News: The Pursuit of Immediacy

Abstract

Underpinning the Victorian public sphere was a network characterized by an intense pursuit of immediacy. By creating an abstract and ‘empty’ space where the public might observe and participate in ongoing events on a societal scale, this network served to establish public opinion as a source of political legitimacy. The telegraph, the development of professional journalistic skill sets, and the extraction of colonial natural resources made it possible to extend the news network beyond regional and national borders. The uniform typographical ‘form of news’ characterizing Victorian daily newspapers was an effect of specific technological adjustments needed to move newsworthy events across vast distances without interruption or distortion. In this way, the news network mediated a secular time independent of motion.

In 1868, when he was about to be elected prime minister, William E. Gladstone wrote a pamphlet—A Chapter of Autobiography—discussing the circumstances of him leaving the Conservative Party.¹ It all, he wrote, came down to certain ‘silent changes […] advancing in the very bed and basis of modern society’.² These subterranean movements implied nothing less than a shift from an ancient principle of political legitimacy to a modern one:

If we have witnessed in the last forty years, beginning with the epoch of Roman Catholic Emancipation, a great increase in the changes of party, or of opinion, among prominent men, we are not at once to leap to the conclusion that public character, as a rule, has been either less upright, or even less vigorous. The explanation is rather to be found in this, that the public mind has been of a nature entirely transcending former experience; and that it has likewise been more promptly and more effectively represented, than at any earlier period, in the action of the Government and the Legislature.³

It was, in other words, not so much that Gladstone and his fellow party-changing colleagues had changed their minds, as that public opinion—that ‘very bed and basis of modern society’—had itself mutated into a form ‘entirely transcending former experience’.

This evolution of public opinion as a source of political legitimacy manifested in actual events both recent and ancient, Gladstone continued— mentioning changes in the governance of Anglican and Non-conformist churches, for instance, and the changing relation between ecclesiastical and political authorities since the Reformation, since Charlemagne, or even since Constantine. Modern political institutions were, he suggested, mere material manifestations, an ‘outward vesture’, of this ever-evolving agency of the public.⁴ Therefore, while political leaders must always ‘take honour and duty for their guides, and not the mere demand of the passing hour’, the nation’s progressive transition from a ‘stationary to a progressive period’ necessitated corresponding changes in the policies that were now to represent and express the wishes of the public. The evolution of public opinion required changes in policy.

Yet at the same time, political change demanded that politicians actively mobilize public opinion in support of their cause. The statesman was on the one hand to observe the movements of public opinion so as to implement in policy its ceaselessly changing character, while on the other he had to mobilize that very public opinion in order to achieve his own proposed policies. In addition to this, Gladstone stated, public opinion was to a large extent unable to realize or express what it actually wanted, ‘and it would resent and repudiate, if offered to its immature judgement, the very policy, which after a while it will gravely consider, and after another while enthusiastically embrace’.⁵ The eventual disestablishment of the Irish Church, for instance, was—so he argued—the manifestation of an evolving force which during the 1840s had been waiting for its ‘season for action [to] come’. Public opinion would eventually arrive at the position of the policymakers, and ‘gravely consider’ or later even ‘enthusiastically embrace’ the same proposals it at present would only ‘resent and repudiate’.⁶ Until the statesman and public opinion achieved temporal synchronicity, then, ‘premature’ policy proposals would simply have to ‘bide their time’.

This left the political leader in a paradoxical position: his role in relation to public opinion was to be at once a follower and a guide. In 1829, Lord Palmerston encountered this problem during a Commons debate. In a revealing section of his speech, he mused on the relation between public opinion and the liberal statesman, comparing the former to the winds and waves of the sea and the latter to the captain of a ship.

Look at one of those floating fortresses, which bear to the farthest regions of the globe, the prowess and the glory of England; see a puny insect at the helm, commanding the winds of heaven, and the waves of the ocean, and enslaving even the laws of nature, as if instead of being ordained to hold the universe together, they had only been established for his particular occasion. And yet the merest breath of those winds which he has yoked to his service, the merest drop of that fathomless abyss which he has made into his footstool, would, if ignorantly encountered, be more than enough for his destruction; but the powers of his mind have triumphed over the forces of things, and the subjugated elements are become his obedient vassals. And so also is it, with the political affairs of empires; and those statesmen who know how to avail themselves of the passions and the interests, and the opinions of mankind, are able to gain an ascendancy, and to exercise a sway over human affairs, far out of all proportion greater than belong to the power and resources of the state over which they preside; while those, on the other hand, who seek to check improvement, to cherish abuses, to crush opinions, and to prohibit the human race from thinking, whatever may be the apparent power which they wield, will find their weapon snap short in their hand, when most they need its protection.⁷

In this passage, Palmerston described public opinion as a mighty force whose power, complexity, and constant fluctuation rendered it stronger (indeed, ‘far out of proportion to’) any political attempt to subdue and master it. And yet, as he saw it, just like the captain of a ship steering his comparatively small vessel through a storm, the statesman might harness its power for his benefit; insofar as he knew public opinion, he could steer it, even whilst relying on it.

Insofar as he knew it, yes—but how could such knowledge be acquired? A Whig commentator writing for the Edinburgh Review in 1840 saw it as ‘a great part of the sagacity of a statesman to discern from a distance what is to be durable, from that which will pass away’. In a striking passage, the author argued that the practice of ‘Open Questions’ in Parliament gave statesmen that direct access to the present condition of public opinion which their vocation required.

Open Questions, debated as such in Parliament, are among the best means for multiplying the data for bold conclusions, and for accelerating the natural formation of the new events and reasonings, which, in stirring times, are thrown so abundantly into the great bubbling cauldron of the public mind. It would be easy to find striking instances of the evils of too protracted an unconsciousness of the course of public opinion, on the one hand, and of too precipitate a following of its transient indications, on the other. The former used to be the besetting sin of Governments—the latter may be more threatening at the present—though probably not, if we have wise men to read the signs of the times… [T]here should be Open Questions for this purpose, agitation or discussion, (call it which you will,) and in order to collect, at large and at leisure, authentic materials for proceeding to legislation, the moment that the public and the subject are both ready for it.⁸

This implied that public opinion was a totalized and synchronous whole available for detached observation. The practice of ‘Open Questions’ created an abstract empty space in which the abundant ‘events and reasonings’ of present public opinion could be isolated from its ‘great bubbling cauldron’ and accurately gauged. Nevertheless, the author argued, public opinion was still moving and changing even while its present state was being defined—when its present condition was decided, it was already moving on. Open Questions provides an empty space where the politician had immediate access to public opinion and so could ‘read the signs of the times’, that is, discern public opinion’s present state. This immediate access to public opinion was also what allowed the statesman to take up position ‘ahead’ of it, and discern when time is ripe for implementing new policies—‘the moment that the public [was] ready for it’.

Temporality and Form

The above examples illustrate how at the heart of public opinion’s emergence as a source of political legitimacy lay an intense pursuit of immediacy and temporal synchronicity. In order to gauge the present state of public opinion, which determined the legitimacy of political leadership, it was necessary to create in practice an empty conceptual space where its developments might be observed in a detached manner, but where public opinion might also be ‘guided’ towards aligning itself with new policies that—presumably—better represented what would be its future state. It is this paradoxical dynamic, where public opinion is at once something observed and participated in, and where participants/observers are at once ahead of and following its developments, which allows Charles Taylor to describe the notion of a public sphere as a prime example of a modern secular social imaginary: the collective performance of ‘a common space in which the members of society are deemed to meet […] to discuss matters of common interest; and thus be able to form a common mind about these’.⁹ The idea (and ideal) here is that each individual enjoys direct and immediate access to an ongoing discussion where every position must mobilize voluntary popular support in order to gain status as a legitimate option, and that the legitimacy of political authority rests ultimately on this discussion and its tentative conclusions. The outside check of political power is not a transcendent Other (whether a providential Will of God or eternal Laws of Nature), but a fully immanent discourse through which society establishes itself through a discussion with itself about itself, without reference to any ‘higher’ temporality.¹⁰

The secularity of the public sphere, then, has nothing to do with the (non)religious nature of various topics debated or views expressed within it, but rather with the temporal concepts implicit in its performance. As William D. Rubenstein has observed, ‘[r]eligious debate, that is the discussion on all aspects of organised religion … constituted a grossly disproportionate share of all public discussion during the nineteenth century in Britain’.¹¹ While self-proclaimed secularist journals and papers did proliferate, particularly during the latter half of the century, this was often in reaction to the predominance of religious assumptions and articulations.¹² Religious periodicals and magazines far outnumbered those of no particular confession, while openly confessing religious believers equally contributed in papers of the latter type. In 1892, the radical and former newspaper editor Henry W. Massingham, writing a pamphlet for the Religious Tract Society, argued that whatever was printed in newspapers was what the public had ‘ask[ed] for and insist[ed] upon having’, which gave him hope for a future ‘when Christian men will demand even in the Daily Press a larger recognition of Christianity’. In 1908, the Catholic Truth Society (founded in 1868) published a pamphlet giving advice (in the form of listed ‘Don’t’s) on how devout Catholics might engage in public debate through whichever journal they were habitually reading. Comparing engagement in the public sphere to a soldier’s engagement in battle, it encouraged young Catholics to draw inspiration from the Tractarian ‘heroes’ of the Oxford Movement: ‘[T]he weapons that the English laity have been counselled to take up […] are those of prayer and pen, of voice and organization’.¹³ It is ‘undoubtedly true’, he concluded, ‘that a newspaper is a kind of neutral ground upon which men of faith and no faith may meet’—presumably for battle.¹⁴

Following Taylor, it is precisely this sense of formal neutrality that indicates the public sphere’s secularity. The modern public sphere exemplifies his claim that religion, in modernity, exists in forms that are compatible with social imaginaries whose temporal dimension is ‘purely secular’. Newspapers could be considered a secularizing technology, then, not because their content is non-religious, but because their form implies a secular temporality.

