A CHEAP PRESS

Evening Post, Volume CXXII, Issue 14, 16 July 1936, Page 23

A CHEAP PRESS

STRUGGLE IN BRITAIN

MARTYRS OF CENTURY AGO

TAXES ON. KNOWLEDGE

In 1836, after a long battle, the stamp duty on newspapers was reduced from fourpence to one penny, writes Barbara Hammond in the "Manchester Guardian." From 1712 every copy of a newspaper had to be taken to the stamp office to be stamped there. This duty, originally imposed in Queen Anne's time for revenue purposes, together with similar duties on linens, soap, and other articles, had risen by small increments from the original penny to fourpence in 1815. With the tax. at fourpence the ordinary newspaper cost sevenpence, a price far beyond the reach of any but the well-to-do, even for a weekly. But as the popular agitation for political reform grew, a new kind of cheap paper was started especially written for the working classes. In 1816 Cobbett issued a regular twopenny edition of his famous shilling "Weekly Political Register," and'the circulation of this "twopenny trash" reached the figures—extraordinary at the time —of 40,000 or 50,000 a week. • By excluding actual news items this paper, and' others like it, avoided 'the stamp duty, although comments gave readers a good idea of what was' happening.

But these twopenny' papers were short-lived. In 1819, after Peterloo, when the Government passed their repressive Six Acts they included a Publications Act, specially aimed at Cobbett's "Political Register." By this Act any periodical paper under sixpence in price and under a certain size which came out more often than once a month and : contained "any public news, intelligence^ or occurrences, or any remarks or observations thereon, or upon any matter in Church or State," became liable to the fourpenny newspaper duty. HORROR OF REFORM. Comment, in fact, became as expensive as news, and the "Political Register" was raised from twopence to sixpence, losing most of its readers and causing Cobbett's financial affairs to go from bad to worse. Though some of the Six Acts expired a few years later, this Publications Act remained in force, and when Joseph Hume, during Canning's Government in 1827, proposed its repeal only ten members voted with him. In the agitation that brought the Whigs into power in 1830 and afterwards enabled the Reform Bill to be earned, denunciations of the taxes on knowledge, of which this duty was one, uttered by Radicals and concurred in by Whigs, were very common. But the Whigs in power seemed no more inclined than the Tories had been to take off the fourpenny stamp. To understand the reason we must realise that the ordinary upper-class politician, whether Whig or Tory, had a horror of the cheap Press. And this horror was not unnatural. Of all the branches of the Reform agitation the campaign for the freedom of the Press, heroic though it was, was undoubtedly the least respectable. Richard Carlile the journeyman tinplate worker, of whom Professor Trevely%n has said fnr *y^V K uffered achieved more nth the r , hb,^ty of the Press than any centurv nghShman °f the n^eteenth century, was a very remarkable man WORE THEM DOWN. He was not only ready to be a martyr himself but he inspired ' others^ wUh the desire for martyrdom, and his wtfe, his rater, and a series of obscure men and women from all over the country were reaßy to go to prison forthe cause, till, after, many years thlv tired "but the prosecutors and WJht prosecutuai for seditious .or blasphemous libels into contempt and ricicule. But Carlile thought it^ust as S—, t0 fulmin*te against Christianity as to attack political oppression; he demanded freedom to blaspheme as well as freedom to criticise the Government, and with, his serious determined courage he combined a schoolboy's delight in shockThus, while selling Paine's works and going to prison for it, he was also producing things like "A God for a Shilling, a plate depicting a revolting monster made up from various figurative expressions in the Bible, taken literally, with an inscription on the top Jews and Christians behold your God —the great Jehovah or Trinity in Unity." In connection with this the curious fact may be noted that while Carlile was in prison, and his shop, the Temple of Reason," in a state of semi-siege, an indignant Jewish gentleman who broke the window and destroyed two of these plates was ordered in court to pay for the damage ho had done. •■,.-• Such a man as this was a severe trial to his fellow-reformers, for it was, to say the least, disturbing when you were denouncing the Government to find the Deity included in the indictment. Even Henry Hunt, no Pharisee about the company he kept, found it necessary when on trial after Peterloo to dissociate himself from Carlile, who had been on the hustings and by the time of the trial was back in residence in Dorchester Gaol. "Good God," exclaimed Hunt, "was it not enough to brand the reformers with sedition, but also with renouncing a belief in their God?" And if this champion of an unshackled Press was avoided even, by Left-wing Radicals, he was anathema to the ordinary Whig, and his cause suffered with him. POLITICAL EDUCATION. In addition to having no enthusiasm for the free Press battle in the past the Whig Government and the ordinary Whig also feared that the abolition of the stamp duty might be used to rouse the multitude against the Reform Bill settlement. Some enthusiasts, indeed, pointing to the success of the "Penny Magazine," which revealed an amazing appetite among the poor for instruction about such things as beetles and caves and birds and balloons, argued that in a cheaper Press it, would be possible for> welldisposed people to give the working classes political education on the right lines, but the ordinary Whig feared an increase in subversive literature urging the poor to seize political power for themselves. Hence it is not surprising that Lord Grey, when pressed by Hume to repeal the newspaper stamp duty, replied that "these matters did not press." Year after year the Chancellor: of the Exchequer, though he might express sympathy with the proposal to abolish the duty, was unable to find the money with which to carry it out. What finally conquered the Government and made it feel that the matter did press was not the influence of the Parliamentary Radicals, though they were constantly bringing the question forward, nor the influence of the heavily-burdened stamped newspapers, for they, for the most, part, dreaded competition if the stamp were removed; it was the success of the "unstamped agitation." "IN DEFIANCE OF THE LAW." This remarkable agitation was conducted by a band of working men of whom' Henry Hetherington, the printer, William Lovett, Francis Place, and John Cleave are the best known. They set themselves to organise the production and distribution and unstamped papers, best known of which was the • "Poor Man's Guardian," published, as was announced on every copy, "in defiance of the Law to try ihs Svavt

