Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

4 Read All About It:Buying the News (#ulink_3492edf2-3230-5dee-b7d9-069767b44d4a)

THE CREATION of the earliest newspapers was a by-product of an event that occurred owing to ‘something of a legislative accident’, a governmental absence of mind.

(#litres_trial_promo) Government censorship of printed material had collapsed during the Civil War and the Interregnum, but the return of Charles II in 1660, and the Licensing Act of 1662, had reasserted control over the content of all books, pamphlets and other publications, requiring prior consent for each and every publication, and, further, restricting the printing trade to a mere twenty approved printers. In 1695 the act lapsed, with no replacement bill in sight. With it went parliamentary control of the printers and prior consent for printed material. The situation that is now in place more or less began then: anyone could print anything without first gaining legislative permission, although the laws of blasphemy, sedition and libel controlled, postpublication, what could be published.

Within weeks of the disappearance of prior censorship, an unlisted printer set up in Bristol; more soon appeared in other cities. Only six years later, in 1701, what may have been the first newspaper in Britain was published: the Norwich Post. The first London paper was not far behind, appearing in 1702. By 1709 there were 19 papers in London alone, between them putting out 55 editions a week; by 1760 there had been at least 150 papers over the intervening 58 years, many of which had survived very briefly. Enough had survived that 35 provincial papers had by that date a combined circulation of 200,000.

(#litres_trial_promo) This sounds like nothing - an average circulation of fewer than 6,000 copies - but by the standards of the day it was considerable: the Salisbury Journal, which sold a ‘few thousand’ copies a week, had the same circulation as a successful newspaper in Paris.

(#litres_trial_promo) The first daily paper in France did not appear until the last quarter of the eighteenth century, by which time there were more than 50 papers in England and 9 in Scotland. Wales did not get its first English-language paper until 1804, although there had probably been a Welsh-language paper as early as 1705 or 1706 (of which no copy has survived); by 1785 the population of Ireland (variously suggested at between 2.8 million and 4 million)* (#litres_trial_promo) was buying 45,000 copies of newspapers a week in Dublin and 2,000 in the provinces.

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The pattern was set early in the eighteenth century. The St Ives Post was founded in Cambridgeshire in 1717, but failed very quickly. It was then acquired by Robert Raikes, who went into partnership with a printer, William Dicey, and together they set up the St Ives Mercury.† (#litres_trial_promo) Soon after, in 1720, they moved it and themselves to Northampton, where they were the town’s first printers, transforming their paper into the Northampton Mercury, which flourished by covering far more territory than the name ‘Northampton’ would suggest. It boasted that it went further in length, than any other country newspaper in England, covering nineteen counties.

(#litres_trial_promo) Newspapers had to appeal to as wide a public as they could reach geographically, because of the small circulation figures: an average provincial newspaper sold 200 copies a week, while by midcentury the larger ones in more urbanized areas might sell 2,000 a week. In 1761, for example, Aris’s Birmingham Gazette advertised that it had agents in London, Shrewsbury, Wolverhampton, Worcester, Bridgnorth, Newcastle under Lyme, Lichfield, Stafford, Dudley, Walsall and Stratford-upon-Avon; in 1755 the Bristol Journal’s agents were as far distant as Liverpool, Sherborne and Gloucester. Agents sent local news to the paper, took in advertisements, and, most importantly, arranged the complicated logistics of moving their paper around the country. The Cambridge Chronicle and Journal in 1773 promised:

This PAPER is dispatched Northwards every Friday Night, by the Caxton Post [i.e. the stagecoach], as far as York, Newcastle and Carlisle; through the Counties of Cambridge, Huntingdon, Bedford, Buckingham, Rutland, Leicester, Nottingham, Lincoln, Northampton, Norfolk, Hereford, Essex and the Isle of Ely, by the Newsmen; to London the next Morning, by the Coach and Fly; and to several Parts of Suffolk, &c. by other Conveyances. - Persons living at a Distance from such Places as the newsmen go through, may have the Paper left where they shall please to appoint.

