England, 1760-1815

4 England, –
Hannah Barker
This chapter covers an important period in the history of the English
press. It begins at the accession of George III in  – often seen as
heralding a new phase in the development of popular politics and print
culture – and ends in , with the cessation of hostilities against France
which had lasted almost twenty-five years. Historians of England have
long associated the press with changes in the way the political world op-
erated in the eighteenth century. For John Brewer, it formed a central
component of an ‘alternative structure of politics’ which emerged in the
s and which spawned a series of radical movements.

For earlier
Whig historians, the emergence of the press – and the newspaper press in
particular – was part of the inexorable rise of accountable government and
democratic society.

Although such a Whiggish teleology is misleading on
several counts – not least because it ignores the role of the conservative
press in combating reform – it is true that from the early eighteenth cen-
tury newspapers (taken in the widest sense to include most types of serial
publication, which included ‘news’) encouraged the wider population to
take an interest, and even to play a part, in political life.
Compared to some of its continental counterparts, the English news-
paper press was intensely political and fiercely outspoken. Moreover,
English newspapers did not limit their coverage to national or interna-
tional affairs and – again in contrast to much of the rest of Europe – the
press in England provided a consistent and often critical commentary
on local events as well. English newspapers would also have appeared
unusual to a European readership as they tended to be larger than pa-
pers produced elsewhere, contained more text and displayed more varied

contents. In addition to news concerning parliament, the court, elec-
tions, local government and foreign relations, advertising constituted an
important part of a newspaper’s make-up, as did information on crime,
trade, fashion, theatre, racing and shipping. Both the breadth and depth of
coverage displayed by the English newspaper press suggest that it catered
for a unique form of public sphere and political arena.

 Hannah Barker
The political views and information that the English newspaper press
imparted, coupled with the intense debate which it engendered, helped
to bring politics in England out of the restricted arena of the political and
social elite to a much wider public. Moreover, through the promotion of
certain concepts of liberty, in particular the belief that Britons were all
free citizens living in a free state, newspapers encouraged the public to
believe they had not just the opportunity, but the right, to involve them-
selves in the nation’s political life, and to protest when they disapproved
of government action. Indeed, the press itself was to become the principle
medium to articulate and dissemina
te protests against the government,
as well as playing a crucial role in the political education and politicisa-
tion of the English people. Bob Harris has further claimed that the press
encouraged a greater sense of national consciousness
in the eighteenth
century.

Thus, newspapers helped not just to create public opinion, but
also gave it a distinctly national character.
The rise to prominence of ‘public opinion’ in English political life dur-
ing the eighteenth century was widely commented upon at the time. Quite
who produced public opinion, though, was hotly deba

ted throughout the
period, and contemporaries could not agree concerning the identity of
‘the public’. For some
it described those whose constitutional standing,
education or wealth gave them a legitimate say in the nation’s affairs; for
others, the term was synonymous with
the mob. But many understood
that it was access to print which secured membership of the public, since
politicisation and the growth of print culture were seen to go hand-in-
hand. Newspapers themselves encouraged readers to believe that they
had a close relationship with each other, and most papers claimed to rep-
resent public opinion in some way, particularly by the nineteenth century.
Using terms such as ‘the people’ and ‘the public’ from the mid-eighteenth
century onwards, newspapers increasingly addressed much wider (and
less easily definable) sections of the population, rather than presuming to
speakonly to freeholders, voters or the rich.
In addition to proclaiming their allegiance to public opinion, newspa-
pers also used more subtle methods to encourage their readers that they
spoke with ‘the voice of the people’. Letter-writers used pseudonyms
to suggest that an individual was speaking not for him or herself, but
as the representative of a wider social group, or even of the public as a
whole. Martin Smith has noted that the signatures of letters published
by the Manchester Herald and Manchester Gazette suggest a ‘proletarian’
readership: for example, ‘one of the common people’, ‘a plebeian’ and
numerous letters signed by weavers and spinners.

This, in turn, sug-
gests a public which extended fairly low down the social scale. Rather
than alienating readers, the anonymity of many newspaper contributions
England –

served to promote both newspapers and the political world which they
described as inclusive and accessible.
A Prussian traveller, Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz, noted in 
how highly the public prized the ability to write anonymously for news-
papers. He described the method by which articles and letters could be
delivered secretly to printers by means of a special post-box, and claimed
that ‘if you chose to make yourself known to the printer, he is obliged
to observe secrecy. Nothing can force him to violate this, for were he to
do so, he would not only lose his business, but also have his house ex-
posed to the fury of the populace.’

