Newspapers and English Society 1695-1855

Hannah Barker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317883456
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This lively new study covers the dramatic expansion of the press from the seventeenth century to the mid nineteenth century. Hannah Barker explores the factors behind the rise of newspapers to a major force helping to reflect and shape public opinion and altering the way in which politics operated at every level of English life. Newspapers, Politics and English Society 1695-1855 provides a unique insight into the political and social history of eighteenth and nineteenth century England as well as an important study of the history of the media.

Part One The Development of the Newspaper Press

Chapter One Newspapers and Public Opinion

DOI: 10.4324/9781315840635-1

Historians have long associated the press with changes in the way the political world operated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For John Brewer, it formed a central component of an ‘alternative structure of politics’ which emerged in the 1760s and which spawned radical movements such as that headed by John Wilkes. For Whig historians, on the other hand, the press, and newspapers in particular, were part of the inexorable rise of accountable government and democratic society. Yet newspapers were also used by the ruling elite to promote their own political visions and in some ways to reinforce their control over society. Despite the claims of many Whiggish historians, newspapers did not necessarily support the cause of freedom and were indeed often opposed to ‘progressive’, reforming movements. As we shall see in Part Two of this book, certain sections of the newspaper press could be politically conservative, and even reactionary, in outlook. However, this does not alter the fact that during our period the ruling elite was increasingly forced to recognise popular politics and the press and to accommodate itself to them.

For many amongst the ruling elite, a diversity of newspaper politics was not apparent and there is much evidence of the unease which popular printed matter in general provoked. This was nothing new in our period. Charles II, like his predecessors, had believed that an unfettered press could promote plots against the government.¹ Between 1695 and 1855, however, the level of anxiety which the press could promote amongst the ruling classes appears to have risen. In part, this can be linked to the growth in newspaper production and spread of newspaper readership, but it was also dependent on the state of national politics, for it was at times of particular political unrest that the newspaper press could appear most influential and potentially threatening. This trend was apparent from the early eighteenth century, when the political writer John Toland claimed that newspapers could ‘poyson the minds of the common people against his Majesty ... vilify his Ministers, & disturb the public peace, to the scandal of all good Government’.² Five years later, in 1722, Dr Burscough preached a sermon before the House of Commons in which he claimed: ‘Seditious papers are the certain forerunners of public confusion; the tendency is natural; nor is it to be wondered at, that when some write upon the confines of treason, others should act within them.’³

1 Lois G. Schwoerer, ‘Liberty of the press and public opinion: 1660–1695’, in J.R. Jones, ed., Liberty Secured? Britain before and after 1688, (Stanford, Calif., 1992), p. 200. 2 Cited in C.Y. Ferdinand, Benjamin Collins and the Provincial Newspaper Trade in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1997), pp. 174–5. 3 Cited in Jeremy Black, ‘Flying a kite: the political impact of the eighteenth-century press’, Journal of Newspaper and Periodical Studies I, 2 (1985), p. 13.

In the latter part of the eighteenth century, conservative fears were even more marked. In 1774, the political writer Josiah Tucker conjured up the spectres of arbitrary rule and superstition when he complained that ‘this country is as much news-mad and news-ridden as ever it was popery-mad and priest-ridden’.⁴ During the wars with revolutionary France, the writer and politician Edmund Burke charged newspapers with deliberately subverting the moral and social order in France and threatening to do the same in Britain.⁵ John Reeves, founder of the Loyalist Associations in 1792, was so dismayed by the ‘circulation of Newspapers filled with disloyalty and sedition’ that he published a pamphlet which urged ‘all good Subjects, whether Masters or Private families, or Keepers of Inns, Taverns, or Coffee-Houses, to discontinue and discourage the use and circulation of all such disloyal and seditious Newspapers’.⁶ The MP William Windham echoed his comments in 1799 when he told the House of Commons: ‘He never saw a man with a newspaper in his hand, without regarding him with the sensation that he was taking poison.’⁷

4 Jonathan Barry, ‘The press and the politics of culture in Bristol, 1660–1775’, in Jeremy Black and Jeremy Gregory, eds., Culture, Politics and Society in Britain, 1660–1800 (Manchester, 1991), p. 65. 5 The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. T.W. Copeland (10 vols., Cambridge, 1958–78), vi. 242; vii. 216, 229, 260. 6 Stephen Koss, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain, vol. 1: The Nineteenth Century (London, 1981), p. 156. 7 Jeremy Black, The English Press in the Eighteenth Century (Beckenham, 1987), p. 139.

The end of hostilities with France in 1815 did little to allay such fears, and the early nineteenth century saw increasing anxieties amongst a ruling class faced with growing demands for reform and on occasion believing the country to be on the brink of revolution. In a speech to the House of Lords in 1819, the Foreign Secretary, Viscount Castlereagh spoke of the danger which Britain faced, and argued

that a conspiracy existed for the subversion of the constitution and of the rights of property; and that it was intended to subvert the fabric of the constitution in church and state. Among the means adopted for the accomplishment of this end, it was with grief he had to state, that the press was one of the principal. It had greatly contributed to produce the danger against which their lordships had to guard.⁸

8 Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-century England (Cambridge, 1996), p. 65.

