The Dawn of the Cheap Press in Victorian Britain tells the story of the mid-VIctorian campaigns against the newspaper ‘taxes on knowledge’ (advertising duty, stamp duty and paper duties) and the impact on the press of their success. It seeks to rescue these struggles from the shadow of the earlier more dramatic ‘war of the unstamped press’ of the 1830s, and show that the main campaigning body, the Association for the Repeal of the Taxes on Knowledge, was one of the most innovative and influential of the nineteenth century extra-parliamentary pressure groups, and much more than a mere addendum to the Manchester School radicalism of the Anti-Corn Law League. It also traces the enormous changes wrought by repeal on the size and shape of the Victorian press, especially in the provinces, where there was an explosion of penny dailies and new cheap weeklies, and through a case study of the Morning Star explores some of the limits of the transformation wrought.
Reviewers’ Comments
‘Hewitt has plumbed an extraordinary number of archival sources and is superb in elucidating the details of the reformers’ activities and in proffering a series of pen portraits of the leaders of the campaign [and] documents with precision many of the important changes in journalism that occurred during these years’. Joel H. Wiener, Victorian Periodicals Review 49:3 (Fall 2016).
‘makes fresh and insightful connections between the mid-Victorian phase of the campaign against press taxes, the broader fiscal context of tax reform, and the role that these played in the emergence of Gladstonian Liberalism. It makes a powerful case for arguing that the removal of the taxes was intrinsically bound to the fiscal concerns and debates of the Liberal and Whig parties rather than the ideological positions of the working-class campaigners of the 1830s’. Melissa Score, Reviews in History, October 2014.
‘impressive for the range and depth of its archival research, … retains our interest by well-selected evidence from the reaches of regional and well as metropolitan newspapers … a valuable assessment of the attributable impact of the succession of repeals’ of the knowledge taxes’. Laurel Brake, Times Literary Supplement, 12 September 2014.
Martin Hewitt 