British Library Newspaper Research Articles

Advertising anxiety: Lucozade narratives in the 1939 newspaper promotion campaign

ABSTRACT Lucozade is a British soft drink consisting of flavoured glucose that has very specific clinical origins but has more generally been associated with convalescence. That name was first used in 1929 and, over the years, the product has undergone metamorphoses to survive changed social and economic circumstances. From a largely local success in the north-east of England, much wider recognition can be attributed to a concerted newspaper advertising campaign in 1939 which extended a narrative of relief, and the prospect of cure, from ill-defined health afflictions. This promotion featured the techniques long-established for tonic preparations. Using the British Library Newspaper Archive, participating print titles were identified as were the complete range of Lucozade advertisements used there. The scale and scope of these presentational efforts can be illustrated. From February to December 1939, town and regional newspaper titles across England, Scotland and Wales were used to advertise 37 different problem scenarios with the consistent message of Lucozade’s effectiveness, and the suggestion of medical endorsement far beyond those clinical origins.

Pauper Voices, Public Opinion and Workhouse Reform in Mid-Victorian England: Bearing Witness, by Peter Jones and Steven King

Reviewed by: Pauper Voices, Public Opinion and Workhouse Reform in Mid-Victorian England: Bearing Witness by Peter Jones and Steven King Marjorie Levine-Clark (bio) Pauper Voices, Public Opinion and Workhouse Reform in Mid-Victorian England: Bearing Witness, by Peter Jones and Steven King; pp. ix + 136. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, $69.99, $54.99 ebook. Peter Jones and Steven King’s little book, Pauper Voices, Public Opinion and Workhouse Reform in Mid-Victorian England, explores demands for workhouse reform during the nineteenth century. It stands out as truly innovative in poor law literature while also engaging scholars of journalism and public opinion. The authors make three significant interventions (and several smaller ones) into poor law historiography, each introduced in the three main chapters of the book. Chapter 1 shows that historians need to reconsider the chronology and content of the resistance to deterrent workhouses. Chapter 2 introduces readers to Joseph Rowntree, an influential “amateur workhouse inspector and journalist,” “entirely neglected” in histories of the poor law (4). Most importantly, perhaps, the authors demonstrate in chapter 3 that (male) paupers inserted themselves in debates about workhouse reform. The study is deeply archival, analyzing sources from the massive MH 12 series of thousands of volumes in the National Archives in London. MH 12 has routinely been mined by historians to find correspondence between local poor law officials and central poor law authorities to tell stories of specific poor law unions. Jones and King use the collection differently. As principal members of the larger project “In Their Own Write: The Lives and Letters of the Poor 1834–c.1900,” they systematically scoured the MH 12 series to locate the letters of paupers across the volumes. (They expect to find 20,000 to 30,000 letters when the project is complete.) This broad look at the series also unearthed the prolific record of a man like Rowntree. In addition to their close archival readings, the authors employed digital searching of the online British Library Newspaper Archive to study the ways that the language relating to poor law reform changed over time. These two approaches to text prove richly rewarding in complicating our received historical narratives. Parts of this research have been introduced and published previously, most notably in the authors’ own edited volume Obligation, Entitlement and Dispute under the English Poor Laws (2015), which underscores the agency of the poor. Pulling the research together in one book, however, allows Jones and King to address more substantively continuities across the Old Poor Law and the New and when significant changes occurred, as well as to investigate more thoroughly the specifically Victorian aspects of their material and arguments. Chapter 1 tells the fascinating story of rhetorical and thematic shifts in criticisms of the workhouse from the Old Poor Law through the end of the nineteenth century. The authors convincingly show that both the idea of the deterrent workhouse and opposition to that idea existed long before the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act. It was the New Poor Law, however, that galvanized resistance and regular attacks in the local and national press. Using the results of digital newspaper searching, the authors illustrate that a language of “abuse” and “cruelty” that followed the establishment of the work-house system changed in the second half of the century to a language of “scandal” (1). While scandal certainly encompassed distinct workhouse abuses, it more importantly came to stand for a general critique of the workhouse that came to dominate [End Page 727] the pages of newspapers. Jones and King insist that “something clearly happened in the 1860s” to shift the public discourse to emphasize the need to hold poor law officials accountable to those for whom they were responsible: the poor themselves (23). This is a persuasive new way of understanding workhouse scandal. As Jones and King note, scholars have tended to use scandal narrowly to focus on individual horrors at single workhouses. The authors’ revisioning of scandal as a broad public concern with the management of workhouses and the care of the poor transforms the story of the Victorian Poor Law in creative ways. In chapter 2 the authors add more to this story by examining the...

