London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City (19 page)

Stead believed that newspapers had a responsibility to expose the iniquities of politicians and to campaign to improve society in all areas. Thus, over his tenure Stead campaigned (among other things) for an increase in the age of consent; exposed child prostitution at home and overseas; criticized the police for their treatment of protestors in Trafalgar Square and for their inability to catch the Ripper; and slammed the government for the state of the Royal Navy. In May 1886 he set out his vision of the future of journalism and styled himself as a modern-day Oliver Cromwell. He was, like his Roundhead hero, driven by a puritan desire for the truth and to end corruption and immorality wherever it manifested itself. His argument was relatively simple: the fourth estate was a more democratic and therefore more legitimate organ of policy making than was Parliament. Just as Cromwell had overthrown an unrepresentative and unelected king so he sought to enforce the will of the people onto the government of the day:

The secret of the power of the Press and of the Platform over the House of Commons is the secret by which the Commons controlled the Peers, and the Peers in their turn controlled the King. They are nearer the people. They are the most immediate and most unmistakable exponents of the national mind. Their direct and living contact with the people is the source of their strength. The House of Commons, elected once in six years, may easily cease to be in touch with the people.'

Stead was not lacking in self-confidence although he may well have miscalculated the reaction that his procurement of a child prostitute for the `Maiden tribute' would bring. He served a short period of time in prison as a result and drew the criticism of contemporaries such as the novelist Matthew Arnold and the poet Algernon Swinburne (who sneeringly called the Pall Mall Gazette the Dunghill Gazette). Stead was probably unmoved by such criticism and apparently detested the city in which he had chosen to work. In particular he thought its newspapers were `driveling productions ... without weight, influence, or representative character'. 'o

The new journalism that Stead espoused (but did not invent - the genre was well underway by the time Stead established himself at the Gazette) was largely aimed at a new audience, the lower middle and working classes, who were buying (or at least reading) the newspapers in greater and greater numbers at this time. At the heart of this new type of journalism was crime reporting. Crime news, especially murder stories, appealed to all readerships regardless of class and the more sensational the murder the better. When Maria Manning's daring attempt to do away with her lover and run off with his railway bonds hit the newsstands the country was gripped. Maria le Roux, a lady's maid on whom Charles Dickens was to base his murderess Hortense in Bleak House, had married Frederick Manning but had stayed friends with her other, more wealthy, suitor Patrick O'Connor. O'Connor was brutally murdered, being shot and bludgeoned to death, and his remains buried in the Manning's London home before each made their separate escapes. Both were quickly captured and the trial became a major news story with Maria's angry outburst at the jury when it convicted her one of the highlights. The pair were executed together on 13 November 1849 with the papers describing their last hours and minutes in great detail, particularly Maria's careful choice of clothes. The Mannings' murder case was a great sensation story: it had death, conspiracy, unrequited love and adultery. An evil (foreign) woman and a man she led astray; greed and envy were followed by a manhunt, trial and execution. Maria played her role to perfection. Indeed it was almost flawless as a performance in a melodrama of the period and it was fuelled by the ability of the press to report its every turn. The case demonstrated the ways in which the newspapers exploited crime news as a means to reach an ever-growing readership, of all classes. For example, Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper, which had a circulation of 900,000 by 1890, devoted 50 per cent of its content to crime in 1866 and the Daily Telegraph likewise owed much of its early popularity to its reporting of criminal activities, murder and trials.

New journalism was also stylistically different from the more traditional form epitomized by The Times. The increasing use of the telegraph to deliver news fast, and the dominance of the two key news gathering organizations (The Central News Agency and the Liberal Press Agency) affected the way in which journalism developed. As Rob Sindall has noted there `was a gain in simplicity and lack of padding, the use of shorter sentences, the over-simplification of complicated issues and the greater distortion caused by increasing use of the emphatic key word"' This style of reporting is very evident in the Whitechapel murders and reflected the fierce competition for sales between the daily, weekly and Sunday papers in London. Much news was still recycled - which in part reflected the dominance of the news agencies - and so the drive to make one's paper distinct was uppermost in editors' minds. The Star, launched in 1888, was most fortunate to have such a major news story to capitalize on in its infancy and it achieved dramatic sales figures in October and November of that year.

Thus, in the 1880s journalism underwent a change of direction that built upon earlier moves at mid-century. As Anthony Smith argued, journalism `became the art of structuring reality, rather than recording it"' The presentation of the news was becoming more important than the news story itself. In this period journalism, for both commercial and reform reasons, began to investigate social issues in a more sensationalist way. The late century saw the emergence of a group of individuals who, along with Stead, pioneered what has been called the `golden age' of English journalism; these were men such as George Reynolds, Edward Lloyd, Henry W. Lucy of the Daily News, Henry Labouchere of Truth, the aforementioned Frederick Greenwood and Sir William H. Russell of The Times. All of the editors and owners that developed and profited from this `new journalism' benefited from the prevailing desire for sensation in several forms of popular culture. Sensationalism touched the press, literature, society and the stage, and the Victorians devoured it with enthusiasm. In order to place the reporting of the Whitechapel murders in context it is necessary to explore the nature of sensation and the Victorians' relationship to it.

