Page 228 - Culture Society and the Media

218 COMMUNICATIONS, POWER AND SOCIAL ORDER
regional press fostered the development of a middle-class political culture,
centred on the clubs, political societies and coffee-houses of provincial England.
In promoting a political awareness amongst its readers, the emergent commercial
press helped to lay the foundations for the subsequent middle-class assault on the
aristocratic order.
The commercial press in the provinces both catered for and was controlled by
the commercial middle class. The majority of newspaper proprietors were
merchants, tradesmen, printers or booksellers—people drawn precisely from the
class that was politically excluded. Journalists came from more varied
backgrounds, but would seem to have been drawn primarily from the petit-
bourgeoisie (Cranfield, 1962 and 1977; Rogers, 1972). It was only a matter of
time before a section of the commercial press adopted a more critical stance
towards the landed élite, if only to attract a larger circulation amongst the
expanding middle-class audience.
The person who first successfully mobilized the commercial press was, as
Brewer (1976) shows, John Wilkes, who transformed a fairly commonplace
occurrence—his imprisonment by general warrant for writing an article attacking
the government—into a major political issue. His subsequent exclusion from the
Commons, despite repeated re-elections, became a national scandal; and his
calculated act of defiance as a magistrate in freeing printers who had published
reports of parliament, brought the mobs out into the streets of London in a mass
action of support that clearly created amongst the landed aristocracy in
parliament something bordering on panic (Rudé, 1962). As Burke commented
sardonically (his frantic private notes at the time belie his detachment), MPs
responded to the mobs outside parliament like mice consulting on what to do
with the cat that tormented them.
The controversies surrounding John Wilkes were the first notable occasions in
which the newspaper press defined the central issues on the political agenda in
active defiance of the consensus amongst the landed oligarchy in parliament. It
was also the first important occasion in which the newspaper press conferred
status upon and brought into public prominence a champion of bourgeois
interests, enabling him to appeal over the heads of the landed élite in parliament
to the disenfranchised constituency that lay outside. The coverage given to
Wilkes’s campaigns in the commercial press also demonstrated the power of the
emergent press (reinforced by printed propaganda) to mobilize discontent on a
national scale that was unprecedented in eighteenth-century England: Wilkes
received not only the backing of the London mobs, but also the support,
manifested in demonstrations, marches and petitions, of people all over the
country from Berwick-on-Tweed to Falmouth. Largely as a result of popular
pressure, general warrants were declared illegal in 1765 and the ban on the
reporting of parliament was effectively abandoned in 1771. The press became
increasingly free to subject parliamentary proceedings and government to public
scrutiny, and to initiate debate outside the parameter of parliamentary consensus.
The politics of oligarchy were at an end: Wilkes inaugurated a new era of