The Long Revolution by Raymond Williams

Author:Raymond Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: epub, ebook, QuarkXPress
ISBN: 111-1-11-111111-1
Publisher: Parthian Books
Published: 2013-10-18T04:00:00+00:00

3 The Growth of the Popular Press

The development of the press in England, in particular the growth of the popular press, is of major importance in any account of our general cultural expansion. The vital period of development is significant in itself, from the establishment of a middle-class reading public in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, through the widening of this public to the virtually universal readership of our own time. And the newspaper, as a continuing element in this period of growth, is an obviously significant element for analysis, both because of this continuity, and because of its status as the most widely distributed printed product.

Some of the facts of the development are very difficult to establish – a few indeed are impossible, due to records lost or not kept. But there are quite enough facts to establish a general pattern, and the histories of newspapers reproduce these faithfully enough. When it comes to analysis, however, there are two general defects. There is still a quite widespread failure to coordinate the history of the press with the economic and social history within which it must necessarily be interpreted. Even more, there is a surprising tendency to accept certain formulas about the development, which seem less to arise from the facts of press development than to be brought to them. The general cultural expansion has been interpreted in a particular way, and the history of the press has been fitted, often against the facts, to this general interpretation.

The most common of these formulas is that before the coming of Tit-Bits and Answers in the 1880s, and of Northcliffe’s halfpenny Daily Mail in 1896, there was no cheap popular press in England. The basis of the new press, it is said, was the Education Act of 1870, by means of which the ordinary people of England learned to read. At this point, the formula has alternative endings. Either, as a result of this process, a popular press, the keystone of a lively democracy, could be established. Or, with the entry of the masses on to the cultural scene, the press became, in large part, trivial and degraded, where before, serving an educated minority, it had been responsible and serious.

Now these alternative endings hardly matter, and the debate between them is really irrelevant, for the fact is that to anyone who knows the history of the press, or the history of education, such an account is nonsense. It can be traced, interestingly enough, to Northcliffe, who said to Max Pemberton in 1883:

The Board Schools are turning out hundreds of thousands of boys and girls annually who are anxious to read. They do not care for the ordinary newspaper. They have no interest in society, but they will read anything which is simple and is sufficiently interesting. The man who has produced this Tit-Bits has got hold of a bigger thing than he imagines. He is only at the beginning of a development which is going to change the whole face of journalism.

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