Person reference and democratization in British English

This article explores the interrelatedness of societal changes and changes in language practices. By using a combination of corpus linguistic and socio-pragmatic methods, we track diachronic changes in word patterns and interpret findings in the framework of democratization. The data comes from a small and representative corpus of British English (ARCHER-3.1) and from three “big data” sets (Google Books, British Library Newspapers and The Economist). We suggest that data triangulation, including sociohistorical contextualization, allows us to conclude that especially from the mid-nineteenth century onwards words signaling social status and referring to individuals have decreased and from the first decades of the twentieth century onwards words referring to collectivities of people have increased.

In Search of America

This article considers how, and why, “Topic Modelling” tools can be used to analyse historical newspaper archives. While a growing number of media and communication studies projects have applied these techniques to corpuses of born-digital journalism, using the same tools to analyse large-scale collections of historical newspapers requires us to overcome additional technological and methodological challenges. Our discussion is framed around a historical case study examining references to the United States in the 19th Century British Library Newspaper Archive. The article begins by highlighting the problems that researchers of both digital and historical journalism face when attempting to deal with an enormous body of evidence. Next, it argues that Topic Modelling offers one potential solution to these problems by providing a way to “distant read” the archive. The remainder of the article is divided into five experiments that demonstrate how Topic Modelling can be applied to a series of research questions, each of which is applicable to other projects that might make use of newspaper archives. As well as demonstrating the investigative potential of topic modelling, the article also highlights the practical and technological barriers that currently undermine its effectiveness, particularly when it is applied to archives of historical material.

Rough Music, Community Protest and the Local Press in Nineteenth-Century England

ABSTRACTE. P. Thompson, in his work, Customs in Common, published in 1991, included a chapter that considered a phenomenon with which he had been interested in much of his earlier research: rough music. Thompson described this as a means by which through the use of raucous “music” and street theatre, mockery or hostility was directed against individuals “who offended against certain community norms.” Thompson's research drew in part upon local newspaper reports in his analysis of rough music. With the digitisation of some 23 million pages of local newspapers, accessible through the British Library's newspaper archive, a much more extensive analysis of the press representation of rough music is now possible. This article revisits Thompson's work and tests his claims about the content and context of rough music in the communal regulation of behaviour contravening local societies’ norms. The article explores inter alia, the changing nature of rough music over time in terms of its focus and incidence, and its regional character. Attention is paid to the way in which rough music itself was reported and how attitudes towards its implementation varied within the press.

Representations of prostitutes and prostitution as a metaphor in nineteenth-century English newspapers

AbstractIn this article, we study the way in which prostitutes, on the one hand, and prostitution, on the other, were evaluated and represented in nineteenth-century English news articles. The main aims of the study are to chart referential terms used of prostitutes as socially marginal agents and objects, as well as to map concepts related to the metaphorical field of prostitution. Our data come from the 19th Century British Library Newspapers Database (British Library newspapers parts 1 and 2: 1800–1900. http://www.gale.com/c/british-library-newspapers-part-i) and The Times Digital Archive (1785–2011. http://www.gale.com/c/the-times-digital-archive), consisting of altogether 300 news articles relating to prostitution. Our results suggest that there is variation between vilification and pity in the language relating to prostitutes in the Victorian press, both from the socio-pragmatic and the cognitive perspectives. While the overall attitudes are mostly negative, there is a tendency to highlight the humanity of the prostitute by referring to her, for example, as a pitiful object of a crime. All the metaphors found in the material also draw from the negativity seen as inherent in prostitution and prostitutes. This is accentuated by the frequent personification of states or political institutions as prostitutes, whose lamentable behaviour or appearance is referred to in the metaphor.

