Читать книгу Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain - Judith Flanders - Страница 10

THE CREATION of the earliest newspapers was a by-product of an event that occurred owing to ‘something of a legislative accident’, a governmental absence of mind.¹ Government censorship of printed material had collapsed during the Civil War and the Interregnum, but the return of Charles II in 1660, and the Licensing Act of 1662, had reasserted control over the content of all books, pamphlets and other publications, requiring prior consent for each and every publication, and, further, restricting the printing trade to a mere twenty approved printers. In 1695 the act lapsed, with no replacement bill in sight. With it went parliamentary control of the printers and prior consent for printed material. The situation that is now in place more or less began then: anyone could print anything without first gaining legislative permission, although the laws of blasphemy, sedition and libel controlled, postpublication, what could be published.

Within weeks of the disappearance of prior censorship, an unlisted printer set up in Bristol; more soon appeared in other cities. Only six years later, in 1701, what may have been the first newspaper in Britain was published: the Norwich Post. The first London paper was not far behind, appearing in 1702. By 1709 there were 19 papers in London alone, between them putting out 55 editions a week; by 1760 there had been at least 150 papers over the intervening 58 years, many of which had survived very briefly. Enough had survived that 35 provincial papers had by that date a combined circulation of 200,000.² This sounds like nothing - an average circulation of fewer than 6,000 copies - but by the standards of the day it was considerable: the Salisbury Journal, which sold a ‘few thousand’ copies a week, had the same circulation as a successful newspaper in Paris.³ The first daily paper in France did not appear until the last quarter of the eighteenth century, by which time there were more than 50 papers in England and 9 in Scotland. Wales did not get its first English-language paper until 1804, although there had probably been a Welsh-language paper as early as 1705 or 1706 (of which no copy has survived); by 1785 the population of Ireland (variously suggested at between 2.8 million and 4 million)* was buying 45,000 copies of newspapers a week in Dublin and 2,000 in the provinces.⁴

The pattern was set early in the eighteenth century. The St Ives Post was founded in Cambridgeshire in 1717, but failed very quickly. It was then acquired by Robert Raikes, who went into partnership with a printer, William Dicey, and together they set up the St Ives Mercury.† Soon after, in 1720, they moved it and themselves to Northampton, where they were the town’s first printers, transforming their paper into the Northampton Mercury, which flourished by covering far more territory than the name ‘Northampton’ would suggest. It boasted that it went further in length, than any other country newspaper in England, covering nineteen counties.⁵ Newspapers had to appeal to as wide a public as they could reach geographically, because of the small circulation figures: an average provincial newspaper sold 200 copies a week, while by midcentury the larger ones in more urbanized areas might sell 2,000 a week. In 1761, for example, Aris’s Birmingham Gazette advertised that it had agents in London, Shrewsbury, Wolverhampton, Worcester, Bridgnorth, Newcastle under Lyme, Lichfield, Stafford, Dudley, Walsall and Stratford-upon-Avon; in 1755 the Bristol Journal’s agents were as far distant as Liverpool, Sherborne and Gloucester. Agents sent local news to the paper, took in advertisements, and, most importantly, arranged the complicated logistics of moving their paper around the country. The Cambridge Chronicle and Journal in 1773 promised:

This PAPER is dispatched Northwards every Friday Night, by the Caxton Post [i.e. the stagecoach], as far as York, Newcastle and Carlisle; through the Counties of Cambridge, Huntingdon, Bedford, Buckingham, Rutland, Leicester, Nottingham, Lincoln, Northampton, Norfolk, Hereford, Essex and the Isle of Ely, by the Newsmen; to London the next Morning, by the Coach and Fly; and to several Parts of Suffolk, &c. by other Conveyances. - Persons living at a Distance from such Places as the newsmen go through, may have the Paper left where they shall please to appoint.⁶

The small circulations had two causes. First, the population, while rising rapidly, was still low when compared to the nineteenth century; there was nothing to be done about this. The second was a high unit price, and this too was a problem without a solution, because all newspapers were forced into artificially high prices by swingeing newspaper taxes. By the time of the French Revolution there were sixteen daily papers in London, two that came out twice a week, and seven that were issued three times a week, while 8.6 million copies of London papers were dispatched annually to the country.⁷ The government taxed newspapers both to raise revenue and as a way of controlling a potentially seditious press. By the end of the century, newspapers carried a tax of 4d. a copy: a paper that would otherwise have cost 1d. or 2d. could not be sold for less than 5d. when it was properly stamped to show that the appropriate tax had been paid. This meant that only the prosperous could buy a newspaper regularly. That this was a straightforward targeting of the working classes by rationing their reading matter, and thus the ideas that reached them, is not a retrospective twenty-first-century reading of the situation. The Seditious Societies Act of 1799, passed as an anti-Jacobin act, was reconfirmed in 1811 specifically to stop ‘cheap publications adapted to influence and pervert the public mind’. Many outside government saw cheap reading matter for the masses as a real threat - the Society for the Suppression of Vice, run by the Church and the upper classes (with the Duke of Wellington as its patron), paid rewards to members of the public who turned in newspapers, books and pamphlets that had been published in breach of the act. (Even at the time, the more unpleasant aspects of this class- and income-bound separation of access to information were apparent. The Revd Sydney Smith remarked that the Society’s proper title should be ‘The Society for the Suppressing of the Vices of Persons whose Income does not Exceed £500 per annum’.)⁸

High taxation, however, did not do what the government had intended. Instead of spending - or not spending - 6d. on a paper (7d. by 1815), people found various ways of reading communally. By 1789 the Secretary of the Treasury estimated that every paper in London was read by as many as twenty to thirty people, and then it was sent to the country, where it was read by even more.⁹ In 1799 a surgeon in Devon had the London Courier sent to him regularly; it was then read by a French émigré, who in turn handed it to a Congregational minister, who passed it to a druggist, who gave it to an assistant schoolmaster. That was the first day. On day two the paper went to another resident, who passed it to a ‘sergemaker’; from there it went to unnamed and unnumbered ‘common people’. All of these readers would have contributed to the cost of the paper, in diminishing shares as they reached the bottom of the list.

