Poor Reporting: Interpreting the Triumvirate

This chapter applies Jameson’s interpretive horizons methodology to the reporting of anti-poverty protests in Stevenson Square Manchester in late 1862 and early 1863. As such, it examines the imaginary solutions, ideologeme, and form of the Victorian journalism. In doing so, it analyses approximately 34,000 words of journalistic copy, in news reports and editorials, as well as motions and resolutions given by the workers. Moral judgement, unity, opportunity, and inevitability are found to be the imaginary solutions with unemployed cotton workers judged, even punished, for their behaviour, encouraged to see their poverty as a shared burden, urged to leave the city, even country, to find work and, ultimately, expected to accept their poverty. The word distress, used not just in the Manchester Guardian, Manchester Courier, and Manchester Examiner and Times, but across regional, national, and international press, is found to be the ideologeme. The shape of the journalistic copy is examined to include intros and endings, and the Victorian use of parentheses as an early form of quotes.