Meant for enjoyment after work, Leisure Hour, affiliated with the Religious Tract Society, offered a mix of snippets and treatises on the press. It celebrated newspaper history, reporters, newsboys, and the “Great London Dailies” as seen by H. W. Massingham.

1. “A Few Remarkable Advertisements.” 1 (1852): 44–45.

Excerpted advertisements from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English and Scottish newspapers.

2. “A Visit to The Times Office.” 1 (1852): 289–92.

Guaranteed that printing from “type in a vertical position,” an important innovation in newspaper technology, allowed The Times to produce 10,000 copies per hour. The paper paid for a sick fund for employees and government taxes of 16,000 pounds on paper, 70,000 on stamps, and 20,000 on advertising that excluded the “disgusting quack notices” found in most local and some metro tribunes. The Times without advertising, the Evening Mail, went to the country. Leaders, though written under pressure of time, evinced “great research and extensive acquaintance with men and manners.”

3. “Shades of the Departed: Joseph Addison.” 1 (1852): 449–53.

Guessed that the Tatler and Spectator were well received.

4. “Refreshment and Reading-Rooms for the Working Classes.” 1 (1852): 526–27.

Petitioned for reading rooms with snacks and a “liberal supply of newspapers” for workers.

5. “‘Our Own Correspondent.’” 1 (1852): 661–62.

Took from Michael Homan, in Italy as “a correspondent for a leading morning journal,” examples of reporters who were “ingenious, though sometimes unscrupulous” in news gathering.