History Compass 10/2 (2012): 140–150, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2011.00828.

Reading Newspapers: Cultural Histories of the Popular

Press in Modern Britain
Adrian Bingham*
University of Sheffield

Abstract
Popular newspapers have not, in general, featured prominently in histories of modern Britain. In
recent years, however, a number of scholars, many inspired by the ‘cultural turn’ and the
increased scholarly focus on language, meaning and identity, have reassessed the value of the pop-
ular press as a historical source. Newspapers provide one of the most effective ways of exploring
the representations and narratives that circulated throughout British society. The ‘spectacular het-
erogeneity’ of their contents, moreover, ensures that newspapers are a potentially rich source of
information on a wide range of subjects. This growing interest in the popular press as a historical
source has been dramatically reinforced in the last decade by the digitisation of a vast number of
newspapers and periodicals from the seventeenth to the 21st centuries. Millions of pages of con-
tent, rapidly searchable by keyword, are now available, at least for those fortunate enough to have
individual or institutional subscriptions. The revolution in the accessibility and usability of newspa-
per archives has transformed scholars’ enthusiasm for them. This article assesses how these devel-
opments have affected the writing of modern British history, and suggests likely future directions
for the field.

It is a Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair,
and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa,
settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the News of the World.1
George Orwell’s description of a typical British Sunday afternoon, originally written in
1946, was emblazoned on the back page of the final issue of the News of the World in July
2011, and also introduced the paper’s farewell editorial.2 The invocation of Orwell was a
self-conscious attempt to locate the paper as ‘part of the fabric of Britain, as central to
Sunday as a roast dinner’ at a time when it, and its parent company, News International,
had been disgraced by allegations of phone-hacking and criminal payments to the police.
Surveying the 8,674 issues since its launch in October 1843, the editorial claimed
that ‘We recorded history and we’ve made history’; apologising for the ‘appalling wrong-
doing’ in recent times that had prompted the paper’s closure, it hoped that ‘history will
eventually judge us on all our years’.3 After the outrage generated in the wake of the rev-
elations of News of the World journalists listening to and erasing messages on the phone of
murdered British schoolgirl Milly Dowler, few commentators had sympathy with these
self-serving words. One accused the paper of producing ‘a torrent celebrity drivel, xeno-
phobia, materialism, kitsch jingoism, shag- ‘n’-brag and bullying of the vulnerable’;
the News of the World was, he argued, a distillation of the worst aspects of contemporary
British culture and its closure was a matter of celebration, not regret.4
The News of the World’s valedictory editorial, with its explicit appeal to the past and
the judgement of history, marked the end of an era, and offers a useful starting point for
broader reflections on the place of the press in British society and the ways in which

ª 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

 Cultural Histories of the Press in Modern Britain 141

scholars have used newspapers to explore the dynamics of popular culture. The paper’s
claim to be woven into the national fabric is hard to deny. The News of the World, with
Lloyds’ Weekly News and Reynolds News, was one of the first modern, commercialised
publications to tap the emerging mass market of working- and lower-middle-class readers,
and it played a major role in propelling the newspaper to the heart of British popular cul-
ture.5 By the time Orwell was writing, the News of the World had indeed become a staple
of ordinary British life: the paper reached its peak circulation of 8.44 million copies per
issue in June 1950, at which time it was read – astonishingly – by more than half of all
adults in Britain.6 It was, moreover, just one part of the most competitive newspaper
market in the world; at mid-century, no other daily papers around the globe could match
the circulations of the Daily Mirror and the Daily Express, both of which sold well over 4
million copies per day. In all, some 85% of the population read a paper every day. The
British, as Orwell suggested, really did like to put their feet up with a newspaper: for
most of the 20th century, they read more newspapers per capita than any other people,
almost twice as many as Americans in the mid-1950s, for example, and nearly three times
as many as the French.7
Yet if popular newspapers were central to British life they have always been sur-
rounded by controversy. The News of the World scandal in the summer of 2011 may have
been unusual in forcing the sudden closure of the paper, but it was only the latest in a
well-established tradition of attacks on popular journalism dating back to the emergence
of the newspaper form in the 17th century.8 As newspapers became more widespread in
the early 20th century, these condemnations became even more widespread. The feminist
and author Lady Rhondda noted in 1937, for example, that ‘everyone says almost every
day’ that the popular press ‘constitute the gravest of our national perils, that they exploit
mass fear and mass selfishness, that compared to them the devil himself is a clean-minded
purveyor of the strict, honest and sober truth.’9 Popular curiosity and elite disgust have
been long been entwined in the history of newspapers. For a recent generation of cultural
historians, however, it is precisely the material that prompted the most intense curiosity
and disgust – court reports, problem pages, celebrity gossip – that has proved so valuable
in revealing attitudes to class, gender, sexuality and morality.
The perception that popular newspapers were – and are – trivial, formulaic, unsophisti-
cated and supportive of the status quo for a long time discouraged serious scholarly study
of their content. For writers in the Marxist tradition, newspapers were part of a ‘culture
industry’ providing ‘substitute gratification’ which prevented working-class readers from
understanding the ways in which they were being exploited by capitalism.10 From very
different perspectives, American sociologists, such as Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton,
and British cultural critics such as Richard Hoggart, attacked the press for encouraging
apathy and consumerism.11 The German social philosopher Jürgen Habermas argued that
newspapers played an important role in the construction of a ‘public sphere’ in the 18th
century, but with the subsequent industrialisation of the press this ‘public sphere’ became
corrupted by organised economic interests.12 The dominant historical framework for
analysing the modern press remains the largely negative one of a gradual process of ‘depo-
liticisation’ and commercialisation. It structures the leading textbook on the history of the
media in modern Britain, James Curran and Jean Seaton’s Power without Responsibility (first
written in 1981, and currently in its seventh edition).13 The brief flourishing of a radical
press in the early 19th century, Curran argued in the earlier editions, was cut short by
the operations of big business: ‘market forces succeeded where legal repression had failed
in conscripting the press to the social order.’14 The media sociologist Jean Chalaby agrees
that after 1850 ‘triviality was a commercial strategy’ dictated by the logic of the market.15

