Flora Shaw: The Times, imperial travels, and a woman in empire

Flora Shaw was a journalist and Colonial Editor of The Times, 1893-1900. She secured this position due to a widely praised series of ‘Letters’ from South Africa, penned during the first of a number of visits to South Africa, Australia, and Canada in the following decade. Shaw visited South Africa and Australia in 1892-3, Canada and the Klondike in 1898, and South Africa in 1900 and 1902. Shaw was an evangelising imperialist, as Dorothy O. Helly and Helen Callaway have

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The deleterious dominance of The Times in nineteenth-century scholarship

By Andrew Hobbs (University of Central Lancashire) This post accompanies Andrew Hobb’s Journal of Victorian Culture article published (2013). It can be read in full here.    There were more local newspapers than London papers throughout the nineteenth century (Fig. 1), and their total circulation overtook the total circulation of the London press from the early 1860s to the 1930s. I didn’t realise this when I started my PhD, which aimed to establish a link between the local press and readers’ sense

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