Hewitson was chief reporter of the Preston Guardian. This bi-weekly paper, published every Saturday and Wednesday, was part of an ecology of London and provincial papers worth sketching briefly here.
London morning newspapers such as the Times and the Daily Telegraph are the most well-known type of Victorian paper. These two titles have survived, but other London dailies such as the Daily News (1846–1960), Morning Chronicle (1770–1865), Morning Advertiser (1793–1965) and Morning Post (1772–1937) were also current. These broadsheets, full of classified advertisements (on some days more than half of the Times was advertising), high politics, diplomacy and commercial news focused their coverage on national institutions and events in south-east England,
5 The 1881 figures have been checked, and are probably an error in the original.
Sources: 1851 Census (1852–53, 1691 [parts 1 & 2]); 1861 Census (1863, 3221); 1871 Census (1873, C.872); 1881 Census (1883, C.3722); 1891 Census (1893–94, C.7058);
1901 Census (1904, Cd. 2174).
45%
50%
55%
60%
65%
70%
1851 1861 1871 1881 1891 1901
Author, editor, journalist, writer, reporter, shorthand writer, others engaged in lit etc
Printer
where they sold most copies.6 London evening papers included the Standard (est. 1827), the Pall Mall Gazette (1865–1923) and the Globe (1803–1923); from 1868 the more downmarket halfpenny Echo became popular. Traditionally, London evenings took most of their news from the morning papers, supplemented by original articles of commentary and analysis, and reviews. Small numbers of these London papers (with the possible exception of the Echo, which had higher sales) could be found in reading rooms and middle-class homes in the provinces. The abolition of the compulsory penny stamp in 1855 ended cheap postal distribution of London papers, leading to a significant decline in their provincial circulation.7
The popular London Sunday papers were less reliant on postal distribution and were aimed at a different readership, the lower middle classes. The News of the World (1843–2011) sold nearly 110,000 in 1855, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper (1842–1931) some 2–3,000 fewer and Reynolds’s Newspaper (1851–1967) nearly 50,000 by 1855, the latter particularly popular in the old Chartist strongholds of Lancashire and the West Riding.8 These Sunday newspapers featured sensational, titillating crime reports, literary/humorous tit-bits, gossip and practical advice via
‘Notices to Correspondents’, alongside political and foreign news; they introduced fiction from the 1880s, led by the News of the World, and more sport.9 Other popular London weeklies included the Illustrated London News (1842–2003), the Illustrated Police News (1864–1938) and specialist sporting and religious papers. The weeklies had more varied, magazine-like content than the London dailies.
6 For a more detailed comparison of the Times and other newspapers, see Andrew Hobbs, ‘The Deleterious Dominance of The Times in Nineteenth-Century Scholarship’, Journal of Victorian Culture 18 (2013), https://doi.org/10.1080/13555502.
2013.854519
7 Anon., ‘The Modern Newspaper’, British Quarterly Review, 110 (1872), 348–80 (p. 371).
8 H. R. Fox Bourne, English Newspapers: Chapters in the History of Journalism, Vol. II (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1887); Virginia Berridge, ‘Popular Sunday Newspapers and Mid-Victorian Society’, in Newspaper History from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day, ed. David George Boyce et al. (London: Constable, 1978), pp. 247–64.
9 Berridge; Laurel Brake and Mark W. Turner, ‘Rebranding the News of the World:
1856–90’, in The News of the World and the British Press, 1843–2011, ed. Laurel Brake, Chandrika Kaul, and Mark W. Turner (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 27–42, https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137392053_3
Regional morning newspapers were creations of the post-Stamp Duty era, and had a status second only to the London dailies, on which they were modelled.10 In their circulation areas, they probably outsold all London dailies (see Table 7.11). Many Victorian commentators acknowledged that the provincial dailies, when treated as a body rather than as individual titles, were as significant as the London press:
The provincial morning newspapers […] have, as a whole, a greater weight in the conduct of the affairs of the Empire than the morning papers of London […] the district served by the London press […] does not contain more than six or seven million persons, and to the remaining thirty millions the London press, with the exception of a few of the more widely circulating dailies, is little more than a name.11
The Manchester Guardian (1821–) and the Leeds Mercury (1718–1939) were particularly close in style to the Times. These two papers were already well-established as weekly and bi-weekly papers, while other successful provincial dailies were new titles, such as Liverpool’s Daily Post (1855–) and Sheffield’s Daily Telegraph (1855–). Most sold at a penny by the mid-1860s, with advertising providing most of the income. They were expensive to run, requiring costly telegraphic news and ‘original matter’, and overtime payments for printers working at night.12 Some of these titles set up weekly companion news miscellanies, which became more popular — and profitable — than their daily stablemates, although the genre had largely died out by the 1930s. Early titles included the Glasgow Times (1855–69) and the Manchester Weekly Times (1855–1922), with the Dundee-based People’s Journal (1858–1990) selling more than 100,000 by the late 1860s. They were published on Saturday, and aimed mainly at working-class readers, priced at a penny or twopence. They featured a summary of the week’s regional, national and international news, slanted towards the more sensational stories, plus middle-brow magazine-style material aimed at a family audience, including serial fiction.13 In the 1870s and 1880s they became
10 Maurice Milne, The Newspapers of Northumberland and Durham: A Study of Their Progress during the ‘Golden Age’ of the Provincial Press (Newcastle upon Tyne:
Graham, 1971), p. 19.
