Discussion Post: The Six Napoleons
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sherlock60This week, the canon story we’re looking at is The Six Napoleons and the chosen topic is Newspapers and Periodicals.
A few facts:
📰 There is some very good scholarship on Victorian newspapers… which points out that there was no national press as we understand it today, and that the provincial press outsold the metropolitan after the abolition of newspaper taxes at mid-century… ...London papers… were [only] provincial papers, largely reporting the South-East of England.
...so much [current] writing on Victorian print culture talked about newspapers as though they were full of politics, ignoring the vast range of magazine-style material… in local papers — fiction, poetry, literary extracts and reviews, history, biography, memoir, geography, women’s columns, travel writing, satire and more. [Andrew Hobbs]
📰 By the early 19th century, there were 52 London papers and over 100 other titles. As stamp, paper and other duties were progressively reduced from the 1830s onwards (all duties on newspapers were gone by 1855) there was a massive growth in overall circulation as major events and improved communications developed the public's need for information...
The development of the press was greatly assisted by the gradual abolition of the taxes on periodicals as well as by the introduction of a cheap postal system. Both of these developments made the newspaper more affordable to a greater percentage of the population… After the reduction of the stamp tax in 1836 from four pence to one penny, the circulation of English newspapers rose from 39,000,000 to 122,000,000 by 1854. [Wikipedia]
📰 From 1860 until around 1910 is considered a 'golden age' of newspaper publication, with technical advances in printing and communication combined with a professionalisation of journalism and the prominence of new owners. Newspapers became more partisan…
With literacy rising sharply, the rapidly growing demand for news led to changes in the physical size, visual appeal, heavy use of war reporting, brisk writing style, and an omnipresent emphasis on speedy reporting thanks to the telegraph. [Wikipedia]
📰 The Daily Universal Register began life in 1785 and was later to become known as The Times from 1788. This was the most significant newspaper of the first half of the 19th century, but from around 1860 there were a number of more strongly competitive titles, each differentiated by its political biases and interests…
The Daily Telegraph was first published on 29 June 1855 and was owned by Arthur Sleigh, who transferred it to Joseph Levy the following year. Levy produced it as the first penny newspaper in London.
The Illustrated London News, founded in 1842, was the world's first illustrated weekly newspaper.
The Daily Mail was first published in 1896 by Lord Northcliffe; it became Britain's second biggest-selling daily newspaper after The Sun. The Daily Mail was Britain's first daily newspaper aimed at the newly literate "lower-middle class market resulting from mass education, combining a low retail price with plenty of competitions, prizes and promotional gimmicks", and the first British paper to sell a million copies a day. It was, from the outset, a newspaper for women, being the first to provide features especially for them… [Wikipedia]
📰 1822 - March 3 : ‘Bell's Life in London’ adds ‘and Sporting Chronicle’ to its title. First newspaper to include sport as a major component. Merged with Sporting Life in 1886.
1832 : First recorded British newspaper cartoon, published in Bell's New Weekly Messenger.
1841 - July 17 : Punch founded.
1843 - Oct 1 : News of the World founded by John Browne Bell at 3d. Newsagents at first refused to handle it at such a low price.
1844 - Aug 6 : First story based on telegraphed news printed in the Times: birth of Queen's son at Windsor.
1846 - Jan 21 : Daily News launched, edited by Charles Dickens.
1848 : William Howard Russell joins staff of the Times. Shortly to become first professional war correspondent.
1848 : First W.H. Smith station bookstall opened, at Euston.
1857 : Daily Telegraph invents box number system for classified advertisements.
1868 : Press Association formed.
1880 : W.T. Stead succeeds John Morley on Pall Mall Gazette and introduces 'new journalism', including the interview and gossip column, into Britain.
1881 - Oct 22 : Tit-Bits launched by George Newnes.
1889 - March 30 : Early use of photographs: Cambridge and Oxford boat crews, in Illustrated London News.
1900 - April 24 : Daily Express launched by Pearson. First national daily to put news on the front page. [British Library]
📰 The "Ladies' Columns" and "Ladies' Pages", which developed in the 1880s and '90s, gave space to women journalists in some of the most popular newspapers of the day. Though society gossip, fashion and domestic affairs were their ostensible raison d'être, columnists were adept at widening the agenda to include issues they considered important.
Three of the best-known such columns were those in the weekly papers the Illustrated London News, the Graphic and the daily Pall Mall Gazette…
Florence Fenwick-Miller's "Ladies' Column" (later "Page")... ran from 1886 to 1918. A trained doctor, journalist, suffragist and successful platform speaker, she blended more frivolous feminine interests with feminist issues...