ª 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd History Compass 10/2 (2012): 140–150, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2011.00828.x
142 Cultural Histories of the Press in Modern Britain

Similar assumptions permeate the work of many historians too. Mark Garnett and Richard
Weight recently observed, for example, that the editorial policy of the popular press held
that ‘for every reader it offended with moronic tittle-tattle, it would probably attract two
more’.16
If, as the News of the World claimed, the popular press ‘recorded history’ and ‘made
history’, then, scholars for a long time paid scant attention. The so-called ‘first draft of
history’ was left largely unread. And even when historians showed an inclination to study
newspapers, they tended to use publications aimed at the political and social elites, such
as The Times or The (Manchester) Guardian.17 Franklin Gannon, for example, examining
the British press’s coverage of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, had little interest in the
reporting found in the popular papers owned by the so-called ‘press barons’, Lord
Beaverbrook’s Daily Express and Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail. Assuming these papers
were simply mouthpieces for their owners – a tendency repeated today with Rupert
Murdoch’s publications – he argued that it ‘would be ludicrous to devote as much space
or attention to Lord Beaverbrook’s or Lord Rothermere’s few unsophisticated and obses-
sive ideas as to the development of important ideas and attitudes in the columns and
offices of the quality newspapers’.18 This snobbery was compounded by practical issues.
Whereas self-styled papers of record such as The Times and The Guardian produced
indexes to assist the work of scholars, no such finding aids existed for popular papers;
those interested in the content of popular newspapers were forced to wade through the
mass of published material to find what they were looking for. And because popular
newspapers are less valued than the ‘quality press’, few libraries kept copies of them;
whereas back issues of The Times were archived by many local libraries across Britain
(and beyond), the British Library’s Newspaper Library in Colindale, North London, was
often the only place for scholars to consult past copies of popular newspapers. In these
circumstances it is perhaps not surprising that that the vast bulk of research on the popu-
lar press was conducted by a relatively small field of specialised newspaper historians.19
Yet in recent years a new generation of historians, many inspired by the ‘cultural turn’
and the heightened scholarly interest in language, meaning and identity, have reassessed
the value of the popular press. Newspapers are increasingly seen as an invaluable window
into popular culture; not a repository of ‘facts’, as suggested by the ‘paper of record’ for-
mulation, but a way of exploring the representations and narratives that circulated
throughout society. Newspapers played a significant role in setting the agenda for public
and private discussion, and in providing interpretative frameworks through which readers
made sense of the world.20 The ‘spectacular heterogeneity’ of their contents, moreover,
ensures that newspapers are a potentially rich source of information on a wide range of
subjects: material can be found on everything from politics to personal relationships, from
sports to shopping.21 This increased interest in the popular press as a historical source has
been dramatically reinforced in the last decade by the digitisation of a vast number of
newspapers and periodicals from the seventeenth to the 21st centuries.22 Speculative trips
to Colindale Newspaper Library to search through uncatalogued newspapers are no
longer needed, at least for those fortunate enough to have individual or institutional
access to these new digital databases: millions of pages of content, rapidly searchable by
keyword, are available via any computer screen. This revolution – if as yet incomplete –
in the accessibility and usability of newspaper archives has understandably transformed
scholars’ enthusiasm for them, and has encouraged the adoption of quantitative techniques
to supplement the close reading of the cultural historians. The rest of this article will
briefly assess some of the most significant research produced by these recent developments
– looking first at social and cultural histories, and then at political studies – and suggest

ª 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd History Compass 10/2 (2012): 140–150, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2011.00828.x
 Cultural Histories of the Press in Modern Britain 143

