As the House of Commons census returns show, the population of Great Britain and Ireland quadrupled between 1801 and 1901,
from something over 10 to 41 million inhabitants. That of the British Empire, through acquisition of new territories, reached
400 million. As populations expanded at unprecedented rates, so too did levels of adult literacy. From 1836, the Registrar-General’s
returns showed increasing numbers of men and women signing rather than marking the marriage register: 66.4 per cent and 49.7
per cent respectively in England and Wales in 1840, rising to 80.2 per cent and 72.7 per cent in England by 1870, the year
of Dickens’s death.
1 Furthermore, the innovative commercialisation of cheap fiction meant that prices fell consistently through the century: ‘[a]
penny would buy a 250-word broadside in the 1840s, a fifty-page songbook or a 7,000-word serial by the 1860s, a 20,000-word
novelette by the 1880s, and from 1896 … unabridged versions of classic texts’.
2 However, while the number of customers for reading material clearly grew exponentially, the growth of the newspaper and periodical
market did not simply shadow the graph, but was complicated if not constrained by numerous external factors.
Periodic economic crises and slumps affected the publishing industry in 1825–6, 1831 and 1841–3: circulations tottered, magazines,
papers and publishing houses folded. Technological advances, whether in press design or steam locomotion, could accelerate
print runs and national distribution, but as critics of the orthodox ‘Whig’ approach to press history point out, the mid-century
industrialisation of the press increased start-up and fixed costs to the point where small enterprises, radical, evangelical
or otherwise, were priced out of the market.
3 In 1837 the Chartist weekly
Northern Star had been floated for less than £700; in 1845 a capital investment of £50,000 was needed to launch
the Daily News (with Dickens as its first editor); by the 1870s some £180,000 was spent by Edward Lloyd on establishing
the Daily Chronicle. By this stage ‘the operation of the free
market had raised the cost of press ownership beyond the readily available resources of the working class’.
4Pre-eminent amongst external factors affecting the market in the first half of the nineteenth century was government interference:
both through legislation (particularly during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars) and taxation, in the form of stamp
and advertisement duty on newspapers, and a duty on paper used for printing. While the laws against seditious libel and these
so-called ‘Taxes on Knowledge’ did not amount to full-scale repression or censorship, Lord Liverpool’s Tory administration
(1812–27) not only prosecuted editors and publishers assiduously but also raised the ‘Taxes on Knowledge’ to their highest
levels (4d per stamp, 3s 6d per advertisement, 4d per sheet for paper in 1815). In the heady climate of the 1830s, the cautious
Whig administrations of Lords Grey and Melbourne fought to contain the expectations of a radicalised but still unenfranchised
workforce. Trade unionism, Chartism and widespread discontent with the effects of the 1814/15 Corn Laws and the New Poor Law
of 1834 spurred the publication of increasing numbers of illegal unstamped publications. The ensuing ‘war of the unstamped
press’ was the backdrop to a calculated reduction of duty from 4d to 1d per stamp in 1836, but while this predictably led
to an upsurge in the number of stamps issued (from 35,576,056 in 1835/6 to 71,222,498 in 1844/5),
5 it did not necessarily increase the number of periodicals available, nor bring newspapers within the reach of every purchaser,
nor pacify those hungry for complete abolition. That would not come until 1853 for advertisement duty, 1855 for stamp duty,
and 1861 for paper duty. From the 1860s onwards, then, with the repeal of the ‘Taxes on Knowledge’ and the widespread introduction
of rotary presses, the stage was set for a dramatic expansion of what can now genuinely be considered a mass media market.
That it lacked the radical commitment of the 1830s has seemed a minor drawback, if not a positive advantage, to a majority
of press historians.
In simple terms of numbers of publications, accurate figures are hard to come by. There was no census for newspapers and no
registrar-general for periodicals. The next best thing, the
Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800–1900, predicts that at the conclusion of its final release (series 5) it will have documented some 125,000 publications for England
alone. Contemporaries probably underestimated the size of the market. In 1830 there were thought to be between 9 and 13 daily
newspapers in London; by 1865, 22. One source gives the total number of papers in the United Kingdom at 369 in the mid 1830s,
another
274. However, it is telling that Germany claimed 593 papers in 1836, and that in 1851, total circulation of British papers
is put at only 91 million overall, or 3.5 per head of population, while that of the USA tops 420 million, 20 per head.
6 On these showings, the UK press, like suffrage itself in the nineteenth century, appears a limitedly democratic affair. Yet
these sketchy statistics are rendered trebly ambiguous by uncertainty over how many readers per copy a given paper or periodical
in circulation actually enjoyed. There is no reliable multiplier. Figures from five to as many as thirty are mooted.
