Milne-Smith, Amy

English

Wilfrid Laurier University

Wilfrid Laurier University Scholars Commons @ Laurier History Faculty Publications History 10-1-2005 Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950 by Mark Hampton [Review] Amy Milne-Smith Wilfrid Laurier University, amilnesmith@wlu.ca Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.wlu.ca/hist_faculty Recommended Citation Milne-Smith, Amy, "Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950 by Mark Hampton [Review]" (2005). History Faculty Publications. 13. https://scholars.wlu.ca/hist_faculty/13 This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the History at Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in History Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca. 884  BOOK REVIEWSunderestimates the ability of critical fashions to turn on a dime and also shows himself tobe unaware of what is going on in English departments these days, where all sorts of writersare being recuperated for their gender and/or cultural significance. Furthermore, he shouldhave considered that Wells might very well be a writer like Rudyard Kipling, who wasdisdained throughout the twentieth century but nevertheless managed to attract admiringattention from T. S. Eliot, George Orwell, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, and, morerecently, Edward Said. Certainly the critical attention to Wells does not abate, and, as inthe case of Kipling, many critics apparently must have their say.But the more vexing question is how much of the work is really history. There is littlecontextualization of Wells’s ideas and few attempts to deal with the immediate popularityor lack thereof of individual ideas. So we get very little sense of who among other thinkersof the time latched onto Wells’s latest rumination or proposal and found themselves sym-pathetic, or which of his ideas had real-world effects. (To use a bizarre, sensational, and yetgermane example, which Wagar does supply unsensationally, Leo Szilard got the idea forthe atomic bomb after reading Wells’s 1914 novel The World Set Free, in which Wells, sureenough, has a nuclear device.) Once he became well known, Wells was constantly approachedby editors for journalistic essays. And he often complied. Wagar is more familiar with thisside of Wells’s oeuvre than anyone else, but he does not employ his knowledge here. Surelythe frequency with which Wells is able to publish pieces on the same topic or scheme issome indication of popular interest.At least the work is superficially historical in that its pursuit of Wells’s ideas is basicallychronological. The alternative would be a more thematic development. But between chro-nology and thematics, the material to be dealt with does not suggest a clear winner.At a time when “metropolitan centers” are disdained, Wells’s one-worldism is too cos-mopolitan, too unsympathetic to local cultures or democratic values to attract a significantfollowing. But for one anyone interested in the ideas of one of the twentieth century’s greatscientific progressives and scientific popularizers, Wagar’s study fills the bill. And its stylereveals just enough of the author’s enthusiasm and quirkiness to add a welcome touch.William T. Ross, University of South FloridaMARK HAMPTON. Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950. Urbana: University of IllinoisPress, 2004. Pp. ix218. $35.00 (cloth).British historians are fortunate enough to be able to draw on the resource of a vast andcomplex collection of newspapers from the Victorian to the modern era. Yet as Mark Hamp-ton points out, few historians critically analyze the context of the British media from whichwe draw so thoroughly. Visions of the Press in Britain provides an overarching view of theBritish press over a hundred years, giving readers a balanced account of the transitionbetweenthe Victorian and the modern press. Hampton’s work attempts to draw out the meaningof the press at different historical moments by placing the press within its political andcultural context.While Hampton’s text is unique in breaching the two centuries, press history writ largeis no longer the neglected field he suggests. Laurel Brake’s Encounters in the Victorian Press(2004), Chris Horrie’s Tabloid Nation: From the Birth of the Daily Mirror to the Death ofthe Tabloid (2003), and Roy Greenslade’s Press Gang: How Newspapers Make Profits fromPropaganda (2003) demonstrate that press history is certainly enjoying a new vogue. Thegap is not a lack of attention to the press, however, but a lack of integration into mainstreamhistorians’ projects. Works such as Hampton’s go beyond narrative histories of particularBOOK REVIEWS  885papers and pose intellectual questions about franchise expansion, literary and reading trends,and elite perceptions of the “masses.”The text focuses on the perspectives of the British elites, including journalists, the gov-ernment, the press barons, and the educated reading public. Rather than focus exclusivelyon the structure and content of the papers themselves, Hampton examines the public debateover the role of the media through pamphlets, articles, books, government investigations,and personal reflections.Hampton wisely recognized that a focus on the elites does not provide the full story andthat an examination of the response from the readers themselves should be developed inanother work. Following Stuart Hall’s division