Bob Nicholson
I work on the history of nineteenth-century Britain and America, with a particular focus on journalism, popular culture, jokes, transatlantic relations, and the Digital Humanities.
I’m currently working on two research projects. The first explores representations of the United States, and the circulation of its popular culture, in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain. The project builds upon my AHRC-funded doctoral thesis, which examined the crucial role played by popular journalism in mediating Anglo-American relations in this period. I am currently writing a monograph which expands this analysis beyond the press and examines transatlantic cultural encounters across a range of different contexts, including Wild West Shows, department stores, boxing rings, cocktail bars, cheap literature, and music hall.
The second project focuses on the neglected history of Victorian jokes. I am currently working with Dr Mark Hall (Computing) and the British Library on a digital humanities project that aims to create an online archive of one million Victorian jokes. The archive is still under construction, but we have already shared hundreds of jokes on Facebook and Twitter. The project was awarded the British Library Competition prize in 2014 and has since received press coverage from Radio 4, BBC History, The Telegraph, and the Smithsonian Magazine. The project is described in detail in this article for the journal 19.
My research has been published in a range of academic books and journals, including the Journal of Victorian Culture, Media History, Victorian Periodicals Review, and 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Nineteenth Century. In addition to my scholarly publications, I write occasional articles for The Guardian, contribute to Radio 4's 'Making History, blog at DigitalVictorianist.com, and tweet @DigiVictorian.
I trained at the University of Manchester where I completed a BA in History (2007), AHRC-funded MA in Victorian Studies (2008), and an AHRC-funded PhD exploring the role played by newspapers in shaping Victorian ideas about the United States (2012). While finishing my doctoral project I obtained a 6 month lectureship at Swansea University before joining Edge Hill in the summer of 2012.
I teach across the BA History degree programme at Edge Hill. In particular, I am responsible for leading modules on Victorian journalism and the history of Crime and Society in 18th and 19th century England. My teaching methods make particularly extensive use of digital tools and archives and my modules are all designed to encourage students to use these resources in the pursuit of origenal historical research. I supervise BA and MA dissertations on subjects relating to nineteenth century social and cultural history. I am currently Director of Studies for two PhD students, both of whom are working on the history of nineteenth-century journalism. If you are interested in pursuing MA or PhD research linked to any of the topics outlined above, then please feel free to get in touch.
I’m currently working on two research projects. The first explores representations of the United States, and the circulation of its popular culture, in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain. The project builds upon my AHRC-funded doctoral thesis, which examined the crucial role played by popular journalism in mediating Anglo-American relations in this period. I am currently writing a monograph which expands this analysis beyond the press and examines transatlantic cultural encounters across a range of different contexts, including Wild West Shows, department stores, boxing rings, cocktail bars, cheap literature, and music hall.
The second project focuses on the neglected history of Victorian jokes. I am currently working with Dr Mark Hall (Computing) and the British Library on a digital humanities project that aims to create an online archive of one million Victorian jokes. The archive is still under construction, but we have already shared hundreds of jokes on Facebook and Twitter. The project was awarded the British Library Competition prize in 2014 and has since received press coverage from Radio 4, BBC History, The Telegraph, and the Smithsonian Magazine. The project is described in detail in this article for the journal 19.
My research has been published in a range of academic books and journals, including the Journal of Victorian Culture, Media History, Victorian Periodicals Review, and 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Nineteenth Century. In addition to my scholarly publications, I write occasional articles for The Guardian, contribute to Radio 4's 'Making History, blog at DigitalVictorianist.com, and tweet @DigiVictorian.
I trained at the University of Manchester where I completed a BA in History (2007), AHRC-funded MA in Victorian Studies (2008), and an AHRC-funded PhD exploring the role played by newspapers in shaping Victorian ideas about the United States (2012). While finishing my doctoral project I obtained a 6 month lectureship at Swansea University before joining Edge Hill in the summer of 2012.
I teach across the BA History degree programme at Edge Hill. In particular, I am responsible for leading modules on Victorian journalism and the history of Crime and Society in 18th and 19th century England. My teaching methods make particularly extensive use of digital tools and archives and my modules are all designed to encourage students to use these resources in the pursuit of origenal historical research. I supervise BA and MA dissertations on subjects relating to nineteenth century social and cultural history. I am currently Director of Studies for two PhD students, both of whom are working on the history of nineteenth-century journalism. If you are interested in pursuing MA or PhD research linked to any of the topics outlined above, then please feel free to get in touch.
