Anthony Trollope's 'Newspaper Scribblers' and a Culture of Publicity

Abstract

Anthony Trollope's emergence as a prominent writer coincided with William Howard Russell's Times reports on the Crimean War, which solidified the place of the newspaper in a new national and imperial media system. In an 1854 letter to a friend, Trollope called the Times a “tyrant” and blamed it for the public’s impatience with the war effort. Trollope later embodied this journalistic tyranny in the figure of editor Tom Towers in The Warden. This paper examines Trollope’s novelistic depictions of the newspaper and its culture of publicity. I focus on two fictional newspapers: The Jupiter in The Warden and the People’s Banner in the Palliser novels. I argue that Trollope’s novels are continually preoccupied with the effect of newspaper publicity on individual characters and how it erodes a sense of an individual’s connection to a larger community. In The Warden, for example, Mr. Harding, the private and meek warden of Hiram’s Hospital, is tormented by the Jupiter’s constant examination. The London-based newspaper calls for the reform of Hiram’s Hospital and accuses Mr. Harding of corruption. Before the newspaper intervenes, Mr. Harding is judged and evaluated by his Barchester peers, but the newspaper presents him to the scrutiny of an unknown, impersonal, and expanded public. My paper will argue that this pressure by an unknown public has consequences for how characters like Mr. Harding imagine their role in a larger community. Benedict Anderson has argued that serial forms like the census and the newspaper create national and diasporic subjects by asking individuals to think of themselves serially – as “a” woman or “an” Englishman. It is exactly this kind of national community that Trollope works against in his novels. In The Warden, Mr. Harding becomes “a” corrupt church official for The Jupiter’s reading public, when in the novel, he is a complex but deeply sympathetic individual character. In the expanded reach of the newspaper, individuals like Mr. Harding are emptied out into mere instances of seriality for readers. Mr. Harding is forced to imagine himself as “a” church official rather than as a self-governing individual, and this self-alienation inhibits his ability to take ethical action. The novel implicitly compares the Jupiter’s attack on Mr. Harding to the Times’s coverage of the Crimean War. Indeed, in his personal correspondence, Trollope blamed the Times for the war’s unpopularity: “I think that waging a war with a corps of newspaper scribblers is too great a lash for any one. … [H]ad Caesar, Hannibal, Napoleon, Alexander or Wellington been so attended, the same sort of things would have been written had our own correspondent of those days been scribbl[ing].”