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(I am) generally not a politician⌠a teetotaller, anti-vaccinationist, or a vegetarian, or any sort of crank⌠industrious⌠casual and intermittent interest in football matches and race meetings⌠I like the theatre and the music hall â the latter, perhaps the more⌠sympathetic, but not sentimental⌠England for the English, a happy England populated by prosperous EnglishmanâŚ
I am the Man in the Street.1
Published on the first day of the 1906 general election campaign, a news article from page four of the Daily Express claimed to be written from the perspective of the âman in the streetâ. This individual claimed to be âthe Man who can Control our Destiniesâ. He was the person from whom all political parties would be seeking a vote. This same man in the street was very similar to the individual, according to the dismissive comments of the then Prime Minister and Conservative leader Lord Salisbury, who ran and read the Daily Mail from its inception in May 1896: âa newspaper produced by office boys for office boysâ.2 Salisburyâs negativity ignored the importance of who the Mail, by his own admission, was particularly appealing to. All three of the new dailies â the Express, Mail, and the Mirror â built their successes throughout the Long Edwardian3 period upon their shared ability to speak to the office-working man in the street, and millions of other lower-middle- and upper-working-class4 British citizens whose lives resonated with the Expressâs short biography.5
This book identifies the significance of the Long Edwardian period within histories of both the British press and the British political system through a parallel analysis. First, it explores the political content of the new dailies during the four general elections of the period: 1900, 1906, and the two elections in January and December of 1910.6 The ways in which all three newspapers represented British election time politics marked a fascinating swinging door moment in histories of British mass democracy. A hugely successful daily newspaper press was representing political news in ways which made the subject matter engaging, accessible, and relevant to the lives of millions of British citizens. Election processes were presented as both exciting and engaging, whilst also being events at the centre of which was the ordinary British man in the street. This simultaneous dramatisation and democratisation of election news made the new dailies a significant form of mass political communication that engaged larger numbers of potential voters than any prior newspaper press that had come before it.
Second, this book investigates some of the ways in which three political parties of the period â the Conservatives, the Liberals, and Labour â responded to the rise of this hugely popular new political press from the launch of the first new daily â the Mail in 1896 â and the outbreak of war in 1914. The new dailies emerged during a period of political history in which British politicians had increasingly sought the votes of members of the electorate who resonated with the Expressâs âman in the streetâ. Both the new dailies and the three political parties were seeking to simultaneously communicate with the same mass audiences, and therefore the ways in which politicians across the Long Edwardian establishment responded to this new press represents a fascinating insight into a variety of aspects pre-Great War British politics. The differences between each of the three political parties in their reactions spoke of the differing extents to which these new mass-selling newspapers were valued as a form of political communication. These differences between and within the three parties spoke considerably of broader attitudes within Long Edwardian Britain regarding what, in the minds of certain politicians, constituted a viable political press; the extent to which popular newspapers were worthy of effort and attention; and the real value of trying to communicate with the man in the street who, as the Express astutely noted, had never held such political power.
The intersection between the new dailies and the Long Edwardian political establishment that this book explores did not exist within a vacuum, however. The significance of the man in the street, both in the political content of the new dailies and within the minds of politicians within three British political parties, built considerably on the back of several decades of cultural, political, and economic developments. Understanding this broader historical context, and the ways in which it influenced both the developments of the new dailies and the evolution of the British political system, is therefore vital.
Long Edwardian Culture
Underpinning much of the new dailiesâ development within wider Long Edwardian culture was the legacy of the 1870 Education Act. While mass illiteracy had been steadily (if unevenly) in decline since at least the early Victorian period,7 the 1870 Actâs establishment of a framework for universal elementary school education in England and Wales still left a significant legacy. Newspapers had been a primary reading material of the British working classes since the mid-nineteenth century.8 The 1870 Act, therefore, helped to swell the size of the literate, newspaper-buying mass audiences to whom the new dailies would then sell so successfully.