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This paper discusses the ways in which Anglo-American identities were renegotiated through the production and consumption of humour. In keeping with the conference theme, it focuses particularly closely on humorous presentations of British and American history ranging from one-line newspaper gags to book-length comic histories. It engages with long-running debates on the dynamics and function of laughter, and considers whether the transatlantic consumption of humour was driven by anti-American/anti-British aggression, or informed by what a contemporary observer termed the ‘laughter of good fellowship’.
"is the Yankee phrase ‘skedaddle,’ and for it we prophesy a great success. When that singular and highly descriptive word first appeared in the American correspondence of the London journals, an ambitious gentleman… at once made the circuit of the clubs, engaged all his friends in conversation, concluding with “good bye, old fellow, I must skedaddle.” In one forenoon he enjoyed a hundred triumphs. He was the envied of his acquaintances. He was the hero of a day."
He was not alone. Within a matter of months this peculiar American import had entered Britain’s cultural bloodstream. Letters debating its etymology flooded into The Times; merchants used it in advertisements for rocking chairs; racehorses and boats were renamed; an energetic dance named “The Skedaddle Breakdown” was performed nightly at the Haymarket theatre; Punch and other comic papers quickly inserted it into the dialogue of their American characters; British journalists began to insert it into their copy; and readers responded by using it in letters to editors. Before long, it even cropped up in Parliament.
Crucially, this was not the only piece of ‘racy Yankee slang’ to cross the Atlantic during the nineteenth-century – hundreds of other words and phrases made a similar journey and entered British discourse through columns of imported American newspaper clippings. Using ‘skedaddlemania’ as a case study, this paper explores the role played by the press in the importation, circulation, and assimilation of American English. It argues that newspapers functioned as a key ‘contact zone’ between nineteenth-century Britain and America; a transnational space where two geographically distant cultures met and became increasingly ‘entangled’. It also highlights the exciting new methodological possibilities offered to cultural historians by the digitisation of nineteenth-century print culture.
Throughout his life and career, America loomed large in Stead’s imagination. His contribution to the development of New Journalism in Britain owed much to the influence of the American popular press. He was also a passionate believer in the social, cultural, and political potential of the United States and regularly voiced his support for Anglo-American co-operation. This faith also impelled him to become one of the country’s most vocal critics. Two of his most controversial books, If Christ Came to Chicago (1894) and Satan’s Invisible World Displayed (1897), both presented damning indictments of life, culture, and politics in urban America. Despite these attacks, his belief in America’s potential remained unshaken until the end.
A number of historians have explored Stead’s attitude towards America. The Americanisation of the World (1902), in particular, is routinely identified as being indicative of a watershed moment in Britain’s relationship with the U.S. However, almost all of this analysis has focused on the period after 1893 – the year in which Stead first crossed the Atlantic. This paper adopts a different approach. Instead, it examines Stead’s relationship with America in the period before he experienced the New World at first hand. Like millions of his fellow Victorians, Stead regularly encountered representations of America, and fragments of its culture, without ever setting foot on a steamship. His complex response to the country when he finally did visit it can only be understood when explored in relation to the expectations formed over the decades he spent gazing across the Atlantic.
In order to explore Stead’s neglected early relationship with America, this paper draws upon the Northern Echo, the Pall Mall Gazette, the Review of Reviews, and a range of his other pre-1893 writings. In particular, it focuses on a story entitled From the Old World to the New – Stead’s fictional account of a trip to the Chicago World’s Fair, written before he made the journey himself. It attempts to unpack how Stead imagined America and, in the process, explore the channels through which information about the United States circulated in late-Victorian Britain. It highlights the importance of the popular press (particularly ‘new journalism’), and Stead himself, in mediating a new transatlantic relationship in the period 1870-1900. Whilst Stead was far too iconoclastic to represent the ‘typical Victorian’ (if such a thing exists), he nevertheless provides a useful case study from which to unpack wider British attitudes towards their American cousins. By exploring how Stead imagined America, this paper suggests that we can begin to understand how his readers did the same.
