Back in print for the first time in seventy years is award-winning
novelist Rose Macaulay's Potterism, a satire on British journalism
through the lens of both the owners and employees of a popular newspaper
empire.
When Jane and Johnny Potter are at Oxford they learn to despise their
father's popular newspapers, though they still end up working for the
family business. But Jane is ambitious and wants more than society will
let her have.
Mrs. Potter is a well-known romantic novelist, whose cheap novelettes
appear in the shop-girls' magazines. She has become unable to
distinguish fact from fiction, and her success gives her an unhealthy
estimation of her own influence. When she visits a medium to try to find
the truth about the murder of her son-in-law, she wreaks terrible
damage.
Arthur Gideon works for Mr. Potter as an editor. He respects his
employer's honesty while he despises the populist newspapers he has to
produce. His turbulent campaigning spirit, and his furious resistance to
anti-Semitic attacks, make him unpopular, and becomes an unwitting
target of malice.
With an introduction is by Sarah Lonsdale, Potterism is about the
Potter newspaper empire, and the ways in which journalists struggled to
balance the truth and what would sell, during the First World War and
into the 1920s.
