An Overview

At the turn of the 19th century, newspapers were a site of contention in an English culture whose power wielding elites had been made anxious by the volatile democracy seized during the French Revolution of 1789. Despite the fact newspapers had emerged as a dominant and well-entrenched form of discourse in the country by the end of the 18th century, many political pundits remained weary of its social effects and democratic potentialities. An 1801 editorial in the Tory Anti-Jacobin Review lamented: "We have long considered the establishment in newspapers of this country as a misfortune to be regretted; but, since their influence has become predominant by the universality of their circulation, we regard it as a calamity to be most deeply deplored" (Aspinall 9; Anti-Jacobin Review, x.281, 1801).

In the year 1812, newspapers circulated with growing frequency throughout London. Though 1830's figures, with the rise of the "penny press," would come to overshadow this period, newspaper circulation remained in the first decades of the 19th century a vital facet of England's nascent industrial culture. A. Aspinall relates in his seminal work on the press of the early 19th century--Politics of the Press: 1780-1850--that in 1811 stamp duty was paid on 24,422,000 papers (Aspinall 23). Also, according to Aspinall, there were no "national" newspapers in the period between 1800 and 1830, and few London papers found their way to the provinces; fewer still were the number of papers which made their way to British colonies and foreign countries due to the fact that the Post Office, without parliamentary authorization, levied a heavy fee for transporting papers to a foreign destination (Ibid. 24). Richard Altick characterizes newspaper readership in the first half of the century as "principally ... unskilled workers, shopkeepers, clerks, and the better grade of domestic servants ... whose preoccupations required not only that they be literate but that they keep their reading faculty in repair (Altick 83). These groups benefited from both an increase in elementary education at the beginning of the century, as well as rising incomes which permitted them to purchase many of the newly available papers. Many English, however, still remained illiterate. As late as May of 1816, Henry Brougham remarked in a parliamentary debate that of the 9756 marriages that had been solemnized in London's East End, not a single person could write their name in the parish register (Aspinall 8).

Despite these cultural impediments--or, perhaps, because of them--the Examiner enjoyed a successful circulation at its inception in 1808. In that year Leigh Hunt describes in a letter to his girlfriend Marianne Kent (later, his wife) that the Sunday paper has sold 2,200 copies per week. In the letter (provided below), Hunt brags to his future bride about the journal's early popularity, and expresses optimism concerning its future sales:

I have been looking over your collection of the Examiner, and have found one or two wanting, which I will supply before the year's out, as it would be a pity to spoil the set, for they are very rare, I assure you.  One or two have been lent, I believe; and people who borrow it may not conjecture that four of six shillings are sometimes given for one of them.  The paper gets on gloriously indeed: our regular sale is now two thousand two hundred, and by Christmas, or a few weeks later, I have little doubt we shall be three; and what is best of all, we shall now keep it to ourselves.  My brother told me the other day that he had no doubt but we should be getting eight or ten guineas apiece every week in a year's time: now eight or ten guineas a week, with my hundred a-year from the War Office (for I rose ten pound the other day), will be a tolerable income for a man to begin housekeeping with.  If it were but six guineas apiece at first (for the paper will increase you know), it would do pretty well for us; don't you think so Marian?  Pray tell me what you think of this; for though I like to talk of money matters very little with anybody, and still less, I think, with you (that is, I mean, with regard to ----------, as Mr. Dyer says, or ----------, but you understand me), yet we must talk of them some day, you know.  I can anticipate what your love might prompt you to say--that we could live on little--but I have seen so much of the irritabilities, or rather the miseries arising from want of a suitable income, and the best woman of her time was so worried, and finally worn out with the early negligence of others in this respect, that if ever I was determined in anything, it is to be perfectly clear of the world, and ready to meet the exigencies of a married life before I do marry, for I will not see a wife, who loves me and is the comfort of my existence, afraid to speak to me of money matters; she shall never tremble to hear a knock at the door, or to meet a quarter-day; she will tremble, I hope, with nothing but love and joy in the arms of her husband (Hunt 40).

