Although the ‘romance’ of the Highlands loomed large in the imagination of visiting royalty and aristocracy in the late-Victorian era, the reality for many of the inhabitants was extensive poverty and squalor. In the aftermath of the potato blight years of 1846 and 1847, much of north-west Scotland was left destitute. Added to this, sheep prices plummeted and landlords turned to the creation of more lucrative deer forests to provide the space for visiting hunters. Emigration, clearances and the push and pull of economic pressures led to a falling population. Between 1851 and 1901 there was a 10 per cent fall in population in the four northern counties of Caithness, Sutherland, Ross & Cromarty and Inverness. Although in decline outside the North-west, Gaelic was still the everyday language for many, before schools were used to try to eradicate it. Despite this, the Highlands were able to sustain an extraordinary number of newspapers in the period.

With a population of around 13,000 in the 1850s, Inverness was by far the largest town in the Highlands, and it was an anglicised town within a still extensively Gaelic hinterland. By 1850 the four-page Inverness Courier & General Advertiser for the Counties of Inverness, Ross, Moray, Nairn, Cromarty, Sutherland and Caithness was well established as the main Highland newspaper, with an average of 1,900 stamped copies per week. In 1847 it had seen off the earlier Inverness Journal that had existed since 1807. Partly owned and edited by Robert Carruthers since 1831, the Courier, which had first appeared in 1817, the same year as the Scotsman, had a wide reputation for its coverage of literature. Thanks to Carruthers's extensive and perceptive reviews, it attracted attention well beyond the Highlands, and Archibald Forbes, the well-known war correspondent of the London Daily News, described it as the most scholarly provincial newspaper in the UK.

Carruthers, a native of Dumfries, who had first come to the paper in 1828 from a teaching job in Huntingdon, combined his editorship with a continuing literary output. He was largely responsible for much of the material in Robert Chambers's Cyclopaedia of English Literature in 1844 and he subsequently edited and revised the second and third editions. He contributed a number of pieces to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and in 1853 produced a Life of Alexander Pope.

Amid the plethora of words expended on editorials in the nineteenth-century Scottish press it is possible to identify certain recurring themes. One is that Scottish politics, like Scottish society as a whole, were different from those of England, in being consistently more liberal and egalitarian. Secondly, although the issue of how to handle the problems of governing Ireland was a huge factor in politics across all of Britain, it loomed particularly large in Scotland, not only because Scotland had a large and growing population of Irish extraction from the 1840s, but because there was a concern to show that Scotland's relationship with England was one of partnership and, therefore, substantially different from the Anglo-Irish relationship. At the same time, there was a determination that the result of the Scotland–England relationship would not be complete assimilation with the loss of distinctive Scottish institutions or a clear sense of Scottish nationhood. A key factor in this was the idea that Scotland's Presbyterian legacy was central to that identity and had to be defended in general terms, even if there was an irritation with the institutions of Presbyterianism that they often seemed hopelessly divided. Finally, there were issues of relationships with other parts of the world and particularly with those parts that were within the Empire and its various spheres of influence, and what the Scottish role in these had been, was and should be in the future.

Every general election from 1832 until 1895 saw a Liberal majority in Scotland. Only in the ‘khaki’ election of 1900 did the Conservative-Liberal Unionist alliance outnumber Liberals, and the 1906 and 1910 elections saw the familiar pattern return. One can, therefore, detect a certain pride in Scotland's radicalism, particularly when so many of the Liberal leaders held Scottish seats, Asquith for East Fife, Birrell for West Fife, Morley for Montrose, Campbell Bannerman for Stirling and Haldane for Haddingtonshire. Being Liberal was to many a powerful feature of Scottishness, and the contrast was with the Toryism of Scotland before 1832 and the continuing Toryism of much of England.

The counties around the city of Glasgow were the industrial heartland of Scotland and were pulling in population from other areas and from Ireland. The populations of Lanarkshire and Dunbartonshire each increased by more than 150 per cent in the half century to 1901. The three counties of Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire and Dunbartonshire were home to nearly 40 per cent of the population of Scotland.

Lanarkshire

Airdrie, once noted as a linen-weaving centre, was, in the second half of the nineteenth century, developing into a centre of heavy engineering, with coalfields and shale-oil mines around it. Neighbouring Coatbridge was the site of some 60 blast furnaces in the 1850s and, from the 1870s, had at Gartsherrie Scotland's biggest ironworks. The area had a large, skilled working class and, significantly, Airdrie had been the first Scottish town by far to adopt the Free Libraries Act in 1853.

