ABSTRACT
During the half-century following the repeal of the ‘taxes on knowledge’, a number of radical newspapers closed down or were eventually incorporated, such as the Reynolds News, into the mainstream of popular Liberal journalism. Militant journalism survived only in the etiolated form of small circulation national periodicals and struggling local weeklies. Yet this decline occurred during a period of rapid press expansion, when local daily papers were established in all the major urban centres of Britain and a new generation of predominantly right-wing national newspapers came into being. These included newspapers such as the People (1881), Daily Mail (1896), Daily Express (1900) and Daily Mirror (1903), which have played a prominent role in British journalism ever since.