Distribution

We can tenuously estimate from one subscriber's correspondence with James Mill that the Examiner sold between 7,000 and 8,000 copies per week during 1812. Jeremy Bentham calls Hunt's journal popular among "especially the high political men ... It sells already between 7,000-8,000" (Bain 123). If we borrow from Bentham's figures (taking the lower estimate of 7,000/week), we can estimate the Examiner's total sales for 1812 at 364,000. Using Aspinall's number of papers stamped in 1811--assuming, therefore, that the flucutation between the consecutive years is minimal--the Examiner in 1812 would account for roughly .01% of British papers in circulation, or 1/1000 sold. Considering the existence of pamphlets (which, along with the newspapers of the day, required government stamp) and high prevalence of daily papers, 1 per 1,000 papers seems to be a significantly meangingful circulation total for a weekly without Whig or Tory affiliation.

John Bowles in 1807 describes the transport of newspapers at the beginning of the century: "No pains are spared to make their disribution as general and as public as possible. Besides the gross indecency of announcing them by the blowing of horns, whenever they contain any extraordinary news, greengrocers, hair-dressers and pastry-cooks throughout the metropolis and its vicinity, are furnished with signboards, intimating that particular papers are to be sold at their respective shops, and they are copiously supplied with copies, of which the number unsold are returned on Monday morning. These papers are also most diffusely circulated, by means of the stage coaches, through the country" (14, Aspinall; Bowles, A Dispassionate Enquiry into the best means of National Safety, 114-15). Thomas Carlyle adds to this description in a letter in which he recalls the delivery of the Examiner in 1812: "I well remember how its weekly coming was looked for in our village in Scotland. The place of its delivery was besieged by an eager crowd, and its columns furnished the town talk until the next number came" (5 Blunden).

Reading Spaces: Public-Houses, Reading Rooms and Coffee-Houses

While we may take an educated stab at the Examiner's 1812 sales figures, and even the middle-class complexion of its readership, it is much more difficult to root out the quantity of the newspaper's actual readers. As Altick astutely observes in The English Common Reader, a landmark text on 19th century British readership, the popularity of circulating libraries and coffee houses during the 19th century meant that many people read and/or heard newspapers read aloud without purchasing a personal copy at full-price (65). While it is doubtful that even several coffee-houses existed in 1812 (a Report of the Committee of Import Duties in 1840 noted no more than a dozen), the presence and importance of the public-house and reading rooms at this early juncture is irrefutable. Appearing in Glasgow as early as 1794, reading-rooms were by 1815 found throughout all parts of England, and large towns often had several (Aspinall 25). Costing approximately a guinea annually for membership, these rooms were too costly for lower class readers. Members of these reading-rooms would vote on their reading, a majority deciding on which newspapers were to be stocked and read. Public-houses were likely the most popular site for the communal reading of the Examiner; Sunday papers were frequently read in these eating/drinking establishments (Aspinall 14). Below is a later representation by Louis De Mansfield Absolon (1872-1889) of a man reading aloud in a 19th century public-house, or "ale-house" as they were then called:

                                                        Courtesy of Collins Antiques  

 Cobbett offers a wonderful description of the public-house and its relation to newspapers of the day: "Ask the landlord why he takes the newspaper. He'll tell you that it attracts people to his house, and in many cases its attraction are much stronger than those of the liquor there drunk, thousands upon thousands of men having become sots through the attractions of these vehicles of novelty and falsehood" (11 Aspinall; Cobbett's Political Register, 11 April 1807)

Works Cited

Aspinall,  A. Politics and the Press: 1780-1850. London: Home & Van Thal Ltd., 1949.

Altick, Richard. The English Common Reader. London: Chicago UP, 1957.

Bain, Alexander. James Mill New York: Longman, Green and Co., 1882.

Blunden, Edward. Leigh Hunt's "Examiner" Examined. London: Harper & Brothers, 1928.

Bowles, Jonathan. A Dispassionate Enquiry into the best means of National Safety.

Hunt, Leigh. Correspondence, ed. Thornton Hunt. London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1861.