Part 840

The first stamp tax on newspapers in England went into effect on the 12th day of August, 1712. "An act had passed the legislature, that 'for every pamphlet or paper contained in half a sheet, or lesser piece of paper so printed, the sum of one halfpenny sterling: and for every such pamphlet or paper being larger than half a sheet, and not exceeding one whole sheet, so printed, a duty after the rate of one penny sterling for every sheet printed thereof.' This act, which was to curb the licentiousness of the press, was to be in force for the space of thirty-two years, to be reckoned from the 10th day of June, 1712. Addison, in the 'Spectator' of this day, says, 'this is the day on which many eminent authors will probably publish their last works. I am afraid that few of our weekly historians, who are men that above all others delight in war, will be able to subsist under the weight of a stamp duty in an approaching peace. In short, the necessity of carrying a stamp, and the impracticability of notifying a bloody battle, will, I am afraid, both concur to the sinking of these thin folios which have every other day related to us the history of Europe for several years last past. A facetious friend of mine, who loves a pun, calls this present mortality among authors, "the fall of the leaf.'" On this tax Dean Swift thus humorously alludes in his Journal to Stella, as follows (August 7):—'Do you know that all Grub-street is dead and gone last week? No more Ghosts or murders now for love or money. I plied it close the last fortnight, and published at least seven papers of my own, besides some of other people's; but now every single half-sheet pays a halfpenny to the queen. The 'Observator' is fallen; the 'Medleys' are jumbled together with the 'Flying Post'; the 'Examiner' is deadly sick; the 'Spectator' keeps up and doubles its price; I know not how long it will hold. Have you seen the red stamp the papers are marked with? Methinks the stamping is worth a half-penny.' The stamp mark upon the newspapers was a rose and thistle joined by the stalks, and enclosing between the Irish shamrock, the whole three were surmounted by a crown. … It is curious to observe what an effect this trifling impost had upon the circulation of the most favourite papers. Many were entirely discontinued, and several of those which survived were generally united into one publication. The bill operated in a directly contrary manner to what the ministers had anticipated; for the opposition, who had more leisure, and perhaps more acrimony of feeling, were unanimous in the support of their cause. The adherents of ministers, who were by no means behind the opposition in their proficiency in the topic of defamation, were, it seems, not so strenuously supported; and the measure thus chiefly destroyed those whom it was Bolinbroke's interest to protect. {2600} For some reason, which we have not been able to trace, the stamp-duties were removed shortly after their imposition, and were not again enforced until 1725. In order to understand how so small a duty as one halfpenny should operate so strongly upon these periodical publications, we must look at the price at which they were vended at that period. The majority of them were published at a penny, many at a halfpenny, and some were even published so low as a farthing."

_C. H. Timperley, Encyclopædia of Literary and Typographical Anecdote, pages 601-602._

PRINTING AND THE PRESS: A. D. 1723. End of Newspaper monopoly in France.

"Until Louis XVI. was dethroned, Paris was officially supposed to possess but three periodicals: the 'Gazette de France' for politics, 'Le Journal des Savants' for literature and science, and the 'Mercure de France' for politics, literature, and social matters mingled. For a time these monopolies were respected, but only for a very short time. … During the Regency of the Duke of Orleans (1715-23), the 'Gazette de France,' 'Mercure,' and 'Journal des Savants' combined to bring an action for infringement against all the papers then existing, but they were non-suited on a technical objection; and this was their last attempt at asserting their prerogative."

_The French Press (Cornhill Magazine, October, 1873)._

PRINTING AND THE PRESS: A. D. 1734. Zenger's trial in New York. Determination of the freedom of the Press.

See NEW YORK: A. D. 1720-1734.

PRINTING AND THE PRESS: A. D. 1771. Freedom of Parliamentary reporting won in England.

See ENGLAND: A. D. 1771.

PRINTING AND THE PRESS: A. D. 1777. The first Daily Newspaper in France.

"In 1777 there appeared the 'Journal de Paris,' which only deserves notice from its being the first daily paper issued in France."

_Westminster Review, July 1860, page 219._

PRINTING AND THE PRESS: A. D. 1784-1813. The earliest daily Newspapers in the United States.