The author of "Place aux Dames" on the rival Graphic was Lady Violet Greville… the first woman acknowledged - if unofficially - as an expert in breeding racehorses… In particular she championed the cause of sports for women.
The "Wares of Autolycus" column in the Pall Mall Gazette ran from May 1893 to the end of 1898, appearing most days of the week, and drawing on a group of female journalists, notably Alice Meynell, to cover between them literature, gardening, fashion, home decor, good food , and society news. But though constructed in gossip column form, its aesthetic and literary standards lifted it well above the level of the average contemporary gossip column. [Barbara Onslow]
📰 With the mid-century came the launch of general interest women's magazines aimed at the burgeoning middle-classes. Sam Beeton's the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine and its rival the Ladies' Treasury dominated this market. Far less popular, but of importance in the development of women's magazines, as well as in promoting their own cause - women's rights - were the early Victorian feminist papers like the English Woman's Journal. (The choice of "woman" rather than "lady" in a title was itself significant.) Indeed, by the 1890s… even the women's penny papers, where home-making was a major concern, addressed political issues affecting women, and positively encouraged them take up careers or play a part in public life. [Barbara Onslow]
📰 The magazines [of the mid-Victorian period] were routinely published in two formats: first in a weekly or monthly issue, and then in a half-yearly volume which collected all of the numbers together; there were no quarterlies. The original issues were essentially ephemera, printed on relatively low quality paper, and stapled or glued together within a limp wrapper. The half-yearly editions, on the other hand, were of much higher quality. They were usually mounted on better paper and were not assembled from the individual issues as first published, but were re-printed on finer stock. Bound within a coloured cloth binding, they were embellished with gilt devices on the spine and upper board. [Simon Cooke, Ph.D., Assistant Editor for Book Illustration and Design]
Some useful resources:
History of British newspapers: 19th century On Wikipedia.
Concise History of the British Newspaper in the Nineteenth Century On the British Library website.
The Dictionary of Victorian London This is the link to the main index: click on ‘Publications’.
newspapers in London On The Dictionary of Victorian London.
The deleterious dominance of The Times in nineteenth-century scholarship By Andrew Hobbs (University of Central Lancashire). A brief explanation of what Victorian newspapers were like in general. On the Journal of Victorian Culture Online.
British Newspapers 1800-1860 By Ed King, British Library.
List of 19th-century British periodicals On Wikipedia.
Victorian Periodicals Mentioned in the Victorian Web Index of articles on The Victorian Web.
Victorian Page Many Useful Articles on various aspects of Victorian magazines and journalism. There is some emphasis on Victorian women's magazines and the work of Victorian women journalists.
Victorian Voices An archive of articles from Victorian magazines.
Victorian Women’s Magazines By Essie Fox, on The Virtual Victorian blog.
Religious Newspapers in the Nineteenth Century By Keith Ives, on Keith’s Histories.
19th-century medical fraudsters who got caught out On The British Newspaper Archive.
Volume XIV: English: The Victorian Age: Part Two: The Nineteenth Century, III Links to parts of The Cambridge History of English and American Literature: An Encyclopedia in Eighteen Volumes. The relevant chapter is IV. The Growth of Journalism By J. S. R. PHILLIPS, Editor of The Yorkshire Post, Leeds. On bartleby.com
9 astonishing deaths reported in Victorian newspapers On HistoryExtra. Extracts from The Burglar Caught by a Skeleton by Jeremy Clay. Article submitted by Emma Mason.
5 Pieces of Bad Advice from Victorian Women's Magazines By Carly Silver, on History Buff.
Waterloo Directory On YouTube. A channel hosting video summaries of popular titles, biographies of people, and descriptions of publication processes from the nineteenth-century newspaper and periodical press.
Victorian Era Newspapers: Various sections, Layouts and Templates There are links to templates for the front page of a Victorian newspaper, if you ever need to mock up your own. On Victorian-Era.org
The Strand Magazine: An Illustrated Monthly This is a collection of the bound editions of 'The Strand Magazine: An Illustrated Monthly', from its first issue (January) 1891-1922 (December)... A commenter mentions that the Sherlock Holmes stories are missing from a particular volume but someone else seems to have uploaded the volume separately with the stories restored.
Genealogy & Family History Includes links to transcribed Victorian newspaper articles.
Wikipedia:List of online newspaper archives: United Kingdom NB Not all Victorian, and not all free.