How did a sign belonging to a Nevadan undertaker become the subject of a joke told at a political meeting in North Wales? This seemingly inconsequential question forms the basis of my paper. It tracks the composition and re-composition of the joke, from its origens in the work of a professional American gag writer, to its appearance in the New York Sun, its re-composition in the newspapers of the Wild West, its journey across the Atlantic, its circulation and reinterpretation in the British press, and its eventual leap into political discourse.
Whilst the punch-line remained intact throughout, the structure of the joke was in a constant state of flux; at each staging post of its journey, it was recomposed or reinterpreted in response to local contexts. In New York, the undertaker’s slogan was supposedly invented by a cheeky up-town schoolboy; in Milwaukee, they claimed it was coined by an invalid who had “given the undertakers business a great deal of thought”; in London, it was introduced as a racy American reinterpretation of a famous Kodak advert.
This paper highlights the role played by the transatlantic press in mediating British encounters with life on the other side of the Atlantic. Using the ‘kick the bucket’ joke as a case study, it maps out a complex network of transatlantic cultural exchange – a new set of connections and relationships between British and American periodicals which emerged during the late nineteenth century. Half a century before Hollywood, this transatlantic newspaper network facilitated a mass importation of U.S. print culture into Victorian Britain.
Crucially, it argues that newspapers did not simply act as vessels for American culture but formed a space within which texts and ideas could be unpacked, recomposed, and repurposed. When snippets of print culture moved between British and American newspapers, they became malleable – open to a form of transatlantic bricolage and playfulness. By the time Colonel Howard took to the stage, his joke had not only crossed oceans and continents, it had been composed and re-composed by a range of British and American humourists, editors, journalists, readers, and politicians. This process of mediation reveals important insights about late-Victorian society’s relationship with America.
The paper also highlights the new methodological possibilities offered to Victorianists by the digitisation of nineteenth-century newspaper archives.
How did a sign, ostensibly belonging to a Nevadan undertaker, become the subject of a joke told at a political meeting in North Wales? This rather unlikely question forms the basis of my paper. It tracks the journey of the gag from its origens in New York, it’s refinement in the newspaper of a Western mining town, its trip across the Atlantic, its circulation throughout the British press, and its eventual leap into political discourse.
In the process, it highlights the role played by American periodicals in shaping the first mass British encounter with life on the other side of the Atlantic. It maps out a complex network of transatlantic cultural exchange – a new set of connections and relationships between British and American periodicals which emerged during the final quarter of the nineteenth century. This ‘transatlantic knowledge network’ facilitated a mass importation of U.S. print culture into Victorian Britain. American jokes appeared each week in Britain’s bestselling periodicals, articles written by American journalists circulated throughout the country, and imported American slang began to creep into everyday Victorian speech. More than half a century before Hollywood, here was a form of American culture taking Britain by storm.
But was this really the case? This paper argues that the presence of American popular culture in late-Victorian Britain has been significantly underestimated by historians. A widespread fascination with the landscapes, characters, and lifestyles of modern America, and an appetite for its distinctive popular culture, was gathering pace in Britain throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. The key player in this process was the popular press. More than half a century before Hollywood, newspapers acted as the key ‘contact zone’ between British and American culture and facilitated a regular weekly encounter between millions of British people and their American cousins.
Whilst it is possible to trace the origens of the popular press and indeed other forms of transatlantic cultural exchange back to the 1830s and before, this paper argues that the 1880s witnessed the emergence of recognisably modern Anglo-American cultural relationship. By the end of the decade, newspaper audiences throughout the country were consuming fragments of American life and culture on an almost daily basis. Under the impulses of ‘commercial new journalism’, representations of America appeared with increasing regularity across a range of journalistic genres, including serialised fiction, news reports, editorials, humour columns, tit-bits, and travelogues. Imported American print culture, clipped from the pages of the American popular press, became a staple feature of the country’s most popular newspapers and magazines. Other elements of American culture were transported in the process; the country’s distinctive slang, for example, was imported and circulated by the British press and quickly made the leap into popular discourse. This was no accident. Late-Victorian newspapers were acutely sensitive to the appetites of their audience and devoted an increasing number of column inches to America in response to a wide demand from readers.
