ABSTRACT
In the Rare Books Room of the University of Sheffield’s main library, history is unfolding before my eyes in the form of bound original copies of the Sheffield Register newspaper dating from around the time of the French Revolution. That was a time when Sheffield was known as one of the most radical towns in England, prompting the king to describe it as a ‘damned bad place’ (Price, 2008: xi). It was the sort of time when ‘every cutler in Sheffield’ had a copy of Tom Paine’s combustible book, The Rights Of Man, a court heard (Harrison, 1974: 30). The Sheffield Register, published by Joseph Gales from 1787 to 1794, printed extracts of work by Paine himself as well as other radicals, but it also carried more of its own reporting than did many earlier such publications, setting ‘new standards in provincial journalism, abandoning the pasteand-scissors copying of the London press, and presenting original editorial articles’ (Thompson, 1968: 166). The issue dated 2 July 1790, for example, listed the precise number of electors who were then allowed to vote for each member of the House of Commons: like a scene from an old episode of the television comedy Blackadder, the size of the electorate ranged from 40 voters down to just one, giving a whole new meaning to the slogan, ‘One man, one vote’. This denial of any real democracy in Britain was a core issue for alternative
publications of the time, as was a concern for human rights not just at home but also overseas. The 22 January 1790 issue of the Sheffield Register reported on a meeting held to campaign for the abolition of the trade in African slaves, giving the lie to that old canard about how ‘everybody’ at the time accepted the slave trade as merely part of business as usual. ‘Foreign intelligence’ was included in the four-page weekly newspaper, alongside local news, reports from London, shipping news from Hull and Liverpool, letters, essays, poems, market prices and adverts for cures for toothache and the like. Each edition also carried a list of shops that stocked the paper, something that many alternative publications still did two centuries later.