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The small circulations had two causes. First, the population, while rising rapidly, was still low when compared to the nineteenth century; there was nothing to be done about this. The second was a high unit price, and this too was a problem without a solution, because all newspapers were forced into artificially high prices by swingeing newspaper taxes. By the time of the French Revolution there were sixteen daily papers in London, two that came out twice a week, and seven that were issued three times a week, while 8.6 million copies of London papers were dispatched annually to the country.

(#litres_trial_promo) The government taxed newspapers both to raise revenue and as a way of controlling a potentially seditious press. By the end of the century, newspapers carried a tax of 4d. a copy: a paper that would otherwise have cost 1d. or 2d. could not be sold for less than 5d. when it was properly stamped to show that the appropriate tax had been paid. This meant that only the prosperous could buy a newspaper regularly. That this was a straightforward targeting of the working classes by rationing their reading matter, and thus the ideas that reached them, is not a retrospective twenty-first-century reading of the situation. The Seditious Societies Act of 1799, passed as an anti-Jacobin act, was reconfirmed in 1811 specifically to stop ‘cheap publications adapted to influence and pervert the public mind’. Many outside government saw cheap reading matter for the masses as a real threat - the Society for the Suppression of Vice, run by the Church and the upper classes (with the Duke of Wellington as its patron), paid rewards to members of the public who turned in newspapers, books and pamphlets that had been published in breach of the act. (Even at the time, the more unpleasant aspects of this class- and income-bound separation of access to information were apparent. The Revd Sydney Smith remarked that the Society’s proper title should be ‘The Society for the Suppressing of the Vices of Persons whose Income does not Exceed £500 per annum’.)

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High taxation, however, did not do what the government had intended. Instead of spending - or not spending - 6d. on a paper (7d. by 1815), people found various ways of reading communally. By 1789 the Secretary of the Treasury estimated that every paper in London was read by as many as twenty to thirty people, and then it was sent to the country, where it was read by even more.

(#litres_trial_promo) In 1799 a surgeon in Devon had the London Courier sent to him regularly; it was then read by a French émigré, who in turn handed it to a Congregational minister, who passed it to a druggist, who gave it to an assistant schoolmaster. That was the first day. On day two the paper went to another resident, who passed it to a ‘sergemaker’; from there it went to unnamed and unnumbered ‘common people’. All of these readers would have contributed to the cost of the paper, in diminishing shares as they reached the bottom of the list.

Other people formed themselves into ‘newspaper societies’, in which people clubbed together to buy a regular paper: the Monthly Magazine in 1821 said there were ‘not less than 5,000’ groups of this sort, and thought that this might mean there were as many 50,000 families who had contact with a society.

(#litres_trial_promo) Other, more social, clubs started with similar aims: in Edinburgh, the ‘first thing that induced us to join in a society was the reading of…Spectators’, said one of the founders of the Easy Club.

(#litres_trial_promo) The simplest and the least restricting way to get the news was to go into a pub or a coffee house, where the paper could be read for the price of a cup of coffee and 1d. Most coffee houses had reading rooms, which could be joined for anything from 1s. a year upward, and they kept newspapers and books for their readers - by 1742 booksellers were already complaining about the ‘the scandalous and Low Custom that has lately prevail’d amongst those who keep Coffee houses, of buying one of any new Book…and lending it by Turns to such Gentlemen to read as frequent their Coffee house’. In 1773 Thomas Campbell went into the Chapter Coffee House because he heard it ‘was remarkable for a large collection of books, & a reading society…I…found all the new publications I sought, & I believe what I am told that all the new books are laid in.’ He later saw a whitesmith, or tin worker, ‘in his apron & [with] some of his saws under his arm, [who] came in, sat down and called for his glass of punch and the paper, both of which he used with as much ease as a Lord’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Pubs were equally welcoming, usually just hanging a sign ‘requesting gentlemen not to monopolise the current day’s paper’ for more than five minutes at a time.

