The Diaries of Anthony Hewitson, Provincial Journalist, Volume 1, 1865–1887 by Andrew Hobbs (review)

Reviewed by: The Diaries of Anthony Hewitson, Provincial Journalist, Volume 1, 1865–1887 by Andrew Hobbs Patrick Leary (bio) Andrew Hobbs, The Diaries of Anthony Hewitson, Provincial Journalist, Volume 1, 1865–1887 (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2022), pp. viii + 672, $42.95/£35.95 hardcover, $31.00/£25.95 paperback, open-access e-book. A diary by a Victorian newspaper journalist is a rare thing. One might conclude that those whose job it was to gather the public news of the day were not typically much inclined to keep a record of their own personal doings. Memoirs there are in plenty, but as a guide to actual journalistic practice, they generally lack both detail and candor. A diary by a journalist based outside of London is even rarer. In fact, there is only one such document known to scholars, and until now one had to travel to the Lancashire Archives in Preston to see it. So it is not surprising that a historian as astute as Andrew Hobbs quickly grasped the significance of the unpublished manuscript diaries of Anthony Hewitson (1836–1912), a journalist based in Preston. Hewitson's diaries deeply inform Hobbs's landmark study of provincial journalism, A Fleet Street in Every Town: The Provincial Press in England, 1855–1900 (2018). This edition of the 1865–87 diaries, soon to be followed by a second and concluding volume covering 1891 to 1912, is a gift to all students of Victorian journalism and, for that matter, of Victorian culture more generally. Starting his working life as an apprentice to a printer, Hewitson provides a particularly useful example of just how common, for much of the century, was the progression from compositor to reporter to subeditor to editor and even to proprietor. This kind of fluidity would become less frequent later, but Hewitson's case demonstrates how seamlessly many members of the "labour aristocracy" of the printing trade were able to move [End Page 308] among various other roles in the production of books, magazines, and newspapers. Printers, reporters, and editors all shared a similar class position, and the last two jobs were frequently held at the same time. A newspaper proprietor, however, had much clearer claims to solid middle-class status. After years of working as the chief reporter for Preston's largest newspaper, the Preston Guardian, Hewitson bought the town's third largest paper, the Preston Chronicle, in 1868. Yet even as proprietor, Hewitson spent much of his time working at the same sorts of things he had worked at in his earlier career while also spending his Saturdays selling copies of his paper, collecting tuppences from behind the counter of his own newspaper office. These are not the kind of diaries meant to be read for their literary merits. There are no passages of fine writing, no particularly striking descriptions of the people, places, or events that Hewitson encountered. He saved all that sort of thing for his columns and guidebooks and local histories. These are the working diaries of a busy provincial journalist, and their effect on the reader as well as their value to the historian lies in their cumulative impact, a steady accretion of quotidian detail that illuminates, as nothing else can, the working life of a Victorian journalist and editor. The rhythms of Hewitson's working life as reflected in these detailed diary entries are revelatory in many ways, not least of which is how thoroughly his work as a journalist was permeated by oral culture. Indeed, his ability to record speech accurately, via shorthand, was the early accomplishment that most fully enabled his move from printer to reporter. The diaries make clear how much his success depended upon the countless bits of gossip that he picked up as he roamed the town in his constant search for "pars" to fill the paper (38). "Running about after paragraphs," runs one entry in 1865, a remark that in one form or another crops up repeatedly through all of the diary's six hundred pages (25). One example must suffice. On June 7, 1872, Hewitson gets wind of a juicy bit of gossip about the seventy-four-year-old local vicar, who, it is whispered...

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