likely future directions for the field. For reasons of the space and clarity, the focus will be
on the use of mainstream popular national and local newspapers from the mid-19th
century onwards – the News of the World era – rather than on more specialised or small-
circulation periodicals. National newspapers are particularly significant for historians
because of their considerable audience and the controversy they provoked amongst
contemporaries; they have also been amongst the first publications to be digitised.
It should be noted, though, that to abstract newspapers from the wider field of
printed journals and periodicals is in many ways artificial, because there were often
extensive overlaps in terms of editorial content, advertising and readership. There has
been in recent years a substantial amount of rich and stimulating work on a wide range
of weekly, monthly and quarterly publications, particularly women’s magazines and
campaigning journals, and those using newspapers have both learned from, and been
in dialogue with, this wider scholarship.23
When Orwell conjured up his vision of the Sunday afternoon News of the World reader,
he had little doubt about what his relaxing husband would be looking at: the latest mur-
der stories.24 Crime and court reporting were central to the popular press’s editorial for-
mula and it is on this fertile ground that much of the recent scholarship has concentrated.
Judith Walkowitz’s City of Dreadful Delight, first published in 1992, was an influential
example of the application of new cultural history approaches to newspaper sources.25
Walkowitz offered an innovative and sophisticated discussion of late-Victorian ideas of
gender, class and sexuality by analysing – amongst other sources – sensational press narra-
tives of sexual danger, notably W. T. Stead’s infamous 1885 investigation into child pros-
titution, entitled ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, and the reporting of the
‘Jack the Ripper’ murders 3 years later. In the wake of Walkowitz’s work, several other
scholars have used the popular press’s court coverage to study the social and cultural
dynamics of late 19th and early 20th century Britain. As Lucy Bland has noted, newspa-
pers transformed criminal trials into ‘mass cultural spectacles’ in which the ‘boundaries of
morality and normality were defined and redefined’.26 As well as revealing the attitudes
of the authorities and mainstream society, court reports also give a glimpse of activities
which, by their very nature, do not usually leave records for historians; they can be ‘read
against the grain’ to provide insights into the lives and identities of individuals defying
moral codes or marginalised by society. Many scholars have focused on those transgressing
sexual boundaries of one sort or another: Angus McClaren, James Vernon, Charles
Upchurch and Alison Oram have explored the phenomenon of gender-crossing27; Patrick
Higgins, Chris Waters, Harry Cocks and Matt Houlbrook have examined trials for
homosexual offences28; Martha Vicinus, Gail Savage, and Anne Humphries have studied
cases from the divorce courts,29 and Harry Cocks has discussed prosecutions resulting
from the improper use of personal ads.30 Others have looked at the coverage of murder
trials, although sexuality and personal relationships are frequently central themes here
too.31 Through these studies we now have a very good knowledge of popular cultural
debates about ‘deviant’ sexualities and criminal lifestyles.
Court reporting was, for a long time, the most effective way for the popular press to
legitimise overt discussions of sex, and thereby titillate an insatiably curious readership.
But newspapers contained plenty of sexual content beyond the court columns. My own
book, Family Newspapers, provides a detailed exploration of this material, studying every-
thing from the advice columns to the pin-ups.32 My work seeks to challenge conven-
tional narratives which identify the 1960s as the key decade in the sexualization of
popular culture, demonstrating that in the late 1940s and 1950s ‘the press coverage of sex
increased markedly and self-consciously ‘‘modern’’ and ‘‘scientific’’ approaches were

ª 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd History Compass 10/2 (2012): 140–150, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2011.00828.x
144 Cultural Histories of the Press in Modern Britain

adopted’; popular newspapers, I argue, ‘made an important contribution to a climate of

reform marked by the spread of public sex education programmes, the increasing respect-
ability of contraception, and growing pressure to alter the laws governing abortion and
marriage.’33 Frank Mort’s recent work also points to the importance of the ‘tabloid sexual
ethics’ in shaping popular ideas of sexuality in the 1950s.34 He notes that plenty of
research remains to be done to understand the role of the press in the emergence of
the ‘permissive society’, especially in terms of mapping the different types of sexual
discourses disseminated by journalists, and grasping how different genres ‘codified sex for
popular consumption.’35
If there is scope for more work on the press coverage of sex, far bigger gaps remain
with regard to gender, class, and ethnicity. The research in these areas remains frag-
mented, and there is a pressing need for synoptic books to pull this material together. My
study of the popular press’s coverage of gender in the 1920s and 1930s, for example,
notes the preoccupation with the ‘modern young woman’ and casts doubt on arguments
that newspapers simply sought to confine women to the domestic sphere by championing
an ideology of domesticity. Yet there has been relatively little sustained research on news-
papers’ construction of gender in earlier or later periods, and there is certainly little
to compare to detailed and sophisticated body of work on men’s and women’s
magazines.36 Investigating the press coverage of race and ethnicity was a key project
for the emerging discipline of cultural studies in the 1970s and 1980s, and has been
complemented by some valuable historical work relating to earlier periods; yet still
major lacunae remain and broader patterns of change over time remain unclear.37
Research on press representations of empire has developed further than that focused on
domestic constructions of race and ethnicity.38 Similarly, while class – and its relationship
to concepts such as ‘mass culture’ and ‘public opinion’ – has been a key theme in a
number of important studies of the press, we still lack an authoritative overview for the
modern period.39 Social and cultural historians have found popular newspapers to be
extremely valuable sources, enabling both the detailed reading of debates about specific
events and incidents, and the tracing of attitudes over periods of time; but we have only
really scratched the surface of what remains a deep mine of material.
Political historians, meanwhile, have in recent years chipped away at the assumptions
that the popular press undermined political engagement over the course of the 20th cen-
tury by reducing the serious discussion of public affairs and championing a coarse, conser-
vative populism. James Thomas – whose academic career was tragically cut short by his
untimely death in 2007 at the age of 35 – produced a major survey of political coverage
which raised significant questions about the depoliticisation narrative; he found more
continuity than change in overall levels of political content since 1945.40 His nuanced
account reminds us that levels of partisanship varied significantly over time, and that for
much of the century, the style of popular political reporting was such that the words and
speeches of political opponents were still routinely reported; in the 1950s and 1960s, for
example, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express gave relatively balanced coverage of party
manifestos during election campaigns. The aggressive, negative, personalised political
journalism of the post-1979 era was certainly foreshadowed in earlier decades – such as
in the vicious anti-socialism of 1920s – but cannot be generalised across the period.
Increasing attention has been paid to popular political writing that challenged the status
quo. It is significant that the latest editions of Curran and Seaton’s Power without Responsi-
bility have been revised to highlight the ‘new openings’ that emerged after the mid-19th
century to enable a reformist, rather than radical, press to contribute to ‘the building of
the welfare state’.41 Historians have, in particular, been reassessing the importance of the