An Airdrie & Coatbridge Luminary and Old and New Monklands Advertiser, published by the Coatbridge printing firm of Baird & Bowskell, had a brief and erratic existence between 1847 and 1852. It campaigned for decent water supplies, particularly for those areas along the Monklands Canal where destitute squatters were living. It was relaunched in December 1851 as a weekly ‘devoted to the interests of the industrious classes’, but quickly disappeared. The Airdrie and Coatbridge Advertiser first appeared in March 1855. Bathgate and Wishaw was added to the title in 1858, and Linlithgowshire in 1883, before it settled down as the Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser in 1902. The founders were Archibald Lawson, a bookseller, and the printer, Robert Rae. The paper began as a monthly but was ready to move to weekly when the Stamp Act was repealed. Its appearance coincided with growing complaints against the secretive running of municipal affairs, with accusations that Airdrie was to all intents ‘a rotten burgh’ in the hands of a local coterie. The Advertiser's complaint against the existing Airdrie Herald was that it did not have enough of a local focus. The Advertiser was also strongly pro-temperance, with a zeal that the Airdrie Herald regarded as very intemperate. The Herald (a monthly, of which no copies seem to have survived), issued from the burgh council's normal printers, M. McCallum, rallied to the council's defence in 1856 but soon folded.

The Press has before it one of the most glorious Missions in which human agencies ever were employed. Its Mission is to Enlighten, to Civilize, and to Morally Transform the World.’ So declared James Grant in the preface to The Newspaper Press: its origin, progress and present position published in three volumes in 1871–2. Grant had been the founder in 1827 of the Elgin Courier, before moving to London and eventually editing there the Morning Advertiser. He waxed eloquent in his conclusion:

Fifty years earlier, the Scotsman, at the beginning of its second year, had an equally clear and noble idea of what the aspiration of journalists ought to be:

The north-east lowlands, stretching from Nairn in the west, along the Moray Coast and south to Stonehaven, were heavily dependent upon farming and fishing. The content of the weekly papers reflected these interests. This was also an area extensively served by well-endowed parish schools. Thanks to the bequests of James Dick, who had made his fortune in the West Indies, these schools in the villages of Morayshire, Banffshire and Aberdeenshire were able to pay for graduate teachers who prided themselves in preparing pupils for university, albeit at an often very young age. Even before the arrival of board schools it seems reasonable to assume a relatively high level of literacy even among the rural population. It was the home of the ‘lad o’ pairts’, mythical or not, and there was a powerful tradition of mutual improvement. All this was reflected in a high proportion of young men who made their way from various small towns and villages in the North-east into journalism across the country.

Nairnshire

Nairnshire was slightly apart from the other counties in the area. It had been a Gaelic-speaking area with cultural links to Inverness and the Highlands to a greater extent than any of the other counties south of Inverness. Nairn in 1850 was as yet unconnected to the railway network but was a significant fishing port with some 60 boats. The railway reached it in 1855 and by the 1860s it was beginning to be noted as a healthy place with good air and bathing and selling itself to tourists as the ‘Brighton of the North’.

Nairnshire got its first newspaper in March 1841, the Saturday Nairnshire Mirror and General Advertiser published and edited by Charles MacWatt, a teacher, and the developer of Nairn's saltwater baths. It initially came out as a monthly, but then switched to fortnightly. It was well produced and well printed, consisting of four pages of summaries of national and international news, together with local items. From June 1852 there was an early example of a serialised story, Oliver Temple's ‘New School for Wives’. However, MacWatt was suffering from ill health and the business was transferred in October 1854 to James Wilson of the threepenny weekly the Nairnshire Telegraph & General Advertiser for the Northern Counties, which had first been published in November 1853.

Edinburgh's neighbouring towns had not yet developed into suburbs of the city. Leith was a bustling industrial town with an extensive coastal trade to both sides of the Firth of Forth and beyond. Portobello had substantial pottery works and other industries, but with the arrival of the railway it gained acceptance as a summer retreat for the Edinburgh middle classes. As sea bathing gained in popularity, so did Portobello and, as Murray's Handbook for Travellers pompously opined, by the 1880s it had become ‘a second-rate watering place crowded in summer with bathing-machines, donkeys and trippers’.

