Malaria in the world

As discussed, the newspapers had a tendency to incorporate metaphor when discussing

‘alien’ numbers. The trend was far more prevalent than the four metaphorical collocates (‘influx’, ‘importation’, ‘horde’, and ‘invasion’) would suggest. Whenever concordance analysis was conducted, or the wider co-text read, metaphors repeatedly emerged. For instance, the water metaphor was apparent across the newspaper sample and expressed using at least 18 different words, but only ‘influx’ appeared as a collocate of ‘alien(s)’ in some of the newspapers.

Through words such as ‘flood’, ‘deluge’, ‘glut’, ‘flock’, ‘swarming’, and ‘hordes’, the water, goods, animal, and military metaphors all involved the implication that migrants were arriving in large quantities. On occasion, metaphors were combined. For example, the mixed metaphor ‘the influx of hordes of pauper aliens’ features language used in both water (‘influx’)

68 See, for instance, Liverpool Mercury, 20 May 1887.

69 The proximity query returned 32 instances of the two words co-occurring in the Liverpool Mercury, 27 in the Glasgow Herald, 15 in the Pall Mall Gazette, 12 in Reynolds’s Newspaper, and 2 in the Ipswich Journal. For comparative purposes, here are the normalised frequencies: Reynolds’s

Newspaper featured 0.04 instances of the co-occurrence per million words, the Pall Mall Gazette and Liverpool Mercury 0.03, the Glasgow Herald 0.02, and the Ipswich Journal 0.00.

121 and invasion or military (‘hordes’) metaphors.⁷⁰ As seen in tables 4.1 and 4.2, some metaphorical collocates, such as ‘importation’ and ‘influx’ could be sorted into the semantic categories of both ‘number’ and ‘arrival’. This indicates an intersection between the two semantic groups and is perhaps a reflection upon the ability of the metaphor to invoke more than one quality.

Metaphor was not apparent when the newspapers discussed ‘alien(s)’ prior to the late 1880s, implying that heightened emotional rhetoric coincided with the increase in numbers, and change in composition, of Britain’s migrant population.⁷¹ Indeed, metaphor occurred particularly heavily in relation to discussions of ‘pauper alien(s)’ entering Britain.

Metaphor has a number of effects. As Van der Valk explains, it involves ‘one domain of reality’ being ‘compared with another more familiar domain of reality’.⁷² In this way, metaphor can (over)simplify complex issues by portraying them in an easily comprehensible manner.

Often this involves making abstract concerns more concrete. As Lakoff and Johnson show, this simplicity ‘can keep us from focusing on other aspects of [a] concept that are inconsistent with [the chosen] metaphor’.⁷³ It is also thought that the images invoked in metaphors bring with them certain connotations. Lakoff refers to this as the ‘invariance hypothesis’ and claims that when a conceptual scheme, for instance, water or rubbish, is used in a metaphor, all the components and implications of that scheme are carried over to the target, in this case,

‘alien(s)’.⁷⁴ This is what makes metaphor such an immediate and visceral rhetorical device, capable of invoking a strong emotional response from readers and listeners and, as Charteris-Black states, ‘bridging the gap between the logical and the emotional’.⁷⁵ He uses the metaphor

70 Glasgow Herald, 20 May 1891.

71 Earlier instances of metaphor were apparent in relation to ‘immigrants’ and ‘immigration’.

However, many of these examples were in articles concerning migration to the United States.

72 I. Van de Valk, ‘Right-Wing Parliamentary Discourse on Immigration in France’, Discourse & Society, 5:3 (2003), pp. 381-405 (p. 330) <https://doi.org/10.1177/09579265030143004>.

73 G. Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 10.

74 G. Lakoff, ‘The Invariance Hypothesis: Is Abstract Reason Based on Image-Schemas?’, Cognitive Linguistics, 1:1 (1990), pp. 39-74 <https://doi.org/10.1515/cogl.1990.1.1.39>.

75 J. Charteris-Black, ‘Britain as a Container: Immigration Metaphors in the 2005 Election Campaign’, Discourse & Society, 17:5 (2006), pp. 563-581 (p. 565) <https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926506066345>.

