The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins posed the question, is a friend a friend because he helps you, or does he help you because he is your friend? Most cultures, Sahlins noted, could choose one of the two. Individuals in Tudor-Stuart Britain, however, would be hard-pressed not to reply, both. Thus, in 1577 after their children’s marriage Sir William Gerard wrote to Moras Wynn of Gwydir that he appreciated Wynn making the match out of “very friendship without respect of gain,” by which Gerard meant affection and goodwill, but went on to add that he understood Wynn now “expected friendship” from him, meaning practical assistance using Gerard’s Court connections. Friendship was both chosen and given, a fortunate accident or a tie strenuously worked for and assiduously cultivated. Ubiquitous and vital, friendship was an act as much as a state of mind: Richard Brathwait spoke to its scope in claiming “there is no greater wilderness than to be without true friends.”

In 1754 when the London debating societies were non-profit entertainments exclusively for men, the well-known actor Charles Macklin attempted to commercialize and feminize them in one step. Ostensibly the time was ripe for these changes because the popularity of the public debating societies demonstrated their potential profitability and because the exclusion of women from these artisan societies was being seen as out of step with the trend of public entertainment and manifestations of the Enlightenment. The temporary success of Macklin’s British Inquisition documents the readiness of a growing middle class to extend the range of their commercialized leisure; more significantly, the failure of the British Inquisition reveals the hazards of violating male space and trying to gentrify a workingmen’s entertainment in one stroke. Macklin’s ambitious attempt to cash in on the cultural trends of mid-century London merits a place in the study of the commercializing of popular entertainment and the feminizing of masculine entertainments for commercial ends. Its inclusion of women in public debating foreshadows the later participation of women in public debates and the consequent assigning to public culture values previously regarded as feminine, or, in Terry Eagleton’s phrase, the “feminization of discourse.” Macklin’s enterprise changed significantly the questions debated at these public meetings. However, the failure of his enterprise shows the difficulty of deliberately attempting to change the character of popular culture and to expand gender conventions exponentially.

This self-promoting editorial in the Star in 1891 made a critical point: labor issues were becoming a standard feature in daily newspapers. Sweating, loopholes in factory legislation, and the famous Dock and Match Girls’ strikes were among the subjects found in the pages of papers such as the Star. This trend in reporting was part of the “New Journalism” that developed in England between the 1880s and 1914. In an attempt to cater to the tastes of mass audiences, there was a shift in emphasis from parliamentary and political news to sports, gossip, crime, and sex. Papers, for instance, reported on the brutal Jack the Ripper murders in the East End of London. New journalists and editors, like W. T. Stead and Thomas P. O’Connor, also produced interviews, exposes, and political editorials in order to influence public opinion and promote what Stead called “government by journalism.” Stead produced what has been called the most successful piece of scandal journalism of the nineteenth century, “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” which depicted young girls for sale to older men. Passage of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, which raised the age of consent for sex to sixteen, was one of its political consequences.