The Dawn of the Cheap Press in Victorian Britain: The End of the “Taxes on Knowledge,” 1849–1869 by Martin Hewitt (review)

Martin Hewitt’s fine study of the repeal of the duties on advertisements, newspapers, and paper (referred to collectively as the “taxes on knowledge”) documents a key moment in the history of nineteenth-century journalism linking the radical and Chartist press of the 1830s and 1840s to the creation of the mass-circulation New Journalism in the final decades of the century. Depending upon one’s contemporary perspective, these taxes offered either a bulwark against political subversion and the decline of cultural standards or set up a firm barrier against the democratization of print and the emergence of an unfettered popular press. Hewitt’s analysis is finely textured, and his careful historical analysis undercuts the positions of both extremes. His final paragraph, however, includes a telling quotation by John Bright, one of the leaders of the campaign: “I think that the great revolution of opinion on many public questions which is now being witnessed in this country is owing mainly to the freedom of the newspaper press. . . . All that we foretold in our agitation for a free Press has come to pass” (178).

The nearly two decades of agitation that Hewitt describes have garnered insufficient attention from historians because they lack the political sexiness of the war of the unstamped press of the 1830s. For one thing, it involved three separate, if closely intertwined, campaigns. The advertisement duty was the first to be repealed, in 1853, as a part of Gladstone’s budgetary innovations of that year. The remaining penny stamp duty on newspapers (partly repealed in 1836), which was the symbolic and political core of the campaign for “cheap knowledge,” followed a scant two years later. Finally, several excise duties on paper were repealed in 1861 amidst a short-lived constitutional crisis provoked by resistance from the House of Lords. The key fact about all three campaigns was that the protagonists were engaged primarily in legal maneuvers and sought to obtain their goals through discussion and debate, whereas their radical and Char-tist predecessors had taken to the streets in open defiance of the law, tapping into “powerful cultures of plebeian radicalism to create a genuinely popular campaign of resistance to the state” (4). A substantial segment of these campaigns was fought within the precincts of Parliament. Debates were initiated there, deputations were organized, and a continuous “pin prick” of effective opposition was maintained that effectively wore down the governments of Lords Aberdeen, Derby, and Palmerston. In addition, opponents of the “taxes on knowledge” created the Victorian equivalent of lobbying associations, which pushed effectively for intellectual acceptance of their case. “Rabble rousing” of the sort witnessed in the 1830s and 1840s was mostly eschewed, though some illegal unstamped newspapers were published and occasional small acts of violence were threatened (43).

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. The two chief organizations were the Newspaper Stamp Abolition Committee, founded in 1849, and its rival and effective successor, the Association for the Promotion of the Repeal of the Taxes on Knowledge. Chares Dobson Collet, who served as musical director of the influential Unitarian South Place Chapel, among other things, played a vital role as secretary of both groups, though he tended to remain in the shadows. His History of the Taxes on Knowledge, published in 1899, continues to provide a central account of the three campaigns, though Hewitt believes that historians have placed too much reliance on it. Collet was supported by a medley of well-known individuals from the previous unstamped and Chartist agitations, including James Watson, the publisher of cheap periodicals, George Jacob Holyoake, one of the foremost freethinking radicals of the period, and the venerable Francis Place, whose consummate tactical skills...