A Fleet Street in Every Town: The Provincial Press in England, 1855–1900 by Andrew Hobbs (review)

Local papers have attracted less attention in academia than London newspapers and metropolitan periodicals, until recently. Andrew Hobbs makes a compelling case for the popularity and political and economic power of the provincial press in the second half of the nineteenth century (following the abolition of the stamp tax in 1855 and the nationalization of telegraph companies in 1870) and for their enduring importance to periodicals scholars today. A Fleet Street in Every Town offers a comprehensive survey of press history, periodicals scholarship, studies of local identity, and even the history of reading, while exemplifying Hobbs's largest claims with a case study of Preston's local press.

Hobbs asserts that "reading the local paper was a social and ritual activity" (27). While much periodicals scholarship attempts to uncover an implied reader based on content analysis, Hobbs takes a different and arguably more fruitful approach. Over several chapters, he recreates the experiences and habits of what he calls "real-life historical readers" using evidence such as diaries, oral histories, and records of provincial libraries and reading rooms (43). Hobbs identifies several different kinds of historical readers, including semi-literate readers, people reading to or for others, eavesdroppers, and oppositional readers. Hobbs's evidence enables him to more precisely differentiate historical readers by age, gender, and class and to uncover discrepancies between readers' points of view and those of the publications they consumed.

Hobbs then discusses where and when readers were likely to consume local papers. In the second chapter, "Reading Places," he takes us on an imaginary walking tour of Preston to illustrate the "micro-geography" of local paper reading rituals and how reading institutions changed and grew between 1855 and 1900 (108). During this time, the place where one could find and read a newspaper changed substantially from, for example, pubs to free public libraries. The period witnessed the evolution of various types of reading rooms for different social classes: co-op and penny clubs for working-class readers and the mechanics institute or the gentlemen's news room in a private club for more privileged readers. Readers might also stand outside grocers' shops or printers' offices with their papers, until the rise of bookshops and newsagents later in the century. Appropriately, the chapter includes images of Preston's newspaper offices and illustrations of reading rooms in Preston, York, Carlisle, Sheffield, and Manchester.

Chapter three attends to the cycles of newspaper printing and the often asynchronous rhythms of reading. Newspaper time is linear and historical, Hobbs points out, but reading times and habits can be less predictable. Provincial newspapers experienced seasonal rhythms: while sales tended to fall in the summer, holiday supplements and annuals could boost sales. Certain events such as wars and elections could cause unpredictable surges in reading times. Hobbs is also sensitive to the ways that reading times and places were gendered, as when he notes that "men generally had more time, as well as more places, to read" (119).

Approaching newspapers as dynamic and interactive texts, Hobbs examines the role of the provincial press not only in reflecting but also in shaping local cultures and forming a national communications network. Chapters four and five, on "What They Read" in the 1860s and 1880s respectively, follow Preston journalist Anthony Hewitson through typical work weeks via daily diary entries. Hewitson's diaries reveal that important functions of the local press in the 1860s included recirculating news from elsewhere in addition to printing local advertisements, poetry and fiction by local authors, historical bits by local historians, and other content by local correspondents and paragraphists. The advent of the so-called "new journalism" in the 1880s only slightly shifted the contents of local papers, adding more non-news material by local writers. This period also saw an expansion in the number and types of local periodicals available to readers, which, combined with the nationalization of telegraphs speeding...