Midlothian

The Leith Herald dated from 1846, produced by the enterprising publisher Charles Drummond, who in 1841 had brought out what has a claim to be the country's first commercial greetings card, declaring ‘A Guid New Year and Mony o’ Them’, two years before William Dobson's better-known Christmas card. In 1853 Drummond turned the monthly Leith Herald into a weekly. The business was up for sale in 1868 after his death and may have been run by his widow, since there was a threatened libel case against the proprietrix, unnamed, for publishing details of a divorce case. From 1868, however, the paper was edited and owned by Ebenezer Drummond, who got himself assaulted after writing a critical review of the Leith Choral Union's performance. In 1876 the business was bankrupt and the title was taken over by the firm of G. F. Steven. It continued under the control of Steven & Hope until 1911, when the paper closed.

The Burghs Reformer, owned and printed by William L. Rollo, appeared in 1859 and survived until 1863, when it was absorbed by the Leith Herald, which became the Leith Herald & Reformer. The focus of the Burghs Reformer was almost entirely local, advocating reform of municipal institutions. The Leith Advertiser appeared for less than a year from July 1864, issued by Andrew G. Henderson, another local printer. By early 1868 Henderson was bankrupt. This was followed in October 1868 by the Leith Burgh Observer, which stood for advanced Liberalism, but despite a change of name to the East Coast Gazette it was gone by the end of January 1869.

The Royal Commission on the Press, set up in 1947 largely as a result of pressure on the Labour government from the National Union of Journalists and others within the Labour Movement who were concerned ‘at the growth of monopolistic tendencies in the control of the press’, issued its report in the summer of 1949. Its assertion that ‘the British Press is free from corruption and second to none in the world’ was taken by newspapers as a vindication. The Dundee Courier declared the whole inquiry ‘a costly damp squib’, while the Sunday Post, in its own inimitable way, commented, ‘so after all the stushie, there's no skeleton in the British press’. In fact, for those that cared to look, there was criticism and there were warning signs.

The popular daily papers were seen as showing an excessive degree of selection and colouring of the news to meet their particular partisan stance. Too often, the Report claimed, they fell short of giving ‘the fullest and most accurate picture of the world which it is possible to give in the space available’. Rather, they tended to attach ‘supreme importance to the new, the exceptional, and the “human”’, emphasising these ‘to the detriment or even the exclusion of the normal and continuing’. The former editor of the Scotsman, Sir George Waters, who had been a member of the Commission, urged newspapers to act to improve themselves before control was imposed on them, declaring, ‘Let us be under no delusion that the Government, parties or the public would rise to our defence if our future is ever threatened … Nobody loves us.’ His pleas largely fell on deaf ears, on a press that, again as the Commission's Report pointed out, was perhaps ‘unduly complacent and deficient in the practice of self-criticism’.

There was a marked difference between the newspapers of the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s and those of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. In appearance, the headlines of the latter were bigger, their advertisements more eye-catching, while photographs proliferated, reports were shorter, political coverage was reduced and editorial comment was much more limited than in the earlier decades.

According to the London correspondent of the Inverness Advertiser in 1855,

Religion and social standing as much as politics and competitiveness divided them and there was no shortage of papers to suit every shade of political and religious ideology for Edinburgh's citizens in the mid-century.

The Scotsman, founded in 1817 to challenge ‘sordid, servile and self-seeking Toryism’, had various challengers in 1850 in the aftermath of the great denominational schism of the Disruption of 1843. The Witness was the main organ of the non-intrusionists within the Church of Scotland, who resisted the appointment of ministers by patrons without the approval of the congregation. The sub-heading in its masthead was from John Knox: ‘I am in the place where I am demanded of conscience to speak the truth, and the truth I speak, impugn it who so listeth.’ It first appeared on 15 January 1840 and was published bi-weekly on Wednesday and Saturday, with daily editions during the sittings of the annual General Assemblies of the rival churches in May. From 1861 until 1864 it moved to tri-weekly, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, but then reverted to twice a week.

The editor of the Witness from 1840 until 1856 was Hugh Miller, and its subscribing readership grew rapidly from 600 in 1840 to 3,300 by 1842. Miller, as a correspondent for the Inverness Courier while working as a bank clerk in Cromarty, had first attracted wider attention when he challenged Lord Brougham's judgment on the Auchterarder Case concerning church patronage. The paper encouraged the secession of 1843 and the formation of the Free Church of Scotland. Miller, however, resisted persistent attempts to have opinion controlled by the leaders of the Free Church.

