Introduction

Serial publication was the engine that drove the generalized expansion of print through London and the nation during the long eighteenth century. This period saw the transition of the London print business from a small-scale workshop activity, supported by modest lines of distribution and catering to a coherent and identifiable audience, towards an industrialized system geared to a highly diversified and expanding market. Underlying the pattern of change in this as in most other forms of commercial activity was the general process of population increase. In London the population of just over half a million in 1695 remained fairly static until the middle of the next century. By 1801, the momentum of increase had pushed the population over one million, a number that more than doubled by 1841. The pattern of population increase in the nation at large followed a similar trajectory. Through the eighteenth century changes within the print business were organizational rather than technological and it was the serial that came to provide the main framework for the internal structure of the London trade. When the new commercial possibilities of the expanding market began to open up in the early nineteenth century, the impulse to mechanization and specialization was again focused in serial publication. The London print trade synchronized its response to changes in the market through this commercial device. That is not to say that the serial simply represented a response to economic circumstances, a means of adapting and responding to market forces; the serial also provided a medium through which many of the internal tensions in play in the London trade itself, as well as in the wider worlds of politics and commerce, could be expressed.