From Grub Street to Fleet Street: An Illustrated History of English Newspapers to 1899 (review)

This is a perfectly decent, straightforward, chronological history that fully delivers the promise of the title, written in a style refreshingly free of the jargon beloved of those media studies lecturers who sometimes dabble in this field. The only drawback is the hefty price and the reputation of the publisher, which might lead the unsuspecting reader to expect a more cutting-edge analytical work. Clarke presents a history of the newspaper as a finished product, but is also strong on the political background, especially with regard to censorship and political subsidies. His chief concern is with the doings of editors and politicians, and though matters relating to circulation and distribution are not neglected, the weakest aspects of the coverage concern issues relating to printing technology. Almost the sole observation about printing machinery refers to that introduced by The Times in 1814.

The concept of a newspaper as opposed to other serial publications is somewhat subjective, but it is difficult to see why the eighteenth-century Gentleman's Magazine should feature so frequently in a history of newspapers while the nineteenth-century Illustrated London News, which has a better claim to being a newspaper, receives comparatively much less attention. As a history of the newspaper in England, it ignores the Celtic fringes of the British Isles, with the exception of a quotation from an Edinburgh paper to illustrate a point about recycling dubious stories. Despite the title this is not a London-focused book, and due space is given not only to important provincial papers such as the Manchester Guardian but to earlier county papers, which until the coming of the railways used scissors-and-paste journalism to cover national and international news before the survivors turned to parish pump news.

Clarke begins the story with the prehistory of the newspaper and a pamphlet of 1513 giving an account of the Battle of Flodden, and ends with the foundation of the Daily Mail in 1896. On the way he describes the newsbooks of the 1620s and those of the Civil War, and the emergence of the daily from the weekly and tri-weekly in the early eighteenth century. The radical press of the early nineteenth century and the struggles against the stamp taxes are all vividly evoked. His coverage of the first half of the eighteenth century is mostly devoted to describing a sample of individual titles; thereafter, while maintaining a chronological arrangement, a more thematic approach is made. One welcome feature is that Clarke gives due prominence to the role of the Sunday paper. The News of the World and others of that genre were significant in developing the newspaper reading habit among working-class readers who had neither the time, money, nor energy to read a daily paper. Only the denominational press, which carried much material other than the purely ecclesiastical, is missing from this survey.

Clarke's heart is clearly in the eighteenth century. In addition to two chronological chapters on this century, there are also three devoted to excerpts from the newspapers of this period. These excerpts give a somewhat lop-sided view, and the author has let his fascination with the exotic go too far at times. While it is legitimate to provide samples of stories concerning improbably aged women giving birth and reports of the earliest balloon flights in England, these ought to have been balanced by more sober passages on town council debates, on toll roads, and on the progress of the harvest. These might not be so eye-catching, but they were the bread and butter of ordinary journalism. The excerpts from advertisements are also somewhat unbalanced: it is too easy to make fun of the miracle cures promised in medical advertisements or to be amazed at the price of a gallon of brandy in 1749, which in any case are not that remarkable considering the level of wages.

There are two...