The Manchester Observer: Biography of a Radical Newspaper
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i i i i The Manchester Observer: Biography of a Radical Newspaper ROBERT POOLE, UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL LANCASHIRE Abstract The newly digitised Manchester Observer (1818–22) was England’s leading rad- ical newspaper at the time of the Peterloo meeting of August 1819, in which it played a central role. For a time it enjoyed the highest circulation of any provincial newspaper, holding a position comparable to that of the Chartist Northern Star twenty years later and pioneering dual publication in Manchester and London. Its columns provide insights into Manchester’s notoriously secretive local government and policing and into the labour and radical movements of its turbulent times. Rich materials in the Home Oce papers in the National Archives reveal much about the relationship between radicals in London and in the provinces, and show how local magistrates conspired with government to hound the radical press in the north as prosecutions in London ran into trouble. This article also sheds new light on the founding of the Manchester Guardian, which endured as the Observer’s successor more by avoiding its disasters than by following its example. Despite the imprisonment of four of its main editors and proprietors the Manchester Observer battled on for ve years before sinking in calmer water for lack of news. Keywords: Peterloo; press; newspapers; radicalism; Manchester; Guardian London has been called the strong hold of the liberty of the press; but Manchester is assuredly the centre and strong hold of the Parliamentary Reformers. (Manchester Observer, 1 September 1821) Early in 2017 the John Rylands Library accepted into its collections two bound volumes: the only complete set of the Manchester Observer (1818–22), the radical predecessor of the more famous Manchester Guardian. Until the late 1950s they had been housed in the oce of the Guardian’s mid-twentieth-century editor A. P. Wadsworth. Not long before the paper’s move to London the two volumes were loaned out to Wadsworth’s neighbour in Didsbury, the young historian Donald Read, to assist with his 1958 history of Peterloo. On Read’s retirement they were passed to the present writer, and nally returned to sit alongside the A. P. Wadsworth Peterloo Collection in the Rylands.1 Use in the past has been inhibited by incomplete bound sets and poorly imaged microlms. Now high-quality digital images have been made of the whole set, and these are freely available as part of the library’s online Peterloo Collection, in a format that allows it to be not merely searched but read.2 Studies of the radical press and its culture have featured prominently in scholar- ship on romanticism and radicalism. These have focused mainly on London, whose ‘radical underworld’ has been extensively explored, assisted by the ready availability of editions of metropolitan periodicals.3 The later Chartist press also has a lively his- toriography, particularly the Leeds-based Northern Star.4 The Manchester Observer was the Northern Star’s Regency equivalent. E. P. Thompson described it as ‘easily the most impressive’ provincial radical periodical, with ‘a greater sense of the news Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, Volume 95, No. 1 (Spring 2019), pp. 31–123, published by Manchester University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/BJRL.95.1.3. This is an Open Access article published under the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by-nc-nd/4.0.Downloaded Funding from was manchesterhive.com provided by the University at 10/04/2021 of 04:29:20AM Central Lancashire. via free access i i i i i i i i 32 BULLETIN JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY of the movement than any competitor’.5 Donald Read noted that the Observer was ‘one of the leading radical organs’, unusual in being published in the provinces and in having a circulation in the thousands. He identied its reporting of Peterloo as an early example of national inuence exerted by the provincial press.6 Unlike other well-known titles like Cobbett’s Twopenny Trash and the Black Dwarf, which did not pay the newspaper tax and could therefore carry only commentary, the Manchester Observer was a full-price stamped and taxed newspaper carrying both local and national news. At its peak in 1819–20 it had the highest circulation of any provincial newspaper (4,000). It did not merely report but actively shaped the radical campaigns of these years, and indeed was the principal organiser of the ‘Peterloo’ meeting of 16 August 1819 and of the campaign for justice which followed. The Manchester Observer’s own columns provide much of the material for a history of the paper, supplemented by material in Manchester Central Library, Chetham’s Library, and in the Rylands. But the paper’s ability to provoke the authorities created