ABSTRACT
More newspaper titles, expanding circulations and a widening readership followed the demise of the ‘taxes on knowledge’. Between 1856 and 1914 the number of newspapers published in Britain and Ireland increased more than eightfold, from 274 to 2,205, with London numbers tripling from 151 to 478.2 By 1881 18 daily newspapers were appearing in the nation’s capital city, 96 in the English provinces, 21 in Scotland, 17 in Ireland and only 4 in Wales.3 In spite of the increase in the number of titles and in sales, the total circulation of British newspapers was still relatively small and confined to a relatively narrow segment of society. However, in the late nineteenth century newspapers began to extend their reach throughout Victorian society. Daily newspapers led this gradual growth, going through a period of change with the advent of the one penny newspaper. The Sunday press built up a circulation which was the envy of the modern world – the first newspaper to reach a million sales was Lloyd’s Weekly News in 1896. The provincial press grew at a more rapid pace, to the extent that most major and even some minor cities in Britain had two, if not more, daily newspapers by the end of the century. The most notable casualty was the radical press, which virtually disappeared. The fate of the radical newspapers was tied up with the changing nature of
the economic structure of the newspaper industry. Advertising increased its prominence in press finances, taking up more space within the newspaper. Newspapers became more independent from politicians and political parties
in the second half of the nineteenth century, although political subsidies still played a role in the financing of the press, particularly outside London, where a close connection between the Liberal Party and provincial newspapers was established. Politics still dominated the content of the newspapers but it slowly began to decline as other forms of news and information expanded. Foreign news was a crucial ingredient of the late Victorian paper, with foreign and war correspondents such as Henri de Blowitz and William Howard Russell becoming household names. The Daily Telegraph, founded in 1855, was one of the first newspapers to take advantage of the new environment. It reduced its price, changed its content, incorporated techniques associated with the American press and employed the most celebrated journalist of the day, George Augustus Sala, whose prose resonated with the Victorian imagination, to become the leading newspaper of the period. The nineteenth century is often portrayed as the era of the ‘sovereign
editor’, epitomised by John Delane at the Times and C.P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian. They are seen as partisan, opinionated and in total control of the content and direction of their newspapers. They are credited with exercising the sovereign right of the editor to edit the newspaper without any intervention from owners or financial backers or government. They asserted the independence of their newspapers and the press in general by articulating the principle of the press as the ‘fourth estate’ of the realm. For some critics the notion that the press operated as a ‘fourth estate’ is a ‘political myth’ promoted by the industry and profession to cement a privileged position in the political process, the ‘indispensable link between public opinion and the governing institutions of the country’.4 The extent to which the great editors of the late Victorian era were independent actors is a matter of conjecture. The tradition of sovereign editorship appears in some cases to have historical substance; but it is limited and has been exaggerated to reinforce over time the perception that newspapers are free from the control of their owners. Technological changes such as the introduction of the telegraph and the
advent of Pitman’s shorthand helped to develop the practice of reporting. The speed and immediacy of the news was enhanced; eyewitness news accounts were now possible. The previous struggles of editors to find material to fill their pages were replaced by a situation in which they had to select from a stream of information that poured into their offices. News reporting, reporting what was happening, became a vital ingredient of the newspaper, although it did not usurp the key role of comment, analysis and interpreting the ‘politics of the day’. ‘Views rather than news’ were the ‘hallmark’ of the late Victorian newspaper.5 Lengthy articles laid out in narrow, heavily compacted columns made up the newspaper. ‘Every reader knew … that every word in the paper was indispensable, he worked his way through the entire solid and black print, from the first page to the last’.6 The reader that these newspapers had in mind was a man of leisure and education who was interested in the great issues of the day, home and abroad.
