If you read a book this year or subscribed to a printed newspaper, you are part of a subculture, according to The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch. And according to Pew Research, younger audiences overwhelmingly source their news and information on social media. They receive it in small chunks, with little context, and worse, the lines between opinion and fact are blurring at an increasing rate. That particular piece of research was conducted in America, but hopefully the outlook is not quite so dire elsewhere. The news we access helps us understand the world, and this informs how we engage with civil society.
It’s easy to despair when considering the current state of the print-edition newspaper, and all the more so when you consider its downmarket offshoot, digital news media. The latter seems intentionally designed to infuriate readers by requiring them to navigate a clickbait hell (which is like wading through treacle), or to risk psychic injury from some right-wing opinion writer. It is, therefore, tempting to feel nostalgia for newspapers past, for some golden age of print, but perhaps those times were less perfect than memory allows.
While fretting over my Sunday paper, which is better characterised as a slender compilation of melodramatic ‘human interest’ stories, I decided that my morning would be better spent in my library. So with newspapers on my mind, I dug out a few ancient periodicals and some old news clippings that my father left me. Keen to see what people once read on winter mornings.
Like most of his generation, my dad was a devoted newspaper reader, and I can picture him now, poring over articles. He would nod or frown in turns, looking up every so often to utter some truncated phrase, like, ‘Suez not looking good’, or, ‘another Bandaranaike in Ceylon’. These disembodied phrases were invitations to my curious young mind, and by following his breadcrumb trails, I learned about world events at an early age.
The enquiring mind will always dig deeper, and the deeper we dig, the more nuanced is our understanding. Anyone who had lived through a war, as my dad had, kept a wary eye on the distant horizon. So monitoring world events was a protective impulse, and perhaps the news was easier to absorb then, as the news cycle occurred only twice a day. An endless stream of news is numbing.
During WW2, my dad’s family cut articles from the papers, along with battle diagrams and cartoons. I still have them in a box under my bed, and when I read them, I am transported to the conflict zones of Europe and the Pacific. The prose has a certain flavour to it and is stripped of sentiment; no doubt because wartime journalists wrote with a military censor looking over their shoulder.
‘300 Children from the northern counties were asleep in a sanatorium when bombs fell nearby. The children behaved magnificently. They stayed in bed and went to sleep when the excitement had abated. Many windows and doors were smashed.
I was initiated into these mysteries by my dad, and after a lifetime of reading the news in print, I find it a hard habit to break. And although I despair at the state of my city’s daily newspaper, I hesitate when contemplating cancellation. There is still some thoughtful writing in my daily, but there are also more dismal opinion pieces. The military censors who oversaw those wartime newspapers have been replaced by controlling billionaires and meddling right-wing politicians, and the jingoistic empire-speak has been replaced by business-speak. Hyperbole is the new normal, and no one is criticised; they are ‘smashed’. During the war years, it was windows that were smashed; now it’s people.
After reading through the war clippings, I hunted out my bound periodicals; many of them were printed over 300 years ago. These are a delight to the reader and a boon to the historian because they are well written, speak of topical events and are frequently satirical.
In earlier times, and especially in the 1700s and early 1800s, the printer was often the owner, publisher, bookseller and journalist. As Leigh Hunt so delightfully writes:
‘My brother John, at the beginning of 1805, set up a paper called The News . . . it was the custom at that time for editors to be intimate with actors and dramatists. They were often proprietors, as well as editors, and in that case, it was not expected that they should escape the usual intercourse or wish to do so. It was thought [of as] a feather in the cap of all parties, and with their feathers they tickled each other. The newspaper man had consequences in the green-room, and got plenty of tickets for friends, and dined at amusing tables. The dramatist secured a good-natured review, often written by himself.
The Hunts decided to give ‘honest reviews’ and to present forthright news, but few believed that this was possible. Not only was it possible, but dangerous. Leigh Hunt and his brother John were both imprisoned after Leigh Hunt wrote that the Prince Regent was a corpulent Adonis. Leigh Hunt, undeterred, continued editing his newspaper during his two years in Newgate Prison. I have a considerable collection of Hunt’s writings and journalism, but the Regency radicals and romantics are deserving of their own space, so more on them another time.