SENSATION AND THE PRESS: FACT AND FICTION COMBINED IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY POPULAR CULTURE

The word `sensation' or `sensational' can be used to mean a number of things in different contexts but here we might simply understand it as a way of exaggerating an event or story to engender a 'startling impression"' The nineteenth century saw an increasing use of sensation in the reporting of crime, society scandals and human disasters. This device was also translated to the stage as London theatre productions became ever more ambitious in their attempts to entertain their audiences. In part this reflected a nineteenth-century interest in innovation. From the 1860s onwards theatrical directors like Dion Boucicault were devising `sophisticated new stage mechanics and elaborate three-dimensional scenery' to deliver excitement on the London stage.14 In After Dark (1868) Boucicault staged the most audacious of all sensation scenes in which a character was seen lying helpless on a mock-up of the Metropolitan Line (the underground railway was itself a new `sensation' having opened only five years earlier) in the path of an oncoming train. As the contemporary review recorded:

The whistle of the locomotive is heard, and the destruction of the prostrate man seems inevitable; but he is perceived and snatched up at the right moment ... and then the train sweeps across the stage, raising the audience to a perfect fervour of excitement.15

The theatre and the music hall formed a part of a growing popular culture in the nineteenth century, with the latter serving a very wide audience across the capital. Competition ensured directors kept up to date with innovations and changing tastes and fashions: in 1888 the American actor Richard Mansfield brought Robert Louis Stevenson's archetypal sensation novel Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde to an eager and shocked public before the Ripper murders forced him to close the show prematurely for fear of adverse reactions from those that might associate Mr Hyde's actions with those of `Jack'. Sensation novels and melodrama blended a number of themes such as crime and punishment, sex and violence, human tragedy and heroism, all of which, we might observe, are now the key ingredients for the modern day soap opera.

One of the techniques of the sensation novel was its serial nature. Subscribers and weekly readers could purchase the novel in stages, so that the story unfolded over a period of weeks and months building to its eventual climax, accompanied by powerful images often created by some of the leading artists of the day. Dickens' work was originally published in this form and towards the end of the century Sherlock Holmes' appearance in The Strand Magazine perhaps illustrates the apogee of this genre of writing. While some of the sensation novels and short stories published by Reynolds's Newspaper and others were fairly poor fare, in Wilkie Collins and Mary Braddon sensation had serious aspirations to literature even if many contemporary purists were loath to agree. George W. M. Reynolds was a notable exponent of the sensation novel as well as being a journalist and the creator of Reynolds's Newspaper, which earned a reputation for printing stories others dared not to touch. His novels featured the classic melodrama characters of desperate young women and sadistic villains wrapped up in sugary prose and cheap titillation, as in this example:

Again did the enraptured Harley imprint a thousand kisses upon her flushed and glowing countenance: again and again did he clasp her to his breast - and he could feel her bosom throbbing against his chest like the undulations of a mighty tide ebbing to and fro. Octavia was lost as it were in a new world of ineffable bliss."

However, in Wilkie Collins' works, such as The Moonstone or The Woman in White the author deployed a much more sophisticated writing style and plot lines. The Woman in White became an instant hit and drew on Collins' interest in crime and crime reporting and demonstrated the interconnection between newspapers and fiction. Collins followed the same themes and literary conventions with The Moonstone, using several narrators to tell their story so that the reader builds an idea of the plot piece by piece. The critics of sensation novels accused them of concentrating on plot over characterization, but in doing so they were creating the page-turning fiction that still dominates the best-seller charts today.

The press stories of real events were often every bit as gripping as a sensation novel when they were presented in dramatic prose. Witness this description of a steamboat accident in Canada that was reported in Reynolds's Newspaper in June 1881. Taking their information from the American press the paper involved its readership in the tragedy by using emotive language and a powerful narrative. Reporting the experience of one survivor, a Mr Montgomery, the journalist (who is unnamed as was often the case in nineteenth-century copy) relates how:

Mr Montgomery caught hold of an iron rod or bracket of some kind in the awning, and holding to this managed to keep his head above water for some seconds after the collapsed promenade deck beneath his feet had gone into the water. His position at this time was a terrible one. Below the deck which had sunk from under him he knew that scores were perishing, drowning like rats in a hole, while the awning to which he was clinging was rapidly sinking and burying beneath it men, women and children, whose piteous shrieks rent the air on every side.17

The loss of the steamboat Victoria, near London, Ontario, claimed 238 lives and was made especially newsworthy as the passengers were meant to be enjoying a day out to celebrate Queen Victoria's birthday. Reynolds's reporting contrasts with the sober contents of Reuters Telegram. The Illustrated Police News covered the story on 3 June alongside news of a'Daring street Robbery, rioting in a Hoxton playhouse, accidents on the Great Northern Railway and the arrival of survivors from an earlier (and unrelated) maritime disaster in April." The Victoria had been overloaded with passengers and the ship's master appears to have been the target of blame. The Graphic carried an image of the steamboat as it set off on its fatal voyage, clearly crowded with people but on a river that seems calm and unthreatening as if to make the starkest of contrasts with the tragedy that was about to occur.19 Illustrations were being used more frequently by the press and helped to convey a powerful sense of realizm to the reportage. The delivery of factual reporting with dramatic prose and occasional images give the newspapers of the second half of the nineteenth century a very modern feel.

Similarly the content and themes of popular theatre, in music hall songs and particularly in melodrama, are reflected in much modern television drama and soap opera. Within melodrama gender roles were crudely drawn, men were chivalrous or predatory, while women were passive victims always at the mercy of unscrupulous landlords and lascivious guardians. In melodrama good always triumphs over evil and the hero invariably `gets the girl'. As for the villains, these men were characterized as `unnatural; `cruel' and monstrous beasts wildly different from other `normal' men. The bestial nature of melodramatic villains was of course paramount in Richard Mansfield's interpretation of Mr Hyde who himself echoed Edgar Allan Poe's ape in The Murders in the Rue Morgue. It is a matter of note that the Victorians liked their bogeymen to be inhuman; or to put it another way, as unlike them as possible. Which helps to explain why the Ripper is perceived to be an `alien, whether foreign or from outside of `society' is perhaps irrelevant.