ABSTRACT
There are many similarities between the concerns of the Victorian era and those of today. For example, just like contemporary observers, the Victorians worried about the commercialisation and sensationalism of the press, the impact of advertising, an increasing concentration of ownership and a decline in serious political coverage (in Negrine 1994: 38–39). Plus ça change. From the mid-Victorian era, following the collapse of radical newspapers, a new target audience was identified in the prosperous lower middle classes and growing industrial bourgeoisie. The working-class Sunday papers had already altered the selection and presentation of news, parcelling stories into ‘short and easily digestible portions’ and emphasising the sensational (Wheeler 1997: 40–41), suggesting that there existed a potentially large working-class readership for similar daily newspapers. Cheap daily newspapers had appeared, but they were not aimed at the Sunday papers’ more working-class readership. Launched in 1855, the one-penny Daily Telegraph soon became popular, but it differed very little from its more expensive contemporaries (Engel 1997: 37). The remarkable thing was the late Victorian press’s resemblance to the pre-Victorian press with few changes to design or marketing (Koss 1990: 431). The time was ripe for a daily paper that would introduce a livelier journalism appealing to the respectable working class and the upwardly mobile lower middle class.
