London press

“ Our readers have often had to oblige us by their attention to what we have said of the blessed THING. We are now going to trouble them upon an extraordinary occasion indeed, and are going to give an instance of the baseness and infamy of the London newspapers, such as we never before had it in our power to give; and such as we are quite sure will, before we have done with it, implant the character of everlasting infamy upon that corrupt press, which has so long been boasting of its independence and its honour. What a deal we have heard about the press being the guardian of public morals! ”

“ The slow growth of the newspaper press from these times is very remarkable. Even so late as sixty years since, a London paper was a very meagre and timid affair. Before us lies a copy of the Times of 1797, insignificant in size and appearance. The small modicum of news is entirely foreign: no brilliant leaders, models of composition—no fearless correction of abuse, or withering sarcasm of folly. ”

“ The English press is more concentrated in its means than the German; it is more sober, versatile, and honorable than the French; and it can be more relied upon, and is more decent in its tone, than the American press. It surpasses all three by the grand solidity of its deportment. It may well be said, that no nation on earth, old or new, could ever boast of such a political press as that of which the English nation can boast. ”

“ In the second place we ought to gain the attention of the newspapers. What the Psychical Society can do, surely the Folk-Lore Society can. What steps to take with regard to the London press I leave to the consideration of Londoners; but there are thousands of middle-class country people who can be reached through the country press better than through any other medium, and what I want particularly to urge on our country members is the importance of drawing attention to the subject in the columns of their several local newspapers. ”

“ When the bulk of the London Press elects to gush over anything or anybody, there are at all events, primâ facie grounds for believing that there is something to justify such a consensus. When, moreover, the object of such gush is a young lady claiming to be a spirit-medium, the unanimity is so unusual as certainly to make the matter worth the most careful inquiry, for hitherto the London Press has either denounced spiritualism altogether, or gushed singly over individual mediums, presumably according to the several proclivities of the correspondents. ”

“ I admire the Press of New York. There are a great many Boston men on it, and I have no mission to reform it. In New York, when you have a surplus of journalistic talent, you export it to London, where it is out of place—some of it. The feverish race for priority, which kills off so many American journalists, sometimes, it would seem, almost before their time (but that is a matter of opinion) , is unknown in London. A man who reads the "London Times," regularly and conscientiously, is guaranteed forever against insomnia. ”

“ Nowhere else is there a long mile of such an atmosphere, redolent of printers' ink and the bustle attendant upon the production and distribution of the printed word. And nowhere else is the power of the press more potent.
Its historian has described it as "a line of street, with shops and houses on either side, between Temple Bar and Ludgate Hill, one of the largest thoroughfares in London, and one of the most famous." ”

“ If there is any one thing aggravating to the American tourist, on his first trip to England, it is the supreme indifference of the English press to American affairs. Accustomed to the liberal enterprise of the press of his own country, which, with a prodigality of expenditure, stops at nothing when news is to be had, and which every morning actually gives him news from all parts of the world, in addition to copious extracts from foreign and domestic papers, he is struck with astonishment at the comparative lack of enterprise shown by the London papers. ”

“ The paragraphist of to-day is a much more elegant person, well educated and with some expert knowledge, of which he can make a monopoly. He flourishes chiefly on the needs of the metropolitan evening papers and on the well established institutions, known as the London letters of the leading provincial papers. By a man of this class and education the calling is not followed as a career in itself but as an65 aid to literature or the professions or sometimes, in between jobs, by the trained journalist. On the other hand the London press does not reciprocate the compliment ”

“ And do you suppose these gentry only get £70 a year for their work, like a curate; or £60, like a sub-lieutenant; or that they have to pay three times those sums for the privilege of belonging to the press, as a barrister does for belonging to his inn? Again, in London at least, there are as many magazines as newspapers, containing every kind of literature, the very contributors of which are so numerous, that they form a public of themselves. ”

“ For ages have science, and nature, and man been preparing its way. Society had to become intellectual—letters had to be invented—types had to be formed—paper had to be substituted for papyrus—the printing-press had to become wedded to steam—the electric-telegraph had to be discovered, and the problem of liberty had to be solved, in a manner more or less satisfactory, before a newspaper, as we understand the word, could be; and that we have the fruit of all this laid on our breakfast-table every morning, for at the most five-pence, and at the least one-penny, is wonderful indeed. ”

“ The character of the London newspaper press, in the earlier years of the present century, bears no comparison with its now-existing posterity, either in character, ability, or influence. Our leading journal, indeed, should scarcely know its own grandfather: appealing, as it does, to the taste of the most highly-cultivated minds of the age ”

“ The London press is not free from the charge of pandering to depraved tastes in its reports of sensational murders and divorce cases, though the great body of its writers and contributors no doubt sit down to their work with a higher sense of their responsibility to the public than is felt by their American contemporaries. ”

“ I knew many men who did fairly well as London correspondents; nowadays the great Press agencies keep a staff to manufacture London letters on the cheap, and the really able original has gone clean out of existence. ”

“ But I am of the belief that the press will never work but for the great and the learned, to any purpose of profit to the printer. How can we ever hope to send our wares abroad? We may hawk our ballads and our merry jests through London; but the citizens are too busy to heed them, and the apprentices and serving men too poor to buy them. ”

