[Miriam_Dobson,_Benjamin_Ziemann]_Reading_Primary_(BookZZ.org)

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go? If so, what is its doctrinal framework? Finally, does the article in question conform to your expectations for the genre or does it defy or modify expected conventions? Why?

Newspapers often engage in elaborate and unfolding debates with one another, playing with one another’s words and consciously turning meanings around in competing narratives. Therefore, in order to understand a newspaper article, it is often essential to use the comparative method: to read the text alongside parallel articles in other newspapers as well as in comparison with what preceded it in its own newspaper. In this vein, one may inquire: How does a story’s length compare with that of other news stories? Do you note a sustained as opposed to a casual or fitful attention to the issue over time? If looking at other newspapers, do you detect evidence of inter-textuality (an awareness of and response to reports in other newspapers or journals)?

Case study: The Times and Sind (1843)

The archival record of news reporting on the British Empire offers modern scholars particularly rich opportunities to delve into the crowded mental landscape of another time and to test the theories that have emerged from media and literary studies. For its case study, this chapter selects articles from The Times on Britain’s conquest of Sind in 1843.

Founded in 1785, The Times established itself as the nation’s pre-eminent newspaper in the nineteenth century. The Times was more than a city daily; read avidly by businessmen, politicians, intellectuals and the educated middle and upper classes throughout the British Isles and Continental Europe, it set the agenda for news reporting. Its vast resources allowed it to gather news from across the globe and maintain its status as the overwhelmingly dominant press voice. In 1841, The Times sold twice as many copies as its rivals, the Morning Post, Morning Herald, and Morning Chronicle, put together; by 1850 it sold four times as many. At this time, the paper’s foreign news budget alone amounted to more than £10,000 a year and supported agents in locales as far away as Marseilles, Malta and Alexandria.29 As they lacked sufficient journalistic manpower, many city and provincial newspapers published extracts from The Times to supply their own national or international news.

The relatively quiet conquest of Sind followed a militarily disastrous and domestically controversial campaign in Afghanistan (1839–1842), from which Britain’s reputation in Asia was only with great difficulty restored. Its ‘Opium War’ with China (1838–1842) aroused a mixture of moral dissent and xenophobic sentiment at home. Both wars took longer to win than expected and yielded few obvious benefits. The independent kingdom of Sind, on the other hand, fell into British hands quickly and unexpectedly. With no convincing military justification for the unprovoked conquest, General Charles James Napier and Governor-General of India Lord Ellenborough defended the annexation of Sind as an opportunity to project British might to the world and to acquire new economic resources for imperial trade along the Indus River. The spoils (in looted gold bullion, treasure and jewels)

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amounted to more than £500,000, of which a handsome cut of £21,000 was deposited into the Bank of England.30 Napier’s famously terse victory telegraph to London, ‘Peccavi’ (‘I have sinned/Sind’), captured the ambiguity of the moment better than he could have known. For close to a year, The Times reported periodically on the conquest of Sind and the 17 February 1843 Battle of Miani that achieved it. A selection of this news coverage follows:

[Editorial]

We yesterday announced to our readers a brilliant victory obtained by Sir C. Napier, at the head of 2,700 of our own troops, over 22,000 Beloochees

– a satisfactory evidence that, in military power at least, the days of Plassey and Assaye are not gone by. Such as the difference then was between the rabblearmy of a native prince and the noble and disciplined array of Sepoys trained and led by English officers – such it remains . . . we find Sir C. Napier's victory brilliant, and in itself satisfactory, as it is, little consolation for the fact which it betrays, that the north-west of India is still unsettled . . . It is disappointing to find that a fresh war has proved necessary at the very moment when we fancied ourselves grasping an honourable and permanent peace. To have plunged in it, if it be proved unnecessary, will be more than disappointing – it will be disgraceful.

(The Times, 6 April 1843)

[Editorial]

On the 17th [of February] a battle took place, which can only be compared to the celebrated one at Plassey, in which, after a severe struggle of three hours, the Ameers were totally routed and their troops dispersed. The loss of the British troops was considerable . . . The capture of this most important position is of immense value; the valuable and fertile districts along the Indus can now be restored to industry and the arts of peace, and millions, as of old, will soon live in happiness in those plains where those despots have during a century scattered misery and desolation. The official accounts are subjoined. It appears that the plan of an attack in order to exterminate all the British in Scinde was not confined to Hyderabad, it extended itself throughout the territories of the Ameers, but their utmost efforts have been baffled, and they are now prisoners.

