Press In Britain Research Articles

The Advent of the Printing Press and Britain’s Multilingual Textual Culture, 1471–1510

This article discusses the effects the new technology of printing had on the rich and multilingual textual culture of late medieval Britain. Before setting up his press in Westminster, William Caxton had books published in Latin, French and English. As soon as he relocated to England, however, he abandoned this multilingual business model and devoted all his energies to print books in English, as did his successors Richard Pynson and Wynkyn de Worde. Not only did they favour English over all other British languages, but promoted a London-based variety of English at the expense of other dialects. Hence, before giving to the press the Scots Contemplacioun of Synnaris by William Touris, Wynkyn de Worde chose to have it Anglicized. When Walter Chepman and Andrew Myllar established a printing press in Edinburgh in 1508, they replicated the choices of their English counterparts, promoting the standard form of Scots and even Scotticizing Middle English texts, such as Sir Eglamour of Artois. I conclude by arguing that the introduction of the printing press in Britain enhanced the prestige of the language variety used by the elite and became instrumental in eroding the balances existing in the British language ecosystem.

Sexual Health, Morality and the Missionary Press in Britain and the South Pacific, 1795–1850

Abstract This article explores the London Missionary Society’s textual production on the South Pacific in the first half of the nineteenth century and argues that sexuality was connected to moral and physical understandings of health in missionary texts. This was due to the nature of missionary and indigenous entanglements in the South Pacific and the era’s burgeoning medical print network. The discussion builds on current debates on mission and the cultural underpinnings of the British empire through showcasing the processes involved in the making of missionary texts and colonial knowledge production from the South Pacific.

Britain and Europe's Gifted Children in the Quests for Democracy, Welfare and Productivity, 1970–1990

Policy, voluntary, psychological and educational interest in gifted children emerged across Europe in the early twentieth century but surged dramatically in the 1970s and 1980s. This article explores the transnational voluntary circles hoping that gifted youth would bring peace and liberal democracy across Europe in these years. It analyses, also, how such work came into conflict with the expectations of conservative press in Britain: that gifted children would in fact bolster national economic progress. Critically, the article demonstrates that parents and children, drawing on professional and cultural capital, resisted ideas of gifted youth as global assets. Interest in giftedness revealed the growing ‘agency’ of articulate, affluent, middle-class families within the contexts of individualism and neoliberalism, but also its limits. Further, we can and must centre the experiences of young people in our scholarship, to truly understand how ‘agency’ operates within families and beyond.

Sketches of Spain: The Role of the Left-Wing Press in Britain, the Netherlands, and amongst Exiled Germans in Recruiting Volunteers for Republican Spain during the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939

This article investigates how, during the Spanish Civil War (1936–9), left-wing British, Dutch and German-language newspapers ‘recruited’ their readers to the cause of the Spanish Republic. Recruitment could consist of donating time, money, social and political capital, or, in extreme cases, actually joining the fighting in Spain. It employs a double comparative approach, analysing recruitment messages attuned to readers in three different national political contexts and cultures produced on behalf of socialist and communist organisations. It argues that different ‘sketches of Spain’ co-existed, aligned to different domestic political and popular cultures and through different ideological lenses. These different sketches, in turn, were vital in shaping people's expectations of the Civil War, circumscribed the scope for and content of anti-fascist transnational connections made in Spain, and helped foster new understandings of social and political circumstances at home.

Colors and Orientalism as associations: Exploring the semiotic (re)presentation of Saudi women in British and Saudi newspapers

AbstractMedia representations can have significant influence in shaping opinions and influence public response to certain communities or gender and ethnic representations around the world. Investigating semiotic representation in linguistic discourse as vehicles for meaning in culture has been a fruitful area of research over the past decades. This study explores how stereotypes of women feed into the representations of Saudi women in contemporary press in Britain and Saudi Arabia. The focus is on the newspaper genre. Data for this study have been gleaned from a particular set of British and Saudi newspapers. Using the Color Image Scale (CIS) as a research tool, this study yielded a number of findings, the main one of which is the discrepancy in Saudi women's representation in the journalistic discourse under study. In addition, variances in color choice and usage between the newspapers in the present study were apparent. The study provides an important opportunity to advance our understanding of Saudi women's representation in British versus Saudi newspapers. The present study also makes a major contribution to research on critical discourse analysis by demonstrating how power as well as orientalism impact Saudi women's representation. The findings of this study are important for scholars of gender, religion, media, and cultural diversity.