7As with Britain’s class system, so its newspaper and periodical market was an intensely hierarchical affair. Its seemingly
infinite gradations can be arranged not simply along a vertical pole of kudos and respectability, but mapped according to regional and local identity, political partisanship, profiled according to generalist,
specialist or niche appeal, or catalogued by technical criteria. All such approaches are themselves interconnected, although
it is also important to remember that the market was not merely reflective of an exterior reality but constituent of and aspirational
towards it: magazines and newspapers (and their advertising supplements) sought to create the readerships they projected,
and addressed imagined communities.
Nevertheless, some broad relationships obtain. Both frequency of publication and circulation related to perceived prestige
in inverse ratios. The
Edinburgh Review (from 1802) and
Quarterly Review (from 1809) were published only four times per annum, and peaked in the 1820s with circulations of little more than 13,000.
Yet both reviews enjoyed the highest reputation available to any form of journalism, immediately distinguishable from the
competition of monthly-produced magazines and reviews such as
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (2½s; from 1817) or
Fraser’s (from 1830): ‘Whereas the quarterlies had
gravitas and solidity, the magazines were measured by their entertainment value even to the point of irresponsibility … In contrast
to the magazines, the quarterlies were sound, thorough and solid’.
8 Quarterlies were handsomely printed and bound like books, and their 5- to 6-shilling cover price further pronounced their
social distinction.
Such distinctions were established in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, when Edinburgh and the values, both
cultural and stylistic, of the Scottish Enlightenment still held sway. From the early 1830s and with national focus on parliamentary
reform and the implementation of controversial new Whig measures emanating from Westminster
and the metropolis, London publishers regained the initiative. Monthly magazines flourished, combining variety of subject
matter with satirical humour and unashamed political zeal. By 1837, however, publisher Richard Bentley was able to launch
a new 2½s monthly called
Bentley’s Miscellany – with Dickens as its first editor – on an ‘anti-politics’ ticket. It was the first of many Victorian periodicals to use
a reputable publisher or author’s name as a branding statement (others included
Howitt’s Journal,
Hood’s Own,
Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine and Ainsworth’s Magazine). Naturally enough, expensive monthlies catered to bourgeois tastes and opinions, but as their political sharpness mellowed
at the market’s behest in the mid-Victorian era, the similarity of their miscellaneous content, both fictional and documentary,
to that of more frequently published and more widely circulating popular prints became arguably more marked.
The combination of text with illustration in the increasingly commodified cheap periodicals of the nineteenth century has
been singled out as a crucial step in the development from a popular to a mass market culture,
9 and in the 1830s and 1840s was prominently oriented towards the provision of ‘improving’ factual material through publications
such as
The Family Herald,
Lloyd’s Illustrated London Newspaper and the
Penny Magazine. But in so far as ‘the field of the imagination presented the most direct engagement between capitalism and the uses of literacy’
and ‘fantasy rather than fact offered the most certain return’ on investment for printers, publishers and authors alike, it
was fiction that fuelled the creation of a mass market as the reign progressed.
10 From the chapbooks and broadsides of James Catnach and other jobbing printers working out of London’s Seven Dials in the
thirties, through the sensational rotary-pressed weekly serials of Edward Lloyd and G. W. M. Reynolds in the forties and fifties,
to the cheap series of reprinted plays and novels pioneered in the sixties by Reynolds’s publisher, John Dicks, fiction inflected
by radical politics and the rhetorical conventions of English melodrama, flooded the newspaper and periodical market, taking
weekly circulations to such levels that ‘for the million’ became a popular advertising catchphrase.
To read Dickens in the context of the periodical and newspaper market is, without robbing his work of creative individualism,
to read him as a particularly intense expression of its force, and to understand the perspective of such commentators as the
Reverend James Baldwin Brown, who told his flock in 1853 that ‘there have been at work among us
three great social agencies: the London City Mission; the novels of Mr Dickens; the cholera’.
11 It was through a rare capacity to appeal simultaneously to multiple subgroups and across all tiers of this Leviathan market,
and to develop artistically so as to survive if not thrive on repeated exposure there, that Dickens and his ‘novels’ could
be reckoned as social agencies, empowered rather than dictated by their media of dissemination.
Dickens’s redoubtable success with his first two collections of newspaper and magazine writings, republished as
Sketches by Boz, showed him the advantages of moving and reshaping material through different market formats and modes of publication, in
this case from the daily press to the fully illustrated volume edition to rerelease in monthly parts.
12 His more characteristic movement through the market, of course, was from illustrated monthly parts with advertising fore
and aft, to illustrated novel (sometimes in more than one volume), to cheap unillustrated reprint. In their innovative approach
to reaching readers, Charles Dickens and his publishers were consummate Victorian entrepreneurs.
Miscalculations were sometimes made.
Master Humphrey’s Clock was intended to be a satirical weekly medley of articles by different authors, a part-radical, part-Gothic and less genteel
reworking of
Bentley’s Miscellany, but instead Dickens found himself sucked into serialising two of his own novels and little else in its pages, to maintain
circulation in a period of widespread commercial instability. His whimsical notion for the project, it has been argued, ‘was
seriously out of date’ and simply ‘did not work in the increasing momentum of the 1840s market’.
