ABSTRACT
The history of the British press has remained stuck in the same mould for over a century.1 Acccording to convention, the British press became free partly as a consequence of a heroic struggle against state control. The first major breakthrough is usually said to have occurred during the Interregnum of 1649– 60 with the abolition of the Court of the Star Chamber. It was followed by the abandonment of press licensing in 1695 and the introduction of a new and less repressive control system, based primarily on press taxes, in 1712. Further concessions were secured in the reign of George III, notably the relaxation of restrictions on the reporting of parliament in the 1770s and Fox's Libel Act of 1792, which made juries the judges of seditious libel suits. But it was only in the Victorian era, according to the received wisdom, that the forces of progress finally triumphed with the reform of libel law in 1843 and the repeal of ‘the taxes on knowledge’ in the period 1853–61. An independent press emerged free of the legal and fiscal controls by which governments had sought to control it.2