This point echoes media ecologist Marshall McLuhan, who famously declared that ‘the medium is the message’; in other words, that the most important impact of news media comes from their form—their particular mode of mediation—rather than their mediated content, and that this form has specific implications both for practical use and for the reader’s possibilities of imagination. For example, ‘[t]he book is a private confessional form that provides a “point of view”‘, whereas, by contrast, the newspaper ‘provides communal participation’. Here, technological form and habitual collective practices are of much more importance than any ideological or religious/nonreligious content—explicit or implicit—of the printed word itself. It is instead the daily presentation of multiple items in juxtaposition that for McLuhan gives the press its complex dimension of ‘human interest’.¹⁵ Especially after the introduction of the telegraph, according to McLuhan, the particular editorial ‘voice’ of the newspaper was lost as a result of the heterogeneity in correspondents’ reports and the lightning speed of communication. The newspaper page increasingly became an empty, ‘neutral’ space in which a ‘daily mosaic’ of different events were reported ‘objectively’—that is, without any internal relation other than their simultaneous occurrence.¹⁶

In the wake of McLuhan’s analyses, several scholars have drawn attention to the centrality of conceptions of temporality in this material performance of a national public sphere. Most notably, in his much-debated analysis of nationalism, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson argues that the modern notion of the ‘nation’ ultimately centres on the collective and practical sharing of simultaneous experience.¹⁷ For Anderson, the ‘national’ identity of an imagined community is conceivable only in terms of an ‘homogenous, empty time’.¹⁸ The ‘mass ceremony’ of regular newspaper reading provides for him the most ‘vivid figure for the secular, historically-clocked, imagined community [that] can be envisioned’.

[Newspaper reading] is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion. Furthermore, this ceremony is repeated at daily or half-daily intervals.¹⁹

The community is ‘imagined’ because it is a collective of persons that do not know one another. Having read his morning paper, the reader might walk out and observe copies of the same newspaper in the hands of neighbours, or in shops around the neighbourhood. This, Anderson argues, ‘roots’ the imagined community in everyday life and ‘creat[es] that remarkable confidence of community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations’.²⁰ Here he echoes Victorian contemporary commentators noting the dynamics at play in the collective habits of newspaper reading. In 1850, one early historian of the British press put it this way:

[Newspapers give] us … day by day, and week by week, the experience of the whole world’s doings for the amusement and the guidance of each individual living man. It is a great mental camera, which throws a picture of the whole world upon a single sheet of paper. But though a great teacher, and an all-powerful instrument of modern civilization, there is no affectation of greatness about it. The Newspaper is the familiar of all men, of all degrees, of all occupations. If it teaches, it teaches imperceptibly.²¹

Anderson argues that this sense of contemporaneous experience is the basic premise of the ‘nation’—that peculiar modern imagined community to which people feel they belong even though they live far apart: an abstract interval of time in which distant and otherwise unrelated events can be seen as happening at once to the same widely dispersed collective.²² Similarly to McLuhan, he argues that this constitutive temporal simultaneity is carried in the newspaper’s form rather than its content. The ‘empty’ present is embodied in the material pages themselves, where events are juxtaposed that have no other internal relation than happening simultaneously to the imagined ‘us’ of the nation.²³ The essential connection between reported events is solely the steady onward clocking of homogenous, empty time. ‘Within that time’, writes Anderson, ‘“the world” ambles sturdily ahead’.²⁴

But how was this immediacy and temporal synchronicity achieved in practice? How, precisely, was the simultaneity of secular time mediated? This chapter describes the emergence of a public sphere and its primary mediating technologies and practices, namely those of news production, presentation, distribution, and consumption—what I will call the news network—together with some of the many embodied micro-practices associated with them. The temporal dimension is key here: the presentation of news was indeed a present-ing, or a ‘making present’, of events that were technically speaking not only taking place far away but also some time ago. Only if the reported events were in some sense present and ongoing would the reader be able to observe and participate in the events and their effects on the imagined community. This means that one main challenge for the news network was to move events from the distant places where they occurred, through multiple steps of translation, and onto newspaper pages, all the while making sure that the events remained the same throughout the process so that they would still be ‘fresh’ on arrival. News are events on the move.

This chapter argues that the form news came to take in the Victorian press stemmed from a combination of technological limitations and innovations with the promise and pursuit of immediacy and temporal synchronicity implied in the notion of a public sphere. This was most evident in the case of daily newspapers, which not only involved mass production and distribution, but where short deadlines also made the environmental resistances such as seasons, topographical variations, or bad weather particularly challenging to the promised regularity. Successfully moving daily news rapidly over long distances required developing technologies, changing human conducts, and harnessing natural forces and resources. To the degree that the combination and alignment of these elements was successful, and events could be moved without distortion or interruption to be presented on the newspaper pages for an ever-growing reading public, the news network mediated a secular time independent of motion.

A Printed Public Sphere

Although pre-1640 England exhibited a complex infrastructure for the transmission and communication of political information and debate—ballads, private letters, and so on—historians generally locate the conceptual beginnings of a ‘public opinion’ and corresponding public sphere in the mid-seventeenth century.²⁵ In his influential thesis on the eighteenth-century emergence of a bourgeois public sphere, Jürgen Habermas famously postulated it as primarily an elite phenomenon.²⁶ By contrast, later historians have emphasized the material infrastructures and performances that—perhaps unintentionally—facilitated continuous debate, as well as direct references to ‘public opinion’ as a recognized part of political processes, long before such ideas were expressed in the formal theories of Whig writers such as John Locke or Algernon Sidney.²⁷ The years both during and following the Civil War saw numerous developments on this level, extending the scope and changing the content of political debates formerly reserved for elites initiated in official secrecy.²⁸ Informal distribution networks for private correspondence emerged, independently of the official postal system;²⁹ petitions—a traditional mode of public participation in political life—began referring explicitly to ‘public opinion’ as a tactical measure in a new factional mode of politics;³⁰ and the printing and circulation of popular genres such as ballads, satirical dialogues, and woodcut pictures was professionalized and presented orally in taverns and public houses, their content increasingly centring on contemporary political issues.³¹ Crucially, for the present purposes, changes were also taking place in the practices associated with the notion of ‘news’, and one mediating technology in particular: the newspaper.

Serial publications had appeared in London as early as the 1590s, and by the 1620s pamphlets bearing titles such as The Weekly News promised regular publication.³² The latter were, however, designed and sold as ordinary books, their front page displaying their title alone—Currant, Herald, or Mercury, for example.³³ Furthermore, booksellers would occasionally alter the pamphlet title (a common sales strategy—no one wants to buy the same book twice), leaving the printed sequence of dates the only remaining sign of continuity.³⁴

During the civil wars, several changes suggest the emergence of a new dynamic of periodicity. The sheer number of printed material during these decades was unparalleled before 1640. Typographically, the size of the title-matter was reduced, making ‘news’ available at a single glance on the front page. These ‘newsbooks’ bore two dates on their title page, to signal the time span covered.³⁵ Already at this point, then, these publications embodied the notion of an empty temporal interval between two abstract points, within which events were unfolding while available to the eye of an independent observer. Such periodical publications became so common that the government came to consider them an ordinary and legitimate feature of political practice and communication. Indeed, in 1665, just as it was putting in motion its extensive surveillance system, the Restoration state itself began publishing its own newspaper The London Gazette on a twice-weekly basis.³⁶