Other people formed themselves into ‘newspaper societies’, in which people clubbed together to buy a regular paper: the Monthly Magazine in 1821 said there were ‘not less than 5,000’ groups of this sort, and thought that this might mean there were as many 50,000 families who had contact with a society.¹⁰ Other, more social, clubs started with similar aims: in Edinburgh, the ‘first thing that induced us to join in a society was the reading of…Spectators’, said one of the founders of the Easy Club.¹¹ The simplest and the least restricting way to get the news was to go into a pub or a coffee house, where the paper could be read for the price of a cup of coffee and 1d. Most coffee houses had reading rooms, which could be joined for anything from 1s. a year upward, and they kept newspapers and books for their readers - by 1742 booksellers were already complaining about the ‘the scandalous and Low Custom that has lately prevail’d amongst those who keep Coffee houses, of buying one of any new Book…and lending it by Turns to such Gentlemen to read as frequent their Coffee house’. In 1773 Thomas Campbell went into the Chapter Coffee House because he heard it ‘was remarkable for a large collection of books, & a reading society…I…found all the new publications I sought, & I believe what I am told that all the new books are laid in.’ He later saw a whitesmith, or tin worker, ‘in his apron & [with] some of his saws under his arm, [who] came in, sat down and called for his glass of punch and the paper, both of which he used with as much ease as a Lord’.¹² Pubs were equally welcoming, usually just hanging a sign ‘requesting gentlemen not to monopolise the current day’s paper’ for more than five minutes at a time.¹³

By this time, coffee houses were part of the landscape. The first coffee house in England may have appeared in Oxford, but the first of which we have any concrete information was in London. A merchant who had lived in Smyrna found, on his return in 1657, that

The Novelty of [the coffee his Greek servant made for him] drew so great Resort to his House, that he lost all the Fore-part of the Day by it; insomuch that he thought it expedient to rid himself of this Trouble, by allowing his Greek servant (in conjunction with his son-in-law’s Coachman) to make and sell it publically [sic]. They set up their Coffee-House in St Michael’s Alley in Cornhill, which was the first in London.¹⁴

They were on to a winning thing, for over the next five years another 83 coffee houses appeared; by 1801 there were 500 in London alone, and they had developed as places to drink coffee and meet friends, and, equally importantly, as places to conduct business.

Outside London, much social life was maintained in these coffee rooms: they were centres of information and news, and they served a wide range of readers, from the whitesmith to the idle dandy. By 1833 the Manchester Coffee and Newsroom took 96 papers a week, plus several periodicals and reviews; it cost 1d. to sit and read, 2d. with coffee thrown in. The Exchange Coffee House, also in Manchester, riposted with 130 papers a week, 186 on Saturdays, as well as a range of foreign papers.¹⁵ The upper classes had their own coffee houses, particularly in the spa and resort towns. In 1739 Tunbridge Wells had three coffee houses that we know of, perhaps more, where for 5s. visitors could have ‘the use of pens, ink, paper &c.’ In Bath, the fashionable coffee house was Morgan’s, where, jibed one satirist, regular customer

…cannot drink his coffee with a goû t, ‘Till he has read the papers thro and thro…

Another visitor

…joined by a whole unthinking crowd, At least once ev’ry day calls out, aloud, Boy, does the London post go out?¹⁶

What time the post went out was becoming an increasingly important question for newspapers and their readers. As we saw above, newspapers were transported by an elaborate system of stagecoach routes in the early part of the century. From the beginning of the eighteenth century, newspapers had been carried post-free, as a way of increasing the circulation of pro-government papers around the country. By 1782 the Post Office was sending 3 million papers a year from London to the country, and in 1788, a parliamentary inquiry recommended that a separate newspaper office be set up by the Post Office to deal with the volume. The Post Office was happy to comply: fraud was keeping its income down. In 1710 the Flying Post newspaper had routinely left a section of the page blank, so that people could write a message of some length and then legitimately send the paper on through the post without paying for it.¹⁷ This had been halted, but there was still nothing to stop individuals slipping letters between the pages and posting the newspapers on without charge. It was hoped that a separate department could give better oversight to the problem.

Certainly it could improve the delivery service. The old system of post boys had asked them to travel at a rate of seven miles per hour in summer, five miles per hour in winter, but this was next to impossible to achieve, given the state of the roads. Ralph Allen, from Bath, had done as much as was possible. One of the early eighteenth-century developers of Bath as a leisure town, he had been a shareholder in the Avon Navigation System, and he had furthermore acted as postmaster for the town. By 1719 he had taken charge of all the post roads nationally - that is, the six roads that carried the inter-city posts, which were, in theory, partly maintained by the government. By the time Allen died, in 1764, he had overseen the development of these six roads into a network of nearly twenty main arteries that now reached the new manufacturing towns as well as a number of subsidiary routes. He had also begun to regularize deliveries so that an extensive six-day-a-week service was beginning to emerge.¹⁸

