The Dawn of the Cheap Press in Victorian Britain

The End of the 'Taxes on Knowledge', 1849-1869

Martin Hewitt

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781474243322
• eBook ISBN: 9781472513052
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

The Dawn of the Cheap Press provides the first detailed study of the mid-Victorian campaign for the repeal of the taxes on knowledge for over a hundred years. Using the recently discovered papers of the Association for the Promotion of the Repeal of the Taxes on Knowledge and taking advantage of new forms of research made possible by the digitisation of nineteenth century newspapers, it assesses the impact of the removal of the last surviving legal disabilities on the newspaper industry, the nature of journalism, and the cultures and practices of newspaper reading. The book demonstrates that the campaign against the taxes on knowledge retained broad popular appeal, and played an important role in the politics of mid-Victorian budgets. It not only makes a seminal contribution to the history of the nineteenth century press and print culture, but also illuminates the culture and politics of mid-Victorian Britain, offers an important re-reading of the history of extra-parliamentary pressure group politics and provides new insights into the origins of Gladstonian Liberalism.

1

Setting the Scene

The repeal of taxes on knowledge marked an important moment in the history of the press in Britain. Lucy Brown has described the removal of the stamp duty in 1855 as one of the ‘few . . . turning-points around which a chronological history [of newspapers] can be shaped’.¹ Joel Wiener, seizing on the slightly later repeal of the paper duty has similarly described its removal as ‘a landmark in the history of journalism, comparable, in its effects, to the termination of press censorship in 1695.’² Historians of the political press, the religious press and of the press in Wales, Scotland and Ireland have highlighted the transformative effects of their removal.³ From a broader perspective, historians of mid-Victorian labour and politics have seen the final removal of the taxes on newspapers as ‘amongst the most important legislative initiatives’ of Britain’s political stabilization in the 1850s.⁴

Yet for all this, the arguments, the campaigns and the consequences of repeal in the 1850s and early 1860s remain largely invisible, even though they were one of the relatively few triumphs of Victorian extra-parliamentary pressure. In the press histories of the later nineteenth century, the campaigns were largely passed over in silence. Modern histories have scarcely done better.⁵ The repeal of the taxes appears marginal to studies of the Manchester school,⁶ can barely claim a mention in the standard histories of Victorian pressure from without,⁷ and even in studies of radicalism or popular liberalism in the mid-Victorian years the subject is given short shrift.⁸ Only in the history of secularist radicalism has its history been given any great attention.⁹ Where historians have been moved to an assessment, they have tended to be dismissive. For Patricia Hollis, in comparison to the struggles of the 1830s, the later agitation was merely ‘one of those many causes, like temperance, foreign refugees, the health of towns, the ballot, corn laws, and land reform which co-opted working men under liberal banners’.¹⁰ For Miles Taylor, perhaps the most perceptive of more recent commentators, the APRTOK was a slightly stranded compromise between old chartists wanting to see the agitation as ‘a gladiatorial battle between a censorious state and a virtuous people’ and financial reformers who saw it as ‘a more pragmatic issue of fiscal administration’.¹¹

Inattention has encouraged imprecision and error. The basic chronology of the repeal is frequently truncated or telescoped. The critical legislation is misattributed. Distinctions between the various campaigning groups involved are often ignored, frequently making identification impossible. Indeed APRTOK, the central body in the mid-century campaigns against the taxes, must have strong claim to be the most variously misnamed association in Victorian Britain, being rendered in more than a dozen alternative ways by contemporaries and later accounts. Even the Association’s own officers were guilty.¹² Such sloppiness would be less significant were it not that APRTOK was only one of several societies and groups which campaigned against the taxes, and the imprecision can make it difficult to distinguish one from another. In 1861 the APRTOK Gazette had to correct a Mr Hennessey (MP) who had sought to claim status as vice-president of the Association while suggesting that its inability to raise funds demonstrated lack of popular support for it, by pointing out that APRTOK did not have vice-presidents, and suggesting he was probably a member of the Newspaper Society Committee, some of the debts of whose Birmingham branch he had tried to pass off as APRTOK’s.¹³ So when the recent Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism (2009), references the ‘Association for the Repeal of the Stamp Tax’, it is impossible to tell whether it means APRTOK, the Newspaper Stamp Abolition Committee, the London Committee for Obtaining the Repeal of the Duty on Advertisements, which after 1853 was reconstituted as the ‘Newspaper Press Association for Obtaining the Repeal of the Paper Duty’, the (distinct) Association for the Abolition of the Duty on Paper (AADP), or another hitherto unidentified body to be added to the list.¹⁴

Perhaps in part because of these confusions, accounts of the final repeal of the taxes on knowledge have tended to follow closely an interpretation propagated most clearly in the writings of media historian James Curran. In a number of more or less self-referential texts, stretching back at least as far as 1978,¹⁵ Curran has presented the campaigns as designed to extend capitalist control of the newspaper industry and promote the effective socialization of the working classes. ‘The driving force behind the campaign was a group of liberal industrialist MPs who saw in the repeal of press taxation a means of propagating the principles of free trade and competitive capitalism’, encouraging the provincial press and undermining the Times.¹⁶ Curran acknowledges that ‘the campaign against press taxes was conducted with remarkable skill and tenacity’, but he presents the movement as essentially a front for the free trade capitalism of the Manchester Radicals.¹⁷ For him, although the ‘posturing as a working-class organisation was never entirely shed’, ‘unlike the repeal lobby of the 1830s, [APRTOK’s] links with the radical working class movement were tenuous’.¹⁸ Curran suggests that the reform campaign conflated ideals of freedom and social control, truth and indoctrination, and operated in a mental framework of a ‘tacit model of society which admitted no conflict of class interest, only a conflict between ignorance and enlightenment and between the individual and the state’.¹⁹