The British Reporter on Screen

This article considers the representation of tabloid journalists in 1930s British cinema. It argues that during this period, British films showed journalists to be collaborating with state powers to maintain a stable society. They also depicted reporters as not adhering to any recognised ethical framework. As a result, cinematic journalists in 1930s Britain differ markedly from later, better-known fictional reporters, as they do not challenge inequalities or uphold principles of ethics. The 1930s saw the consolidation and expansion of the popular press in Britain, as well as a boom in cinemagoing. The depiction of the relatively novel ‘type’ of the tabloid reporter in fiction films in this period therefore had the potential to greatly impact the public’s view of the journalism profession. The article highlights how this under-researched period in British film history gives important indications of the place of the reporter in the country’s popular imagination, in this decade.

The 2014 Ebola outbreak: narratives from UK/USA and West Africa media

ABSTRACTThis study explored how elite press in Britain and the United States framed the 2014 Ebola outbreak compared to how three West African countries covered the same epidemic. This comparison showed that the press in Britain and the USA emphasised the limitations of the African continent, resorting to ancient stereotypes about the continent to make sense of the situation. The media is West Africa, highlighted the broader implications of the outbreak on the African continent. The findings in this study have broader consequences that border on systemic approaches to coverage of health.

Evangelical Periodical Culture: Or, Evangelicalism Was Everywhere

Evangelical Periodical Culture:Or, Evangelicalism Was Everywhere Juliet Shields (bio) In 1897, Hugh Price Hughes, founder of the Methodist Times, declared that "under the conditions of existing civilization, every Movement must have a Newspaper or Magazine" (1). Hughes was not referring to social movements, such as those supporting temperance or women's suffrage, but specifically to religious ones. And at the end of the nineteenth century, most religious movements did issue a periodical publication of some sort. Perhaps nowhere was the plurality of denominations of Christianity, and of parties or movements within denominations, more readily apparent in Victorian Britain than in the periodical press. Over the course of the nineteenth century, [End Page 176] periodicals supplanted printed sermons and tracts as the primary printed means by which churches and religious organizations spread their word locally and nationally. Unlike tracts, however, religious periodicals did not generally seek to convert readers but instead to unite communities of belief around shared doctrines and practices. Josef L. Altholz's The Religious Press in Britain, 1760–1900 offers a comprehensive account of nineteenth-century religious periodicals by denomination. My aim in this short piece is to give an overview of the evangelical periodical press, the distinctiveness of which has been overlooked by scholars of Victorian literature and culture. As essays in this forum from Timothy Larsen, Chad Stutz, and Mark Knight attest, evangelicalism was a "movement rather than a denomination" (Knight and Mason 122). As such, it was devoted to actively spreading the Gospel: evangelicals promoted individual improvement and social transformation through the practice of Biblical teaching. While virtually every religious denomination produced its own distinctive periodical publications, the evangelical press comprised a fluid network of publishers, editors, and writers, many of whom worked for multiple publications. Evangelical periodical culture, like evangelicalism itself, was remarkable for its "breadth and diversity" (Knight and Mason 122). It included some periodicals that were specific to a particular denomination, such as the Presbyterian Evangelical Witness (1862–73) and the Baptist Freeman (1855–99), and some that were non-denominational, such as the Evangelical Magazine (1793–1904) and the Leisure Hour (1852–1905). Evangelicals of all denominations shared a concern with the spiritual and practical well-being of those regarded as intellectually inferior or morally dependent: children, women, servants, and labourers. The abolition of the Advertisement Tax in 1853, the Newspaper Stamp Duty in 1855, and the Paper Duty in 1861 made possible the publication of magazines specifically for these classes, and the Elementary Education Act of 1870 increased the demand for cheap and morally edifying reading material. Already prone to consider themselves "people of the Word" (Knight and Mason 131), evangelicals took advantage of these developments in the periodical press to create a sense of community that would encompass multiplicity. The evangelical press took advantage of all available forms of periodical publication, issuing expensive quarterly, mid-range monthly, and cheap weekly magazines. The Free Presbyterian Church envisioned its journal, the North British Review (1844–71), as a competitor to elite quarterly reviews such as the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review and sought quite successfully to become an arbiter of national culture (Shattock 457). By contrast, the broadly evangelical Sunday at Home (1854–1940) cost just a penny and aimed to provide the working classes with "profitable employment [for] those intervals of the Lord's day which are not devoted to Divine Worship and the reading of Holy Scriptures" ("A Few Words"). While these penny papers did not eschew fiction entirely, they tended toward the overtly didactic [End Page 177] and uplifting sort. Newspapers were problematic for evangelicals because, although they were cheap enough for working-class readers to purchase, the format carried connotations of worldliness (Altholz 49–51). Newspapers were by definition concerned with the here and now rather than with the timelessness of Christianity. Nonetheless, the repeal of the taxes on knowledge in the 1850s inspired several attempts to establish non-sectarian biweekly newspapers, including the Christian Cabinet (1855–64), the London Christian Times (1863–64), and the Christian Times (1866–71). As their relatively short lifespans suggest, these newspapers did not develop large enough readerships to become financially sustainable. Although it employed a range of...

