British politics and provincial print culture: 18th century
A first chronology of politics and print (mainly newspapers) outside the capital cities of Britain and Ireland, in 4 parts.
The study of provincial print culture raises so many vital political questions:
- How do local and regional identities relate to class? While Patrick Joyce argues that such place-based identities were more important than class for most people, other scholars such as James Curran believe that newspapers, especially the new provincial dailies of the 1850s onwards, used them to hide class conflict.[1]
- Whose interests are served by journalistic impartiality? A depoliticised press was not necessarily politically neutral, a point that Koss seems to miss.[2] However, such neutrality might ensure the personal safety of editors and owners, in small local worlds lacking the anonymity of London journalism.[3] Upsetting powerful individuals or interests could lead to an editor being horse-whipped, shot at, thrown into a ponds or a bath, or to a collapse in sales and the closure of the business. While ‘newspapers were, in a sense, free publicity for a town’s ruling classes’, the study of historical readers such as those who wrote to the Chartist Northern Star shows that they could read against the grain, or eavesdrop on conversations in print that were not intended for them.[4]
- And who defines where is core, where is periphery? Who was spoken to, spoken for, spoken about, and who spoke for themselves, ebbed and flowed over time, as with the illegal press of the 1830s, or the new genres of the evening paper and the weekly miscellany aimed at working-class readers, the latter incorporating large quantities of material written by those readers.
Almost any type of article or advertisement could be analysed politically — the front-page mastheads (Tory papers emphasising the Crown, Liberal papers foregrounding the Magna Carta) and other historical content, or the alignment of religion and politics.
18th century
There is some excellent scholarship on the small, manageable number of provincial papers in the eighteenth century.[5] Printing had been illegal outside London, York, Oxford and Cambridge until the final lapse of the 1662 Licensing (or Printing) Act in 1695; the first provincial papers, probably in Bristol and Norwich, launched at the turn of the century (around the same time as the first Edinburgh newspaper, but more than forty years after the first Dublin paper). For most of this century, printers selected material from London papers relevant to their local readers, supplemented by local advertising and occasional local correspondence. They were reluctant to take sides or comment on matters too close to home, for fear of losing business. News and comment on foreign and London news was safer.
Two of the most notable political events in this new era of provincial newspapers were the 1745 Jacobite rising and the French revolution. Some papers, such as the Norwich Gazette and Chester Courant were overtly Jacobite.[6] The big story was happening outside London, for once, and as the Young Pretender marched south, papers along his route published letters of news about his progress, while others promoted loyal support for the Hanoverian regime.[7] The ban on reporting the Westminster Parliament lapsed after 1771, leading to provincial papers carrying lengthy Parliamentary reports, collated from newspapers, newsletters and the speeches of local MPs, sent direct to provincial printers. These unique selections could be found nowhere else.[8] In the same decade, Irish newspapers began to report debates in the Irish parliament.
In the 1780s and 1790s, radicals across Britain and Ireland, inspired by the French Revolution, began to publish papers in Sheffield, Manchester, Leicester and many smaller English towns, and in Belfast and Cork.[9] These papers also commented on local politics, but lasted for only a few years, closed either by prosecutions or Church and King mobs.[10] In other places, some established newspapers also responded favourably to events in France, such as the Dublin Evening Post, which drew parallels between the Irish situation and other revolutions around the world, only drawing the line at the black revolutionaries of Haiti.[11]
Notes
[1] Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); James Curran, ‘The Press as an Agency of Social Control’, in Newspaper History from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day, ed. David George Boyce, James Curran, and Pauline Wingate (London: Constable, 1978), 71.
[2] Jean Chalaby, The Invention of Journalism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 77.
[3] Croydon’s Penny Punch, ‘well spiced with local allusions and personalities’ led to a plot to harm or even kill its editor; Thomas Frost, Reminiscences of a Country Journalist (Ward & Downey, 1886), 59–64.
[4] Peter Brett, ‘Early Nineteenth-Century Reform Newspapers in the Provinces: The Newcastle Chronicle and Bristol Mercury’, in Studies in Newspaper and Periodical History: 1995 Annual, ed. Tom O’Malley and Michael Harris (London: Greenwood, 1997), 51.
[5] Geoffrey Alan Cranfield, The Development of the Provincial Newspaper, 1700–1760 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962); R.M. Wiles, Freshest Advices: Early Provincial Newspapers in England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1965); C.Y. Ferdinand, Benjamin Collins and the Provincial Newspaper Trade in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Hannah Barker, Newspapers, Politics and English Society, 1695–1855, Themes in British Social History (Harlow: Longman, 2000); Victoria E.M. Gardner, The Business of News in England, 1760–1820 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016). Jeremy Black’s several histories of the press in the eighteenth century apply a broad brush, and include London papers, but offer useful overviews.
[6] Jeremy Black, The English Press, 1621–1861 (Thrupp, Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2001), 40.
[7] Bob Harris, ‘England’s Provincial Newspapers and the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745–1746’, History 80, no. 258 (1995): 7, 12.
[8] Gardner, The Business of News in England, 1760–1820, 34, 36.
[9] R. B. McDowell, ‘Irish Newspapers in the Eighteenth Century’, The Crane Bag 8, no. 2 (1984): 40–43.
[10] Donald Read, The English Provinces, 1760–1960: A Study in Influence (London: Edward Arnold, 1964), 45, 50; Gardner, The Business of News in England, 1760–1820, 22–24.
[11] Duncan Frankis, ‘“That Nefarious Newspaper”: The Dublin Evening Post, 1789–1794’, in Print, Politics and the Provincial Press in Modern Britain, ed. Ian Cawood and Lisa Peters (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019), 9–30.