Abstract
The phrase “Americanization of the British Press” appears to have been used for the first time in a leader in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1882 and then, in a more substantive way in 1887, in the concluding pages of Henry Fox Bourne’s magisterial two-volume history of English newspapers. Bourne, a dispassionate observer who was himself a journalist, was seeking to describe a critical moment in the history of Anglo-American journalism, when traditional forms of print were ceding ground, seemingly in a rush, to popular modes of expression. The changes to which he was alluding, given an impetus earlier in the decade by William T. Stead in Britain and Joseph Pulitzer in the United States, did not create sudden new structures of journalism. They were instead the product of a process that had been evolving for half a century, much of which appeared to be driven by American models.
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Notes
Theodore Child, “The American Newspaper Press,” Fortnightly Review, new series, XXXVIII (1885), 831, 834.
Henry James, The Reverberator (New York: Grove Press, 1979; first published in 1888), 6.
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Quoted in Amanda Claybaugh, “Toward a New Transatlanticism: Dickens in the United States,” Victorian Studies, XLVIII (2006), 440.
See Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 ( New York: Oxford University Press, 2007 )
Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City & the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1984 ).
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See Laurence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988 ).
James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (London: Macmillan, 1888), III, 566.
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George Gissing, Born in Exile (London: The Hogarth Press, 1985; first published in 1892), 111, 185.
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See Joanne Shattock, Politics and Reviewers: The “Edinburgh” and the “Quarterly” in the Early Victorian Age ( London: Leicester University Press, 1989 )
Merle M. Bevington, The Saturday Review, 1855–1868: Representative Educated Opinion in Victorian England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941). As a student at Christ’s College, Cambridge, in the 1850s, Walter Besant, later to endorse aspects of popular journalism, stated the point sharply: “The only journalism that was accounted worthy of a gentleman and a scholar was the writing of leaders for the Times.” Besant, Autobiography (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1902 ), 92.
Charles Dickens, The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1968; first published in 1843–4), 321.
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Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1842), 302–3; Trollope, Domestic Manners, 259; Arnold Bennett, Those United States (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1912), 133; G. W. Steevens, The Land of the Dollar ( Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1897 ), 264.
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George Gissing, New Grub Street (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1962; first published in 1891), 62. In Island, a novel by Aldous Huxley, the journalist Will Farnaby describes his work as “making money by turning out the cheapest, flashiest kind of literary forgery.” (New York: Bantam Books, 1963; first published in 1962), 100.
Charles Whibley, “The Yellow Press,” Blackwood’s Magazine, CLXXXI (1907), 536.
W. T. Stead, “Government by Journalism,” Contemporary Review, XLIX (1886), 47 Anthony Trollope, North America (eds), Donald Smalley and Bradford Allen Booth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951), 503. Trollope wrote: “When we express a dislike to the shoeboy reading his newspaper, I fear we do so because we fear that the shoeboy is coming near our own heels.” 424.
Stuart J. Reid (ed.), Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid, 1842–1885 ( London: Cassell and Company, 1905 ), 313
Paul Blouët (“Max O’Rell”), “Lively Journalism,” North American Review, CL (1890), 366.
Lydia Kingsmill Commander, “The Significance of Yellow Journalism,” Arena, XXXIV (1905), 155.
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Paul Blouët (“Max O’Rell”), A Frenchman in America: Recollections of Men and Things (New York: Cassell, 1891), 110.
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© 2011 Joel H. Wiener
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Wiener, J.H. (2011). The Fear of Americanization. In: The Americanization of the British Press, 1830s–1914. Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230347953_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230347953_2
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