Newspaper Readers

If it is difficult to establish how many newspapers were published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is even harder to discover how many people read them and who those people were. The gender composition of newspaper readers is particularly opaque. Although it is evident that women read newspapers, the size of the female readership remains extremely unclear, even in comparison with the vexed issue of readers’ social status. The figures given in chapter 2 for the payment of newspaper stamps suggest that the sales of stamped newspapers more than quadrupled in proportion to the adult population between the early eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, this increase was not as dramatic as might first appear, since the proportion of newspapers to population remained extremely low for most of the period under discussion, even if we take into account the unstamped press. In 1712, just over one stamped newspaper was produced each year for every two adults in England. By 1760, the ratio was closer to 3:2, and at the turn of the century it had jumped to almost to 3:1. By the 1830s, more than three taxed newspapers were produced annually per adult head of population, with perhaps as many unstamped papers being published at the same time. Although the growth in production was significant, these calculations suggest that newspaper readers comprised a tiny percentage of the total population. But newspaper readership was likely to have been much higher than these figures suggest. Relatively few papers would have been read by just one person. In the early eighteenth century, Joseph Addison estimated that at least twenty people read each copy of the Spectator. ¹ 47A century later the Westminster Review revised this estimate to thirty. ² The unstamped press of the early nineteenth century was particularly variable in this respect, with levels of political interest or agitation determining both a paper’s overall print-run and the numbers of people who read each copy. Estimates of the degree of multiple readership which took place may have varied a good deal, but commentators were not divided concerning the frequency with which newspapers were shared.