Scissors and Paste: The Georgian Reprints, 1800–1837

This dataset, part of the Scissors and Paste Project (https://osf.io/nm2rq), describes instances of reprinting and text reuse (scissors-and-paste journalism) in British newspapers between 1800–1837. It was derived from the 19 th -Century British Library Newspapers, Part 1 digitised newspaper collection by using plagiarism detection software to identify instances of substantially similar text. It contains a series of manifests that describe a) instances of shared content b) the likely directionality of copying and c) which instances are evolutionary dead-ends and have no known reprints. It is comprised of 1,824 TSV files, divided into four directories, each representing one month between January 1800 and December 1837.

PUBLIC RELATIONS AND THE PRICE COMMISSION, 1973–74

In the early 1970s, rising prices were a particularly sensitive issue, as pay rises were being limited. This article focuses on the work of the government body established to implement and maintain price controls. Drawing on governmental files held by The National Archives, and the British Library newspaper archive, it evaluates the public relations work of the price commission: judging its performance with regard to the business community and the general public. The role of the chairman, Sir Arthur Cockfield, is also explored in some depth. This study shows how a detailed investigation of the public records can enable the historian to understand how Britain was governed in the early 1970s; the extent to which inflation dominated national discourse at that time; and more specifically, how the strictest price controls since war time operated in a free, western society in peacetime, and the effect of these measures on public opinion.

Pills, Potions and Devices: Treatments for Hearing Loss Advertised in Mid-nineteenth Century British Newspapers

This article examines the ameliorative options facing people with hearing loss in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. As reflected in professional journals of the day, medical understanding of diseases and dysfunctions of the ear was limited, yet there was vigorous assertion and counter-claim as to the cause and treatment of problems. At the time, medicine was largely unregulated and quack practitioners were also able to promote their nostrums and services to a credulous the general public with little chance of a genuine cure for their hearing loss. Using the nineteenth-century British Library Newspapers Archive for 1850, 379 advertisements offering cures for deafness were identified and examined to illustrate the variety of nostrums and devices offered to the public. Individuals with hearing loss were easy prey when even qualified medical practitioners had little understanding of cause or treatment, and when scant legal protection protected them from fraudulent treatment claims or offered redress for their failure.

19th Century British Library Newspapers

19th Century British Library Newspapers

Full-Text Databases and Historical Research: Cautionary Results from a Ten-Year Study

Full-text electronic searching of books, periodicals, and government documents is providing historians with the ability to survey unprecedented amounts of historical material for references traditionally not associated with those sources. Yet because the research conducted with these new tools is often not possible or practical using other methods, the shortcomings of the results are not always evident. This article highlights some of those shortcomings through a detailed discussion of a ten-year study that spanned the development of some of the main databases now used in nineteenth-century British history. The study was designed to uncover the number of newspaper reports discussing sex between men in three major London newspapers between 1820 and 1870, ultimately detecting over one thousand such reports. The study was designed in 1999 using the Palmer's Index to the Times on CD ROM in conjunction with archival sources, and those results were contrasted in later years to the results from the Times Digital Archive , the Palmer's Index to the Times within C19: The Nineteenth Century Index , and the British Library Newspapers 1800-1900 databases. The inability of newer tools to detect large amounts known material sparked a systematic crosschecking of the results of these databases to map the extent of the discrepancies. The article discusses some major shortcomings of these new tools, demonstrates methodologies for working around the limitations, and highlights some of the new findings related to the public discussion of sex between men obtained through this study.