(The Times, 7 April 1843)

[News article]

The Affairs of India. Private Correspondence. Deccan, March 28.

. . . In the proclamation, the Governor General has made the best of the subject, and Scinde now belongs to the British Government, except such part as his Lordship may bestow on his faithful ally and base traitor to his family, Meer Ali Morad, Ameer, &c. I dare not trust myself to comment upon Lord Ellenborough's notification now, and I leave it to abler pens than mine – he has

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glossed over his own acts in the opening paragraph, left it to be inferred that the Ameers were in the wrong altogether, that his usurpation and total bouleversement of affairs there were strictly justifiable and needful, and has made the most, as of course he would, of the attack on [diplomat Sir James] Outram [in Hyderabad]. We have a flourish of trumpets too about the blessings of our own rule in future, and though this may be the only part of our conduct which may hereafter become subject for praise we have to account for what has been done to a higher tribunal than sits on earth. Read the gallant Napier's despatch, and if it does not stir your blood, ay, that of every man in England who reads it, then you had needs warm it somehow. Eloquent, just, spirited, it is worthy of the gallant old veteran . . . It was, indeed, a hard fought and daringly-contested field on both sides, and I question if ever before in India there was so much hand to hand, sword to bayonet fighting as on this occasion, nor ever more disparity of odds – the victory, indeed, seems a miracle. May it be the last. It will be a wise and beneficent policy, now that the deed of blood is done, to pour a large body of troops into Scinde, so as completely to put it beyond the means of the Ameers and the haughty Beloochee chiefs to attempt to regain by force what has been lost. As to the former, they are our prisoners and at our mercy; the others may be thorns in the side of the Governor-General, if he remain. As a territorial acquisition the importance of Scinde cannot be denied: the command of such a river and such a country, capable of becoming a second Bengal in wealth and productiveness, is beyond all question.

(The Times, 8 May 1843)

[Editorial]

We remain masters of Scinde . . . The opportune accident of a family dispute impaired the irregular strength of the Ameers. One of those usurpations so common in Oriental sovereignties furnished us with an excuse for interfering in the quarrel. We interfered only to divide; and from the divisions which we encouraged, we already begin to speculate on the aggrandizement of our Indian empire . . .

While we do not mean to justify these aggressions by the success which has attended them, nor to assert that, because the districts on the banks of the Indus may be cultivated to the highest point of fertility, the occupation of Scinde was, on that account, a measure to be advised or applauded; at the same time we do not hesitate to affirm, that, as things have turned out, it is the duty of the Indian Government to make the best use they can of this new acquisition. Whether their mode of acquiring it be defensible on the score of political morality or no, there can be no question that they may retain it both on safer and more honourable terms than those whom they dispossessed. They could not by any possibility be worse rulers of the country than the old Ameers. It is no great compliment to say that we expect they will be much better. The territory is represented as being of great capabilities. Let them improve these to the utmost. They will thus improve the physical, and with it the moral, condition of the people. When we are reproached with the treachery, the ambition, and

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the violence by which we have extended our Eastern empire, let us at least be able to answer, in our own defences, that in destroying dynasties we have not substituted one slavery for another, but that in every case we have made the people more happy, more wealthy, and more secure than they ever dreamed of being under their native princes. Let us point to more enduring and substantial reigns of our power than the Sepoy camp or the tax-collector; let us point to the change in manners, morality, and jurisprudence, which best attests the influence and the honesty of a paternal government.

(The Times, 24 October 1843)

[News article] Indian Affairs.

(From Our Own Correspondent.) Camp, Deccan, Oct. 24.

Scinde.

. . .

The country has become unhealthy because it was neglected by the oppressive Ameers, who seem to have considered that there were but two objects of government – that of screwing money out of the people, and that of creating hunting grounds for their own pastime. A scientific system of drainage will soon alter the face of the country and remove all cause of complaint on the score of unhealthiness . . .

However defective may have been our right to dispossess the Ameers, it is allowed by all, even by those who most violently impugn [Governor-General] Lord Ellenborough's policy, that we cannot relinquish the country without committing an act of unparalleled madness. To restore it to its former rulers and thus establish a new and independent, perhaps a hostile, power on the frontiers of India, would bring in question our capacity for governing the rest of the country. If the Indus is to be regarded as the natural limit of our empire, we cannot spare a foot of land within that boundary; and the sooner the anomalous independence of the various chiefs, whom our forbearance has spared, ceases, and the whole country is brought under the same scheme of administration, the better for the interests of the people, and the better also for the consolidation of our empire . . .

(The Times, 5 December 1843)

A number of basic contextual points arise from this reading. First is the plain fact of the anxiety-inducing delay between an event in India and the arrival of news reports in London (by about six weeks). While the recent introduction of steamships shortened the eightto twelve-week journey of the 1820s, it must be observed that reading news reports from India was a bit like gazing into the stars: one never could be certain whether what one saw, no matter how brightly it shone, still existed in fact. Another point is the anonymity of the field reporter; readers are left in ignorance as to whether he is an independent agent or an employee of the East India Company, be it as officer, soldier, veteran or merchant, all of which hold important

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implications. (This is one indication that the journalistic profession was still in its infancy, and certainly so in colonial spaces. The personalized reporting of William Russell on the Crimean War in the 1850s would signal an important shift in journalistic authority here.) Finally, there is the distinction between the news article written in India and the editorial column composed in London, which synthesizes and interprets the former for the reader in sometimes unexpected ways.

Within the text itself, one notes the recurring deployment of several key words and ideas. The very first is ‘we’, creating an implied unity amongst the military, the East India Company, the newspaper, the nation, and the reader as well as a tone of celebration over the outcome of events. To promote the British ‘side’ in these events is not to suffer from subjective bias, but rather to practise objective and neutral journalism. In a sense, the anonymity of the reporter noticed above supports this ideological notion, casting the story beyond the subjective experience of any particular writer. The repeated discussion of the small number of British forces relative to their Baluchi opponents advertise the superior quality of each Company officer, soldier and sepoy (native Indian recruits, who comprised some 80 per cent of the Company army’s rank-and-file). As with the reporter, both Baluchi and British soldiers go unnamed (in army lists of the killed and wounded only officers are delineated), revealing a striking adherence to social hierarchies. The army becomes a simple extension of the will of Sir Napier. The use of the term ‘British soldier’ also creates ambiguity, allowing readers to imagine the army as more European than it was in fact, while word of the ‘miraculous’ turn of this violent contest hints at the hand of Providence.

The reports assume common knowledge amongst readers of two historical British victories in South Asia. One was the 1757 Battle of Plassey (Palashi) between Nawab (governor) of Bengal Siraj ud-Daulah and General Robert Clive, establishing British rule in Bengal. Then in 1803 the Battle of Assaye gave Britain an important victory over the Maratha Empire of south-central India, its last serious rival for power on the subcontinent. By forging these links with an established noble past, news writers attenuated any hint of moral scandal surrounding the attack upon Sind.

At the same time, these articles betray anxiety about the fundamental illegitimacy of the attack upon Sind. They therefore raise multiple and repeated rationalizations for it: the amirs as ‘Oriental’ despots; false rumours of a plan to ‘exterminate all the British’ from Sind; the Indus River as a ‘natural’ limit to Britain’s eastern empire; the promise of economic trade for Britain; the scientific, agricultural and economic improvements that Britain will bring to the regions’ inhabitants; and the moral, cultural and political improvement of the people of Sind, left in the dark ages by their oppressive amirs. British imperial warfare and expansion, then, are presented as benign tools to bring about the real benefits of ‘peace’ and ‘civilization’ to unenlightened natives as imperial subjects. Newspaper coverage thus limited the many possible impressions of Sind to several options: a land of internal oppression, menacing threat, outright violence or peaceful progress under British tutelage. The possibility of British wrongdoing (beyond wellintentioned error) is simply not a category of thought here. To return ‘a foot of land’

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would be an act of ‘madness’. Even where British aggression is acknowledged, there is no contemplation of decrying the imperial enterprise itself. British expansion by definition means progress, modernity, liberty.

Victorian news accounts of imperial warfare clearly worked to galvanize loyal sentiment at home.31 The Times, alongside other broadsheets, increasingly addressed its readers as politically engaged persons and as though Indian events naturally touched their lives, discursively positioning Britons as an imperially invested people. In the press, Britons were formidable frontiersmen and sober soldiering men bringing order and tranquility to a broad landscape peopled with diverse tribes, but emphatically unchanged by them.

Conclusion

Despite the prodigious bounty that newspapers bring to the intellectual table, the promising evolution that newspaper scholarship has undergone, the growing accessibility of newspaper writing and their enormous contemporary relevance, newspapers have inspired relatively few historical monographs as a subject in themselves and fare even less well within general history writing. In 1990, Brian Maidment lamented the fact that ‘there is almost no attention paid to Victorian periodicals in themselves, though many articles and essays depend on evidence drawn from periodicals to substantiate, illustrate, or reinforce arguments constructed out of other kinds of scholarly evidence.’ Maidment found ‘a startling absence of any well-developed corpus of work studying the generic issues specific to periodicals’ such as editorial policy, print technique, readership definition, sales figures, distribution patterns, and finance, all of which ‘underlie, or perhaps even construct, the statements of opinions, beliefs, or values which scholars read off from the diligently researched page or microfilm’. Maidment called upon scholars to move beyond the use of newspapers as mere illustrations and to adopt an authentically interdisciplinary approach worthy of the genre:

If we regard periodicals not like fossil hunters, in search of specimens to fill a cabinet, but like theoretical geologists or theologians, as expositions of processes by which change occurs and is made legible, then I think a quite major shift in thinking will have occurred. 32

Nearly two decades later, it is no longer true that ‘a case still has to be made for the centrality of the study of newspapers as a scholarly project’.33 The fruit of that recognition has yet to grow and multiply, but the prospects for researchers to break new ground in this genre and to shape its future are without limit.

Notes

1R. Chartier, ‘Intellectual History or Sociocultural History? The French Trajectories’, in Dominic Lacapra and S.L. Kaplan (eds), Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982, p. 30.

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2A. Smith, ‘The Long Road to Objectivity and Back Again: The Kinds of Truth We Get in Journalism’, in G. Boyce, J. Curran and P. Wingate (eds), Newspaper History from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day, London: Constable, 1978, pp. 168 and 170.

3Smith, ‘The Long Road to Objectivity’, p. 152.

4C. Mitchell, Newspaper Press Directory: Containing Full Particulars Relative to Each Journal Published in The United Kingdom and the British Isles; Together with A Complete Guide to The Newspaper Press of Each County, Etc. Etc. Etc., London, 1846, p. 327.

5For evidence of the advance of this logic in the contemporary commercial press, see R. Perez-Peña, ‘Why Big Newspapers Applaud Some Declines in Circulation’, in the New York Times, 1 October 2007.

6T. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus; The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh, London, 1920, Book I, pp. 48–49.

7Mitchell, Newspaper Press Directory, p. 22.

8J. Grant, History of the Newspaper Press, vol. 2, London, 1871, p. 402.

9The phrase ‘fourth estate’ arose early in the nineteenth century as a short-hand for journalists and newspaper editors. In early modern England and France, those who represented the nation and participated in the life of the body politic were divided by tradition into three orders or ‘estates’: the clergy, the nobility and the commons. In its power to monitor and limit state action through its influence upon public opinion, the press had in the nineteenth century become an unofficial ‘fourth estate’ of the realm, according to writers such as William Hazlitt and Thomas Carlyle.

10A. Jones, Powers of the Press: Newspapers, Power and the Public in NineteenthCentury England, Brookfield: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1996, p. 52. See also F. Knight Hunt, The Fourth Estate: Contributions towards a History of Newspapers, and of the Liberty of the Press, 2 vols, London, 1850; P.-A. Cucheval-Clarigny, Histoire de la Presse en Angleterre at aux Etats-Unis, Paris, 1857 [English transl. Andrews (London, 1870)]; and A. Andrews, The History of British Journalism: From the Foundation of the Newspaper Press in England, to the Repeal of the Stamp Act in 1855, with Sketches of Press Celebrities, 2 vols, London: Richard Bentley, 1859.

11L. Stanhope, Sketch of the History and Influence of the Press in British India (1823) and S. Arnot, A Sketch of the History of the Indian Press During the Last Ten Years, With A Disclosure of the True Causes of Its Present Degradation . . . With a Biographical Notice of the Indian Cobbett, Alias 'Peter the Hermit’ (1829).

12Report of the Second Anniversary Meeting of the Newspaper Press Benevolent Association, Held at the Freemason’s Tavern, 13 July 1839.

13Jones, Powers of the Press, pp. 25–27. See also Papers Relating to the Public Press in India (House of Commons, 1858).

14J.D. Vann and R.T. VanArsdel (eds), Victorian Periodicals: A Guide to Research, New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1978, p. 87.

15For a classic example of this interpretive framework, see S. Koss, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain, 3 vols, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1981.

16J. Curran and J. Seaton, Power Without Responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain, 4th edn, London: Routledge, 1991, pp. 35 and 39.

17R. Williams, ‘The Press and Popular Culture: An Historical Perspective’, in Boyce, Curran, Wingate (eds), Newspaper History, p. 50.

18As if to prove Orwell’s theory, the British Ministry of Information suppressed his preface; it sat unknown until its publication in the 1970s. See B. Crick, ‘How the Essay Came to Be Written’ in The Times Literary Supplement, 15 September 1972.

19G. Orwell, Animal Farm, London: Penguin, 2000, Appendix I.

20Marxist theorists such as Louis Althusser, Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton have used ideology to refer to a coherent system of ideas that rely upon certain basic assumptions about the social world that ultimately advance a particular class interest. The principal theorist of hegemony was Antonio Gramsci, though his ideas were not well known

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until the latter third of the twentieth century. Hegemony points to the capacity of dominant social groups to cause others to accept, adopt and internalize their values and norms without the brute use of force, though force may be available. Postmodern theorists like Michel Foucault, in shifting away from any search for singular truths, looked instead at how knowledge and experiences are produced and sustained through discourses, such as texts, beliefs, attitudes, policies and practices. Discourse analysis seeks to reveal the wider social processes of legitimation and power contained within texts and practices.

21Shattock and Wolff, The Victorian Periodical Press, p. 262.

22L. Brake, A. Jones and L. Madden (eds), Investigating Victorian Journalism, London: Macmillan Press, 1990, p. 10.

23L. Williams, ‘Bad Press: Thomas Campbell Foster and British Reportage on the Irish Famine, 1845–1849’, in L. Brake, B. Bell and D. Finkelstein (eds), Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities, London: Palgrave, 2000, p. 295.

24J. Shattock and M. Wolff (eds), The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings, Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982, p. xiii.

25See J.F. Codell (ed.), Imperial Co-Histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press, Madison. N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003, and Brake, Bell and Finkelstein (eds), Nineteenth-Century Media.

26Some of the most ground-breaking work in this field deals with the rich English-lan- guage newspaper history of South Asia. See D. Finkelstein and D.M. Peers (eds),

Negotiating India in the Nineteenth-Century Media, London: Macmillan, 2000; M. Israel, Communications and Power: Propaganda and the Press in the Indian Nationalist Struggle, 1920–1947, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994; C. Kaul (ed.), Media and the British Empire, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006; C. Kaul, Reporting the Raj: The British Press and India, c. 1880–1922, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003; and S. Potter, News and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial Press System, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003. For two important bibliographies of imperial newspaper collections, see E.M. Palmegiano, The British Empire in the Victorian Press, 1832–1867. A Bibliography, New York: Garland Publishing, 1987, and J.D. Vann and R.T. VanArsdel (eds), Periodicals of Queen Victoria's Empire: An Exploration, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996.

27B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 1993. For an influential thesis on the role of newspapers

and print media on the creation of bourgeois civil society, see J. Habermas,

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989.

28For detailed case studies of the effect of corporate ownership upon US news reporting in the latter half of the twentieth century, see E. Herman and N. Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.

29M. Walker, Powers of the Press: The World's Great Newspapers, London: Quartet Books, 1982, pp. 33–36.

30The Times, 24 November 1845, citing Allen’s Indian Mail (n.d.).

