ABSTRACT
During the half-century following the repeal of the ‘taxes on knowledge’, a number of radical newspapers closed down or were eventually incorporated into the mainstream of popular Liberal journalism. Militant journalism survived only in the etiolated form of small-circulation national periodicals and struggling local weeklies. 1 Yet this decline occurred during a period of rapid press expansion, when local daily papers were established in all the major urban centres of Britain and a new generation of predominantly right-wing national newspapers came into being. These included newspapers such as the People (1881), Daily Mail (1896), Daily Express (1900) and Daily Mirror (1903), which were to play a prominent role in British journalism.
