Local Newspapers and the Shaping of Local Identity in North-East London, c.1885–1925

Abstract

In the 1990 edited volume Investigating Victorian Journalism Michael Harris argued that the absence of London local newspapers 'from most views of the Victorian press seriously distorts the general picture' .1 His essay went on to describe some of the problems facing historians of the London local press, including the difficult subdivisions of London's political and community landscape and the loss of many of the publication records due to complex merger patterns. His complaint stands largely unanswered almost twenty years on, and the problems he identifies remain largely untackled. London's local history in general is under-researched, and newspapers are just one aspect of this; although some individual local studies have emerged since 1990 London local newspaper research has not kept up with the advances in other areas of newspaper history. Brake, Bell and Finkelstein's NineteenthCentury Media and the Construction of Identities (2000) discusses a wide variety of issues of personal, group, national and political identity, and they argue strongly for the interesting and appealing idea of a periodical text as a 'site for competing voices'.2 However, the volume still gives very little space to the idea of place identity on a small scale. In fact, Harris's arguments for the London local press are merely an extreme case for regional, provincial and local newspapers in general. The huge number of different titles, the difficulty of tracing related sources and the physical and temporal drawbacks of studying long print-runs make local newspaper research a sometimes daunting proposition. Yet local newspapers are often not merely the best available source for local history and community identity, but the only available source.