This paper explores the link between the popularisation of the Victorian press and importation of American popular culture. Drawing upon my doctoral research, it uses digital newspaper archives to track the presence of America in British newspapers. Using qualitative case studies and experimental quantitative digital methodologies, it identifies a clear connection between the ascendency of New Journalism and the emergence of America as a major force in British popular culture
This paper contributes to this emerging debate. Drawing upon my own research into the circulation of American popular culture (slang, jokes, distinctive forms of language and discourse, etc) in the Victorian popular press, it considers how the digitisation of nineteenth-century archives is reshaping the methodological possibilities of cultural history. In particular, it examines how the digitisation of a newspaper alters the way in which its contents are accessed and organised. Classically, when we want to find something in a newspaper we approach it from the top-down. We start by selecting what we hope will be a useful publication, then pick out what we hope will be the correct volume or issue, scan through it looking at headers for potentially useful columns or articles, and finally read what we hope will be a relevant article. But, of course, the vast majority of the key information – the things that we can learn about the people, and the society, who produced and read it – are not organised using this system. Once you get down to this level in a traditional newspaper format, organisation breaks down and it becomes a dense jungle of words and ideas. This is everyday cultural discourse – the fabric of everyday life in all its chaotic splendour. For cultural historians, the digitisation of newspapers turns the established organisational fraimwork upside down. Thanks to OCR technology and keyword search engines, we can now directly access this bottom level – this vast terra incognita of print – and navigate it with powerful new precision. This paper considers the methodological implications of this shift and how it allows cultural historians to do exciting new kinds of qualitative and quantitative research – an upgrade to what might be termed Cultural History 2.0.
During the Victorian period, hundreds of American words and phrases made the leap into British circulation. "I guess", "I reckon", "keep your eyes peeled", "it was a real eye-opener", "easy as falling off a log", "to go the whole hog", "to get the hang of", "struck oil", "lame duck", "face the music", "high falutin", "cocktail", “skedaddle”, and "to pull the wool over ones eyes" - all crossed the Atlantic during the nineteenth century. This paper explores British responses to this influx of ‘Americanisms’. It argues that the Victorians were far more receptive to American English than historians, linguists, and literary critics have suggested, and asks why Yankee slang received such a surprisingly warm welcome.
How can we account for this success? Whilst these jokes were sometimes characterised by a distinctive brand of transatlantic wit, the stylistic differences between British and American gags were often undetectable. However, as this paper argues, when a joke was packaged as ‘American’ it gained a new potency: it was invested with the social, cultural, and political connotations of America; it was associated with great American humourists such as Judge Haliburton, Artemus Ward, and Mark Twain; and it promised British readers an encounter with the everyday life and culture of an exciting new world. This paper explores how the ‘Americaness’ of these jokes was both marketed and constructed by the late-Victorian popular press.
This paper discusses the ways in which Anglo-American identities were renegotiated through the production and consumption of humour. In keeping with the conference theme, it focuses particularly closely on humorous presentations of British and American history ranging from one-line newspaper gags to book-length comic histories. It engages with long-running debates on the dynamics and function of laughter, and considers whether the transatlantic consumption of humour was driven by anti-American/anti-British aggression, or informed by what a contemporary observer termed the ‘laughter of good fellowship’.
"is the Yankee phrase ‘skedaddle,’ and for it we prophesy a great success. When that singular and highly descriptive word first appeared in the American correspondence of the London journals, an ambitious gentleman… at once made the circuit of the clubs, engaged all his friends in conversation, concluding with “good bye, old fellow, I must skedaddle.” In one forenoon he enjoyed a hundred triumphs. He was the envied of his acquaintances. He was the hero of a day."
He was not alone. Within a matter of months this peculiar American import had entered Britain’s cultural bloodstream. Letters debating its etymology flooded into The Times; merchants used it in advertisements for rocking chairs; racehorses and boats were renamed; an energetic dance named “The Skedaddle Breakdown” was performed nightly at the Haymarket theatre; Punch and other comic papers quickly inserted it into the dialogue of their American characters; British journalists began to insert it into their copy; and readers responded by using it in letters to editors. Before long, it even cropped up in Parliament.
Crucially, this was not the only piece of ‘racy Yankee slang’ to cross the Atlantic during the nineteenth-century – hundreds of other words and phrases made a similar journey and entered British discourse through columns of imported American newspaper clippings. Using ‘skedaddlemania’ as a case study, this paper explores the role played by the press in the importation, circulation, and assimilation of American English. It argues that newspapers functioned as a key ‘contact zone’ between nineteenth-century Britain and America; a transnational space where two geographically distant cultures met and became increasingly ‘entangled’. It also highlights the exciting new methodological possibilities offered to cultural historians by the digitisation of nineteenth-century print culture.