ª 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd History Compass 10/2 (2012): 140–150, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2011.00828.x
 Cultural Histories of the Press in Modern Britain 145

press to the rise of the Labour Party in the mid-20th century. Martin Pugh has argued
persuasively that the Daily Mirror played a part in encouraging the non-unionised work-
ing-classes to shift to the left in the 1940s, while Laura Beers has made a strong case that
the Daily Herald was a potent means of disseminating the Labour message to a broad and
diverse audience of readers in the run up to the party’s decisive electoral success in
1945.42 Popular political journalism was not always simplistic and propagandist; many
writers and cartoonists were able to convey complex political messages in an accessible
format.43 As Mark Hampton has observed, scholars need to develop an approach that
takes on board the important points made by radical critics of the press, but which empir-
ically explores the contribution newspapers made to public discussion rather than falling
back on assumption and stereotype.44
The rapid digitisation of newspapers in the last few years raises the prospect that these
gaps in the scholarship can be filled. The ability to search not just individual newspapers
but whole collections at once – made possible by facilities such as Gale Cengage’s News-
vault, which provides access to over 10 million pages of content – will enable far more
ambitious studies of popular journalism.45 (Newsvault contains a variety of periodicals –
such as the The Listener and Picture Post – alongside newspapers, and may therefore help
to bring together the scholarship on different branches of print culture). With such digital
resources, patterns of language use can be mapped far more rigorously and sensitively,
and across greater stretches of time. Increasingly sophisticated tools are becoming available
for ‘text-mining’ – searching and comparing very large quantities of text using algorithms,
statistical formulae, and language processing techniques – and many humanities scholars
may well find themselves working with technical experts to exploit the full potential of
these archives.46 Digitisation also makes it much easier to compare the journalism of dif-
ferent countries, and to trace flows of ideas and information across national boundaries.
The Centre for the Study of Journalism and History’s AHRC-funded research network,
‘Exploring the language of the popular in American and British newspapers, 1833–1988’,
is an example of the interdisciplinary collaborative projects that may become more com-
mon.47 Digital newspaper archives have become an essential resource for a young genera-
tion of postgraduate researchers, and we can expect popular journalism to feature far
more prominently in the history writing of the future. Commercially produced digital
archives remain expensive, however, and even leading British universities are often able
to subscribe only to a few of the available databases; outside of the UK, the take-up is
even slower. The full promise of digitisation will not be realised until archives become
more accessible to scholars inside and outside of the academy.
Yet even where they are available, digital resources certainly do not solve all the issues
associated with the study of the popular press. We cannot properly assess the political,
social and cultural significance of newspapers simply by studying their content: we need
to place them in their proper historical context and understand how they were produced
and received. The News International scandal provides a useful reminder of the impor-
tance of tracing the ways in which media organisations were connected to political, social
and legal power structures: as we have seen very clearly, newspaper reporting is power-
fully shaped by the relationships between journalists and politicians, the police, and
business interests. We also need to consider – as Orwell did – how newspapers were read
and understood by actual readers. For historians, evidence about production and recep-
tion is often very sketchy, but, as the rich scholarship surveyed here demonstrates, the
search is worthwhile. Love them or loathe them, papers like the News of the World did
indeed ‘record history’ and ‘make history’, and they deserve serious consideration by
scholars of modern Britain.

ª 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd History Compass 10/2 (2012): 140–150, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2011.00828.x
146 Cultural Histories of the Press in Modern Britain

Short Biography
Adrian Bingham’s main research interests are in the social and cultural history of 20th-
century Britain. He has worked extensively on the national popular press in the decades
after 1918, examining the ways in which newspapers both reflected and shaped attitudes
to gender, sexuality and class. His first monograph, Gender, Modernity and the Popular Press
in Inter-War Britain (Oxford, 2004) explored press debates about femininity and masculin-
ity in the inter-war period. His second book, Family Newspapers? Sex, Private Life and
the British Popular Press 1918–1978 (Oxford, 2009) discussed the role of the press as a
source of information and imagery about sex, morality and personal relationships. He is
co-director of the Centre for the Study of Journalism and History. Dr. Bingham joined
the History Department at the University of Sheffield in September 2006. Previously,
he read history at Merton College, Oxford, staying there to study for his D.Phil; he
held Leverhulme and British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowships at the Centre for
Contemporary British History, Institute of Historical Research, University of London.

Notes
* Correspondence: Department of History, University of Sheffield, Jessop West, 1 Upper Hanover Street, Shef-
field, S3 7RA. Email: adrian.bingham@sheffield.ac.uk.

1
G. Orwell, ‘Decline of the English Murder’, Tribune, (February 15, 1946), reprinted in S. Orwell and I. Angus
(eds.), The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. IV: In Front of Your Nose 1945–1950 (Har-
mondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 124.
2
News of the World (July 10, 2011), 3, 68.
3
Ibid., 3.
4
G. Newey, ‘Short Cuts’, London Review of Books (July 28, 2011), 22.
5
M. Conboy, The Press and Popular Culture (London: Sage, 2003), chs. 4–5.
6
J. Tunstall, Newspaper Power: The New National Press in Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 13; Hulton Press
Survey 1952, as summarised in World Press News (September 19, 1952), 3.
7
F. Williams, Dangerous Estate: The Anatomy of Newspapers (first published 1957; London: Longmans, Green, 1958),
1–2.
8
G. Cranfield, The Press and Society: From Caxton to Northcliffe (London: Longman, 1978).
9
M. H. Mackworth (Viscountess Rhondda) (ed.), ‘In Defence of the Popular Press’, Notes on the Way (London:
Macmillan, 1937).
10
The classic exposition of this position is T. Adorno and M. Horkheimer (eds.), ‘The Culture Industry: Enlight-
enment as Mass Deception’, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. J. Cumming (London: Allan Lane, 1973).
11
P. Lazarsfeld and R. Merton, ‘Mass Communication, Popular Taste and Organized Social Action’ in P. Marris
and S. Thornham (eds.), Media Studies: A Reader, 2nd edn. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 18–30;
R. Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (first published 1957; London: Penguin, 1962).
12
J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans.
T. Burger (Cambridge: Polity, 1989).
13
J. Curran and J. Seaton, Power without Responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain (first published 1981; 7th
edn., London: Taylor and Francis, 2009).
14
Curran and Seaton, Power without Responsibility, 5th edn. (1997), 5.
15
J. Chalaby, The Invention of Journalism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 104.
16
M. Garnett and R. Weight, The A-Z Guide to Modern British History (London: Jonathan Cape, 2003), 357.
17
The Manchester Guardian was renamed The Guardian in 1959.
18
F. Gannon, The British Press and Germany, 1936–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), vii.
19
A notable example here is Stephen Koss, although his focus was primarily on elite newspapers: S. Koss, The Rise
and Fall of the Political Press, Vol. 1, The Nineteenth Century; Vol. 2, The Twentieth Century (London: Hamish Hamil-
ton, 1981, 1984).
20
On the significance of the press in British culture, see A. Bingham, Family Newspapers? Sex, Private Life, and the
British Popular Press, 1918–1978 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2009, 15–28. For a useful summary of agenda-
setting and interpretative frameworks, see C. McCullagh, Media Power: A Sociological Introduction (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2002).
21
Bingham, Family Newspapers?, 14.