The emerging news networks—the printed periodicals themselves as well as the range of institutions associated with their distribution and popular consumption—‘constructed the basis of a series of interlocking and overlapping spheres of political debate and action in different communities of readers’,³⁷ and played an important role in what has been dubbed the ‘urban renaissance’ of the period.³⁸ As Kathleen Wilson affirms, the expansion of news networks was central to the eighteenth-century mobilization of ‘the extra-parliamentary nation’, in London and provincial towns alike.³⁹ C. John Sommerville has shown how a gradual shift from sporadic publication under changing titles to regular and periodical publication under a single title implied both a series of uniform temporal intervals—embodied in the paper pages—independent of their diverse and dynamic content, and a ‘public’ whose opinion became an increasingly recognized political factor in ‘society’s’ progressive movement.⁴⁰

The first daily newspaper appeared with Samuel Buckley’s The Daily Courant in 1702, and introduced at least three important innovations.⁴¹ Firstly, Buckley cited his foreign sources (from which he translated foreign news), with the implicit effect that a multitude of visibly temporally and geographically separated events were gathered under a single rubric, printed on a single transportable object, and made to appear as simultaneous on a shared background. Secondly, he attempted to organize the news so that distant or foreign news was presented first, and local news last (the latter having been received by the typographer at the time nearest publication). This, argues historian Stuart Sherman, created a ‘centripetal’ movement through time and space, as the reader ‘moved’ from events far away and comparatively long ago towards times and spaces more immediate to the act of reading. Finally, Buckley introduced a visible constant in the current of events by printing the present date at the top of the pages (as well as the imprint of the local bookseller at the bottom of the verso). Being the date of the present day, it was asymptotic—‘approached but rarely broached by the events reported’.⁴²

All of these innovations invested in the material pages of the newspaper a concept of time which gathered multiple events within a single ‘expanded’ interval which remained the same independent of its shifting content.⁴³ The organization of news items in terms of a measurable temporal ‘distance’ was premised on time being isochronic and divisible into spatialized intervals, as was the regularity of successive issues. Continuities such as recurring titles or names of local booksellers provided a frame in which the reported events appeared to be synchronous. In this way, the newspaper page came to embody a disinterested interval of time independent of shifting events and developments, providing a neutral space in which a variety of political opinions might be expressed, and where otherwise unrelated events might occur together. Through the eighteenth century, newspapers increasingly distinguished themselves from other print media precisely in this respect.

Towards the end of the eigthteenth century, it became more common to print records of parliamentary proceedings and whole speeches given by MPs. These allowed the newspapers to become both independent reporters of as well as interested commentators on political events. On the one hand, named politicians could be evaluated, celebrated, or ridiculed. On the other, editors began feeling pressure to give accurate reports of what had been said.⁴⁴ Through such ‘live’ parliamentary reports, the newspaper reader was invited to participate in the current of events, where the unknown future was still ‘in-the-making’. Yet this was only made possible by granting a permanency and institutional authority to the abstract interval of secular time in which the debate was taking place, much like the Open Questions in Parliament, making this empty temporal interval more stable than any utterance or specific participant contained within it.

Another way that secular time was gradually embedded in the growing news networks was in the emerging notion of a reading ‘public’ conceived as a single, contemporaneous entity at once participating in and observing the current of reported events. In the 1620s, ‘news’ had been commonly published under the rubric of recent history; but during the turmoil of the civil war pamphlet writers began drawing a distinction between the permanent nature of history and the ephemeral, not to say vulgar, nature of ‘news’. Within the empty secular present established by the newspaper page, events were still in motion, and so could be engaged with before slipping into the past. As one scholar has remarked, ‘[t]he literate public of the 1640s were aware that the events through which they were living were incomplete … and that, subject to providence, they would be called upon to shape their final disposition’.⁴⁵ Through establishing an empty interval in which events could be observed as if from an independent and detached vantage point, the empty interval typographically embodied on the page also invited readers to step into the current of events, possibly even altering its course through their own actions (or indeed inaction). According to Bob Harris, by the 1740s the newspaper press was widely accepted as ‘vital to the exercise of the people’s alleged right to examine “the measures of every administration”’.⁴⁶ For the Restoration government’s official newspaper, this meant that its authority implicitly and paradoxically relied on the active contribution of its readership, in complete accord with the ‘culture of incessant public adulation’ ingrained in the dynamic of periodicity itself.⁴⁷ The synchronised ‘public’ was becoming—at least rhetorically—an acknowledged participant in contemporary political affairs.

Emerging Publics

After the Napoleonic Wars, public opinion was increasingly spoken of as a supreme authority before which all politics must subject to scrutiny. Historians have associated this shift with the rise of ‘liberal Toryism’ and in particular the statesmanship of George Canning.⁴⁸ According to Jonathan Parry, Canning was central to establishing the idea of public opinion as the ultimate basis and animating force of the state, an idea which came to be generally shared across the political spectrum, and was subsequently maintained by successive Whig governments.⁴⁹

The so-called Queen Caroline affair of 1820 in particular gave the ‘tribunal of the public’ a new place in popular imagination and political debate.⁵⁰ The response to the events surrounding the Queen’s return from exile constituted something of a ‘high-water mark of the post-war agitation’, with high levels of popular involvement, wide coverage in pamphlets, and the occasional radical group threatening revolution. Whereas earlier events such as the Peterloo uprising had served to cast doubt upon the ability of ‘public opinion’ to prevent violent outbreaks, the Queen Caroline affair was taken, at least by advocates of reform, as positive proof ‘that a widespread agitation could be vehemently oppositional and at the same time protect the basic pillars of the social fabric: namely, those family and matrimonial values on which the opposition to the King was predicated’.⁵¹ The fact that the Queen, legally speaking, lost her case did not quench her supporters’ enthusiasm for public opinion’s ultimate triumph. ‘We have just witnessed the irresistible force of public opinion’, wrote physician and political writer Charles MacLean after the Queen’s trial, ‘[and i]t is incumbent upon us to maintain that opinion in activity’.⁵²

In the first book devoted entirely to the question of public opinion (published in 1828), Whig MP William MacKinnon related its ‘rise and progress’ directly to the present level of civilization achieved in Britain. The emergence of public opinion was, he argued, conditional on a certain ‘degree of information and wealth, which together may be styled civilization, and also […] proper religious feeling’.⁵³ As so many of his contemporaries, MacKinnon considered it crucial that the government of any civilized country be governed by the dictates of public opinion, and not vice versa. Indeed, the mere assumption that ‘the form of government in a country [is what] gives freedom and security’ was mistaken, he argued; it was rather the strength and prevalence of the ‘requisites’ of public opinion that underpinned the establishment of ‘a liberal government and constitution’.⁵⁴

The young liberal MP John C. Colquhoun advocated similar views in 1831, when he urged peers not to oppose public opinion in the matter of the Reform Act. Public opinion, he maintained, was the tribunal before which Whigs and Tories alike must appear. It was ‘the deliberate opinion of the majority of reflecting and educated men, of the highest as well as the lowest … To oppose such an occurrence of opinion, is not only unavailing, it is altogether unconstitutional’.⁵⁵ Colquhoun regarded it a ‘mere fact’ that the present age was one in which ‘the influence of the few has given way to the opinion of the many’.⁵⁶ For better or worse, he argued, public opinion was ‘omnipotent, and present every where [sic]’.

I do not say whether it is well that such a power should govern—this is no longer the question;—it is now established, and whether we like it or not, we must submit to its authority … to denounce its evils, would appear to me as unprofitable as to condemn the effects of the natural atmosphere.⁵⁷

What was at stake was not whether it existed, but how one could cooperate with it and facilitate its further progress.

But precisely who to include in ‘the public’ and what should be its relation to the press was not so straightforward. MacKinnon reserved the term ‘public opinion’ for the articulated views of individuals of good means, a certain level of education, and ‘proper religious feeling’.

Public opinion may be said to be, that sentiment on any given subject which is entertained by the best informed, most intelligent, and most moral persons in the community, which is gradually spread and adopted by nearly all persons of any education or proper feeling in a civilized state.⁵⁸

On this understanding, public opinion was the accumulated sum of the informed and well-considered opinions of certain individuals, and clearly distinguished from mere ‘popular clamour’. Similarly, legal scholar Hommersham Cox argued that public opinion must be articulated by independent individuals, not least because of how crowds might negatively influence any individual’s judgement.

Men who, individually, are humane, tolerant, and sensible, collectively, are comparatively incapable of exercising their feelings and judgement voluntarily. By mutual pressure their thoughts are wont to become confluent, like many waters mingling in a current and flowing all by one way—often by a very devious way, through barren plains—often by a self-destructive way, over vortices insatiable, and treacherous quicksands—often by a dark way, through gulfs and chasms which the light of heaven does not penetrate—often by a way of violence and destruction down mountain steeps, through rocky barriers, and over sudden precipices; sometimes by a right way, a noble stream flowing calmly and magnificently onwards, fertilizing the earth, and bearing rich freights of blessings for the whole human race.⁵⁹

For Cox, and others who shared the view that the ‘public’ was really a collective of the best informed and most rational individuals, the purpose of the press was therefore to provide readers with reliable reports and facts for their individual consideration (as well as to offer guidance as to which conclusions might be considered truly ‘rational’).