Teaching Nineteenth-Century Periodicals Using Digital Resources: Myths and Methods

Teaching Nineteenth-Century Periodicals Using Digital Resources: Myths and Methods Jim Mussell (bio) Back in 2006, VPR published a special issue edited by Teresa Mangum that discussed how periodicals might be studied in university classrooms.1 The essays described innovative and exciting courses that engaged with different aspects of the nineteenth-century press. Each, in its own way, had to engage with a central methodological difficulty: how to provide access to newspapers and periodicals for students. Some managed with photocopies, others with trips to special collections in the library, and many made use of what digital resources were available. Now, with the publication of resources such as Gale Cengage's 19th Century UK Periodicals (2007), Gale Cengage and the British Library's British Newspapers 1800-1900 (2007) (also known as 19th Century British Library Newspapers), Pro-Quest's Historical Newspapers (2001-) and British Periodicals (2007), and Brightsolild's British Newspaper Archive (2011-), as well as the material republished in Google Books (2001-) and the Internet Archive (1996), this key methodological difficulty has largely been overcome. And, as textual transcripts provide access to page images through a searchable index, it has been overcome in such a way that exerts significant bibliographical control over what has long been acknowledged as a recalcitrant and complex print archive. This is not to argue that problems regarding access have been solved. The lack of political will for publicly-funded and accessible digitization programs (in England at least) has meant that the bulk of nineteenth-century newspapers and periodicals have been published by commercial publishers as packages to be sold to (predominantly North American) academic institutions. In some cases, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), under their JISC Collections scheme, has underwritten the cost of subscriptions for British universities, but access elsewhere depends on the wealth of the institution and the ability of academics to make the case [End Page 201] for the expense. Yet for scholars within subscribing institutions, there has been a fundamental transformation in the terms of access to nineteenth-century newspapers and periodicals. This transformation has the potential to return the press to its central place in studies of nineteenth-century culture, but only through the introduction of a new set of mediating forms. Working with periodicals always involves an engagement with mediation as lost print forms are reconstructed from traces in the surviving print archive. When we use digital resources, we introduce a further dimension to this familiar methodological consideration. The gains from using digital resources are so significant that nobody working within nineteenth-century studies can afford to ignore them. My argument here is that both students and scholars must be equipped to understand the constitution of this new digital representation of nineteenth-century print culture. Some Myths about Digital Scholarship The web, at the time of writing, is twenty-one years old—older than most of the undergraduate students on campus. Computers, of course, are much older, and computation has been both a method and object of study for as long as the modern university has existed. The digital humanities traces its roots back to Father Busa's work in the 1940s, and computational methods have long been employed in a number of humanities disciplines.2 Neither digital scholarship, then, nor digital culture, can really be approached as if they were still new. The rhetoric of novelty has political value, for both advocates and critics, but does not provide an intellectual framework through which to approach digital resources. A better approach is to substitute novelty for difference, taking the digital on its own terms while embracing the implicit question, "different from what?" It is this methodological embrace of difference that underpins each of my responses to the four myths below. 1. The next generation knows what it is doing. Marc Prensky's influential paper, "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants," from 2001, argued that young people, because they have been exposed to digital culture for most of their lives, are intrinsically different learners than those who adapted to it later in life.3 These "digital natives," according to Prensky, "think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors" and so require a learning environment and methodology specially attuned to their needs...

The British Library newspaper collections and future strategy

PurposeThis paper aims to describe the history and current plans for the newspaper collections of the British Library.Design/methodology/approachThe Library will create more access to its older collections, via mass digitisation of texts. The Library is seeking to work with UK newspaper publishers to secure the ingest of “born digital” newspapers, to present issues of recent newspapers to users in library reading rooms. Digitised newspapers will be taken into the Library's digital library storage system being developed for all types of digital materials that the Library is acquiring in growing quantities. There are plans to move the existing collections from Colindale to a new storage facility at its Boston Spa site, to ensure controlled environmental conditions for the original printed newspapers.FindingsIt was found that the British Library is investing in the future in order to improve access to a vital part of its collections.Originality/valueThis is one of the few published articles on how a national library deals with the massive task of providing access to newspapers.