In a remarkable book published in 1946, R. M. W. Cowan covered the expansion of newspapers in Scotland from 1815 until the 1850s. The thesis was submitted for a D.Litt. at Glasgow University in 1937 but, because of the war, could not be published until 1946. What is remarkable is that even a cursory look at the 145 newspapers listed – and most of his examinations were far from cursory – required a huge amount of effort when many papers were still scattered around the country in the hands of the publishers and in local libraries. By the time Cowan's thesis came to preparation for publication, even the British Museum newspaper collection at Colindale was out of action, some of it damaged or destroyed by enemy bombing, other volumes packed away for safety in a quarry in Wiltshire.

A decade after Cowan's book, Joan Ferguson, of what was then the Scottish Central Library, published an invaluable Directory of Scottish Newspapers which was updated by the National Library of Scotland in 1984. This listed 1,178 individual newspapers and their location and the present writer has only been able to find two or three gaps in that list.

In 1989 came the excellent two volumes of Waterloo Directory of Scottish Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800–1900, edited by Professor John S. North of the Department of English at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. Nowhere else can scholars find anything so detailed and so well cross-referenced and indexed as these two thousand-plus pages. It goes well beyond newspapers and journals and includes reports of associations, almanacs, postal directories and a plethora of religious pamphlets. It was an extraordinary team effort, involving visits to more than eighty libraries. In a pre-digital age it tried, where possible, to identify owners, printers and editors, along with the sizes, prices and publication dates. It was no easy task but, as the introduction to the volume states, ‘better to know one editor of fifteen in a journal's life span than none’.

At least one aim of the present work is to try to rescue many more editors and journalists from obscurity. Thirty years ago a leading pioneer of research on journalism, Joel Wiener, argued that ‘it is imperative that we become more knowledgeable about the human element behind journalism’; not an easy task and, intriguingly, often more difficult in the twentieth century than earlier.

With the arrival of the dailies, established weekly papers faced a huge challenge. One of the first casualties was Glasgow's oldest Liberal paper, the Glasgow Chronicle. It had first appeared in 1811. Since 1840 the proprietors were the heirs of one of the founders, William Kippen of Busby, and the editor was Michael Thomson, a licentiate of the United Presbyterian Church. It tried to go daily in 1855, but the experiment lasted only a month. It reverted to a Wednesday weekly and was the first to publish theatrical criticism in 1856. However, it folded in 1857, by which time circulation had fallen to less than 1,000.

The cantankerous Peter Mackenzie continued to battle with many in his Reformers’ Gazette, which could date its roots back to 1831. In 1856 it became the Glasgow Gazette and reforming zeal gave way to Palmerstonian bluster, calling for bullets rather than missionaries in India after the revolt, but it also continued to rage against fraud and dishonesty. As Mackenzie's obituary in the Evening Citizen recalled, he was a natural fighting man who was always more or less in conflict. Time and again he faced libel actions and, in 1857, presumably with bankruptcy threatening, the copyright and plant were unsuccessfully offered for sale. The Gazette was still around for, and presumably was assisted by, the interest in the trial of Madeleine Smith and, by 1858, Mackenzie was back in control. He did very briefly try to turn the paper into a daily, but it eventually succumbed in July 1864. It had been brought down, he believed, by the penny papers that ‘were taking the legs from under the old established weeklies’ and he had lost more money in the last three years ‘than he would like to tell and would probably be believed’. But, belligerent to the last, he ‘defied any human being to show he had prostituted his pen for filthy lucre of base-born bribes’.

William Forbes, who was active in the National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights, tried to launch a Scottish Journal in October 1856 ‘to supplant those publications of doubtful tendency that emanate weekly from London’, and to counter the imitation of ‘English fashions and ideas’, but it failed to get beyond a single issue.

Mid-nineteenth-century Perth was a successful linen- and whisky-manufacturing town and a port on the River Tay, with a population of some 24,000. It was also, from 1866, a key railway junction. Perth's first weekly, the Perth Courier, was established in 1809 by the Morison brothers and became the Perthshire Courier & General Advertiser for the Central Counties of Scotland in 1822. In 1834 the sub-title of Farmers’ Journal & Scottish Central Advertiser was added. In 1853 ownership passed from Messrs Morison to the bookseller and Lord Provost, James Dewar, who had been associated with the Northern Warden. Under Dewar's ownership the paper became Palmerstonian in the 1850s and 1860s. James Dewar died in 1861 but the business was continued by his son, also James Dewar. In 1869, in association with the printer Robert Mitchell, the company became Dewar, Mitchell & Co.

Dewar seems to have been manager, compositor and editor for much of the time, as well as acting as the town's registrar, and under him in the 1870s and 1880s the paper vigorously opposed unification of the Free Church and the United Presbyterians. He was assisted initially by a schoolteacher, Frederick Laing, but Laing soon went back to teaching. In 1876 Thomas K. Robertson was the lead reporter and he found himself before the Free Church Presbytery for refusing to divulge the author of a critical letter in the paper. The language in editorials against deviants from what it regarded as traditional belief, such as those experimenting with the use of the organ, could be quite venomous. Dewar seems to have retained the editorship until 1889, when Peter McGlashan came in. McGlashan, however, was killed on the railway track in September 1890.

In 1891 ownership passed to Alexander Wright, a local bailie and former compositor on the Constitutional, and James Barks was his main reporter. In 1901 Robert E. Steedman of the Alloa Journal, the secretary and treasurer of the Scottish Newspaper Proprietors’ Association, took over the Courier but he in turn soon sold to a partnership of Colin Smart and John McKinley. They had both trained as compositors and had both worked on the China Mail in Hong Kong. They acted jointly as editors until Smart's early death at the age of 38 in 1912, after which McKinley became editor until his death in 1929, when the Perthshire Courier was merged with the Perthshire Advertiser.

Most commentators on the press in the early twentieth century emphasise the extent to which commercial considerations shaped newspapers, as ownership fell into the hands of press barons and business conglomerates. In England it is a trend dating back to the 1880s and the appearance of George Newnes's Tit-Bits and to the Daily Mail from 1896. Both discovered ‘that the public prefers tit-bits to solid fare, headlines to descriptions, sensation to fact’ and, with a need for large circulations to cover rising costs, most followed. Circulation attracted advertising and without advertising a penny daily paper, still less a halfpenny one, could not cover its costs. Greenock-born George Blake, who, before moving to London, had been at the Glasgow Evening News, writing in 1930, believed that ownership of the papers was no longer in the hands of people who cared about journalism, but in the hands of financiers. The financiers dictated ever greater expansion out of Fleet Street, penetrating the furthest reaches of the British Isles and spreading ‘the tawdrier sides of London life’ to all corners and imposing ‘third-rate standards of taste’. What Blake called ‘that great reservoir of Britain's power, local quality’ was in danger of being drained away.

Hamilton Fyfe, also writing in the 1930s, argued that the provincial press, within which he would have included the Scottish press, was avoiding some of the worst effects of London-controlled papers:

More recently, Mark Hampton has argued that, in the first half of the twentieth century, what had once been seen as the educational ideal of newspapers, that they had a role in educating their readers and improving society, gave way to a view that they should somehow reflect the views and desires of their readers.

In Glasgow the ‘age of cotton’ was giving way to the ‘age of iron’ by mid-century, and as iron-shipbuilding grew along the Clyde it needed not just workers but a support industry with engineering skills. In the half century since 1800 the city's population had quadrupled to over 330,000. The city and its surrounding villages were expanding rapidly in what, by British standards, was an unprecedented pace of population growth. In the later 1840s, to the high level of natural increase and local migration was added a flood of immigration from famine-ravaged Ireland, bringing with it, it was believed, an epidemic of typhus and other diseases in the increasingly packed wynds and closes of the old parts of the city. In 1850 the city already had two daily newspapers both battling over the title of Daily Mail.

Morning Dailies

Scotland's first established daily newspaper and the first successful daily outside London, the North British Mail, appeared in Glasgow on 14 April 1847, with Daily added to the title in December of that year. The idea of a daily had been first floated by Charles Mackay, the editor of the Glasgow Argus, but his efforts to raise backing from the Liberal business community were defeated by political splits in the election of 1847. The person who picked up the idea and was behind the North British Mail was Alexander Alison, jnr, managing partner of the Blair Iron Works of the Ayrshire Iron Company. Alison was already part owner of a paper, the National Advertiser, launched in 1844, and of the long-established Tait's Edinburgh Magazine. The National Advertiser was intended as a west of Scotland version of the Edinburgh North British Advertiser, a huge broadsheet published on a Saturday and crammed with advertisements. Like the North British Advertiser, the National Advertiser was issued free to banks, reading rooms, public offices and various business establishments.

The editor of the new North British Mail was the remarkable George Troup. Stonehaven-born Troup had been editor of the Banner of Ulster, but regularly wrote leaders for the National Advertiser and made frequent trips to Glasgow. He was a fervent, teetotal, Protestant evangelical, who had had short periods at the Liverpool Weekly Telegraph and at the Montrose Review and had edited the Aberdeen Banner from 1839 until 1842, before clashing with its publishing committee and moving to Belfast.