THE DAILY MIRROR AND THE CREATION OF A COMMERCIAL POPULAR LANGUAGE A people's war: a people's paper?

It has long been acknowledged that the Mirror's transformation from middle-class to working-class newspaper after 1934 was effected to a large extent through its astute identification of a language which could communicate its journalism to a new market. This language has been explored with particular intensity during the period of the Second World War and the post-war period when the paper rose to both political as well as commercial prominence. However, there has been little interest in the early years of this evolution, merely a generally held assumption that some time between 1934 and 1940, the newspaper developed a brand of journalistic language which embodied a credible appeal to a working-class readership. This paper attempts to redress this imbalance by focusing on the ways that the newspaper dealt with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939; part of the period described by Pugh as the neglected pre-1939 era-a neglect which is all the more surprising because, as he observes, "the Mirror was profoundly influenced by international events around 1935-36, and by 1939 it had become a central element in the tide of opinion that was shortly to envelop the parliamentarians" (Pugh, 1998, p. 424).