Metropolitan metrics: Nineteenth-century historians and literary scholars still love The Times (original) (raw)

The Deleterious Dominance of The Times in Nineteenth-Century Scholarship

Journal of Victorian Culture, 2013

The Times was a mid-nineteenth-century newspaper phenomenon, defeating rival London newspapers through its skilful management, advanced technology, greater editorial resources and access to powerful politicians. Its authority enabled it to make and break governments. However, the uniqueness of The Times limits its usefulness as a historical source. This article begins with a brief history of The Times, before analysing how the newspaper remains centre stage in the historiography of journalism and of nineteenth-century culture more broadly, despite the digitization of provincial and other London papers. Over-dependence on The Times, it argues, has exaggerated the significance of London daily newspapers and underplayed the importance of weekly papers, particularly those published outside London. The Times was unusual because it was a metropolitan rather than provincial paper, with a focus on political news and a dearth of lighter, broader content, or news of events around the UK. Using quantitative analysis of recent scholarship, the article demonstrates that unwarranted conclusions are still drawn from over-use of this source and from a wider view that it was representative of nineteenth-century newspapers in general. The conclusion urges a more geographically and culturally nuanced approach to Victorian newspapers, beyond a metropolitan-focused political and cultural history.

The London Journal 1845-1883: Periodicals, Production and Gender, Ashgate, 2004, ISBN 0 7546 3343 8

This book is the first full-length study of one of the most widely read publications of nineteenth-century Britain, the London Journal, over a period when mass-market reading in a modern sense was born. Treating the magazine as a case study, the book maps the Victorian mass-market periodical in general and provides both new bibliographical and theoretical knowledge of this area. Andrew King argues the necessity for an interdisciplinary vision that recognises that periodicals are commodities that occupy specific but constantly unstable places in a dynamic cultural field. He elaborates the sociological work of Pierre Bourdieu to suggest a model of cultural 'zones' where complex issues of power are negotiated through both conscious and unconscious strategies of legitimation and assumption by consumers and producers. He also critically engages with cultural theory as well as traditional scholarship in history, art history, and literature, combining a political economic approach to the commodity with an aesthetic appreciation of the commodity as fetish. Previous commentators have coded the mass market as somehow always 'feminine', and King offers a genealogy of how such a gender identity came about. Fundamentally, however, the author relies on new and extensive primary research to ground the changing ways in which the reading public became consumers of literary commodities on a scale never before seen. Finally, King recontextualizes within the Victorian mass market three key novels of the time - Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (serialised in the London Journal 1859-60), Mary Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1863), and a previously unknown version of Émile Zola's The Ladies' Paradise (1883) - and in so doing he lends them radically new and unexpected meanings. Contents: Preface; Part 1 Periodical Discourse: Periodical questions; Periodical titles; or, 'The London Journal' as a signifier. Part 2 Periodical Production; 1845–9. Theoretical issues; or, genre, title, network, space; Cultural numerology; or, circulation, demographics, debits and credits; 1849–57. Moving from the miscellany; or, J.F. Smith and after; 1857–62. When is a periodical not itself? or, Mark Lemon and his successors; 1862–83. The secret of success; or, American women and British men; Part 3 Periodical Gender; or, the Metastases of the Reader: 1845–55. Gender and the implied reader; or, the re-gendering of news; 1863. Lady Audley's secret zone; or, is subversion subversive?; 1868–83. Dress, address and the vote; or, the gender of performance; 1883: The revenge of the reader; or, Zola out and in; Appendix; References; Index. About the Author: Dr Andrew King is a senior lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Canterbury Christ Church University College, UK. Reviews: '… King has taken on the task of correcting this historiographic imbalance by thoroughly excavating some of the more obscure purlieus of mid-nineteenth century Grub Street, and nearly every page of the book bears witness to the assiduity and ingenuity of his primary research... a detailed and illuminating contribution to the expanding list of books dealing with various aspects of Victorian print culture published as part of Ashgate’s impressive 'The Nineteenth Century' series.' SHARP News '... this remarkable study. Its comprehensiveness and interdisciplinarity are likely to make it attractive to scholars in such diverse fields as media history, library science, cultural studies, journalism, and literary studies. King makes a convincing case for the London Journal as a key text in the history of the mass media, and provides a variety of interpretative tools that scholars are likely to find useful as they continue to explore the vast field of Victorian journalism.' The Library 'Andrew King has succeeded in writing a well-informed and thought-provoking study that breaks new ground, particularly in the way it balances theoretical insights with more traditional periodical historiography.' Victorian Periodicals Review ‘Andrew King's detailed examination of the production and reception of the London Journal during the mid-nineteenth century offers an excellent model for analyses of literary periodicals…’ Script and Print

A Fleet Street in Every Town: The Provincial Press in England, 1855-1900

A Fleet Street in Every Town: The Provincial Press in England, 1855-1900, 2018

I love being part of a scholarly community, and I owe so much to the generosity, time, encouragement and practical help of other members of this community. Thanks to Dave Russell and Steve Caunce for taking this project seriously in the first place, and for their excellent supervision, with the help of Dawn Archer; to other historians at the University of Central Lancashire, past and present, who have offered encouragement and inspiration to so many mature students like myself, including