Synopses & Reviews
Review
"Mark Hampton has succeeded in presenting a critical study both of 'how the press was discussed and understood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries' (2), and of how the press's role changed over that period from educator of the 'people' to representative voice of the 'people' to representative voice of the 'people' to entertainer and propagandiser of the 'people.' . . . The result is a study that should be as interesting for the general reader as it is valuable to intellectual historians and periodicals scholars."--Victorian Periodicals Review
Synopsis
Historians recognize the cultural centrality of the newspaper press in Britain, yet very little has been published regarding competing conceptions of the press and its proper role in British society. In Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850-1950, Mark Hampton surveys a diversity of sources--Parliamentary speeches and commissions, books, pamphlets, periodicals and select private correspondence--in order to identify how governmental elites, the educated public, professional journalists, and industry moguls characterized the political and cultural function of the press. Hampton demonstrates that British theories of the press were intimately tied to definitions of the public and the emergence of mass democracy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries