Authorship

This essay analyses the conflicted notion of authorship and traces the changes in literary life throughout the nineteenth century. It argues that with the cessation of aristocratic patronage and the dwindling support for state pensions, the establishment of quarterly, monthly and weekly reviews and magazines fortuitously opened up new opportunities for writers, who could earn a middle class income by writing for the periodical press while at the same time pursuing their art. As the range of possible outputs increased, authors learned to manage a portfolio of literary tasks. With the removal of the ‘taxes on knowledge’ at mid-century the newspaper press became another outlet for writers. Efforts to secure professional status for authors and then for journalists began in the 1840s. Although neither achieved parity with the older professions of the law, the church or medicine, by the end of the century the working life of the man and woman of letters had been transformed.

After meeting the writer and journalist G. H. Lewes Harriet Grote, the wife of the historian George Grote, remarked to a friend that she and her husband had not cultivated men like Lewes, ‘whose condition as working men of letters necessarily separates them from our section [of society]’ (Ashton 1991, 54). It was a curious remark and a telling one. At the time Lewes was a well-known figure in literary London, the author of a four-volume history of philosophy, two novels, a biography, and several plays. He was also a prolific contributor to quarterly reviews and monthly magazines. The Grotes were at the centre of the Philosophical Radicals, a group of intellectuals, writers and politicians who were sympathetic to the radical cause. Many of them, including Harriet Grote herself, would have answered to the title of men and women of letters. Her designation of Lewes as a ‘working’ man of letters, in which there was undoubtedly an element of social as well as intellectual snobbery, reveals the conflicted notions about authorship that were prevalent in the first half of the nineteenth century.

The realities of literary life, the difficulty of earning enough to provide for a family and maintain a respectable lifestyle, and the question of whether the state should offer support to writers were part of an ongoing debate. In 1831 the novelist Bulwer Lytton drew attention to the recent withdrawal of a state pension from ten associates of the Royal Society of Literature, an event that produced a mixed reaction from the general public. Authors could no longer rely on the patronage of the aristocracy that had prevailed up to the middle of the eighteenth century, but the public, Bulwer Lytton argued, were unaware that writers were owed both respect and some form of protection. Authorship, unlike other professions, did not have a monopoly, he suggested, and intellectual produce, like manufactured goods, should be protected. The following year he proposed that literary men should form a brotherhood for mutual support analogous to the cooperative movement in trade. The proposed union would be open to anyone who had written a work above ten pages, or to ‘all men connected by literature with any newspaper or other periodical’ (Bulwer Lytton 1832, 419). ‘Intellectual produce’, in other words, consisted of a variety of outputs besides books.

The union did not materialise, but Bulwer’s intervention highlighted two important issues. The argument that authorship was a profession like the law, the church, or medicine, gathered strength over the following decades. Secondly, the extension of the term ‘author’ to include those who contributed to newspapers and periodicals marked the nineteenth-century writer out from his or her predecessors. As Linda Peterson (2009) argues in Becoming a Woman of Letters, the romantic view of the writer as a solitary genius concerned only with his or her posthumous reputation was gradually being eroded. In its place was a more savvy professional, conscious of a literary marketplace and of a variety of possible outputs, from essays, articles, book reviews, or serial fiction through to a traditional volume. In The Economy of Literary Form Lee Erickson (1996) notes the collapse in the market for volumes of poetry in the 1820s and the rise of the literary periodical, as publishers responded to a reading public prepared to purchase moderately priced periodicals with a variety of content rather than more expensive books. As a result, he argues, the periodical essay became the ‘dominant literary form’, and periodical writing a means of earning a livelihood.

The profession of letters

As a new or emerging profession, authorship differed from the established professions in significant ways. There was no prescribed course of training, no formal qualifications or entrance requirements, and no established pattern of progression. The boundaries of the literary profession were porous. Anyone could declare him or herself an author by publishing an article, an essay, or a review, as members of other professions, lawyers, churchmen, and academics frequently did, using a pseudonym or relying on anonymity, which was the policy of all newspapers and most periodicals in the first half of the nineteenth century. Women writers routinely disguised their identity by adopting pseudonyms. ‘George Eliot’ and ‘Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell’, the well-known pen names of Marian Evans and the three Brontë sisters, attest to a widely held belief that entering the literary marketplace under a masculine name was more likely to result in a contract and ultimately higher sales and more reviews. The range of publishing opportunities open to the would-be author in the 1830s and 1840s, when contrasted with the situation at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was vast. However, earning an adequate living by writing for periodicals was by no means a certainty. Nor was the status of this new literary life clear.

The precariousness of writers’ lives was brought into sharp focus in 1845 with the death by suicide of the writer and journalist Samuel Laman Blanchard. Blanchard had supported himself and his family by editing and contributing to a succession of periodicals. The illness and sudden death of his wife combined with the pressures of work brought on a severe depression and drove him to take his own life. The shocking circumstances of his death and its underlying cause prompted comparisons with the security and rewards of the more established professions and revived the debate as to whether writers should be offered pensions. The underlying implication was that Blanchard had exhausted himself with hackwork, which prevented him from achieving literary distinction, and that a pension or charitable grant could have made a difference. This was the position taken by Bulwer Lytton, who edited three volumes of Blanchard’s essays in 1846. Thackeray, a close friend of Blanchard’s, took the opposite position. In the whimsically titled ‘A brother of the press on the history of a literary man, Laman Blanchard, and the chances of the literary profession in a letter to the Reverend Francis Sylvester at Rome, from Michael Angelo Titmarsh, Esq.’ (Fraser’s Magazine, March 1846), a review of Bulwer’s edition, he opposed any form of pension or grant for writers, arguing that leisure did not necessarily produce great works of literature and that if literary men were pensioned they might not work at all. He defended Blanchard’s decision to concentrate his career in the periodical press, commenting shrewdly that ‘his education and habits … his sparkling, hidden fun, constant tenderness and brilliant good humour were best employed as they were’ (335). In other words, he had carved out a writing life suited to his talents.

The response to Blanchard’s death laid bare the uncertain status of periodical writing. The frequently quoted comment by Francis Jeffrey, the founding editor of the Edinburgh Review, in 1802, that the review was to consist of ‘all gentleman and no pay’ (Cockburn 1852, vol. I, 131) implied a determination to avoid the taint of commercialism that dogged the newspaper press. In fact Jeffrey quickly reversed his decision and offered a generous scale of payment that contributed to the review’s success. The key word was ‘gentleman’. When in 1825 John Gibson Lockhart had to choose between the offer of an editorship of a newspaper or that of the Quarterly Review, he was advised that editing a review like the Quarterly was the office of a scholar and a gentleman, whereas editing a newspaper was not. The commercial basis of a newspaper, according to his advisor, was repugnant to the feelings of a gentleman (Lang 1897, vol. I, 365, 367).

In March 1847 an anonymous article in Fraser’s Magazine on ‘The Condition of Authors in England, Germany and France’ endorsed the value of periodical literature for the mid-Victorian generation of writers. ‘Literature has become a profession’, the article began. ‘It is a means of subsistence, almost as certain as the bar or the church’ (Lewes 1847, 285). ‘It is by our reviews, magazines and journals, that the vast majority of professional authors earn their bread’, the writer continued (Lewes 1847, 288).

The author of the article was G. H. Lewes, and his use of the term ‘professional authors’ was deliberate. Periodical literature was ‘the only decisive means of rescuing authorship from the badge of servility’, in his view (Lewes 1847, 289). The thrust of his argument was that the periodical press provided an opportunity for writers to earn an adequate income while at the same time pursuing their art. The periodical press enabled a writing life, rather than shutting down all possibility of achieving greatness, which was the popular interpretation of Blanchard’s fate. Lewes made it clear he was not advocating pensions for writers except in cases of age or ill health. However, Harriet Grote’s designation of Lewes as a ‘working’ man of letters, by which she marked him down for earning his living by writing, in contrast to her own circle who, she implied, wrote in their leisure time or had independent means, suggested that it would take some time for the new profession of letters, as described by Lewes, to be accepted.

Lewes’s other point was the need for public recognition for authors. As his title indicated, he compared the situation in England with that in France where, he noted, authors were statesmen, and two journalists had become prime ministers. Germany, he went on, had created professorships for literary men. Comparison with France and Germany was a common thread running through discussions of authorship in the first half of the century.

The new profession differed from the established professions in another respect. Unlike the law, the church, or medicine, it had no professional body to represent its interests. In 1843, upwards of a hundred writers of both sexes signed up to form a Society of British Writers, incensed at the injustice of American piracy of their work and by the perceived greed of publishers. Several meetings were held, the first chaired by the poet Thomas Campbell, and the second by Dickens, but the initiative faltered before any practical plans could be put in motion. Walter Besant, a novelist and journalist who became a key figure in the establishment of the Society of Authors later in the century, blamed Lewes for the failure. ‘His intellect you see, was too lofty to stoop to things practical’, he wrote with undisguised irony, quoting a letter Lewes had written to the fledgling society claiming that ‘my business is to think, not to act’ (Besant 1889, 23). The real failure was not so much a lack of leadership, although this was true, but the absence of a clear sense of what such a body hoped to achieve.

The dignity of literature debate

Lewes’s bullish article, with his argument that the new profession could hold its head up amongst other professions, had signalled a change in mood. The question of pensions for writers, on the other hand, did not go away. On 3 January 1850 the Morning Chronicle took up the issue, arguing that pensions had been ‘commonly parcelled out amongst respectable mediocrities’ and concluding that ‘all the patronage in the world will never produce a truly great and original author’ (1). The article quoted a passage from a recent instalment of Thackeray’s Pendennis that presented an unflattering portrait of men of letters, accusing the novelist of ‘unconsciously (we are sure) fostering a baneful prejudice’ against the literary profession.

The Examiner entered the debate the following week, defending the practice of literary pensions but endorsing the Chronicle’s implied criticism of Thackeray’s depiction of his own profession. In a signed letter in the Chronicle headed ‘The Dignity of Literature’ on 12 January an irate Thackeray rejected the Examiner’s claim that he had ‘stoop[ed] to flatter the current prejudice against literary men’ or that he had caricatured his ‘fellow labourers’ in order to ‘pay court to the non-literary class’. He had, he said, no objection to writers being honoured with ‘stars and ribbons’, titles, or even pensions but he reserved the right to mock quackery and falsehood in his own profession. ‘I hope that a comic writer, because he describes one author as improvident and another as a parasite, may not only be guiltless of a desire to vilify his profession, but may really have its honour at heart’, he concluded. The Examiner countered by reiterating its support for literary pensions, not because the system was without fault, but because it was the only extant mechanism for offering support to an undervalued and exceptionally talented section of society. It accused Thackeray of undermining his support for the literary profession by his propensity for irony and mockery.

A small media storm it may have been, but the so-called ‘Dignity of Literature’ debate had one tangible result. Dickens, assisted by Bulwer Lytton and other friends and colleagues, raised funds to create the Guild of Literature and Art, a project that grew out of dissatisfaction with the Royal Literary Fund, founded in 1790 for the relief of authors. The project was trialled in Dickens’s weekly miscellany Household Words on 10 May 1851. Membership of the Guild offered a range of support from housing to annual stipends, plus financial assistance for writers during illness or incapacity. Despite the substantial sums raised through amateur theatricals, the Guild failed to win wide support among the literary establishment. The initial enthusiasm for the project waned, although four houses were built on land donated by Bulwer Lytton.

Periodical writing and the ‘higher journalism’

Lewes referred to himself as ‘a periodical writer’, rather than a journalist. In the 1840s it was a significant distinction. In his mind periodical writing was a separate category, with a tradition stretching back to the foundation of the Edinburgh Review and the monthly reviews that preceded it. In an article on ‘Periodical Writing’ the Saturday Review for 12 February 1859 summarised the advantages and disadvantages of such a career. If undertaken by men with ‘a high and sound education’ who aimed only at periodicals of ‘a high character’, an income of four hundred a year was possible by the age of 30, rising to a thousand at 40. The downside was that there was little opportunity for further advancement apart from an editorship or a government or educational appointment. A periodical writer, then, had either to be satisfied with a modest lifestyle or exchange a writing career for one of the established professions such as the law. Until journalism became more of an acknowledged profession, the reviewer advised, the latter was the better option.

An editorship, on the other hand, could bring a guaranteed income and some prestige. When Dickens launched his weekly miscellany Household Words in 1850 his publishers Chapman and Hall offered him a half share of the profits and an additional £500 a year for his editorial work, plus a separate fee for the articles he contributed (Slater 2009, 306). This was in recognition of the fact that its likely success would be due to its association with his name. George Smith, of the publishing firm Smith Elder, made a similar calculation in 1860 when he launched the monthly Cornhill Magazine and offered Thackeray an annual salary of £1,000 to edit the journal. Several of the novelist’s shorter novels and sketches were serialised in the Cornhill during his brief editorship. William and Mary Howitt had a less fortunate experience when they launched the eponymous Howitt’s Journal in 1847. The tangled financial affairs of an unscrupulous proprietor resulted in bankruptcy for the Howitts, whose ensuing careers were blighted by financial hardship.