Small Presses and Little Magazines: A Print Culture Perspective on Modernism

Although the importance of small presses and little magazines to the development of early twentieth-century modernism has long been recognized, recent scholarship in print culture studies has enlarged this field of enquiry and challenged some of conventional literary history's assumptions about how modernist literature is defined and categorized. Drawing on developments in periodical studies, and the concept of a communications circuit for books and other print forms, this essay explores the historical significance of some prominent as well as lesser-known magazines and publishing imprints from the era of high modernism. Key topics, including advertising and censorship, are discussed in relation to a range of magazines, including the shortlived British Blast, the American Little Review, and the international Transatlantic Review, as well as ‘quality’ mainstream magazines. Overlapping networks of writers, editors and publishers also supported the spread of modernist book publishing from new presses: some, like the Black Sun Press and Hours Press, served small elite markets, while the imprints of B. W. Huebsch in America and the Hogarth Press in Britain each grew into diverse publishing enterprises, bringing modernism into the mainstream of the literary marketplace.

“Amongst the Most Desirable Reading”: Advertising and the Fetters of the Newspaper Press in Britain, c. 1848–1914

What is the difference between advertising and news? This essay examines the rise of this dilemma and its precarious resolution in the formative era of modern advertising and press commercialization in Britain, c. 1848–1914, with particular attention to legal powers mobilized in the process. The essay traces a dialectical process, which began with the midcentury campaign to repeal taxes on the press, one of which was the advertisement duty. The campaign framed advertising as a communication of essential information. Its success gave full reign to advertising in the newspaper press, but also triggered a readjustment: Newspaper owners soon faced a threat to their effective control of the medium; their proprietary power to differentiate advertising from their self-proclaimed business - news - was put to the test. Owners' responses established a hierarchic distinction between news and advertising, along an informational metric: advertising was framed as an inferior kind of information, more biased than news. The hierarchy became embedded as a common sense to the point that the process of historical creation has been forgotten; yet, it asserted a difference between news and ads which had little to hang on in theory and practice, giving rise to challenges which still resonate today.