Robert Southey, erstwhile reformer turned defender of the establishment, agreed and traced popular unrest directly to those ‘weekly apostles of sedition’ which found their way ‘to the pothouse in town, and the ale-house in the country, inflaming the turbulent temper of the manufacturer, and disturbing the quiet attachment of the peasant to those institutions under which he and his fathers have dwelt in peace’.⁹ Such sentiments were also expressed outside parliament. A government informer named W. Waddilove wrote to the Home Office from Hexham in November 1831 enclosing an unstamped paper which he had purchased in the open market and which had been bought ‘with great avidity’. Waddilove grimly predicted that ‘before this reaches you, the poison will have infected our retired valleys’.¹⁰ When the Poor Law Commissioners asked magistrates and overseers the reasons for the agricultural riots of 1830 and 1831, many replied that newspapers had played a part. A respondent from Dorset blamed trouble there on ‘the active dissemination, through the press, of seditious and revolutionary principles, seconded by much distress’. In Kent, riots were ascribed to the writings of Richard Carlile and William Cobbett, ‘which are taken exclusively, or nearly so, at all the ale and beerhouses, where they are read and commented upon by the lower classes, who frequented these houses, and would allow no publication of a contrary tendency to be brought into the house, so that the baneful poison had its full operation ...’¹¹

9 Gilmartin, Print Politics, p. 74. 10 Patricia Hollis, The Pauper Press: A Study in Working-class Radicalism of the 1830s (Oxford, 1970), p. 36. 11 Hollis, The Pauper Press, p. 40.

However, despite the alarm shown by members of the ruling elites at radical and ‘seditious’ publications, it is worth remembering how limited state action against the press was (as is discussed in chapter 4). No doubt many shared the view of the politician Henry Bankes, expressed in 1819, that the press was ‘a tremendous engine in the hands of mischievous men’,¹² but the country’s rulers either felt unwilling or unable to counteract any but the most extreme of publications. One reason for this was the ambivalence with which many politicians viewed the press. It was true that a hostile press was a thorn in any government’s side, but it was equally the case that a supportive press could prove a great advantage. Moreover, and more importantly, despite the loud declamations made about the threat to constitutional stability posed by newspapers, few, if any, politicians would have believed that the press on its own could initiate radical change in the way in which society was governed or dictate the identity of the party in power. It is unlikely that the former Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, really did believe that the country was governed by the ‘Gentlemen of the Press’ as he stated in 1826, even if he did attribute part of the blame for his downfall in 1830 to his neglect of newspapers.¹³

12 Arthur Aspinall, Politics and the Press, c. 1780–1850 (London, 1949), p. 1. 13 Aspinall, Politics and the Press, p. 2.

When trying to suppress newspapers, politicians also came up against powerful ideological opposition, which stemmed from a belief in the sanctity of the liberty of the press. For most of our period, many commentators argued that the press was not a threat to the constitution, but its main form of protection. The ‘liberty of the press’ was to become a powerful rhetorical concept. For much of the eighteenth century, it was seen as a means of defending the country against corrupt government, by publicising the actions of its rulers and thus taking the role of public watchdog. Later in the nineteenth century, the liberty of the press became a more radical tool in campaigns to reform society. From the early eighteenth century onwards the concept had clearly gained political currency, and politicians seemed keen to treat the concept respectfully, even if their actions belied their words. The Lord Chancellor, Lord Hardwicke, for example, argued in 1739 that ‘the liberty of the press is what I think ought to be sacred to every Englishman’, and even Sir William Younge, whilst speaking in favour of a resolution to prohibit the publication of parliamentary debates in 1738, was keen to stress that ‘attacking the Liberty of the Press is a point I would be as tender of as any gentleman in this House’.¹⁴

14 Simon Targett, ‘Sir Robert Walpole’s newspapers 1722–42: propaganda and politics in the age of Whig supremacy’ (Cambridge University PhD thesis, 1991), p. 85.

Outside parliament, too, commentators made much of the benefits which a free press could bestow. The Old England Journal declared that

the people of England without the Liberty of the Press to inform them of the Fitness and Unfitness of measures, approv’d or condemn’d by those whom they have trusted, and whom they may trust again, would be in as blind a state of subjection, as if they lived under the most arbitrary and inquisitorial Government.¹⁵

15 Bob Harris, A Patriot Press: National Politics and the London Press in the 1740s (Oxford, 1993), p. 32.

Bob Harris asserts that it was ‘near commonplace’ in the 1740s to argue that the press ‘was vital to the exercise of the people’s alleged right to examine “the measures of every administration”’. He cites a pa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART ONE: The Development of the Newspaper Press
• PART TWO: Newspapers and Politics
• Conclusion
• Select Bibliography
• Index