In the Aeolus episode of Ulysses – set in the offices of the Freeman’s Journal newspaper in Dublin – the editor, Myles Crawford, speaks about “the whole bloody history ... on a hot plate”, a reference to the hot metal process of newspaper production in pre-computer days.
I have worked intermittently in the field of newspaper history for 45 years now – specialising, as it happens, in the history of the Freeman’s Journal, the newspaper that features in Joyce’s Ulysses – and what I propose to do in this short article is to reflect on how my thinking about newspapers, about their history and their place in history, and about their usefulness as source material for historians, has evolved in response to the research that I have undertaken and what I have written on the subject.
I begin with a fairly lengthy quotation from a recent paper given by Prof John Horgan, the former Irish press ombudsman and doyen of Irish scholars working on the history of journalism. Speaking in St Patrick’s College, Dublin City University, at the end of January, he said:
“Newspapers are generally understood to be secondary sources for historians but, I would argue, this is not always the case. Their utility as primary sources can, I think, be advanced in limited but not insignificant ways. Sometimes they are the only record of things that actually happened. Sometimes they provide brief items of information, unavailable elsewhere, that can contribute important missing parts of a much larger historical jigsaw puzzle. And sometimes, precisely because they do not know what happened next, they are important witnesses to, and evidence of, the general mindset of populations and elites – and, of course, of journalists, who straddle both these categories. This in itself can be of considerable help to contemporary historians as they attempt to evaluate the motives, choices, decisions, context and actions of historical figures without yielding to the siren song of hindsight.”
That summarises most succinctly how most historians regard newspapers: of interest essentially because of the light they throw on politics, society and public opinion at a particular time, and because they offer us the proverbial “first rough draft of history” – a phrase usually attributed to Philip Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post now immortalised in stone on a wall in that admirable temple to freedom of the press, the Newseum in Washington DC. That was certainly my own view when I began working on the history of the Freeman’s Journal as a graduate student in 1971.
The Freeman was the organ of the Irish party at Westminster during the period of the Easter Rising in 1916 and afterwards, until the party was wiped out by Sinn Féin in the general election of December 1918. An anonymous memorandum in the papers of John Redmond, leader of the Irish party, described the Freeman in 1916 as “a sort of political bulletin, circulating amongst already staunch friends of the Party, and bringing them information and arguments with which they supported the movement and [its] policy”. Accordingly, my first venture into newspaper history was to study the editorial columns of the Freeman for the period in question, 1916 to 1918, and to use the editorials to map the response of the Irish party leaders – more accurately, their polemical response – to the sequence of events that culminated in the party’s downfall. In effect, the Freeman’s editorials enabled me to view the rise of Sinn Féin, and the reasons for it, through the eyes of what it displaced. It was a very conventional use of newspapers as a historical source.
I still consider it a proper use of newspapers as a historical source and, given the circumstances of the Freeman’s Journal at that time, I think I was entirely correct in equating those editorials with Irish party thinking – but today I would be much more cautious than I was then about making such an assumption. Even when newspapers profess to be organs of specific political movements or opinion, the reality is often more complicated than that.
To illustrate this, I again refer to the Freeman’s Journal. It had been the organ of the Home Rule movement since as far back as the 1870s, recognised as such by its contemporaries – and historians today tend to rely on it as such for research purposes. However, unlike in 1916 when the party effectively owned the newspaper, in the 1870s and 1880s it was the property of the Gray family. The head of that family from 1875 until his death in 1888 was one Edmund Dwyer Gray. He was a Home Rule MP, and fiercely ambitious. But for the advent of Charles Stewart Parnell, he might have led the Irish party at Westminster. He thus opposed the rise of Parnell within the party, and threw the weight of the Freeman unsuccessfully against him. He fully accepted Parnell’s leadership only after Parnell had established his own newspaper, the weekly United Ireland in 1881; the threat that United Ireland might be turned into a daily publication to rival the Freeman forced Gray to fall into line.
My point here is that anyone using the Freeman as a source in the period 1875 to 1881 needs to be aware of these factors complicating the Freeman’s coverage of events and its editorial position. It was not simply the organ of the Irish party, but was capitalising on its reputation as the party organ in order to influence the outcome of a power struggle within the party.
Likewise, when Thomas Sexton became chairman of the Freeman company after the Gray family lost control of the newspaper in 1892, the party could not rely on the unequivocal support of the Freeman – despite it being supposedly the party’s organ. Sexton had been a leading Irish party MP under Parnell and afterwards, but he retired from parliament in 1896. He seems then to have regretted his loss of influence within the party, and he sought to compensate for it by using the Freeman to try to impose his will on his erstwhile colleagues. He was increasingly out of sympathy with them, and this was reflected in the columns of the Freeman. For example, Sexton and the Freeman were in open conflict with the party over the land purchase scheme introduced by the chief secretary for Ireland, George Wyndham, in 1903. Ultimately, the Irish party leaders had to move against Sexton in order to reclaim the party organ – and in 1912 they arranged a takeover of the newspaper, using party funds. The tension that defined the relationship between the party and the newspaper in the period from the mid-1890s to 1912 compromises the usefulness of the Freeman as a source for the history of this period.
