ABSTRACTS

KEYNOTE ADDRESS:

Professor David Finkelstein (University of Plymouth) – "Union Networks and the Great Dublin Strike of 1878".

In 1878 there occurred a wide scale strike across the entire Dublin print trade sector around changes in wages, hours and working conditions. It affected newspaper press, book and government print production, lasted 8 months and resulted in a crushing defeat for union workers. Its participants would refer to it later in awestruck terms as a defining moment in their history, akin to what 1798 stood for in Irish nationalist ideology. And it led to the decimation of Dublin print union strength from which it took several decades to recover.

The story of this battle is a fascinatingly raw narrative of a multiplicity of social, political, trade and cultural networks in action. It is a useful case study of the marshaling of social capital on behalf of trade organizations, offering insights into how international links were mobilized for financial and moral support, how knowledge was circulated via press sources, trade informants and paid spies, how debates were kindled in British Parliament over women print trade and press workers, free trade movement and national protectionist interests, and how union divisions manifested in drunken disorder, flared tempers, insults and bare knuckled fisticuffs.

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SESSION 1: THE POLITICS OF THE PRESS

Françoise Baillet (Université de Caen Normandie) –“Invincible Brothers: The Pen and the Press in The Compositors’ Chronicle (1840-1843)”

With the repeal of the Combination Laws in Britain in 1824, trades and professions became more organised in their defence of workers. As costs of press production decreased, a slew of trade journals appeared, targeting an emerging public of lower middle- and working-class readers. The flourishing print trade was no stranger to these evolutions and from the 1840s newly emerging unions started backing the launch of typographical journals across Britain. In London, print workers were mostly supported by the London Union of Compositors, an organisation founded in March 1834 as a result of an amalgamation between the London Trade Society of Compositors (1816) and the London General Trade Society of Compositors (1826). Printed and published by R. Thompson, ‘office keeper’ of the Union’s headquarters in Bouverie Street, Fleet Street, The Compositors’ Chronicle (1840-1843) was launched in September 1840 as a monthly, priced at 2 pence with strong commitments to print trade concerns.

This paper will investigate the Chronicle as a cooperative medium seeking to support and sustain the development of a shared professional trade identity. At a time when many print workers remained outside the scope of the political nation, Thompson’s journal provided them with a space for political and social debate as well as literary creation which, Kirstie Blair has noted, “constituted direct evidence that nothing was to be feared from extending the franchise in their favour.”[1] Open to “all correspondents whose aim is to promote the interests of the profession—to the secretaries of the various societies in England, Ireland, and Scotland, and to the literary effusions of the members of the trade upon all subjects” – the collaborative columns of the short-lived Compositors’ Chronicle were instrumental in the creation of what Benedict Anderson has called an ‘imagined community’ of print workers through a common and shared language.

Olivier Coquelin (Université de Caen Normandie) – "Press and Social Unrest in Revolutionary Ireland (1919-1923): The Case of the Great Belfast Strike of 1919".

This paper aims to provide an overview of how different press coverage in the British Isles was given to social unrest during the 1916-1923 Irish Revolution, through the specific case of the Great Belfast Strike of January-February 1919. Apart from the fact that it received particularly extensive media coverage, the latter dispute had the peculiarity of being led by a strike committee which the the special correspondent for the Manchester Guardian described as a “soviet” (“A Strikes’ ‘Soviet’ in Belfast”, Manchester Guardian, 29 January 1919). In these troubled times, when the British government extended in Ireland the press censorship it had established in the UK during the Great War, the content of press articles varied according to three main criteria: geographical (Ireland vs. Great Britain, national vs. regional), ideological (whether conservative, liberal, unionist, nationalist, socialist or syndicalist), social (workers vs. employers). Beyond the overlapping facts reported in the various newspapers, the present paper will highlight the differences of opinion and their appraisal among the Belfast striking workers as expressed in their own newspaper columns (Belfast Strike Bulletin / Workers’ Bulletin) throughout this major class dispute.

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SESSION 2: CONNECTIONS AND CIRCULATIONS

Michelle McNamara (Université de Strasbourg) – "Breaking News? The Dublin Press's Dependence on the Postal Service in the early Nineteenth Century"

This paper will study how the postal service influenced the frequency and, especially, the content of Dublin newspapers during the early nineteenth century. Newspapers were dependent on the postal service both for content and distribution of their publications. News from London-based and other publications were frequently reprinted in Irish newspapers, which was due to the one man show that was the newspaper business at the time, with one man taking on the roles of owner, printer, publisher, editor, etc. This business model was ultimately detrimental to many newspapers and limited the potential endeavors of publications of the time. This was revealed during my own PhD research investigating the evolution of attitudes on emigration which we will analyze and demonstrate how this affected the articles collected for my earlier research.

Tony Dex Odounga (Independent researcher, Dijon) – "The implementation of women's agenda through a highly proactive press network: the case of The English Woman's Journal (1858-1864)."

As an output of the first feminist press network in Britain, created in 1858 with the aim of unveilling and denouncing women’s exclusion from public life, the English Woman’s Journal succeeded in arousing a public debate on the female emancipation. This study has been conceptualised to show its basic strategy which consisted of gathering together all women – such as Elizabeth Blackwell and Jessie Boucherett – sharing a common sentiment of injustice concerning the women’s lack of civil and political rights. That cooperation of women’s rights activists transformed the periodical from a mere woman’s magazine to a more politically engaged press organ. The target of that press network depended not only on the exchange of texts in connection with public affairs, but also on the organisation of meetings in its official office in Langham Place. Likewise, it has been relevant to find out more about the affiliation of the English Woman’s Journal with political and social organisations – such as the Association for Promoting the Employment of Womenand National Association for the Promotion of Social Science – to see how this federation helped to achieve and enforce women’s agenda.

Pascale Villate (Université Bordeaux III) – Expanding cultural networks: the bookstalls and libraries of W.H. Smith and Son, 1848-1900. 

The mid-19^th century saw an increase in the circulation of popular reading matter, in which the firm W.H. Smith and Son played a significant part. From being distributors and sellers of newspapers and periodicals, the company diversified into the book trade. W.H. Smith became a major supplier of books by securing contracts with the main railway companies of the British Isles, thereby gradually establishing a vast network of railway station bookstalls.

It is widely held that the reasons for this development were mainly moral and cultural: William Henry Smith II wished to replace the cheap, trashy reading material then sold by news vendors at railway stations with a higher quality literature more suited to the middle-class traveller. However, if those were indeed the original aims of W.H. Smith, they were not fully realised. By the end of the century, the democratisation of the railways, the gradual access to literacy of the largest part of the population, the growing taste for escapist literature and also the economic reality of company sales targets meant that W.H. Smith’s bookstalls and subscription libraries were offering a considerably wider selection of reading material than they had perhaps intended.

This paper will examine the expansion of W.H. Smith into the book trade and it will address the question of its overall contribution to the diffusion of culture in the second half of the 19th century.

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SESSION 3: ADDRESSING OTHERNESS

Christophe Gillissen (Université de Caen Normandie) – The Great Famine in The Times.

The Times was the most influential newspaper in Britain at the time of the Great Famine. Between 1846 and 1847 it published numerous leading articles on Ireland, of which four recurrent themes will be studied. Firstly, the Times repeatedly questioned the extent of poverty and distress in Ireland, arguing that English labourers could ill afford to pay for relief. The newspaper also claimed that the problem was not the famine itself, but the character of the Irish, whose apathy and indolence were presented as the primary cause of all their difficulties. A third point emphasised in The Times’ columns was that the British acted honourably during the famine and that they could not be suspected of having reneged on their duties; the numerous criticisms, at home and abroad, were groundless. Finally, the Times insisted that the only satisfactory solution to the Irish crisis was a Poor Law on the English model, by which landlords would pay for the relief of their poor – in other words, that Irish property should pay for Irish poverty. There would be no solidarity on the part of the neighbouring island therefore.

Bertrand Cardin (Université de Caen Normandie) – "‘Irish as Paddy’s Pig’: the persistence of stereotypes".

In the 19^th century, some British magazines and newspapers fueled anti-Irish prejudices and contributed to make them available. They regularly lampooned the Irishman as a Yahoo, a monkey or a pig. Such stereotypes regularly resurfaced. They are characterized by their amazing longevity, their vividness in collective memory. Isn’t it surprising, however, that they are still present in the works of Irish writers of the 21^st century? It is understandable that resistance endures as long as the colonial policy is applied, but how come the same old prejudices still haunt contemporary Irish fiction? Isn’t there a risk for writers in going against the concerns of their potential readers and provoking their outright rejection when they take up the language of the past which is not really PC, to say the least? Why rekindle the embers of the darkest moments in history? How can we explain that such antediluvian prejudices remain so stable throughout the ages? These are the questions this paper is going to answer.