I've just watched the trailer for the new Dickens movie. I'm not usually bothered by inaccuracies in historical dramas, but I'd like to politely request that film makers STOP PUTTING MASSIVE HEADLINES ON VICTORIAN NEWSPAPERS. 
For most of the nineteenth century, the biggest daily newspapers carried nothing but densely-packed adverts on their front page. Here are some examples from around the time this film is set...
To put this is further perspective, this relatively modest 24-point headline from W. T. Stead's Pall Mall Gazette was considered innovative (and rather radical) in 1885... nearly thirty years after Dickens died.
Meanwhile, the front page of papers like The Times still looked like this in 1965!
SURELY a sensationalist, populist paper like the Daily Mail would have news and headlines on its front page, right? Not until the 1940s!
Welcome to the smallest hill that I'm willing to die on.
I know these props serve a convenient narrative purpose, but media history matters too! The ‘newspaper’ as we know it evolved, piece-by-piece, over many centuries and went through countless transformations on the way.
If we imagine the ‘newspaper’ as an unchanging institution that looked much the same in 1843 as it does today, then the imminent death of print journalism looks apocalyptic; but the migration to digital isn’t an ending, just another chapter in a long story.
While we're here, I should point out that not *all* Victorian newspapers looked like a wall of text. Some weeklies like the Illustrated Police News (low-brow, crime, sensation) and the Illustrated London News (high-brow, news, culture, etc) looked rather different...
You might also be surprised to learn that interviews - something we now think of as being so central to the practice of journalism - were uncommon in British papers until the 1880s. They were regarded as an invasion of privacy & condemned as an uncouth American import!
(DNCJ)
(DNCJ)
Side note: if you'd like to see more weird clippings from the Illustrated Police News, I've been tweeting about it fairly relentlessly for the last 5 years. Recent tweets are mostly from the American version. See this search: twitter.com/search?f=image…
Thanks for humouring this (admittedly *very* petty) rant about the cinematic misrepresentation historical newspapers. Join me next time as I try to sit through the trailer for the forthcoming P. T. Barnum movie without having an aneurysm.