a great deal of further correspondence in the Home Oce papers in the National Archives in Kew – much of it in uncatalogued cardboard boxes, subsequently mud- dled by a generation of social historians with an interest in public disorder. A recent project to begin re-imaging and cataloguing has proved helpful in identifying much of this scattered material.7 The Manchester police oce was probably the paper’s best customer, oen buying multiple copies in search of incriminating material and stamp duty evasion. From all these materials it is possible to write the history of Regency England’s most successful, and most persecuted, radical newspaper. For nearly ve years, with occasional interruptions, the Manchester Observer was a noisy radical voice in a commercial-industrial town dominated by a high Tory regime ruling through an antiquated jumble of parish and manorial institutions. It was regarded by the authorities as ‘the Ocial Journal of the Radicals’ and treated accordingly.8 Founded in January 1818, as the repressive government measures of 1817 were lied, the Manchester Observer reported on the reviving campaign for parliamentary reform, the regional strike wave in the summer of 1818, the popular reform movement of 1819 that culminated in Peterloo, the period of protest and repression that followed, the Queen Caroline agitation of 1820–21, and the prolonged campaign for an inquiry into Peterloo. Its contacts with both Henry Hunt and the London ultra-radicals helped to create a national movement committed to a ‘mass platform’ strategy of rallying an irresistible force of numbers behind a radical reform of Parliament. At the same time it reported with unmatched richness on the inner workings of Manchester’s secretive and corrupt local government. E. P. Thompson wrote in 1963 that ‘we can no more understand the signicance of Peterloo in terms of the local politics of Manchester than we can understand the strategic importance of Waterloo in terms of the eld and the orders of the day’.9 Nor, however, can we understand Peterloo without the Manchester dimension, particularly given the close collusion between the Manchester authorities and the Home Oce over many issues including the press. The Observer covered all the high-prole trials of the day and campaigned on behalf of political prisoners, at the same time ghting for its own survival through the courts as one editor and proprietor aer another faced prosecution, imprisonment Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 10/04/2021 04:29:20AM via free access i i i i i i i i THE MANCHESTER OBSERVER 33 and bankruptcy. The appearance of the Manchester Guardian in May 1821 helped to nish o the Manchester Observer as a local paper, yet it survived for a year longer by pioneering another strategy later followed by its younger rival: a move to a dual base in Manchester and London. The history of the Manchester Observer provides a vantage point for a Manchester-based history of the post-war mass platform radical movement and of the government’s campaign against the radical press. It is also a way into the murky inner history of Regency Manchester.10 Aer a rst section assessing the place of the Manchester Observer in the publishing world of Regency England, sections two to six each cover one of the Manchester Observer’s ve principal editor/proprietors: the founder Mark Wardle (January 1818–January 1819); the businessman Thomas Chapman (January–May 1819); the radical bookseller James Wroe, who led the paper at its peak in the Peterloo period (May 1819–January 1820); the former Spencean revolutionary Thomas Evans of London (January 1820–March 1821), continued for a further three months by his colleague on the Metropolitan Relief Committee, G. W. Service; and last of all John Thacker Saxton who, aer a hiatus and in association with the battle-hardened London publisher T. J. Wooler, kept the paper alive until its improbable death by natural causes in September 1822. A seventh section discusses the founding of the Manchester Guardian, in some respects the Observer’s successor, and the way in which the character of the Guardian was formed by the experience of the Observer. The conclusion focuses on the relationships between the Manchester Observer and the radical movement, between London and Manchester, and between the law and the press. 1. Introduction: The Radical Press in Regency England An early issue of the Manchester Observer reprinted an article by the London writer and reformer Sir Richard Philips, about a ‘mighty engine’: the newspaper press.11 There were at this time altogether 423 newspapers in Britain with a total weekly circulation of half a million: around 1,200 per copy on average, with the typical weekly local paper getting by on fewer than a thousand. Newspapers were still a cra production, their printing done sheet by sheet on manual, iron-framed presses costing only £10–15 and capable of turning out, at most, 200 copies an hour.