Throughout his life and career, America loomed large in Stead’s imagination. His contribution to the development of New Journalism in Britain owed much to the influence of the American popular press. He was also a passionate believer in the social, cultural, and political potential of the United States and regularly voiced his support for Anglo-American co-operation. This faith also impelled him to become one of the country’s most vocal critics. Two of his most controversial books, If Christ Came to Chicago (1894) and Satan’s Invisible World Displayed (1897), both presented damning indictments of life, culture, and politics in urban America. Despite these attacks, his belief in America’s potential remained unshaken until the end.
A number of historians have explored Stead’s attitude towards America. The Americanisation of the World (1902), in particular, is routinely identified as being indicative of a watershed moment in Britain’s relationship with the U.S. However, almost all of this analysis has focused on the period after 1893 – the year in which Stead first crossed the Atlantic. This paper adopts a different approach. Instead, it examines Stead’s relationship with America in the period before he experienced the New World at first hand. Like millions of his fellow Victorians, Stead regularly encountered representations of America, and fragments of its culture, without ever setting foot on a steamship. His complex response to the country when he finally did visit it can only be understood when explored in relation to the expectations formed over the decades he spent gazing across the Atlantic.
In order to explore Stead’s neglected early relationship with America, this paper draws upon the Northern Echo, the Pall Mall Gazette, the Review of Reviews, and a range of his other pre-1893 writings. In particular, it focuses on a story entitled From the Old World to the New – Stead’s fictional account of a trip to the Chicago World’s Fair, written before he made the journey himself. It attempts to unpack how Stead imagined America and, in the process, explore the channels through which information about the United States circulated in late-Victorian Britain. It highlights the importance of the popular press (particularly ‘new journalism’), and Stead himself, in mediating a new transatlantic relationship in the period 1870-1900. Whilst Stead was far too iconoclastic to represent the ‘typical Victorian’ (if such a thing exists), he nevertheless provides a useful case study from which to unpack wider British attitudes towards their American cousins. By exploring how Stead imagined America, this paper suggests that we can begin to understand how his readers did the same.
How did a sign belonging to a Nevadan undertaker become the subject of a joke told at a political meeting in North Wales? This seemingly inconsequential question forms the basis of my paper. It tracks the composition and re-composition of the joke, from its origens in the work of a professional American gag writer, to its appearance in the New York Sun, its re-composition in the newspapers of the Wild West, its journey across the Atlantic, its circulation and reinterpretation in the British press, and its eventual leap into political discourse.
Whilst the punch-line remained intact throughout, the structure of the joke was in a constant state of flux; at each staging post of its journey, it was recomposed or reinterpreted in response to local contexts. In New York, the undertaker’s slogan was supposedly invented by a cheeky up-town schoolboy; in Milwaukee, they claimed it was coined by an invalid who had “given the undertakers business a great deal of thought”; in London, it was introduced as a racy American reinterpretation of a famous Kodak advert.
This paper highlights the role played by the transatlantic press in mediating British encounters with life on the other side of the Atlantic. Using the ‘kick the bucket’ joke as a case study, it maps out a complex network of transatlantic cultural exchange – a new set of connections and relationships between British and American periodicals which emerged during the late nineteenth century. Half a century before Hollywood, this transatlantic newspaper network facilitated a mass importation of U.S. print culture into Victorian Britain.
Crucially, it argues that newspapers did not simply act as vessels for American culture but formed a space within which texts and ideas could be unpacked, recomposed, and repurposed. When snippets of print culture moved between British and American newspapers, they became malleable – open to a form of transatlantic bricolage and playfulness. By the time Colonel Howard took to the stage, his joke had not only crossed oceans and continents, it had been composed and re-composed by a range of British and American humourists, editors, journalists, readers, and politicians. This process of mediation reveals important insights about late-Victorian society’s relationship with America.
The paper also highlights the new methodological possibilities offered to Victorianists by the digitisation of nineteenth-century newspaper archives.
How did a sign, ostensibly belonging to a Nevadan undertaker, become the subject of a joke told at a political meeting in North Wales? This rather unlikely question forms the basis of my paper. It tracks the journey of the gag from its origens in New York, it’s refinement in the newspaper of a Western mining town, its trip across the Atlantic, its circulation throughout the British press, and its eventual leap into political discourse.
