Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain. Judith Flanders

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.СКАЧАТЬ