"The first daily newspaper published in the United States was the 'American Daily Advertiser.' It was issued in Philadelphia in 1784, by Benjamin Franklin Bache, afterwards of the Aurora. When the seat of national government was in Philadelphia, it shared the confidence and support of Jefferson with the 'National Gazette.' It was strong in its opposition to the Federal section of the administration of Washington, and to all the measures originating with Hamilton. Zachariah Poulson became its proprietor and publisher in 1802, and it was known as 'Poulson's Advertiser,' and we believe he continued its publisher till October 28, 1839, when the establishment was sold to Brace and Newbold, the publishers of a new paper called the 'North American.' The name after that was the 'North American and Daily Advertiser.' … The 'New York Daily Advertiser,' the second real journal in the United States, was published in 1785. It was commenced on the 1st of March by Francis Childs & Co. … On the 29th of July, 1786, the 'Pittsburg (Pennsylvania) Gazette,' the first newspaper printed west of the Alleghany Mountains, appeared, and in 1796 the 'Post' was issued. … 'The United States Gazette' was started in New York in 1789 by John Fenno, of Boston. Its original name was 'Gazette of the United States.' It was first issued in New York, because the seat of the national government was then in that city. When Congress removed to Philadelphia in 1790, the 'Gazette' went with that body. In 1792 it was the special organ of Alexander Hamilton. … Noah Webster, the lexicographer of America, was a lawyer in 1793, and had an office in Hartford, Connecticut. 'Washington's administration was then violently assailed by the 'Aurora,' 'National Gazette,' and other organs of the Republican Party, and by the partisans of France. Jefferson was organizing the opposition elements, and Hamilton was endeavoring to strengthen the Federal party. Newspapers were established on each side as the chief means of accomplishing the objects each party had in view. Noah Webster was considered, in this state of affairs, the man to aid the Federalists journalistically in New York. He was, therefore, induced to remove to that city and take charge of a Federal organ. On the 9th of December, 1793, he issued the first number of a daily paper, which was named the 'Minerva.' According to its imprint, it appeared 'every day, Sundays excepted, at four o'clock, or earlier if the arrival of the mail will permit.' … With the 'Minerva' was connected a semi-weekly paper called the 'Herald.' … The names of 'Minerva' and 'Herald' were shortly changed to those of 'Commercial Advertiser' and 'New York Spectator,' and these names have continued. … The 'Commercial Advertiser' is the oldest daily newspaper in the metropolis. Of the hundreds of daily papers started in New York, from the time of Bradford's Gazette in 1725 to the 'Journal of Commerce' in 1827, there are now [1872] only two survivors—the 'Evening Post' and the 'Commercial Advertiser.' … The first prominent daily paper issued in New England was the Boston Daily Advertiser, the publication of which was commenced on the 3d of March, 1813. There was a daily paper begun in that city on the 6th of October, 1796, by Alexander Martin, and edited by John O'Ley Burk, one of the 'United Irishmen.' It lived about six months. It was called the Polar Star and Boston Daily Advertiser. Another was attempted on the 1st of January, 1798, by Caleb P. Wayne, who was afterwards editor of the United States Gazette of Philadelphia. This second daily paper of Boston was named the Federal Gazette and Daily Advertiser. It lived three months. The third attempt at a daily paper in the capital of Massachusetts was a success. It was published by William W. Clapp, afterwards of the Saturday Evening Gazette, and edited by Horatio Biglow."

_F. Hudson, Journalism in the United States, pages 175-194, and 378._

PRINTING AND THE PRESS: A. D. 1785-1812. The founding of "The Times," in London. The beginning of "leading articles."

The newspaper afterwards famous as "The Times" was started, in 1785, under the name of the "Daily Universal Register," and did not adopt the title of "The Times" until the 1st of January, 1788.