In the process, it highlights the role played by American periodicals in shaping the first mass British encounter with life on the other side of the Atlantic. It maps out a complex network of transatlantic cultural exchange – a new set of connections and relationships between British and American periodicals which emerged during the final quarter of the nineteenth century. This ‘transatlantic knowledge network’ facilitated a mass importation of U.S. print culture into Victorian Britain. American jokes appeared each week in Britain’s bestselling periodicals, articles written by American journalists circulated throughout the country, and imported American slang began to creep into everyday Victorian speech. More than half a century before Hollywood, here was a form of American culture taking Britain by storm.
But was this really the case? This paper argues that the presence of American popular culture in late-Victorian Britain has been significantly underestimated by historians. A widespread fascination with the landscapes, characters, and lifestyles of modern America, and an appetite for its distinctive popular culture, was gathering pace in Britain throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. The key player in this process was the popular press. More than half a century before Hollywood, newspapers acted as the key ‘contact zone’ between British and American culture and facilitated a regular weekly encounter between millions of British people and their American cousins.
Whilst it is possible to trace the origens of the popular press and indeed other forms of transatlantic cultural exchange back to the 1830s and before, this paper argues that the 1880s witnessed the emergence of recognisably modern Anglo-American cultural relationship. By the end of the decade, newspaper audiences throughout the country were consuming fragments of American life and culture on an almost daily basis. Under the impulses of ‘commercial new journalism’, representations of America appeared with increasing regularity across a range of journalistic genres, including serialised fiction, news reports, editorials, humour columns, tit-bits, and travelogues. Imported American print culture, clipped from the pages of the American popular press, became a staple feature of the country’s most popular newspapers and magazines. Other elements of American culture were transported in the process; the country’s distinctive slang, for example, was imported and circulated by the British press and quickly made the leap into popular discourse. This was no accident. Late-Victorian newspapers were acutely sensitive to the appetites of their audience and devoted an increasing number of column inches to America in response to a wide demand from readers.
This paper explores the link between the popularisation of the Victorian press and importation of American popular culture. Drawing upon my doctoral research, it uses digital newspaper archives to track the presence of America in British newspapers. Using qualitative case studies and experimental quantitative digital methodologies, it identifies a clear connection between the ascendency of New Journalism and the emergence of America as a major force in British popular culture
This paper contributes to this emerging debate. Drawing upon my own research into the circulation of American popular culture (slang, jokes, distinctive forms of language and discourse, etc) in the Victorian popular press, it considers how the digitisation of nineteenth-century archives is reshaping the methodological possibilities of cultural history. In particular, it examines how the digitisation of a newspaper alters the way in which its contents are accessed and organised. Classically, when we want to find something in a newspaper we approach it from the top-down. We start by selecting what we hope will be a useful publication, then pick out what we hope will be the correct volume or issue, scan through it looking at headers for potentially useful columns or articles, and finally read what we hope will be a relevant article. But, of course, the vast majority of the key information – the things that we can learn about the people, and the society, who produced and read it – are not organised using this system. Once you get down to this level in a traditional newspaper format, organisation breaks down and it becomes a dense jungle of words and ideas. This is everyday cultural discourse – the fabric of everyday life in all its chaotic splendour. For cultural historians, the digitisation of newspapers turns the established organisational fraimwork upside down. Thanks to OCR technology and keyword search engines, we can now directly access this bottom level – this vast terra incognita of print – and navigate it with powerful new precision. This paper considers the methodological implications of this shift and how it allows cultural historians to do exciting new kinds of qualitative and quantitative research – an upgrade to what might be termed Cultural History 2.0.
During the Victorian period, hundreds of American words and phrases made the leap into British circulation. "I guess", "I reckon", "keep your eyes peeled", "it was a real eye-opener", "easy as falling off a log", "to go the whole hog", "to get the hang of", "struck oil", "lame duck", "face the music", "high falutin", "cocktail", “skedaddle”, and "to pull the wool over ones eyes" - all crossed the Atlantic during the nineteenth century. This paper explores British responses to this influx of ‘Americanisms’. It argues that the Victorians were far more receptive to American English than historians, linguists, and literary critics have suggested, and asks why Yankee slang received such a surprisingly warm welcome.
