“Roast Seagull and other Quaint Bird Dishes” The development of features and “lifestyle” journalism in British newspapers during the First World War

The accepted narrative of British press conduct during the First World War is highly negative. Commentators overwhelmingly agree that newspapers downplayed the horror of life in the trenches and afterwards were found to have published fabricated atrocity stories to encourage hatred of “the Hun” on a grand scale. Scholarly assessment of news coverage of women’s involvement in war work is also predominantly negative, highlighting patronising and unrealistic portrayals of munitions workers and others. These narratives, however compelling, ignore sections of newspapers and other current affairs journals devoted to helping readers trying to feed families on restricted budgets with scant food, who were grieving for or caring for sons and husbands and who were adjusting to bewildering disruptions to family life. The dominant historical narratives ignore the development of a previously unexamined form of “lifestyle” journalism and a genre of vivid features journalism focussing on lives on the “Home Front” and which helped undermine traditional boundaries between the domestic and public realms. This article asks whether “soft” genres of journalism actually better reflected the realities of Wartime readers’ lives, and better satisfied their need for information than propaganda-driven news pages. Assessing readers’ responses to these different genres of journalism helps explain why readers can simultaneously mistrust and also enjoy their news media

A Golden Interlude: Journalists in Early Twentieth Century British Literature

This article examines fictional representations of journalists and journalism from Guy Thorne's Edwardian bestseller When it Was Dark (1903) through to novels of the interwar years. It examines how literature about journalism and journalists addresses contemporary issues such as the march of technology; the relationship between politics and the press at a time when the franchise was extending; the increasing ‘mediation’ of politics and anxieties about the growth of sensational journalism. Of particular note is the dramatic change in the character of the journalist in these years, from democracy-defending Fourth Estate hero to cynical hack. It concludes that First World War press ‘failings', the ennoblement of press barons, the growing power of a mass medium and the evaporation of social idealism after the war combined to destroy the once heroic image

We Agreed that women were a nuisance in the office anyway: The portrayal of women journalists in early twentieth-century British fiction

The growing numbers of women journalists entering the profession in the early twentieth century provoked mixed reactions from contemporary novelists. Responses evolved from cheering on a doughty pioneer to questioning whether women’s presence in the mass print media was helping reform the status of women or reinforcing gender stereotypes. Little is known about the personal struggles of women journalists in the early years of the popular press. In the absence of plentiful data the study of novels and short stories, many of them semi-autobiographical and written by men and women working in the early twentieth century newspaper industry, combined with analysis of previously un-studied memoirs and early guides for women journalists illuminate the obstacles – and opportunities – experienced by these pioneers

'Imprisoned in a cage of print': Rose Macaulay, Journalism and Gender

This book is the first collection on the British author Rose Macaulay (1881-1958). The essays establish connections in her work between modernism and the middlebrow, show Macaulay’s attentiveness to reformulating contemporary depictions of gender in her fiction, and explore how her writing transcended and celebrated the characteristics of genre, reflecting Macaulay’s responses to modernity. The book’s focus moves from the interiorized self and the psyche’s relations with the body, to gender identity, to the role of women in society, followed by how women, and Macaulay, use language in their strategies for generic self-expression, and the environment in which Macaulay herself and her characters lived and worked. Macaulay was a particularly modern writer, embracing technology enthusiastically, and the evidence of her treatment of gender and genre reflect Macaulay’s responses to modernism, the historical novel, ruins and the relationships of history and structure, ageing, and the narrative of travel. By presenting a wide range of approaches, this book shows how Macaulay’s fiction is integral to modern British literature, by its aesthetic concerns, its technical experimentation, her concern for the autonomy of the individual, and for the financial and professional independence of the modern woman. There are manifold connections shown between her writing and contemporary theology, popular culture, the newspaper industry, pacifist thinking, feminist rage, the literature of sophistication, the condition of ‘inclusionary’ cosmopolitanism, and a haunted post-war understanding of ruin in life and history. This rich and interdisciplinary combination will seta new agenda for international scholarship on Macaulay’s works, and reformulate contemporary ideas about gender and genre in twentieth-century British literature

The Emergence of the Press Baron as Literary Villain in English Letters 1900 – 1939

The figure of the journalist has long been a familiar character in British literature. Dallas Liddle and Matthew Rubery chart the critical preoccupation of Victorian writers with journalists and the press, particularly after 1855 when the abolition of Stamp Duty caused a rapid increase in the volume of newspapers and periodicals in the literary marketplace. For a brief period in the early twentieth century, a positive image of the modern news reporter emerged portrayed by practising or former journalists on the new mass circulation dailies eager to promote their trade . Scholars have examined inter-war writers’ attitudes to the popular press in some detail, particularly those of modernists including T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. Scholars of the ‘middlebrow’ have now begun to analyse previously overlooked inter-war writers’ attitudes to the popular press. Often prolific contributors to newspapers these writers had a more intimate and direct relationship with the press than more economically independent ‘highbrow’ writers. The fictional portrayal of the ‘press baron’ in the early twentieth century has however escaped detailed study, despite his being such a potent, feared and hated figure . Keith Williams examines W. H .Auden and Christopher Isherwood’s portrayal of newspaper proprietor Lord Stagmantle in their collaborative play Ascent of F6 (1936), although more from the point of view of his threat to leftwing politics than to the artist and language . Matthew Kibble examines Ezra Pound’s portrayal of ‘the news owners,….s/the anonymous/…….ffe…[Northcliffe]’ in his Hell Canto XV, however a comprehensive survey of literary representations of the press baron figure from the early years of the popular daily press has not so far been undertaken