Abstract
Anthony Hewitson (1836-1912), the son of a stone mason, worked as a reporter, and later editor and proprietor, of a variety of provincial newspapers in the north west of England, from when he was apprenticed, aged 14, to the Lancaster Gazette. He kept a diary from 1865-1912 (with gaps), recording the minutiae of his daily life as a journalist, author, businessman, husband and father. The diaries help us understand the conditions of Victorian news production and the communications ecology that begins with a reporter sitting in a police court, railway station or at a Board of Guardians meeting, via columns in provincial newspapers, and ending in the paragraphs published in the national Times and Daily Telegraph.
Hewitson worked inordinately long hours, wrote thousands of words a week, walked miles and miles, often in very uncomfortable shoes for his reporting duties, enjoyed (sometimes too much) a drink in the evening, revived himself with Sunday morning Turkish baths and buried four of his children while still infants. We also discover that on occasions he was not averse to fabricating copy, that he had a lucrative side-line in writing reports for trade bodies in industrialising Preston and occasionally published paid editorial matter without informing his readers. He disliked hypocritical priests (of which there were many), idolised the journalist Thomas Carlyle and, with his wife Margaret dabbled in the Victorian vogue for spiritualism.
We know much about the lives of the “great” Victorian journalists such as W. T. Stead, Augustus Sala and the more literary writer-journalists Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling. Hewitson’s diaries reveal to us the life of the anonymous, forgotten, provincial reporter, the social and commercial networks he forged and his methods of news gathering. This was a time of rapid modernisation and the growth of new technology; new railway lines were being built and gas-powered street lighting was transforming the night time streetscapes of small towns. Hewitson’s access to new developments such as the first demonstration of Preston’s automatic gas lamp lighting technology (244) and, in Rochdale, a new system for collecting night soil for use as fertiliser (346) reveal the privileged role of the reporter in witnessing, and communicating modernity.
The diaries are owned by the Lancashire Archives, purchased in 2004 from Hewitson’s great-grandson and this first volume covers 22 years of his life from his late 20s as he moves from being chief reporter for the Preston Guardian to owning and editing the Preston Chronicle, gradually becoming more comfortably off. It reveals his changing preoccupations, from travelling miles in tight shoes and on horse-drawn wagons to cover far-flung public meetings, to wage negotiations with his printers and collecting debts from advertisers. The volume is presented with an introduction by Andrew Hobbs, which places the diaries in the context of Victorian journal-keeping and the nineteenth century press. As Hobbs argues, these diaries are a virtually unique resource as “the only known diaries of a UK provincial journalist” (xvi), and in their very ordinariness shed light on the “thousands of other small-town reporters and editors who, between them, week after week, produced a national network of local newspapers which were at the heart of Victorian culture” (ibid).
In this current era when traditional local newspaper journalism is under severe pressure leading to so-called “local democratic deficit” (Clark, 2021: 177) it is worth reminding ourselves of the dense network of local news coverage that existed in Victorian Britain. In one typical month, as chief reporter for the Preston Guardian Hewitson covered the local police court, the court of Assizes in Liverpool, local magistrates courts, various lectures by local clergy; the annual meeting of the Blackpool Pier Company, the annual meeting of a local ‘Ragged School’, an inquest into the deaths of two children, various art exhibitions and theatrical performances, a new railway line, speeches by the local Tory members of parliament, the annual meeting of the Preston Samaritan Society, various Board of Guardians meetings, fires, the annual dinner of the Licensed Victuallers Association, the distribution of prizes to artillery men, Town Council meetings. After major news events such as the numerous rail accidents that took place (20 mortalities in 20 years at Preston railway station alone, 143), Hewitson also sold these stories to national newspapers.
We must thank Andrew Hobbs for his careful and painstaking editing, the helpful footnotes as well as the useful chronology, family tree and glossary of archaic words. These diaries are a valuable contribution to Victorian press history and social history and represent an opportunity to show to students the life of an “ordinary” journalist and the conditions under which he produced his copy.