ª 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd History Compass 10/2 (2012): 140–150, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2011.00828.x
 Cultural Histories of the Press in Modern Britain 147
22
On this see A. Bingham, ‘The Digitization of Newspaper Archives: Opportunities and Challenges for Histori-
ans’, Twentieth Century British History, 21 ⁄ 2 (2010), 225–31.
23
For example, P. Tinkler, Constructing Girlhood: Popular Magazines for Girls Growing Up in England 1920–1950
(London: Taylor & Francis, 1995); M. Beetham, A Magazine of her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s
Magazine 1800–1914 (London: Routledge, 1996); F. Mort, Cultures of Consumption: Masculinities and Social Space in
Late Twentieth-Century Britain (London, Routledge, 1996), esp. Part 1; D. Reed, The Popular Magazine in Britain and
the United States 1880–1960 (London: The British Library, 1997); L. Brake, B. Bell, and D. Finkelstein (eds.), Nine-
teenth Century Media and the Construction of Identities (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000); M. Tusan, Women Making News:
Gender and Journalism in Modern Britain (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005).
24
Orwell, ‘Decline’, 124.
25
J. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (London: Virago,
1992). For a more recent, and more detailed, study of the ‘Jack the Ripper’ coverage see L. P. Curtis, Jr., Jack the
Ripper and the London Press (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
26
L. Bland, ‘The Trials and Tribulations of Edith Thompson: The Capital Crime of Sexual Incitement in 1920s
England’, Journal of British Studies, 47 (July 2008), 626, 628.
27
A. McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), ch. 9; J. Vernon, ‘ ‘‘For
Some Queer Reason’’: The Trials and Tribulations of Colonel Barker’s Masquerade in Interwar Britain’, Signs,
26 ⁄ 1, (2000), 37–62; C. Upchurch, ‘Forgetting the Unthinkable: Cross-Dressers and British Society in the Case of
Queen vs. Boulton and Others’, Gender and History, 12 ⁄ 1, (2000), 127–57; A. Oram, Her Husband Was A Woman!
Women’s Gender-Crossing in Modern British Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 2007).
28
P. Higgins, Heterosexual Dictatorship: Male Homosexuality in Postwar Britain (London: Fourth Estate, 1996), ch. 13;
C. Waters, ‘Disorders of the Mind, Disorders of the Body Social: Peter Wildeblood and the Making of the Modern
Homosexual’ in B. Conekin, F. Mort, and C. Waters (eds.), Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain 1945–1964
(London: Rivers Oram Press, 1999), 134–51; M. Houlbrook, ‘ ‘‘Lady Austin’s Camp Boys’’: Constituting the
Queer Subject in 1930s London’, Gender and History, 14 ⁄ 1, (2002), 21–61; H. Cocks, Nameless Offences: Homosexual
Desire in the Nineteenth Century (London, IB Tauris, 2003), ch. 3.
29
M. Vicinus, ‘Lesbian Perversity and Victorian Marriage: the 1864 Codrington Divorce Trial’, The Journal of Brit-
ish Studies, 36 ⁄ 1, (1997), 70–98; G. Savage, ‘Erotic Stories and Public Decency: Newspaper Reporting of Divorce
Proceedings in England’, Historical Journal, 41 ⁄ 2 (1998), 511–28; A. Humphries, ‘Coming Apart: the British News-
paper Press and the Divorce Court’, in L. Brake, B. Bell and D. Finkelstein (eds.), Nineteenth-century Media and the
Construction of Identities (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 220–31.
30
H. G. Cocks, Classified: The Secret History of the Problem Column (London: Random House, 2009).
31
Bland, ‘The Trials and Tribulations’; J. C. Wood, ‘ ‘‘Those Who Have Had Trouble Can Sympathise with
You’’: Press Writing, Reader Responses and a Murder Trial in Interwar Britain’, Journal of Social History, 43 ⁄ 2
(2009), 440–62. On the notorious Rillington place murders of the post-war period, see F. Mort, Capital Affairs:
London and the Making of the Permissive Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
32
Bingham, Family Newspapers?
33
Ibid., 12, 13; see also A. Bingham, ‘The ‘‘K-Bomb’’: social surveys, the popular press and British sexual culture
in the 1940s and 1950s’, Journal of British Studies, 50 ⁄ 1 (2011), 156–79.
34
Mort, Capital Affairs.
35
F. Mort, ‘The Permissive Society Revisited’, Twentieth Century British History, 22 ⁄ 2 (2011), 281.
36
A. Bingham, Gender, Modernity, and the Popular Press in Inter-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2004). For examples of the scholarship on magazines, see Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own?; J. Greenfield and
C. Reid, ‘Women’s Magazines and the Commercial Orchestration of Femininity in the 1930s: evidence from
Woman’s Own’, Media History, 4 ⁄ 2 (December 1998), 161–74; J. Greenfield, S. O’Connell, and C. Reid, C.,
‘Fashioning Masculinity: Men Only, Consumption and the Development of Marketing in the 1930s’, Twentieth
Century British History, 10 ⁄ 4 (1999), 457–76; J., Bengry, ‘Courting the Pink Pound: Men Only and the Queer
Consumer, 1935–1939’, History Workshop Journal, 68 (2009), 122–48.
37
For example, P. Hartmann and C. Husband, Racism and the Mass Media (London: Davis-Poynter, 1974); S. Hall,
C. Critcher, T. Jefferson, J. Clarke and B. Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (London:
Macmillan, 1978); P. Gordon and D. Rosenberg, Daily Racism: The Press and Black People in Britain (London: Run-
nymede Trust, 1989); T. Van Dijk, Racism and the Press (London: Routledge, 1991). Examples of historical work
include B. Schwarz, ‘Claudia Jones and the West Indian Gazette’: Reflections on the Emergence of Post-colonial
Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 14 ⁄ 3 (2003), 264–85; S. Auerbach, Race, Law, and the ‘‘Chinese Puzzle’’
in Britain (Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2009).
38
For example, J. MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1986); G. Wilkinson, ‘Purple Prose and the Yellow Press: Imagined Spaces and the Military Expedition to Tirah,
1897’ in D. Finkelstein and D. M. Peers (eds.) Negotiating India in the Nineteenth Century Media (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 2000), 254–76; C. Kaul, Reporting the Raj: The British Press and India, c. 1880–1922 (Manchester: Man-
chester University Press, 2003); S. Potter, News and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial Press System,
1876–1922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); S. Potter (ed.), Newspapers and Empire in Ireland and Britain:

ª 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd History Compass 10/2 (2012): 140–150, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2011.00828.x
148 Cultural Histories of the Press in Modern Britain