_J. Grant, The Newspaper Press, volume 1, chapter 16._

"All the newspapers that can be said to have been distinguished in any way till the appearance of the 'Times' were distinguished by some freak of cleverness. … The 'Times' took up a line of its own from the first day of its existence. The proprietors staked their fortunes upon the general character of their paper, upon the promptitude and accuracy of its intelligence, upon its policy, upon the frank and independent spirit of its comments on public men. … The chief proprietor of the 'Times' was John Walter—a man who knew nothing or next to nothing of newspaper work, but who knew precisely what the public wanted in a newspaper, and possessed, with this instinct and intelligence, the determination and enterprise which constitute the character of a successful man of business. {2601} He saw how a newspaper ought to be conducted, and he thought he saw how, by the development of a new idea in printing, he could produce the 'Times' a good deal cheaper than any of its contemporaries. The whole English language, according to Mr. Walter, consisted of about 90,000 words; but by separating the particles and omitting the obsolete words, technical terms, and common terminations, Mr. Walter believed it to be possible to reduce the stock in common use to about 50,000, and a large proportion of these words, with all the common terminations, he proposed to have cast separately, so that the compositor, with a slip of MS. before him to set in type, might pick up words or even phrases instead of picking up one by one every letter of every word in his copy, and thus, of course, save a good deal of time. The idea was impracticable, utterly impracticable, because the number of words required to carry out the system must in itself be so great that no case of type that a printer could stand before would hold them all, even if the printer 'learn his boxes' with a case of some 4,000 or 5,000 compartments before him; but it took a good many years, a good many experiments, and the expenditure of some thousands of pounds to convince Mr. Walter that the failure was not due to the perversity of his printers but to the practical difficulties which surrounded his conception. John Walter was far more successful in the general conduct of the 'Times' as a newspaper than he was in the management of the 'Times' printing office. He set all the printers in London by the ears with his whim about logographic printing. But he had a very clear conception of what a national newspaper ought to be, and with the assistance of a miscellaneous group of men, who, as they are sketched for us by Henry Crabb Robinson, were apparently far more picturesque than practical, John Walter made the 'Times' what the 'Times' has been for nearly a century, pre-eminently and distinctly a national newspaper. The 'Times,' in its original shape, consisted merely of the day's news, a few advertisements, some market quotations, perhaps a notice of a new book, a few scraps of gossip, and in the session, a Parliamentary report. The 'Morning Chronicle' had the credit … of inventing the leading article, as it had the credit of inventing Parliamentary reporting. The 'Morning Chronicle,' on the 12th of May, 1791, published a paragraph, announcing that 'the great and firm body of the Whigs of England, true to their principles, had decided on the dispute between Mr. Fox and Mr. Burke, in favor of Mr. Fox, as the representative of the pure doctrines of Whiggery,' and that in consequence of this resolution Mr. Burke would retire from Parliament. It was very short, but this paragraph is the nearest approximation that is to be found in the newspapers of that time to a leading article, and appearing as it did in the part of the 'Morning Chronicle' where a year or two afterwards the leading articles were printed, Mr. Wingrove Cooke cites it as the germ of the leaders which, when they became general, gave a distinctive colour and authority to newspapers as independent organs of opinion and criticism. The idea soon became popular; and in the 'Morning Post' and the 'Courier' the leading article, developed as it was by Coleridge and Macintosh into a work of art, often rivalling in argument, wit, and eloquence the best speeches in Parliament, became the object of quite as much interest as the Parliamentary reports themselves. The 'Times,' knowing how to appropriate one by one all the specialties of its contemporaries, and to improve upon what it appropriated, was one of the first newspapers to adopt the idea of leading articles, and in adopting that idea, to improve upon it by stamping its articles with a spirit of frankness and independence which was all its own. … The reign of John Walter, practically the founder of the 'Times,' ended in the year 1812, and upon his death his son, the second John Walter, took possession of Printing House Square, and, acting in the spirit of his father, with ampler means, soon made the 'Times' the power in the State that it has been from that day to this."

_C. Pebody, English Journalism, pages 92-99._

PRINTING AND THE PRESS: A. D. 1817. The trials of William Hone.

See ENGLAND: A. D. 1816-1820.

PRINTING AND THE PRESS: A. D. 1830-1833. The first Penny Papers in the United States.

"The Penny Press of America dates from 1833. There were small and cheap papers published in Boston and Philadelphia before and about that time. The Bostonian was one. The Cent, in Philadelphia, was another. The latter was issued by Christopher C. Cornwall in 1830. These and all similar adventures were not permanent. Most of them were issued by printers when they had nothing else to do. Still they belonged to the class of cheap papers. The idea came from the illustrated Penny Magazine, issued in London in 1830. … The Morning Post was the first penny paper of any pretensions in the United States. It was started on New-Year's Day, 1833, as a two-cent paper, by Dr. Horatio David Shepard, with Horace Greeley and Francis V. Story as partners, printers, and publishers. … After one week's trial, with the exhaustion of the capital, the original idea of Dr. Shepard, his dream of the previous year 1832 was attempted, and the price reduced to one cent; but it was too late. … This experiment, however, was the seed of the Cheap Press. It had taken root. On Tuesday, the 3d of September, in the same year 1833, the first number of the Sun was issued by Benjamin H. Day."

_F. Hudson, Journalism in the United States, pages 416-417._

PRINTING AND THE PRESS: A. D. 1853-1870. Extinction of taxes on Newspapers in England. The beginning of Penny Papers. Rise of the provincial daily press.

"In 1853 the advertisement duty was repealed; in 1855 the obligatory newspaper stamp was abolished, and in 1861, with the repeal of the paper duty, the last check upon the unrestrained journalism was taken away. As a matter of course, the resulting increase in the number of newspapers has been very great as well as the resulting diminution in their price. … When it was seen that the trammels of journalism were about to be loosed the penny paper came into existence. The 'Daily Telegraph,' the first newspaper published at that price, was established in June, 1855, and is now one of the most successful of English journals."

