Outline and explain the reasons for the growth and popularity of the radical press; also outline and debate the reasons for its apparent, swift decline.
The term radical
is from the latin radix meaning root hence the radical press’s portrayal of the
root issue. We know that they started around 1790 and continued to 1860 and was
split into two phases the first until 1830. (Pg 48-50, Kevin Williams, 2009)
From a
sociologic determinism argument the radical press came as a consequence of the increasing
want from the people not to be repressed. At the time of the radical press
great change was rife, the American and French Revolutions were in full swing and
the Agricultural Revolution was coming to an end. The British Agricultural Revolution
which started in the late 1600’s and continued into the 18th century
resulted in a surplus in food produce and an exponential increase in
population. The Industrial Revolution was a result of an increased demand for
produce. This was due to the snowball effect of an increased population needing
more food and also because due to easier methods of production now many people
had more disposable income to spend on more produce. What also made it capable
was the developments in new technology in industry which allowed an increase in
speed and ease of production.
The Industrial
Revolution which has been said to of started around 1820 added to the problem
of overpopulation as the urbanisation of built up areas occurred. The working
class were pushed into dirty and crammed areas with the prospect of factory
work. This divided the class gap further as the rich’s quality of life
increased and the poor peoples quality of life got worse. The French Revolution
although starting in 1789 before the Industrial revolution was a revolt against
the exact issue of an increased and unnecessary class gap and poor living
conditions for the poor. This combined with movements such as The Enlightenment
in 1690 and The Scientific Revolution caused the whole of Europe to question traditional
lines of authority and rely more on reason and logic. (Pg4, Norman Hampson,
1990)
All these
factors combined into a feeling of oppression to those in authority and for the
working classes a growing pessimism of the working conditions and the radical
press was a way of uniting the groups of people with these feelings. Also in
1815 people were returning from the battle of waterloo. They were tired and
shell-shocked and were returning to poverty and bad conditions. With many of
events in history war and the hate found in people involved serves as a
catalyst for change, people would of joined political radicalism eagerly, fuelled
by their anger from the war. The radical press was a vehicle for radicalism
letting it be promoted to the distinct niche of people who was angered the most
by what comes with abundance in production. These people being the ones
producing and not receiving the product, the working class.
The early
Newspapers pre radical press were short pieces licensed by the government with
governmental censorship, read only by the literate upper middle class usually
in coffee houses. Coffee houses were a place where people could debate and
exchange ideas. Governments would start to see coffee houses as threatening due
to the sharing of new ideas. Later half way through the 18th century
the coffee houses would be a place where radicalism would thrive with the Chartist
papers such as The Northern Star being common place here. It was these coffee
houses that helped The Radical Press become so popular as they acted as
institutions where free thinking was encouraged.
Before the
radical press however, before 1790 the content of these papers was constrained
by state control and so portrayed a very much upper middle class right wing ideology.
Many wanted to break free from this mould and this meant releasing it from
state control. Some claim that the press became free because of the opposition
to state control and financial independence. Others believe that as a result of
the emergence of the free press’s financial independence it ended up being
repressed more because of market forces becoming a control system but I will
come back to this later.
Before the
Radical press the lower class had few news publications available to them. The
literature that they would read would be in the form of chapbooks and ballads,
fictional stories created as a form of escapism from they’re relatively
suppressed existence. It was the scandalous nature of plot-lines in the chap
books which transferred a scandalous radicalism into the radical press. We
could draw parallels between the satirist nature of the chapbooks and the
scandalous nature of radical publications such as Thomas Wollers Black Dwarf:
‘It
blended with the oral nature of popular culture in its use of reported
speeches, quotations, questions, answers and parodies. His satire remained very
much within the 'old corruption' school - iconoclastic and populist, developing
a style of anti-authoritarianism with a strong contemporary flavour.’ (Pg 66, Conboy,
Martin, 2010) Conboy, Martin)
It was this easy
transition between the relatively similar in style contents which made Radical
Press an easy read to pick up for the working class. News was virtually inexistent to
the working class before 1790, however with the radical thinking of the American
and French revolutions and the prospect of harsh working conditions with the
Industrial revolutions, political
publications began to cross along class lines.
The French
revolution was a response to the poor treatment of the working class and the greediness
of the upper class. France had a systemic problem collecting taxes because of
the way that the society was structured. The nobles and the clergy never paid
taxes because the taxation was biased to the upper classes and the monarchy,
specifically the king Louis xvi lived with overindulgence. An accumulation of
these factors led the working class to rebel. The geographic proximity of
France to England made the transport of ideas on rebellion and radicalism much
easier. This alongside the urbanisation of living given by the Industrial Revolution
led to thinkers and journalists such as William Cobbet to write about political
corruption and favouritism ‘with and awareness of the threat of new economic
practises as they impacted on the quality of ordinary peoples lives’(Pg 92, Conboy Martin,
2010).
