The Economics of Press and Periodical Production

This chapter assesses the interplay of technological innovation and market forces on the development of press and periodical publishing in nineteenth-century Great Britain. It gives due consideration to the significance of institutional factors and the role of government policies towards publishing up until 1855. The chapter begins by exploring how the so-called ‘taxes on knowledge’ affected the economics of periodical and penny magazines publishing in the first half of the nineteenth-century. It then moves on to consider the economic development of the press in Britain and Ireland across three distinct time periods. Until mid-century, periodical publishing firms tended to be small businesses, mainly family-owned, that almost invariably produced just a single title. Between 1850 and 1870, a small number of London-based publishers began to issue a portfolio of publications, particularly in the field of popular women’s magazines and Sunday newspapers, directed at a national audience served by vertically integrated wholesalers/retailers, most notably W.H. Smith. By the final quarter of the nineteenth-century radical improvements in the technology of printing and increased disposable incomes facilitated the emergence of large-scale newspaper and magazine enterprises such as those of George Newnes and Alfred Harmsworth, focused on London’s Fleet Street.