The notion that journalists might take on the role of the first-hand investigator of social conditions was central to Thomas Cooper’s project for Douglas Jerrold in 1846 and one he repeated in the late 1850s for a radical weekly called The People. A Chartist poet and journalist, Cooper had published his epic prison poem Purgatory of Suicides in 1845, aided by the radical printer John Cleave, who introduced him to Jerrold. In July 1846, just at the time the Corn Laws were repealed by parliament, Jerrold launched a new publication,
Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, which was published on Saturdays and primarily
aimed at a lower middle-class and artisan readership. It was intended to be a crusading journal and emphasized radical politics, self-improvement, and the importance of education.
Cooper recalled that Jerrold commissioned him to investigate the ‘industrial, social, and moral state of the people’ of England, citing The Times’s recent reports as an inspiration.165 Jerrold’s editorial introduction to the first instalment emphasized the novelty of the project and the motives for commissioning it. A key intention was to make readers outside the industrial towns aware of the hardships that were experienced there. Jerrold expresses the intentions of the project by posing a series of questions to the reader:
What is the real life of the ‘masses?’— how are the people fed, clothed, housed? — what is the nature and kind of their labour? — how long are their
164
Anon., [Charles Mackay], ‘Labour and the Poor’, Morning Chronicle, 25 November 1850, p. 5. 165 Thomas Cooper, The Life of Thomas Cooper, Written by Himself (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1971), p. 286.
days of work, and how frequent are their holidays? — what influence has this labour upon their health, and term of life? — how are they progressing in education, or are they without it altogether? —what are their thoughts upon the great subjects of morals, religion, government, and the difference of outward condition among men? — or have they no thought, — no care at all, concerning such questions? — What, in a word, is the real social state of our people? — not of the privileged few, but of the many? 166
Unlike the Morning Chronicle’s experiment, the focus was on social justice rather than the potential threat to middle-class interests from the disgruntled lower classes. Jerrold’s project sought, he said, to make ‘diligent inquiry respecting the means men have of feeding their bodies, and enlightening their souls.’167
The format was two, or two and a half, columns of unbroken text, attributed ‘By an Eyewitness’, and included the dateline of the city with the date of writing. The articles were placed alongside other features about artisan life that were likely to appeal to the newspaper’s readers. Cooper’s text indicates close observation of workplaces and dwellings but it is unclear whether Cooper used a standard questionnaire in the manner of Royal Commissioners. He represented himself primarily as a researcher in the mould of a parliamentary commissioner, hence the use of official statistics and histories of particular trades. His interviews elicited details about the social conditions of classes of workers, rather than focusing on individual experience. Individual experience is presented in a heavily mediated form. For example, in Leicester, Cooper quoted a manufacturer’s view on surplus labour and invited the reader to ‘listen awhile to what the working framework-knitter says’. However, the responses were paraphrased as a summary of six grievances.168
166 Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, 25July 1846, p. 28.
167 Anon. [Thomas Cooper], ‘The Condition of the People of England’, Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly
Newspaper, 25 July 1846, p. 28.
168 [Cooper], ‘The Condition of the People of England’, Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, 1 August 1846, p. 52.
A recurring theme is the effectiveness of trade union organisation. Cooper argued that strong unions secured better conditions for the workers but found more examples where organization was weak. Hull provided a rare, successful strike by sailors. His article from Preston in November, however, described the wretchedness of handloom weavers and the grindingly hard work extracted from them. Far from living up to its nickname of ‘Proud Preston’, Cooper believed the people were subjugated by their employers.169
The series ended in Manchester, with detailed observation of the processes of the cotton mill and the risk of industrial injuries. The reader is taken on a ‘journey’ through the rooms of the mill, a method of exposing a social problem through a tour of the space in which it occurs that was used by Dickens and Greenwood. Cooper’s journey was the process of refining cotton. Firstly, the ‘devil’ is a machine ‘that tears up the raw cotton, with its huge teeth, and knocks the dust out of it’. But ‘hands are sometimes torn off by this machine, though such an extreme accident occurs now more seldom than formerly; but not a day passes [...] without accidents’. The workers wear masks for protection, but are emaciated: ‘the devil-rooms are so unhealthy that strangers fear to enter them: Lord Ashley lately attempted this but was compelled to withdraw.’ The dangers were slightly less extreme for workers in the cording room and in the spinning machine rooms though hands were easily injured.
A room of power-looms is a field of wonder to a stranger-visitant [a reference to himself as investigator]; but half an hour’s continuance there is sufficient to convince one, even without the painful testimony of the poor workers that their labour is one perpetual process of exhaustion to health and strength.170 [my emphasis]
Cooper’s investigations were the work of an individual but framed as though conducted by a commission.
169
Preston was the model for Coketown in Dickens’s Hard Times, serialized eight years later, which deals with the lock-out of 1853 to 1854.
