The British Weekly: A Journal of Social and Christian Progress was a significant publication from its founding in 1886 well into the 20th century. One of the most successful religious newspapers of its time, it was published by Hodder & Stoughton. It was "a central force in shaping and promoting the 'Nonconformist conscience'", according to the Dictionary of Nineteenth-century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland. [1]
The founder and nominal editor was William Robertson Nicoll till his death in 1923, but the de facto editor was really his assistant Jane T. Stoddart. Her entry in the Dictionary of National Biography was prepared by none other than the DNB's overall editor Colin Matthew, who wrote that she:
in 1890, became a full-time journalist, working as assistant editor on Nicoll's very successful paper, the British Weekly, the chief London nonconformist paper. Stoddart became the paper's main interviewer at a time when the interview was becoming a prominent feature of British weeklies; many of her interviews were published under the byline Lorna. In politics Stoddart was a strong Liberal Imperialist and quite influential on nonconformity in that respect. [2]
The biography of Nicoll in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica describes his publication as "a Nonconformist organ which obtained great influence over opinion in the free churches", [3] i.e. those Christian denominations which are neither the established church (the Church of England) nor the Roman Catholic church. Nicoll intended it to be the main vehicle for "liberal nonconformist opinion" and he succeeded in as much as the circulation numbers reached 100,000. [4]
A 2011 book entitled Voices of Nonconformity: William Robertson Nicoll and the British Weekly from The Lutterworth Press sets out how Nicoll founded the paper in order to "introduce Nonconformist readers to the best in contemporary culture as well as promote a liberal political agenda". He followed stylistically in the footsteps of the Pall Mall Gazette , "including interviews of prominent personalities, use of line illustrations and photographs, special supplements, investigative reporting, sensationalist headlines, and serialised debates". Nicoll "gave expression to the moderate 'Nonconformist conscience', promoting religious equality and popular education." A review of this book in the Journal of Scottish Historical Studies describes the British Weekly as "one of the most successful religious newspapers of its time" and Nicoll as "a remarkable proponent of the 'New Journalism' and a major voice of the 'Nonconformist Conscience' in late Victorian Britain" [5] (The phrase "New Journalism" had been coined by Matthew Arnold in 1887 [6] to describe the sensational style of the Pall Mall Gazette and its muck-raking editor W. T. Stead. [7] [8] [9] )
The biographer of Christian socialist and publisher Arthur Mee judges the British Weekly to have been the most influential of all of Britain's many religious newspapers. [4]
The author of the 2011 book asserts that "The British Weekly acquired the Christian World in the 1960s, but in the 1970s, it passed into the ownership of the Christian Weekly Newspapers, the publishers of the Church of England Newspaper." [10] Another source mentions that its editorship moved from Edinburgh to London's Fleet Street in 1967, and in 1970 was sold. (Church of England newspaper 7 February 2014) [11]
Matthew Arnold was an English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the celebrated headmaster of Rugby School, and brother to both Tom Arnold, literary professor, and William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator. Matthew Arnold has been characterised as a sage writer, a type of writer who chastises and instructs the reader on contemporary social issues. He was also an inspector of schools for thirty-five years, and supported the concept of state-regulated secondary education.
In English church history, the Nonconformists are Protestant Christians who did not "conform" to the governance and usages of the established church, the Church of England. Use of the term in England was precipitated after the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660, when the Act of Uniformity 1662 renewed opposition to reforms within the established church. By the late 19th century the term specifically included other Reformed Christians, plus the Baptists, Brethren, Methodists, and Quakers. The English Dissenters such as the Puritans who violated the Act of Uniformity 1559 – typically by practising radical, sometimes separatist, dissent – were retrospectively labelled as Nonconformists.
William Thomas Stead was a British newspaper editor who, as a pioneer of investigative journalism, became a controversial figure of the Victorian era. Stead published a series of hugely influential campaigns whilst editor of The Pall Mall Gazette, including his 1885 series of articles, The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon. These were written in support of a bill, later dubbed the "Stead Act", that raised the age of consent from 13 to 16.
The Pall Mall Gazette was an evening newspaper founded in London on 7 February 1865 by George Murray Smith; its first editor was Frederick Greenwood. In 1921, The Globe merged into The Pall Mall Gazette, which itself was absorbed into The Evening Standard in 1923.
