Journalism on the move

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Journalism on the move

The special correspondent and Victorian print culture

‘Journalism on the move’ is a three-year project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. It analyses the significance of ‘special correspondence’ as a new, highly popular form of Victorian journalism and its evolution in the context of developments in the periodical and newspaper press throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. It asks: Who were these journalists? What was distinctive about their role? How did it either resemble or differ from, for example, the role of the foreign correspondent, who was likely to remain in the same place for many years and required specialised diplomatic skills and influential contacts, or the war correspondent, who travelled with an army and moved from one country to another? What features characterise their writing and what role did it play in the development of literature and journalism in the second half of the nineteenth century?

The project identifies and charts the careers of individual ‘specials’, many of whom also wrote as novelists and periodical reviewers. Characterised by a vivid, descriptive style of reportage that was criticised by some contemporary commentators as sensational, special correspondence played a key role in forming the discourses of literature and journalism at a time when the boundary between them was contested. The impact of this remains evident today in debate about the relationship between fact and fiction in the press, and in its exploration of the cultural resonance of this writing the project will help to chart the emergence of the modern mass media.

People

  • Principal Investigator: Professor Catherine Waters c.waters@kent.ac.uk
    Catherine Waters is Professor of Victorian Literature and Print Culture in the School of English. She is the author Dickens and the Politics of the Family (1997) and Commodity Culture in Dickens’s ‘Household Words’: The Social Life of Goods (2008) as well as various essays on Victorian topics. She is a member of the Editorial Advisory Boards of the Dickens Journals Online project and of Victorian Periodicals Review. She is currently co-editing the Oxford Handbook to Charles Dickens with Robert L. Patten and John O. Jordan.
  • Research Associate: Dr Angela Dunstan
    Angela Dunstan is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Kent. She has published on nineteenth-century print culture, literary societies, sculpture and intersections between Victorian literary, visual and celebrity cultures in The British Art JournalBurlington Magazine, and 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, and in several edited collections including William Morris and the Art of Everyday Life (2010).

Project-related publications

  • Waters, Catherine. ‘“Much of Sala and but little of Russia”: “A Journey Due North,” Household Words and the birth of a special correspondent.’ Victorian Periodicals Review, 42 (2009): 305-23.
  • —. ‘Dickens’s “Young Men”, Household Words and the Development of the Victorian “Special Correspondent”’. In Reflections on/of Dickens. Ed. Ewa Kujawska-Lis and Anna Krawczyk-Laskarzewska. Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014. 18-31.

Project-related conference presentations

  • Waters, Catherine. ‘Journalism on the move: Towards a definition of Victorian special correspondence.’ Places, Spaces and the Victorian Periodical Press’, University of Delaware, 12-13 September 2014.
  • Waters, Catherine and Angela Dunstan. ‘New communication technologies for old?
    The Victorian Special Correspondent and the 1865 Atlantic cable expedition’, ‘Victorian Transport’, University of Hong Kong, 10-12 July 2014.
  • Waters, Catherine. ‘Dickens’s “young men”, Household Words and the development of the Victorian “Special Correspondent”’. ‘Reflections on/of Dickens’. University of Warmia and Mazury, Olsztyn, Poland, 11-13 April 2013. Abbreviated version presented at the annual Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) conference, ‘Tradition and the New’, University of Salford, 12-13 July 2013.
  • —. ‘Specials, Spies and the Franco-Prussian War’, ‘Victorian Vocabularies’, Griffith University, Brisbane, 11-14 April 2012. Revised version given at ‘Contact and Connections’: Travel and Mobility Studies symposium, University of Warwick, 27 June 2013.