C. (eds) Media and the British Empire. Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230205147_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230205147_6
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