Marriage or Celibacy? The Daily Telegraph on a Victorian Dilemma

Jeremy Caple is an assistant professor of history at Wilfrid Laurier
University in Waterloo.

Begun in 1858 as one of the “penny” press, the Daily Telegraph
quickly secured a readership equal to that of all the other London
morning papers combined. Initiating a new form of popular journalism,
the paper sought to articulate the views of those whose political
aspirations were met by the Reform Act of 1867. Those who feared the
“great leap in the dark,” and who ruminated upon the wisdom of
giving the franchise to a social group that had threatened society
during the Chartist years (1838–49), need not have worried. The
popular press gave a forum to views that in their essentials were
remarkably similar to the ones emanating from The Times and other
“respectable” journals. There might have been a difference in tenor
but the essentials were analogous. Letters to the editor resonated with
concern over topics that equally perplexed polite society.

Robson’s book is an interesting and important addition to the history
of popular journalism and popular culture in 19th-century England. The
success of the Daily Telegraph and similar papers, it argues, paved the
way for the emergence of the press barons later in the century. Although
working-class culture as a social and political articulation of earlier
forms of class consciousness continued to exist, there is little doubt
that the striving for “respectability,” as defined by middle-class
culture, animated those within the lower middle class and the labor
aristocracy. One drawback of this book is that it never tells us how
representative the readership of the Daily Telegraph was. How was this
London daily received in the provinces?