ABSTRACT
Financial journalism in the UK is almost two hundred years old, first emerging in tandem with the expansion of capital markets in the early nineteenth century. However, historians have neglected financial journalism’s origins, with most research focusing on the period from the 1880s, which saw the arrival of the financial dailies.1 But understanding the earlier history is important because many issues that have emerged in the wake of the recent global financial crisis – the quality of financial reporting, the role of the press in hyping investment bubbles, the ethical standards of financial journalists, and ambiguity over which constituencies they aspire to serve – first rose to prominence during the first three quarters of that earlier turbulent century. Nineteenth-century crises – in particular those of 1825, 1845, and 1866 – presented challenges to the new profession of financial journalism, but also opportunities, and if the picture that emerges is not quite a heroic story of an idealistic press opening up the secretive City to the public gaze, nor is it the catalogue of shortcomings and failures suggested by some media scholars.2 This chapter begins by exploring financial journalism in its earliest forms, emphasizing the crucial impact of the speculative boom of the early to mid 1820s. It goes on to chart the rising power and prestige of financial journalism, taking in the rise of the specialist press connected with the railway booms of the 1830s and 1840s. The third section moves on to the 1860s and 1870s, when crisis and scandal highlighted to the public the fallibilities of financial journalists. It explains how the financial press was able to retain its credibility, the chief factor being the various benefits it brought the investing public.