of Right against Might." Fictitious names of printers and publishers were printed on the papers to avoid prosecution; importanWooking dummy parcels were dispatched in order to attract the notice of the police whilst the bearers of the genuine papers crept away from the office unnoticed. A Victim Fund was started. There was an immense amount of correspondence with sympathisers in different towns, and much of the distribution was done by volunteers, whilst hawkers were encouraged to sell the papers, which booksellers naturally rejected, by the offer of a free stock to start with and compensation at the rate of £1 for every month's imprisonment. Hetherington, who did most of the printing and sacrificed a prosperous business for the cause, spent two out of the five years' agitation in prison and the rest of the tune was "on the run." HIGH FIGURES. Numbers of small men, hawkers and distributors, were fined or sent to gaol, but the prosecutions had no effect on j the circulation and it was estimated that the weekly circulation of this illegal, surreptitious literature reached some 130,000. The Government was indeed, beaten. The working classes, in spite of the.stamp duty, were being fed with highly spiced cheap literature, consisting largely of abuse of the Whigs and all their ways. And the whole thing was made ridiculous when suddenly in 1835 the "Poor Man's Guardian," for selling which five hundred persons had gone to prison, was declared by Lord Lyndhurst and a special jury not to be a newspaper at all but a strictly legal publication. In 1836 the Chancellor of the Exchequer] confessed defeat and proposed to use his surplus in reducing the duty from' fourpence to a penny.

One last attempt was made in Parliament to save the fourpenny duty. Let us, said the Tories, look to the real interests of the working class and spend the surplus instead in saving them from filth and disease by taking off the soap tax. It is more important to be clean than to read a paper, and the whole nation, fifteen million persons, will benefit by cheap soap, whereas only a small portion will benefit, if benefit it be, by cheap papers. By a majority of 33 the House decided on cheaper papers. The reduction from fourpence to a penny killed the unstamped agitation, whose protagonists devoted their energies to the Chartist campaign, and it was not until 1853, when the Crimean War had caused a great demand for news, that the remaining penny duty was finally abolished.