More specifically, the extent of the 1870 Actâs benefits helped to create mass audiences of news readers to whom the majority of traditional British newspapers, âwith their long articles, long paragraphsâ and more intellectually demanding news content, had traditionally poorly catered.9 These audiences demanded newspaper content that was as entertaining as it was illuminating, and that drew on aspects of daily life which resonated with their own experiences. These audiences were steadily catered to in the decades before the Long Edwardian period, as the idea of newspapers being ârepresentativeâ of the opinions and tastes of readers gathered credence.10 Various weekly newspapers in the mid-nineteenth century, most notably the Sunday press, all became hugely popular through news content which combined radical politics with prominent reporting of everyday sensation and particularly crime through stories and images.11 These popular Sunday newspapers, and early popular daily newspapers such as the Daily Telegraph, also benefited from the increasing affordability of newspapers. Growing mass literacy occurred alongside the gradual erosion of the âtaxes on knowledgeâ, which created the conditions for publications to price themselves as affordable options to an increasingly literate mass public. These developments earlier in the nineteenth century were significant, but it was during the Late-Victorian period that the mass potential of affordable and sensationalised everyday news content exploded.
The end of the nineteenth century witnessed the rampant success of a strand of the British newspaper press which prioritised the kind of content that saw the contemporary critic Matthew Arnold famously denounce this âNew Journalismâ as âfeather-brainedâ,12 due its perceived negative impact on the quality and value of British culture.13 His critique, however, did little to stem the success of a media revolution which took inspiration from the early Sunday press and maximised its commercial potential, and served as a template for the new dailies which would come to define the twentieth century.14 The New Journalism was particularly defined by a selection of both weekly and daily-evening newspapers that reaped huge reward through their focus on âbrighter, more accessibleâ news content which simultaneously ârevivedâ past traditions of entertaining content and marked a âhistoric shiftâ in the history of the British press.15 Among their most successful titles were newly found âsnippetâ publications such as Tit-Bits (launched in 1881 by George Newnes) and Answers, the million-selling weekly founded by the Daily Mailâs founder Alfred Harmsworth.16
The most significant of these titles, however, was the evening daily Pall Mall Gazette under the editorship of W. T. Stead: the individual about whom Arnold was writing. His 1886 four-part investigative piece into child prostitution â âThe Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylonâ â marked a landmark moment both for the Gazette (PMG) and British journalism, in general.17 Its graphic descriptions of sexual assault, abduction, and police corruption made the most of the news-reading publicâs appetite for true crime; it salaciously warned readers of the articleâs content and drew eager crowds to the paperâs office in anticipation of the next instalment.18
The PMG was not alone; the New Journalism as a whole found success through selling crime stories; the genre and its specific interest in the grotesque and the outrageous proved hugely popular with large audiences of Victorian readers.19 Crime however formed part of a wider array of news content which the new dailies sold so successfully. This content tapped into newly emergent aspects of late-Victorian and Edwardian culture which resonated with the interests and tastes of the mass British public, especially on an emotional level.20 In particular, the late-Victorian period, especially after the Bank Holiday Act of 1871, saw the gradual blossoming of a commercialised leisure industry which, by the beginning of the Long Edwardian period, specifically catered to upper-working- and lower-middle-class audiences.21
Sports such as football and horse racing, for example, grew into mass spectator events which popular newspapers increasingly covered due to their resonance with lower-middle- and working-class audiences.22 Similarly, the growth of the popular music hall23 â estimated at its peak to have drawn over one-million attendees a week in London alone â was part of a swelling of popular demand for theatrics, assisted by new technologies and innovations such as light spectacles and sound.24 The success of these and other late-Victorian pastimes, notably the seaside holiday,25 represented the growth of working- and lower-middle-class leisure time, as more of British culture identified the potential to successfully cater to people who had both increased free time outside of work and more disposable income.26
Moreover, these increasingly affordable aspects of public life and the ability of the new dailies to successfully cover them were increasingly convenient thanks to the broader âmassificationâ of Britain in the proceeding decades to the Long Edwardian era.27 Earlier technological breakthroughs such as the rotary printing press and the electric telegraph helped revolutionise the ease and speed at which information could be sent, received, and distributed throughout Britain.28 Similarly, the rapid development of affordab...
