The News of the World and the British Press, 1843-2011

'Journalism for the Rich, Journalism for the Poor'

Laurel Brake, Chandrika Kaul, Mark W. Turner, Laurel Brake, Chandrika Kaul, Mark W. Turner

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137392053
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Sozialgeschichte

This volume is the first scholarly treatment of the News of the World from news-rich broadsheet to sensational tabloid. Contributors uncover new facts and discuss a range of topics including Sunday journalism, gender, crime, empire, political cartoons, the mass market, investigative techniques and the Leveson Inquiry.

1

The Foundation and Early Years of the News of the World: ‘Capacious Double Sheets’

James Mussell

Introduction

The News of the World (NOTW) was established in 1843 and quickly found a readership. By 1846, when Charles Mitchell first published his Newspaper Press Directory, the NOTW was claiming a weekly circulation of over 35,000. In this chapter, I consider how the NOTW carved out such a remarkable place for itself in the mid-nineteenth-century market, becoming one of the largest-selling newspapers of all time. The Sunday newspaper was fairly well established, the first – E. Johnson’s British Gazette and Sunday Monitor – had appeared in 1779, but it was the papers that emerged in the 1840s that demonstrated the large potential audience for cheap weekly newspapers. These papers, led by Edward Lloyd’s Lloyd’s Illustrated Newspaper (later Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, then Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper 1842–1931), took advantage of the reduction of the newspaper stamp duty in 1836 to keep their prices as low as possible while orienting their contents towards the interests of this emerging market. Their success in identifying and cultivating a readership amongst the working- and lower-middle classes meant that they reached more readers than newspapers ever had before. It is in this context, as a pioneering publication in the vanguard of a new and successful newspaper genre, that we should consider the NOTW.

The success of the cheap Sunday newspaper is generally attributed to its generous coverage of violent crime and close attention to the more scandalous proceedings in the courts. However, while the Newspaper Press Directory recognised that the NOTW was emblematic of a particular genre, it did not mention this type of content at all. According to the Press Directory, the NOTW was ‘one of the many papers which compresses into a capacious double sheet the news of the week.’¹ All weeklies contained the week’s news: what was remarkable about the NOTW and its rivals was the amount of news they contained given their price. For the Newspaper Press Directory, what made these papers distinct was the way they were oriented towards ‘a class of readers who, though respectable, may be supposed – through incessant occupation in the week – not to have had much opportunity before the Saturday evening for newspaper reading.’² It was these busy readers, unwilling to pay for a daily paper and without the time to read it, who constituted the market for the cheap Sunday press. These readers might have wanted to read, in a mixture of prurience and shock, of the latest murder, but these were not the motives recorded by the Newspaper Press Directory.

The Newspaper Press Directory was aimed at advertisers and newsagents and, while it did not shy away from noting a paper’s politics or orientation to the police courts, tended to present papers positively. As the NOTW was a cheap weekly, it might not have been necessary for the Press Directory to make explicit the type of content printed in its pages. Nonetheless, its delineation of this new genre is important, as it situated it on grounds other than those for which it has become known. As Raymond Williams, amongst others, has argued, the cheap Sundays laid the foundations for the commercial mass press.³ One of the key arguments for the reduction of the newspaper stamp duty in 1836 was that it would enable the more respectable publications to compete with the radical unstamped papers that crowded the bottom end of the market. The success of the cheap Sundays, when they appeared 16 years later, appeared to have achieved this end, displacing the unstamped press with newspapers whose politics and contents, although not ideal, were tolerable to the establishment. To understand the appeal of this new genre is to understand the broader political shift, as early nineteenth-century radicalism gave way to an increasingly hegemonic Victorian liberalism. The NOTW, both less sensational and less radical than its two closest rivals, was the most representative of the genre. To recognise its appeal, we must do more than look to its more lurid contents.

What follows is in two parts. The first describes the foundation of the NOTW and its place in the market for Sunday newspapers. The paper’s founder, John Browne Bell (1779–1855), was well placed to launch a new, cheap Sunday newspaper as he already had substantial experience in the print trade. The success of Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper made apparent the market for cheap, unillustrated Sunday papers: Bell, who already owned one Sunday paper, launched the NOTW in an attempt to develop this new market. The second part explores the way the NOTW positioned itself as a new cheap Sunday newspaper. While it followed Lloyd’s Weekly in an attempt to win a share of its working-class readers, the NOTW presented itself as an up-market alternative available for the same price. Its rapid success suggests that Bell judged the market correctly, and the NOTW remained remarkably consistent in both form and content for the next 30 years. However, the newspaper market changed radically over this period, particularly after the repeal of the final tax on knowledge: the removal of paper duty in Gladstone’s 1861 budget. The NOTW’s refusal to follow its competitors and reduce its price to a penny has been cited as the reason for its declining fortunes. It had conceived of itself as a respectable newspaper, aligned to the interests of working- and lower-middle-class readers and at a price they could afford. While the NOTW succeeded in adapting the upmarket newspaper for lower-class readers, after 1860 it was no longer a cheap weekly and so had to sell itself on other grounds.

