Undercover
Victorian Investigative Journalism in Fact and Fiction

A revisionist history of how the emergence of undercover investigative journalism transformed Victorian culture and British society.

Stephen Donovan (Author), Matthew Rubery (Author)

9781009586399, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 March 2025

317 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.627 kg

The scandalous 1866 publication of 'A Night in a Workhouse' altered the course of press history. Victorian journalist James Greenwood's disconcerting exposé of spending a night in a casual ward while disguised as a vagrant launched an enormously popular genre of newspaper writing that would come to be known as undercover reporting. Inspired by the exploits of the 'Amateur Casual', imitators infiltrated restricted areas by adopting disguises of their own as beggars, migrants, homeless people, mental patients, street performers, and single mothers. Undercover traces the seismic consequences that the radical innovation of 'going undercover' had for Victorian media, literature, and culture. This revisionist history of a distinctly British tradition of investigative journalism reconstitutes the pioneering investigations that shaped the global development of undercover reporting, analyses the format's vicarious appeal to audiences anxious about their own precarity, and traces the impact that incognito investigations had on the Victorian era's leading novelists.

List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Amateurs
1. Doing the Amateur Casual: The Legacy of James Greenwood's 'A Night in a Workhouse'
2. Undercover Authors: Asylum Reform and Lewis Wingfield's Gehenna
3. Emigration with a Vengeance: Transatlantic Steerage and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Amateur Emigrant
4. Massacre of the Innocents: 'Baby Farming' Panics and George Moore's Esther Waters
5. Splendid Paupers: Street Begging and Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
6. The Other Side of the Hedge: Rural Migrancy and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Epilogue: the inside story
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]