between dominant and popular culture, heacknowledges that “the popular classes were not passive objects of study but active readersand letter writers. Popular tastes could shape newspaper content, and readers of all classescould approach the press with scepticism” (6). Rather than the final word, Hampton presentshis work as a beginning; it is left to other historians to trace the changing experiences ofpeople’s consumption of and relationship to the press.The text ostensibly begins in 1850, yet Hampton situates his subject within a longerhistory of the nineteenth-century British press. The development of the press is presentedas both dependant on and a reflection of an emergent democracy. He traces the changinglaws, systems of taxation, and readership demographics of British newspapers. Hamptonposits that it is possible to understand the meaning of the press by tracing the tensionbetween two disparate models, which interacted throughout the century in question. Thefirst model, the “educational ideal,” posits the press as a means to improving and enlighteningsociety. At its best, this model verges on the utopian with the press steering society towardenlightenment and democracy; at its worst, the educational ideal smacks of the paternalismof the elites. The second model, the “representative ideal,” conceives of the press as a reflectionof the will of the people. Before universal suffrage, this model had revolutionary overtonesfor representing the underrepresented; in the modern era, it tends toward pandering to thelowest form of entertainment. In bringing forward the two models, Hampton attempts tocounter earlier historians’ claims that the press enjoyed high ideals in the mid-Victorian goldenage before succumbing to commercialization and profit seeking. According to Hampton, thetwo models coexisted and transformed one another throughout the period. Neither modelwas without faults, nor was there a simple triumph of one vision over the other.The four following chapters outline the emergence of the two models and their specificcontexts. Hampton argues that in the mid-nineteenth century, champions of the press wereidealistic about the potential for the press to educate and usher the people into the democraticpublic sphere. The educational ideal, however, was quickly challenged by the birth of “NewJournalism” and its tendency toward news rather than opinion. As the franchise was furtherexpanded in the late nineteenth century, the economic uncertainty and a new style of popularjournalism made the educational model seem out of date. The representational ideal servedthe interest not only of the press barons, but libertarian or market views of public accessto knowledge. The predominance of the representational ideal in the late nineteenth centuryis set against the context of the press as a reflection of the new mass electorate. WhileHampton attempts to counteract the idea that one model quickly overcame the other byproviding caveats to his arguments, in the last chapter those caveats outweigh any otherevidence, and it seems that only a crude vision of the representational ideal remained. It isdifficult to interpret his picture of the 1950s and beyond as anything less than the destructionof both ideals. While Hampton complicates the idea of an idealistic Victorian press corruptedby the mass age, he does not contradict the ultimate decline of the press.Hampton cannot help ending on a rather bleak note. The representative ideal may havebeen revolutionary when it attempted to speak for those who had no vote, but he admits it“risks becoming a mere legitimising charade in today’s commercial environment” (178).Hampton wisely only provides glimpses of the period after the Second World War, because886  BOOK REVIEWSnew forms of media transformed that landscape of information, and it would be impossibleto study the press without any mention of radio, television, and new media sources after 1950.This text is an accessible resource for those with no background in press history andshould prove a useful model for debate among experts in the field. Hopefully Hampton’sbook and other recent work on press history will inspire a greater appreciation for, anddebates about, the complexities of the British press.Amy Milne-Smith, University of TorontoJOSEPH LENNON. Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Cultural History. Syracuse, NY: SyracuseUniversity Press, 2004. Pp. xxxi478. $45.00 (cloth).At the heart of Anglo-French Orientalism has been the supposition that “East” and “West”are absolutely distinct. Not so Irish Orientalism, argues Joseph Lennon, in his recent re-evaluative study, Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Cultural History. Lennon maintains thatfar from imposing strict boundaries between East and West, Irish Orientalists from themedieval period through the Celtic Revival embraced and elaborated upon myths and pseu-dohistories to cement Ireland’s “fantastic Eastern credentials” (126). Unlike Anglo-FrenchOrientalism, a discourse Lennon characterizes as predicated on strict binaries between civilityand savagery, intellect and emotion, and piety and paganism, Irish Orientalism emerged asa discourse that from its inception reacted to negative associations of the Irish with theOrient by reordering the process of representation, often transforming imperial stereotypeinto anticolonial allegory. Irish Orientalism offers an