Page 230 - Culture Society and the Media

220 COMMUNICATIONS, POWER AND SOCIAL ORDER
those that appeared in other middle-class publications of the same period. James
Mill in the Westminster Review, for instance, hailed the middle class in 1826 ‘as
the glory of England; as that which alone has given our eminence among
nations; as that portion of our people to whom every thing that is good among us
may with certainty be traced’ (quoted in Perkin, 1969, p. 230). By celebrating the
virtues of the middle class, and in some cases by attacking the traditional leaders
of society as parasitic, decadent and unproductive, commercial newspapers
helped to coalesce disparate groups within the middle class by reinforcing a
growing consciousness of class.
The commercial reform press contributed, moreover, in a very direct way to
advancing middle-class interests and influence. The full enfranchisement of the
middle class during the 1830s, the repeal of the Corn Law and the decontrol of
trade during the 1840s and 1850s, and the initial reforms of the civil service,
universities and armed forces during the 1850s and 1860s, transformed the
position of the middle class in Britain. These gains were the culmination of
pressure-group campaigns in which the reform press played a central part by
generating publicity for reform, raising (in some cases) finance for reform
organizations, and gaining converts by representing reform as the universally
valid and shared interest of all.
The assault of the reform press on the ancien regime in Britain had disruptive
consequences in the short term. Some of the campaigns that the reform press
backed—from ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ in the 1750s to electoral reform in the 1830s
—came close to inciting popular armed resistance to aristocratic rule. But viewed
from a long-term perspective, the rise of the commercial press represented an
integrative rather than dislocative influence. It acted as an early-warning system
in an increasingly unstable society, alerting aristocratic politicians to the need for
accommodation and change in order to preserve the social order.
The commercial press also helped to maintain the initially fragile alliance
between the aristocracy and bourgeoisie that developed from the 1830s by
providing an internal channel of communication within the new class coalition.
Although the aristocracy dominated parliamentary politics until late into the
nineteenth century, parliament nevertheless enacted many of the demands of the
industrial and professional middle class. The commercial press provided an
important institutional means by which middleclass opinion was organized and
pressure effectively mounted to ensure that these demands were met, thereby
averting a renewed confrontation. The commercial press also furnished a moral
framework that legitimized the British capitalist system during a dislocative
phase of its development. Indeed, with the building of mass circulations during
the second half of the nineteenth century, commercial newspapers and magazines
came to play an increasingly significant role in engineering consent for the social
system within the working class.
* * *
The development during the early nineteenth century of a militant press,
financed from within the working class, posed a more serious threat to the social