After his death, however, the system stopped improving and simply stagnated. The post was still being carried by boys on broken-down packhorses, or on small carts. Twenty years later, a letter sent from London to Birmingham on a Monday could not be acknowledged that same week.¹⁹ John Palmer, who held a patent for theatres in Bath and Bristol, grew impatient with the state of communications along the roads and determined to follow in the footsteps of his Bath predecessor. In 1784 he presented to William Pitt, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, a system he had devised to set up contracts with stagecoach owners, who would carry the post in newly designated mailcoaches at between eight and nine miles per hour, providing changes of horse as necessary. They would have an armed guard to sit next to the coachmen, and commit themselves to meeting exact schedules, which would mean that each postmaster would now know exactly what time his post was leaving - and would arrive.* To increase speed still further, these mailcoaches would also be exempt from toll fares along the turnpikes. Pitt agreed to a trial, and the Bristol-London route was chosen. The coach was to leave Bristol at 4 p.m., and was scheduled to arrive in London at 8 a.m. the next morning. It arrived well within that time and, with Pitt’s help, by early 1875 mailcoaches were running in Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, and on the cross roads between Bristol and Portsmouth. By the summer, Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool had their own coaches; by October, mailcoaches had reached Milford Haven and Holyhead, Birmingham, Carlisle, Dover, Gloucester, Nottingham, Shrewsbury and Worcester. (Now that letter from London to Birmingham could be acknowledged in a mere two days.) By the following summer the 400 miles between Edinburgh and London could be traversed in 60 hours, down from the 85 it had taken 25 years before. (Further development in Scotland had to wait because its road improvements lagged behind England’s: until 1800 there was only one all-Scottish mailcoach route, Edinburgh to Aberdeen, which after some years was finally extended to Thurso, then to Inverness and on to the Highlands.)²⁰

Time, and the spending of it, began to take on more urgency. (It would become a more compelling subject still with the arrival of the railways; see pp. 194-5.) Advertisements for stagecoaches before the turnpike age had said that coaches would arrive ‘in about two days’, or ‘if the roads are good’. Now the Post Office was determined that outside conditions should not interfere. In 1789 snow had caused a driver on the Glasgow route to spend twelve days almost entirely on the road, ‘to get the coach through on time’; he was so exhausted by this feat that he had to stay in bed for a week afterwards, but the Post Office paid for his recuperation period in order to encourage others to emulate his dedication.²¹ In a similar manner, while newspapers continued to be carried free if they were brought to the post office before 7 p.m., there was a surcharge of ¹/₂d. per paper if they came after that hour, to discourage late delivery and permit the eight o’clock mailcoach to depart on schedule.²² (Although this is not to say that there was not always a way around the schedule: the General Evening Post struck a deal with the Post Office, paying a flat fee so that, even if its papers were late, the mailcoaches would wait for them.)²³

Getting the post to the country was, in many ways, the same thing as getting the news to the country. In the 1810s, some newspapers began to produce boards with breaking news on them, to stand outside the offices of local distributors and to hang on the sides of the mailcoaches as they raced through towns and countryside. In 1837 the Reading Mercury had placards on mailcoaches giving the news of William IV’s death, and ‘in less than an hour…there was scarcely a person within the borough’ who had not heard: unimaginable speed.²⁴ In the 1770s, during the American Revolution, and through the late 1780s, with the impeachment and trial of Warren Hastings, the concept of parliamentary reporting in the newspapers was created. There were no facilities for writing in the House of Commons, so the Gazetteer paid ‘impecunious barristers’ to sit in relays, listen, then rush across to the newspaper’s office and scribble down a précis of what they had heard for publication. Evening newspapers, with the day’s news in them, could by 1875 reach some parts of the country by morning: the Courier went from selling 1,500 copies to selling 7,000 in four years (it was also the first paper to have a second edition).²⁵

All this created a demand for news, and newspapers, but what really drove the engine was advertising. This had been fundamental to local papers from the earliest days: Dicey and Raikes’s Northampton Mercury had carried advertisements for retailers in Northampton, St Ives, Daventry, Loughborough and Boston.²⁶ As early as 1750 the advertisements in many local papers swallowed up half of the available space (there is a reason, after all, that ‘Advertiser’ was a popular name for newspapers).

Sophie von la Roche, in 1786, wrote to her family in Germany describing the contents of the daily papers (which she numbered in London at twenty-one). The proportion of news to advertisements and announcements was fairly standard:

The notices in to-day’s paper run:…

1 Plays produced at the Haymarket theatre; names of actors and actresses…followed by the prices of the seats…

2 Plays at the small Sadler’s Wells theatre, where to-day’s programme offers a satire on magnetism and somnambulism in particular, and where tumblers and tight-rope walkers may be seen…

3 At the Royal Bush, Mr Astley’s amphitheatre;* men, boys and girls in trick-riding; fireworks; short comedies and ballets…

4 Bermondsey Spa, a place where firework displays are held, announces that the scaffolding has been well and strongly made.

5 The royal Circus; adults and children in trick-riding, children in comedy and pantomime; Italians in dancing and buffoonery.

6 Two fine large green tortoises for sale.

7 A notice against some piratical printer.

8 Discovery of new pills.

9 Notice of maritime matters…

10 On the docks at Woolwich all kinds of old ships’ timber and nautical instruments to be sold.

11 Notice that…the South Sea Voyagers’ company will meet.

12 Fifty guineas reward for information concerning attack of a customs officer by one or more of the shipping hands…

13 A pleasant villa in Fulham to be sold; with orchards and fish-pond.

14 Bitter stomach pills…

15 Notice that the king and queen returned here yesterday from Windsor…and all the names of the gentlemen presented: further, that the list of criminals committed to die was placed before the king; that yesterday evening in the queen’s palace a concert was given for the Archduke and duchess of Milan.

