Transported to Botany Bay. Dorice Williams Elliott

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      Broadside is a printers’ term that means there is print on one side of a folio-sized sheet. Broadsides could be sold as one large sheet, which is what is usually meant when the term is used. They could also be printed horizontally with one-column ballads that were cut up and sold, usually in groups of two; the term for this is slip-sheet. The broadsides and slip-sheet ballads were sometimes collected by middle-class readers and pasted into scrapbooks, which is the primary reason that many of them are still available. My work would have been impossible without such collectors, both those of the nineteenth century and more-recent ones; however, all of the readings of the broadsides and ballads I offer here are my own.⁴

      The broadsides that I am discussing were published at a moment—roughly 1790 to 1860—in between primarily oral folk ballads and cheap commercial literature such as penny fiction and the penny press. Broadsides of many sorts had been printed since the sixteenth century and were read by all classes of people, but when a steep tax on newspapers was instituted in 1712, the broadsides, which were not subject to the tax, became almost the only source of printed news and entertainment for many in the working classes (Collison, 9). Further, with the advent of the iron-frame press, patented in 1800, any journeyman printer could buy a press for thirty pounds and set himself up as a publisher (L. James, 23). The publication and sale of broadsides, which sold for a penny or halfpenny, exploded. By the beginning of the nineteenth century there were seventy-five printers selling broadsides in London alone, with many in other cities and towns as well (Vicinus, 9). The number of broadsides produced increased over the next fifty years; one execution broadside from the late 1840s reportedly sold two and a half million copies, with others routinely selling in the thousands and tens of thousands weekly—astounding numbers for nineteenth-century publishing, in which well-known novels were issued in editions of only five hundred or a thousand and even the circulation numbers of the most popular newspapers were less than two hundred thousand (Webb, 31; Coggeshall, 87–89). The popularity of the broadsides gradually faded beginning at midcentury with a reduction in the tax duties and new technological developments, including the emergence of the huge steam presses that made newspapers and books more affordable to all classes. Broadsides were printed throughout the nineteenth century, but their heyday coincided roughly with the years during which the English government was transporting many of its felons to Australia. These were also the years during which England was changing from a largely rural agricultural economy to an urbanized industrial one, causing major social transformation, especially for the working classes.⁵