ABSTRACT
The parliamentary campaign against ‘the taxes on knowledge’ is generally portrayed as a triumphant struggle for press freedom, sustained by an amalgam of special interests but motivated largely by libertarian ideals in opposition to the authoritarian legacy of the past.1 The only discordant note in this inspiring account comes from the parliamentary campaigners celebrated in this historical legend. Their aims and, indeed, their public utterances are difficult to reconcile with the historic role assigned to them in liberal ideology. Widespread evasion of the stamp duty in the early 1830s caused press
regulation to become a major political issue. Traditionalists argued that the government should enforce the stamp duty with tougher measures, while a relatively small group of reformers in Parliament argued that the stamp duty had become unenforceable in the face of mass resistance and should be repealed. The two sides in the debate did not disagree over objectives so much as over tactics. As the Lord Chancellor succinctly put it in 1834,
the only question to answer, and the only problem to solve, is how they [the people] shall read in the best manner; how they shall be instructed politically, and have political habits formed the most safe for the constitution of the country.