The Times hired experts outside journalism for a project in the 1850s. After publishing
reports of rural distress in the mid-1840s, The Times returned to the subject with a larger project in 1850, commissioning James Caird to investigate the agricultural areas of England for the newspaper. The first report was printed on 22 January 1850 on page 5 of the newspaper (where subsequent articles usually appeared) and datelined ‘Aylesbury, Bucks’. Caird’s name does not appear. The series was entitled ‘The Agricultural Districts of England’ and presented as a series of letters. Its aims and intentions were stated in the first letter:
Sir, - Having been commissioned by you to proceed on a tour of investigation through the agricultural districts of England, and to communicate to the public, through your columns, the results of our observations and inquiries, it is necessary that at the outset we should explain fully and clearly the origin and nature of the mission with which you have honoured us, and the spirit in which we propose to discharge it.171
The series ran in parallel with the Morning Chronicle letters from the agricultural districts by Alexander Mackay and Shirley Brooks but Caird was less concerned with the condition of the labouring poor than with the scientific practice of agriculture. His investigation was whether the drop in grain prices as a result of free trade since 1846 meant there would be little economic sense in adopting new agricultural methods. Nevertheless, his choice of Aylesbury as a starting point was topical and driven by its ‘prominent position in the agitation which has arisen out of the low price of corn (p. 5).’
These articles were credited to ‘our commissioners’, the plural being used because Caird was accompanied for most of his journey by J. C. McDonald, a lawyer who also helped write many of the articles. They were subsequently collected and published in volume form and dedicated to ‘John Walter Esq. By whose public spirit the inquiry which it embodies
was undertaken’.172 Caird explained that the series arose from The Times’s response to complaints from farmers and landlords about low agricultural prices. Far from accepting the
Morning Chronicle and Daily News argument that lower grain prices were entirely
beneficial, The Times addressed the concerns of the landowners who had argued that repeal would lead to cheaper food for the urban poor at the expense of those who relied on farming.
In an introduction to the second edition of the collected series, G. E. Mingray comments that the work ‘appeared at a time when the industry was in a state of great uncertainty’ and that it helped to establish Caird as an authority on agriculture (p. v). Caird’s pamphlets on farming helped contribute to his selection as a newspaper ‘commissioner’ and he also became a parliamentary advocate for agriculture after his election to the House of Commons in 1857.
Caird’s efforts to handle his material fairly are borne out by his criticism of the Duke of Marlborough’s treatment of his lands and tenants — criticisms that were robustly refuted in a letter to the newspaper by Marlborough on 5 February.173 There is a strong emphasis on facts, science, and economics in the articles as well as examples of the legitimate grievances of the poor. A supporter of Robert Peel, Caird advocated free trade and modern agricultural methods. However, although The Times was committed to the series, Caird’s articles had to yield to a more topical subject when the paper suspended the series for several months to make way for coverage of the Great Exhibition in 1851.
The medical weekly journal the Lancet launched a more ambitious version of the commission model in 1865. It responded to several widely reported inquests which revealed institutional neglect of patients in workhouse infirmaries in London. The overarching impetus behind the Lancet’s series was its sense that the system was in crisis and to campaign for government action. After the Crimean War (1853–1856), economic conditions had begun to deteriorate and by the 1860s, a combination of high unemployment, appalling overcrowding in cities and renewed calls for the working class to gain the franchise were
172
James Caird, English Agriculture in 1850-51, With a New Introduction by G.E. Mingray (London: Frank Cass, 1968), p. xxxi.
spurring private philanthropy and agitation for reform. By 1865, London workhouses were chronically overcrowded. Cholera was once again an issue as was the growing awareness of the inadequacies of workhouses as a means of alleviating the hardship of the ‘deserving’ poor. The Lancet’s team of commissioners personally inspected all the pauper hospitals. They aimed to expose the inadequacy of the current system and persuade the government to change the workhouse infirmaries into public hospitals. This would remove them from the control of local poor law boards and replace untrained pauper nurses with trained, paid staff. The commissioners were led by Ernest Hart, a Lancet journalist and doctor who became editor of the British Medical Journal in 1866. The series was a continuation of the Lancet’s long-running campaign to improve professional standards in medicine.
The Lancet commissioners published their findings fortnightly between 1865 and 1866. The reports were reinforced by sympathetic coverage in The Times, which republished extracts verbatim and supported the Lancet’s recommendations on proper medical provision in forthcoming legislation. The commissioners’ reports covered every aspect of the infirmaries and were written in a plain, accessible style that made reproduction in a daily newspaper straightforward. Acknowledging the efforts of Louisa Twining and the Workhouse Visiting Society, the Lancet revealed horrific neglect in the worst infirmaries and numerous examples of mismanagement and poor care by unpaid pauper nurses, buildings that were unfit for purpose, and inadequate diet. They found that the largest share of the workhouse population was the pauper sick and elderly infirm and that in several cases, medical officers’ complaints had been ignored by the guardians. The exposé of workhouse infirmaries did not shirk from describing revolting scenes but they were not presented in a sensationalist way. In contrast, James Greenwood’s ‘A Night in the Workhouse’ published in the Pall Mall Gazette in January 1866, discussed below, deliberately employed sensation to move public opinion, whereas the Lancet accumulated an immense weight of detail to put pressure on the authorities to reform the system.
The Lancet’s findings forced the guardians to improve buildings and to begin to replace pauper nurses with trained, paid ones. Hart subsequently wrote two articles for the
Fortnightly Review, in December 1865 and April 1866, calling for more specific measures,
including more new hospitals funded centrally. Though some of the reformers’ ideas were watered down when the Metropolitan Poor Act was finally passed in 1867, the Lancet welcomed the legislation, commenting that its impact would reach much further than was generally realized.