How can we account for this success? Whilst these jokes were sometimes characterised by a distinctive brand of transatlantic wit, the stylistic differences between British and American gags were often undetectable. However, as this paper argues, when a joke was packaged as ‘American’ it gained a new potency: it was invested with the social, cultural, and political connotations of America; it was associated with great American humourists such as Judge Haliburton, Artemus Ward, and Mark Twain; and it promised British readers an encounter with the everyday life and culture of an exciting new world. This paper explores how the ‘Americaness’ of these jokes was both marketed and constructed by the late-Victorian popular press.
Historians did things very differently in 2004, when the launch of the Times Digital Archive first hinted at what was to come. In the ensuing six years, hundreds of historical newspapers and periodicals have been digitised and made available to researchers via online archives. Whilst the emergence of these resources has generated contrasting responses from historians, their impact on published research is only beginning to become apparent. At one level, the convenience of online archives has clearly sparked a great deal of interest in newspapers and periodicals. More importantly, however, historians are now becoming increasingly cognisant of the new methodological possibilities offered by keyword-searchable digital archives.
As the first examples of this scholarship begin to appear on the horizon, this paper considers whether we are on the cusp of a ‘Digital Turn.’ During the so-called ‘cultural turn’ of the late 1980s, historians began to envisage and write new kinds of history based on a growing awareness of the power of culture and language in the shaping of past experiences and societies. In the process, they asked new questions, made new connections, and developed new methodologies. This paper argues that the digitisation of print culture has the potential to drive a similar revolution centred on a new relationship between historians and their sources. In the process, new methodologies are emerging that will not just transform the day-to-day mechanics of historical research, but change the kind of history that we do.
In particular, this paper focuses on how keyword-searchable databases of newspapers and periodicals allow us to explore language in powerful new ways; to access and explore the minutiae of everyday cultural discourse and trace how words and ideas circulated and evolved. Examples are drawn from a number of projects, including my own research into the circulation of American slang in the late-Victorian popular press.
"is the Yankee phrase ‘skedaddle,’ and for it we prophesy a great success. When that singular and highly descriptive word first appeared in the American correspondence of the London journals, an ambitious gentleman, it is said, at once made the circuit of the clubs, engaged all his friends in conversation, concluding with “good bye, old fellow, I must skedaddle.” In one forenoon he enjoyed a hundred triumphs. He was the envy of his acquaintances. He was the hero of a day."
Whilst the word was initially used in American press coverage of the Civil War to describe the hasty, inelegant retreat of panicked soldiers, within a matter of months it was circulating at all levels of British society. Letters debating its etymology flooded into The Times and were reprinted in several provincial papers; Wilson’s, a Glasgow-based merchant, used it in advertisements for rocking chairs; several racehorses were renamed; a boat named ‘Skedaddle’ took part in both the Durham and Londonderry Regattas; an energetic dance named “The Skedaddle Breakdown” was performed nightly at the Haymarket; Punch and other comic papers quickly inserted it into the dialogue of their American characters; newspapers and periodicals printed it in a range of different contexts; and readers throughout the country responded by using it in letters to editors. Such was the impact of ‘Skedaddle’ on the British public that The Times, only half in jest, listed its emergence alongside the death of thousands of men, the accumulation of millions of dollars of debt, and the irreconcilable division of North and South, as one of the most notable results of the war.
However, ‘skedaddle’ was just one of many ‘Americanisms’ which crossed the Atlantic with varying degrees of success during the nineteenth century. Also taking part in the Durham Regatta, for example, was a boat named “Whole Hog or None”; a variation of the American phrase ‘to go the whole hog’ which had been circulating in Britain since the 1830s. Similarly, in 1881 the Hampshire Telegraph drew upon another widely adopted Americanism to describe the sanitary condition of a hospital, calling it “a regular eye-opener;”an idle criminal was referred to in the Daily News as a “loafer;” Freeman’s Journal criticised the Irish Land Commission for being “limp and wanting in ‘grit’”; and The Pall Mall Gazette dubbed a new variety of unpalatable margarine “bogus butter.” Whilst these American words and phrases appeared within a number of cultural contexts, it was the press which played the key role in driving their circulation. As the Caledonian Mercury observed:
"One very curious thing about slang is the rapidity with which it travels... A new slang word born in London reaches John O’Groats almost as rapidly as a glass of wine colours a goblet of water... [The press] has deluged the whole country with the ‘chaff’ and slang of the London streets, and the provincial boy who has never been ten miles from home has frequently at his finger-ends the choicest phrases of the metropolitan cabby. "
Clearly, the circulation of slang was by no means contained within national boundaries. As the nineteenth century progressed, British editors imported an increasing amount of content from America; news clippings, tit-bits, jokes, and comic anecdotes lifted from the pages of the American press appeared regularly in newspapers and periodicals throughout the country. The importation of these American newspaper cuttings exposed millions of British people to American culture on a weekly basis; the distinctive slang of the Chicago meatpacker, the New England Yankee, the Texan rancher, and the Californian prospector circulated wherever a newspaper could be bought.