Many letters consisted of attacks on
individual public figures. Newspapers offered the unique opportunity to
utter a tirade against, or to appeal to, those individuals – like politicians,
ministers, bishops, or even the King – who would normally have been at
too great a social distance. As ‘John Bull’ noted in a letter addressed to
the King in , ‘it is the Birth-right of all free Britons to study public
affairs, it is their duty to lay the result of their enquiries with candour
and impartiality before your Majesty, and even the Public, when their
views are laudable to your Royal interest, and the Good of their Fellow
Citizens’.

Indeed, such was the degree to which the newspaper audience was
presumed to be able to involve itself
in the nation
’s political affairs that
the modern separation of ‘high’ and ‘low’ politics appears artificial and
inadequate to describe the complexities of
political life, particularly in the
capital. Newspapers encouraged their readers to believe that they could

participate in the world of politics in a variety of ways: most clearly, in the
letters which appeared to allow individuals to address important figures,
or the public en masse, and which also gave the opportunity to con-
tribute to public debate in its truest sense. In addition, the familiarity with
which those in ‘high’ politics were described, flattered in its assumption
that the well-informed newspaper-reader was politically ‘in-the-know’,
rather than just a passive observer of political life.
As towns across England witnessed a growth in population, newspapers
helped promote a new political culture which encouraged individuals out-
side the political elite to form independent political organisations and to
develop further notions of their own rights and liberties. Over time, crit-
icism of central government gave rise to full-scale national movements
that aimed to change the way in which society was run. Newspapers
both represented and helped to further such movements in crucial ways.
Although newspapers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
did not – as a rule – dictate to individual politicians or
governments,
nor effect policy changes on a day-to-day basis, a fundamental acknowl-
edgement that government was based on consent meant that successive
 Hannah Barker
administrations were neither unaffected by newspapers, nor unbending
in the face of popular protest. The political elite became increasingly
sensitive to the tenor of extra-parliamentary politics and on certain oc-
casions, particularly during periods of political crisis, the press played an
important role in altering or promoting existing governmental policy.
Moreover, as speeches made in parliament, at election hustings and
in public meetings became more commonly reported, speakers at such
events were increasingly aware that their message would be conveyed to
a much wider audience, and as a result, often modified what was said.


The frequency with which newspapers influenced political decision-
making, and the degree of impact that the press had on the general
political climate became more marked during the eighteenth century.
Such influence was evident during the s, when a press war forced
the Prime Minister, the earl of Bute, into the political wilderness, and
helped secure both fame and power for one of his main critics, the radi-
cal politician John Wilkes. The press helped Wilkes to create a popular
movement on a national scale, as his success at capturing much of public
opinion outside the ruling elite was given clear expression in the coun-
try’s newspapers.

Wilkes’s struggle with the government clearly repre-
sented wider political issues for English men and women. Throughout
the country newspaper readers were kept apprised of events surround-
ing him at the same time that they were informed about the war with
America.

During the s, the newspaper press buttressed the cause of
the King and his Prime Minister, William Pitt, against a hostile campaign
by supporters of the defunct government of Lord North and Charles
James Fox,

and in the following decade, newspapers helped promote
and define the increasingly polarised nature of English popular politics,
whilst the radical press acted as a constant irritant and source of alarm
for the government.

The growing role of the newspaper press in British politics was related
to the increased prominence of print culture as a whole. However, the
place of newspapers in the hierarchy of political print also changed signifi-

cantly during our period. The essay paper was in decline after the s,
and although pamphlets were still hugely important during the American
War, they were being slowly eclipsed by newspapers, which increasingly
not only provided their readers with the most up-to-date news, but also
produced their own commentary on events. Moreover, the extensive pub-
lication of letters meant that the relationship between readers and the
political opinions espoused by newspapers appeared particularly close:
a fact that made them more attractive to their audience. By the s,
newspapers had emerged as a force to rival all other forms of political
print. Their dominance of the popular political sphere was reinforced
England –
by the part they played in several nationally based extra-parliamentary
campaigns in the s and s, in particular the parliamentary re-
form and anti-slavery movements, and in the role of the press in the
fierce political arguments surrounding the French Revolution. From this
point on, newspapers increasingly dominated public debate: a situation
that was not to change until the twentieth century.
Not surprisingly, it was at times of particular political unrest that the
newspaper press could appear most influential, and even a source of threat
to politicians. In the later part of the eighteenth century, such fears were
marked. During the wars with revolutionary France, the writer and politi-
cian Edmund Burke charged newspapers with deliberately subverting
the moral and social order in France and threatening to do the same in
Britain.

