The Politicization of Everyday Life in Cleave's Weekly Police Gazette (1834-36)

With circulation as high as 40,000, Cleave's Weekly Police Gazette, published 1834–36, was one of the first and most popular unstamped newspapers to mix political news with coverage of non-political events like sensational crimes, strange occurrences, and excerpts from popular fiction. Scholars have differed widely in their interpretations of the fact that the paper's mixture of radical politics and "entertainment" outsold unstamped papers that offered undiluted political news, such as Hetherington's Poor Man's Guardian (1831–35), whose circulation peaked at around 16,000.¹ Some, like Louis James and Virginia Berridge, argue that Cleave's helped to co-opt legitimate working-class political discourse by cultivating a taste for sensational Sunday papers and melodramatic fiction.² Others, like Ian Haywood and Iain McCalman, argue that the paper's mixture of what Haywood calls the "genres" of "popular pleasure and radical politics" empowered radicalism, by articulating its "new" political discourse onto popular traditions of festivity and sensationalism.³ And while both Joel Wiener and Patricia Hollis recognize the difference between purely political papers and "mixed-genre" ones like Cleave's in their histories of the unstamped press, they interpret that difference only minimally, focusing instead (and quite reasonably) on the unstamped press as a politically homogenous radical movement.⁴

Oddly, in making these arguments, few critics have analyzed in any detail exactly how political and other news were organized and related within Cleave's. By contrast, this essay focuses on how the paper spatially organized the various genres it contained. My conclusion is that the layout of Cleave's incited its audience to read politics into all items, however putatively non-political. Yet I also argue that this politicization of non-political items by the paper had ambivalent effects on working-class culture, on the one hand extending the purview of political discourse, but on the other cultivating "creative" political interpretation as a potentially co-opting substitute for political action.

Generalizing about the "standard layout" of periodicals is an inevitably contingent project. However, doing so about Cleave's is much aided by the eleven numbers of the paper held by Glasgow University Library (GUL), which are evidently unique copies of these numbers, and which are not included among the extant numbers listed in Wiener's Finding List of Unstamped Newspapers or in John North's Waterloo Directory.⁵ Wiener and North may have overlooked these eleven numbers because they bear, and are catalogued under, the title Weekly Police Gazette, which they reveal to have been the name of the paper for two-thirds of its life, with Cleave's name being added to the title only sometime between the 1 August and 5 September 1835 numbers.⁶ I will therefore refer to it hereafter as "WPG," citing articles by page and column number. Because the eleven numbers at Glasgow date from between 12 April 1834 (the paper's fifteenth weekly number) and 5 September 1835, whereas all but two of the seventeen other extant full issues date from 1836, the Glasgow holdings significantly broaden our knowledge about the paper over its three-year run between January 1834 and its final unstamped number of 3 September 1836. Among other revelations,⁷ the Glasgow holdings indicate that with the 14 March 1835 number, WPG significantly changed both its content and layout in ways that enhanced the encouragements it gave readers to politically interpret non-political news.

One major change to WPG's content in this number was a marked increased in the amount and institutional level of its political discourse. After 14 March 1835, WPG regularly includes between two and five columns of news from Parliament, and between two and three columns of the "Weekly Police Gazette," an editorial commentary focused on actions in Parliament and other relatively "high-level" government institutions. By contrast, in the two numbers from 1834 (12 April and 5 July) at Glasgow, the only coverage of Parliament is a jokey note in the 12 April number that "In the House of Commons, on Wednesday night se'nnight, the Highways' Bill, the Hemp...