‘By the People, for the People’: The Literary North and the Local Press 1880–1914

Abstract

To speak of a ‘Literary North’ in terms of working-class communities such as Middlesbrough in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods is to talk mainly, if not exclusively, about newspapers. In her social survey of Middlesbrough’s working population, At the Works (1907), Florence Bell notes its relish for penny novelettes and sensation fiction, especially that of Ellen Wood whose appeal, she surmises, is based on the ‘admirable compound of the goody and the sensational’, with East Lynne ‘the book whose name one most often hears from men and women both’ (Bell 1907: 166). Yet by far the most preferred form of the written word for a good three-quarters of Bell’s sample is not so much in books as in newspapers, and in particular the ‘local halfpenny evening paper, which seems to be in the hands of every man and woman, and almost every child’ (144). This was the North-Eastern Daily Gazette, a Middlesbrough-based newspaper whose breadth of reference comes from a mixed format that Bell goes on to describe as containing ‘a summary of general news, a serial story, a good deal of sporting information’ as well as ‘gossip and commercial news’ (144). It is on this newspaper and its offshoot the Northern Weekly Gazette that this chapter will focus, to locate their popular working-class fictions within wider constructions of the North.