11 Arnot Reid, ‘How a Provincial Paper Is Managed’, Nineteenth Century 20 (1886), p. 391.
12 Printers’ Register supplement, 6 August 1870, p. 169.
13 Graham Law, ‘Weekly News Miscellany’, in Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism (DNCJ), ed. Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, online, C19: The Nineteenth Century Index (ProQuest).
the main publishing platform for new novels (Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, for example, was commissioned by the publisher of the Bolton Journal).14 As Graham Law has noted, they published many journalistic genres later identified with the ‘New Journalism’ of the 1880s and 1890s.
While the provincial morning and weekly papers covered whole regions, most (but not all) of the traditional weeklies and bi-weeklies tended to be more local in their coverage and circulation. They were the oldest type of provincial newspaper, dating back to the early eighteenth century, with the Norwich Post (1701–13) and the Bristol Post-Boy (1702–
15) some of the first. The local newspaper market expanded in the 1830s after advertising duty and paper duty were halved, and stamp duty was reduced from 4d to 1d, between 1833 and 1836. (Stamp duty was both a tax — bad for newspapers — and a postage fee — good value for those titles needing postal distribution, particularly London papers.) The highest-circulation papers went from weekly to bi-weekly, and new titles entered the market. The content tended towards a newspaper-magazine hybrid, mixing news and features. Weeklies with good circulations and plenty of advertising could be very profitable — by the 1840s the Hampshire Advertiser made £2,000 a year and the Birmingham Journal £5,000.15 In rural areas, weeklies were typically published from the market town and circulated in all the areas oriented to that market, whilst in more urban areas such as Manchester or Liverpool, they sold across a smaller but much more densely populated territory. There were also some county papers, such as the Westmorland Gazette, published from the county town of Kendal, with an editorial remit to cover the whole shire.
The abolition of the three main newspaper taxes between 1853 and 1861 profoundly altered the economics of newspaper publishing, enabling publishers to reduce their cover prices to as little as a halfpenny, increase their circulations and therefore charge more for advertising, their main source of income (as it had been since the eighteenth century; accurate figures are scarce, but by 1849 the Buckinghamshire Herald received three or four times as much income from advertising as
14 Commissioned by Tillotsons, the manuscript was rejected on grounds of taste.
15 F. David Roberts, ‘Still More Early Victorian Newspaper Editors’, Victorian Periodicals Newsletter, 18 (1972), 12–26.
from sales, for example).16 The number of local weekly papers roughly doubled, from 363 in 1856 to 698 in 1866, according to Mitchell’s Newspaper Press Directory (Introduction, Table 0.1). Weeklies were at the centre of this golden age of the local press.17
However, the late 1850s and the first half of the 1860s were a volatile time for local newspapers, as many new entrants joined — and left — the market and experimented with new formats and publishing models.
Throughout the nineteenth century, but particularly at this time, the most common business model for a newspaper was to launch with too little capital, lose a great deal of money and then fold in a matter of weeks.18
Magazines accounted for only thirty per cent of the periodicals market in the 1860s, newspapers around seventy per cent.19 In contrast to newspapers, most magazines were published in London, with the most popular featuring serial fiction, alongside ‘humour, fiction, poetry, gossip […] general interest articles and answers to correspondents’. These included Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper (1853–1932), Chambers’s Journal (1832–1956), the Family Herald (1842–
1940), London Journal (1845–1928) and All The Year Round (1859–95).20 One of the only provincial magazine genres to be successful was the satirical and comic periodical of the late 1860s to the mid-1890s, often named after small but annoying creatures. Notable examples included Liverpool’s Porcupine (1860–1915) and Manchester’s City Jackdaw (1874–84).21
16 Martin Hewitt, The Dawn of the Cheap Press in Victorian Britain: The End of the ‘Taxes on Knowledge’, 1849–1869 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), p. 23.
