ABSTRACT
Between the lapsing of the Printing Act in 1695 and the removal of stamp duty in 1855, English newspapers were transformed from the reading matter of a handful of the political and social elite to the main source of information on current debates and contemporary affairs for the majority of the population. By the end of our period, the scale of the newspaper press – both in terms of overall circulation and the number of titles produced – was at a level which would have been inconceivable (and unsupportable) in the early eighteenth century. In addition, the character of most newspapers in the mid-nineteenth century was self-confident, opinionated, probing and critical in ways which would also have appeared alien to earlier newspaper readers. Many late nineteenth-century claims for the importance of newspapers would have seemed equally astonishing. Not least that made in 1871 by James Grant, the former editor of the Morning Advertiser, that the press had ‘one of the most glorious missions in which human agencies ever were employed’, namely, ‘to enlighten, to civilise, and to morally transform the world’. 1 The degree to which Grant’s prophesy came true, is, of course, open to debate. What is less contentious is the increasingly prominent role which newspapers played in English political life.
