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oa Family, politics and media
Gladstone during the Midlothian campaign, 1879–1880
- Source: Journal of Historical Pragmatics, Volume 25, Issue 2, Aug 2024, p. 329 - 353
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- 14 Dec 2020
- 26 Feb 2024
- 09 Aug 2024
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Abstract
Abstract
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.