Nineteenth-Century Mediamorphosis: Transformations in Print Culture

Andrew King

Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Greenwich, London

Mediamorphosis – transformation in the organisation of the media – defines who we are, what we can communicate and to whom, what we can hear and from whom, and what we can do and feel. This essay breaks down the extreme nineteenth-century mediamorphosis into four impure elements, each with their own distinct but connected histories: Technology, Distribution, Access, and Regulation.

What such a breakdown offers is not only a convenient way to tell a long, complex, and potentially confusing story but also a rich array of topics that students and academics with diverse interests and skills can research. While treated separately, these elements are really like the circles in an untidy and constantly mobile Venn diagram: they overlap now here, now there, now a great deal, now hardly at all. This essay points out some of these overlaps, but the attentive reader will find many more. Each element offers either exploration as a whole or focussed research on illustrative case studies: both are suggested below.

Mediamorphosis

In 1896, Charles Cooper (1829–1916), the editor of the Scotsman newspaper, began his recollections with a memory of a former method of printing that was on its last legs even when he began in the industry in the 1840s:

There can be few journalists now in active work who have seen a newspaper of good size and fair circulation printed on a wooden press… In the days of that old wooden press… newspaper life was easier, even for those who had to produce daily papers. The electric telegraph was not. Railways were in their infancy. Posts were slow. You could discuss a piece of news without troubling yourself as to any possible modification of it in the next hour or the next twenty-four hours.

(Cooper 1896, 1)

As Cooper’s 1896 Retrospect charts, the nineteenth century can be characterised by a marked acceleration of change in our communication practices. It is a process that Roger Fidler would call in 1997 ‘mediamorphosis’. This essay does not depend on Fidler’s methodology or his divisions into time periods (which he devised to understand the late twentieth-century turn to the electronic) but I find the term useful for naming nineteenth-century transformations in the media and their effects on practices and identities, as, unlike many other terms, like ‘explosion’ or ‘rise’, it allows for the different paces and modes of metamorphosis that we see across the country and the print industry as a whole.

Early in the nineteenth century, the seeds of change were already visible. At the beginning of the century, the Times (1785–) had already invested in iron presses which could print about 150 copies an hour. At the same time the nearest to what would later become mass-market print media was the cheap chapbook printed on wooden presses, whose design had hardly changed since Gutenberg in the fifteenth century. Many expensive books, newspapers, and magazines were printed on such presses, but they were restricted to a comparatively small social group: in 1800, almost all communication, including entertainment and news, would still have been face-to-face.

By 1850, The Times, now with a circulation of around 50,000, was being challenged by the weekly Illustrated London News (1842–1989, hereafter the ILN), the first of a new breed of newspaper which combined energetic journalism with news illustration: the ILN’s circulation after just a decade was over 130,000. By 1860, hundreds of newspapers were catering for local populations all around Britain and the Telegraph (1855–) – significantly named after the fastest communication technology of the day – was outselling The Times. Meanwhile, cheap weekly magazines like the Family Herald (1842–1940), the London Journal (1845–1928), Reynolds’s Miscellany (1846–1869), and Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper (1853–1932) were serialising novels (usually illustrated) that over 50% of the entire British population was consuming – a density of consumption anticipating late twentieth-century prime-time soap opera. It will be no surprise that advertising agents, although starting in the eighteenth century, were thriving as never before: they did not yet provide copy or campaigns, but they bought up space in periodicals and newspapers at a discount and sold it on to their clients, promising them specialised knowledge of target readerships to maximise sales for minimal effort.

By the end of the century, the Strand Magazine (1891–1950) – where Sherlock Holmes conducted his ‘Adventures’ – was promising ‘a picture on every page’, while advertising saturated urban streets festooned with telegraph wires, crowded by trams and omnibuses. Millions of magazines, newspapers, books, postcards, and pre-printed forms were being sent to every corner, thronging station kiosks, bookshops, libraries, department stores, trains, and homes, offering reproductions of photos, works of art, maps, celebrity signatures, opinions and interviews, serials and snippets, knowledge and news, puzzles and politics, all demanding purchase and promising a better life, often in conjunction with insurance, pens, flags, hats, or trinkets. Communication had become distant, technologised and commodified: Britain was now a nation of media consumers.

