British politics and provincial print culture, 1800–1855
A first chronology of politics and print (mainly newspapers) outside the capital cities of Britain and Ireland, in 4 parts.
There was a spate of short-lived radical papers after the Napoleonic Wars, energised by the 1819 Peterloo massacre, such as the Dudley Patriot and the Manchester Observer (1818–22), the highest selling provincial paper of its time. Robert Poole’s study of this paper is a masterclass in the use of sources beyond the newspaper, in this case the Home Office ‘disturbance papers’, revealing the scheming of the government and Manchester magistrates to close it down, but also details of how it was published and even the identities of some anonymous contributors.[1]
Supporters of the Establishment fought back, with loyal addresses, and with handbills and tracts, such as one titled ‘Infidelity Exposed, by some account of the Writings and Death of Thomas Paine’, published by in 1819 by the Church of England Tract Society, Bristol.
Help through the ocean of 19th-century print
The number of provincial newspapers increased rapidly throughout the nineteenth century, from about 100 to more than 1500; but thousands of individual titles came and went, some lasting for only one issue, others publishing for decades. How can researchers make sense of ‘the intimidating bulk of the newspaper archives’, in the words of Cawood & Peters?
In the 1960s and 1970s, students of Victorian literature who formed the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals soon realised that this enormous field needed some scholarly infrastructure. Those resources particularly relevant to provincial print culture include Vann and VanArsdel’s study guides, the awe-inspiring Waterloo Directories of newspapers and periodicals (volumes for Ireland, Scotland and England), the Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism and three recent substantial edited collections. The society also produces the Victorian Periodicals Review. These are essential resources for any study of the nineteenth-century press.[2]
One reason for the increase in newspaper publishing was the increase in political partisanship in the first decades of the nineteenth century.[3] Typically, a town’s first newspaper would be radical or reforming, and after a few years the Tories, despite disapproving of newspapers, would feel obliged to challenge their opponents’ monopoly on local print. Novelists’ caricatures of squabbling Georgian local papers such as Eatanswill’s Gazette and Independent, and Middlemarch’s Pioneer and Trumpet, are accurate enough.
However, the very idea of a newspaper is democratic, as it has been understood in Britain and Ireland for centuries, even if the society of the time is not. Readers, and listeners, could learn what their rulers were up to, share commentary and critique, and even make their own contributions, in letters to the editor.
Provincial newspapers were part of most of the political movements that came and went, such as the campaign against the trafficking of enslaved Africans, the 1830s reform movement, international causes, republicanism and votes for women. In the Parliamentary reform campaigns waged by the political unions of the early 1830s, some publishers and editors were directly involved, such as Edward Baines of the Leeds Mercury, while others, such as the Manchester Guardian, opened their pages to local activists.
Lopatin argues that the provincial press
made it possible for thousands of political outsiders to become part of the political debate on reform by making news and information concerning the [1832] Reform Bill and Political Unions readily available… More than anything else the provincial press broadened the definition of “public” during the Political Union campaign and helped redefine the political self-identity and national political culture of the age, as well as secure the Reform Act …’[4]
When the Tory Manchester Courier opposed the 1831 Reform Bill, its sales fell by a half, demonstrating how political principles could sometimes be very costly.[5]
In the 1830s an anonymous party donor gave £10,000 (more than £600,000 in today’s money) to establish nearly 20 provincial Tory newspapers around the country; political and literary content was supplied from London by Alaric Watts and sent to provincial printers as partly printed newspapers, with local advertising and editorial added on arrival.[6]
The less respectable ‘unstamped’ newspapers of the 1830s, which refused to pay the Newspaper Stamp duty, either on principle or to make more money, were mainly published in London, but there were a handful of radical papers in other parts of the country. They supported radical Parliamentary candidates such as Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt in Preston, exposed local government corruption, or called on working-class readers to follow the example of the 1830 French Revolution.[7]
The Chartist movement of the 1840s was less London-centred, inspiring many papers in England, Wales and Scotland, the best known of which is the Northern Star, perhaps the most genuinely ‘national’ paper up to that time, with its genuinely nationwide coverage and circulation. Alongside titles clearly identifying as part of this movement, other more mainstream local papers such as the Birmingham Journal or the Dumfries Times were sympathetic to varying degrees.
Chartism dissolved as a movement, but many of its activists went on to careers as editors and journalists on provincial papers for the rest of the nineteenth century, the most notable being W.E Adams of the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle.
From Catholic Emancipation onwards, Roman Catholic newspapers and periodicals began to appear in cities and towns with high concentrations of adherents, defending their faith against sometimes violent attacks. Some of the worst myths could be found in cheap street literature such as the Leeds chapbook, ‘Life in a Yorkshire Nunnery’.[8] Charles Diamond’s national syndicate of local Catholic newspapers, published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, supported Irish independence.[9]
The temperance movement started around the same time, in the 1830s, with the press an important part of its work. From the 1850s its publications, national and local, began to campaign for local legislation restricting or banning alcohol sales. Many temperance activists were also involved with Liberal newspapers.[10]
Notes
[1] Robert Poole, ‘The Manchester Observer: Biography of a Radical Newspaper’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 95, no. 1 (2019): 31–123.
[2] JD Vann and RT VanArsdel, Victorian Periodicals: A Guide to Research, 1978; J.Don Vann and Rosemary T. VanArsdel, Victorian Periodicals and Victorian Society (Aldershot: Scolar, 1994); John S North, ed., The Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800–1900 (Waterloo: North Waterloo Academic Press, 1997-), see also Irish and Scottish editions; Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, eds., Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland (Ghent; London: Academia Press ;British Library, 2009); Andrew King, Alexis Easley, and John Morton, eds., The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers (London: Routledge, 2016); Alexis Easley, Andrew King, and John Morton, eds., Researching the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Case Studies (London: Routledge, 2017); David Finkelstein, ed., The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, Vol. 2: Expansion and Evolution, 1800–1900 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020).
[3] Jeremy Black, ‘Continuity and Change in the British Press, 1750–1833’, Publishing History 36 (1994): 59.
[4] Nancy P Lopatin, ‘Refining the Limits of Political Reporting: The Provincial Press, Political Unions, and The Great Reform Act’, Victorian Periodicals Newsletter 31, no. 4 (1998): 338–39.
[5] Donald Read, Press and People, 1790–1850: Opinion in Three English Cities (London: Edward Arnold, 1961), 193.
[6] Andrew Hobbs, ‘Watts, Alaric Alexander’, in Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism, online edition (Chadwyck-Healey, 2013), http://c19index.chadwyck.co.uk/home.do.
[7] Patricia Hollis, The Pauper Press: A Study in Working-Class Radicalism of the 1830’s (London: Oxford University Press, 1970); Joel H. Wiener, Descriptive Finding List Of Unstamped British Periodicals, 1830–1836, First Edition edition (Bibliographical Society, 1970).
[8] Brian Lake and Janet Nassau, Street Literature II. Chapbooks & Tracts (Catalogue) (London: Jarndyce & Jarndyce, 2008) lot 73.
[9] Allen, Joan, ‘Catholic Herald’, in Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism (Chadwyck-Healey, 2012), http://c19index.chadwyck.co.uk/home.do.
[10] Annemarie McAllister, ‘Temperance Periodicals’, in The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, ed. Andrew King, Alexis Easley, and John Morton (London: Routledge, 2016), 342–54.