Introduction

This chapter will examine the business objectives and commercial forces that shaped the world of the British and Irish press. The business objectives and possibilities changed over the period as the peri-odical press transformed from the low-circulating weekly newsbooks of the 1640s to the financially robust dailies, tri-weekly and weekly papers of the late eighteenth century. What started out as a supplementary income for the news makers in question – be they publishers, printers, editors, news compilers or translators – developed into a commercial enterprise capable of providing significant financial reward even if it was not evenly divided between the various participants. In general, it was newspaper proprietors who would accumulate wealth, social prestige and political influence, whereas printers, compositors, distributors and news writers benefited to a much smaller degree from the increased financial potential of a successful news publication.

The business of managing a news publication was complex. Apart from advertising, which became key to sustaining newspaper viability and profitability, news publishers also contended with business considerations such as the cost of paper, distribution (and the ways in which it could be improved), how many people to employ and, not least, punitive taxes on newspapers and how best to evade their full effect. All these matters, coupled with other operational considerations such as managing content, design and formats, had an impact on the newspaper's price, sales and possible profits.

Early Developments

The possibility that a regular supply of print news could be profitable was recognised in the early 1620s with the first series of sequentially numbered news-sheets or corantos. In 1622 a five-person syndicate of individual printers who had previously published occasional news pamphlets teamed up to publish a coranto in the expectation of financial gain (Raymond 2003: 132–3). News had become the new social commodity: everyone wanted to read the latest information on events, and even if corantos were restricted to reporting foreign news, there was strong interest in relevant events such as the fast-developing Thirty Years War, which it was hoped would lead to Protestant victories against the Catholic imperial forces. The news syndicate anticipated that with such imminent victories predicted, the market for corantos would undoubtedly increase, and their monopoly on foreign, serialised news circulation would become extremely profitable.

This book is part of a three-volume series, and the structure and content of the series are shaped by a set of exchanges led by the series editors, David Finkelstein and Martin Conboy, into the writing of a new history of the British and Irish press. It responds to the absence of wide-ranging, up-to-date surveys of newspapers and periodicals across Britain and Ireland by providing ambitious, interdisciplinary and research-led volumes that seek to analyse long-term continuities and changes. Following volumes covering c.1650–1800 (forthcoming), and 1800–1900 (already published), this book addresses the long twentieth century, from 1900 to the present. The Introduction provides an initial overview of the century by studying the evolution of the British and Irish press across five milestone years, and, in particular, examining how the leading titles in the market, the popular daily newspapers, sought to develop their appeal to a broad, mainstream audience. Five chapters then analyse in more detail the central features of the environment in which the press operated: economic forces and patterns of ownership; the institutions and technologies of production and distribution; the reading audience; the legal and regulatory framework; and the identities and communities that structured the market. After these, the bulk of the volume comprises a series of thematic chapters attending to different aspects of the creation, content and impact of newspapers and periodicals in this period. The book concludes with a detailed timeline and a comprehensive bibliography.

It is worth emphasising that the editors have not imposed an interpretative model for authors to follow. The authors come from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, bring different expertise to their topics, and offer their own perspectives on the central questions raised by the volume. There are alternative and sometimes competing opinions in this volume. We firmly believe such diversity, and occasionally, discord, is both creative and reflects the breadth of the wider field. What we have asked authors to do, where possible, is to be expansive in their coverage, both chronologically and geographically, and also to combine generalisation with the particularities of examples and case studies. Within the constraints of copyright and our budget, we have also tried to illustrate each chapter, capturing something of the visual appeal that was so important to newspapers and periodicals in this period.

In late 1825, in a lavish drawing room on Albermarle Street, London, the Scots-born publisher John Murray II sat and listened avidly as a twenty-year-old family contact pitched an idea for a new Conservative daily newspaper. Murray had built up his family firm through astute management of literary property: he had been responsible for turning Lord Byron into a household commodity, selling his volumes of poetry as fast as they could be printed; he had championed Jane Austen, who brought her greatest works to him for publication; and he had instituted the Quarterly Review in 1809, which had become a leading Conservative voice in the periodical press world. Now he was being asked to invest in a new venture, a daily newspaper to be called the Representative, set to stand as a Conservative counterpoint to the more Whiggish London Times. The man pitching the idea was young firebrand Benjamin Disraeli, who promised to find half the start-up capital needed if Murray would front the other half. Disraeli sought but failed to get Walter Scott's Scottish born-and-bred son-in-law, editor and writer John Gibson Lockhart, to take on the editorship role, though Lockhart did accede to playing a consultancy role while taking up editorship of Murray's Quarterly Review instead. A number of less qualified individuals were called on to fill the gap, with the polymath Irishman William Maginn providing crucial interventions as an overseas correspondent, provider of copy, and then manager of the newspaper's production. Money was lavishly poured into launching the new press entrant on 26 January 1826, but it soon became apparent that this Conservative voice was not of interest to the paying public, and that Disraeli was signally unable to manage the running of the paper. It did not help that it was launched in the face of opposition by two key players of the Conservative government then in power, the Foreign Secretary George Canning, and the First Secretary to the Admiralty John Wilson Croker. It also fought headwinds occasioned by the financial crash of 1825–6, where overburdened debt structures and risky investments in overseas shares, bonds and government loan schemes collapsed and brought down a great number of financiers, investors, printers, publishers and press outlets.