Curran’s work has been enormously influential and widely cited, but it is not entirely satisfactory. Partly this is because it rests on a narrow range of source materials, most particularly the history of the movement published in 1899 by Collet Dobson Collet, secretary of APRTOK, and the parliamentary proceedings by which it was effected. Partly because it too readily interprets at face value the rhetorical performances of the Association’s leaders, ignoring the complicated processes of hesitation, negotiation and persuasion which brought the political elites to their support of repeal, and places too much store on the undoubted moderation of the parliamentary leadership at the expense of the more complicated and unruly tendencies of activists, supporters and fellow travellers.

In the absence of detailed historical study it is understandable that historians should have been thrown back to such sources, and in particular to the two-volume History of the Taxes on Knowledge: their origin and repeal, written by Collet at the end of his life.²⁰ Based on a substantial archive of APRTOK’s correspondence and publications,²¹ Collet’s book has become the standard reference. It offers an indispensible account of the campaigns, recording activities not elsewhere visible and gives a full and reasonably unvarnished picture of the relationship between Collet and the Manchester radicals. It does, however, have its limitations. The focus is overwhelmingly on the activities of the close-knit group of campaigners around Collet and Cobden. Little effort is made to detail the wider support for the campaign, or to consider the context of the reform in the political agendas of the movement’s leaders. The case against the taxes tends to be taken as axiomatic, and the opposition as entirely petty and self-interested. Most notably, Collet downplays the role played by hostility to the Times, a motivation visible in the private correspondence of Cobden and Bright which at least in part supports the argument of the official history of The Times that the movement was ‘a political move directed by the motive of “stopping” The Times’.²² Aspects of the campaign in which APRTOK itself took little part, most notably the ‘Constitutional Defence’ agitation of 1860 and 1861 (see Chapter 5) are unduly ignored. And of course, without access to the private papers of members of the mid-Victorian cabinets, Collet was left accounting for the movement’s progress almost entirely in terms of the strength of the case against the taxes, rather than the tactical calculations of the politicians.

The reason for the neglect which has left Collet’s interpretation so largely unchallenged is obvious enough. The campaigns of the 1850s can appear rather anodyne in comparison with the drama of the 1830s ‘war of the unstamped press’, when a dramatic resistance was sustained against the 4d newspaper stamp regime then in force.²³ Championed by radical MPs in the late 1820s, this struggle drew strength from the successful pressure for parliamentary reform, and from working-class frustration at the limits of political change that the Reform Act of 1832 provided. Between 1830 and 1836 radicals throughout the country published and circulated unstamped papers sold at 1d or 2d in clear defiance of the law. Most significant was the Poor Man’s Guardian, published from October 1831, by Henry Hetherington, who at the same time founded the National Union of the Working Classes. The Poor Man’s Guardian sold across the country and its example encouraged the appearance of several hundred unstamped titles between 1830 and 1836.

These papers offered a direct challenge to state control of the press, which had been tightened in the wake of the ‘Peterloo’ meeting in 1819. They challenged the political system which supported this regulation, arguing forcibly for the power of the working classes to effect change through combination and confrontation. They presented the conflicts of the 1830s as a struggle of labour against capital, workers against aristocrats, ‘millocrats’ and ‘shopocrats’, tapping into powerful cultures of plebeian radicalism to create a genuinely popular campaign of resistance to the state. The ‘socialist patina’ as Patricia Hollis argues in one of two detailed studies of the movement, might have been thin, but it was nonetheless threatening, and as the law ground into action it was met with political meetings, petitions, subscriptions and letters of protest to the unstamped and stamped papers.

The Whig government determined to suppress the unstamped newspapers. Its printers were tracked down and their presses confiscated. Especially employed runners seized stocks of unstamped papers. Particular efforts were made to block up the supply by prosecuting newspaper sellers. The government’s use of informants was at best unscrupulous and in many cases illegal. Hollis notes that between 1830 and 1836 at least 1130 cases of selling unstamped papers were considered by London magistrates, and by 1836 almost 800 people had been imprisoned. Repression only fuelled the campaign. Many vendors went back to prison time and again. Publishers produced dummy parcels over which they wrestled with runners at the front of their premises while the actual papers were smuggled out of the rear. An Association of Working Men to Procure a Cheap and Honest Press was formed, and several hundred pounds was subscribed to the Victim Fund for those imprisoned. By 1836 the combined sale of the Poor Man’s Guardian and the Weekly Police Gaze...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Prologue: William Woods Mitchell and the West Sussex Gazette
• 1 Setting the Scene
• 2 The Foundations of the Mid-Victorian Campaigns
• 3 The Association for the Promotion of the Repeal of the Taxes on Knowledge as a Pressure Group
• 4 Repealing the Advertising and Stamp Duties, 1851–5
• 5 The Paper Duties, 1858–61
• 6 The Cheap Press
• 7 The Morning Star
• 8 Regulations and Securities: A Free Press?
• 9 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright