The Birth of the Daily Mirror and the Arrival of the Newspaper Strip

Following the huge success of the Daily Mail, in 1904 Alfred Harmsworth and Kennedy Jones launched a second morning daily newspaper, the Daily Mirror, in 1904. This was designed explicitly as a female-oriented newspaper, but failed to find a market; this chapter will examine the Mirror’s swift rebirth as a picture paper, and how a focus on the visual allowed the paper to create an ecosystem within which cartoons could transfer from the evening newspaper market into the morning dailies, and the arrival of William Kerridge Haselden as the first staff cartoonist of a British morning newspaper. It was through Haselden’s work that the daily newspaper strip came into being, with the artist having adopted a multipanel format by 1907, the same year that the first annual collection of his Mirror work appeared under the title Daily Mirror Reflections. This chapter will examine these developments, and consider how the extension of the Daily Mirror’s output into cartoons and comic strips allowed the paper to articulate its core messaging through a layered system of multiple self-reflexive authorial modes. It will also consider how the comic strip was, by the first decade of the twentieth century, beginning to occupy a cultural position that was distinct from the political cartoon, as strips became more closely associated with the emerging forms of mass populism.