The end of hostilities with the French in  did little to allay
such fears, and the early nineteenth century saw increasing levels of anx-
iety amongst a ruling class facing growing demands for reform, and, on
occasion, believing the country to be on the brinkof revolution. Robert
Southey, erstwhile reformer, turned defender of the establishment, traced

contemporary popular unrest in the s directly to those ‘weekly apos-
tles of sedition’ which found their way ‘to the pot-house in town, and
the ale-house in the country, inflaming the turbulent temper of the man-
ufacturer, and disturbing
the quiet attachment of the peasant to those
institutions under which he and his fathers have dwelt in peace’.

Despite the alarm shown by members of the ruling elite at radical and
‘seditious’ publications, however, state action against the press was lim-
ited. No doubt many shared the view of the politician Henry Bankes
that the press was ‘a tremendous engine in the hands of mischievous
men’,

but the country’s rulers either felt unwilling or unable to counter-
act 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
either initiate radical change in the way in which society was governed,
or dictate the identity of the party in power.
Despite the existence of a series of sweeping laws in the eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, the press in England was rarely subject
to a system of organised government or legal repression, and it certainly
never experienced the kind of rigorous censorship which occurred in
parts of Continental Europe (providing a source of much comment by
foreign visitors).


This is not to say that English newspapers were free
 Hannah Barker
from governmental constraints, and the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries witnessed the enactment of a variety of controlling and contain-
ing measures. One of these was taxation, although government policy
in this area seems to have been driven largely (although not wholly)
by the revenue needs of the state, rather than by a desire to keep the
press within certain limits. Thus, newspaper taxation, like many other
forms of taxation, was at its height at the end of
the war with Napoleonic
France in , after two decades during which government expendi-
ture had been driven steadily upwards by a war effort unprecedented
in its proportions.

Enforcement of the taxation laws could be hapha-
zard, though, and an unstamped press thrived from the early eighteenth
century, and was especially active in the early
nineteenth century. The
producers of unstamped papers could rely in the main on bureaucratic
inefficiency or the unwillingness of government to prosecute, coupled
with their own attempts at evading detection.
Alongside the pressures imposed by taxation, another important res-
triction on press freedom came from the seditious libel law. This was
sweeping in both its reach – in terms of who could be prosecuted – and
in its definition of sedition. For almost all of the period under discussion,
truth was not
a defence, and for much of the eighteenth century the role
of the jury was only to determine the fact of publication and the identity of
the subject.
It was the judge who decided whether the act had been done

with criminal intent and if the material concerned did indeed constitute
seditious libel. The power which this conferred on the judiciary was a
cause of much discontent, and was the motivation for Fox’s Libel Act of
, which gave juries the right to bring in general verdicts and reduced
the part played by judges. However, this change in the law may well have
made little difference at the time, since the climate of the s probably
encouraged more convictions than previously.

Despite the bulkof legislation concerning the press appearing particu-
larly harsh, royal proclamations were still used throughout the eighteenth
century to exhort magistrates to unearth and prosecute the authors and
publishers of seditious material at times of political crisis. This suggests
the inefficiency with which the law was enforced the rest of the time. Of
course, as the amount of political printed matter produced expanded on
a dramatic scale, rigorous control of the press became increasingly im-
practical, even if the government had been sufficiently motivated to try to
enact it. Instances of government repression were more than balanced by
the amount of anti-administration material that was able to flourish. Even
in the midst of the anti-revolutionary paranoia of the s, for example,
the state did not attempt a systematic clamping-down on press freedoms
(or any other freedoms come to that), and the machinery of repression
England –
in England changed very little in the s in comparison with the rest
of the eighteenth century.

This is not to say that Pitt’s government made no moves against the
press, and radical newspapers in particular were often harassed both by
central and local apparatuses of the state. The editor of the radical London
daily the Argus, for example, was forced to flee the country in  to
escape a prosecution for seditious libel.


The government also made use
of exofficio informations to combat radical newspapers. This was a legal
move which dispensed with the intermediate step of a grand jury and
allowed the government to prosecute for libel more or less at will.

Ver y
few exofficio informations were filed against publishers and printers, but
there is no doubt that they served to intimidate the printing community
in general. Such action resulted in the destruction of both the Leicester
Chronicle and the Manchester Herald in .

In the case of the Herald, the
government brought as many as thirteen informations and indictments
against the paper within a matter of months.

Whilst governments might bully certain sections of the press, the state
also conceded some of its powers following legal battles in the s and
s, when politicians lost their ability to issue general warrants and
to prevent the publication of parliamentary debates.

The results of
government action against the press were piecemeal and scarcely unifor
m
in their impact, particularly outside London. Thus, in , a friend of the
political reformer Christopher Wyvill recommended
Solomon Hodgson
’s
Newcastle Chronicle to him, as it was run by ‘a man ...veryfirmtothe
cause of liberty & reform & ...not to be dismay’d at the threats that are

constantly made to intimidate him’.

In addition, some of the London
newspapers, most notably the Morning Chronicle and the Morning Post,
also opposed the government throughout the s. Some years later,
during the wars with Napoleonic France, the lackof an official or even
a voluntary form of press censorship caused the government alarm on
several occasions as sensitive military information was divulged which –
it was claimed – the enemy might have used to its advantage. Whilst
commanding in the Peninsula, the Duke of Wellington often had cause
to complain of the freedom with which the press discussed the military
situation. In March , he wrote to his brother, Lord Wellesley, that
the next campaign should prove a success ‘unless those admirably useful
institutions, the English newspapers, should have given Bonaparte the
alarm, and should have induced him to order his marshals to assemble
their troops to oppose me’.

In addition to the enactment of legal restraints, the press was subject
to more subtle means of ‘high’ political interference. The payment of
‘subsidies’ or bribes during the eighteenth century became a dominant
 Hannah Barker
theme for many historians of the press. Perhaps the most influential of
these was Arthur Aspinall, whose workdepicts eighteenth-century news-
papers as victims of the supposedly rampant and pervasive corruption of
the period.

Aspinall’s views were based largely on politicians’ correspon-
dence and government papers, and the resultant ‘high’ political vision
is too narrow to show fully the relationship between newspapers and
the wider political world. He asserted that the sale of newspapers in the

eighteenth century was too restricted
to make them self-supporting, and
that they were therefore dependent for their survival on political subsidy.
Yet this was unlikely to have been the case, since newspapers were increas-
ingly profitable during this period, whilst levels of bribery appear to have
been relatively low. In the early s, the Morning Post, for example, paid
out dividends of £, and made returns for its owners of  per cent,

whilst in , a third share in the Wo r l d was worth £,.

Christie
has shown that by the s a successful paper such as the Morning
Chronicle could make annual profits of £,.

Indeed, Aspinall him-
self argued that by around  newspapers were becoming so profitable,
and governments so poor by comparison, that full-scale ‘corruption’
was no longer an option. As Lord Liverpool wrote to Castlereagh in that
year,
no paper that has any character, and consequently an established sale, will accept
money from the Government; and, indeed, their profits are so enormous in all
critical times, when their support is most necessary, that no pecuniary assistance
that Government could offer would really be worth their acceptance.

But newspapers were not wholly, or even largely, open to control by
political subsidy even before the nineteenth century. The relationship
between politicians and newspapers throughout the period under discus-
sion was a complex one, but by and large, subsidy was not the controlling
force in newspaper politics. For the most part newspapers depended
on advertising revenue and, more importantly, sales, to make money.

Newspapers in England were, above all, commercial enterprises. Given
the basis of newspaper profitability, newspapermen concentrated on in-
creasing readership and advertising revenue as the means to ensure finan-
cial security, rather than chasing relatively small political bribes.

It was
the profitability of newspapers, not the availability of politicians’ money,
which led to an increase in titles as the period progressed. This deve-
lopment was not, of course, limited to London, and the provincial press
also grew prolifically (with less question here of political subsidy, at least
in the eighteenth century). There is no doubt that political ‘corruption’
was not uncommon. What we need to remember is that the relation-
ship between newspapers and politicians was complicated: that politically