By the end of the century, print had permeated every aspect of life. As Cooper registers, it had profoundly altered identities and behaviours, created new jobs and geographies, new passions and pursuits. How did this mediamorphosis come about?

Technology

The most obvious answer to what mediamorphosis involves (one highlighted by Fiddler) is technological development. The standard beginning of the change is taken to be the adoption of the Koenig press by The Times in 1814. This steam-driven machine enabled more copies to be produced by fewer personnel, thus improving productivity and efficiency. Nine hundred sheets printed on both sides of paper in just one hour was a 400% increase on the iron handpress. While it is possible to find isolated examples of the use of steam printing earlier than the 1840s such as at The Times, or (as Aileen Fyfe details), at Chambers’s Edinburgh Magazine, it was only in that decade that the technology became truly mainstream, and then mainly for newspapers and magazines.

There were several other less mythologised technological developments that were equally important. Up to the nineteenth century, paper had been made by hand, limiting both how much could be made and how big a sheet could be. In 1807, Foudrinier machines revolutionised paper making by enabling it to be made in huge quantities and in huge rolls that could be cut to whatever size was required.

A third key technology was stereotyping. The process comprised making a plaster of Paris mould of an entire page of type (which could include an engraving – enabling publications like the ILN, illustrated fiction weeklies, and visually attractive adverts) and then casting metal plates from that mould. The metal plates would then be melted down and used for the next set of pages. Stereotyping thus enabled the same pages to be printed simultaneously and cheaply on different printing presses – including steam-driven ones – so that thousands rather than hundreds of copies could be printed per hour.

While there were certainly other important new technologies involved in printing over the nineteenth century (notably lithography, colour printing methods, typesetting, and linotype), it was the combination of these three that enabled the huge increase in printing over the first half of the century. Just like all new technologies, though, their adoption was neither universal nor sudden: they only gradually became mainstream. Since books had (and still have) slower production and sales cycles, it was only from the 1860s onwards that it became common to invest in steam technologies to print them. By the 1890s, Cooper took it for granted that ‘a single machine [would] print between twenty and thirty thousand copies [of a newspaper] an hour’ (Cooper 1896, 3) and books had caught up.

These new technologies created new jobs and defined new and more rapid working and consumption rhythms. They thereby altered the very experience of time, as we see in the quotation from Cooper. In addition to printing methods, he also mentions the ‘electric telegraph’ which became widespread in Britain from the 1840s. In the 1850s Britain was connected to continental Europe, enabling the near instantaneous transmission of news; in 1866, the first successful transatlantic submarine line was laid, connecting Britain and America. Such was the plethora of information that in the 1860s specialist agencies arose to select it, transform into news, and pass it on to newspapers: Reuters (1865–) is only the most famous of many. By the time Cooper was writing, the wireless and telephone had already been invented, though they were not yet mainstream, but even so he was only repeating a commonplace that ‘Australia is as near to us’ as 50 years previously ‘London was to Birmingham’ (Cooper 1896, 3).

Distribution

Technology is just one aspect of any mediamorphosis. Distribution (which also involves technology but of a different sort) had an equally huge effect on print media. In the early nineteenth century, newspapers, periodicals, and books, as well as people, were carried across country by horse-driven vehicles. Cheap (often second-hand) items like almanacks and chapbooks were also hawked by itinerant vendors who travelled on foot. Both these distribution methods obviously limited the speed, the geographical range, and the quantity of print that could be delivered. All was to change with something else that Cooper noted: the railway.

Rail transport marked not only a shift in the speed and quantity of distribution but also in social organisation and identities. In the eighteenth century, there were of course bookshops, but these tended to be in cities and large towns simply because they contained populations with enough money to afford reading matter. Many, perhaps most, country dwellers – the majority of the population – relied on the pedlars for reading matter. The Liverpool-Manchester line, the first truly commercial railway line, opened in 1830 and over the next 30 years the rail network became both more extensive and intensive. Together with the steamship (used for longer journeys, such from Edinburgh to London or overseas), railways enabled the carriage of huge quantities of paper goods across the country at a regular rate so that by 1859 Dickens’s friend Wilkie Collins (1858) noted in a famous article on ‘The Unknown Public’ how he saw cheap magazines in shop windows everywhere he went.

