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The world’s leading professors explain the latest thinking in the humanities and social sciences in just 10 minutes.
00:00
Hello, my name is Pablo Mukherjee. I teach Anglophone World Literature at Oxford University. Today I'm in British Academy, London. I'm going to talk a little bit about something that might sound a little strange, Victorian fake news.
00:22
Now, fake news we think of as being a contemporary thing. Driven by social media, AI, tech billionaires, authoritarian governments, et cetera. Actually, fake news has been with us for about 200 years. So from around about 1820s to 1900, what we think of as the Victorian era, nowadays we call it the first information age. Fake news flowed along massive network of submarine cables, of electric telegraph, of newspapers that were now read by millions across the world.
00:59
And as news mushroomed, so did the idea of what really happened or not. So, for instance, in 1857, did the Indian rebels really kill British women and children and throw their bodies down a well in Kanpur? Or later on in the century, was Roger Tichborne really an Australian butcher?
01:23
Or think of Jack the Ripper. Was he really a member of the royal family? All these contrasting news items proliferated, as did the technology of news and media. Now, news became something that people lived with across the century. As early as 1829, you had people writing about how the Daily Press was a good thing because it brought the private and the public together.
01:54
Around 1850s, there's a very famous essay on the Electric Telegraph that talks about the telegraph wires being like the neural network that stitched the entire nation together, right from the metropolitan heartlands to the imperial outposts. And along these neural networks flew the intelligence that ended up at the headquarters or the brain in Westminster. But the question remained, what was the quality of this intelligence? What could people believe in or what should people disbelieve in? And here's where the Victorian writers stepped in.
02:33
Now, it'll be hard to point out a single major Victorian writer who didn't also dabble in journalism. Think of Charles Dickens here, or someone like Wilkie Collins. Arguably, their writing is not just an extension of their reportage or their journalism, but also they fed into each other as a overall creative process. There are some Victorian writers who were hostile to the spread of news for fear of what it could be doing to literature. Margaret Oliphant wrote a very famous essay decrying what she called the dreary drab pages of a broadsheet on which writers were now publishing their stories.
03:18
But for others, like, as I said, Dickens and Collins, the establishment of what you might think of as a media ecology actually opened up new opportunities, new audiences, but also new ways of experimenting with their own writing. For the most successful of these literary experiments, Victorian writers incorporated news not just as something they wrote about, but also something like a formal or stylistic principle of their writing. Take the example of Rudyard Kipling. Towards the end of the century in 1888, he writes this very successful and very famous story called 'the Man who Would Be King', which today is read as a kind of parable for imperial misadventures. But really it's a story about how to manage news.
04:09
Kipling's narrator is a newspaper editor working in Bombay, or Mumbai as we call it now, in India. And much of his waking hours is spent in managing news from all over the world for this broadsheet that he runs. But at night, he also encounters purveyors of fake news, imperial rogues and adventurers who arrive in his newspaper office, with fantastic tales of trying to start a kingdom in Afghanistan, for example, which is what this story is about. And his entire job to see if he can stitch together or see if he can decide which of these fantastical news items that are arriving at his desk every day are believable and which he should discount. Or take someone like Flora Annie Steel, who writes again a very successful novel about the Indian mutiny, which happened in 1857, but she's writing in the 1890s.
05:03
'90s, 'Call on the face of the water'. The central character is a kind of proto-James Bondian spy. But apart from all the action this character sees in 1857, what he's really good at is parsing or understanding the different kinds of information ranging from rumours to reports in local Indian newspapers to, in fact, reports he writes and submits to British authorities, et cetera, about what was actually going on in 1857. So in some ways, he's more of a manager of news than a spy. Now, what is interesting, I think, it's going on in these later writing of the Victorian era is that we're not being asked to think of what really happened as opposed to what didn't happen.
05:56
We're being asked to think about what makes news believable. Why do some people believe in some kinds of news? At what point even the most outlandish kinds of stories become absolutely convincing. And part of that, I think, remains as a valuable lesson for us today in an era when technology has advanced, but the basics of what makes up news, facts, or fake news, remain more or less stable. Part of what the Victorian writers have handed down to us, I think, is this idea that literature may not be a kind of companion to media.
06:40
It might in fact be an arena where the central claims of media are being constantly tested out and revealed for us as readers to assess. In other words, it turns the gaze back to us as readers. Why do we find some kinds of information more compelling than others? Who owns that information? What do we do with it?
07:40
Under what conditions do we react in some ways as opposed to others? That seems to be the key legacy of Victorian writing for our age today. And for that reason alone, I would suggest that literature remains an indispensable tool for approaching and understanding the second great age of information that we're living through today.