Provincial Newspaper Proprietors

Abstract

Surveying his life, Charles Knight recalled the anxiety of his seventeen-year-old self over his future career. The traditional professions—law, church, army and medicine—were closed to him because his father was unwilling to let him leave Windsor. Literature proved unappealing. Instead, Knight junior considered that provincial newspaper journalism was still a vocation. It might not be a profession but it required literary skills and offered locus standi, literally a place of standing, in essence to claim a public voice. It is perhaps unsurprising that by the time Knight wrote his memoirs in 1864 he considered some of the characteristics of journalism to be similar to those of a profession. Fundamental change had occurred across the press in the reduction of stamp duties in 1836 and their abolition in 1855 and in the adoption of new industrial technologies, principally steam printing and the railways. Coupled with seemingly epochal change in the form of the Reform Act of 1832, these changes were celebrated by contemporaries as heralding a new era of the press as the Fourth Estate. Yet the transition from trade to profession is disputed in timing and inchoate in character and process. Whereas Chapter 2 examined the emergence of the provincial press from the perspective of its national centralisation and representation, this chapter focuses on the newspaper proprietors themselves and changes to their working lives and modes of operation.

It became clear to me that, as the professions seemed to be shut out from my adoption by my father’s anxious desire that I should remain with him, my only way of escape from the petty cares of the trade of a country bookseller and small printer was to make literature, in some way or other, my vocation. It was not by writing commonplace essays and occasional odes and sonnets … that I was to carry out this purpose. If I were to accomplish anything, I must have a locus standi. There was my father’s printing-office; he was not without capital. Windsor, with its objects of interest, was without a newspaper. Some day, not very far off, should my ambition gain me the conduct of such a journal? I felt that the vocation of a journalist—even of a provincial journalist—required thought, energy, various knowledge.¹