When the Provincial Press was the National Press (c.1836-c.1900)

Ladies of theTimes

“…The letters pages evidence as strong an orientation towards events in the empire and abroad as to events at home. The division between the provincial and the London press is marked in the nineteenth century (Brown 1985;Hobbs 2009), so much so that the London dailies could hardly be said to be national newspapers in the sense that term implies today. In the provinces, newspapers such as the Times were not regarded as more significant than the local paper (Hobbs 2009).…”

Legislating to Ensure ‘Impartial’ Justice: Palmer’s Act of 1856

“…An appendix at the end of this chapter summarizes the main facts of the case as they developed: each, following the death of Cook, was a point upon which the media pounced. Stories were printed in one part of the country and reprinted elsewhere a day or two later, as was typical of the Victorian press, 21 and this case became a cause célèbre among British newspaper readers: journalistic accounts merged investigation with human interest in what the Illustrated Times described as 'the crime of the age' . 22 At a time when serial murder by poison seemed frighteningly frequent, 23 the three accusations of murder, together with a catalogue of other mysterious deaths in Palmer's house, ignited a media storm.…”

Periodical press and port cities: Creation of knowledge, representations and networks1

“…The relation between cities as providers of a market of middle-class readers and periodical press has been studied from different perspectives, capturing the attention of disciplines as economy and business, cultural studies, history and communication studies. Still, most of the research and published studies are concentrated in the capitals of the different countries, leaving behind an essential group of cities, which produced their views on local and international events (Hobbs, 2009). Moreover, if we restrict the perspective for port cities, we will find even less systematic studies about the local press and its dependence on local conditions for surviving or about the specificity of the covered news or published opinions.…”

“…The abundance of social and political debate in this press is representative of the main groups supporting or challenging local powers. While favoring the connections between people, port cities became nodes for regional, national, and international networks (Hobbs, 2009) exchanging information and knowledge.…”

“…New technologies which triggered the revolution of news, like the mail by steamship or the telegraph, were mainly based on port cities. Several researchers have documented and broadly recognized the impact of the periodical mail system as one of the oldest methods to connect distant places in the exchange of ideas (Hobbs, 2009, Goring, 2018, Pettegree, 2018. The introduction of the mailing system through the steamship had an enormous effect on communications as it permitted to calculate the day some correspondence would arrive or depart, thus endorsing predictability to communications.…”