17 For more details see Andrew Hobbs, ‘Provincial Periodicals’, in The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, ed. by Andrew King, Alexis Easley, and John Morton (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), pp. 221–33, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315613345; Hobbs, ‘Deleterious Dominance’.
18 Hewitt, p. 14.
19 Simon Eliot, Some Patterns and Trends in British Publishing, 1800–1919 (London:
Bibliographical Society, 1994), p. 83.
20 Laurel Brake, ‘Markets, Genres, Iterations’, in Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, pp. 237–48 (p. 242).
21 Simon Gunn, The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class: Ritual and Authority in the English Industrial City, 1840–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London:
Verso, 2003).
Table 4.1. Newspapers and periodicals published in Preston, Lancashire 1800–1900.22 Author’s diagram, CC BY 4.0.
22 Sources: British Library catalogue, John S. North, ed., The Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800–1900 (North Waterloo Academic Press);
Anthony Hewitson, History of Preston (Wakefield: S. R. Publishers [first published 1883], 1969), pp. 341–44.
1Philatelic World (1899) 2Preston Argus (1897–1917) - MonthlySatiricalMagazine 3Cross Fleury's Journal(1896–1900?)MonthlyMiscMagazine 4Empire Journal (1896–1897)Monthly/WeeklyMiscMagazine 5Preston Monthly Circular(1895–1915)MonthlyAdvertiser 6Lancashire Catholic(1895–1902)MonthlyCatholicMagazine 7Upward (1895?–1900)MonthlyTemperanceMagazine 8Preston Co-operative Record (1894–1920)MonthlyMembershipMagazine 9Faith Of Our Fathers (1891–?)MonthlyCatholicMagazine 10Preston Weekly Advertiser (1890–1894?)WeeklyAdvertiser 11The Antidote(1890–1892)WeeklyCatholic, polemicalMagazine 12Financial Opinion(1889)Financial 13Catholic News (1889–1934)WeeklyCatholicNewspaper 14Onward (1888–?)MonthlyTemperanceMagazine 15Lancashire Evening/Daily Post(1886 to date)EveningNewspaper 16Preston Football News (1885)WeeklyFootballNewspaper 17National Fair Trader (1884)WeeklyProtectionistNewspaper 18Preston Telegraph (1881)Weekly?SportsNewspaper 19The Echo(1880)MonthlySatiricalMagazine 20The Wasp (1878)WeeklySatiricalMagazine 21Commercial Traveller's Review (1874–75) 22Preston Penny News (1874)WeeklyNewspaper 23Preston Sun (1874)WeeklyNewspaper 24Preston Illustrated Times(1874)WeeklyIllustratedNewspaper 25Preston Daily Guardian (1870)MorningNewspaper 26Preston Evening News (1870–1871)EveningNewspaper 27Preston Evening Express (1870)EveningNewspaper 28Longworth’s Preston Advertiser(1867–1882)MonthlyMiscAdvertiser 29Staunch Teetotaller (1867–68)MonthlyTemperanceMagazine 30Collector's Circular(1865–66) 31Preston Mercury(1861)WeeklyNewspaper 32Mitchell's Monthly Preston Advertiser (Oct–Nov 1859)MonthlyAdvertiser 33Preston Herald & General Advertiser(1855–1970)Weekly/bi-weeklyNewspaper 34Preston Standard and Northern Weekly Advertiser (1855–56)WeeklyNewspaper 35Preston Illustrated General Advertiser(1854–55)WeeklyIllustratedMagazine? 36Livesey's Progressionist(1852–53)WeeklyPoliticalMagazine 37Weekly/bi-weeklyNewspaper 38Preston Magazine & Christian's Miscellany (1843)MonthlyAnglican, anti-RCMagazine 39The Struggle (1841–46)WeeklyAnti-Corn LawsMagazine 40Pollard’s Preston Advertiser(1840–41)Advertiser 41Livesey's Moral Reformer (1838–39)WeeklyPolitical, temperanceMagazine 42Preston Observer (1837–40)WeeklyNewspaper 43Youthful Tee-totaller (1836)Temperance 44Preston Temperance Advocate(1834–37)WeeklyTemperanceMagazine 45An Address From One of the 3730 Electors of Preston (1831–32)WeeklyPoliticalNewspaper 46Moral Reformer(1831–33)WeeklyPolitical, temperanceMagazine 47The Crisis, or Star to the Great Northern Union(Sept–Aug 1830)Weekly?Political Magazine 48Preston Pilot(1825–1888)WeeklyNewspaper 49Preston Sentinel (1821–22)WeeklyNewspaper 50Preston Chronicle(1812–1893)WeeklyNewspaper 51Preston Journal (1807–12)WeeklyNewspaper
Preston Guardian (1844–1964)
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