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By this time, coffee houses were part of the landscape. The first coffee house in England may have appeared in Oxford, but the first of which we have any concrete information was in London. A merchant who had lived in Smyrna found, on his return in 1657, that

The Novelty of [the coffee his Greek servant made for him] drew so great Resort to his House, that he lost all the Fore-part of the Day by it; insomuch that he thought it expedient to rid himself of this Trouble, by allowing his Greek servant (in conjunction with his son-in-law’s Coachman) to make and sell it publically [sic]. They set up their Coffee-House in St Michael’s Alley in Cornhill, which was the first in London.

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They were on to a winning thing, for over the next five years another 83 coffee houses appeared; by 1801 there were 500 in London alone, and they had developed as places to drink coffee and meet friends, and, equally importantly, as places to conduct business.

Outside London, much social life was maintained in these coffee rooms: they were centres of information and news, and they served a wide range of readers, from the whitesmith to the idle dandy. By 1833 the Manchester Coffee and Newsroom took 96 papers a week, plus several periodicals and reviews; it cost 1d. to sit and read, 2d. with coffee thrown in. The Exchange Coffee House, also in Manchester, riposted with 130 papers a week, 186 on Saturdays, as well as a range of foreign papers.

(#litres_trial_promo) The upper classes had their own coffee houses, particularly in the spa and resort towns. In 1739 Tunbridge Wells had three coffee houses that we know of, perhaps more, where for 5s. visitors could have ‘the use of pens, ink, paper &c.’ In Bath, the fashionable coffee house was Morgan’s, where, jibed one satirist, regular customer

…cannot drink his coffee with a goû t, ‘Till he has read the papers thro and thro…

Another visitor

…joined by a whole unthinking crowd, At least once ev’ry day calls out, aloud, Boy, does the London post go out?

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What time the post went out was becoming an increasingly important question for newspapers and their readers. As we saw above, newspapers were transported by an elaborate system of stagecoach routes in the early part of the century. From the beginning of the eighteenth century, newspapers had been carried post-free, as a way of increasing the circulation of pro-government papers around the country. By 1782 the Post Office was sending 3 million papers a year from London to the country, and in 1788, a parliamentary inquiry recommended that a separate newspaper office be set up by the Post Office to deal with the volume. The Post Office was happy to comply: fraud was keeping its income down. In 1710 the Flying Post newspaper had routinely left a section of the page blank, so that people could write a message of some length and then legitimately send the paper on through the post without paying for it.

(#litres_trial_promo) This had been halted, but there was still nothing to stop individuals slipping letters between the pages and posting the newspapers on without charge. It was hoped that a separate department could give better oversight to the problem.

Certainly it could improve the delivery service. The old system of post boys had asked them to travel at a rate of seven miles per hour in summer, five miles per hour in winter, but this was next to impossible to achieve, given the state of the roads. Ralph Allen, from Bath, had done as much as was possible. One of the early eighteenth-century developers of Bath as a leisure town, he had been a shareholder in the Avon Navigation System, and he had furthermore acted as postmaster for the town. By 1719 he had taken charge of all the post roads nationally - that is, the six roads that carried the inter-city posts, which were, in theory, partly maintained by the government. By the time Allen died, in 1764, he had overseen the development of these six roads into a network of nearly twenty main arteries that now reached the new manufacturing towns as well as a number of subsidiary routes. He had also begun to regularize deliveries so that an extensive six-day-a-week service was beginning to emerge.

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After his death, however, the system stopped improving and simply stagnated. The post was still being carried by boys on broken-down packhorses, or on small carts. Twenty years later, a letter sent from London to Birmingham on a Monday could not be acknowledged that same week.

