ABSTRACT
By 1800 there was a flourishing provincial and national press, the latter using the mail-coach system to cover the country. Increased production came with the development of steam printing, used on The Times by 1814, but newspapers bore a heavy stamp duty until 1855, restricting their readership largely to the upper and middle classes. Cheaper newspapers became possible after 1855 and improved public education led to the birth of mass circulation papers such as Alfred Harmsworth’s Daily Mail, started in 1896. The number of newspapers grew most rapidly in the late nineteenth and the first part of the twentieth century.
