The changes in society stemming from industrialisation in late 18th and early 19th century Britain created a new demand for reading material for new social classes. Ian Gasse traces some of the historical background ö and presents a publishing environment whose objectives seem strangely familiar to those of todayâs...

The early decades of the 19th century in Britain were a time of enormous economic, social, political and cultural change, stemming from those developments in the organisation of the means and relations of production commonly described as the 'industrial revolution'.

The political and cultural implications of these changes were vast and were not resolved in any permanent form until the middle of the 19th century. The stabilisation of the economy during its golden age as 'workshop of the world' was dependent upon the inclusion of the industrial middle classes in the political settlement through both the 1832 Reform Act and the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, when it was finally acknowledged that the imperatives of industry were more important features of British society than those of agriculture. Culturally, the results included a struggle involving government, publishers and middle and working class radicals over the provision of popular printed material for the developing new 'mass' audiences.

In 1801 the population of England and Wales was just under 9 million; by 1851 it was almost 18 million. From the end of the 18th century, this population increase confronted the rulers of British society with urgent questions of social and political control and gave rise to a much increased interest in the place of education in society. The number of schools offering basic education for the growing numbers of 'the poor' increased substantially. Many of these were Sunday schools but, from the beginning of the 19th century, these were augmented and then overtaken by the networks of voluntary schools.

These schools contributed to an increasing literacy, estimated in 1840 ö at the time of the first official survey by the registrar-general ö to be 67% of adult males, and 51% of adult females. This, in turn, gave rise to a new appetite for printed material and a new commercial market for it. From the 1790s, partly in response to a growing amount of radical literature, there had been a huge increase in the volume of religious tracts for the newly literate working classes, illustrating the then dominant view of what was considered suitable for them to read.

With restricted leisure time and limited leisure facilities ö Preston was, for example, the only town in Lancashire in the 1840s which had a municipal park, and spectator sports and the music hall did not develop until the later 19th century ö reading was one of the few opportunities for working people to participate in leisure and cultural activity, apart from the public house. The provision of literature and opportunities for reading or attending readings, through the spread of coffee houses, libraries, mechanics institutes and also at public houses and even some workplaces, grew enormously during the 1820s and 1830s. Reading had come to be recognised both by governments and both middle and working class radicals as a means to inform and influence large audiences, as well as to entertain them.

The tory-Anglican view, which was the dominant one during at least the first two decades of the century and the one informing the governments of those years, was represented by the output of the tracts and other literature produced by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), by the Religious Tract Society (RTS) and by the methodists. By the 1830s, the RTS and the methodists were producing millions of tracts aimed at the literate working-classes and, to augment its work in this field, the SPCK began publishing The Saturday Magazine in 1832, price one penny and therefore accessible to a working class readership.

The radical democratic view was represented from the 1790s by the publications of the political corresponding societies and, from the early 19th century, by the newspapers and magazines of journalist-publishers like Cobbett, Carlile and Wooler, who began to articulate criticisms of the ruling class and the corrupt government's inability to recognise or deal with the extreme problems of poverty, migration, bad housing and vulnerability to the new economic 'laws' of 'laissez-faire' capitalism, in any way which was not simply repressive.

By the 1830s, working class radicals were publishing unstamped newspapers to defy the law in an attempt to secure removal of the stamp tax, which had been introduced to price newspapers out of the reach of the working classes. The radicals insisted newspapers and magazines for the working classes, such as the Chartist Circular [1839-42], must have a political content and that the working classes should be able and encouraged to construct their own political solutions to the problems which faced them through, for example, participation in the Chartist movement.

The Whig-utilitarian and subsequent middle class radical view was based on a belief that the securing of a stable 'laissez-faire' capitalist order could be achieved only through providing opportunities for the working classes to gain access to the ideas of utilitarianism and middle-class notions of improvement and to see that the solutions to social problems could only come through their wider application. The need was, therefore, to provide access to this 'useful' knowledge and consequently the Whig-led Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) published its Penny Magazine from 1832 to 1845.

However, by the 1840s, the working class audience for printed material had come to be recognised as a large potential market by new elements in the publishing industry, and more varied and entertaining material was made available, some of it based on the sensationalism of gothic and horror novels, some of it based on more traditional forms of popular culture and often offering more humorous material. In the face of this competition, the sales of the more conservative magazines started to fall and, in order to create a commercially successful appeal, it became necessary for magazines to provide a more varied range of material. The People's Journal [1846-9], price a penny-halfpenny, was one of a number of these magazines representing a more developed journalism and offering a more diverse content, whilst retaining notions of self-improvement and a commitment to the 'people's' cause, but in a context that sought to link working class aspirations with those of an emerging and more sophisticated liberal cultural politics.

As a result of these developments, and of changes in the manufacture of paper and printing technology, which made the production of such publications both quicker and cheaper, "the printed word came to be seen," in the words of one commentator, "as the means to consolidate and maintain stability in nineteenth-century industrial society". The two decades of the 1830s and the 1840s, from the introduction of the first Reform Bill to the repeal of the Corn Laws and the collapse of Chartism, were key years in the establishment of a new hegemony for mid-Victorian society. Growing economic prosperity was the background for the creation of this hegemony, but the presentation of conflicting versions of reality in some of the cheap magazines produced in those years, formed part of the battleground where the hegemony was won and lost in the minds and daily lives of ordinary working men and women.

Ian Gasse [ian.gasse@GEO2.poptel.org.uk]