16 That the East India Company offers several million pounds of tea for sale, terms of disposal consequently much lower.

17 That on the continent there is a rising against papal power…

18 More congratulations to the king from various cities for having escaped the mad Nicholson woman’s attack…

19 Discovery that the bottom of a fishing-smack was exclusively laden with French brandy…

20 That the commercial pact with France would mean permanent peace.

21 That all those gentlemen opposed to the minister Pitt are gone to the country to increase the number of their supporters…

22 A match [i.e. prize-fight] between a Jew and a harness-maker in the Epping Forest…

23 Miss Farren reprimanded for having been ashamed to repeat an epilogue for the fourth time…

24 A reminder to change the post-time…

25 News from Paris.

26 From Plymouth.

27 Horse-racing, breed and virtues of horses.

28 Short verses.

29 Shipping news - who, where and whither.

30 Bills of exchange, per cents, and bank news…

31 A desirable residence, eighty-four years’ lease. In all these cases a separate breakfast-room is mentioned…

32 Several estates, all laying particular stress on the fact that fruit-trees are planted there, and are watered by a canal…

33 In addition several more houses, mills and farms. With the houses there is always a note to the effect that they do or do not contain many mahogany pieces…

34 Sixty kinds of coaches for sale.

35 Horses of all descriptions.

36 All kinds of wines, 110 bottles.

37 Inquiry about two missing men…²⁷

Provincial papers did not have this quantity of notices and advertisements, but in their own markets they satisfied their customer base. Circulations remained small - in 1795 the daily circulation of the Morning Post was 350;²⁸ even multiplied by 30 readers per copy, that was a tiny number. But, properly focused, it was enough. Chester had a population of 10,000 in 1700, and that sustained two newspapers, the Courant and the Chronicle, which covered, according to their advertisements, the areas across Chester, north Shropshire, north-east Wales, south Lancashire (including Liverpool, Wigan and Manchester) and north Staffordshire. Itinerant sellers found it worth their while to advertise that they would be ‘at the Wolf’s Head, Watergate Street’, to sell ‘foreign china’, or ‘at Mr Maddox’s Cork Cutters Shop…with great choice of China Ware’. Other retailers advertised their shops selling seeds, bankrupt stock, thread, drapery and alcohol. Many stressed their London connections: those selling fashion items like shoes, fabric, upholstery and furniture all had advertisements suggesting their stock had just been purchased in London, or was ‘in the present fashion’.²⁹

The advertisements for patent medicine were the mainstay of many newspapers. The New Bath Guide, a satire, mocked the fashionable doctor and herbalist John Hill and those who were dosed by him:*

He gives little Tabby a great many Doses

For he says the poor creature has got the chlorosis,

Or a ravenous pica, so brought on the vapours

By swallowing Stuff she has read in the papers.³¹

Many newspaper owners, or their agents, were heavily involved in the patent-medicine business. By 1730 William Dicey and Robert Raikes were in partnership with Thomas Cobb and Benjamin Okell to sell Dr Bateman’s Pectoral Drops. John Newberry, the publisher of the first children’s magazine,† had a quarter-share in Dr Hooper’s Female Pills, and from 1746 he owned the rights to Dr James’s Fever Powders, which he advertised through the newspapers and also in the books he published: Goody-Two Shoes - which may very well have been written by Oliver Goldsmith - began, ‘CARE and Discontent shortened the Days of Little Margery’s Father. - He was forced from his Family, and seized with a violent Fever in a Place where Dr James’s Powder was not to be had, and where he died miserably.’³³ At the end of the volume, the child-reader was reminded that the following could be purchased:

By the King’s royal Patent, And Sold by J. NEWBERY, at the Bible and Sun in St Paul’s Church-Yard.

1 Dr James’s Powders for Fevers, the Small-Pox, Measles, Colds, &c., 2s. 6d.

2 Dr Hoope’s Female Pills, 1s.

3 Mr Greenough’s Tincture for Teeth, 1s.

4 Ditto for the Tooth-Ach [sic], 1s.

5 Stomachic Lozenges for the Heart-burn, Cholic, Indigestion, &c, 1s. 6d.

6 The Balsam of Health or (as it is by some called) the Balsam of Life, 1s. 6d.

7 The Original Daffy’s Elixir, 1s. 3d.

8 Dr Anderson’s Scots Pills, 1s.

9 The Original British Oil, 1s.

10 The Alternative Pills, which are a safe, and certain Cure for the King’s Evil, and all Scrophulous Complaints, 5s. the Box, containing 40 Doses. - See a Dissertation on these Disorders sold at the Place above-mentioned. Price 6d.³⁴

Those newspaper proprietors who did not own a medicine could still help to sell one: ‘Dr Benjamin Godfrey’s Cordiall’ was advertised in the Leeds Mercury in 1751, and ‘for the convenience of those who live in the country, it will be brought by the men who deliver the News to any place within the reach of this paper’.³⁵ Even for those without a newspaper, or its distribution services, the new Post Office could provide similar business facilities: ‘The True Spirit of Scurvy-Grass’ was advertised for sale

By the new ingenious Way of the Penny-Post, any Person may send for it, from any part of the City or Suburbs, writing plain directions where to send it to them: if for half a dozen Glasses, they will be brought as safe, as if fetch’t by themselves, and as cheap as one. But who sends this way, must put a Penny in the Letter (besides Six Pence for each Glass) to pay the carriage back; for no body can think the profit great: therefore a Penny must be sent for every Parcel. None need fear their Money, in sending by the Penny-Post, for things of considerable value, are daily sent with safety by it, security being given for the Messengers. There are Houses appointed in all parts of the Town, to take in the Penny-Post Letters.*³⁷

