Abstract
Journalism and crime go together like a horse and carriage and always have. The connection sustained the newspapers' predecessor, newsbooks, into the 17th century. In 1624, for example, The Crying Murther: Contayning the cruell and most horrible Butcher of Mr. Tate omitted no detail of the poor curate's demise: “There these butchers with their hands already soaking with his blood, did cut up his carkeise, unbowell and quarter it; then did they burne his head and privy members, and parboile his flesh…”. And just so readers should be unconfused, a woodcut showed the murderers wandering about clutching different bits of poor Tate. Of course, the authors of such works were not in the business of mere titillation; rather they were offering moral lessons on the wages of sin. Of course.
Crime afforded the bridge to the popular cheap press of the 19th century. This had its roots in the reformist Chartist newspapers such as Fergus O'Connor's Northern Star, but their circulations could not match that of John Cleave's Weekly Police Gazette. Founded in 1835, it combined sensationalist crime reporting with a radical message. With a circulation of 40,000, it outsold The Northern Star, which stuck only to Chartism, by four copies to one. Cleave, in fact, pointed the way to a politically neutered popular press. In 1842, Edward Lloyd, another Chartist publisher like Cleave with a background in “Penny Dreadfuls”, started his Sunday Lloyd's Penny Weekly Miscellany, with even less politics.
A year later came the next logical step, no radical politics at all, just the sensationalism. The News of the World promised to be: “A paper that will combine the attractions of the rich newspaper, and that from the smallness of price will be certain to secure circulation amongst both poor and rich.” The lead story was an “EXTRAORDINARY CHARGE OF DRUGGING AND VIOLATION”.
Arguably, this solved the vexed question of regulating the press. Free from prior constraint by the early 18th century, all other methods of censorship had failed. Juries would simply not convict journalists of seditious libel, and attempts to bring newspapers into court were likely anyway to provoke riots. Only the taxes on newsprint and advertising remained, and, even then, a hydra-headed untaxed press flourish. The News of the World showed a better way. “Men of capital”, needed to fund newspapers' ever increasing budgets, could be trusted to minimise the dangerous politics while maximising circulation with sensational stories. The stage was set for the removal of the “taxes on knowledge” and the birth of the modern “free press” in the 1860s. The Illustrated Police News, priced one penny, was one beneficiary of this reform.
Cruel Deeds and Dreadful Calamities celebrates the title's three-quarters of a century's existence. As is only right, The British Library has produced a volume that defies electronic pad and Kindle, and reminds one of the physical pleasures of the book. Receiving it was a delight, akin to the feeling I remember getting from the Eagle Comic Christmas Annual 60 years ago. But it is, nevertheless, a rather curious piece of work. Surely there are other illustrated tiles more worthy of such careful treatment?
The IPNwas a lamentable, parasitic piece of work. It was in the business of systematic, if legal, plagiarism. It employed no journalists of its own, merely reprinting the crime and disaster reports of others with original drawings — often of corpses in the morgue — added. It also ran such things as saucy songs and, in its first years, legal advice from a barrister. It broke no new ground in any way. Indeed, how it survived into the 1930s with, for example, no photographs until a year before it closed, is the most intriguing thing about it. When the Pall Mall Gazette, itself no stranger to the worse sort of titillations, called the IPN “the worse paper in the country”, it was retailing a judgment as much technical as moral.
In her analysis of the paper's contents, Linda Stratmann is good on its social awareness and its racist tinge, but fails to locate it meaningfully in the history of press developments. The Daily Mirror and Daily Mail, for example, which were to reformulate the nature of the popular newspaper, get no mention. And she seems to think that late 19th century “new journalism” means sensationalism when, rather, it betokened investigative “stunts”, interviews and other interventionist activities. It is also a pity that she does not reprint the original stories but rather paraphrases them. Overall, despite the excellence of the production — the illustrations are great and beautifully reproduced — it's a missed opportunity.