The 5 Best Free Sites for Online Newspaper Research for Genealogy On The Ancestor Hunt blog. Emphasis on US.
Papers Past New Zealand newspapers and periodicals from the 19th and 20th centuries, available to read online for free.
newsvenders and news-boys On The Dictionary of Victorian London.
Fleet Street: the surprising origins of Britain's newspaper industry By Dr. Matthew Green, on the Telegraph website. The Victorian era isn’t mentioned in the article but I’ve included it here because there is a painting which seems relevant: A 1894 print of a young newspaper seller at work in Fleet Street.
Please feel free to discuss this topic in the comments.
Please also feel free to comment about the canon story itself or any related aspects outside this week’s theme. For example, any reactions, thoughts, theories, fic recs, favourite adaptations of the canon story… Or any other contribution you wish to make. And if you have any suggestions for fic prompts springing from this week's story, please feel free to share those in the comments as well.
A few facts:
📰 There is some very good scholarship on Victorian newspapers… which points out that there was no national press as we understand it today, and that the provincial press outsold the metropolitan after the abolition of newspaper taxes at mid-century… ...London papers… were [only] provincial papers, largely reporting the South-East of England.
...so much [current] writing on Victorian print culture talked about newspapers as though they were full of politics, ignoring the vast range of magazine-style material… in local papers — fiction, poetry, literary extracts and reviews, history, biography, memoir, geography, women’s columns, travel writing, satire and more. [Andrew Hobbs]
📰 By the early 19th century, there were 52 London papers and over 100 other titles. As stamp, paper and other duties were progressively reduced from the 1830s onwards (all duties on newspapers were gone by 1855) there was a massive growth in overall circulation as major events and improved communications developed the public's need for information...
The development of the press was greatly assisted by the gradual abolition of the taxes on periodicals as well as by the introduction of a cheap postal system. Both of these developments made the newspaper more affordable to a greater percentage of the population… After the reduction of the stamp tax in 1836 from four pence to one penny, the circulation of English newspapers rose from 39,000,000 to 122,000,000 by 1854. [Wikipedia]
📰 From 1860 until around 1910 is considered a 'golden age' of newspaper publication, with technical advances in printing and communication combined with a professionalisation of journalism and the prominence of new owners. Newspapers became more partisan…
With literacy rising sharply, the rapidly growing demand for news led to changes in the physical size, visual appeal, heavy use of war reporting, brisk writing style, and an omnipresent emphasis on speedy reporting thanks to the telegraph. [Wikipedia]
📰 The Daily Universal Register began life in 1785 and was later to become known as The Times from 1788. This was the most significant newspaper of the first half of the 19th century, but from around 1860 there were a number of more strongly competitive titles, each differentiated by its political biases and interests…
The Daily Telegraph was first published on 29 June 1855 and was owned by Arthur Sleigh, who transferred it to Joseph Levy the following year. Levy produced it as the first penny newspaper in London.
The Illustrated London News, founded in 1842, was the world's first illustrated weekly newspaper.
The Daily Mail was first published in 1896 by Lord Northcliffe; it became Britain's second biggest-selling daily newspaper after The Sun. The Daily Mail was Britain's first daily newspaper aimed at the newly literate "lower-middle class market resulting from mass education, combining a low retail price with plenty of competitions, prizes and promotional gimmicks", and the first British paper to sell a million copies a day. It was, from the outset, a newspaper for women, being the first to provide features especially for them… [Wikipedia]
📰 1822 - March 3 : ‘Bell's Life in London’ adds ‘and Sporting Chronicle’ to its title. First newspaper to include sport as a major component. Merged with Sporting Life in 1886.
1832 : First recorded British newspaper cartoon, published in Bell's New Weekly Messenger.
1841 - July 17 : Punch founded.
1843 - Oct 1 : News of the World founded by John Browne Bell at 3d. Newsagents at first refused to handle it at such a low price.
1844 - Aug 6 : First story based on telegraphed news printed in the Times: birth of Queen's son at Windsor.
1846 - Jan 21 : Daily News launched, edited by Charles Dickens.
1848 : William Howard Russell joins staff of the Times. Shortly to become first professional war correspondent.
1848 : First W.H. Smith station bookstall opened, at Euston.
1857 : Daily Telegraph invents box number system for classified advertisements.
1868 : Press Association formed.
1880 : W.T. Stead succeeds John Morley on Pall Mall Gazette and introduces 'new journalism', including the interview and gossip column, into Britain.
1881 - Oct 22 : Tit-Bits launched by George Newnes.
1889 - March 30 : Early use of photographs: Cambridge and Oxford boat crews, in Illustrated London News.
1900 - April 24 : Daily Express launched by Pearson. First national daily to put news on the front page. [British Library]
📰 The "Ladies' Columns" and "Ladies' Pages", which developed in the 1880s and '90s, gave space to women journalists in some of the most popular newspapers of the day. Though society gossip, fashion and domestic affairs were their ostensible raison d'être, columnists were adept at widening the agenda to include issues they considered important.
Three of the best-known such columns were those in the weekly papers the Illustrated London News, the Graphic and the daily Pall Mall Gazette…
Florence Fenwick-Miller's "Ladies' Column" (later "Page")... ran from 1886 to 1918. A trained doctor, journalist, suffragist and successful platform speaker, she blended more frivolous feminine interests with feminist issues...
The author of "Place aux Dames" on the rival Graphic was Lady Violet Greville… the first woman acknowledged - if unofficially - as an expert in breeding racehorses… In particular she championed the cause of sports for women.
The "Wares of Autolycus" column in the Pall Mall Gazette ran from May 1893 to the end of 1898, appearing most days of the week, and drawing on a group of female journalists, notably Alice Meynell, to cover between them literature, gardening, fashion, home decor, good food , and society news. But though constructed in gossip column form, its aesthetic and literary standards lifted it well above the level of the average contemporary gossip column. [Barbara Onslow]
📰 With the mid-century came the launch of general interest women's magazines aimed at the burgeoning middle-classes. Sam Beeton's the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine and its rival the Ladies' Treasury dominated this market. Far less popular, but of importance in the development of women's magazines, as well as in promoting their own cause - women's rights - were the early Victorian feminist papers like the English Woman's Journal. (The choice of "woman" rather than "lady" in a title was itself significant.) Indeed, by the 1890s… even the women's penny papers, where home-making was a major concern, addressed political issues affecting women, and positively encouraged them take up careers or play a part in public life. [Barbara Onslow]
📰 The magazines [of the mid-Victorian period] were routinely published in two formats: first in a weekly or monthly issue, and then in a half-yearly volume which collected all of the numbers together; there were no quarterlies. The original issues were essentially ephemera, printed on relatively low quality paper, and stapled or glued together within a limp wrapper. The half-yearly editions, on the other hand, were of much higher quality. They were usually mounted on better paper and were not assembled from the individual issues as first published, but were re-printed on finer stock. Bound within a coloured cloth binding, they were embellished with gilt devices on the spine and upper board. [Simon Cooke, Ph.D., Assistant Editor for Book Illustration and Design]
Some useful resources:
History of British newspapers: 19th century On Wikipedia.
Concise History of the British Newspaper in the Nineteenth Century On the British Library website.
The Dictionary of Victorian London This is the link to the main index: click on ‘Publications’.
newspapers in London On The Dictionary of Victorian London.
The deleterious dominance of The Times in nineteenth-century scholarship By Andrew Hobbs (University of Central Lancashire). A brief explanation of what Victorian newspapers were like in general. On the Journal of Victorian Culture Online.
British Newspapers 1800-1860 By Ed King, British Library.
List of 19th-century British periodicals On Wikipedia.
Victorian Periodicals Mentioned in the Victorian Web Index of articles on The Victorian Web.
Victorian Page Many Useful Articles on various aspects of Victorian magazines and journalism. There is some emphasis on Victorian women's magazines and the work of Victorian women journalists.
Victorian Voices An archive of articles from Victorian magazines.
Victorian Women’s Magazines By Essie Fox, on The Virtual Victorian blog.
Religious Newspapers in the Nineteenth Century By Keith Ives, on Keith’s Histories.
19th-century medical fraudsters who got caught out On The British Newspaper Archive.
Volume XIV: English: The Victorian Age: Part Two: The Nineteenth Century, III Links to parts of The Cambridge History of English and American Literature: An Encyclopedia in Eighteen Volumes. The relevant chapter is IV. The Growth of Journalism By J. S. R. PHILLIPS, Editor of The Yorkshire Post, Leeds. On bartleby.com
9 astonishing deaths reported in Victorian newspapers On HistoryExtra. Extracts from The Burglar Caught by a Skeleton by Jeremy Clay. Article submitted by Emma Mason.
5 Pieces of Bad Advice from Victorian Women's Magazines By Carly Silver, on History Buff.
Waterloo Directory On YouTube. A channel hosting video summaries of popular titles, biographies of people, and descriptions of publication processes from the nineteenth-century newspaper and periodical press.