These views exemplify what historian Mark Hampton has called an ‘educational’ ideal of the press, entailing that the mission of the press was to ‘inform’ or ‘elevate’ the individual reader into a rational recognition of ‘supposedly established truths—such as the scientific basis of political economy and the wonders of the British constitution’.⁶⁰ Hampton sees a shift in the latter half of the century, when a contrasting ‘representational’ ideal became increasingly dominant (though not hegemonic). In contrast to the ‘educational’ ideal, this carried the notion that newspapers reflected a public opinion which was already there, requiring only a medium in order to be articulated. No longer cast as a set of coherent political statements or positions, public opinion was increasingly conceived as a kind of self-generating and subterranean ‘social’ force embracing the nation in its entirety, on which the very legitimacy of political governance depended—much like Palmerston and later Gladstone had envisioned. The press was, in this sense, merely the material manifestation of the underlying, ever-changing force that was public opinion.

Environmental Resistance

Publics were manifold, and their respective constitution was partly due to the temporal rhythms of the news’ production and distribution process. Provincial newspapers were distributed through a complex network involving local presses, agents in local towns, and walking carriers who delivered papers to smaller villages and rural areas.⁶¹ Thrice-weekly London newspapers were sent by coach to the provinces, and provincial papers sent back to the capital, both timed according to the post coach departure. Some of these networks were organized so that readers could receive the newspaper on the evening of the day it had been printed.⁶² Indeed, as Hannah Barker puts it, ‘the way in which provincial newspapers were distributed and their publication timed appears to have been carefully calculated’.⁶³

Generally speaking, London publics were more inclusive than their provincial equivalents, simply because urban readerships were more diverse and generally boasted a higher rate of literacy.⁶⁴ One estimate suggests that there were, at any time during the 1780s, ‘at least nine daily newspapers (appearing six times a week), eight thrice-weekly, and approximately nine weekly papers in London at any time’.⁶⁵ Another estimate suggests that London held a newspaper readership of 250,000, a sizeable portion of its 750,000 population.⁶⁶ Although high prizes were matched to the higher classes, the actual readership extended across class borders through lending, hiring, and public reading.⁶⁷ The public constructed by the London papers was therefore generally independent of particular interests, propertied or otherwise. In the provinces, by contrast, the term ‘public’ most commonly referred to land-owning elites. Already by the 1760s, however, newspapers had become an ‘essential part of country life’⁶⁸ for everyone. Most provincial towns had coffee houses where a wide range of newspapers were available, and where new newspapers would be sent in attempts to establish readerships.

As Hannah Barker has argued, the relative success of such a high number of provincial newspapers in certain regions could be due to the complementary frequencies at which they were published. The distribution of several newspapers within overlapping geographical areas, and at varying frequencies, provided not a single synchronic pulse enveloping the whole ‘nation’, but rather something like a cacophony of intersecting and even competing local and regional temporal rhythms. The empty interval mediated by a twice-weekly paper, for example, was in a sense more ‘spacious’ than that of a thrice-weekly publication, since the temporal distance between each issue was three days rather than two. This affected both the general ‘voice’ of the paper and the expectation and inner posture of the reader.

These multiple publics could never be integrated into a single, synchronized one on a national scale without the news network overcoming a number of environmental obstacles. The promise of immediate access to current events through frequent and regular publication depended on a continuous flow of information into the printing office. Early eighteenth-century newspapers lifted much of their content from London newsletters, and Dutch and French newspapers, which, as foreign, were considered more or less immune to the charges of triviality and vulgarity often accompanying the printing of local rumours.⁶⁹ This and other news was delivered by post, which meant it was transported by carriage along continental roads, by ship over sea, and then again by carriage to the printer. Its journey was always at risk of being disrupted by weather or other unforeseeable hold-ups. This vulnerability gave early seventeenth-century news a certain ‘seasonal’ flavour: ‘more plentiful during the summer when travel was easier, and sparse during the winter’.⁷⁰ It also followed the social rhythms of travelling in groups, so that news was for instance more plentiful whenever local gentry travelled to regional assizes or to London to settle legal matters.

Under these circumstances, regular publishing—especially if it was to be frequent—was a demanding exercise. Since weather conditions made the news flow unreliable, editors had to find ways of making sure the open space left on certain pages would be filled in the case of unexpected difficulties. The printer prepared as much as possible of the uniform typographical material—titles and columns, for instance—before news arrived to the printing office creating a frame in which the news content could be incorporated. By the 1720s, most established newspapers had learnt to anticipate the potential absence of foreign news by keeping a file of substitutes, which could be drawn upon as the need arose.⁷¹ James Sutherland has described how the challenges of the hand press impacted on the presentation of news on the page:

The printer had to pick each letter for each word out of its appropriate ‘box’ in the ‘case’ or receptacle in which the type was kept, place it in on his composing stick, and then go through the same movements with the next letter, and the next. While the process was the same for a newspaper as for a book, the news paper had to appear on time at regular weekly, twice-weekly, thrice-weekly, or daily intervals, and the copy for the current issue was coming in all the time the printer was at work. In reckoning the period available, we have to allow not only for the manual type-setting, but for the inking, the pulling of each sheet, and the time required for the wet sheets to dry. In addition, some time might be lost in correcting printer’s mistakes … in practice the low speeds that could be attained and sustained in manual type-setting meant that no sooner was a paper selling on the streets than the printer had begun to set the next issue. He could not wait until all the news were assembled and arranged in an orderly and systematic manner by himself or by someone else; he had to start with what he had, or he would never keep ahead of the clock. [Hence,] a piece of news in an eighteenth-century newspaper is where it is because that is where the printer had got to when it reached him.⁷²

The empty space could also be filled by encouraging the readers to participate. Newspaper distribution already depended on the postal system, and it is perhaps not surprising that the new genre of news reporting often intermingled with styles of personal correspondence. Publications such as the Scottish Tatler (from 1709) and The Spectator (from 1711) consciously left blank spaces on some pages, and encouraged readers to contribute their own news before passing on the newspaper to friends or relatives. In other words, the newspaper form itself implicitly anticipated the reader’s direct and active contribution to its content. Ichabod Dawks, metropolitan bookseller, printer and editor of Dawks’s News-Letter (1695–1716), went so far as to invent a printed type that simulated older handwritten manuscript types, while also leaving blank spaces for readers to insert their own correspondence, thus appealing to wide, cross-generational audiences in London and provinces alike.⁷³ The cheapness of printed news appealed to younger and less wealthy readerships, whereas the personal tone and typographical style appealed to older readers familiar with written newsletters. The public was not only a detached observer of the newspaper’s content, but equally an active part of and contributor to that content.

In summary, the limitations imposed by the weather, the inadequate means of distribution, the typographical limitations of printing technology, and the ideal, promise, and expectation of immediacy and active participation in ongoing events jointly secured a strong sense of continuity and regularity in what we might call the ‘form of news’.⁷⁴ The most common typographical format allowed by the hand press was a single title above three or four columns of text.⁷⁵ During the 1780s, the front page of all London newspapers was occupied mainly by advertisements, which the printer would have had ready at hand before the news arrived from abroad.⁷⁶ The newspaper pages, embodying the empty temporal interval delimited by the preceding publication and the date printed on their front page, contained all the various movements of the world while remaining independent of them. As we shall see, during the nineteenth century, the evolving telegraph network further consolidated the newspaper—especially when it was published at daily intervals—as the increasingly national (and indeed global) public’s primary site for observing and participating in current events.

Expanding Networks

Periodical publications of many kinds continued to circulate throughout the nineteenth century, but few were issued on a daily basis or primarily concerned with reporting news. Quarterly, monthly, weekly, and twice- or thrice-weekly journals, together with unstamped pamphlets and literary novels, provided targeted readerships (as defined, for instance, by professional, political, or gendered markers) with leisurely entertainment, moral edification, and informed interpretations of current events.⁷⁷ Some periodicals had strong, articulated political leanings, like those that had been dominant at the beginning of the century, such as the Tory-inclined Quarterly Review (1809) or the more Whiggish Edinburgh Review (1802). Others, such as Charles Dickens’ Household Words (published between 1850 and 1859), were closely tied to the book-publishing industry.⁷⁸ Weeklies such as Punch (1841) or the Illustrated London News (1842) pioneered satirical or pictorial forms of journalism.

