Introduction

This chapter introduces the reporting of protests in Stevenson Square in Manchester during the cotton crisis. I argue for the continued need to examine reporting of poverty to challenge the obscuring of the truth of its horror and to challenge the accepted idea of economic crises as an inevitable burden for the working class. I argue there is an inherently, structurally antagonistic, class struggle witnessed inside the copy, one which is not just evident at protests but in what the journalists choose to report. I outline how we can unearth the political unconscious by utilising Fredric Jameson’s interpretive horizons through which I analyse nineteenth-century journalism in the same way he examined nineteenth-century fiction.