Between Literary Entertainment, Public Engagement, and Social Research: Nineteenth-Century Investigative Reporting and the Case of ‘London Horrors’ (1861) by John Hollingshead

Abstract

ABSTRACT Around the mid-nineteenth century, the investigative reportage consolidated as a journalistic genre that introduced early social debates into the commercial periodical. This article analyzes how John Hollingshead's series ‘London Horrors’ (1861) and comparable journalistic reports such as ‘Labour and the Poor’ (1849–1850) produced testimonials on the housing and working conditions of the underprivileged urbanites. It shows how social reporters like Hollingshead made an unknown social sphere understandable to a growing middle-class audience of newspapers by using the narrative strategies of reformist surveys and political tracts on the one hand, and the semi-fictional, audience-oriented sketch on the other. This kind of writing entailed combining particularising, at times sensationalist accounts of social situations with large-scale analyses, the presentation of diverse types of data (demographic numbers, inventories, eyewitness testimonies, biographic stories), and political commentary. Examining ‘London Horrors’ from the perspectives of social science history and literary/media studies, the article contends that investigative journalism on an expanding print market acted as an intermediary between literary entertainment, public engagement, and social research.