Victorian Era Newspapers: Various sections, Layouts and Templates There are links to templates for the front page of a Victorian newspaper, if you ever need to mock up your own. On Victorian-Era.org
The Strand Magazine: An Illustrated Monthly This is a collection of the bound editions of 'The Strand Magazine: An Illustrated Monthly', from its first issue (January) 1891-1922 (December)... A commenter mentions that the Sherlock Holmes stories are missing from a particular volume but someone else seems to have uploaded the volume separately with the stories restored.
Genealogy & Family History Includes links to transcribed Victorian newspaper articles.
Wikipedia:List of online newspaper archives: United Kingdom NB Not all Victorian, and not all free.
The 5 Best Free Sites for Online Newspaper Research for Genealogy On The Ancestor Hunt blog. Emphasis on US.
Papers Past New Zealand newspapers and periodicals from the 19th and 20th centuries, available to read online for free.
newsvenders and news-boys On The Dictionary of Victorian London.
Fleet Street: the surprising origins of Britain's newspaper industry By Dr. Matthew Green, on the Telegraph website. The Victorian era isn’t mentioned in the article but I’ve included it here because there is a painting which seems relevant: A 1894 print of a young newspaper seller at work in Fleet Street.
Please feel free to discuss this topic in the comments.
Please also feel free to comment about the canon story itself or any related aspects outside this week’s theme. For example, any reactions, thoughts, theories, fic recs, favourite adaptations of the canon story… Or any other contribution you wish to make. And if you have any suggestions for fic prompts springing from this week's story, please feel free to share those in the comments as well.
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no subject
Date: 2017-01-22 08:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-01-23 12:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-02-25 06:40 pm (UTC):: Though society gossip, fashion and domestic affairs were their ostensible raison d'être, columnists were adept at widening the agenda to include issues they considered important. ::
Still true today, that! Judith Martin (aka Miss Manners, who started her journalism career on the society desk) talks about how she was able to get quotes that the news-desk reporters couldn't, because politicians would assume she was "just" a gossip columnist, and thus would say whatever damning thing in front of her under the very false presumption that she wouldn't understand and didn't care. Sometimes she'd even ask for an on-the-record quote on a thing, and they'd go ahead and answer, presuming she was making a joke. (She never was, as they'd find out the next day.)
I don't expect you to have the answer to this, but why "Wares of Autolycus?" I'm familiar with the Greek character (a demigod, a thief, Odysseus' grandfather) but it strikes me as an odd choice. *pokes at the internet, tries to make an answer come out*
I don't know what the setup is on that side of the Atlantic, but over here, a good many of those paywall newspaper archives are available via one's public library. As in, the municipal library has already paid the fee, so as long as you're logged in as a patron, you can search and read them through your library website. (I totally have not taken advantage of that while researching fic, nope.)
no subject
Date: 2017-02-25 11:29 pm (UTC)I don't expect you to have the answer to this... Never doubt my ability with a search engine, madam ^___^ I found this on Google Books in a preview of The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=lfEh4TUvhFgC&pg=PA47&lpg=PA47&dq=Wares+of+Autolycus&source=bl&ots=GGKwwtzK6Q&sig=wtxC41t2w0oS5-l9VkragLnxL3I&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjapJeK9KvSAhWkC8AKHdXvAsMQ6AEIIzAC#v=onepage&q=Wares%20of%20Autolycus&f=false) By Talia Schaffer:
A different set of women writers were associated with another magazine. The Pall Mall Gazette published a column called “The Wares of Autolycus,” reserved for the most eminent women writers of the period, who wrote anonymously on different days. The Yellow Book women were daring young women making their living in journalism and leading Bohemian lives, but the Pall Mall Gazette women tended to be older, more established figures with reputations already in place. “The Wares of Autolycus” derived its name from the pickpocket, liar, and rogue Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale. Thus the very name of the column establishes the expectation that these women’s words are ruses to cheat the reader or, at best, “unconsider’d trifles”.
In spite of publishing under such a hostile cognomen, the “Wares” authors wrote some of the most important prose of the period...
Re being able to use newspaper archives via libraries in Britain... I've just had a go! I was able to log into the British Library Newspapers Archive just by using my local libraries' account number - I had no idea it was so simple. Thank you ^__^
no subject
Date: 2017-02-26 12:44 am (UTC)And yay! I can't always find a newspaper archive for the place and decade I'm trying to research, but when I can, it's a motherlode of useful stuff. :-D