Reporting the British Empire, c.1857–1921 (Dublin, Four Courts, 2004); C. Kaul (ed.), Media and the British Empire
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
39
A. C. H. Smith, with E. Immirizi and T. Blackwell, Paper Voices: The Popular Press and Social Change 1935–1965
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1975); T. Jeffery and K. McClelland, ‘A World fit to Live in: the Daily Mail and the
Middle Classes 1918–1939’, in J. Curran, A. Smith, and P. Wingate (eds.), Impacts and influences: Essays on Media
Power in the Twentieth Century (London: Methuen, 1987), 27–52; D. LeMahieu, A Culture for Democracy: Mass Com-
munication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain between the Wars (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
40
J. Thomas, Popular Newspapers, the Labour Party and British Politics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), Conclusion.
41
Curran and Seaton, Power without Responsibility, 7th edn., 5.
42
M. Pugh, ‘The Daily Mirror and the Revival of Labour 1935–1945’, Twentieth Century British History, 9 ⁄ 3
(1998), 420–38; L. Beers, Your Britain: Media and the Making of the Labour Party (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2010).
43
See, for example, Mark Hampton’s analysis of the cartoonist David Low: ‘Inventing David Low: Self-Presenta-
tion, Caricature and the Culture of Journalism in Mid-Twentieth Century Britain’, Twentieth Century British History,
20 ⁄ 4 (2009), 482–512.
44
M. Hampton, ‘Renewing the liberal tradition: The press and public discussion in twentieth-century Britain’, in
M. Bailey (ed.) Narrating Media History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 26. Hampton has also produced the best
overview of the historical debates about the role of the press in British society: M. Hampton, Visions of the Press in
Britain, 1850–1950 (Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 2004).
45
Gale Cengage’s Newsvault is available at http://gale.cengage.co.uk/product-highlights/general-reference/gale-
historical-newspapers/gale-newsvault.aspx. Proquest has made available the archives of a number of British titles,
namely the (Manchester) Guardian (1821–2003), the Observer (1791–2003), the Irish Times (1859–2008) and The Scots-
man (1817–1950) http://www.proquest.co.uk/en-UK/catalogs/databases/detail/pq-hist-news.shtml. Ukpressonline
have digitised the archives of the Daily Express (1900- current) and the Daily Mirror (1903-current) http://www.
ukpressonline.co.uk/ukpressonline/open/index.jsp. For more details, see Bingham, ‘Digitization’.
46
Bingham, ‘Digitization’.
47
For details of this research network, see http://www.shef.ac.uk/journalismhistory.

Bibliography
Adorno, T., and Horkheimer, M. (eds.), ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, The Dialectic of
Enlightenment, trans. J. Cumming (London: Allan Lane, 1973).
Auerbach, S., Race, Law, and the ‘‘Chinese Puzzle’’ in Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
Beers, L., Your Britain: Media and the Making of the Labour Party (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
Beetham, M., A Magazine of her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine 1800–1914 (London: Routl-
edge, 1996).
Bengry, J., ‘Courting the Pink Pound: Men Only and the Queer Consumer, 1935–1939,’ History Workshop Journal,
68 (2009): 122–48.
Bingham, A., ‘The Digitization of Newspaper Archives: Opportunities and Challenges for Historians’, Twentieth
Century British History, 21 ⁄ 2 (2010), 225–31.
Bingham, A., Family Newspapers? Sex, Private Life, and the British Popular Press, 1918–1978 (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2009).
Bingham, A., ‘The ‘‘K-Bomb’’: Social Surveys, the Popular Press and British Sexual Culture in the 1940s and
1950s’, Journal of British Studies, 50 ⁄ 1 (2011), 156–79.
Bland, L., ‘The Trials and Tribulations of Edith Thompson: The Capital Crime of Sexual Incitement in 1920s
England’, Journal of British Studies, 47 (July 2008), 624–48.
Brake, L., Bell, B. and Finkelstein, D., (eds.), Nineteenth Century Media and the Construction of Identities (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2000).
Chalaby, J., The Invention of Journalism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998).
Cocks, H., Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century (London: IB Tauris, 2003).
Conboy, M., The Press and Popular Culture (London: Sage, 2003).
Cranfield, G., The Press and Society: From Caxton to Northcliffe (London: Longman, 1978).
Curran, J. and Seaton, J., Power without Responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain (first published 1981; 7th
edn., London: Taylor and Francis, 2009).
Curtis Jr., L. P., Jack the Ripper and the London Press (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
Gannon, F., The British Press and Germany, 1936–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).
Garnett, M. and Weight, R., The A-Z Guide to Modern British History (London: Jonathan Cape, 2003).
Gordon, P. and Rosenberg, D., Daily Racism: The Press and Black People in Britain (London: Runnymede Trust,
1989).
Greenfield, J., O’Connell, S. and Reid, C., ‘Fashioning Masculinity: Men Only, Consumption and the Develop-
ment of Marketing in the 1930s’, Twentieth Century British History, 10 ⁄ 4 (1999), 457–76.

ª 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd History Compass 10/2 (2012): 140–150, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2011.00828.x
 Cultural Histories of the Press in Modern Britain 149