The term ‘higher journalism’ emerged in the middle decades of the century, from the 1850s through to the 1870s, and referred to the contents of quarterly, monthly, and weekly publications that specialised in criticism on a broad range of subjects. Its practitioners were the elite of periodical writers, mainly but not exclusively male, and often graduates of the ancient universities, together with members of established professions like law and the church. Walter Bagehot, in ‘The First Edinburgh Reviewers’ (National Review, October 1855) coined the phrase ‘the review-like essay and the essay-like review’ to describe a typical article in early reviews. These were leisurely in pace, generous in the use of quotation, often exploratory rather than conclusive, and usually lengthy. A modified version of the ‘review-like essay’ was characteristic of the higher journalism of the middle decades of the century as well. But its heyday was over by the end of the 1870s, when commentators warned that ‘long-winded’ reviews were going out of fashion, in part because they took too long to appear, but also because readers wanted more concise assessments of current publications.

The rise of journalism

The status of the literary profession was further complicated in the 1850s when as the historian Martin Conboy observed, ‘journalism moved from the margins of English society to a more economically lucrative and socially respectable position’ (Conboy 2004, 124–5). According to the Oxford English Dictionary the first use of the word ‘journalism’ occurred in an article in the Westminster Review in 1833. The author, Gibbons Merle, was a regular contributor to the periodical press and to provincial newspapers. In England, he noted, the terms ‘newspaper’ and ‘newspaper-writing’ had negative associations, whereas in France ‘to be a journalist, is to be a person of note … the title of a journalist, implies education, character, and perhaps disinterested enthusiasm; at any rate, in public opinion a union of respectable qualities’ (Merle 1833, 195). Merle’s assessment of the state of English newspapers in 1833 was not flattering. The quality of the writing and in most cases the editing was poor. The papers were bloated by advertisements and driven by commercial interests. The penny-a-line men, on whom the London morning papers relied for domestic news, he alleged, lacked the education of ‘decent butlers’ (Merle 1833, 199). The answer, as he saw it, was the removal of the remaining stamp or tax, which would result in a free trade in newspapers, and the creation of new titles that would thrive on competition. His comments were proleptic. When the remaining tax on newspapers was abolished in 1855 as part of the repeal of the so-called ‘Taxes on Knowledge’ (the other taxes were duties on advertisements and on paper), as one journalist recalled, ‘journalism took its mighty departure’ (National Review 1892, 278). The removal of the stamp ushered in a buoyant period in the development of the newspaper in Britain.

A debate as to whether journalism could be regarded as a profession distinct from literature was underway by the 1840s. An unsigned article on ‘English Journalism’ in Fraser’s Magazine in December 1846 expressed confidence that it had been elevated to a profession, that it was no longer regarded as a trade, but there was a need to give journalists ‘a recognized position in the social and political scale’ (633–4). Newspaper writers were for the most part ‘men of scholar-like attainments, gentlemanly notions and associations’, whose circumstances prevented them from devoting their lives exclusively to the press. They suffered from ‘the burden of the anonymous’ (637), in contrast to their French colleagues whose contributions were signed. The porous boundaries of the embryonic profession would soon prove problematic, as would the convention of anonymous publication.

Anonymity

The issue of anonymity in the newspaper and periodical press aroused passionate debate throughout the nineteenth century. The generation of authors who wrote for the reviews and magazines that were established in the early decades of the century did so in the knowledge that their reviews and articles would be published without a signature, that their individual views would be subsumed under the collective editorial ‘we’ of the journal. The early to mid-Victorian generation of reviewers and critics, of whom Lewes was typical, worked under the same assumption. It was not until the late 1850s and early 1860s that a new tranche of reviews and magazines, among them Macmillan’s Magazine, founded in 1859, and the Fortnightly Review, launched in 1865, inaugurated a policy of signed articles. John Morley, who took over the editorship of the Fortnightly in 1867, was a staunch advocate of signature. He argued that the anonymous system ‘teaches the journalist to look upon himself as nothing and his Journal as everything’ (Morley 1867, 292). He was writing about the newspaper press of the day, where anonymity remained the norm, but the argument was equally applicable to the periodical press. The reviewers and critics who collected their reviews and articles for republication from the mid-century on were unwilling to submit to anonymous publication. Moreover, the serialisation of fiction in the new ‘shilling’ magazines of the 1860s like the Cornhill and Macmillan’s, even if published without the author’s name, made a mockery of anonymity once the novel was republished and widely reviewed. The advocates of anonymity continued to argue that the practice enabled members of other professions to write for periodicals and newspapers without compromising their professional standing, but this argument gradually lost its force as public figures added their signatures. The other defence of anonymous publication, that the authorship of significant articles was in fact widely known in political circles or by those closely associated with a newspaper or periodical, no longer carried any weight in an era of mass circulation papers. The journalist Tighe Hopkins, who conducted a survey of eminent writers, journalists, and politicians on the question of anonymity in 1889–90, countered the traditional argument that the power of an article derived from its anonymity. To the contrary, he argued, it paved the way for deception. Anonymity ‘opens the door to any facile hack, to any mercenary of the quill with “opinions” to sell to the highest bidder’ (Hopkins 1889, 523). It would be some time before by-lines and signed articles would become the norm in newspapers, but by the turn of the century anonymity was on the wane in periodical publications.