122

‘swamp’, notoriously associated with migration by Enoch Powell, to demonstrate metaphor’s emotive power.⁷⁶ He states that ‘the association of being overwhelmed by something unpleasant, as in a swamp, has a strong negative force’. Charteris-Black draws attention to the fallacy of this metaphor, explaining that as long as migrants remain a minority, they are far more likely to be ‘absorbed into the native “swamp”’.⁷⁷

This fallacy is evident in metaphors in the newspaper sample that reduced Britain and England in scale to amplify the threat posed by the ‘alien’. The Pall Mall Gazette, for instance, often compared the nation to a household. In one such example, the ‘alien’ is cast as an unwelcome intruder, the ‘stranger within our gates’.⁷⁸ However, whilst the presence of an unknown ‘stranger’ in a family household would be a cause for concern, it is par for the course that a large country contains many individuals who are, and remain, ‘strangers’ to one another. In a second example, the Pall Mall Gazette asks why it is so wrong ‘for the state to […] refuse admission to dangerous or pauper aliens’ if ‘it be right and proper for an English land-lord to turn an undesirable resident off his estate’.⁷⁹ Like the previous example, the metaphor compares two illogical domains of experience. The rights of a renting tenant and

‘alien’ subject are simply not directly comparable. Incidentally, the grandeur of the latter household metaphor speaks volumes about the affluence of the Pall Mall Gazette’s intended audience, or at least their class affiliation.

Not only do metaphors draw upon these common, everyday frames of reference, they are also familiar due to their oft-repeated nature. Researchers believe that people are exposed to certain metaphors on such a regular basis that they have developed an easy, often subconscious, understanding of their meanings and implications.⁸⁰

76 Charteris-Black, ‘Britain as a Container’, p. 567.

77 J. Charteris-Black, Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 23.

78 Pall Mall Gazette, 18 May 1900.

79 Pall Mall Gazette, 1 August 1894.

80 J. Wilson, Politically Speaking: The Pragmatic Analysis of Political Language, Language in Society (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1990).

123 Linguists generally conclude that when metaphor is used in migration contexts it dehumanises. Charteris-Black describes the practice of referring to something that is animate

‘using a word or phrase that in other contexts refers to something that is inanimate’ as

‘depersonification’ and notes that metaphors often ‘discourage empathy with immigrants by treating them as objects’.⁸¹ This dehumanisation was often evident in the nineteenth-century newspapers, and specific examples will be discussed in more depth shortly. Several of the metaphors, when taken to their natural conclusions, imply a need for action, often by the Government. O’Brien argues that dehumanising depictions of ‘marginalized groups’

‘constitute an important and possibly essential’ precursor to distasteful Government policy.

He adds that ‘when the public at large accepts these pejorative metaphorical depictions as an accurate means of perceiving group members, regressive policies may be forthcoming’.⁸²

The implications of this kind of metaphorical language were not lost on contemporaries.

In her autobiography, the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social commentator Beatrice Webb described her reaction upon hearing a water metaphor used to describe human labour. She wrote that her companions’ comparison between ‘“artificially [raising] the wage of labour”’ and ‘“forcing water uphill”’ ‘puzzled’ her, and that ‘the allusion to water and its ways [gave] a queer physio-mechanical twist to [her] conception of the labouring classes’. She wondered whether the speaker had deliberately chosen the substance of water because they believed that, like labour, it was ‘the most monotonous and most easily manipulated of the elements’. Although she missed some of the subtleties of the metaphor, Webb recognised its potentially dehumanising effects and astutely added that expressions such as these had caused her, for a long time, to view labour as an ‘abstraction’ rather than ‘as separate men and women of different sorts and kinds’.⁸³

81 Charteris-Black, Politicians and Rhetoric, p. 15; Charteris-Black, ‘Britain as a Container’, p. 569.

82 G. O’Brien, ‘Indigestible Food, Conquering Hordes, and Waste Materials: Metaphors of Immigrants and the Early Immigration Restriction Debate in the United States’, Metaphor and Symbol, 18:1 (2003), pp. 33-47 (p. 44) <https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327868ms1801_3>.