_T. G. Bowles, Newspapers (Fortnightly Review, July 1, 1884)._

{2602}

"With the entire freedom from taxation began the modern era of the daily press. At this time [1861] London had nine or ten daily newspapers, with the 'Times' in the lead. Of these, six or seven still survive, and are holding their own with competitors of more recent origin. Up to the time of the abolition of the stamp duties, London was the only city which had a daily press; but between 1855 and 1870 a large number of newspapers published in the provincial cities, which had hitherto been issued in weekly or bi-weekly form, made their appearance as daily journals. With only one or two exceptions, all the prosperous provincial morning papers of to-day were originally weeklies, and as such had long occupied the ground they now hold as dailies."

_E. Porritt, The Englishman at Home, chapter 13._

PRINTING AND THE PRESS: A. D. 1874-1894. Surviving Press Censorship in Germany.

"It would be wrong to speak of the Newspaper Press of Germany as the fourth estate. In the land which gave Gutenberg and the art of printing to the world, the Press has not yet established a claim to a title so imposing. To the growth and power of a Free Press are needed liberal laws and institutions, with freedom of political opinion and civil action for the subject. Hitherto these fundamental conditions have been absent. During the last fifty years little has been done to liberate the newspaper, to give it free play, to unmuzzle it. It is the misfortune of the German Press that the special laws for the regulation of newspapers and serial publications have been evolved from a system of legislation which was devised in times of great political unrest and agitation. … Liberty of the Press has been one of the leading political watchwords of the reform party during the last three-quarters of a century. Yet though the Press does not stand where it stood at the beginning of the century, when even visiting cards could not be printed without the solemn assent of the public censor, and when objectionable prints were summarily suppressed at the mere beck of a Minister or his subordinate, little ground has been won since the severer features of the measures passed in 1854 for the repression of democratic excesses were abandoned. The constitution of Prussia says that 'Every Prussian has the right to express his opinion freely by word, writing, print, or pictorial representation' (Article 27). But this right is superseded by the provision of the imperial constitution (Article 41, Section 16) which reserves to the Empire the regulation of the Press, and by a measure of May 7th, 1874, which gives to this provision concrete form. This is the Press Law of Germany to-day. The law does, indeed, concede, in principle at least, the freedom of the Press (Pressfreiheit), and it abolishes the formal censorship. But a severe form of control is still exercised by the police, whose authority over the Press is greater in reality than it seems to be from the letter of the statute. It is no longer necessary, as it once was, and still is in Russia, to obtain sanction for the issue of each number before it is sent into the world, but it is the legal duty of a publisher to lay a copy of his journal before the police authority directly it reaches the press. This an informal censor revises, and in the event of any article being obnoxious he may order the immediate confiscation of the whole issue, or a court of law, which in such matters works very speedily, may do so for him. As the police and judicial authorities have wide discretion in the determination of editorial culpability, this power of confiscation is felt to be a harsh one. While the Socialist Law existed the powers of the police were far more extensive than now, and that they were also real is proved by the wholesale extermination of newspapers of Socialistic tendencies which took place between the years 1878 and 1890. Since that law disappeared, however, Socialist journals have sprung up again in abundance, though the experience gained by their conductors in the unhappy past does not enable them to steer clear of friction with the authorities. The police, too, regulates the public sale of newspapers and decides whether they shall be cried in the street or not. In Berlin special editions cannot be published without the prior sanction of this authority. … So frequent are prosecutions of editors that many newspapers are compelled to maintain on their staffs batches of Sitzredakteure, or 'sitting editors,' whose special function is to serve in prison (colloquially sitzen=sit) the terms of detention that may be awarded for the too liberal exercise of the critical faculty. … Some measure of the public depreciation of newspapers is due to the fact that they are largely in Hebrew hands. In the large towns the Press is, indeed, essentially a Jewish institution."

_W. H. Dawson, Germany and the Germans, part 2, chapter 1 (volume 1)._

PRINTING AND THE PRESS: American Periodicals founded before 1870 and existing in 1894.

The following is a carefully prepared chronological list of important newspapers and other periodicals, still published (1894) in the United States and Canada, which have existed for a quarter of a century or more, having been founded before 1870. The * before a title indicates that the information given has been obtained directly from the publisher. For some of the periodicals not so marked, the dates of beginning have been taken from their own files. In other cases, where publishers have neglected to answer a request for information, the facts have been borrowed from Rowell's American Newspaper Directory:

1764. * Connecticut Courant (Hartford), w.; added Courant, d., 1836.

* Quebec Gazette (French and English), weekly; ran many years as tri-weekly, in English; discontinued for about 16 years; now resumed as Quebec Gazette in connection with Quebec Morning Chronicle (founded 1847).

1766 or 1767. * Connecticut Herald and Post Boy (New Haven); various names; now Connecticut Herald and Weekly Journal.

1768. * Essex Gazette; changes of name and place; suspended; revived at Salem, Massachusetts, as Salem Mercury, 1786; became semi-weekly, 1796; became Salem Daily Gazette, 1892.

1770. Worcester Spy, weekly; added daily, 1845.