The National Association of Journalists

Discussions about journalism as a career and the state of the new profession took off in earnest in 1884 with the creation of the National Association of Journalists. Renamed the Institute of Journalists when it received a Royal Charter in 1890, the new organisation was conceived as a professional body, the equivalent of the Royal Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons or the Bar Association, which would act as a gatekeeper to the profession as well as providing services to members. The Institute established regional associations or ‘districts’ around the country with subdistricts beneath them and held annual conferences in different cities each year, following the model of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. A trade paper, The Journalist, was launched in 1886 and became a semi-official organ of the National Association and later the Institute. A regular column in The Bookman reported on the meetings of the districts and sub-districts of the Institute, and on editorial and other appointments, a further indication of the enhanced profile of the new profession.

The Institute was controversial from the outset, criticised by its articulate and vociferous members as much for what it tried to do as for what it could not or chose not to do. The Bookman, in its September 1892 issue, was critical of the narrow and technical topics discussed at the Institute’s annual meetings, arguing that if journalism was to rank with the learned professions, it should demonstrate that it was ‘intellectually on a level’ with them. The level of debate about the state of the profession, on the other hand, was high, not surprising given the calibre of the participants, many of them nationally known journalists. One of the points raised was the perceived openness of journalism, the fact that members of the established professions found it easy to write for the press in addition to their main commitments. Some, who were disenchanted with their original choice of profession, moved into journalism, overtaking those who had worked their way up over many years. This was the point made by Henry R. Fox Bourne (1887), in English Newspapers. Chapters in the History of Journalism, one of several histories of the press published in the 1870s and 1880s. The problem, as Fox Bourne pointed out, was that there were no formal entry requirements for journalism, no entrance examinations, no essential qualifications or training. Highly educated professionals in other fields could easily outstrip those who, like him, had entered at the bottom and worked their way up (Fox Bourne 1887, vol. II, 371). These were precisely the arguments raised against the new ‘profession’ of authorship in the 1830s and 1840s.

The question of professional training for journalists erupted into a public debate in 1892 when the Institute proposed to launch a formal course of study with examinations and to make its certificate of competence the prerequisite for entry to the profession. An unidentified ‘Old Journalist’, writing to the editor of the conservative National Review in October 1892, insisted that the professional newspaper writer ‘never was, and never will be the product either of University or of Technical education’. Quoting his first editor who had sat in the reporters’ gallery with Dickens, he declared that the only gift a reporter needed was the ability ‘to hear and see what no other body sees and hears’ (National Review 1892, 274). The rest would be gained by experience. Journalists, like poets, were ‘external to the processes of manufacture’ (National Review 1892, 275). The same journalist bemoaned the practice of allowing those who had failed in other professions to poach on the journalist’s territory. The so-called learned professions had provision for those members who were misfits, without ‘taking the butter off the bread of the trained journalist’. But if entrance to journalism was to be ‘through a turnstile’, the new professional body should keep watch ‘at this nasty gap in the enclosing fence’ (National Review 1892, 276).

The Society of Authors

The Society of Authors was founded in 1884, the same year as the National Association of Journalists, by a group of writers that included Walter Besant, who became chairman of the management committee. Besant and his colleagues strove to instil some business sense into the new generation of writers and an appreciation of the value of literary property. The Society’s report for 1889 proclaimed, ‘We demand for Literary Property the same jealousy and the same resolution to obtain just treatment as prevails in all other branches of business’ (Sprigge 1890, 1). A pamphlet on Methods of Publishing (1890) urged writers to scrutinise the way production costs were calculated, so as not to be outwitted by unscrupulous publishers who traded on the innocence and naïveté of authors. Besant’s (1899) The Pen and the Book devoted several chapters to the practical details of book production, from the costs of paper and ink through to binding and distribution. He proposed that more prizes should be created for authors and criticised Carlyle and Dickens for refusing to accept various honours they were offered during their lifetime, arguing that their acceptance would have contributed to the status of the profession. He also sketched out the daily routine of the modern man or woman of letters, who like a barrister going to chambers, entered their study each morning to take up various tasks:

Two or three books waiting for review: a MS. sent him for an opinion: a book of his own to go on with – possibly a life of some dead and gone worthy for a series: an article which he has promised for a magazine: a paper for the Dictionary of National Biography: perhaps an unfinished novel to which he must give three hours of absorbed attention.