It was these advertisements that led, over the next century, to the formation of some of the great drug companies, for there was not much of a line to be drawn between patent medicines and ‘real’ medicines, between quacks and doctors. In the eighteenth century the University of Edinburgh’s Pharmacopoeia listed ‘spider’s webs, Spanish fly, pigeon’s blood, hoofs of elks, eggs of ants, spawn of frogs, dung of horse, pig and peacock, human skulls and mummies’ as valid ingredients for medical remedies.³⁸ Dr Robert James patented an antimonial powder which one historian of medicine thinks probably hastened the death of both Oliver Goldsmith and Laurence Sterne ‘among others’, while many more promoted things like ‘medicinal chocolate’, or teething necklaces, or indigestion powders.³⁹ A Rowlandson cartoon of 1789 shows the draper Isaac Swainson, who owned the rights to Velno’s Vegetable Syrup, being attacked by apothecaries and surgeons - not because Velno’s harmed people, or because it didn’t work, but because Swainson was taking business that they thought was rightfully theirs. (He claimed sales of 20,000 bottles a year, bringing him an income of £5,000.)⁴⁰

It was hard to see the difference between these men and John Hunter, the famous surgeon and anatomist, who in 1984 wrote to Edward Jenner, the pioneer of smallpox inoculation: ‘Dear Jenner, - I ampuffing off your tartar as the tartar of all tartars, and have given it to several physicians to make trial, but have had no account yet of the success. Had you not better let a bookseller have it to sell, as Glass of Oxford did his magnesia? Let it be called Jenner’s Tartar Emetic, or anybody’s else that you please. If that mode will do, I will speak to some, viz., Newberry, &c. [to distribute it].’⁴¹

But while Hunter and Jenner are today considered to have been pioneers of medical science, Dr James Graham was a quack in any period, and he used newspapers and their advertising potential to its full. Born in 1745 in Edinburgh, he was a qualified doctor; by 1775 he had set up in Pall Mall and was advertising that, as a specialist in eye and ear problems, he had ‘cured or relieved 281; refused as incurable on their first Application, 317; after a short Trial (by desire) found incurable 47; dismissed for Neglect, &c. 57; country, foreign, and other Patients, events unknown, 381’. Perhaps the honesty of admitting he cured only a quarter of those who applied to him was a legacy of his training. But by 1779 he had opened the Temple of Health, and between 1778 and 1781 he was a regular advertiser in the Morning Herald, promoting himself and, more particularly, the ‘Temple’ with its ‘Celestial Bed’:

To their Excellencies the Foreign Ambassadors, to the Nobility, Gentry, and to Persons of Learning and of Taste.

THE CELESTIAL BRILLIANCY of the Medico-Electrical Apparatus in all the apartments of the Temple, will be exhibited By Dr GRAHAM himself Who will have the honour of explaining the true Nature and Effects of Electricity, Air, Music, and Magnetism when applied to the Human Body…Previous to the display of the Electrical Fire, the Doctor will delicately touch upon the CELESTIAL BEDS which are soon to be opened in the Temple of Hymen, in Pall Mall, for the propagation of Beings, rational and far stronger and more beautiful in mental as well as in bodily Endowments, than the present puny, feeble and nonsensical race of Christians…

Admittance to the Temple was 5s., while pamphlets outlining the cures that had already taken place could be bought for a mere 3d. At his lectures, ‘Vestina, the Rosy Goddess of Health’, stood by in attendance, helping ‘at the display of the Celestial Meteors, and of that sacred Vital Fire over which she watches, and whose application in the cure of diseases, she daily has the honour of directing’. (One of Graham’s unwitting claims on posterity was that ‘Vestina’ was none other than the soon-to-be Emma Hamilton, wife to Sir William Hamilton and mistress to Lord Nelson.) Infertile couples hoping to conceive were recommended Graham’s Treatise on Health (for 10s. 6d.), which gave advice on hygiene, on singing (which ‘softens the mind of a happy couple, makes them all love, all harmony’), and on ‘drinking of the divine balm, which for the benefit of the human race, I have concocted with my own hand, and which, however, costs only a guinea a bottle’.

If cleanliness, song and the divine balm all failed, then it was on to the Celestial Bed, which was available for rent at £100 (or sometimes £50) a night:

the first, the only one in the world, or that ever existed…In a neighbouring closet is placed a cylinder by which I communicate the celestial fire to the bed-chamber, that fluid which animates and vivifies all, and those cherishing vapours and Oriental perfumes, which I convey thither by means of tubes of glass. The celestial bed rests on six massy and transparent columns; coverings of purple, and curtains of celestial blue surround it, and the bed-clothes are perfumed with the most costly essences of Arabia: it is exactly similar to those that adorn the palaces in Persia, and to that of the favourite sultana in the seraglio of the Grand Turk.⁴²

In addition, the advertisements promised, ‘In the celestial bed no feather is employed…springy hair mattresses are used…[having] procured at vast expense, the tails of English stallions, which when twisted, baked and then untwisted and properly prepared, is [sic] elastic to the highest degree.⁴³ And if a celestial bed and the tails of English stallions between them couldn’t cure the problem, then clearly nothing would.

It was on the basis of this kind of relentless advertising that newspapers achieved the financial stability that, in the nineteenth century, enabled expansion into ever-growing markets. Very quickly with the new century, circulations skyrocketed beyond anything that had been achieved before. In exactly the same pattern we have seen already, the increase in the number of newspapers and the increase in the number of people who read them were brought about by developments in technology, in this case in printing and papermaking; by developments in transport, for the papers’ dissemination; and by the recognition among newspaper proprietors that attention to the vast working-class market could reap equivalently vast rewards.