Shops (even now in villages) began to sell not only more reading materials but also writing matter – new kinds of pens and writing paper, printed greetings cards, diaries, address books, lined notebooks, calling cards, even printed decorative items for the table and mantlepiece. While some was produced centrally for national and international distribution, a good deal was produced locally: the hand presses that the large printing firms had used before steam were gradually sold on to small businesses which used them to print and circulate ‘fancy goods’. Such firms would also generate much of the vast quantity of standardised yet customisable business forms, from ledgers, receipts, and ready-addressed postal wrappers and envelopes, to multi-colour and embossed advertising fliers.

The railways had huge effects on consumption. It was early noted that people got bored (or wanted to avoid social contact) on train journeys: what better activity to while away the time than reading? William Marshall opened the first station bookstall in 1841 but the most famous by far was W.H. Smith. Smith’s opened their first outlet at London’s Euston Station in 1848, and soon added hundreds of others all over England (John Menzies occupied Scottish stations). By the end of the century, veteran journalist George Augustus Sala would call railway books stalls ‘perhaps one of the most wonderful of the many marvels of up-to-date railway life’ (Sala 1894, 352).

Railway distribution also enabled the development of national chains of lending libraries, of which Mudie’s (established in 1842) was the most famous. Its basic subscription, costing a guinea a year, enabled subscribers to borrow one volume at a time. Although it had few branches, it sent books to subscribers both nationally and internationally. Mudie’s purchased vast quantities of books from publishers which in turn meant it could obtain huge discounts, leading to an economic symbiosis of publisher and distributor. To allow more than one reader to read the same text at once, Mudie’s preferred multi-volume formats, especially the ‘triple decker’ whose standard retail price was, at 31 shillings and sixpence, prohibitive for all but the very wealthy. The multi-volume format also encouraged subscription at the higher price of two guineas a year, since that enabled them to borrow four volumes at once. Since Mudie’s also had a strict policy on what it considered respectable, it had a huge effect on both the content and format of books until 1894 when, in conjunction with its rival Smith’s, it called for even bigger discounts from publishers.

A serious rival to Mudie’s arose in 1861: no less than W.H. Smith which opened its own lending library service through its railway bookstalls with terms almost identical to Mudie’s. Unlike its rival’s immense catalogue, it could offer only a small selection of borrowable books at any given store. But whereas a reader in the country might have to order from Mudie’s central depots in London or (later) Manchester and wait for the volume to arrive, Smith’s had hundreds of outlets that offered instant impulse reading. Another effect of the limited space at Smith’s bookstalls was that it preferred single volumes. These could either be bought for less than a tenth of the price of the three-volume version or, on proof of subscription, borrowed. While various octavo-sized single-volume ‘railway libraries’ had been started in the 1840s (the best known was Routledge’s), the advent of Smith’s lending system started a reduction in the time lag between the expensive three-volume versions for Mudie’s and the cheap single volume of the same text. The co-existence the two formats that we see until the 1890s is partly due to the different preferences of Mudie’s and Smith’s. In short, the railways not only altered distribution but also transformed and maintained publication modes and formats.

Access

Mediamorphosis involves identities, practices, and feelings. A satirical 1853 article describes not only a new kind of reader – a new identity – but also points out that these new readers had not yet trained themselves in the isolation required to become fully engaged in a book. The piece imagines a Mr James Johnson, a shopkeeper in Tottenham Court Road in London, picking up what seems a respectable book from a railway bookstall to read on the train – Tristram Shandy by an author with the very morally upright-sounding name of the Reverend Lawrence Sterne. Johnson gets into a carriage with two ladies concerned with fashion and their pets and two gentlemen discussing international relations. He tries to read.