Forging the Missionary Ideal: Gender and the Family in the Church Missionary Society Gleaner

The missionary press in Britain served not only to diffuse knowledge, but to create identity. For an emergent evangelical middle‐class, notions of masculinity, femininity, and family were negotiated and refined through the representations of missionaries and their lives in the field. Evangelical identity was configured through the ideologies and practices of gender and domesticity in the mission context. This article explores the representations of gender and the family in the philanthropic press in Britain through the case study of the Church Missionary Society Gleaner. For the missionary public at home, the pages of the missionary press contained the exemplary normativity of gender, culture, and family. In forging those ideals through the work and representation of mission endeavour, notions of gender and family became both implicitly and explicitly linked to Empire. By once again taking the colony and metropole into the same analytical space, we can consider the ways in which colonialism “out there” structured Britishness not only “at home.” but in the heart of the home as well.

Police violence and judicial bias in the age of mass democracy: Glasgow, 1933–1935

ABSTRACTUsing the example of an impoverished, so-called ‘slum’ district in Glasgow, this article argues that poorer, working-class people were subjected to aggressive and frequently violent policing along with systematic hostility from the judiciary and the press in Britain during the 1930s. In Glasgow, attempts to challenge police methods and police officers’ courtroom testimonies met with a highly punitive response from the city’s legal establishment. Despite enjoying the rights of citizenship, working-class people found it difficult to find politicians to take up their complaints about police incivility and brutality, embodied in the conduct of a police constable known locally as ‘Hitler’. Those few politicians willing to do so, whether in Glasgow Corporation or in the House of Commons, found themselves marginalized as mainstream politicians of all parties refused to accept that the British police were capable of inflicting ‘terror’ on civilians. Press sympathy extended only to those working-class women jailed for perjury and separated from their children in the wake of trials of ‘rioters’ at Glasgow Sheriff Court. Human-interest coverage of the plight of their families gave working-class people a voice as victims of misfortune. They were not permitted to speak as victims of miscarriages of justice.

In Case You Haven't Heard

Mental Health WeeklyVolume 28, Issue 45 p. 8-8 In Case You Haven't Heard In Case You Haven't Heard First published: 03 December 2018 https://doi.org/10.1002/mhw.31691Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Abstract Up to 3,000 foreign doctors in the United Kingdom are having their backgrounds checked after it emerged that a fake psychiatrist with no qualifications was allowed to practice for over 22 years, CNN reported Nov. 19. Zholia Alemi was jailed for fraud in October after she changed an elderly client's will to make herself a beneficiary. Following that, it was discovered that when she first registered in Britain in 1995, Alemi had conned medical bodies into believing she had a qualification from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. The General Medical Council (GMC) has now launched an investigation into thousands of U.K.-based doctors who registered for U.K. licenses in the same way as Alemi, Britain's Press Association reported. In 1995, Alemi took advantage of a section of the Medical Act, subsequently removed in 2003, that allowed medical graduates from some commonwealth countries to skip exams and rigorous document checks. A spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Social Care said in a statement: “As the organization responsible for regulating doctors, we expect the GMC to investigate how this criminal was able to register as a doctor and put measures in place to make sure it can't happen again.” Volume28, Issue453 December 2018Pages 8-8 RelatedInformation

‘What the country wanted’: The houses of parliament, the press and the origins of media management in Britain, c. 1780–1900

This paper considers a topic that has received scant attention in the historiography of public relations: official attempts to manage the press in Britain in the Houses of Parliament in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Existing accounts of the emergence of government public relations in the UK have tended to focus on the civil service in the first half of the twentieth century, but this article sheds light on a series of earlier developments, including the allocation of seats for reporters in the viewing gallery of the Commons in 1803, the construction of dedicated Reporters’ Galleries in both parliamentary chambers in 1847–52 and the creation of a Westminster Lobby in 1884. Taken together, these reforms improved journalists’ access to parliament in an era in which direct governmental control over newspapers lapsed. Yet, they also allowed politicians to influence media commentary by determining who was permitted access to parliament and what type of content made its way into print. A case can thus be made that Westminster, not Whitehall, played host to the earliest official attempts to manage the media in Britain, and this has important repercussions for current understandings of public relations history.