“ The business of the New York journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his race and his country for his daily bread.
You know this and I know it, and what folly is this to be toasting an “Independent Press.”
We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping-jacks; they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes. ”

“ In the picture of any event happening at a great distance the readers of even the best-intentioned journals necessarily have presented to their view only the highest lights and the blackest shadows. In this instance a certain section of the American press—what is specifically known as the "yellow" press—had strong motives, of a political kind, for making the case against the packers as bad as possible. It is unfortunate that many of the London newspapers look much too largely to that particular class of American paper for their American news and their views on current American events. ”

“ But in our opinion, it is worth while to inquire into the circumstances to which the weekly press in England owes its circulation and popularity, while it never prospered either in France or in Germany. A combination of causes produces this result. The morning papers are too expensive and too voluminous for the middle classes, especially in the country. ”

“ The public take a peculiar interest in the press to which they contribute, and a man whose letter is inserted in the Times considers himself in a certain degree as connected with the establishment; he becomes its champion, and reads it with great assiduity and interest. The authors of rejected letters, on the other hand, are offended; they get angry with the Times, they abuse it, and from sheer hatred and spite, they read it all the more eagerly. A journal can exist only by means of half a world of friends and a whole world of enemies, if indeed such an unalgebraic expression is admissible. ”

“ For the last fifteen years there cannot be any doubt or question that the leading articles in the four principal daily London morning papers exhibit an amount of talent, energy, information, readiness, and compression, which are not found in such perfect and wonderful combination in the French press. ”

“ A low London Bohemian is a mere animal, and will beg a copper from you in the same breath that he professes his willingness to translate a Greek tragedy—to oblige the giver of the copper, or else he will favor you with an account of his days at Oxford or Trinity, when he was a "first honor" man or a B.A. But one thing I have not found as yet in London on the press, and that is an illiterate or badly taught man, such as can be met with by the score on the American press.
The House to-night is in a Committee of the Whole on the Scottish Education bill. ”

“ Up to this time the press had been amusingly tolerant and good-naturedly sensational about him, but now he was to learn what virulent scrupulousness an antagonized press was capable of. Every episode of his life was resurrected to serve as foundations for malicious fabrications. ”

“ Especially in the political influence they exert, they have the advantage over their metropolitan contemporaries, because there is so much give and take in the whole London press that both sides of a question are heard by most people, even if not generally accepted. In the provinces on the other hand, while there used to be as a rule two important dailies in every large town representing each side in politics, there has been a tendency in each centre to concentrate business on one of these dailies to the loss and perhaps extinction of the other. ”

“ Their example has at length quickened some of the morning papers, and has spread into the provinces to such a signal degree that several of the great newspapers of the North of England are now served with literary matter of a quality and a fulness not to be matched in a single London daily twenty years ago. When an eminent man of letters dies, the comments which the London and country press make upon his career and the nature of his work are often quite astonishing in their fulness ”

“ The Scottish and the leading Irish newspapers of necessity, the wealthiest and most enterprising English papers for convenience and advantage, engaged special wires. Others that were near enough to London to do so secured London news and advertisements by railway, and completed their news supply by a liberal use of the telegraph. Commercial news, both home and foreign, especially American, was expanded. The Press Association spread its news-collecting organization over the whole country, and was stimulated to activity by the rising opposition of the Central News. ”

“ Tom Hood, son of the poet, was editor of the Tomahawk formerly, and lately of the Latest News, a penny Saturday paper, and Arthur A. Becket has edited Fun. James Grant is now editor of the Morning Advertiser, at a salary of fifty pounds a week, and Blanchard Jerrold receives £800 a year for editing Lloyds' Weekly. The salaries of editors on the London press vary from fifteen to fifty pounds a week, according to the ability displayed, and the circumstances of the journal on which they are employed. ”

“ In London, and in all our great centres of population, the newspaper has become the unfailing accompaniment of the City man’s journey to business. At the railway stations journals of every kind tempt the loitering passenger, while the illustrated papers appeal to him in a language of their own. Whether in the railway carriage, the omnibus, or the steam-boat, the newspaper is eagerly conned, and its contents form the food of conversation. ”

“ C. H. Ray, of The Chicago Tribune, attracted much attention when he exposed the fake correspondents of The London Times. (Incidentally, it may be said that much of the correspondence which appeared in English papers was written in London and was based upon data taken from Union and Confederate news- papers.) The London Times was also criticized in the American press because of the insertion of an item, sent by its New York
correspondent, which asserted that "Lincoln writes English that passes muster in America, but that would not be tolerated in a British school for young men." ”

“ The ladies were of all ages, evidently matrons as well as spinsters, with really nothing at all approaching a "blue stocking" element; but all evidently bent on business. All were taking vigorous notes, and seemed to follow the Professor's somewhat difficult Scotch diction at least as well as our two selves, who appeared to represent not only the male sex in general, but the London press in particular. ”

“ The newsvendors and newsmen are a very subordinate part of that wonderful engine—the newspaper press. Still I think we all know very well that they are to the fountain-head what a good service of water pipes is to a good water supply. Just as a goodly store of water at Watford would be a tantalization to thirsty London if it were not brought into town for its use, so any amount of news accumulated at Printing-house Square, or Fleet Street, or the Strand, would be if there were no skill and enterprise engaged in its dissemination. ”