Sterne – Nay, if you come to that, sir, have not the wisest of men in all ages, not excepting –
1st. Gentleman – Lord Palmerston and –
1st. Lady – Such a duck of a shawl that –
Sterne – Solomon himself –
2nd. Gentleman – Speaking of our foreign policy made this remark –

2nd. Lady – I always thought a Cashmere shawl, real Cashmere, mind you, looked better than anything. But, I forgot to tell you, you have not seen my little dogs, Fido and Dido?

Sterne – Have they not had their HOBBY-HORSES –
2nd. Lady – Positively the most sagacious animals –
1st. Lady – Indeed! You ought to give them every morning –

Sterne – Their running-horses – their coins and their cockle-shells, their drums and their trumpets, their fiddles, their pallets, – their maggots and their butterflies –

1st. Gentleman – And the balance of power becomes disarranged –
2nd. Gentleman – But so long as the Sultan –
Sterne – Rides his HOBBY-HORSE –

(Allen 1853, 485)

In the end poor Mr Johnson is so confused he puts down his book and goes to sleep.

The whole article suggests that there is a great deal more involved in the interaction of railways and print than a change in distribution methods or even format and new reading spaces. Mr Johnson has no idea that Tristram Shandy (1759–1767) might not be entirely respectable. He represents a whole new reading constituency that has good literacy skills in the sense of an ability to read, but without the considerable education that could contextualise what he is reading. He may be just a comic figure to the smugly educated readers of Ainsworth’s Magazine (1842–1854) where the article appeared, but his is an arresting example of the new identities, practices, and social organisation that the nineteenth-century mediamorphosis was creating.

Above all, Mr Johnson shows how distribution overlaps with changes in the access to print. Access involves several components. First of all, and peculiar to print as an optional purchasable commodity, is that consumers like Mr Johnson need to be taught how to consume it – how, in other words, to read. This is not the place to trace the development of Victorian schools and education: suffice it to note that literacy was much higher in the nineteenth century than is sometimes supposed. Even by 1850 literacy was around 60% and the 1870 and 1880 Education Acts boosted it by making attendance at school compulsory between the ages of five and ten. By the end of the century, literacy was close to 100%.

But access to print is not simply a question of knowing how to read. It also involves having the spare cash and time for reading matter. In the 1840s, there was a drop in prices for basic food and other items without a wage reduction, a situation which lasted until the 1890s. Then there was the increasing regulation of working hours through the several Factory Acts and a great deal of local and national legislation and custom concerning everything from shop opening times to the dinner hour. The millions of cash-strapped yet literate workers simply had more cash and time for non-essentials like books and magazines, and those two factors, in combination with others recorded here, contributed powerfully to the mediamorphosis.

Another, often forgotten, cause of increasing access was lighting (we see an overlap with technological changes here). While several forms of artificial illumination were available from well before the beginning of the century, they were either expensive or ineffective. Again in the 1840s, gas lighting began to be installed in middle-class homes; by the 1880s it was common in urban areas. Despite their many dangers (well-recognised at the time), gas lamps at least meant many more additional hours were available for reading at home. Electric lighting, although invented early in the nineteenth century and commercially manufactured from the 1880s, only became common in ordinary homes after World War I.

There was one more component to access related to lighting, one which, so Dickens wrote to Charles Knight in 1850 (Dickens 1850–1852/1965, vol. 3, 32–3), was a huge obstacle to the spread of reading: the Window Tax. First imposed in 1696, in 1851 it was removed: windows could now freely be put into dwellings to let in more daylight. Reading was suddenly more possible indoors with or without artificial lighting. Architecture, too, is a contributory factor to mediamorphosis.

Regulation

The Window Tax and legislation involving working hours clearly overlap with the final of the four elements I discuss here: regulation. There are two major components to regulation: legal (like the Window Tax and the Factory Acts) and, much less often discussed in this context, informal custom. It is the latter that I want to start with.