interdisciplinary overview of the long-standing, multiple, and often frankly outlandish arguments deployed by both Irish and non-Irish writers intent on forging genealogical, migratory, linguistic, and colonial connectionsbetween Ireland and the East. Although the dominant European mode of Orientalismcertainly influenced Irish representations of Eastern cultures, Irish Orientalism has a distincthistory—one which Lennon argues has not been fully apprehended, defined, or appreciated.Lennon’s study meticulously tracks a shifting cross-cultural discourse linking the twinnedfigures of the “Celt” and the “Oriental.” Surveying over twelve centuries of such Irish-Asian identifications, Lennon consistently sets Irish texts that foreground and celebrateancestral and cultural connections with the East against texts by non-Irish writers that linkedthe Celt and the Oriental to “textually barbarize” both. Such racist representations, Lennondemonstrates, encouraged Irish writers to allegorize Ireland’s relationship to the Orientdifferently. Examples of this discourse first surfaced in ancient Greek geographies and travelnarratives in which Ireland was imagined as a “wild, remote borderland” existing, like Asia,on the outer fringes of the known world. Later British writers, from Cambrensis to Spenser,transformed such ancient correlations into spurious origin myths linking the “borderland”peoples of ancient Ireland and barbarous Scythia. Early Irish writers retaliated not by de-bunking the Irish/Asian link altogether, but by instead affirming ancestral ties to the more“civilized” Phoenecians and Milesians. After centuries of such “perpetual reinvention” (2),Ireland became known as a kind of “backyard Orient”: an ancient, peculiar, and mysteriousisland that offered seventeenth- and eighteenth-century antiquarians, etymologists, and Ori-entalists—both Irish and non-Irish—a European culture to dissect and codify as they wouldthose other “ancient” cultures of the East.The scope of this cultural history is vast; simply scanning Lennon’s introduction, one isconfronted with this daunting overview of works consulted: “grammatical texts, genealogies,histories and pseudohistories, pastoral dialogues, pseudoletter collections, travel narratives,antiquarian studies, Orientalist romances, Celticist studies, popular fiction, colonial critiques,syncretic Irish-Asian works” (xix). When examined in isolation, Lennon observes, such

\u3cem\u3eVisions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950\u3c/em\u3e by Mark Hampton [Review]

Scholars Commons

Wilfrid Laurier University 
Scholars Commons @ Laurier 
History Faculty Publications History 
10-1-2005 
Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950 by Mark Hampton 
[Review] 
Amy Milne-Smith 
Wilfrid Laurier University, amilnesmith@wlu.ca 
Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.wlu.ca/hist_faculty 
Recommended Citation 
Milne-Smith, Amy, "Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950 by Mark Hampton [Review]" (2005). History 
Faculty Publications. 13. 
https://scholars.wlu.ca/hist_faculty/13 
This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the History at Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has 
been accepted for inclusion in History Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of Scholars Commons @ 
Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca. 
884  BOOK REVIEWS
underestimates the ability of critical fashions to turn on a dime and also shows himself to
be unaware of what is going on in English departments these days, where all sorts of writers
are being recuperated for their gender and/or cultural significance. Furthermore, he should
have considered that Wells might very well be a writer like Rudyard Kipling, who was
disdained throughout the twentieth century but nevertheless managed to attract admiring
attention from T. S. Eliot, George Orwell, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, and, more
recently, Edward Said. Certainly the critical attention to Wells does not abate, and, as in
the case of Kipling, many critics apparently must have their say.
But the more vexing question is how much of the work is really history. There is little
contextualization of Wells’s ideas and few attempts to deal with the immediate popularity
or lack thereof of individual ideas. So we get very little sense of who among other thinkers
of the time latched onto Wells’s latest rumination or proposal and found themselves sym-
pathetic, or which of his ideas had real-world effects. (To use a bizarre, sensational, and yet
germane example, which Wagar does supply unsensationally, Leo Szilard got the idea for
the atomic bomb after reading Wells’s 1914 novel The World Set Free, in which Wells, sure
enough, has a nuclear device.) Once he became well known, Wells was constantly approached
by editors for journalistic essays. And he often complied. Wagar is more familiar with this
side of Wells’s oeuvre than anyone else, but he does not employ his knowledge here. Surely
the frequency with which Wells is able to publish pieces on the same topic or scheme is
some indication of popular interest.
At least the work is superficially historical in that its pursuit of Wells’s ideas is basically
chronological. The alternative would be a more thematic development. But between chro-
nology and thematics, the material to be dealt with does not suggest a clear winner.