Russia electrification plan in the USA and UK press assessment of the 1920-1929

The following paper deals with the research of the place and value of Russia electrification plan and its reflection in Great Britain and the USA public opinion. The study of information campaign around Russia electrification plan has its specifics and value: first, it gives a chance to establish new, unknown facts; secondly, to determine the level of knowledge of Another (in this case, American) society about the Soviet power; thirdly, to understand what place information about Russia electrification plan took in the USA and Great Britain in the system of the USSR image creation, the image of the Soviet power revolution. This paper uses materials of the USA and Great Britain press about Russia electrification plan. Besides, the author analyzes the image of the Soviet power in the American and British society. The information campaign around Russia electrification plan could report to the world about the Soviet economy achievements as well as promote preparation (in the information plan) to the following large project - industrialization. Articles, reports, notes on Russia electrification plan helped to change the attitude towards Russia / the USSR in the USA and Great Britain and helped to correct the image of the USSR in the world.

The Delhi Durbar Comes to Moscow: Charles Urban and Kinemacolor in Russia, 1910–1916

This article examines the exhibition and reception of Kinemacolor in Russia from 1910 to 1916. Kinemacolor was a British method of filming and projecting in natural color invented by George Albert Smith and financed by Charles Urban, a US-born entrepreneur; film historians generally regard it as the most commercially viable color process before the outbreak of war in 1914. The article investigates Urban's interest in Russia as a potential market for Kinemacolor and as a source of interesting filmic material. In addition to identifying the extent of Kinemacolor's exhibition and distribution in Russia between 1910 and 1916, it also examines the Russian subjects filmed by Urban's companies in black and white and color, and identifies two occasions (1909 and 1913) on which Tsar Nikolai II and Tsarina Aleksandra Fedorovna were filmed in Kinemacolor. The article argues that the reception of Kinemacolor was widespread and diverse, and included members of the Russian imperial family and the Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Lenin. It references the specialist film-trade press in Britain, Russia, Europe, and North America; theater listings in Britain and Russia; and contemporary reports on Kinemacolor exhibitions in the British and Russian media. The article also draws upon the extensive archive of Urban's private papers, which is currently preserved in Bradford's National Science and Media Museum.

Adrian Bingham and Martin Conboy, Tabloid Century: The Popular Press in Britain, 1896 to the present

Adrian Bingham and Martin Conboy, Tabloid Century: The Popular Press in Britain, 1896 to the present

Tabloid Century: The Popular Press in Britain, 1896 to the Present. By Adrian Bingham and Martin Conboy

Tabloid Century: The Popular Press in Britain, 1896 to the Present. By Adrian Bingham and Martin Conboy

Tabloid Century: The Popular Press in Britain, 1896 to the Present, by Adrian Bingham and Martin Conboy

The term ‘tabloid’ seems first to have been transferred from pharmaceuticals to newspapers in 1901. It denotes a distinctive combination of appearance and content that lent a newspaper convenience, time-saving and impact. A Mirror editor described his paper’s objective in 1949: ‘the vivid and dramatic presentation of events so as to give them a forceful impact … big headlines, vigorous writing, simplification into familiar everyday language and the wide use of illustration by cartoon and photograph’. The Mirror’s editor, grumbling to Northcliffe in 1911 about employees from Eton and Oxford whose education apparently ended with events in 42 BC, said that ‘highly educated men, I find as a rule, have no sense of news’. Perhaps this mandarin trait persists, and explains why the press’s historians have preferred to study what one newspaperman wrote to another rather than what they published in the popular press. Not so with the authors of the present book, Adrian Bingham and Martin Conboy: after soaking themselves in the content of Mirror, Express, Herald and Sun, they now surface to tell the tale. They do not pinch their noses, but fair-mindedly aim to understand and to contextualise: ‘we need to take the tabloids seriously’, they rightly say. Covering much the same ground as A.C.H. Smith’s somewhat disappointing Paper Voices: The Popular Press and Social Change 1935–1965 (1975), but with a longer time-span, they offer six thematic chapters: on war, politics, monarchy/celebrity, gender/sexuality, social class, and race/nation, outlining a century of change within each area.