(Besant 1899, 24–5)

It was a routine that many, if not most, authors at the end of the nineteenth century would have recognised.

Women and journalism

Women were active as critics and reviewers throughout the nineteenth century, the convention of anonymity serving on the one hand to prevent their receiving recognition but on the other enabling them to participate in discourses that were traditionally designated masculine, such as history, science, theology, and politics. Harriet Martineau was a regular point of reference as a pioneer because her range of interests included politics, economics, and history, and because she wrote regular leaders in the Daily News for over a decade in the 1850s and 1860s. But until the 1890s there were few references to other women who wrote for the newspaper press.

It was only at the end of the century that articles about women journalists began to appear, focusing on outstanding women like Emily Johnson Crawford, Charlotte O’Conor Eccles, and the American-born Elizabeth L. Banks. Late nineteenth-century writers and journalists like Marie Belloc Lowndes wrote about their careers by way of encouragement to other women. The Society of Women Journalists was founded in 1893, with premises in central London offering practical assistance as well as professional support. The Writer’s Club, with facilities for authors and journalists, was one of a small number of women’s clubs that opened in London in the 1890s. It stipulated that only those who wrote for a living could join. Arnold E. Bennett’s Journalism for Women. A Practical Guide was published in 1898, more than a decade after the main rush of guides and handbooks to journalism in the mid-1880s. Written at a time when he was better known as a journalist than a novelist, Bennett delivered some home truths about the difficulties women faced in this predominantly masculine profession and encouraged them not to settle for writing on ‘women’s subjects’ in women’s periodicals but to aim for mainstream publications and to write on a wide range of subjects.

Conclusion

The move to establish a professional status for literature and then for journalism, as their advocates recognised, was successful in raising the profile of both, but not in creating the structure and regulation of other professions. Ultimately it became clear that they did not fit the established mould. As Arnot Reid concluded in an article on the newspaper press in 1887, journalism, like literature, was a ‘calling’ and as such it was resistant to regulation:

The calling of journalism shares with the sister calling of literature this peculiar distinction, that only those engage in it who feel ‘called’ to it in the truest sense of the word, and against such it has no regulations, no fees, no terms of apprenticeship, no artificial barriers of any kind. The one essential feature of a good newspaper is the one that conduces to that state of freedom. Its conductors are eager to take anything that suits them from anyone who offers it.

(Reid 1887, 459)

It was a shrewd point, and one that was borne out by events. The Institute of Journalists abandoned its efforts to create a system of compulsory examinations. However, in 1919 the London School of Journalism opened in recognition of the need for professional training for journalists. The National Union of Journalists, established in 1907, has proved effective in protecting its members’ interests, but as a trade union, not a professional association. The Society of Authors, now in its second century, describes itself on its website as ‘the UK’s largest trade union for all types of writers, illustrators and literary translators, at all stages of their careers’. Its official journal The Author was established in 1890 and edited by Besant until his death in 1901.

There were, however, benefits from the efforts to secure professional status for literature and journalism at the end of the nineteenth century. One was the gradual removal of the stigma attached to newspaper writing. Major writers who had written for the press in the past were routinely invoked by way of establishing a distinguished lineage for journalism. Dickens’s early career as a parliamentary reporter and his brief period as editor of the Daily News were frequently referred to in articles about newspaper writing. Samuel Johnson, as creator and editor of The Rambler, became another famous forebear of the modern journalist. An article entitled ‘A Great Whig Journalist’ in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1869, a review of a recent biography of Defoe, argued that he could lay claim to have invented the leader, as well as establishing two newspapers. Others enlisted in the ranks of eminent journalists included the essayists Addison and Steele, the historian Sir James Macintosh, the dramatist Thomas Noon Talfourd, and the novelist and poet Rudyard Kipling. Although neither authorship or journalism had managed to secure parity with the established professions, by the end of the nineteenth century the status of both had been transformed.

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