13 Then, when unexpectedly high production costs for
A Christmas Carol reduced profits for publisher and author alike, in spite of critical acclaim for the work (‘a national benefit’, Thackeray
announced),
14 Dickens feared himself, with characteristic hyperbole, ‘ruined past all mortal hope of redemption’ (
Letters,
IV, 42).
Long-cherished plans for running a newspaper culminated in Dickens’s appointment as launch editor of new Liberal broadsheet
the Daily News in 1845–6 – a post soon relinquished after disputes with Bradbury & Evans, the paper’s proprietors and Dickens’s own publishers.
15 His signed serialisation there, as ‘Travelling Sketches Written on the Road’, of part of his travel book
Pictures from Italy (1846) attempted to establish a much more intimate relationship between editor and readership than obtained in the ‘Olympian’
pronouncements of papers such as
the Times or even the
Morning Chronicle, as well as suggesting the odd idea that a hard-working editor could somehow be in more than one place at once. This suggestion
was to be developed in a characteristically fanciful outline sent to Forster for a magazine to be called
The Shadow, and narrated by
a kind of semi-omniscient, omnipresent, intangible creature … which may go into any place, by sunlight, moonlight, starlight,
firelight, candlelight, and be in all homes, and all nooks and corners, and be supposed to be cognisant of everything, and
go everywhere, without the least difficulty … I want him to loom as a fanciful thing all over London; and to get up a general
notion of ‘What will the Shadow say about this, I wonder?’ (Letters, V, 622–3 [7 October 1849])
Forster recalled in his
Life of Dickens that he ‘could not make anything out of [this] that had a quite feasible look’ (book 6, ch. 4) and the idea was dropped,
but with greater hindsight it is not hard to see Dickens’s imagination pushing here towards the new technologies that made
cinema, television and video cameras crucial media for journalism in the twentieth century. As Grahame Smith has argued, Dickens
possessed an uncanny ability to project narrative perspectives visually, and ‘anticipates in images the medium that would
only come into being after his death’.
16On a more prosaic level, the ‘shadow’ proposal also anticipated Dickens’s successful launch, on 30 March 1850, of
Household Words. For the next twenty years, and until his death in 1870, Dickens would be editor (‘conductor’ as he preferred to style it)
of a highly successful 24-page weekly, which, while imitating in some respects publishing practices from the cheap sensationalist
press,
17 nevertheless gave its readers original fiction commissioned from some of the most respected authors of the day, and groundbreaking
investigative journalism carried out by Dickens and his small team of staff writers. Its lack of populist illustration, appearance
in 9d monthly parts with respectable advertising sections,
18 and in handsome leather- or cloth-bound bi-annual volumes also reassured and appealed to middle-class readers. At one level,
its ‘direct inspiration’ was
Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, a solid unillustrated penny weekly ‘designed for the self-improving artisan’, but in choosing W. H. Wills, a former assistant
editor of
Chambers’s, as his subeditor, and repeatedly exhorting him to look over the copy and ‘[b]righten it, brighten it, brighten it!’, Dickens
ensured that such worthy competition was eclipsed.
19At an average circulation of just under forty thousand per week,
Household Words was certainly ‘a
good property’, though Dickens’s aspiration to displace what he saw as the ‘national disgrace’ of sleazy publications such as
Reynolds’s Miscellany and
Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper (the former with a circulation of 300,000 by 1855) was largely unfulfilled.
20 In recognition of the hegemony of popular fiction, when
Household Words was
merged into its successor,
All the Year Round, in 1859, Dickens’s satirical and well-researched leaders on sanitary reform, factory legislation, political and administrative
malpractice and others made way for instalments of sensational serialised novels.
A Tale of Two Cities, Wilkie Collins’s
The Woman in White,
Great Expectations, Edward Bulwer Lytton’s
A Strange Story and Collins’s
No Name ran more or less consecutively between April 1859 and January 1863, increasing the journal’s circulation ‘to a steady current
sale of 100,000’
21 at a time when numerous new monthly and weekly rivals were crowding the market. However, given that the winding up of
Household Words had been caused by bitter wrangling in the courts and widely publicised rumours surrounding Dickens’s separation from his
wife Catherine in 1858, his straight-faced suggestion of the title
Household Harmony in a list of possible new titles is evidence of an occasional blind spot in the keenness of Dickens’s vision of his public.
22 Nevertheless, that sense of an audience, with whom, as he wrote even the briefest of notes (or ‘Chips’, as he called them)
for publication, he felt himself in sentimental and sincere fellowship, was one which bound Dickens to the multitudinous Victorian
newspaper and periodical market more closely and enduringly than any other writer of the era.