Strictly speaking, however, a periodical publication was not considered a newspaper ‘unless its object was to give the general current of news of the day’, as defined by Lord Monteagle arguing for the repeal of the so-called Taxes on Knowledge in the 1830s.⁷⁹ Likewise, in 1850, historian Frederick Knight Hunt added to this definition that newspapers were ‘published at fixed intervals … and that each paper was numbered in regular succession’.⁸⁰ Focusing on publications reporting current events on a daily basis not only helps limit the scope of the present analysis but also calls attention to a Victorian trend: over time, daily newspapers slowly but surely supplanted weekly periodicals as the dominant form of producing and distributing news.⁸¹

The total number of daily newspapers increased dramatically during the Victorian period, as did their individual circulation numbers and geographical ambit. Contributing to these numbers were a series of tax repeals from 1835 culminating in the abolition of advertising duty in 1853, stamp duty in 1855 and paper duty in 1861—all of which had been in place since 1712.⁸² According to one estimate, there were 15 dailies published in London in 1860 (6 evening and 9 morning papers), as well as 16 in the provinces, in addition to as many twice-weeklies.⁸³ Just before 1890, the total number had risen to no less than 150 daily publications.⁸⁴ These numbers are of course provisional. Many newspapers ran only for a few years or indeed months before giving up or amalgamating with other newspapers, and consequently any notion of simple accumulative increase would be misguided. The early Victorian emergence of the ‘unstamped’ press, which could in many instances be categorized as pamphlets rather than newspapers, further complicates the issue. Furthermore, reading practices continued to differ between strata of the population—‘middle-class’ readers perusing their newspaper quietly in the privacy of their home, poorer people more often gathering to read in groups, for example in pubs. These factors complicate any precise estimation of the actual circulation of newspapers; it is impossible to know how many times any single issue was read, or the number of (indirect) readers.⁸⁵ Nevertheless, as Lucy Brown has suggested, during the ‘second half of the nineteenth century the newspaper became established as a part of the normal furniture of life for all classes’.⁸⁶ Indeed, between 1880 and 1914 the number of daily newspaper purchasers almost quadrupled, suggesting that at least towards the end of the century, the practice of private, daily reading was becoming ubiquitous.⁸⁷

The technological networks were increasingly extended and integrated, during the latter half of the century even on a national scale. The railways, for instance, accelerated the growth of readerships. Reading the newspaper became a common ‘tactic of travelling’ and a popular pastime for idle passengers, as indicated by the many newsstands and bookstalls built in station complexes and on platforms since the early 1850s.⁸⁸ More importantly, the railways made possible a much wider geographical distribution of both London-based and provincial newspapers than was the case when coaches or canal boats were the best transport options.

Prominent London newspapers rarely reported news from the provinces, even though most of what constituted the ‘nation’ in geographical and demographical terms resided there. In fact, in addition to the few metropolitan newspapers aspiring to be ‘national’, such as The Times, London boasted a large selection of local newspapers of its own. These covered specific areas of the capital, treating it more as an assemblage of local places than a united whole. Beyond London, many morning papers, halfpenny evening papers, and local weeklies covering specific counties and/or towns were published independently of any metropolitan connections.⁸⁹ Provincial newspapers sold and distributed content amongst themselves, so that almost any local newspaper contained more news from around the UK than did London newspapers.⁹⁰ Indeed, the provincial news network operated with a relative autonomy that has recently led some historians to question whether a ‘national’ view of nineteenth-century press is possible at all—at least if the view is taken from London.

Even so, contemporary politicians and advertisers soon began to see the news network as one integrated entity, and as such vital to their own potential impact on larger scales. As one contemporary historian wrote:

[t]he provincial press … is the canal of information which irrigates the country, and makes knowledge fruitful in the land: it is the great system of arteries which, circulating through the body politic, carries nourishment to, and receives strength from, the heart which is in London: it is as a hundred tributaries bringing their streams of intelligence into the source from whence springs the London press.⁹¹

In terms of geographical and demographical coverage, then, the provincial press and its metropolitan counterpart together constituted an ever-more nationally integrated network.

Mobilization

As the expanding news network became increasingly integrated, more work was required in order to ensure its temporal synchronization. This was where the pursuit of immediacy became central. The daily newspaper provided a space where public opinion on current events could be observed and gauged, a process which depended on moving news across increasingly longer distances rapidly and without distortion. What eventually made this possible was innovation in printing technology, developing new professional conducts of journalists, and integrating into the network both galvanic forces and colonial natural resources.

Insulation

From mid-century onwards, one technology in particular became central to constituting a sense of a shared simultaneity embracing provincial and metropolitan publics alike in a single, temporally synchronized one: the electric telegraph. By this time, telegraphic lines followed most railway tracks, where electricity was initially being used for signalling. The Telegraph Acts of 1868 and 1869 transferred the ‘exclusive privilege of transmitting telegrams within the United Kingdom’ from the five major telegraph networks to the Post Office.⁹² Already at this time, according to one estimate, ‘the public telegraph network consisted of almost 150 000 km of wire and over 3000 stations, plus another 1000 stations provided by the railway companies’.⁹³ The cheapening of telegraph services (from 1870, anyone could send a telegram for the price of one shilling) and the establishment of more telegraph offices in major towns led to a substantial increase in popular use. Between 1874 and 1899, the number of single words transmitted increased from 4.2 million to 15.7 million.⁹⁴

The speed of electric currents drastically shortened the temporal distance between events and their typographical representation at the other end of the line. From the late 1860s, submarine cables reduced the transmission time of news between New York and London from a week to a few hours; British businessmen could now receive information about American morning prices on the same day, rather than a week later.⁹⁵ The technologies of the telegraph system hence limited the extent of deterioration undergone by the news items during their transmission. Put another way, representations of particular events might now appear in print before the readers’ eyes after having been transmitted across large geographical distances, nevertheless remaining the same throughout their transmission. The events and opinions referred to in print could be seen as fully corresponding to events and opinions in relatively distant locations, and so these as being immediate to the reader.

Weather conditions had always been a factor to reckon with for news producers. As we have seen, prior to the nineteenth century, the collection and distribution of news depended largely on changing seasons and the absence of accidents or other hold-ups along the route, whether over land or sea. Telegraphic technology offered the possibility of translating news items into electric currents travelling at high speeds through metallic cables, making it possible (if not exactly easy) to protect them from unforeseeable interruptions. In this way, readers could be given immediate access to observing current events and partaking in the present movements of public opinion, since these could be transmitted over distances—even on a global scale—entirely without friction or distortion.

The electric current had to be protected so that it did not die out or veer from its course. As Benjamin L. Green, author of the celebrated Gutta Percha: Its Discovery, History, and Manifold Uses put it in 1851, describing ‘the principle upon which [the] telegraph performs its marvels: To insulate the wire […] has been a prime concern with the constructors of electric telegraphs’.⁹⁶ Likening the electric current to an invisible ‘spirit’, he explained that it, ‘like more material beings, will never take more trouble than it can help, and if, consequently, it can get to the ground [by a conductor] before it reaches its destination, it will do so and leave the messages beyond its returning point undelivered’.⁹⁷

It is simply the imperative necessity that the galvanic fluid (if it is a fluid) should pass from one pole of the battery to the other. It must also pass by a conductor. Let the poles therefore be but a few inches apart, and if the nearest conductor be a wire that starts from London, and communicates with the ground at Edinburgh, or Paris, or Calcutta, by that road it will go with the swiftness of light, exciting on its way the ordinary electrical phenomena in every apparatus set to mark its progress and register its tidings, then returning straight through the earth and water.⁹⁸

In material terms, what was at stake here was the protection of telegraphic wires, making sure that these would not deteriorate (or at least to bring this natural process almost to a halt) so that the ‘spirit’ of information might fly unhindered and without delay.

