It would be very strange indeed if a volume on the British and Irish press in the nineteenth century did not contain a chapter on the political press. Our image of the nineteenth-century press has politics at its very centre (Hilton 2006; Hoppen 1998; Searle 2004). The nineteenth century has often been presented either as the golden age of the serious political press, or as a politics-obsessed era rightly superseded by the twentieth-century media's discovery of human life in the round. Despite, or perhaps because of, the prevalence of this view of nineteenth-century newspapers, recent years have not seen an outpouring of work on the political press. Indeed, much of the scaffolding of our present understanding dates back decades.

Much of the most stimulating writing about the political press has appeared as part of the flowering of political culture as a subject, evident particularly in studies of popular politics with a strong sense of place, along with accounts more concerned to trace the emergence of subjectivities and the nature of governmentality. The growth of digitisation has created new possibilities for the investigation of content at scale, enabling us to trace changing patterns of partisanship, ideology and language use across large numbers of periodicals. It is, therefore, timely to look again at the political press in Britain and Ireland in the nineteenth century.

Historians of the political press owe a considerable debt to Stephen Koss's epic and pioneering two-volume account of The Rise and Fall of the Political Press (Koss 1981, 1984, 1990). Dealing with both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries and rooted in prodigious archival labour, it remains an indispensable starting point and has proven deeply influential. It is, though, now almost forty years since its publication, while the underpinning research and methodology reflect the concerns of a decade earlier. Koss's meticulous quarrying of personal correspondence between editors and politicians was an analogue in media history to the ‘high politics’ research current in the 1970s. It is the world of London clubland evenings and country house weekends – a world of intimate, often intense relationships between pressmen and politicians – that Koss evoked. The result of this approach, as is apparent from a comparison with Alan Lee's more regionally oriented portrait of The Origins of the Popular Press in England, is a concentration upon Westminster politics (Lee 1976).