Conceptos

This book gathers historical evidence from across England, but it is grounded in a study of the reading, production and circulation of local

88 Habermas, pp. 27, 51.

89 Carey, Communication as Culture, p. 21; see also Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel’s Political Writings, ed. by Z. A. Pelczynski and T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), p. 6.

90 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006).

newspapers in one place, the town of Preston in Lancashire.⁹¹ The case study approach is a concrete and manageable way to bring this book’s themes together and to test the theories of other scholars. It embraces the specificity of a place, recovering the concrete details of the readers, the where and when of what they read. Preston was small enough for its reading places and practices, and its newspapers, to be studied as a whole. The reader is invited to imagine an emotional connection to this town in the second half of the nineteenth century. From the inside, every place is unique (despite their sameness from the outside, when we hurtle past them on a train) and, to many of those who live in any particular place, it is numinous in its specialness. Some background information about Preston is therefore needed.

Fig. 0.1. Location map of Preston. Outline map by D-maps.com, CC BY 4.0, https://d-maps.com/carte.php?num_car=2555&lang=en

Halfway between London and Edinburgh, Preston was Lancashire’s second oldest borough, and was a market centre for the agricultural areas of north Lancashire. This geography, and the rhythms of its

91 Other studies of local press ecologies (but lacking a focus on readers) include Maurice Milne, The Newspapers of Northumberland and Durham: a Study of Their Progress During the ‘Golden Age’ of the Provincial Press (Newcastle upon Tyne:

Graham, 1971), and Peter J. Lucas, ‘The First Furness Newspapers: the History of the Furness Press From 1846 to c.1880’ (unpublished M.Litt. dissertation, University of Lancaster, 1971).

London LiverpoolManchester

PRESTON Edinburgh

weekly markets, became visible in the circulation areas and publishing schedules — the where and the when — of its many newspapers. Preston was the administrative centre for all parts of Lancashire outside the cities and large towns, giving it a greater number of lawyers and other professionals. Geographically isolated from the main industrial areas of Lancashire, it drew many immigrants from the rural areas north, east and west of the town, and this reservoir of labour enabled its mills to pay lower wages than in other parts of Lancashire. Many of these immigrants were ‘old’ (as opposed to Irish) Roman Catholics, making Preston the most Catholic town in England.⁹² Industrial relations in Preston were more acrimonious than in most other Lancashire textile towns, and were at their worst during the 1853–54 lock-out, which inspired writers such as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and Karl Marx, the first two using the dispute as inspiration for their novels Hard Times and North and South respectively, while Marx predicted that world revolution would begin there, as the working class began to cry, ‘our St Petersburg is at Preston!’⁹³ The town’s population grew from some 69,000 in 1851 to 125,000 in 1901. The railway arrived in 1838, the telegraph in 1854, but neither technology harmed Preston’s newspapers, in fact quite the opposite. As geographers of place have argued, distinctiveness and sense of place are not necessarily threatened by connections to other places, or by the globalisation of the international telegraph system; the local and the global are not opposites, they are ‘entangled’ with each other.⁹⁴

Preston’s sense of its own significance was not based solely on its size and industry, but also on its social, administrative and commercial functions, and its long history, so that it saw itself as Lancashire’s third centre, after Manchester and Liverpool. Spinning and weaving mills dominated the economy at mid-century, although its status as a market centre and county town gave it a more mixed economy than some other textile towns. It became the headquarters of the new county council in 1889, and its economy continued to diversify, particularly

92 Thirty-six per cent of Preston church attenders on March 30, 1851 were Roman Catholics: Census of Great Britain, 1851: Religious Worship in England and Wales Abridged from the Official Report (London: Routledge, 1854), p. 128.

93 Karl Marx, ‘The English Middle Classes’ [1 August 1854], in Dispatches for the New York Tribune: Selected Journalism of Karl Marx, ed. by James Ledbetter (London:

Penguin Classics, 2007), pp. 142–45.

94 Shep, pp. 62–63.

into engineering (including print machinery), enabling it to survive the late nineteenth-century depression better than most Lancashire towns.⁹⁵ Its established river port was greatly expanded in 1892, by the controversial creation of a new deep water dock, at enormous cost. Its ship-building and maritime trade linked it to the empire and the wider world, as did its barracks, where regiments were stationed between deployments, including Waterloo, the Crimea, Afghanistan and South Africa.

Politically, Preston was a two-member Parliamentary constituency, with a tradition of electing one Whig and one Tory. This custom ended in 1865, when the Conservatives began an unbroken forty-one years of control of both seats. Michael Savage argues that working-class Conservatism in Preston was created by the party’s cultural populism, and its support for redevelopment of the port. The town’s Liberals, in contrast, were seen as the party of the mill and factory owners, and their Nonconformist, teetotal tendencies threatened a working-class Anglican culture which included drinking, gambling and blood sports.⁹⁶ The large Catholic electorate voted en bloc for Whig-Liberal candidates until 1858, after which Liberal foreign policy divided them.⁹⁷ These divisions were reflected in rival Liberal and Tory newspapers, and, from the 1880s, Roman Catholic publications.

An unusually high proportion of Preston residents had the vote until the 1880s. There had been a tradition of universal male suffrage in Preston that had officially ended in 1832; however, those with a vote under the old franchise retained it for the rest of their lives. These ‘old franchise men’ still accounted for more than 25 per cent of the electorate in 1865, giving Preston a more working-class franchise than most other towns.⁹⁸ In consequence, one might expect a wider political culture,

95 Michael Savage, The Dynamics of Working-Class Politics: The Labour Movement in Preston 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 66, 95, https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511898280; David Hunt, A History of Preston (Preston: Carnegie/Preston Borough Council, 1992), pp. 230, 234.

96 Jon Lawrence, ‘Class and Gender in the Making of Urban Toryism, 1880–1914’, English Historical Review, 108 (1993), 629–52 (p. 635).

97 Savage, Dynamics; Tom Smith, ‘Religion or Party? Attitudes of Catholic Electors in Mid-Victorian Preston’, North West Catholic History, 33 (2006), 19–35 (pp. 22, 24).

98 Smith, ‘Religion or Party?’; Tom Smith, ‘“Let Justice Be Done and We Will Be Silent”: A Study of Preston’s Catholic Voters and Their Parliamentary Elections Campaigns, 1832 to 1867’, North West Catholic History, 28 (2001), 5–54 (p. 8).

resulting in higher newspaper readership, but there is no evidence that levels of newspaper reading in Preston were unusually high in this period. After the 1867 Reform Act the middle classes dominated the town’s Parliamentary electorate, which expanded enormously from 2,649 men in 1865 to 11,312 in 1868.⁹⁹ The municipal electorate was broader than that for Parliament, and included some working-class men throughout the period. From 1869, single women could also vote in corporation elections, with married women eligible after 1894.¹⁰⁰