By the end of the century, most countries in Europe operated on so-called mixed systems, where telegraphic wires were stretched both overhead and underground, depending on the area. Overhead wires could easily be set up along existing railway tracks or canals, and were also a cheaper option in urban centres than digging up the pavements. Furthermore, underground cables required less insulation, which became more expensive the longer it was able to last before needing replacing. But railway tracks or canals did not always exist where the cables were needed, and in crowded urban areas, overhead wires were still exposed to the shifting weather and hence might (and sometimes did) cause serious injuries if they fell down.⁹⁹ Hence, from the 1860s, existing overhead wires were gradually transferred underground, a process gaining speed after a snowstorm in 1886 caused failure in much of London’s telegraph (and, by then, telephone) services.¹⁰⁰

But when it came to integrating the network beyond the country’s borders, this was achieved largely thanks to one substance in particular: Malayan rubber, or gutta-percha. In contrast to most elastic latex rubbers, the molecular structure of gutta-percha crystallizes, making it a more rigid material which regains its flexibility if heated to 70 degrees Celcius.¹⁰¹ From the late 1850s, its unique plasticity made it a popular material in the production of a number of artefacts, ranging from golf balls to industrial belts. Furthermore, and also in contrast to other natural rubbers, it does not deteriorate in salt water; during the latter half of the century more than 25,000 tons of the stuff were laid across the seabed, insulating telegraphic wires and securing instant communication between London and its imperial outposts. During the 1850s, insulated submarine cables were successfully laid between Dover in England and Calais in Northern France (1850), Portpatrick in Scotland and Donaghadee in Ireland (1853), and a number of other coastal localities.¹⁰² After several failed attempts, a cable was laid across the Atlantic in 1865, reducing the travel time of news between New York and London from a week to 8 minutes. By the end of the decade, Britain had several cables connecting it to the Americas and to India, and British companies were central in laying telegraphic submarine cables across the globe.¹⁰³

Its extraction was hard work. As John Tully has pointed out, local workers extracted gutta-percha from Isonandra trees, which ‘rising sixty feet or more toward the forest canopy yielded on average no more than eleven ounces (312 grams) of latex, although greater quantities remained inside the tree and could not be drained off’.¹⁰⁴ With this fantastic substance extracted from colonial forests, news could finally be transmitted almost unlimited distances without transformation: events could be described and translated into galvanic currents, which could later be decoded and reconstructed back into printed accounts without (almost) anything being lost in the process.¹⁰⁵

The successful transmission of electronic signals over such vast distances also required inventions and improvements, such as ‘loading’ the cable with iron filings to avoid signal distortion, or constructing more sensitive recorders (such as Thomson’s siphon recorder, patented 1867) able to detect a signal which still, inevitably, became progressively weaker as it travelled down the line.¹⁰⁶ But it was gutta-percha that overcame the problem of deterioration over distance. It was later discovered that gutta-percha did in fact deteriorate somewhat if exposed to sunlight or oxygen, but this posed no problem for its use in insulating subterranean or submarine cables. As demand increased, so did the tree felling, and by the 1870s the Isonandra tree was extinct in several regions. Further extraction was banned in 1883, but it was too late; by the mid-1890s, more than 280,000 nautical miles of submarine cable had been laid, securing the great British public’s immediate access to events occurring all over the empire, while the Isonandra tree population in Borneo, Malaya, and Sumatra was almost completely extinct.

Printing

Through the emerging telegraph network, and especially following the mid-century establishment of news agencies such as Reuter’s (established in 1851), newspapers began receiving regular and systematic communication through national and global telegraphic networks, and became, in the words of one historian, ‘an unofficial but important part of the worldwide machinery of the British Empire’.¹⁰⁷ From its formation in 1868, the Press Association likewise secured direct links between provincial newspaper offices and the telegraph companies.¹⁰⁸ News agencies increasingly distributed content in ready-made format, on partly printed sheets or even stereotyping, and newspaper owners—some, as we have seen, owning smaller networks made up of several provincial papers not necessarily connected to London—could now fill large parts of their papers with content provided in this way. By the 1890s, ‘every town of any size’ boasted at least two daily newspapers containing both national and international news. To illustrate: between 1854 and 1856, The Times was the only English newspaper using its own correspondents as sources for its reports from the Crimean War. By the end of the 1860s, this exclusivity was history, as both metropolitan and provincial newspapers began subscribing to news agencies’ regular reports from overseas.¹⁰⁹ The combination of telegraph system and news agencies became essential in establishing simultaneous publication of the same foreign intelligence across the geographical space of the nation.

The resultant reading experience was described in 1862 by an anonymous commentator in Cornhill Magazine:

Every morning […] a mass of print containing as much matter as a thick octavo volume is laid on our breakfast tables. It contains an accurate report of speeches which were made some hours after we went to bed and of the incidents which took place up to a late hour of the night; it gives us on the same day letters from persons specially employed for the purpose of writing them about the Chinese, the Americans, the Italians, the enfranchisement of the Russian serfs, and scores of other subjects; and besides this, it puts before us a sort of photograph of one day’s history of the nation in which we live, including not only its graver occupations such as legislation and commerce, but every incident a little out of the common way brought to light by police courts or recorded by local newspapers.¹¹⁰

Observing the entire ‘world ambling sturdily ahead’, as Benedict Anderson would later put it, and the sense of participating in the events occurring within the moment captured on the newspaper page, of course depended on the pages’ typographical presentation. It is remarkable how typographically uniform Victorian daily newspapers remained throughout the century: as much text as possible compiled within a six- or seven-column grid. The Times had adopted this style early on, and it soon became standard for most daily newspapers; in these terms, there were few differences between the Times and its main penny rivals in the metropolis, such as the Daily Telegraph and the Standard.¹¹¹ Different genres, such as poems or sports results, might indeed be presented in ways that made them stand out from the surrounding news reports, as if suggesting a comparatively ‘slower pace of life’.¹¹² But they were nonetheless all contained within the all-encompassing secular simultaneity embodied by the page itself, where a single glance could capture several otherwise unrelated events and movements.

This long-standing typographical uniformity is more than a little surprising considering the rate and extent of innovation the Victorian period saw in the area of printing technology. In 1800, most printers were still using the same tools and techniques as had been used the past 300 years. The nineteenth century, however, saw an intense mechanization and automization of every step of the printing process, from composition (the setting of types) and uniform application of ink, to the feeding of paper sheets into the machine and the application of pressure to make an imprint, and to distribution by railways.¹¹³ One crucial development was the mechanization of papermaking. The brothers Henry and Sealy Fourdrinier’s improvements on an earlier French patent in 1803 integrated all the manual steps of the process, and could produce paper in a single continuous ‘web’ rather than separate sheets. The result was a tenfold increase in output, which led to a shortage of linen rags, which until then had been the most common material for manufacturing high-quality paper. Several other materials were tried in its place: straw, bark, reeds, and even pine needles. In the early 1840s, the idea was introduced to use mechanically ground wood treated with sulphate to create a pulp of cellulose fibres. The shift did not occur over night, however:¹¹⁴ the scarcity of linen rags remained the most important reason for the high price of paper, and even the Times’ 1854 promise of £1000 for a suitable substitute did little to change this.¹¹⁵ Only in the 1870s and 1980s did wood pulp, together with esparto grass, become the most extensively used materials in paper production.¹¹⁶

The most important sites of technological experimentation and innovation were newspaper printing offices, and in particular those of the Times. It was the first newspaper to support itself solely by advertising revenues instead of subsidies from political parties, and had (from the 1820s) financial security to employ its own foreign correspondents, dispersed throughout the world and reporting news from the Far East and America alike.¹¹⁷ It could also increase its circulation in spite of the ‘taxes on knowledge’ such as the Stamp Duty, which still put strict limits on other newspapers’ number of pages.¹¹⁸ Finally, The Times could afford both to invest in and to implement technological innovations: as a non-union house, it was among the few newspaper institutions that could apply new machinery without heeding protests from manual workers—compositors and printers in particular—who were increasingly being replaced by automatons.

The gradual automatization of news production technologies had substantial impact on the extent of circulation and frequency of publication. During the Napoleonic Wars, the Times had struggled to meet the demands of its growing readership, and only partly succeeded when its printing offices acquired and improved the König and Bauer’s (K&B) steam-driven cylinder press.¹¹⁹ When the first new issue was printed, on November 29, 1814, the new printing machine had an output capacity of approximately 1000 sheets of paper per hour, some five times more than the Stanhope hand presses which had been in use since 1800.¹²⁰ In 1828, engineers A. Applegath and E. Cowper improved the K&B machine, combining four machines in a so-called four-feeder, quadrupling the hourly output (though still printing on one side only).¹²¹ A number of similar technological improvements and combinations allowed the newspaper to reach a circulation of a staggering 30,000 copies by 1841, over 15 times more than at the turn of the century.¹²² By 1854, the Times circulation had reached 55,000 copies, an astonishing number considering the circulation of its London competitors: the Morning Chronicle circulated 2500, the Morning Post 3000, and the Morning Herald 3500.¹²³ In fact, its steam presses were likely the only ones in operation in London at the time.¹²⁴ Nevertheless, due to repeated boosts in the growth of readerships, for example during the Crimean War, the newspaper still had considerable difficulty achieving sufficient output.¹²⁵ After Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper acquired a press from American printer Richard M. Hoe in 1856, The Times abandoned Applegath and Cowper’s constructions and bought two of Hoe’s the year after.¹²⁶ The mid-1860s saw the introduction of so-called web-presses—rotary presses using curved plates and a single roll of paper, four miles long—which (together with the 1860 repeal of paper taxes) allowed a further increase of output.¹²⁷ Roller presses were used to cast whole-page matrixes in papier mâché moulds, and these curved stereotype plates were fastened to rotating cylinders.¹²⁸ In 1868, the number of sheets per hour printed this way on the Times’s machines had increased to 20,000.¹²⁹ However, during the 1870s, other publications substituted new presses for their old sheet-fed machines, and began challenging the Times’ technological advantage. By 1880, the Times circulated 50,000 copies, compared to the Daily Telegraph’s 217,000 and the Standard’s 200,000.¹³⁰