(#litres_trial_promo) John Palmer, who held a patent for theatres in Bath and Bristol, grew impatient with the state of communications along the roads and determined to follow in the footsteps of his Bath predecessor. In 1784 he presented to William Pitt, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, a system he had devised to set up contracts with stagecoach owners, who would carry the post in newly designated mailcoaches at between eight and nine miles per hour, providing changes of horse as necessary. They would have an armed guard to sit next to the coachmen, and commit themselves to meeting exact schedules, which would mean that each postmaster would now know exactly what time his post was leaving - and would arrive.* (#litres_trial_promo) To increase speed still further, these mailcoaches would also be exempt from toll fares along the turnpikes. Pitt agreed to a trial, and the Bristol-London route was chosen. The coach was to leave Bristol at 4 p.m., and was scheduled to arrive in London at 8 a.m. the next morning. It arrived well within that time and, with Pitt’s help, by early 1875 mailcoaches were running in Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, and on the cross roads between Bristol and Portsmouth. By the summer, Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool had their own coaches; by October, mailcoaches had reached Milford Haven and Holyhead, Birmingham, Carlisle, Dover, Gloucester, Nottingham, Shrewsbury and Worcester. (Now that letter from London to Birmingham could be acknowledged in a mere two days.) By the following summer the 400 miles between Edinburgh and London could be traversed in 60 hours, down from the 85 it had taken 25 years before. (Further development in Scotland had to wait because its road improvements lagged behind England’s: until 1800 there was only one all-Scottish mailcoach route, Edinburgh to Aberdeen, which after some years was finally extended to Thurso, then to Inverness and on to the Highlands.)

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Time, and the spending of it, began to take on more urgency. (It would become a more compelling subject still with the arrival of the railways; see pp. 194-5.) Advertisements for stagecoaches before the turnpike age had said that coaches would arrive ‘in about two days’, or ‘if the roads are good’. Now the Post Office was determined that outside conditions should not interfere. In 1789 snow had caused a driver on the Glasgow route to spend twelve days almost entirely on the road, ‘to get the coach through on time’; he was so exhausted by this feat that he had to stay in bed for a week afterwards, but the Post Office paid for his recuperation period in order to encourage others to emulate his dedication.

(#litres_trial_promo) In a similar manner, while newspapers continued to be carried free if they were brought to the post office before 7 p.m., there was a surcharge of

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d. per paper if they came after that hour, to discourage late delivery and permit the eight o’clock mailcoach to depart on schedule.

(#litres_trial_promo) (Although this is not to say that there was not always a way around the schedule: the General Evening Post struck a deal with the Post Office, paying a flat fee so that, even if its papers were late, the mailcoaches would wait for them.)

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Getting the post to the country was, in many ways, the same thing as getting the news to the country. In the 1810s, some newspapers began to produce boards with breaking news on them, to stand outside the offices of local distributors and to hang on the sides of the mailcoaches as they raced through towns and countryside. In 1837 the Reading Mercury had placards on mailcoaches giving the news of William IV’s death, and ‘in less than an hour…there was scarcely a person within the borough’ who had not heard: unimaginable speed.

(#litres_trial_promo) In the 1770s, during the American Revolution, and through the late 1780s, with the impeachment and trial of Warren Hastings, the concept of parliamentary reporting in the newspapers was created. There were no facilities for writing in the House of Commons, so the Gazetteer paid ‘impecunious barristers’ to sit in relays, listen, then rush across to the newspaper’s office and scribble down a précis of what they had heard for publication. Evening newspapers, with the day’s news in them, could by 1875 reach some parts of the country by morning: the Courier went from selling 1,500 copies to selling 7,000 in four years (it was also the first paper to have a second edition).

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All this created a demand for news, and newspapers, but what really drove the engine was advertising. This had been fundamental to local papers from the earliest days: Dicey and Raikes’s Northampton Mercury had carried advertisements for retailers in Northampton, St Ives, Daventry, Loughborough and Boston.

(#litres_trial_promo) As early as 1750 the advertisements in many local papers swallowed up half of the available space (there is a reason, after all, that ‘Advertiser’ was a popular name for newspapers).

Sophie von la Roche, in 1786, wrote to her family in Germany describing the contents of the daily papers (which she numbered in London at twenty-one). The proportion of news to advertisements and announcements was fairly standard: