Family, politics and media
Gladstone during the Midlothian campaign, 1879–1880
In this paper, we utilise the
Nineteenth Century Newspaper Corpus to examine reporting
surrounding William Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign, a key point in the democratization of British politics where a politician not
only communicated with ordinary people through hustings but indirectly to a wider electorate via media reporting of those
hustings. With the use of social actor analysis (
van Leeuwen 2008), approached through
collocation, we find that a distinctive feature of media reporting was a focus on Gladstone’s family. This surprising intersection
of family and electioneering reveals a powerful hierarchy of social relationships in terms of gender and seniority, which became
an effective propaganda strategy as Gladstone, enabled by Liberal-supporting newspapers, utilised his family as a political
tool.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Midlothian campaign as a focus of generic democratization
- 3.Data and methodology
- 4.Social actor analysis
- 5.Exploratory collocation analysis
- 5.1Collocates of gladstone
- 5.2Collocates of disraeli
- 6.The social practice of leading a family and its intersection with the social practice of electioneering
- 6.1Key collocates in the social actor analysis
- 6.2Focus on Herbert Gladstone
- 6.3Representing the social practice of electioneering
- 6.4Electioneering and news values
- 7.Conclusion – reflecting on historiography and democratization
- Notes
-
References
-
Corpora, primary sources and text collections