So why did this development not have any effect on British daily newspapers’ typographical form? From mid-century, not only did American equivalents see a shift towards larger headlines and more space around the text,¹³¹ but the typographical variation exhibited by London weeklies such as Illustrated London News shows that the technological means necessary for more visual variation on each page—curved stereotypes in particular—were certainly available—and indeed adopted by most printing offices.¹³² Furthermore, the 1855 repeal of the Stamp Act—which had put a strict limit on page numbers—would have made a wider dispersion of text across a higher number of pages affordable to most large newspapers. Still, there are no indications that daily newspapers even attempted to experiment with typographical presentation, not even in order to present information in ways that would be more accessible to new readers.¹³³

There might be several reasons for this. Newspapers were business ventures, and the aesthetic concerns of professional typographers might ultimately have had to give way to the financial concerns of owners and editors seeking to maximize the quantity of information on each page. From the same ‘business perspective’, continuity in visual appearance might provide a sense of purchasing the ‘same’ product, even when its content changed on a daily basis, and thus help secure a dependable customer base.¹³⁴

However, a much more crucial reason was that the technological innovation described above was coupled with the pursuit of immediacy, which at this time meant at least daily publication. This meant—as it had since the early days of twice- and thrice-weekly newspapers—that the printers had to prepare as much content as possible on every page before news arrived at the office. Even with the technological advantages of rotary presses, short deadlines meant it was still convenient for the typographer to first prepare the outer sheets of the paper (front and back pages, say, or pages 3 and 6, depending on the total number of pages) and then to fill these with whatever content was already at hand. From around the 1780s, the pages first ‘filled’ by the typographer continued to boast large newspaper titles, editorials produced in the newspaper office, and a selection of regular advertisements. The grid-like form was already in place, and any content might be fitted into it.

In the 1880s, we might expect to see some change. By then, American engineer Joseph Thorne had successfully automatized the process of putting types back into their containers after use.¹³⁵ In 1886, Ottmar Mergenthaler’s Linotype machine even combined casting, composing, justifying, and distributing in a single apparatus. As Marshall McLuhan noted, in the 1890s the printed press was—in terms of technological possibilities—able to ‘adjust its form more fully to the news-gathering of the telegraph and the news-printing of the rotary presses’.¹³⁶

But it still took another 20 years before this actually began to happen. Even after the introduction of the Linotype, the more obvious ‘Americanization’ of the press towards the end of the century initially failed to fundamentally challenge the visual appearance of English newspapers.¹³⁷ In terms of literary style, the ‘New Journalism’ was indeed shifting away from ‘detached’ descriptions of events, emphasizing instead personal and perhaps emotive topics, and employing a tone that was more straightforward than its ‘old’ counterpart¹³⁸—‘striking the reader between the eyes’, as T.P. O’Connor put it in a much-quoted essay.¹³⁹ The new tabloids were physically smaller, and indeed boasted unprecedented circulation numbers.¹⁴⁰ Nevertheless, in terms of form, the new tabloids did not stray particularly far from the received norm. Only at the turn of the twentieth century did a few of them begin to challenge the conventional grid-like layout adopted from the heyday of the Times.¹⁴¹

The peculiar uniform grid-like visual appearance of Victorian daily newspapers was the combined result of technological innovation and the pursuit of immediacy. Daily publication promised immediate access to the current of ongoing events, compared to weekly publications. Here, as Benedict Anderson pointed out, the date printed on each newspaper carried a particular importance.¹⁴² The newspaper page opened up an empty secular interval enveloping all events in equal measure, whilst itself remaining a neutral container. At the publication of the present issue, all of the referred changes would still be in transition, their outcome unknown. At the publication of the next issue, however, the same events would become static facts of the past, mere traces of completed processes, to be stored in archives or catalogues. The date printed on the present newspaper was asymptotic; like the horizon, always moving. Its boundary was in principle never transgressed by the events recounted on the pages—this only happened at the publication of the next issue. By implication the ‘spaciousness’ of the secular interval embodied in periodicals was relative to the frequency of publication. Monthlies might provide their readers opportunities for reflection on events that had already acquired status as ‘facts’ of the near past. Daily newspapers, by contrast, provided a more intense sense of contemporaneous participation and immediate observation.¹⁴³

One example of this were the so-called running stories found in many newspapers towards the end of the century. In the 1860s and 1970s, for instance, the accounts of Dr Livingstone’s dis- and reappearances in Africa kept Victorian readers on the edge of their seats as they followed fragments of his life more or less in ‘real time’. Likewise, the ‘romantic’ and semi-fictional adventures of imperial ‘heroes’ or ‘villains’ (such as Jack the Ripper in 1888) were reported in a way that made the events and the reader appear contemporaneous and part of the same progressing storyline.¹⁴⁴

Journalism Skills

Finally, the pursuit of immediacy between event and reader put high demands on journalists. In his 1850 book The Fourth Estate, one of the first books attempting a history of the British Press, historian F.K. Hunt declared that those who want to enter the profession must ‘bid farewell to mental rest or mental leisure’:

If he [the journalist] fulfils his duties truthfully, his attention must be ever awake to what is passing in the world, and his whole mind must be devoted to the instant examination, and discussion, and record of current events … What he has to deal with must be taken up at a moment’s notice, be examined, tested, and dismissed at once, and thus his mind is kept ever occupied with the mental necessity of the world’s passing hour.¹⁴⁵

Only journalists trained in certain skills could hope to achieve the ideal of total immediacy—to be so immersed in the current of events that what they wrote articulated public opinion as it was at that precise moment. ‘Journalism is public opinion embodied in the periodical press’, declared Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal in a review of Hunt’s book.

A journal does not, in the common phrase, address a certain class of readers; it is the voice of these readers themselves. It is the expression of an idea previously existing in their minds, or the supply of a thing for which their souls even unconsciously thirsted … No journalist is in the strict sense of the word original—if he were so he would be alone: he is merely the mouthpiece, the agent, the representative of his readers, and he employs his energies in collecting the peculiar ailment which their taste demands, and which their intellectual constitutions are capable assimilating. These are facts which journalists know practically—instinctively; and it has often been said that the greatest of all our existing newspapers owes its success to the unwearied care with which it watches the changing tide of public opinion, so as to appear to direct that mighty current on which it only floats.¹⁴⁶

The reviewer lauded Hunt’s work, declaring that since journalism was ‘a perpetual reflection of the sentiments and intellect of the nation, and a gauge by which we may measure both its advance and its shortcomings … [t]o write its history … is to trace the progress of civilisation, and to prophesy of the future of mankind’.¹⁴⁷ The writing journalist was contemporaneous with public opinion to the extent that, for the historian, the public opinion of past ages was immediately available in the respective age’s contemporary journals and newspapers. Indeed, the readers themselves might gain access to their own thoughts through the newspaper, due to the journalists’ ability to articulate themselves thoughts to them. One North British Review writer called the press ‘a manifestation of our collective self’, as if it was a higher cosmic unity into which the newspaper reader might lose himself in order to find himself:

[T]he public is that portion of the universal life of which each of our own selves forms an element; but it is also that great stream of external vitality, by throwing one’s self into which, almost entirely, each one of us gets additional strength […] our object is not to be influenced or led, it is to discover our own true thought.¹⁴⁸

This pursuit of immediacy between the reader and the reported public opinion spurred several paradoxes. In terms of secular time, this meant the empty interval embodied by the newspaper pages was spacious enough to envelop everything from the events when they occurred and until the reader decoded the printed text. But how could the journalist report events and opinions simultaneously with the reader experiencing them? ‘It is the business of the journalist’, wrote one commentator in 1875, ‘both to swim with the tide [of public opinion], and at the same time to head it by a few inches’.¹⁴⁹ A 1918 pamphlet introducing women to the prospects of a journalistic career put it thus: ‘[as the] voice of the multitude … the journalist must have the capacity of thinking ahead of ninety-nine out of every hundred readers, and while supposed to guide them, the journalist is only voicing what men or women are thinking at the moment.’¹⁵⁰

Even critical observers of the press would agree that immediacy was the ideal, even if the press tended to exaggerate its status as objective representative of public opinion. In 1870, a writer in Cornhill Magazine, naming himself simply ‘A Cynic’, wrote a scathing critique of the press arguing that newspaper editors and journalists influenced contemporary politics as much as did politicians, but with less accountability. While the statesman appeared as a ‘framer of public opinion’ (‘public opinion is supposed to have bowed to him, not he to public opinion’), the press was in a different situation altogether:

[T]he press boasts that it is the embodiment of public opinion … That vague authority which it claims to represent is always present in the immediate background and keeps a very firm hand upon its vagaries. In short, we know very well that at best it is the work of a few clever men a little in advance, it may be, of the general current of opinion but compelled by the necessity of their position not to be too far in advance.¹⁵¹

In the latter half of the century, the readers’ experience of simultaneity had become an explicit goal of Victorian news editors. Reporting ongoing events as they were happening—and thereby creating immediate access to them—was seen as ‘the very backbone of a newspaper, which, without it, would be nothing’, as the experienced journalist John Dawson put it in his 1885 book, Practical Journalism. The book was one of several aiming to describe to aspiring journalists the skills they would need in order to be successful in the job.

