‘This Short Grumbling Season’: Letters to the Editor, grievance and social regulation

Allison Cavanagh
University of Leeds

This paper reports on on-going research into the way that letters to
the editor came to occupy a particular discursive space during the
course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In a period of
rapid transformation for the press, wherein changes in audiences,
modes and patterns of distribution and in understandings of the nature
and purpose of journalism came together, it is argued that the letters
pages played a key role in reforming the press and repositioning it at
the centre of social as well as political life. Using materials from
the Times (1880-1900) and the Daily Mail (1896-1900) digital archives,
the work looks at the ways in which people used letters to the editor
as a form of surveillance, a platform from which they could enunciate
and seek to rectify specific grievances. Throughout the period members
of the public used the letters pages to air these matters of
quasi-public interest, and most often these were concerned with
grievances connected with commercial encounters. Newspapers, it is
argued, came to play a key role in the policing the commercial sphere,
through a process of ‘naming and shaming’, in an era otherwise
characterised by a laissez faire approach to business. This paper
examines the implications of this burgeoning understanding of
newspapers as having an intermediary status. In particular it looks at
the way in which the writing of such letters, and their subsequent
publication, instantiates transformations in understandings of the
social position of the press and, moreover, connects with notions of
citizenship, its rights and responsibilities, in respect of the media.
It further goes on to consider how these sensibilities were
differently interpreted by readers of the Times and the Daily Mail and
connects these approaches back to the demographics of the audiences
for the two papers.

Newspapers and Periodicals in Britain and Ireland from 1800 to 1900