Politics, Publishing and Personalities: Wrexham Newspapers, 1848-1914 (review)

This accessible volume is based on the author's University of Wales, Aberystwyth, PhD dissertation, which comprised a micro-history of newspaper publishing in Wrexham, a small town in northeast Wales, across the border from Chester, where Lisa Peters is a university law librarian. It is the first publication from the revitalised University of Chester Press. All PhD students should be made to condense their dissertations into a similarly readable, well-illustrated seventy-two-page general-interest book.

The first of four chapters introduces Wrexham, an old market town surrounded by coal-mining villages that became the largest town in nineteenth-century North Wales. Chapter 2 gives a pithy introduction to the provincial press, identifying a distinctive Welsh print culture, while Chapter 3 takes up nearly half the book, introducing each newspaper title in turn. The final chapter describes the petty squabbles typical of any place where more than one title vied for readers and advertisers. There is an epilogue bringing Wrexham's press history up to date, appendices listing editors, owners, printers, and publishers, and a six-page selected bibliography.

Peters combines a narrative of the births, lives, and deaths of each title with the political, religious, economic, and geographical contexts and personalities involved. She draws wider conclusions, such as the complex effects of railways on the relative popularity of London and regional dailies, with local weeklies less affected (6-7); the hybrid nature of midcentury local newspaper-magazines that moved from monthly to weekly publication as readership grew (20-21); and the growth in local news content in response to the incursions of London papers carrying national news (30). Her final conclusion is that a complex interaction between editorial quality, circulation area, and politics enabled two titles, the Advertiser and the Guardian, to dominate this small local print market.

This is chiefly a local-interest book, but its academic pedigree makes it a useful addition to the long list of single-place and single-title histories of the provincial press from which a national synthesis can eventually be written.