Already in 1835, one writer in the weekly journal Athenaeum described the journalistic task in the following manner:

It is all very well as a mere declamatory theme to talk about the influence of the press; but though to a certain extent a journalist may and ought to lead public opinion, he must always be especially cautious not to go so far a head as to be out of sight of his followers.¹⁵²

Because journals were dependent on keeping their readerships, the article continued, ‘[their] tone, temper and character […] must […] reflect the tone temper and character of the readers’. As one writer put it, insofar as journalists were ‘the servants of the public … the course which they take [should always be] determined by the public’.¹⁵³ In his Topics for Indian Statesmen, legal scholar John Bruce Norton advised aspiring leaders in the colony to view the journalists they encountered through their vocation in the following manner:

The journalist, though he affects to lead public opinion, in point of fact, follows in its wake; and the most successful journal is that which [succeeds] in the delicate art of trimming at the right moment; which discerns the first wavering of the fickle popularis aurce and shapes his course so dextrously as to seem to be moved by his own independent volition instead of being, in fact, impelled by every external influence.¹⁵⁴

The journalistic task in other words required immersion in the public journalists were meant to represent. ‘The specific distinguishing faculty, in virtue of which men become first-rate journalists’, wrote one contributor to the Cornhill Magazine in 1862, ‘is the power of filling the mind rapidly and almost unconsciously with the floating opinions of the day, throwing these opinions into a precise, connected and attractive form’.¹⁵⁵ A journalist was to follow the changing tides of public opinion so closely—by mere ‘instinct’ rather than detached and reflective thought—that what was printed in the newspaper would be an instant image of current public opinion.

Successful journalists must exhibit exceptional vigilance and clarity of thought. ‘To carry a note-book continually, and to put down in it all the owner sees, hears, or thinks at the moment, constitutes the perfect journalist’,¹⁵⁶ declared another commentator in the Saturday Review in 1869.

[O]n a daily paper [the journalists] have to write their story and see that it gets to the office the same day, no matter how late the hour, to ensure inclusion in next day’s news columns. Sometimes press days on weeklies necessitate just as rapid work, for no society of charity function which a good journalist could include in a weekly “just going to press” would be anything but stale a week later. The hours of work must be irregular, but the true journalist never grumbles at that.¹⁵⁷

They must equally master techniques such as writing shorthand,¹⁵⁸ and be able to prioritize what to report first. In 1883, Reuters circulated a specific set of instructions to its correspondents and agents. The circular described what kinds of events should be reported, and instructed the agents to telegraph ‘the bare facts’ with ‘utmost promptitude, and as soon as possible following this, a descriptive account, proportionate to the gravity of the incident. Care should, of course, be taken to follow the matter up’.¹⁵⁹ In other words, priority should be given to reporting the event itself; descriptive summaries and opinions about the event could come later. Editor W.T. Stead quoted Lord Salisbury, saying that the importance of ‘the special correspondent [superseeds that of] the editor, chiefly because he [is] nearer to the things which people wish to see’. Indeed, the skill of ‘eye-witnessing’ events and translating these into compelling and gripping stories was a hallmark of the special correspondent.¹⁶⁰

Conclusion

The promise and pursuit of immediacy between event and reader, together with technological innovation in several fields, produced the form of Victorian news: an empty interval between two points in time within which multiple events were juxtaposed with no internal relation apart from their simultaneous occurrence to the imagined community of the national public. The integration of this national public, whose opinion could be gauged in the typographical frame offered by daily newspapers, depended on moving news over long distances without distortion. The Victorian daily newspaper page embodied a temporal interval independent of its changing content and thereby allowing the reader, the reported events, the ‘public’, and its ever-changing opinion—indeed the news network itself—to be conceived of as singular and synchronous wholes.¹⁶¹

To achieve this, the news network had to perform a work of immense complexity. ‘An English newspaper is certainly a marvellous production’, declared judge and mathematician Hommersham Cox in the 1850s, beautifully capturing the process of its daily creation.

The immense amount of intelligence which issues every morning from the press has, for the most part, been collected from innumerable sources in all parts of the kingdom but a few hours before. From the senate, the forum, and the mart, from the highways of commerce by sea and land, from the thronged streets and crowed ports, from every great haunt of men, every seat of political events throughout the globe, and by the most refined mechanical means, the information of the daily sheet has to be collected. How many agencies, political, material, and intellectual, are at work to produce it! and every one of them is a condition essential to its production. An English newspaper is an example of the combined effect of free institutions; for were not the national institutions free, free criticism, the very life of the press, would be impracticable;—of immense energy; for the powers, mental and mechanical, which are at work the livelong night to produce the morning newspaper, are taxed to their utmost;—of division of labour; for unless the labours or reporting, editing, and printing, were divided according to a system, carried, apparently, to the pitch of perfection, the most vigorous energy, and the most robust powers of endurance, would be inadequate to the accomplishment of the required task;—of the resources of vast capital; for every part of the civilized world the news is collected, digested, and recorded;—of extensive learning; for nearly every branch of history, law, political economy, literature, æsthetics, ethnology, statistical lore, and constitutional and moral philosophy, is laid under contribution;—of mechanical genius, for the most subtle contrivances are necessary, in order to effect the printing with sufficient rapidity;—and, lastly, an insatiable public appetite for political knowledge; for it is this universal demand which alone sustains the exertion of those energies by which a newspaper is produced.¹⁶²

For centuries, the flight of news had been liable to disruption from weather or other unpredictable forces, and risked being old and outdated at arrival. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, by contrast, news were transmitted electronically through wires hidden beneath urban pavements or stretched across the ocean floor, insulated from the world’s disruptive forces. The process consisted of several steps of translation. The actual event had to be translated into first-hand verbal accounts, jotting down with shorthand symbols on a note book, accounts the reporter would later be expected to modify so as to make their content even more clear to the readers.

The reporter should listen carefully so as to catch the sense of the speaker, for it is scarcely likely that if he does not himself understand the subject of discourse, newspaper readers will easily comprehend his “report.” A good reporter will frequently make a speaker’s meaning more clear to the readers of his paper than the speaker himself was able to make it to his hearers at the time of delivery.¹⁶³

The shorthand symbols would then be translated into Latin letters on a different sheet of paper, and handed to a telegraph clerk, who would translate them into codified patterns of electric currents travelling through alloyed metal cables protected by layers of colonial rubber. These currents would be turned into sound signals at the moment of arrival at the desk of another telegraph clerk, who would translate the sounds back into ink letters on paper, which would then undergo a series of proofreadings and cuttings depending on printing limitations and an editor’s preferred style (which again was related to the intended readership). The translated text would then (to put it shortly) be translated into marks on a stereotype plate, then further into ink letters printed on paper sheets which, when assembled properly, would become a folded newspaper. Under the cover of night, hundreds of these would be ‘flung from the windows, or trundled along passages, or carried in huge bundles through the doorways into the street’, where a horse cart would be ready to take them to the station in time for the morning post train.¹⁶⁴ The train would carry them along its frictionless road to towns and villages, where, unpacked and made ready for sale, the news would finally arrive in the hands of the intended readers, who would then be able to observe the original events with a sense of being immediately present with the events reported on the pages.

As long as the news remained unchanged during their passage, it was as if this long chain of mediators was not there at all. News moved through a time independent of their motion and could therefore appear before the readers’ eyes immediately and without delay. However, much like the achievement of smooth railway travelling, the reader’s frictionless access to current events—we might even say the public’s access to itself—was made possible only through the hard work of so many mediators: colonial forests, telegraph cables, printing machinery, and the ‘diligent hands of many writers’.¹⁶⁵ It was a mediated immediacy.

Fourteenth-century scholastics had conceived the saeculum as a kind of time enveloping angelic messengers travelling without transformation, bringing tidings to men. In Victorian England, the same kind of time was mediated by the networks producing and distributing daily newspapers, some of which even bore the names of angelic heralds and mercuries. Rather than angels, it was now news that moved across vast distances without undergoing change, and their flight was measured by the secular time implied by the pages’ typographical form and the promise of immediacy.