Greenfield, J. and Reid, C., ‘Women’s Magazines and the Commercial Orchestration of Femininity in the 1930s:
Evidence from Woman’s Own’, Media History, 4 ⁄ 2 (December 1998), 161–74.
Habermas, J., The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Trans.
T. Burger (Cambridge: Polity, 1989).
Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J. and Roberts, B., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and
Order (London: Macmillan, 1978).
Hampton, M., ‘Renewing the Liberal Tradition: The Press and Public Discussion in Twentieth-Century Britain’,
in M. Bailey, (ed.), Narrating Media History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 26–35.
Hampton, M., Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004).
Hartmann, P. and Husband, C., Racism and the Mass Media (London: Davis-Poynter, 1974).
Higgins, P., Heterosexual Dictatorship: Male Homosexuality in Postwar Britain (London: Fourth Estate, 1996).
Hoggart, R., The Uses of Literacy (first published 1957; London: Penguin, 1962).
Houlbrook, M., ‘‘‘Lady Austin’s Camp Boys’’: Constituting the Queer Subject in 1930s London’, Gender and
History, 14 ⁄ 1 (2002), 21–61.
Humphries, A., ‘Coming Apart: The British Newspaper Press and the Divorce Court’, in L. Brake, B. Bell and
D. Finkelstein, (eds.), Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 220–
31.
Jeffery, T. and McClelland, K., ‘A World Fit to Live in: The Daily Mail and the Middle Classes 1918–1939’, in
J. Curran, A. Smith and P. Wingate, (eds.), Impacts and Influences: Essays on Media Power in the Twentieth Century
(London: Methuen, 1987), 27–52.
Kaul, C., (ed.), Media and the British Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
Kaul, C., Reporting the Raj: The British Press and India, c. 1880–1922 (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2003).
Koss, S., The Rise and Fall of the Political Press, Vol. 1, The Nineteenth Century; Vol. 2, The Twentieth Century
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1981, 1984).
Lazarsfeld, P. and Merton, R., ‘Mass Communication, Popular Taste and Organized Social Action’, in P. Marris
and S. Thornham, (eds.), Media Studies: A Reader, 2nd edn. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999),
18–30.
LeMahieu, D., A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain Between the Wars
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
MacKenzie, J., (ed.), Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986).
Mackworth, M. (Viscountess Rhondda) (ed.), ‘In Defence of the Popular Press’, Notes on the Way (London:
Macmillan, 1937).
McCullagh, C., Media Power: A Sociological Introduction (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002).
McLaren, A., The Trials of Masculinity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
Mort, F., Capital Affairs: London and the Making of the Permissive Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
Mort, F., Cultures of Consumption: Masculinities and Social Space in Late Twentieth-Century Britain (London: Routledge,
1996).
Mort, F, ‘The Permissive Society Revisited’, Twentieth Century British History, 22 ⁄ 2 (2011), 269–98.
Newey, G., ‘Short Cuts’, London Review of Books, (July 28, 2011), 22.
Oram, A., Her Husband Was A Woman! Women’s Gender-Crossing in Modern British Popular Culture (London:
Routledge, 2007).
Orwell, G., ‘Decline of the English Murder’, in S. Orwell and I. Angus (eds.), The Collected Essays, Journalism and
Letters of George Orwell, Vol. IV: In Front of Your Nose 1945–1950 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 124–8.
Potter, S., News and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial Press System, 1876–1922 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003).
Potter, S., (ed.), Newspapers and Empire in Ireland and Britain: Reporting the British Empire, c. 1857–1921 (Dublin:
Four Courts, 2004).
Pugh, M., ‘The Daily Mirror and the Revival of Labour 1935–1945’, Twentieth Century British History, 9 ⁄ 3 (1998),
420–38.
Reed, D., The Popular Magazine in Britain and the United States 1880–1960 (London: The British Library, 1997).
Savage, G., ‘Erotic Stories and Public Decency: Newspaper Reporting of Divorce Proceedings in England’, The
Historical Journal, 41 ⁄ 2 (1998), 511–28.
Schwarz, B., ‘Claudia Jones and the West Indian Gazette’: Reflections on the Emergence of Post-colonial Britain’,
Twentieth Century British History, 14 ⁄ 3 (2003), 264–85.
Smith, A. C. H., Immirizi, E. and Blackwell, T., Paper Voices: The Popular Press and Social Change 1935–1965
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1975).
Thomas, J., Popular Newspapers, the Labour Party and British Politics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005).
Tinkler, P., Constructing Girlhood: Popular Magazines for Girls Growing Up in England 1920–1950 (London: Taylor &
Francis, 1995).
Tunstall, J., Newspaper Power: The New National Press in Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

ª 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd History Compass 10/2 (2012): 140–150, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2011.00828.x
150 Cultural Histories of the Press in Modern Britain

Tusan, M., Women Making News: Gender and Journalism in Modern Britain (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 2005).
Upchurch, C., ‘Forgetting the Unthinkable: Cross-Dressers and British Society in the Case of Queen vs. Boulton
and Others’, Gender and History, 12 ⁄ 1, (2000), 127–57.
Van Dijk, T., Racism and the Press (London: Routledge, 1991).
Vernon, J., ‘‘‘For Some Queer Reason’’: The Trials and Tribulations of Colonel Barker’s Masquerade in Interwar
Britain’, Signs, 26 ⁄ 1 (2000), 37–62.
Vicinus, M., ‘Lesbian Perversity and Victorian Marriage: The 1864 Codrington Divorce Trial’, The Journal of British
Studies, 36 ⁄ 1 (1997), 70–98.
Walkowitz, J., City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (London: Virago, 1992).
Waters, C., ‘Disorders of the Mind, Disorders of the Body Social: Peter Wildeblood and the Making of the Mod-
ern Homosexual’, in B. Conekin, F. Mort and C. Waters, (eds.), Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain
1945–1964 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1999), 134–51.
Wilkinson, G., ‘Purple Prose and the Yellow Press: Imagined Spaces and the Military Expedition to Tirah, 1897’,
in D. Finkelstein and D. M. Peers (eds.) Negotiating India in the Nineteenth Century Media (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
2000), 254–76.
Williams, F., Dangerous Estate: The Anatomy of Newspapers (first published 1957; London: Longmans, Green, 1958).
Wood, J. C., ‘‘‘Those Who Have Had Trouble Can Sympathise with You’’: Press Writing, Reader Responses and
a Murder Trial in Interwar Britain’, Journal of Social History, 43 ⁄ 2 (2009), 440–62.

ª 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd History Compass 10/2 (2012): 140–150, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2011.00828.x