My advice, therefore, to historians and others using old newspapers as source material must be: caveat lector, let the reader beware! It is dangerous to rely on any newspaper as a source without some background knowledge of the publication in question, especially its political agenda.
This, it seems to me, is the essential reason why we must study the history of newspapers in general and also the history of individual newspapers. We need to understand their history so as to critically assess their value as a source. It is the key lesson that I take from my work on newspaper history over the past 45 years – but my work has also taught me that the history of newspapers is an inherently interesting topic for study, of value in its own right and for its own sake. It is not merely a side show, not just an effort to enhance our ability to use newspapers as sources – important though that is.
In my student days, historians who took themselves and their careers seriously focused on events and institutions of high politics and diplomacy to the exclusion of virtually everything else. In University College Dublin I was taught by past masters of that kind of history.
Newspapers, however, have been a vital element in the political, social and cultural life of our societies on both sides of the Atlantic for the past two centuries – as demonstrated by, for instance, a remarkable handbill held in the collection of the National Library of Ireland advertising a newspaper lending office in Belfast in 1830. It asserts: "In England, every man reads a newspaper, but never buys one" – a model to which we have returned in the digital age! And it is no accident that James Joyce, in Ulysses, places the Freeman's Journal "in the heart of the Hibernian metropolis" in 1904. So I have come to appreciate that the history of the press and its influence on politics and society over time is a valid field of study.
I have spent a lot of time in the past 45 years thinking about the nature and extent of the influence of the press. This is difficult territory for the historian, public opinion being an even more nebulous concept in the past than it is today – but it is indisputable that newspapers, both individually and collectively, have always been regarded by politicians and others as of very great importance in creating and moulding public opinion and/or as an expression of it. Few have attested more eloquently to that than Charles Stewart Parnell. In August 1891, just a few months before he died, he spoke as follows:
“The profession of journalism is a great and powerful one in these days. It is likely to become more influential as the years go by. The readers of newspapers increase from time to time, and the press is becoming even mightier than the politician ... In these days politics and journalism run very much together, and a tendency is more and more to combine the two.”
Mark Hampton’s seminal study, Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850-1950, traces the provenance of the two common perceptions of the press and its influence that I have mentioned: the first, the press as a persuasive agent, shaping public opinion; the second, the press as an embodiment of public opinion.
The history of the Freeman’s Journal, however, presents a more complex picture and exposes a disjunction between these contemporary perceptions and the reality of that newspaper’s place in Irish public life. The true influence of the Freeman was not actually in leading public opinion or representing a point of view – that of the Irish party or of a faction within it – but was rather in focusing public opinion on specific issues and then defining the terms and tone of the political discourse that followed.
In his book Public Opinion, published in 1922 and described by Robert Schmuhl as “one of the first intellectually rigorous inquiries of journalism”, Walter Lippmann argued that the importance of newspapers derives from the fact that they “signalize” an event or issue – and, based on my own work on the Freeman, that seems to me just right. In other words, newspapers tell people what to think about. They do not, and cannot, determine what their readers think – and, though conscious always of the need to avoid alienating readers, newspapers rarely tailor their editorial policy to accommodate what they, or others, adjudge public opinion to be.
Joyce inserted a wonderful aphorism into the Aeolus episode of Ulysses: “Sufficient for the day is the newspaper thereof”. Much as I love that witty assertion, I am not sure what exactly it means. It echoes the Sermon on the Mount from St Matthew’s gospel – “sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” – and that may imply that Joyce sees the press as, in some way, ignoble. If so, then Joyce shares a prejudice held by many – and indeed his aphorism could be regarded as prefiguring President Trump’s accusation that the press is “the enemy of the people”.
For me, the significance of the aphorism is that it reminds us that newspapers are ephemeral. They have a shelf-life of one day – hardly ever longer than that. They may well be the "first rough draft of history", but they necessarily lack the long-term perspective that is the hallmark of the work of the historian. Historians using newspapers as source material must add that perspective, as well as bringing to their work an informed appreciation of the limitations of newspapers as sources. This, however, should not preclude us from celebrating the remarkable human endeavour that a newspaper represents – in the words of GK Chesterton, "the largest work ever published anonymously since the great Christian cathedrals".
This is an edited version of a lecture given to the 2017 national meeting of the American Conference for Irish Studies at the University of Missouri-Kansas City on March 30th. Felix M Larkin, historian and writer, is a former director of the Parnell Summer School. He is the author of Terror and Discord: the Shemus cartoons in the Freeman's Journal, 1920-1924 (2009).
