Introduction

Characteristically, the arrival of the twentieth century was celebrated differently by the main Belfast newspapers for Monday, 1 January 1900. Writing in the Irish News and Belfast Morning News, editor T. J. Campbell offered a retrospective on the ‘eighteen hundreds’ which had begun with ‘the iniquitous Act of Union’. Campbell recast the whole period as one of national struggle for a readership who had ‘never swerved from the conviction that the privilege of governing themselves, which had been so corruptly taken from them in the first year of the century, was the only real remedy for the wrongs of Ireland’ (Irish News, 1 January 1900, p. 4). Its rival, the Belfast Evening Telegraph, was more concerned with the present, with the editorial noting that ‘[t]he dawn of the new year’ came at a time when ‘the largest army that ever left our shores’ was actively fighting against ‘the Troublesome Republics’ in the Second Boer War (Belfast Telegraph, 1 January 1900, p. 5). In that day's editorial for the Belfast News Letter, W. G. Anderson refused to break from the title's tradition of a retrospective: ‘As is usual, we publish to-day a detailed survey of the local trade of the past twelve months … 1899 will fall within the category of the fat years.’ Anderson was also concerned with how the war in Africa would threaten the prosperity Belfast had enjoyed under the iniquitous Union: ‘in the lsat [sic] few expiring days the business world was thrown into something resembling a panic’ (News Letter, 1 January 1900, p. 6). The News Letter thus emphasised the need for economic and architectural progress: ‘In a few years we shall be able to show in High Street, Royal Avenue, Donegall Place, and Donegall Square, with the new City Hall in the middle, as fine a business centre as any city in the three Kingdoms can boast of’ (ibid.). The spatial and temporal affiliations which each title expressed in these retrospectives were exemplary beginnings to a century in which these papers would represent different conceptions of history, place and identity. These categories became prey to sudden and exacting change over the course of the next century.