83 B. Webb, My Apprenticeship (New York: Longmans, 1926), p. 65.

124 Nonetheless, although metaphor was often a means of dehumanising the ‘alien’, it was not always negative. Reynolds’s Newspaper contained a report in which Gladstone used the trade metaphor to defend migration and draw attention to the hypocrisy of a country that exported paupers to other nations whilst criticising other nations for sending their paupers in turn. He is quoted as having stated that ‘it was not wise for a country which exported a particular commodity to lay restraint upon the importation of that commodity’. In the same speech, Gladstone also used a water metaphor in a counter-discourse to the usual anti-migration rhetoric with which water was associated. He stated that compared to the British labour market as a whole, migration ‘was a drop in the ocean’, implying that the large numbers often quoted in arguments against migration were overblown.⁸⁴

Three metaphors are now explored in more depth: the water metaphor associated with the collocate ‘influx’; the invasion metaphor represented by the collocate ‘invasion’; and the goods metaphor linked to the collocate ‘importation’.

Water

(1) ‘…to treat the Norman as the first of the great waves of alien immigration into England. Since then the stream has never ceased’.⁸⁵

(2) ‘…the evils brought about by the continuous stream of pauperism which is daily flowing into London’.⁸⁶

(3) ‘…unless we keep out the tide of immigration from Europe’.⁸⁷

84 Reynolds’s Newspaper, 5 February 1893.

85 Glasgow Herald, 29 January 1898.

86 Reynolds’s Newspaper, 7 June 1891.

87 Ipswich Journal, 9 November 1888.

125 (4) ‘…if we do not want to see a Judenhetze in the East End, something will have to be done to deflect the stream of Jewish immigration to regions less thickly peopled than Whitechapel’.⁸⁸

(5) ‘…will discuss the possibility of putting up barriers against the anticipated deluge of penniless foreigners’.⁸⁹

(6) ‘The influx of aliens whose apparent object is to settle in our midst is not decreasing in volume’.⁹⁰

Perhaps the most frequently occurring metaphor invoked water. The prevalence of this metaphor is evident in the appearance of ‘influx’ as a top collocate in the Pall Mall Gazette, Glasgow Herald, and Liverpool Mercury. As seen in example (6), ‘influx’ is sometimes used to signify the arrival of large, and possibly overwhelming, numbers. However, its meaning is intertwined with water, having originated from the Latin to ‘flow in’.⁹¹ The Pall Mall Gazette reported upon ‘…the influx of a continuous stream of an alien pauper population’, and the Glasgow Herald upon ‘the great influx of pauper aliens into the country’.⁹² Although ‘influx’

emerged the most often in the concordance lines of ‘alien(s)’, the metaphor also manifested in many other forms. In the concordance lines, ‘alien(s)’ were variously described as a ‘stream’,

‘flow’, ‘waves’, ‘flood’, ‘tide’, and as increasing [in] volume’, threatening to ‘overflow’ the

‘drain’, and ‘swamping’ Britain.⁹³ Researchers have sometimes labelled this as a ‘natural

88 Pall Mall Gazette, 28 April 1891.

89 Pall Mall Gazette, 28 April 1891.

90 Liverpool Mercury 13 June 1892.

91 ‘Influx, N.’, OED Online (Oxford University Press, 2016) <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/95533>

[accessed 10 March 2017].

92 Pall Mall Gazette 18 November 1897; Glasgow Herald, 21 February 1888.

93 For an example of each, see the following. Stream: Pall Mall Gazette, 2 May 1891. Flow: Liverpool Mercury, 4 September 1896. Waves: Glasgow Herald, 29 January 1898. Flood: Reynolds's Newspaper, 16 September 1900. Tide: Pall Mall Gazette, 16 January 1893. Volume: Liverpool Mercury, 6 July 1894.

Drain: Liverpool Mercury, 7 July 1894. Swamping: Glasgow Herald, 21 March 1895.

126 disaster’ rather than ‘water’ metaphor because the water being invoked often refers to unmanageable quantities such as ‘floods’ and ‘deluges’.⁹⁴

These metaphors were not unique to ‘alien(s)’, but also associated with other migration terms. For example, using a series of proximity searches across the newspapers, the following water metaphors were identified within ten tokens of ‘immigrant(s)’: tide (107), stream (82), influx (79), flow (33), flood (12), volume (12), flows (8), wave (6), waves (6), swamp (5), swamped (4), backwash (1), floods (1), overflow (1), overflowing (1), streams (1), swamping (1), and tides (1).⁹⁵

The water metaphor has been well documented in previous research. Boke notes its prevalence in present-day migration discourse in the German magazine Der Spiegel.⁹⁶ El Refaie similarly finds the Austrian press to have been ‘replete’ with the water metaphor when covering the 1998 arrival of Kurdish refugees.⁹⁷ Khosravinik also finds a ‘remarkably high frequency of […] metaphors of large quantities’, many of which are associated with water, such as ‘floods’, ‘tide’, and ‘influx’, in British press coverage of refugees during the Balkan conflict.⁹⁸ Interestingly, like the aforementioned example from Reynolds’s Newspaper, Khosravinik finds that the water metaphor was not always used negatively, but sometimes to

‘argue for more humanitarian help’.⁹⁹

94 See, for instance, Charteris-Black, ‘Britain as a Container’.

95 The number in brackets signifies the number of times each metaphor occurred within a ten-word co-text of ‘immigrant(s)’ across the newspaper sample.

96 K. Boke, ‘Die Invasion aus den “Armenhausern Europas” [The Invasion from “Europe’s

Poorhouses”]’, in Die Sprache des Migrationdiskurses: Das Reden uber ‘Auslander’ in Medien, Politk and Alltag, ed. by M. Jung, M. Wengeler and M. Boke (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag,1997), pp. 164-193, as cited in Van de Valk, ‘Right-Wing Parliamentary Discourse’, p. 331.

97 E. El Refaie, ‘Metaphors We Discriminate by: Naturalized Themes in Austrian Newspaper Articles about Asylum Seekers’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 5:3, pp. 352-71 (p. 358)

<https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9481.00154>.

98 M. Khosravinik, ‘The Representation of Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Immigrants in British Newspapers during the Balkan Conflict (1999) and the British General Election (2005)’, Discourse &

Society, 20:4 (2009), pp. 477-498 (p. 486) <https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926509104024>.

99 Khosravinik, ‘The Representation of Refugees’, pp. 486-87.

127 Nonetheless, as Chilton indicates, once a metaphorical concept such as water has been invoked, it brings with it a number of associations.¹⁰⁰ ‘Stream’, for instance, which appears in examples (1), (2), and (4), suggests continuous movement in a single direction, implying that migrants will continue to cross into Britain. The ‘tide’, featured in example (3), is less negative, as a tide can both rise and fall; however, Charteris-Black suggests that the reversibility of the tide ‘evokes the concept of repatriation’ and draws attention to migration as a reversible phenomenon.¹⁰¹ Van der Valk believes that the ‘water’ metaphor is often intended to symbolise ‘a loss of control over immigration’.¹⁰² If present in large enough quantities, water is dangerous and destructive. It arrives quickly and can swiftly become overwhelming, and to avoid this outcome, action is required in the form of defences. Examples (4) and (5) are instances of the water metaphor being taken to this conclusion; respectively these examples call for ‘something’ to ‘be done to deflect the stream of Jewish immigration’ and compare

anti-‘alien’ legislation to the ‘putting up [of] barriers’.¹⁰³ As discussed, the newspapers had a tendency to mix metaphors. In example (1) the Glasgow Herald describes the Normans as the first in the many ‘great waves’ of ‘alien immigration’, before proceeding to conceptualise immigration as a ‘stream’. Although both ‘waves’ and ‘stream’ are types of water, to use them interchangeably does not make sense in a non-metaphorical context and demonstrates the lack of internal logic often present in such emotive language.

Invasion

(7) ‘England has been invaded by immigrants’.¹⁰⁴

(8) ‘…this invasion by a horde of starving aliens’.¹⁰⁵

100 P. Chilton, Analysing Political Discourse: Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 147.

101 Charteris-Black, ‘Britain as a Container’, p. 571.

102 Van de Valk, ‘Right-Wing Parliamentary Discourse’, p. 331.

103 Pall Mall Gazette, 28 April 1891.

104 Pall Mall Gazette, 7 May 1888.

105 Reynolds’s Newspaper, 14 July 1895.

128 (9) ‘The Prime Minister and, we believe, the majority of the Unionist Party, are strongly in favour of providing machinery of defence against the landing in this country of foreigners’.¹⁰⁶

(10)‘…it has gone on until the enemy is already in possession of the capital’.¹⁰⁷

Newspapers adopted military language to discuss Britain’s ‘invasion’ by ‘hordes’ of migrants, as seen in examples (7) and (8). ‘Horde’ collocated with ‘alien(s)’ in the Pall Mall Gazette and ‘invasion’ with ‘alien(s)’ in the Glasgow Herald. However, from the examples, it should be apparent that invasion metaphors also occurred in other newspapers. The trope of