The British Library Newspaper Collection: Long Term Storage, Preservation and Access

The British Library has recently unveiled plans for improving the collection care of, and digital access to, one of the world's greatest newspaper collections. The collection, which dates from the 16th century, contains UK titles as well as 200 overseas titles and is at risk. 15% of the collection is unusable because of its deterioration, and there are pressures on space and a need to develop greater digital content for access. The solution is to place all of the physical newspapers into a new, state of the art Newspaper Storage Building at Boston Spa, the British Library's main storage and logistics site, and home to its document delivery service. The building will comprise of 160 km of high density shelf space, fully automated under special environmental conditions including low oxygen, regulated 16 degree Celsius temperature, and 52% humidity. Future access to the collection will be at the BL's main Library site at St Pancras, in a specially equipped reading room, so that researchers can integrate other collection items into their studies. However, access will be by surrogate means, initially microfilm, stored in London, and then, increasingly, digital access. By March 2009, the British Library will have digitised 3 million historic newspapers with JISC funds, and this content will be available to readers for free in reading rooms and on a paid for basis online, or via subscriptions. The Library is investigating a similar model going forward with a private sector partner who is willing to digitise and sell online out of copyright newspapers from the BL's collection for a fixed period. This will provide digital content for customers in reading rooms, free at the point of access.

19th Century British Library Newspapers

19th Century British Library Newspapers

III. The Bibliographers: The Pioneer Bibliography

In 1965 I had my initiation into Victorian periodicals when I began my dissertation on the critical reception of David Copperfield in London newspapers. At the time the study of periodicals was pretty much virgin territory, but I did have a slight introduction through two of my professors at Texas Tech. Knowing that Alan Lang Strout had done pioneering work on Blackwood's Magazine, I sat down with the run in the library and became immediately hooked. Also, I had an excellent guide in my major professor, Roger Brooks, who had used London newspapers in his dissertation on Matthew Arnold. In 1965 I spent the summer at the British Library Newspaper Library at Colindale tracking down reviews of Copperfield and then completed the dissertation in 1967. I was awed by the prospect of the vast unexplored territory of Victorian periodicals with its potential as a source for research in so many disciplines and was thrilled with the announcement of the formation of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals. William E. Fredeman's RSVP: Proposal for Discussion (VPN, no. 5/6, September 1969, p. 5) listed a series of suggestions, the second of which was A Bibliography of publications on Victorian periodicals might appear as an annual feature of VPN, the preparation of which would be assigned to an elected or appointed RSVP bibliographer. I could see that such an annual list would be valuable to all sorts of

Digitisation of Newspapers at the British Library

ABSTRACT The newspaper collections of the British Library are among the world's finest. The repository at Colindale, North London, UK, holds some 20 miles of UK, Colonial, and overseas newspapers published since 1800. The author charts the work of the British Library over the last dozen years, in using the technology of the time to explore how digitisation can provide greater access to portions of the British Library's newspaper collections. Software and hardware developments have quickened since 2000, and projects have been completed on a small scale to prove the concept of Internet access to texts using software which can enhance readibility of texts, and also can search all of the texts, with results immediately available to users. In currently undertaking a large project to scan up to 2 million pages of nineteenth century newspapers, the Library is moving to a larger level of scale in its programme to provide wider access to its newspaper collections.

The British Library newspaper library: (Formerly titled The Newspaper Library web catalogue)

The British Library newspaper library: (Formerly titled The Newspaper Library web catalogue)

Newspaper preservation and access: developments and possibilities

Discusses newspaper provision in the British Isles and the services provided by the British Library Newspaper Library. Assesses previous unsuccessful attempts to set up a loan service for newspapers, and the NEWSPLAN co‐operative programme for preservation microfilming of local newspapers. Suggests a co‐operative approach to interlibrary lending of some microfilmed newspapers, with input from advisory bodies such as LINC, SCONUL and the British Library.

Local newspaper indexing British Library Newspaper Library Seminar: 10 April 1987, York University

Local newspaper indexing <i>British Library Newspaper Library Seminar: 10 April 1987, York University</i>