At a time when “metropolitan centers” are disdained, Wells’s one-worldism is too cos-
mopolitan, too unsympathetic to local cultures or democratic values to attract a significant
following. But for one anyone interested in the ideas of one of the twentieth century’s great
scientific progressives and scientific popularizers, Wagar’s study fills the bill. And its style
reveals just enough of the author’s enthusiasm and quirkiness to add a welcome touch.
William T. Ross, University of South Florida
MARK HAMPTON. Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2004. Pp. ix218. $35.00 (cloth).
British historians are fortunate enough to be able to draw on the resource of a vast and
complex collection of newspapers from the Victorian to the modern era. Yet as Mark Hamp-
ton points out, few historians critically analyze the context of the British media from which
we draw so thoroughly. Visions of the Press in Britain provides an overarching view of the
British press over a hundred years, giving readers a balanced account of the transitionbetween
the Victorian and the modern press. Hampton’s work attempts to draw out the meaning
of the press at different historical moments by placing the press within its political and
cultural context.
While Hampton’s text is unique in breaching the two centuries, press history writ large
is no longer the neglected field he suggests. Laurel Brake’s Encounters in the Victorian Press
(2004), Chris Horrie’s Tabloid Nation: From the Birth of the Daily Mirror to the Death of
the Tabloid (2003), and Roy Greenslade’s Press Gang: How Newspapers Make Profits from
Propaganda (2003) demonstrate that press history is certainly enjoying a new vogue. The
gap is not a lack of attention to the press, however, but a lack of integration into mainstream
historians’ projects. Works such as Hampton’s go beyond narrative histories of particular
BOOK REVIEWS  885
papers and pose intellectual questions about franchise expansion, literary and reading trends,
and elite perceptions of the “masses.”
The text focuses on the perspectives of the British elites, including journalists, the gov-
ernment, the press barons, and the educated reading public. Rather than focus exclusively
on the structure and content of the papers themselves, Hampton examines the public debate
over the role of the media through pamphlets, articles, books, government investigations,
and personal reflections.
Hampton wisely recognized that a focus on the elites does not provide the full story and
that an examination of the response from the readers themselves should be developed in
another work. Following Stuart Hall’s division between dominant and popular culture, he
acknowledges that “the popular classes were not passive objects of study but active readers
and letter writers. Popular tastes could shape newspaper content, and readers of all classes
could approach the press with scepticism” (6). Rather than the final word, Hampton presents
his work as a beginning; it is left to other historians to trace the changing experiences of
people’s consumption of and relationship to the press.
The text ostensibly begins in 1850, yet Hampton situates his subject within a longer
history of the nineteenth-century British press. The development of the press is presented
as both dependant on and a reflection of an emergent democracy. He traces the changing
laws, systems of taxation, and readership demographics of British newspapers. Hampton
posits that it is possible to understand the meaning of the press by tracing the tension
between two disparate models, which interacted throughout the century in question. The
first model, the “educational ideal,” posits the press as a means to improving and enlightening
society. At its best, this model verges on the utopian with the press steering society toward
enlightenment and democracy; at its worst, the educational ideal smacks of the paternalism
of the elites. The second model, the “representative ideal,” conceives of the press as a reflection
of the will of the people. Before universal suffrage, this model had revolutionary overtones
for representing the underrepresented; in the modern era, it tends toward pandering to the
lowest form of entertainment. In bringing forward the two models, Hampton attempts to
counter earlier historians’ claims that the press enjoyed high ideals in the mid-Victorian golden
age before succumbing to commercialization and profit seeking. According to Hampton, the
two models coexisted and transformed one another throughout the period. Neither model
was without faults, nor was there a simple triumph of one vision over the other.
The four following chapters outline the emergence of the two models and their specific
contexts. Hampton argues that in the mid-nineteenth century, champions of the press were
idealistic about the potential for the press to educate and usher the people into the democratic
public sphere. The educational ideal, however, was quickly challenged by the birth of “New
Journalism” and its tendency toward news rather than opinion. As the franchise was further
expanded in the late nineteenth century, the economic uncertainty and a new style of popular
journalism made the educational model seem out of date. The representational ideal served
the interest not only of the press barons, but libertarian or market views of public access
to knowledge. The predominance of the representational ideal in the late nineteenth century
is set against the context of the press as a reflection of the new mass electorate. While
Hampton attempts to counteract the idea that one model quickly overcame the other by
providing caveats to his arguments, in the last chapter those caveats outweigh any other
evidence, and it seems that only a crude vision of the representational ideal remained. It is
difficult to interpret his picture of the 1950s and beyond as anything less than the destruction
of both ideals. While Hampton complicates the idea of an idealistic Victorian press corrupted
by the mass age, he does not contradict the ultimate decline of the press.