31For a sampling of the eighteenth-century analogue, see P.J. Marshall, ‘“Cornwallis Triumphant”: War in India and the British Public in the Late Eighteenth Century’, in L. Freedman, P.M. Hayes and R. O'Neill (eds), War, Strategy and International Politics: Essays in Honour of Sir Michael Howard, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 57–74 and P. Lawson, ‘“Arts and Empire Equally Extend”: Tradition, Prejudice and Assumption in the Eighteenth-Century Press Coverage of Empire’, in K. Schweizer and J. Black (eds), Politics and the Press in Hanoverian Britain, Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellon Press, 1989, pp. 119–146.

32B.E. Maidment, ‘Victorian Periodicals and Academic Social Discourse’, in Brake, Jones and Madden (eds) Investigating Victorian Journalism, pp. 147–148.

33Maidment, ‘Victorian Periodicals’, p. 153.

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Select bibliography

Boyce, G., Curran, J. and Wingate, P. (eds), Newspaper History from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day, London: Constable, 1978.

Brake, L., Bell, B., and Finkelstein, D. (eds), Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities, London: Palgrave, 2000.

Brake, L., Jones., A., and Madden, L. (eds), Investigating Victorian Journalism, London: The Macmillan Press, 1990.

Curran, J. and Seaton, J., Power Without Responsibility: The Press, Broadcasting and New Media in Britain, 6th edn, London: Routledge, 2003.

Finkelstein, D. and Peers, D.M. (eds), Negotiating India in the Nineteenth-Century Media, London: Macmillan, 2000.

Jones, A., Powers of the Press: Newspapers, Power and the Public in Nineteenth-Century England, Brookfield: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1996.

Kaul, C., Reporting the Raj: The British Press and India, c. 1880–1922, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.

Koss, S., The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain, volume 1, The Nineteenth Century, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1981.

Potter, S., News and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial Press System. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003.

Shattock, J. and Wolff, M. (eds), The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings, Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982.

Vann, J.D., and R.T. VanArsdel (eds), Periodicals of Queen Victoria's Empire: An Exploration. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996.

Online sources:

C19: The Nineteenth Century Index <http://c19index.chadwyck.com> [This archive supersedes The Wellesley Index]

The Times Digital Archive <http://www.gale.com/Times/> [This archive supersedes Palmer's Index]

12 Speeches

Paul Readman

‘The great men’s speeches in this exciting time are the most interesting reading in the world. Nothing could be more absorbing than one’s own sentence of death.’1 Thus Lady Monkswell confided to her diary on 30 January 1878, at the height of the controversy over the British government’s foreign policy in the near east. The political debate over this policy, which saw Britain and Russia come close to war, were largely fought out by means of public speeches such as those of the great Liberal leader William Gladstone, who delivered open-air orations to audiences of thousands on the unwisdom and immorality of the line taken by his Conservative antagonist Benjamin Disraeli, the earl of Beaconsfield, who was then Prime Minister. In Britain and elsewhere, this was the golden age of public speaking, that moment in history which extended from the mid nineteenth to the mid twentieth century, when the progressive democratisation of political cultures served to make the set-piece speech vital to the very stuff of a newly popularised politics. In these years before the advent of television, speeches were the primary means of political communication and persuasion, being routinely reported in detail by the newspaper press. Even as early as 1855, a single number of The Times could contain nearly 60,000 words of reportage on proceedings in parliament.2 Yet speechmaking retained its importance with the twentieth-century arrival of new broadcast media. While radio and television may have meant the eventual demise of hours-long addresses in the style of Gladstone, privileging excerpts and soundbites over the full coverage of old, speeches remained of key historical significance. It may be, for example, that the length of excerpts from speeches shown on American news programmes during presidential elections had fallen to an average of just nine seconds by 1988, but while Harry Truman gave 58 speeches in his first year of office, Ronald Reagan gave 211, and in all, American presidents spoke nearly 10,000 times in public in the forty years after 1945.3 These observations suffice to illustrate the central importance of speeches as sources across the whole chronological range of modern history, and particularly modern political history, which will form the focus of the present chapter.

Scholars interested in speech before the nineteenth century face difficulties finding the sources they need to carry out their research. As James Axtell, the distinguished historian of early modern North America has commented, ‘[o]ur best evidence about human history, people’s words, have almost wholly vanished into