Abstract
In January 1884, General Gordon was the man of the moment. He was poised to take the lead role in a great drama of empire which would not conclude — so far as the newspapers were concerned — until after the battle of Omdurman in September 1898. William Thomas Stead, pioneering journalist and the influential editor of the Pall Mall Gazette from 1883 to 1889, had set in motion a newspaper campaign which would push the government into sending Gordon to the Sudan and, ultimately, to his death at Khartoum in February 1885. Stead’s campaign was the beginning of a step change in Britain’s involvement in Africa and also in popular culture. The years 1884–1898 saw not only entanglement in the Sudan but also an unprecedented integration of imperial activity, popular journalism and fiction. In January 1884, the Illustrated London News went so far as to compare Gordon’s exploits to the popular romance fiction of imperial Britain:
The expectation of General Gordon’s success in this desperate enterprise is amply justified by his past career. His achievements as Governor of the Equatorial Provinces from 1874 to 1879 were more wonderful than are to be found in the wildest Oriental romance.1
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Notes
‘Polyglossic’ is used in the sense that Mikhail Bakhtin intended. Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse,’ ed. Michael Holquist and trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 41–83.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 101.
W.T. Stead, ‘Government by Journalism’, Contemporary Review, 49 (May 1886), 653–654.
W.T. Stead, ‘The Future of Journalism’, Contemporary Review, 50 (November 1886), 664.
Matthew Rubery, The Novelty of Newspapers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 6.
Dallas Liddle, ‘Bakhtinian “Journalization” and the Mid-Victorian Literary Marketplace’, Literature Compass, 4:5 (2007), 1468.
Niklas Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 55.
John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984); Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986);
Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, 2nd edition (Yale: Yale University Press, 2010);
Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004);
John Darwin, The Empire Project (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
See also Simon Potter, ‘Jingoism, Public Opinion and the New Imperialism: Newspapers and Imperial Rivalries at the fin de siècle,’ Media History, 20:1 (January 2014), 34–50.
See Donald Read, The Power of News (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992)
and Simon Potter, News and the British World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003).
See, for example, Laurel Brake, Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender and Literature in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994),
Lucy Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985),
Joel H. Wiener, The Americanization of the British Press, 1830s–1914: Speed in the Age of Transatlantic Journalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011).
Rubery , ‘Victorian Print Culture, Journalism and the Novel’, Literature Compass, 7:4 (2010), 295.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (1983; London: Verso, 1993), 34.
Laurel Brake, ‘The Old Journalism and the New: Forms of Cultural Production in London in the 1880s’, in Joel H. Wiener, ed., Papers for the Millions (New York and London: Greenwood Press, 1988), 1.
T.P. O’Connor, ‘The New Journalism,’ The New Review, I (October 1889), 427.
Kate Jackson, George Newnes and the New Journalism in Britain, 1880–1910: Culture and Profit (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 42.
George Gissing, New Grub Street (1891; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 459–460.
Mark Hampton, Visions of the Press in Britain: 1850–1950 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 37.
Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (1957; Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998), 363–364.
Alan J. Lee, The Origins of the Popular Press in England: 1855–1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1976), 120.
Andrew King and John Plunkett, Popular Print Media: 1820–1900, vol. I (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 18.
Raymond L. Schults, Crusader in Babylon: W.T. Stead and the Pall Mall Gazette (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1972), 37.
Paula Krebs, Gender, Race, and the Writing of Empire: Public Discourse and the Boer War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 4.
Mary A. Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 15.
Donald Read, The Power of News: The History of Reuters (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 7 and 45.
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 264.
Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Penguin, 2004), 222.
Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa (London: Abacus, 2003), xxiii.
John R. Seeley, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (1883; London: Macmillan, 1921), 10.
J.A. Froude, Oceana, or England and Her Colonies (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1886), 334.
Bernard Porter, The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism, 1850–1995, 4th edition (London: Longman, 2004), 87.
John O. Springhall, ‘“Up Guards and at them!”: British Imperialism and Popular Art, 1880–1914,’ in MacKenzie, ed., Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1986), 49.
Estelle W. Stead, My Father: Personal and Spiritual Reminiscences (London: William Heinemann, 1913), 106.
This is discussed in detail in Joseph Bristow’s, Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World (London: Harper Collins, 1991).
Innes Shand, ‘Contemporary Literature: I. Journalists,’ Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 758 (December 1878), 652 and 660.
Fitzjames Stephens, ‘Journalism,’ Cornhill Magazine, 6 (July 1862), 61.
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© 2015 Andrew Griffiths
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Griffiths, A. (2015). Introduction: Empire, News and Novels. 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_1
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