Before any of this could happen, that vast working-class market, or at least a substantial part of it, needed to be able to read. The figures we have for literacy in the population before the end of the nineteenth century are not terribly reliable - for the most part they come from surveys of signatures on marriage registers, the assumption being that if one could sign one’s name, one could both read and write. In fact many who could sign their names could not read, and then a further number who could read could not write. The evangelical writer and educator Hannah More was one of many who thought that it was essential for the working classes to be able to read the Scriptures, but that writing would cause the lower classes to become discontented with their place in the world. At a bare minimum, however, it is estimated that in 1500 only 10 per cent of all men could sign their names, and just 1 per cent of women. By 1750 these figures had risen to 60 per cent of men and 40 per cent of women.⁴⁴ Several things went to make this change: urbanization was one, with increased literacy being necessary for a city life; the growth in the numbers of shops and other small trades was another, for it was impossible to sell on credit without being able to write. (It has been suggested that in London and Middlesex perhaps as many as 92 per cent of tradesmen were literate as early as 1730, while even in rural East Anglia the figure approached 70 per cent.)⁴⁵ Self-improvement and a desire for education to promote oneself into the ranks of petty traders were great promoters of literacy: Thomas Dyche’s A Guide to the English Tongue went through thirty-three editions, selling over a quarter of a million copies, in less than fifteen years between 1733 and 1747 (and these figures come from the one printer whose records have survived).*⁴⁷ There were numerous other books aimed at the lower middle-class autodidact: G. Bird’s Practical Scrivener (1733), and Joseph Champion’s Practical Arithmetick (1733), or even James Dodson’s Antilogarithmic Canon (1740).⁴⁸ An educational framework had also been established for those who wanted to set up in business: by the 1770s and 1780s there were eight schools with a commercial curriculum in Derby alone (which had a population of only 10,000), while Aris’s Birmingham Gazette contained advertisements for schools in Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Staffordshire and Shropshire with the same sort of syllabus - 70 per cent offered writing; slightly fewer than 60 per cent arithmetic; 40 per cent bookkeeping and accounting; and 30 per cent further mathematics.⁴⁹

Religion was another precipitating factor in the surge in literacy. At the end of the eighteenth century, evangelicalism began its century-long rise, mainly spurred by Anglicans, who soon joined with the Nonconformists to create a nationwide movement whose influence was felt far outside the walls of church and chapel. (For my purposes, I refer generically - and to some degree technically incorrectly - to ‘evangelicalism’ as it affected society at large, rather than as a form of religious organization.) Evangelical stress on activism and good works led to a societywide ethos of reform, philanthropy and ‘improvement’, and much was precipitated by the crusading leaders of the movement - William Wilberforce and the abolition of slavery; Lord Shaftesbury and the Factory Act, as well as numberless voluntary societies, philanthropic organizations and Sunday schools.

By 1800, about 75 per cent of men could read, which opened up opportunities and, to some, increased anxiety. Hannah More, horrified by the threat of atheism as displayed both in the French Revolution and in pamphlets like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1792), began to produce tracts, ballads and moral stories for what in 1795 became the Cheap Repository Tract Society. Subsidized by several evangelical societies, these pamphlets were printed to look like the ‘old trash’ their supporters so despised, and priced similarly, at ¹/₂d. or 1d. In the first six months of 1795, 600,000 copies were sold, and by the end of the year that had mounted to 2 million.⁵⁰

This was a precursor to a new trend in educating the masses. In 1801, only 13.8 per cent of all working-class children attended Sunday school regularly.⁵¹ But after the advent of the French Revolution promoted fears of a similar revolution in Britain, and again after the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, education was seen as a way of socializing the workers, bringing them into the evangelical fold, teaching them to accept their station in life and contribute to the bourgeois civic structure. Adam Smith had seen this - without the evangelical slant - in 1776: ‘An instructed and intelligent people…are always more decent and orderly than an ignorant and stupid one.’⁵² In 1833 the government set aside public funds for education for the first time, and, although its intervention produced very little in comparison to the work of the evangelicals, this was representative of the spirit of the times; by 1851, 75.4 per cent of working-class children attended Sunday school. These Sunday schools, the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church of England (established 1814), and its non-sectarian counterpart, the British and Foreign School Society, as well as charity schools, tract societies, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (1831), the Mechanics’ Institutes, the Methodist reading rooms and many other similar groups and societies all contributed to the creation of a literate working class. Between 1800 and 1830 the sales of stamped newspapers had nearly doubled, from 16 million copies to 30 million copies, while the population had risen only by half, from 10.5 million to 16 million.⁵³

What the working classes read, however, was not necessarily what their social superiors thought was good for them. Working hours were long: most shops were open from seven or eight in the morning until ten or eleven at night, while those shopkeepers who were located in streets with a busy nightlife - near theatres, or pubs - expected to stay open until midnight. Artisans and skilled labourers worked equally long hours, while factory shifts could last sixteen hours. These hours were gradually lessened over the century, and from the 1860s increasing numbers of workers had half-days on Saturdays as a holiday (except for the shopkeepers, who worked their longest hours on Saturdays, from seven until midnight). For most workers, however, through much of the century, the expectation was that they would leave home every morning while it was still dark, and return in time only to eat before falling into bed once more, six days a week. Those working in the countryside, even in the old agricultural occupations, also had little time or energy for reading. In Charles Kingsley’s novel Yeast, which began to appear in Fraser’s Magazine in 1848, the gamekeeper says, ‘Did you ever do a good day’s farm-work in your life? If you had, man or boy, you wouldn’t have been game for much reading when you got home; you’d do just what these poor fellows do, - tumble into bed at eight o’clock, hardly waiting to take your clothes off, knowing that you must turn up again at five o’clock the next morning to get a breakfast of bread, and, perhaps, a dab of the squire’s dripping, and then back to work again; and so on, day after day, sir, week after week, year after year.’⁵⁴ (For more on working hours and holidays, see pp. 209-10.) Thus for many the one day on which they had adequate leisure and energy to read was Sunday. And what many chose to read were the newspapers. For them, there was a range of papers which combined short, lurid police-court stories, murder trials and other gore with sensation fiction and a few news snippets.