In 1712 the
newspapers abandoned press licensing as a form of state control. Curran writes
how press licensing was not successful:
‘direct state censhorship of the printed word in
Britain was never fully effective… the absence of modern law enforcement
agencies prevented the effective control of print’. Pg 81, James Curran, 2003.
Instead they
decided to introduce press taxation and this ended up in a split where some
papers decided not to pay the tax. This tax was in the form of a stamp duty, a
tax on every copy sold to the public and on the advertisement. This ‘effectively and
explicitly priced newspapers out of the pockets of the poor’ vii Patricia Hollis. A main agenda promoted by political
radicalism was the fight for press being available to everyone. Thomas Jefferson a radical was concerned about this
restricted readership.
‘I should mean that every man should receive
those papers and be capable of reading them’. Thomas Jefferson 1787
Leigh Hunt a
radical and the publisher of The Examiner agreed to pay the stamp tax but
called it on the front page the ‘tax on knowledge’.
‘The Examiner
was founded in 1808 with an explicit commitment to radical principles. It
was undeniably intellectual in tone and liberal/ progressive in its politics.’ (Pg 60 Conboy, Martin, (2010) Chapter 3.)
It was this
increased gradual radicalism of the mainstream press that is what many say was
the reason for the changing of the whole political landscape to a wholly more
left wing bar mark. The Examiner didn’t have advertisements because it wanted
to remain independent of corruption. As a knock on effect of this arguably mainstream
papers started becoming more left wing gradually the class gap began to
decrease to the point that it is today and the readership of certain newspapers
began to cross over class lines. This is perhaps an adding factor for the radical
press’s decline as when more mainstream newspapers such as the Sunday Papers
display the same agenda the niche market that the radical press inhibited
becomes more commonplace.
Radical papers
were aimed at and only available to the working class. They were cheap, nation
wide and radically scandalous. More threatening to the government was their
ability of uniting workers through discussing the common predicaments of their
working struggle. This would bond the outspoken and often isolated groups of
people who’s voice needed hearing:
People struggling to establish a trade union in
their locality could read in the radical press in 1833-4 for instance, of
similar struggles by glove workers in Yeovil, cabinet-makers and joiners in
Carlisle and Glasgow, shoemakers and smiths in Northampton, and bricklayers and
masons in London (Curran, 84, 2010)
Many of the
radical newspapers such as the Northern Star were set up by trade unions. This
was at a time when Trade Unions were becoming popular and the supporters of the
trade unions and the radical movement wanted to hear radical promotion. Curran suggest
that ‘The rise of the radical press was a direct consequence of the emergence
of a radical trade union and the political movement’ (Curran, page pg84,
2010)
They grew in
popularity due to their cheapness and this was made possible by the low costs
of manufacture. They recruited the unemployed as sellers, didn’t pay any tax
and many of their news reports were written by volunteers.
The whole
structure of the radical press was that they were financed, created and owned
by the working class. The papers that weren’t owned by the trade unions were
owned by liberal left wing individuals often from the working class themselves
and they’re conception of their job differed from that of commercial owners and
journalists as Curran points out:
‘These men had very different conceptions of
their role as journalists from those of the institutionalized journalists of
the popular press in the subsequent period.’
Curran media and power pg 88
The Radical
press was a high point when the stamp duty was in force because many of the
papers completely ignored it therefore developing it into its own certain niche.
Haters of the radical press argued that if the stamp duty was abolished it
would lead to an influx in these seemingly bad publications to the middle class.
