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Article In:
Corpus-Pragmatic Studies of Democratization in Public Discourses: New perspectives, methods and materials
Edited by Turo Hiltunen, Turo Vartiainen and Jenni Räikkönen
[Journal of Historical Pragmatics 25:2] 2024
► pp. 330–354

Family, politics and media

Gladstone during the Midlothian campaign, 1879–1880

ORCID logo | Lancaster University
ORCID logo | Lancaster University | Shanghai International Studies University

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.

Keywords: Gladstone, collocation, social actor analysis, electioneering, family
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Midlothian campaign as a focus of generic democratization
  • 3.Data and methodology
  • 4.Social actor analysis
  • 5.Exploratory collocation analysis
    • 5.1Collocates of gladstone
    • 5.2Collocates of disraeli
  • 6.The social practice of leading a family and its intersection with the social practice of electioneering
    • 6.1Key collocates in the social actor analysis
    • 6.2Focus on Herbert Gladstone
    • 6.3Representing the social practice of electioneering
    • 6.4Electioneering and news values
  • 7.Conclusion – reflecting on historiography and democratization
  • Notes
  • References
  • Corpora, primary sources and text collections
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
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Corpora, primary sources and text collections

The corpora used in this paper are available from [URL]