John Browne Bell and the Sunday newspaper in the early nineteenth century

The market for Sunday newspapers was inaugurated by E. Johnson’s British Gazette in 1779 and, by 1795, there were five Sundays published in London.⁴ Despite concerns about the sanctity of the Sabbath, these new Sunday papers closely resembled those published during the working week. E. Johnson’s British Gazette’s only concession to the Sabbath, for instance, was the inclusion of the ‘Sunday Monitor’ column on its front page, where the theatre advertisements would otherwise be placed.⁵ In 1796, John Browne Bell’s father, John Bell, entered the market with Bell’s Weekly Messenger (1796–1896). John Bell was a well-regarded (and well-connected) figure in the London print trade. He was a member of the syndicate behind The Morning Post (1772–1937) and his periodicals, the World, or Fashionable Advertiser (1787–94) and La Belle Assemblée (1806–47), were important pioneering publications in their respective genres. His Weekly Messenger was a successful innovation of the Sunday newspaper genre, developing its review-like aspects to increase its appeal over the course of the week. Bell ensured its respectability, moderating its content and refusing to take advertisements, to make it suitable for families. At 7 ½d it was fairly expensive but the paper was considered good value (it expanded in 1802, 1810 and 1828) and found a market, particularly amongst country readers. Its circulation was modest – around 6,000 a week in 1803, climbing to 14,000 at the time of Nelson’s funeral in 1806 – but this was sufficient to establish the paper, and it prospered, surviving until 1896, when it became the Country Sport and Messenger of Agriculture.⁶

The market became more competitive in the early years of the nineteenth century and, by 1812, there were at least 12 papers published on a Sunday.⁷ The Observer (1791–) and the Weekly Dispatch (1795–1961) were already well established, but they were joined by the Sunday Times (1821–, originally as The New Observer) and Bell’s Life in London (1822), amongst others. The name ‘Bell’ clearly operated as a signifier for a type of Sunday newspaper. The Weekly Dispatch, which was edited by an Irish barrister called Robert Bell, had appeared as Bell’s Weekly Dispatch for the first six years of its run; when Bell’s Life in London appeared in 1822, Robert Bell made clear that it was nothing to do with him (it was founded by another Robert Bell⁸) and noted, too, that the Weekly Dispatch was unconnected with John Bell of the Weekly Messenger.⁹ The market was clearly attractive but, because of the rise of the newspaper stamp duty in 1804 to 3 ½d, there was little room to compete through price. Instead, the papers differentiated themselves through their content. The Weekly Dispatch (8 ½d) and Bell’s Life in London (7d), for instance, were both more radical and more seedy than the Weekly Messenger, targeting a knowing, London-based, male readership.

John Browne Bell made a number of attempts to establish himself in this market before the launch of the NOTW in 1843. He was motivated by a combination of commercial astuteness and personal grievance, often pitching his publications directly against those of his father. Bell’s origins are a little murky. The Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) claims that John Bell ‘appears never to have married and left his estate to his niece’, but this appears to have been a deliberate attempt to disinherit his son.¹⁰ John Browne Bell’s record as a publisher certainly suggests he was aggrieved. In 1806 he launched Le Beau Monde, a three-shilling monthly that directly imitated his father’s La Belle Assemblée, which had appeared just a few months previously, even going so far as to take its title from one of La Belle Assemblée’s sections. In January 1808, he entered the Sunday market with his National Register (subtitled ‘The King, Constitution, and Laws’), an 8d. weekly that combined foreign and domestic news, commercial intelligence and police reports with a review of national political institutions. The paper was not a success, and in January 1809 Bell merged it with Le Beau Monde. The resulting paper, Le Beau Monde and Monthly Register lasted a few more months before being sold in April 1809, and Bell and his publishing partner, John de Ca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  The Foundation and Early Years of the News of the World: Capacious Double Sheets
• 2  Rebranding the News of the World: 185690
• 3  Rebranding the News of the World: 1891 and After
• 4  Child Slavery in England: The News of the World and Campaigning for Children (184378)
• 5  Imagining the Mass-market Woman Reader: The News of the World, 184377
• 6  News of the Imperial World: Popular Print Culture, the News of the World and India in the late Nineteenth Century
• 7  Residual Radicalism as a Popular Commercial Strategy: Beginnings and Endings
• 8  Passports to Oblivion: J.M. Staniforths Political Cartoons for the News of the World, 18931921
• 9  Woman as Husband: Gender, Sexuality and Humour in the News of the World 191050s
• 10  The Irish Edition From Filthy Scandal Sheet to Old Friend of the Taoiseach
• 11  One in Every Two Households: The News of the World in the 1950s
• 12  Bringing Popular Journalism into Disrepute: The News of the World, the Public and Politics 19532011
• 13  Gross Interference with the Course of Justice: The News of the World and the Moors Murder trial
• 14  Harbingers of the Future: Rupert Murdochs Takeover of the News of the World Organisation
• 15  The Downfall of the News of the World: The Decline of the English Newspaper and the Double-Edged Sword of Technology
• 16  Afterword: Lessons of the Leveson Inquiry into the British Press
• Appendix: Circulation of the News of the World
• Bibliography
• Index