They proclaimed that stamp duty limits bad publications to the apparently lowly
and irresponsible working class. The government sought to stamp out the Radical
press with the tax, instead the stamp duty was a blessing to the popularity and
role of the radical press. People wanted to be part of the club, part of this
underground unstamped movement:
‘the
reading of unstampeds was above all an activity that working-class persons per-
formed as members of a newly demotic public sphere’ (Wickwar, 1928: 54). Pg 63 Conboy, Martin, (2010)
It meant that
because the working class could not afford any other papers the radical press were
being given a market:
Radical
publishers were not being stopped by inefficient controls; instead they were
being given a clear fiend in which to indoctrinate the people with ‘the most pernicious
doctrines’ without effective
competition. (Pg17,
James Curran, 2002)
Haters thought
they were bad quality publications because of the very low production costs. To
give an example of the low production costs the expenses of the Northern Star a
week were £9.10 shillings and it sold 6,200 copies at 4 and a half dimes a week
(Pg 88,
Curran, 2002). Because of
the low production costs radical newspapers were self sufficient on the
proceeds alone and so didn’t have to rely on advertisements. An equal reason
for the radical press’s non involvement with advertising was because of their
hate towards commodity capitalism:
‘Commitment
to refuse to use advertisement … as with the working-class radicals, a form of
guerrilla opposition to the system of commodity capitalism which so alienated
working people’ pg 60 Conboy, Martin, (2010)
Because of their
non-involvement they weren’t affected by party subsidies and government
official advertisement which proved another contributing factor to their
freedom from state control. Many mainstream newspapers political agendas would
be swayed by governmental advertisement alongside the promise to the owners of
high ranking political positions if certain political ideologies were being
promoted. On the flip side the radical, less respected papers would never receive
advertisement even if they wanted to. Perhaps the advertisers saw these lowly
publications not worthy, James Curran points out:
‘The grudge held by the London Dispatch and
other radical newspapers against advertisers was more than justified. An examination
of the official advertisement duty returns reveals a marked difference in the
amount of advertisement support received by the radical press compared with its
more respectable rivals.’ (Pg 89, Curran, 2002)
When the stamp
duty was abolished in the 1860’s perhaps symbolically it would of grouped the
mainstream press with the radical if both now appeared without stamps tax on
the front. This may of hindered the radical press’s niche marketing of an
illegally underground eccentricity. This combined with more left wing content
from newspapers such as The Examiner and The Times would of perhaps of made the
Radical Newspapers less unique. (Pg49-50, Kevin Williams, 1998)
Barker theory differs from conboy’s idea of the six acts legislations being the culprit for the decline of the daily radical papers and consequently the increase of the Sunday papers. She believes that the popularity of the Sunday press is because of the goverments conscience decision to take away the stamp tax so that the papers that were previously paying were now placed at a better advantage. Curran writes that:
‘leading
publishers of stamped papers warned the government that they would evade the
stamp duty unless more effective steps were taken to enforce it.’ (Pg 12 James
Curran, 2002)
She believes that
by
‘freeing the more
respectable sections of the newspaper press from the payment of duties which
had placed them at an unfair disadvantage to their un stamped - and non-tax paying
- counterparts, it was hoped that more conservative - or at least less
seditious - sections of the rest would thrive.’ (Pg 21 Barker, Hannah, 2000) Barker believes this to of
succeeded and now the Sunday papers that had taken over from the radical as the
main reading source for the working class. They were still radical but within
the structure and control of the government their content ‘did
not challenge the very basis of government as man unstamped newspapers had
done.’ If we are to go with
Barkers theory then we can hypothisise that it is because of the removal of the
stamp duty that the radical press had a swift decline. ‘The radical newspapers of the working
classes were replaced by popular newspapers which sold throughout the length
and breadth of the British Isles.’ (Pg 48, Kevin Williams, 2010). The nature of the papers
also changed, they now
‘expanded on popular reading
material in the areas of crime, scandal, romance and sport at the expense of
independent political comment.’ (Pg 48, Kevin Williams, 2010)In conclusion the radical press shot up in popularity due to an immense upheaval on traditional thinking prompted by revolutions and philosophical thinking. A large factor was also the economical and political climate of the country, the class gap between the rich and poor and the poor working conditions for the working class. Trade unions worked in collaboration with the radical press to get they’re word spoken and the partnership launched the radical press’s popularity into the sky. Finally the stamp tax meant that some radical papers denied paying putting them at a financial advantage to their mainstream competitors. It also meant that because they didn’t pay and because the manufacture was so cheap they could be marketed exclusively to the working class because this grouping of people couldn’t afford any others.
The reason for the radical press’s swift decline is debated with some believing it to be the repression of the six acts and others believing it to be the conclusion of the stamp tax being abolished. I believe it was because the political climate had changed to become much more liberal with chartist newspapers being popular amongst the middle class. This shift in ideology of mainstream papers alongside the introduction of sensationalism and the popular press pushed business away from the radical papers.
Bibliography
Hampson, Norman, the enlightenment, penguin books, 1990
Conboy, Martin, The language of newspapers : socio-historical, Bloomsbury publishing, 2010
Curran, James, Media and Power communication study,
routledge, 2002
Barker,
Hannah, Newspapers, politics and English society, 1695-1855, Harlow: Longman.
2000
Williams,
Kevin, Get me a murder a day! A history of Media and Communication in Britain.
Bloomsbury academic. 2010
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