During this period, papers also managed to start to increase their circulation by technical advances. Thomas Barnes succeeded in this with The Times and the paper’s circulation increased from 7,000 in 1817 to 28,000 by 1841. This was an important change for the press since more people would be buying papers and be reading the different political messages sent out in them.
Another change for the press was the launch of illustrated papers in the 1840s. The first two important, successful illustrated papers were Punch and The London Illustrated News. Punch was more of a magazine than a paper but even so its circulation reached to 90,000 copies and it was famous for its cartoons and political satire. For the first few years of its existence, Punch Magazine developed a reputation as ‘a defender of the oppressed and a radical scourge of all authority’. Early targets included the monarchy and leading politicians. This became an important source of the press for pushing social change and each of its cartoons had a message for the readers to think about.
In 1845 Henry Mayhew- an important figure working with Punch- wrote his last article for the magazine. The loss of Mayhew reduced the radical content of the magazine. The publishers believed that the radicalism of Punch Magazine was not popular with the majority of its readers. Although there were some campaigns it did support, such as a reduction in the hours of shop workers, after 1850, the magazine reflected the conservative views of the growing middle class in Britain. This is an example of how any form of the press can change due to the journalists employed and that it is not always social or political change that results in these transformations.
The Illustrated London News was the first weekly paper to carry topical engravings but the engravings took time to complete and the stories were published about a week later after they had happened.
However, cartoonists had been around all of the nineteenth century. One famous cartoonist was a man called George Cruikshank. His early drawings included attacks on the royal family and leading politicians such as Lord Castlereagh and Lord Sidmouth. Cartoonists were hit by the struggle for press freedom, but those such as Cruikshank still managed to produce political pamphlets to spread their ideas across the country. The nature of cartoons changed as the political mood changed and they were influenced by the topical events of the day. Many artists were unhappy about the changes that had resulted from the Industrial Revolution and so in the late 1820s many cartoonists attacked the developments through their drawings.
It is clear that newspapers took on the role of fighting for reform and informing all classes of society what the politicians were currently working on. In 1849 Henry Mayhew, worker on the Morning Chronicle, suggested that the paper should carry out an investigation into the condition of the labouring classes in England and Wales. The editor John Douglas Cook agreed; it was the first time in history that a newspaper undertook a project like this. The country was divided into six broad areas and writers were sent to investigate. This demonstrates how the nature of the press was changing and how the papers wanted to get themselves further involved in the topical issues to get a good story. Thus the role of the press was changing to get a story that would sell and capture the spirit of the country by getting them actively involved.
The crucial event to happen that would change the nature of the press forever was the removal of stamp duties in 1855. A cheaper stamped press meant that more people could buy a paper and the unstamped press went out of business, as they could no longer compete with the higher quality of the legitimate papers. As it was now cheaper to produce newspapers, and the demand for them higher, new publications appeared such as the Daily Telegraph. This meant the people would not only get more angles on stories, but papers would be competing against each other even more making the quality improve too. The layout of papers would also change as a result of this, but these visual effects did take longer to appear but once they did papers were able to use headlines and spread out the reports to make them easier to read.
In 1961 Gladstone helped the papers further by abolishing the excise duty on paper. This made producing papers cheaper still and hence revived the rural paper works, encouraged the growth of London newspapers and the provincial press.
The popular press continued to grow in the second half of the nineteenth century due to new legislation being passed. The expansion of the electorate meant an increasingly important role for party politics to win over the voters. In turn this meant the role of the press as an opinion former had become much more important as the only effective means of doing this. The Elementary Education Act of 1870 led to an increase in literacy meaning more people of the lower classes would be able to buy and read a paper.
Other factors in the second half of the nineteenth century also helped to influence the growth of the press. Technological advances meant newsprint was cheaper and printing methods were more efficient. Technology also made it possible for papers to print foreign news in a matter of hours with the submarine telegraph cable and the telephone. The formation of the Press Association also made it easier for papers to supply foreign news since it lowered their costs because not each individual paper had to send its own reporters around the world. This gave the press a new role to inform the British public of world news and would change their views of battles forever.
William Howard Russell joined The Times in 1843 and he was sent to cover the Crimean War. His reports revealed the sufferings of the British army during the winter of 1854. These accounts upset Queen Victoria and led to attacks on the government by the Liberal M.P. John Roebuck. Russell developed a reputation as Britain’s finest military reporter with accounts of the Indian Mutiny, the American Civil War, The Austro-Prussian War and the Franco-Prussian War. This was perhaps the start of ‘real’ reports of war where the journalists would no longer hold back on detail as they saw their role as an informer to the people who read their paper and as they no longer had the pressure from the government trying to stop them from publishing stories they may find offensive.
Further development of foreign news came at the very end of the nineteenth century during the Boer War and would set the scene for the beginnings of the twentieth century in world reporting. The Boer War would prove to be the first mass media war. The newly literate masses of industrial Britain were avid consumers of newspaper and magazine reports about the war. At this time there were more advances in technology allowing events to be captured on film. The Boer War was recorded by the sharp lens of cinematography and there were also new hand-held machines used to produce more intimate pictures of the soldiers in action. This was yet another change to the press as they could now report back with real images of what was going on- although some photographers restaged events for the camera.
In the late nineteenth century the influence of the American press played a major role in changing the nature of the British press. By the 1890s British papers were copying the American sensationalism and design. An example of this new adopted style could be seen in the Pall Mall Gazette edited by William Stead. The paper featured banner headlines, shorter paragraphs in a readable style and pictures and diagrams were used to break up the text.
Many papers also started to report on human-interest stories and editors such as Stead used their paper to campaign for various causes. These types of stories brought in thousands of readers and they saw a new approach from the press. They were using scandal to sell stories and the role of the press was to bring in mass readership and increase circulation all the more.
By the very end of the nineteenth century the introduction to the really modern press arrived first with the Daily Mail. They printed news and gossip in easily readable paragraphs, women readers were catered for the first time, photos were used instead of drawings and headlines were bigger. Also at this time virtually all newspapers had a clear political identity. However the popular dailies kept their political identity under the surface so as not to alienate the mass readership and often did not address politics until actual elections were approaching.
Throughout the course of the nineteenth century it can be seen that the role and nature of the press changed considerably and that the press played an important part in addressing and developing political issues to all its readers. The newspapers developed themselves as they received more freedom and during the course of the century their reports generally became more politically fired to their own view, could include foreign news and in some cases were more sensational. Other very important factors that resulted in major changes to the press were the abolishing of Stamp tax, excise duty on paper and technological advances. They all contributed to a cheaper paper and thus enabling more people to the choice of buying and reading them.
The cartoonists stayed focused throughout the whole century on topical political issues they found important. Although the nature of cartoons did not change dramatically through changes in the press (only really if there was a change in cartoonists), they were an important source of information to the people, who could relate to them.
I would say that overall the press did change considerably over the course of the nineteenth century. The press was always an important source of information to the people, but by the end of the nineteenth century the newspaper would have been easier to read, cheaper and accessible to everybody.