ABSTRACT
The proliferation of different types of periodical publil:ation also led contemporaries to question the relevance of the traditional notion of the liberty of the press. What, it was asked, was 'the press' in this new industrialised market-place? Even the newspaper itself seemed to evade all rational attempts at definition. In 1896, Sir Hugh Gilzean-Reid and P.J. Macdonell dated 'the modern press' from the joint occurrence in 1861 of the removal of the paper duty and the outbreak of the American Civil War, but conceded that the many-sidedness of the newspaper rendered it a most difficult commodity to describe with any degree of precision. What possible connection, the authors speculated, linked such titles as the Licensed Victuallers' Mirror with the Spectator, or the Daily Chronicle with the Sporting Times ? Yet , 'all these discordant elements make up THE PRESS, and to the careful inquirer certain things will be found common to all' .'H It is, perhaps, significant, that nowhere in their survey do they suggest what those 'certain things' were. Furthermore, each of the newspaper historians, whose work will be considered in greater detail in a later chapter, proffered different definitions of what a newspaper actually was. Knight Hunt, for example, was satisfied with a broad definition of material published at fixed intervals and sequentially numbered, whereas Alexander Andrews included 'newes' books and ballads within his definition of newspaper journalism. In France, Eugene Hatin wrote only of 'The Periodical Press','~ whilst in the United States, Horace Greely included anything printed as often as once a week, or had 'the appearance of a newspaper'. Exasperated, Greely eventually left it to the postmaster to decide what was and was not a newspaper by defining it as any publication that was subject to the newspaper rate of postage. British law was equally imprecise. In 1819, 60 George III had for the first time distinguished 'public news' as a category of text quite distinct from material that was 'newly published', and introduced also the classification of news commentary as a taxable item. But apart from the attempt to define news, for the purposes of controlling its flow, the 1819 Act left the law in a state of considerable confusion. 10 Royal assent was given to 6 & 7 William IV, c. 76, on 13 August 1836, which muddied the
Thus by the middle of the Victorian period, the democratisation of knowledge through the liberty of the press had, for more than two centuries, been a deeply embedded element, principally if not solely, in the more liberal and oppositional aspects of English political culture. Moreover, theories regarding the ideological possibilities of the printing machine were perfectly attuned to a society increasingly fascinated by both mechanical invention and moral and political reform. But from the beginning of our period, there existed more complex, even contradictory, means of understanding the ways in which the press in general operated on society. For alongside the optimistic notion that the free press was a prerequisite of political freedom ran a series of less comforting arguments. In 1807 William Cobbett, himself an innovative and successful journalist, had warned that the power of the press, as then configured, led not to political emancipation but to subjection. Most insidiously of all, Cobbett sensed that the very notion of the liberty of the press was being used to mask a new form of repression.
