ABSTRACT
By the end of the nineteenth century the press critic Henry Sell could confidently declare that ‘Sunday papers have established a precedent that no opposition can break down.’1 Numbers alone proved his assertion: in 1890 some two million copies of popular Sunday papers such as Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, the People or the Weekly Dispatch were being sold every week. Their coverage of sensational news, sport and crime was highly appealing. Sunday penny papers were the leading cultural products of late Victorian Britain, eclipsing music halls, cheap novels and football in size, if not necessarily in influence.