Both Germany and the Netherlands can lay claim to printing the earliest newspapers, but their offerings differed from those which emerged at around the same time in London. The newspaper, as we know it, began in the London coffee shops of the 1600s, and what began as a novelty, enjoyed by the few, soon became a fad. The first newspapers were folio-sized limited editions, printed on high-quality rag paper, and the coffee-drinking public could access them for a penny a read. The newspapers were initially printed on one side only and secured between split strips of wood, or occasionally pasted onto a coffeehouse wall.
Coffee had been brought back from the Middle East by merchants, and its bitter taste was quickly seen as a novelty. In those first London coffee houses, and over those newspapers, heated debates raged; and according to which coffee house you frequented, science, politics, commerce, fashion or gossip would be the likely topic. Coffee arrived at a time when cheap gin was causing a crisis in the city, so coffee-consumption was encouraged by the city fathers. These newly caffeinated, sober drinkers devoured the printed news page with glee.
The earliest Coffee House newspapers, although of durable quality, were still ephemera. They were folio-sized (typically 13.5 by 8.5 inches), but for reasons that I will explain later, the sheets increased in size after 1712.
As the paper-reading public grew, many demanded back editions, and so the printers catered to that need by issuing collected editions. These were initially large and cumbersome, so the printers, seizing an opportunity, created the octavo-sized bound periodicals (approximately 6 x 9 inches). These periodicals soon reached the wider reading public and launched literary careers.
The periodicals from those times, in my library, are leather-bound editions ranging from the early Georgian era through to the end of the Regency era. Of actual early newspapers, I possess only one example, The London Courier. This coffee house broadsheet is printed on white rag paper, and what a lovely thing it is.
Publishing a newspaper in Britain had not been possible until the strict censorship laws lapsed in the late 1600s. Before that, the much-feared Star Chamber oversaw all printing and controlled paper supplies. The folio newspapers first appeared in the 1680s, and in a strange twist of events, Sir Roger L’Estrange, the former Official Censor, started a paper. That paper was The Observator (1681), a fiercely royalist publication, designed to shape public opinion by attacking the Whigs. The Whigs soon retaliated with their own paper, and it parodied the Observator. The Tatler (1709) and Spectator (1711) arrived just over a decade later. It was during that Georgian era that the large broadsheet appeared.
Strict censorship laws, promulgated from the palace, had prevented news from being published during the 1500s and for most of the 1600s, but the authorities took a different tack in the 1700s; taxing the newspapers by the sheet. This was not merely a revenue-gathering exercise, but a move designed to limit their spread. As a cunning workaround, the paper sheets became larger, and the typeface was reduced. A large sheet folded in half still counted as a single sheet, and the folio size grew to become the broadsheet. The tax law in question was officially known as the Stamp Act of 1712 (unofficially, it was called ‘the tax on knowledge’). So, because of a law which had unintended consequences (and because of coffee), the broadsheet was born.
Newspapers of the 1700s generally fell into distinct camps. They could be Tory, Whig, science-focused or gossipy, and a bit later came the radical papers. The newspapers also displayed trade advertisements or items of public interest, like the shipping news. The latter were often the best bits. My London Courier has a report of a ‘prize ship’ being towed into port (one of Napoleon’s fleet had been seized on the high seas). The same paper notifies readers where they could go to receive the King’s laying on of hands, to cure Scrofula, or where you could spy on the Prince Regent as he strolled out with his mistress, Marchioness Conyngham.
Hot topics like the abolition of slavery divided along Tory, Whig or radical lines. Some newspapers had an educational focus, like Addison’s & Steele’s ‘The Spectator’, while others had a more conservative bias, like ‘The Rambler’, ‘The Adventurer’ and ‘The Idler’ (the last three are all associated with Samuel Johnson). I have a selection of the above-named periodicals, but the nicest item I possess is a four-volume, leather-bound edition of The Connoisseur; a chatty, liberally minded publication run by George Coleman the elder (a dramatist) and Bonell Thornton (a poet and satirist).
