Identity is, simultaneously, the simplest and most slippery of concepts. The impassioned debates today pitting the determinism of biological sex against the (arguably) social construct of gender identity is simply the latest iteration of age-old tensions between individuals and the societies within and against which they define themselves. If linguistic ability is inherent in the human race, the vocabulary of the language(s) we use is a matter of, firstly, environment, then choice and education.
I’m not going to go into a discussion of semiotics; there are others far better qualified than I am for such an exercise. I am, however, currently musing on the markers of identity for periodicals – intrinsic ones (titles, mastheads, slogans) and extrinsic, for example, proprietors and editors. What gives a newspaper its fundamental identity? It seems obvious, to begin with; it’s the title, then the masthead. Yet newspapers with the same owners, editors, staff, premises and journalistic style change title, sometimes with great success (as witnessed by the Daily Universal Register becoming The Times after two years in print). Alternatively, a paper might retain its title and change just about everything else. The Daily Mirror, for example, was begun by Alfred Harmsworth in the early twentieth century as an illustrated paper for middle-class women; The (Manchester) Guardian campaigned bitterly in the nineteenth century against parliamentary moves to reduce the factory working day to eleven hours. Yet these titles, like many others, claim longevity and continuity despite having arguably a very different identity to that under which they appeared originally.
All of this is on my mind as I look into examples of nineteenth-century newspapers that merged with, or were incorporated into, other papers. Again, I’m finding that these ‘marriages’ take many forms – from hostile takeovers, to more consensual if anti-competitive buyouts; from pragmatic joining of forces to promote similar aims to desperate attempts to stave off ruin by seeking to appeal to dwindling readerships of discrete titles. The question this poses for me is: should we judge the lifespan of a newspaper or periodical by its title alone? Taking a purely bibliographical approach, this might be the best way. So that, when a paper changes title, it effectively becomes a new publication as it has a new bibliographic record. This necessarily inflates the proportion of short-lived newspapers. On the other hand, some of the contemporary directories and catalogues, such as Mitchells, attempt to track these title changes over time and where the change is made openly, this can work well; often the editorial address will explain the decision to change title and, arguably, the reader is then assured of the continuation of the former choice. In these cases, it seems correct to treat the newspaper as a continuation of the former title. To the nineteenth-century reader, the choices were probably quite clear. Retrospectively, the situation is much more fluid and I’m finding that exploring the identities of some of these newspapers over their lives is prompting some interesting theoretical challenges. Which, for these purposes at least, puts me in the Questioning category of the identity debate.