Journalism is literature in a hurry

Just finished the very enjoyable The Fleet Street Murders by Charles Finch, another in the Charles Lenox series.  Good writing, good characterization and history.  Interesting plot.  His is somewhat parallel to the John Fielding series by Bruce Alexander set in 18th century London.  Lenox is set in 19th century upper class London.  

Lenox left soon thereafter and, after stopping at home to make sure that Dallington wasn’t waiting for him, directed his driver to Fleet Street. 

 

Printers and pamphlet makers had inhabited Fleet Street since 1500, but it was only in the spring of 1702 that it had gained its modern character—that was when the first daily newspaper in the world, the Daily Courant, opened its office and began publishing from the street. 

 

In the subsequent century and a half it had become a collegial place, its pubs full of dueling journalists who put aside their differences at the bar to drink, to laugh, and to trade barbs, often with the equally drunken and witty solicitors who inhabited the close-by Inns of Court. It all savored even now of Dickens and Dr. Johnson and the grand tradition of literature—of a certain kind of literature. As Matthew Arnold said, “Journalism is literature in a hurry.”