By ‘informal regulation’ I mean those rules, often but not always unarticulated in everyday life, that govern what we say and do. It covers a very great deal and can only be gestured to here, but not to mention it at all would be to misrepresent how mediamorphosis works. It covers assumptions about politics, economics, gender, class, race, sex, sexuality, age, dis/ability, and all the myriad markers of hierarchy we are familiar with. To varying degrees, they have received a huge amount of attention over the decades, even if they are not always regarded in relation to mediamorphosis. They do, however, have a profound effect on it. For example, in the 1840s female literacy rose considerably, partly because literacy amongst urban women servants became highly valued by mistresses and masters. While women were by no means barred from authorship, in the printing industry women were largely confined to sewing pages together or attaching covers on books – rebellion against these gender norms caused Emily Faithfull to set up the all-women Victoria Press in 1860.

We need to be alert to how regulation, whether informal or formal, might not only restrict freedoms: it can also maintain rights, create a happier workforce, and augment the industry. For example, print workers would charge a penny in the pound of ink for ‘chapel dues’ from the supplier when ink was bought by the master printer. There was also the tradition of the ‘wayzgoose’ or summer annual outing paid for by the owner of the printing works that workers would expect. These were often reported in the press. Anne Humpherys has explained in detail how the radical mass-market author and publisher G.W.M. Reynolds used his to establish his political and cultural credentials, thereby increasing his chances of wide distribution (Humpherys 2023).

Legal regulation of the media might be perceived as dry and specialised, but it is essential to understand mediamorphosis, which offers a wealth of human stories. By far the most discussed legal regulations of the press in the nineteenth century are the ‘Taxes on Knowledge’, an attempt by successive governments to keep print too expensive for the spread of seditious ideas. The most famous of them was the ‘Stamp Tax’ on newspapers. Inaugurated in 1712, it decreed that each full-sized copy of a newspaper sold had to be literally stamped at a cost of a penny. Furthermore, advertisements were taxed at a shilling each (meaning it was expensive for the unemployed to advertise their services), while paper itself was taxed differentially according to quality. In the wake of the French Revolution, the taxes were extended and in 1819, after the Peterloo Massacre, even cheap monthly periodicals containing only a modicum of news were also subject to them. The result was that publications without considerable resources and circulations (like many provincial papers) could not continue, while metropolitan dailies like The Times benefitted. From the 1830s, the taxes were slowly reduced and all were abolished by 1870. While this story has been presented as a heroic fight for freedom (a narrative promoting a particular version of masculinity – formal and informal regulation collide here, as so often), we can also see it as the triumph of Whig (liberal) ideas of social control over Tory: rather than restrict the market (as the Tories had done through the Corn Laws as well as the Taxes on Knowledge), Whigs thought that seditious print could be counteracted with civilising entertainment (as produced by, for example, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 1826–1848). It was the success of this strategy and what turned out to be the politically harmless rise of the mass market at mid-century that caused the eventual abolition of the taxes.

Early in the century, newspapers and periodicals were often economically subvented by politicians to support their political perspectives: while a change from reliance on subvention to income from sales was already taking place, the removal of the tax on advertising in 1853 enabled a shift to dependency on sales of advertising space. Higher circulations now meant higher prices for that space. The Mr Johnsons of Britain with spare cash for goods were targeted through increased readability and emotional engagement: the modern idea of the media being financed by selling audiences to advertisers (rather than by selling a media product like a book or periodical to a consumer) began to be established. By the 1880s, this led to a phenomenon named by Matthew Arnold in 1887 as the ‘New Journalism’. Exemplified by periodicals with sales of well over 500,000 each, such as Tit-Bits (1881–1984), Answers [to Correspondents on Every Subject Under the Sun] (1888–1955), and Pearson’s Magazine (1896–1939), and by newspapers like the Star (1888–1960) and the revamped Pall Mall Gazette (1865–1923), the New Journalism often prioritised emotion, desire, the rapid precis, and the personal over detailed and complex analysis. Connected to this new style of communication was the gradual widening of the franchise to more and more (male) householders. The politically powerful now needed to manage the media not just through subvention or restricting the market but through the careful management of image: hence the careful crafting of Queen Victoria as, in John Plunkett’s (2003) words, the ‘first media monarch’.