Inside the Connoisseur and tucked between the essays are some advertisements poking fun at the gentry. They look like genuine advertisements, but they are satirical. The sort of things that later appeared in Punch or Oz. It must have surprised people to see references to buffoonish aristocrats or have ‘ladies of quality’ being compared to ‘ladies of pleasure’. My complete edition of the Connoisseur dates from the mid-18th century and is in very good to fine condition. Most of my copies of the Rambler and the Spectator are odd-number purchases, and generally in a condition known to bibliophiles as ‘reading copies’.
I do, though, have one complete set of The Spectator; an edition that was specifically bound for the Canton Club, in China, and shipped there just before the Opium Wars. Luckily for me, the set was grabbed by the fleeing traders and taken to Hong Kong. The same set also survived the twentieth-century Japanese invasion of Hong Kong. I was told when I purchased it that a servant had buried the books in a waterproof case, after hearing rumours that the Japanese soldiers were burning books printed in English. The books have chop stamps in Chinese, which validate the tale.
All of those early publications enabled readers to feel that they were up on events and that they were, in fact, participants in the affairs of the world. This was a new experience.
The Georgian era is a fascinating period to examine, and, although we learn little of the working class, it comes alive in these periodicals. It was a time of significant typographical innovation too, particularly during the last two decades of the 1700s. You can observe that in the pictures that I have posted. Notably, the removal of the long ‘s’, which to today’s eyes looks like the cursive letter ‘f’. When you look closely, you can see that it is, in fact, an elongated ‘s’. What confuses us is the short ligature in the middle, but a closer examination shows that it doesn’t pass through to the front side of the letter. The simpler ‘s’ was mostly reserved for the end of a word, but confusingly, the ‘f and s’ could be mixed if there was a double ‘s’. The reason for the change was not, as I was once told, to stop schoolboys sniggering over words like suck with a long ‘s.’ It was an innovation of the printer and typographer, initiated by the likes of printer/publisher/bookseller John Bell, and deemed necessary to avoid confusion when typefaces shrunk in size.
In the mid-19th century, my forbears, the Leightons, printed The Illustrated London News. The Leightons are responsible for several significant printing innovations, and they produced the world’s first Illustrated newspaper. Launched in 1842, it became wildly successful and it only ceased publication in 2003, ending a 161-year run.
Sarah Leighton was my third great grandmother (1787-1868), and it was her grandfather Archibald Leighton (1742-1799) who moved to London to found a famous bookbindery. Sarah’s father, George, set up the Leighton printery and her brother Stephen became a master printer. The Leightons were a printing dynasty.
The Leighton family belonged to the egalitarian Sandemanian congregation, and married within that sect. Michael Faraday FRS , the famous scientist, married Sarah’s sister – there was also a parliamentary librarian, book seller/publishers and some plate engravers in the family. First cousins, the Boosey family, were book and music publishers and created the world’s first copyright laws.
I look at my library, and I think about my Leighton ancestors, and about all of the writers, illustrators, printers, engravers, typographers and typesetters. And when I do, I can’t help but wonder, has the age of the printed newspaper passed?
So here I am on a wet Saturday morning, having retrieved my paper from a neighbours lawn. A cat has settled on my knee, refusing to move, so I juggle paper, coffee and animal. The paper is a broadsheet on Saturdays, and I prefer that format, so I discard the supplements and begin reading.
Although my dad left us long ago, his paper reading habits survive in me, and I catch myself muttering truncated phrases, just as he did. ‘What absolute clowns’ I say to no-one in particular, shaking my head in disbelief. ‘I can’t hear you’ comes a voice from the other room, and I read on muttering to myself. After saving a few pages to read over lunch, I reluctantly pick up my iPad to read the online Guardian. A blander, expurgated, one dimensional Guardian, a version purged of paper crackle, marmalade stains and the smell of printers ink.
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Sources: The clippings, images and books are all sourced from my library. Books: ‘The Coffee House’ by Markman Ellis, ‘The Spectator’ Addison and Steele, ‘The Rambler’ Samual Johnson, ‘The Connoisseur’ Thornton/Coleman, ‘The Horrid Conspiracy’ Star Chamber (1765), ‘The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt’, ‘The Indicator’ Leigh Hunt, the war time ‘Herald’, the ‘True Briton’ newspaper, ‘The Atlantic’ , the archives of the Sandemanians (private descendants group).
Meandering Curious Reader – July 2026, edition one