In 1829 there were seven London morning papers, selling 28,000 copies each on average, while six evening papers sold 11,000 copies each; by 1832 there were a further 130 provincial papers, of which sixty-one had circulations above 1,000, and two above 4,000.⁵⁵ Most of these sales, especially in London, were made by the radical press. The Sunday papers in London sold 110,000 copies each week, and there were ten radical Sunday papers to every conservative one. There were some more potentially mainstream papers - the Observer (established 1791) and the Sunday Times (1822) were both newspapers with a middleclass readership; the News of the World (1843) and the Weekly Times (1847) were also ‘respectable’, although radical in political content. But those that sold most to the working classes were the Weekly Dispatch (1801), Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper (1842) and Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper (1850; for more on Reynolds’s part publications, see Chapter 5), which were ‘distinguished chiefly by the violence and even brutality of their tone’.⁵⁶ Those papers with the goriest crime and most sensational sensations were those that were the most successful: Lloyd’s, for example, contained in one issue ‘The Emperor Napoleon on Assassination. Fearful stabbing case through jealousy. Terrible scene at an execution. Cannibalism at Liverpool. The Great Seizure of Indecent Prints. A man roasted to death. A cruel husband and an adulterous wife.’⁵⁷ In 1886, over half of the space in Lloyd’s was given over to crime or scandal. Then there were ‘specials’, editions produced for particular events, such as the execution of a particularly notorious murderer.⁵⁸ A summary of Reynolds’s, Lloyd’s and the Weekly Times shows they were all much of a muchness: except in times of national or international trauma (the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War), home and foreign news rarely took up more than 20 per cent of the non-advertising text, while ‘sensational’ coverage might get as much as 50 per cent of the space. During the Crimean War, Reynolds’s gave 30 per cent of its space to coverage, Lloyd’s 32.5 per cent, while the Weekly Times gave a grudging 23.5 per cent. After the war was over, however, Lloyd’s did its best to cater to its market by giving less than 1 per cent of its entire coverage in 1858 to foreign news; even then, it was trumped by the Weekly Times, which found space for just three-quarters of 1 per cent.⁵⁹ As the century wore on, less and less space was given to news of any sort, while sensation took over.

The Town, which started in 1837, was similar, but it was unstamped, and therefore cost only 2d., instead of the 6d. that those newspapers which paid tax were forced to charge. Being unstamped, it could not legally carry any news, including any references to politics. But even without news its low price brought it a readership at the bottom end of the middle classes, as can be seen from the large proportion of articles promoting a reduction in working hours, or its several series on different types of workplace, which discussed particularly the head clerks aiming itself at a readership of junior clerks with ambitions. It also published numerous accounts of ‘Sketches of courtezans’, ‘Brothels and Brothelkeepers’, ‘Cigar shops and pretty women’, and articles on ‘free and easies’ (the precursors to music hall; see pp. 372-4), as well as carrying advertisements for books with titles like Venus’s Album, or, Rosebuds of Love, which sounds like pornography, but was advertised as a collection of ‘the best double-entendre, flash, and comic songs’.⁶⁰

For a couple of decades early in the nineteenth century there was a demand for newspapers that were more concerned with gossip and scandal: John Bull (1820), Paul Pry (1830/31), the Satirist (1831) and the New Satirist (1841), and the Crim.-Con. Gazette (1840).* Some of these had started off as political journals: John Bull was Tory, the Satirist an interesting mix of anti-Chartist, anti-abolition, pro-parliamentaryreform, pro-O’Connell views. But ultimately they were - or became - little more than organs of vituperation, as with John Bull’s abuse of that ‘elderly smug Cockney, William Hazlitt, alias Bill Pimple, alias the Great Shabberon [a mean, shabby person]…an old weather-beaten, pimplesnouted gin-smelling man, like a Pimlico tailor, with ink-dyed hands, a corrugated forehead, and a spiritous nose’. The Satirist and the Age were even worse - they had swiftly degenerated into blackmail sheets: ‘If a Reader of the Satirist will furnish us with evidence of the “publication” on the part of the “Gin-and-water Curate residing in the neighbourhood of Dorset-square”, we will make the reverend tipler [sic] repeat it.’ The paper then either received information from disgruntled or vindictive readers, for which it (sometimes) paid, or the person written about got in touch with the editor, and a pay-off guaranteed the rapid insertion of a paragraph countering the original claims.⁶²

By the 1840s these frankly vicious papers had more or less run their course, and had either closed or turned respectable. Instead Reynolds’s, Lloyd’s and the News of the World took over their readerships. There were also, from the 1840s, new penny papers for unskilled workers: the Penny Times, which appears, from its pictures, to have expected an audience who read only with difficulty, and centred around episodes of murder, abduction, rape and other violent crimes, and Bell’s Penny Dispatch, and Sporting and Police Gazette, and Newspaper of Romance, and Penny Sunday Chronicle (all one title), which had ‘thrilling tales’ every week. These tales took off, and as politics - particularly radical politics - became less of a selling point on the collapse of the Chartist movement, more and more papers joined in: Clark’s Weekly Dispatch ran ‘A Ghost Story’ in 1841, Bell’s began a serial ‘The Green Man’ in 1842, and in 1843 Lloyd’s Penny Sunday Times and People’s Police Gazette had ‘The Waltz of Death’ by C. G. Ainsworth, with a gory illustration on the front page.*⁶³ (This paper was made up entirely of fiction and police reports, so it didn’t need to be stamped - hence its 1d. price, compared to the 7d. charged by the Sunday Times.) The journalist Henry Vizetelly, looking back at the end of the century, remembered these ‘lengthy and exciting stories, telling how rich and poor babies were wickedly changed in their perambulators by conniving nursemaids, how long-lost wills miraculously turned up in the nick of time’. The characters were always of a type: ‘The villains were generally of high birth and repulsive presence; the lowly personages were always of ravishing beauty and unsullied virtue. Innocence and loveliness in a gingham gown were perpetually pursued by vice and debauchery in varnished boots and spotless gloves. Life was surrounded by mystery; detectives were ever on the watch, and the most astonishing pitfalls and mantraps were concealed in the path of the unwary and of the innocent.’⁶⁴ These tales all had illustrations in keeping with the Gothic sensibilities of their stories. The British Quarterly Review in 1859 warned its readers that

