ABSTRACT
The daily newspaper first appeared in 1702. Newspapers thrived as people enjoyed their newly found freedom of expression following the collapse of state censorship in 1695. Weekly, tri-weekly and daily newspapers arrived and departed at a rapid rate in London, but by the 1750s the London press had established itself at the heart of national life and politics. Weekly newspapers outside the capital city began to emerge: between 1714 and 1725, 22 provincial newspapers were born and the total number is estimated to have increased from 25 in 1735, rising to 35 in 1760 and around 50 in 1780.2 This led the British Observer in 1733 to report ‘a general complaint that there is already such a glut of newspapers and weekly pamphlets’.3
Scotland produced another nine newspapers by the end of the century, although Wales had to wait until the start of the nineteenth century for its first home-grown newspaper. More significantly, the annual consumption of newspapers rose dramatically, from an estimated 2.5 million in 1712-13 to 7.3 million in 1750 and 12.6 million in 1775. This expansion represented the birth of the modern newspaper and many of the features we associate today with the newspaper. A leading historian of the eighteenth-century press emphasises that the
‘form and character of the newspaper’ were established by ‘a series of adjustments focused in the first half of the century’.4 The first adjustment was to the State, which, following the ‘inundation’ of newspapers in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, resorted to the law and taxation to damp down the flow of news and information in the press. The laws of blasphemy, sedition and libel were used by successive governments to influence what was reported. The system of press taxation introduced in 1712
remained the main tool to control the press until the mid-nineteenth century. These taxes had a profound impact on the newspaper, the kind of reporting it undertook, as well as its shape and appearance. The aim of the government was to put newspapers out of business by taxing them beyond the means of ordinary people. This did not happen – as the thirst for news propelled the press forward. What contemporaries called the ‘furious itch for novelty’ could not be contained. Nevertheless the growth of the press was arrested and the kind of newspaper that emerged was strongly shaped by these taxes. They ensured that many newspapers operated at the financial margins, relying on individual or party bribes to print ‘puffs’ or suppress gossip to keep on publishing. Operating at the margins meant that there were insufficient resources for news gathering, so opinion, comment and essays were important components of these newspapers. It also ensured the press was closely allied to politics, with individual titles usually serving the interests of a politician or political party or political faction. Newspapers in eighteenthcentury Britain were organs of political opinion and their publishers and contributors were men – and sometimes women – who could be bribed, bought and paid off. Newspapers also had to adjust to the demands of the marketplace. The rise
of the ‘leisured’ class increased the purchasing power of a section of British society. As the century progressed, newspapers became increasingly profitable ventures, so much so that an effective newspaper entrepreneur could, as Jeremy Black5 observes, counteract fiscal constraints imposed by the State by increasing readership and/or advertising revenue. Advertising gradually became an important source of revenue; as early as 1705 one of the leading newspaper figures of the period, Daniel Defoe, could comment that ‘the principal support of all the public papers now on foot depends on advertisements’.6
More advertisements were carried and newspapers started to specialise in particular kinds of advertising. The organisation of the newspaper changed as sales, profits and revenues rose. The early eighteenth-century newspaper was typically a one-man operation; at most it involved a handful of people. By the end of the century more and more people were participating in the production of the newspaper, with the employment of specialist writers and news gatherers. The content diversified as news and politics were complemented by other kinds of stories. A more dynamic entrepreneurial culture pervaded the business, with a corresponding shift from politics to profits in determining the content and composition of the newspaper. The term ‘newspaper’ was first used in the 1670s but what constituted
the ‘newspaper’ took on a variety of formats, styles and content for most of the eighteenth century.7 It is not until the 1780s that it is possible to see the basic shape of the modern British newspaper emerge. Regular publication, a particular appearance and a specific mix of stories developed from responses to the political, social, economic and cultural change in eighteenth-century Britain. Standardisation in the form and character of the
newspaper was a response to commercialisation. Newspapers became businesses in their own right, transforming the relationship between them and their readers. Newspapers increasingly claimed to speak on behalf of the public, defined as their readers, rather than parties, factions or sectional interests.