‘migrants as an invading army’ has recurred frequently throughout history and, as Charteris-Black notes, ‘creates a powerful political myth evoking cultural-historical fears of “invasion”

by alien “others”‘.¹⁰⁸ In the late nineteenth century, the metaphor fed into contemporary anxieties about Britain being overrun or infiltrated by a foreign power, typified in the genre of

‘invasion literature’, which first emerged in the 1870s.¹⁰⁹ It is still apparent in contemporary discourse. In her research into their representation in the Austrian press, El Refaie found that Kurdish refugees were ‘regularly represented as an “army” on the point of invading or attacking Europe’.¹¹⁰

Like the water metaphor, the invasion metaphor attributes the characteristics of the frame of reference being invoked to the target subject. If it is reasonable for the newspapers’

readers to accept that migrants are ‘invading’, on the basis that they are arriving in larger

106 Ipswich Journal, 27 May 1898.

107 Pall Mall Gazette, 7 May 1888.

108 Charteris-Black, ‘Britain as a Container’, p. 565.

109 For one of the earliest examples of invasion literature see G. T. Chesney, The Battle of Dorking:

Reminiscences of a Volunteer (London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1871) Google Books. See also A.

Bulfin, ‘“To Arms!”: Invasion Narratives and Late-Victorian Literature’, Literature Compass, 12:9 (2015), pp. 482-496 <https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12253>; and M. Hughes and H. Wood, ‘Crimson Nightmares: Tales of Invasion and Fear of Revolution in Early Twentieth-Century Britain’,

Contemporary British History, 28:3 (2014), pp. 294-317

<https://doi.org/10.1080/13619462.2014.941817>.

110 El Refaie, ‘Metaphors We Discriminate by’, p. 364.

129 quantities than in previous years, then it is not that much of a stretch for them to conceptualise the figure of the migrant with some of the attributes of an invading army. Armies take over, destroy that which is their path, and require fighting or defending against. In example (10), migrants are portrayed as being ‘in possession of the capital’; the takeover of London is hyperbolically depicted as having already happened. As the newspapers do not specify what the consequences of this ‘invasion’ are, it is left to the reader to speculate. That armies require fighting is presented as justification for the Government’s ‘machinery of defence’, that is anti-migration legislation, in example (9). As well as suggesting that migrants were arriving in dangerously large numbers, the invasion metaphor also contributed to their portrayal as the

‘enemy’, something which is made explicit in example (10). This manifestation of the metaphor implies not only that migrants are ‘other’, but that they have overwhelmed ‘us’, playing upon a public fear of change. These examples combine to demonstrate how militarised language invokes a sense of crisis, escalating a situation and feeding into moral panics by establishing an enemy out-group.

Reynolds’s Newspaper also utilised this metaphor, but in an entirely different manner to the other newspapers, giving an indication of the contrast between the Radical and other political stances towards migration.¹¹¹ Unlike the other newspapers, Reynolds’s rarely framed the ‘alien’ as a threat. Instead, the newspaper’s military metaphor had a socialist slant, with global capitalism cast as the attacker, using the ‘alien’ as a weapon to damage ‘the great social struggle for the assertion of the just rights of labour’.¹¹² This attribution of blame to wider forces than the individual migrant worker was a trope prevalent throughout Reynolds’s discussions of ‘alien(s)’ in Britain. The newspaper viewed many of the difficulties faced by the British working class as either systemic, or symptomatic of elite neglect. Blame was variously ascribed to Government ineptitude, upper-class disregard, global oppression, or the capitalist

111 For a breakdown of the newspapers’ political stances, see section 1.5.3.

112 Reynolds’s Newspaper, 7 June 1891.

130 system. On the few occasions where the newspaper criticised migration, its anger was not usually directed at the ‘alien’ worker, but at the system which allowed them into Britain. For instance, it stated that it was ‘scandalous that the authorities should sit tamely down and

130 system. On the few occasions where the newspaper criticised migration, its anger was not usually directed at the ‘alien’ worker, but at the system which allowed them into Britain. For instance, it stated that it was ‘scandalous that the authorities should sit tamely down and

In document UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID (página 32-36)