Hampton cannot help ending on a rather bleak note. The representative ideal may have
been revolutionary when it attempted to speak for those who had no vote, but he admits it
“risks becoming a mere legitimising charade in today’s commercial environment” (178).
Hampton wisely only provides glimpses of the period after the Second World War, because
886  BOOK REVIEWS
new forms of media transformed that landscape of information, and it would be impossible
to study the press without any mention of radio, television, and new media sources after 1950.
This text is an accessible resource for those with no background in press history and
should prove a useful model for debate among experts in the field. Hopefully Hampton’s
book and other recent work on press history will inspire a greater appreciation for, and
debates about, the complexities of the British press.
Amy Milne-Smith, University of Toronto
JOSEPH LENNON. Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Cultural History. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse
University Press, 2004. Pp. xxxi478. $45.00 (cloth).
At the heart of Anglo-French Orientalism has been the supposition that “East” and “West”
are absolutely distinct. Not so Irish Orientalism, argues Joseph Lennon, in his recent re-
evaluative study, Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Cultural History. Lennon maintains that
far from imposing strict boundaries between East and West, Irish Orientalists from the
medieval period through the Celtic Revival embraced and elaborated upon myths and pseu-
dohistories to cement Ireland’s “fantastic Eastern credentials” (126). Unlike Anglo-French
Orientalism, a discourse Lennon characterizes as predicated on strict binaries between civility
and savagery, intellect and emotion, and piety and paganism, Irish Orientalism emerged as
a discourse that from its inception reacted to negative associations of the Irish with the
Orient by reordering the process of representation, often transforming imperial stereotype
into anticolonial allegory. Irish Orientalism offers an interdisciplinary overview of the long-
standing, multiple, and often frankly outlandish arguments deployed by both Irish and non-
Irish writers intent on forging genealogical, migratory, linguistic, and colonial connections
between Ireland and the East. Although the dominant European mode of Orientalism
certainly influenced Irish representations of Eastern cultures, Irish Orientalism has a distinct
history—one which Lennon argues has not been fully apprehended, defined, or appreciated.
Lennon’s study meticulously tracks a shifting cross-cultural discourse linking the twinned
figures of the “Celt” and the “Oriental.” Surveying over twelve centuries of such Irish-
Asian identifications, Lennon consistently sets Irish texts that foreground and celebrate
ancestral and cultural connections with the East against texts by non-Irish writers that linked
the Celt and the Oriental to “textually barbarize” both. Such racist representations, Lennon
demonstrates, encouraged Irish writers to allegorize Ireland’s relationship to the Orient
differently. Examples of this discourse first surfaced in ancient Greek geographies and travel
narratives in which Ireland was imagined as a “wild, remote borderland” existing, like Asia,
on the outer fringes of the known world. Later British writers, from Cambrensis to Spenser,
transformed such ancient correlations into spurious origin myths linking the “borderland”
peoples of ancient Ireland and barbarous Scythia. Early Irish writers retaliated not by de-
bunking the Irish/Asian link altogether, but by instead affirming ancestral ties to the more
“civilized” Phoenecians and Milesians. After centuries of such “perpetual reinvention” (2),
Ireland became known as a kind of “backyard Orient”: an ancient, peculiar, and mysterious
island that offered seventeenth- and eighteenth-century antiquarians, etymologists, and Ori-
entalists—both Irish and non-Irish—a European culture to dissect and codify as they would
those other “ancient” cultures of the East.
The scope of this cultural history is vast; simply scanning Lennon’s introduction, one is
confronted with this daunting overview of works consulted: “grammatical texts, genealogies,
histories and pseudohistories, pastoral dialogues, pseudoletter collections, travel narratives,
antiquarian studies, Orientalist romances, Celticist studies, popular fiction, colonial critiques,
syncretic Irish-Asian works” (xix). When examined in isolation, Lennon observes, such


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\u3cem\u3eVisions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950\u3c/em\u3e by Mark Hampton [Review]

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