with few exceptions…[such stories were] of a violent or sinister character. There is usually either a ‘deed of blood’ going forward, or preparations for it. If there be not a dishevelled villain in a slouch hat shooting a fair gentleman in lace and tassels, or a brawny savage dragging an unprotected female into a cavern by the hair of her head, we may reckon at least upon a man in a cloak watching from behind a rock, or a ‘situation’ of thrilling interest, in which the figures look as if they had been taken in a spasm, and were suddenly petrified.⁶⁵

This type of fiction was to prove lucrative for newspapers in general, and for William Frederic Tillotson in particular. He was the proprietor of the Bolton Evening News, which he established in 1867. Soon he also owned the Bolton Journal and Guardian, and then local editions of this paper (renamed the Bolton Weekly Journal), which served a number of towns in Lancashire. In 1872 he published in his Saturday paper a weekly serial called ‘Biddy MacCarthy; or, the Murder of the O’Haras’. This was not substantially different from tales published by his many colleagues, but his next move was. The following year he set up a ‘fiction bureau’, becoming a broker of fiction, or agent, buying work from authors and selling it on to other newspapers. By the early 1880s he had over sixty established authors on his books for serialized work, including Harrison Ainsworth, R. M. Ballantyne, J. M. Barrie, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Rhoda Broughton, Wilkie Collins, Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Eliza Lynn Linton, Captain Marryat, Mrs Oliphant, Trollope, Charles Reade and H. G. Wells. By the 1890s he had agents working for him in the USA, in Europe and in the British colonies.⁶⁶ Tillotson’s reach meant that authors’ work was seen in local papers that, without his centralized selling, would not have had a chance of acquiring the work of such successful writers. For example, in 1900 a short story by Arnold Bennett appeared simultaneously in the Queen; the Evesham Journal, the Nottingham Guardian, the Manchester Weekly Times, the Weston-super-Mare Mercury, the Cardiff Times, the Newcastle Courant, the Carlisle Journal, the Sheffield Independent and the Huddersfied Chronicle. But Tillotson’s work was not finished, and the story was then reprinted in the Aberdeen Free Press, Irish Society, the Blackburn Times, the Deal Mercury, the Birmingham News, the Batley News, the Stratford News, the Salford Chronicle, the Barnsley Independent, the Bradford Telegraph, the Tiverton Gazette, the Portsmouth Telegraph, the Hartlepool Mail, the Sunderland Echo and the Bury Visitor.⁶⁷ The financial stability of many small newspapers now depended on the quality of their fiction.

These papers had survived despite the London - now national - papers being easier to come by than ever throughout the country. The Post Office was still carrying newspapers without charge, but as early as 1827, two years after the opening of the first railway line, a shareholder in the soon-to-be-running Stockton and Darlington Railway wrote to Francis Freeling, the secretary (or administrative head) of the Post Office, notifying him that the railway ‘coaches were going as fast as any mail in the Kingdom, with one horse and fifty passengers’. With the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830, Freeling was in touch with the postmasters in both cities to suggest that they enter into discussions with the railway to carry post; and only months after the line opened, and the first commercial train ran, a contract was agreed.* Within a decade, carrying the post by train was the norm: the London to Preston postal route, which had previously taken 24 hours from post office to post office, could now be travelled in 10 hours and 46 minutes.⁶⁹

But long before this, in 1831, the Liverpool and Manchester was carrying newspapers between the two cities - without charge if the printers dropped them off at the station, and the newsagents collected them at the other end. The ‘without charge’ part didn’t last long, but the railways gave greatly reduced rates - up to half the going parcel-post rate - in return for volume and daily orders.⁷⁰ A London newsagent, William Henry Smith, saw his chance. He and his brother Henry, ‘Newspaper Agents, Booksellers and Binders’, ran a business in Little Grosvenor Street that they had inherited from their father. In 1821 they opened a reading room in the Strand, stocking 150 newspapers, journals and reviews, and charging a stiff 1 guinea annual subscription. By 1826 they still had not quite found their niche, and were calling themselves ‘Stationers, Travelling-case and Pocket-book Makers, and Newsmen’. (In 1828 Henry left the business.) William understood that getting the news out first was what mattered. When daytime stagecoaches began to replace night coaches, he hired carts to collect the newspapers directly from the printers and deliver them, wrapped and addressed, to the stagecoach offices first thing in the morning. He advertised in The Times:

The Times, published on Saturday, the 1st inst., at half-past eight o’clock in the morning, was forwarded, by special express, to Birmingham, where it arrived in time for the inland mails, by which subscribers to the above paper in Birmingham, Liverpool, Chester, Warrington, Manchester, Rochdale, Preston, Lancaster, &c., obtained their papers 14 hours before the arrival of the London mail. The above express was sent by Messrs. H. & W. Smith, newspaper agents, 192, Strand, London, who have sent several expresses since the Parliamentary sessions commenced.

On the death of George IV, in 1830, Smith hired his own boat to carry the news to Dublin, twenty-four hours ahead of the Royal Messenger - or so he boasted.⁷¹

By 1838 he was deep in negotiations with the Grand Junction Company to carry newspapers by rail between Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool; by 1847 there were nine special newspaper trains in the region, and soon another ran from Carlisle to London. In 1848 a London train carrying newspapers to Edinburgh had knocked an hour and a half