Sir William Robertson Nicoll was a Scottish Free Church minister, journalist, editor, and man of letters.
Hugh Price Hughes was a Welsh Protestant clergyman and religious reformer in the Methodist tradition. He served in multiple leadership roles in the Wesleyan Methodist Church. He organised the West London Methodist Mission, a key Methodist organisation today. Recognised as one of the greatest orators of his era, Hughes also founded and edited an influential newspaper, the Methodist Times in 1885. His editorials helped convince Methodists to break their longstanding support for the Conservatives and support the more moralistic Liberal Party, which other Nonconformist Protestants were already supporting.
The Northern Echo is a regional daily morning newspaper based in the town of Darlington in North East England, serving mainly southern County Durham and northern Yorkshire. The paper covers national as well as regional news. In 2007, its then-editor claimed that it was one of the most famous provincial newspapers in the United Kingdom. Its first edition was published on 1 January 1870.
David William Bebbington is a British historian who is a professor of history at the University of Stirling in Scotland and a distinguished visiting professor of history at Baylor University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Royal Historical Society.
Sir Edward Tyas Cook was an English journalist, biographer, and man of letters.
The Church of England Newspaper is an independent Anglican weekly newspaper. Based in London, it is published on Fridays.
Edward Royle is a British academic who is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of York and author of several books on the history of religious ideas, particularly in York and Yorkshire.
The Nonconformist conscience was the moralistic influence of the Nonconformist churches in British politics in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Nonconformity was a major religious movement in Wales from the 18th to the 20th centuries. The Welsh Methodist revival of the 18th century was one of the most significant religious and social movements in the modern history of Wales. The revival began within the Church of England in Wales, partly as a reaction to the neglect generally felt in Wales at the hands of absentee bishops and clergy. For two generations from the 1730s onwards the main Methodist leaders such as Howell Harris, Daniel Rowland and William Williams Pantycelyn remained within the Church of England, but the Welsh revival differed from the Methodist revival in England in that its theology was Calvinist rather than Arminian. Methodists in Wales gradually built up their own networks, structures, and meeting houses, which led, at the instigation of Thomas Charles, to the secession of 1811 and the formal establishment of the Calvinistic Methodist Presbyterian Church of Wales in 1823.
The history of Christianity in Britain covers the religious organisations, policies, theology and popular religiosity since ancient times.
The Christian Guardian was a Wesleyan Methodist journal founded in Upper Canada in 1829. The first editor was Egerton Ryerson. It ceased publication in 1925 when the Methodist Church of Canada merged with the Presbyterians and Congregationalists to form the United Church of Canada, and merged their journals to create The New Outlook, later renamed the United Church Observer.
Government by Journalism was a form of New Journalism pioneered by the English newspaper editor William Thomas Stead in which he began to think of journalism as more than just a position to report information, but through the paper the journalist or editor could become ruler.
The Liberation Society was an organisation in Victorian England that campaigned for disestablishment of the Church of England. It was founded in 1844 by Edward Miall as the British Anti-State Church Association and was renamed in 1853 as the Society for the Liberation of Religion from State Patronage and Control, from which the shortened common name of Liberation Society derived.
The history of journalism in the United Kingdom includes the gathering and transmitting of news, spans the growth of technology and trade, marked by the advent of specialised techniques for gathering and disseminating information on a regular basis. In the analysis of historians, it involves the steady increase of the scope of news available to us and the speed with which it is transmitted.
Jane Thompson Stoddart was a Scottish journalist and author and de facto editor of The British Weekly, "a central force in shaping and promoting the 'Nonconformist conscience'".
Hulda Friederichs was a Prussian journalist and writer working in London.
see lines 5 and 6
We have had opportunities of observing a new journalism which a clever and energetic man has lately invented. It has much to recommend it; it is full of ability, novelty, variety, sensation, sympathy, generous instincts; its one great fault is that it is feather-brained
It was the first sign of the coming of the 'New Journalism', and Stead was its prophet. When Arnold wrote his article in The Nineteenth Century for May 1887 he had W. T. Stead in mind.
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