Many other legal regulations on printing remained – it is a myth that nineteenth-century print media came to operate in a really free market – but only four more will be discussed here: obscenity, libel, copyright, and ownership. Unlike the Taxes on Knowledge, none of them was intended to restrict growth: on the contrary, the latter two were intended to promote it, while the former two were designed to protect readers and members of the public represented in the media. In fact, all four contributed to press expansion, not least in the form of constantly updated legal guides for journalists, publishers, and lawyers, the reports of the many trials the legislation generated, and the ingenious when not hilarious ways the industry found to work around and with them.

Perhaps because it offers scandalous tales, the Obscene Publications Act of 1857, is popular amongst students for research topics. The most far-reaching test of this law was ‘The Queen v. Benjamin Hicklin’ (29 April 1868) which defined the concept of obscenity for the next century as the ‘tendency to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences’ – women and children are the examples of the vulnerably ‘open’. While obscenity cases offer amusing opportunities, far more important to nineteenth-century publishers and printers (and hence to the general mediamorphosis) were the other three. Even more than obscenity, libel, copyright, and its relation, media ownership, were just as ambiguous and kept changing throughout the century. They too offer entertaining cases to explore.

Libel, though originating as a concept in the Middle Ages, was newly defined as defamation through written words in 1812 when it was differentiated from slander (defamation by spoken words). It was refined in the courts many times over the course of the century and much debated in the press. By the 1860s it was being defined as ‘anything … which tends to bring another into hatred, ridicule, or contempt’ and, as with obscenity, the intensions of the producers or sellers were not deemed relevant. The Bookseller magazine (31 May 1862, p. 308) feared that the law was so nebulous that it was damaging the industry because, after a case in 1862, it seemed that negative reviews of books as well as personal attacks could be prosecuted. Indeed, there were many cases reported in the press where what might have been intended as simply witty remarks about an author or publisher were brought to court (or at least threatened with court action).

In 1881 the Newspaper Libel and Registration Act (refined by an 1888 Amendment) decided that behaviour and words at public meetings (even if presenting a negative image of the person involved) could be reported in newspapers if they were in the public interest. The redefinition of libel in relation to the ambiguous term ‘public interest’ was particularly salient to New Journalism. Since it thrived on the investigation of scandal, the risks for charges of libel increased. That is why a small network of newspaper proprietors played a central role in demanding and formulating the idea of ‘public interest’ in the 1888 Amendment. It was now possible to argue that what consumers were interested in (signalled by what they bought) was ‘in their interest’.

Nineteenth-century domestic copyright law, like the Taxes on Knowledge, had originated in the early eighteenth century. Before copyright, the ownership of a literary work lay in the physical manuscript: an author sold the thing to the printer, not the particular arrangement and selection of words. The printer, who had to belong to the Company of Stationers, was deemed responsible for its dissemination and so held accountable by the state. With the idea that it would encourage the production of literary work to rival that of European countries, the 1710 ‘Statute of [Queen] Anne’ (as it was often called in the nineteenth century) gave ownership of their printed works to any printer or author for 14 years (renewable for the author if they were still alive). In 1814 the term was extended to 28 years or the life of the author. Legislation in 1842 extended the terms of copyright to 42 years or seven years after the death of the author. While some authors kept their copyrights and paid outright for printing (‘copying’) their work, that was always a risk: sales might not be forthcoming and they would lose their investment. That is why most authors sold their copyrights to publishers for a lump sum which might vary from, in the case of novels, tens of pounds to (in the case of the few authors with proven huge sales) a couple of thousand. Publishers would then commission printers to manufacture a certain number of books whose copyright they had bought at a fixed rate before selling the material objects on to wholesalers, libraries like Mudie’s or Smith’s, or direct to the public. With luck they sold them all. In this understanding, publishers were intermediary speculators in a market with books as their stock offerings: they, rather than the printers, increasingly took on the investment risk over the century.

The 1842 law also clarified the copyright of publication in periodicals and newspapers with the result that the practice of journalism came to be differentiated between what ‘staffers’ wrote in return for a fixed salary and what was written by occasional contributors paid by the line or article. In the latter case, we know that friends of the editor would often be paid more – yet another case where formal and informal regulation and networks overlap.