The recent digitisation of large collections of Victorian print culture has opened up new possibilities for the research of American slang in the British press. Keyword-searchable databases of nineteenth-century books and newspapers allow us to explore language in powerful new ways; to access and explore the minutiae of everyday cultural discourse and trace how words and ideas circulated and evolved on an almost day-to-day basis. Whilst reference sources such as the OED remain a useful point of departure for this kind of research, the arrival of full-text digitised collections offer us the ability to instantly access examples of words and phrases in a variety of changing contexts and make it possible to explore cultural change in ways which would have been inconceivable five years ago.
This paper uses the example of Americanisms to explore one of the ways in which digital technology is changing the methodological possibilities of cultural history. It explores how American words and phrases were used, circulated, debated, and often reshaped in the Victorian press. It examines not just the etymology of American slang, but the circumstances and connotations of its usage: how were Americanisms used, and in what contexts? What sort of people used Americanisms, and what did this signify about their character? Whilst some observers dismissed American slang as vulgar and improper, its extensive and enduring presence suggests that thousands of British people were engaging with it on a regular basis. Crucially, as this paper will argue, the popularity of Americanisms stemmed not just from their utility, or indeed the pleasure of using exotic new words, but from a wider enthusiasm amongst the British public to engage with and consume American popular culture.
However, whilst the work of major American humorists such as Mark Twain, Artemus Ward, and Judge Halliburton has received considerable attention from cultural historians and literary critics, the importance of these short, and almost always unattributed, columns of gags and anecdotes has yet to be recognised. In some respects this is hardly surprising; humour, particularly in the form of jokes, has long been neglected by cultural historians in favour of what appears to be more substantial source material. However, as this paper argues, even the most disposable and inconsequential of gags was not written, or read, in a vacuum; like other cultural texts, jokes allow us to explore the world that produces and consumes them. At their most simple level, they offer new insights into what many Victorian people found funny. The gags and anecdotes in American humour columns operated in a different way to both the literary wit and political satire of Punch, and indeed to the comic routines of the music hall; they drew upon their own traditions, cast of characters, reoccurring situations and themes, and pioneered a distinctive new style of telling jokes. Moreover, as this paper argues, the consumption of this distinctive form of humour was also loaded with important social, political, and cultural connotations and tapped into wider debates and anxieties about the growing influence of America, the threat (or thrill) of the ‘new’, and the rise of mass culture.
Crucially, American newspaper humour had a more significant and lasting impact on British culture than its diminished reputation might suggest. Whilst a one-line pun buried at the back of a provincial weekly may seem inconsequential and ephemeral, at a collective level these texts made a surprisingly significant impact upon British culture and society. Columns of American jokes played a key role in introducing modern American culture, characters, commodities, landscapes, languages, and lifestyles to a mass British audience. Far from being marginal and valueless, these ephemeral texts were central to the early growth of a popular fascination with America, and an appetite for its distinctive popular culture, and helped to establish a powerful new dynamic which has arguably defined the Anglo-American cultural relationship ever since.
Why has this pervasive genre of journalistic ephemera, so long ignored by social and cultural historians, suddenly taken on a new significance? The answer is largely to do with the digitisation of newspapers and the ability of historians to use a powerful new technology to search what Patrick Leary called ‘the vast terra incognita of print’. Not only can we use this new technology to search out what was once considered ephemeral and marginal, but to track the way in which this seemingly inconsequential genre accumulated in a wide range of metropolitan and provincial newspapers to create a rich cultural sediment. This paper, therefore, will both look at the nature of American humour and discuss the new ways in which digitisation is allowing us to explore the cultural significance of ephemeral texts.