ABSTRACT
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the London financial press was both expanded and transformed. May's British and Irish Press Guide for 1874 listed 19 titles under the heading ‘Finance and Investment’ in its classified section; the list grew to 32 in 1884, 50 in 1894, 92 in 1904 and 109 in 1914. 1 The Financier, published on five days each week, was started in 1870; the Financial News and the Financial Times followed in 1884 and 1888. A corresponding increase was evident in the specialist coverage provided by national and provincial dailies. This expansionary surge was underpinned by concurrent developments related to both the supply of and the demand for financial news. Cable communication had boosted enormously the range, volume and velocity of useful economic intelligence. Rapid growth in the numbers of limited liability enterprises augmented the demand for business publicity in the form of company meeting reports and prospectus advertising. There also emerged during the late nineteenth century what Ellis Powell of the Financial News identified as ‘the modern investing public, its personnel numbered by hundreds of thousands, and representing every class of society except the absolutely destitute’. 2 It will be argued that Harry Marks and his creation, the Financial News, flourished because they successfully exploited these impulses to expansion.