Developments in international copyright contributed to shaping the mediamorphosis. Until Britain’s first international copyright treaty (with France in 1852), paying for a translation of a work that had already proved its popularity in its home country was often cheaper and safer for a publisher than speculating on new British authors (despite an 1838 Act that granted foreign authors the same rights as British authors – provided they resided in Britain). Conversely, however, overseas publishers (especially American publishers) would ‘pirate’ work published in Britain, which, if these works were re-imported into Britain (so easy given the transport improvements), meant loss of potential revenue for British publishers. To avoid this, more and more international copyright treaties were signed over the century, culminating in Britain becoming a signatory of the Berne Convention in 1887. This regulated copyright across most of the world (though not the USA until 1988), and meant, in effect, a sharing of risk across publishers in the countries involved.

As we have seen, regarding publishers as speculators raises issues of financial risk as well as ownership of a text. At the beginning of the century, publishers and printers were privately owned by individuals; by the end of the century, a large proportion comprised limited companies owned either by partners or a large number of shareholders. These later arrangements both shared risks across a larger number of people and, in the latter case, enabled the raising of additional capital as necessary, paving the way for the gigantic media conglomerates we have seen since the 1970s. The transformation of ownership patterns, which was fundamental to mediamorphosis (though often overlooked), was enabled by several significant changes in the legal regulation of ownership, notably the Limited Liability Acts of 1857 and 1862.

Conclusion

The four elements of mediamorphosis I have sketched here could and should be extended to include others such as relevant historical events and relations with the wider entertainment industry.

Although I have focused on developments within print media, mediamorphosis takes place in a much wider historical context. There is a constant dialogue between the external world and media in terms both of representation (as in the article on ‘Railway Reading’) and, as in most of the present piece, of the industry. To focus on print alone also risks misunderstanding that intrinsic to the nineteenth-century mediamorphosis was print’s ever closer integration into the entertainment industry as a whole: novels and news were put on the stage, events (including publication itself) were organised and timed so as to maximise press coverage, art was used as advertisement and vice versa. The nineteenth-century mediamorphosis was essentially a move towards the multi-media composite text. Above all, though, the nineteenth-century mediamorphosis was an exuberant transformation from the individual to the masses, from the artisanal to the industrial, from the selling of products to the selling of audiences.

‘[T]here are at least a hundred workers employed on newspapers nowadays for one similarly employed fifty years ago’ wrote Cooper (Cooper 1896, 4). Was the old system better? Cooper replied with a clear no: journalism at the beginning of the mass market in the 1840s ‘could command thunderous sentences’ but not the ‘agility’ to ‘produce better work’ (Cooper 1896, 4–5). Whether we agree with him is yet another topic of research.

References

Allen, John Naule (1853) ‘Railway Reading. With a Few Hints to Travellers’, Ainsworth’s Magazine, 24: 483–487,

Collins, Wilkie (1858, 21 August) ‘The Unknown Public’, Household Words: 217–22.

Cooper, Charles A. (1896) An Editor’s Retrospect: Fifty Years of Newspaper Work, Macmillan & Co.

Dickens, Charles (1850–1852/1965) ‘Letter to Charles Knight (8 February 1850)’, in Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson and Nina Burgess (eds) The Letters of Charles Dickens Pilgrim edition, Vol. 3, Clarendon Press, pp. 32–3.

Fidler, Roger (1997) Mediamorphosis: Understanding New Media, Sage.

Fyfe, Aileen (2012) Steam-Powered Knowledge: William Chambers and the Business of Publishing 1820–1869, University of Chicago Press.

Humpherys, Anne (2023) ‘Dining with Reynolds: The Reports of Reynolds’s Annual Festival’, in Jennifer Conary and Mary L. Shannon (eds) G.W.M. Reynolds Reimagined: Studies in Authorship, Radicalism, and Genre, 1830–1870, Routledge, pp. 165–80.

Plunkett, John (2003) Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch, Oxford University Press.

Sala, George Augustus (1894) London Up to Date, A. and C. Black.