News and Print in Victorian London
The industrial revolution, typography, printing, and the digital humanities.
Written communication is incredibly telling, and type as a medium for communication is particularly interesting. The form of a letter can exist in a seemingly infinite number of variations and still retain legibility, with differences and styles throughout this range allowing insight to the age and location a letterform has originated from.
These symbols not only make sense when looked at, they can be converted into sound, or speech. Grouped together they can build up ideas of immense complexity, or beauty, or subtlety, or outrage. They order up, help up, guide us, inform us, entertain us, enable us to navigate life and the world with precision and, to a large extent, clarity. Alan Bartram Typeforms: A History
We are currently in the midst of a typographic revolution that appears to be a part of a larger digital revolution, spurring the increased onset of global networks, open resources, and the availability of specialized information, specific to a certain subject or field. One such resource being Lee Jackson’s Dictionary of Victorian London.
Given an inclination towards type and technology, entries regarding Newspapers in London and Printing come across as particularly interesting. At this time in London, mass production and industrialization were well underway. As such there had been huge advances in both print and type design, which often can seem to converge. Tobias Frere-Jones has written about this in the context of New York City in his post titled ‘My Kind of Neighborhood.’
During the Victorian era in London, advances in printing allowed reading material to become more accessible, allowing literacy rates to increase and audiences for publications such as Newspapers to expand. From the entry in the Victorian Dictionary on News in London, we find that the circulation for morning papers to be around 28,000, and the circulation for evening papers to be around 12,000. Sunday papers surpass these counts with circulation coming in at around 110,000 copies. As is such with revolutions, things change fast. At the time, there was also a stamp duty on Newspapers, now allowing insight into the expansion of newsprint readership and adoption over a relatively short amount of time. Pulling again from the entry, data regarding this includes that in a half year ending April 5th, 1836, nearly 14,900,000 papers were stamped. Following this, in the half year ending April 5th, 1837 — a single year later — about 21,400,000 papers had been stamped.
This had been made possible in large part by advances in technology. Fervently interested in the news, there was now a market of readers to be filled, and with that a profit to be made. From the book Meggs History of Graphic Design the point is made that these innovations in technology also sparked innovations in type:
The cheaper, more abundant merchandise now available stimulated a mass market and even greater demand. As this supply-and-demand cycle became the force behind relentless industrial development, graphics played an important role in marketing factory output.
So, type design became a huge part of society. With the production of type becoming easier and more cost efficient, all sorts of new and perhaps eccentric type was unleashed. Here is the arrival of bold fat-faced type, heavy egyptian slabs, some absolutely gorgeous Clarendons, lively tuscan serifs, and plentiful outlier type designs.
But designing new and innovative letter forms without a way to print or share them would put their creators at a loss, if not at least financially. Luckily, technology in regards to printing presses also developed. This meant that newspapers could output increasing numbers of imprints per hour, allowing the growing demand of news readers in London to be satisfied without a huge delay in time. From the entry on Newspapers in London, it’s said that the morning papers are published in time for early railway trains, with the first few thousand copies printed going into the provinces. Copies going towards the metropolitan area usually reached the inhabitants of London at approximately 9h, right around the normal time to breakfast.
The rise in demand for printed matter required that type compositors work quickly so that copies could be printed and delivered without suffering delays. This wasn’t without some fun, though. Sometimes compositors would even compete with each other to see who was the fastest (fun fact courtesy of A. Hoener). Nevertheless, the need for work to be completed with accelerated pace perhaps led to the dramatic decrease in the quality of news typesetting that is still prevalent today, with too narrow columns of fully justified text, causing brusque alternations between opulent word spacing and far too tight letter spacing, not to mention an endless amount of rivers, widows and orphans. Self-proclaimed ‘Typomaniac’ Erik Spiekermann has commented on news type in his book Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works:
Newspaper typography has created some of the very worst typefaces, typesetting, and page layouts known to mankind. Yet we put up with bad line breaks, huge word spaces, and ugly type, because that is what we are used to. After all, who keeps a newspaper longer than it takes to read it? And if it looked any better, would we still trust it to be objective?
The degradation in type setting may also be the result of the manner compositors were compensated. From the Victorian Dictionary’s entry on printers, it is mentioned that compositors were paid by the number of letters they set, and lost money with mistakes made in setting the copy.
Good and bad are the results of a revolution. The industrial revolution yielded new technology for printing and manufacturing type, the emergence of new letter forms, and increased literacy — all of which is absolutely great. We are currently in the midst of another type revolution, figuring out what type wants to be in a digital age. Gorgeous web type is emerging, as well as new technology that makes it further possible. Additionally on the web is a wonderful community built upon sharing. The development of emerging technologies does not rest upon the shoulders of one person — it’s a collective effort. As is the same within the field of Digital Humanities. We have all sorts of information available on the web, and are steadily developing and expanding the digital tools we have to help us get the most out of it.
“The fact is that the mind thinks with ideas not information, so acquiring knowledge is useless unless one learns how to use it. A dictionary may contain all the words but no one can tell a poet which to choose or what to write.”
Alan Fletcher The Art of Looking Sideways
Always eager to expand upon my knowledge base, I’d be delighted to receive any corrections, additional information, thoughts and ideas. Written as part of @DHM293