Alston, Charlotte The History of a Radical International Movement: Tolstoy and his Disciples (review)

SEER, 94, 3, july 2016 516 close readings and generalizations that merit the attention of anyone seriously concerned with Russian poetry. New College, Oxford G. S. Smith Alston, Charlotte. The History of a Radical International Movement: Tolstoy and his Disciples. I. B. Tauris, London and New York, 2014. x + 309 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £59.50. Starting in the mid 1880s, enthusiasm for Russian culture swept Europe, and subsequentlyspreadtosuchplacesasSouthAfrica,India,ChinaandtheMiddle East.LevTolstoiwaspartofthiswave,inhiscaseasmuchasapublicintellectual as a writer of fiction. The History of a Radical International Movement: Tolstoy and his Disciples tells the story of his relation to and influence on contemporary social reform movements. It focuses on the Anglo-American arena, but also discusses activists and movements in the Netherlands, Hungary, the AustroHungarian Empire and elsewhere. This storyline develops naturally, because the book tells how different centres of Tolstoi activity and individuals who considered themselves Tolstoyans interacted. While there are many individual studies about Tolstoyism, Charlotte Alston is the first to provide an overview of it. To do so, in addition to accessing previous scholarship, she has worked in archives in many countries. This transnational approach weaves many threads of the subject together for the first time. Alston provides many case histories of individuals inspired by Tolstoi through such works as A Confession (1879), What I Believe (1884), What Then Must We Do? (1886), On Life (1887) and The Kingdom of God is Within Us (1893). These included lawyers; businessmen, clerks and professionals; activists, socialists and anarchists; and conscientious objectors, many associated with the military. They came from many countries and backgrounds and reacted to their conversions in different ways. For all of them, however, it was an awakening or intensification of conscience that inspired, even demanded action. Many of them rejected their previous lives, and Tolstoi would have approved of this. Personally I find Tolstoi’s non-fictional tracts compelling but extreme. Many ofTolstoi’scontemporariesreactedsimilarlytothem:whileadmiringthepurity of his ideals, they considered them unrealistic. Tolstoi was a Christian anarchist who believed that life could be reformed and changed only one individual at a time. ‘To be a Tolstoyan meant to apply the principles of brotherhood, non-violence and non-resistance in all aspects of life, and to follow one’s own conscience at the expense of Church and state’ (p. 197). But what should one do REVIEWS 517 beyond expressing one’s ideals in one’s personal behaviour? Tolstoi opposed all political action. This meant that Tolstoyans could not engage in social reform through government or the courts, the legitimacy of both of which he rejected. Tolstoi’s beliefs made more sense in Russia, an authoritarian state whose ruler was above the law, and whose subjects sought moral freedom outside of politics, than in England and America, where citizens enjoyed political freedom. Left on their own, devoted Tolstoyans put their conscience to work in the service of many causes. Some became radicals and revolutionaries. True to his principles, Tolstoi did not actively participate in organizing Tolstoyan societies or communities. Devoted followers did this for him, however. Chief among these was Vladimir Chertkov. Alston offers the most unbiased account of Chertkov that I know — neglecting neither his faults nor his virtues. She also traces the history of such Tolstoyan establishments as the Christian Commonwealth in the US, the Purleigh Colony in Britain and the Vrede group in the Netherlands. She discusses Tolstoi societies, publishing enterprises such as the Intermediary Press in Russia and the Free Age Press in Britain, and the Tolstoyan periodical press. Tolstoi advocated a form of Christianity that emphasized ethics above all else, and that ‘would not ask him to suspend rational thought’ (p. 15). Like many Victorians, he sought to reconcile science with religion, even if he privileged the latter. For him conscience was the conduit to the sacred; this belief appealed both to various Russian sectarians with whom he was close, and to the modern mentality, whether religious or secular, that favours individualism. He was a kind of transcendentalist, for whom self-reliance became a mantra. He relied on intuition for moral guidance, but practiced a kind of Kantianism according to which morality was the product of a higher reason inaccessible except through that intuition...