The Growth of Newspapers

There was a dramatic increase in the number of newspapers produced in England during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This was most noticeable outside the capital. Prior to the lapse of the Printing Act in 1695, there had been no provincial newspapers in England. During the opening decade of the eighteenth century, however, a handful of papers emerged in Norwich, Bristol and Exeter. By the early 1720s over twenty provincial newspapers were in production, and by the mid-century this figure had risen to over forty. A surge in the last two decades of the eighteenth century meant that by 1800 more than seventy provincial newspapers were published each week, while an even greater rate of increase in the early nineteenth century saw numbers reach 130 in 1832 and over 200 a decade later. ¹ In London, the pace of change was less striking, primarily because numbers were high from the opening decades of the eighteenth century. As early as 1719, one paper complained that ‘at present both city, town and country, are over-flowed every day with an inundation of newspapers’, whilst in 1733, the British Observator claimed that ‘it is grown a general complaint that there are already such a glut of newspapers and weekly pamphlets’. ² The capital’s printers had been even quicker than those in the provinces to take advantage of the lapse of the Printing Act, so that in 1712 there were probably twelve papers produced in the capital. By the middle of the century London had eighteen newspapers: six weeklies, six tri-weeklies and six dailies, 30and in 1783, nine dailies and ten bi- or tri-weeklies were published each week. This number had risen to fourteen dailies, seven tri-weeklies and two weeklies by 1790, and in 1811, swelled by the emergence of the Sunday press, the total figure had reached fifty-two. ³ However, as we shall see, not all papers were equal in stature. This was particularly true in the early nineteenth century, when sales could vary dramatically between newspapers. Moreover, in this latter period, the increasing domination of the market by The Times was such that the number of London dailies actually fell from fourteen to ten between 1790 and 1855, even though total sales of daily papers in the capital had risen. ⁴