Unlike the history of the book, where scholars have done a great deal of work uncovering and studying readers’ responses to texts (Towheed and Owens 2011a; Halsey and Owens 2011; Crone and Towheed 2011) the readership of newspapers in the UK has not been the focus of a similar level of scholarly attention. This chapter addresses this relative neglect by examining aspects of the relationship between newspapers and their readers in the UK during the twentieth century. It explores the ways in which the industry understood its readership and how readers responded to the newspapers they read. If we are to grasp the role newspapers played in the political, cultural and social history of the twentieth century, we need to pay far greater attention to their readers and how they related to and understood what they were reading. Section 1 sets some context for the issues discussed in the chapter; section 2 addresses patterns of circulation growth and decline. After outlining the effect of industry research on the content and appearance of newspapers, section 3 discuss the dominant demographic characteristics of readership. Section 4 focuses on what readers read in their newspapers and section 5 draws on evidence from immediately before and during the Second World War (1939–45) to examine readers’ engagement with newspapers in more depth.

Section 1: Context

Historians dealing with the press in the twentieth century have touched on the issues associated with readership, usually making extensive use of industry-generated data about the demographic characteristics of the people purchasing and reading newspapers (Jeffrey and McClelland 1987; Seymour-Ure 1991; Williams 2010; Curran and Seaton 2010). Ross McKibbin's study of classes and culture in England between 1918 and 1951 contains a compact summary of circulations and of regional, gender, age and class differences among readers, but like other work in the area, does not consider the response of readers (McKibbin 2000: 503–8). It is far simpler to discuss contemporary speculation about the impact of reading newspapers (Harrison 2011a: 28, 196) or statistics of the rise and fall of circulations (Harrison 2011b: 403–5) or to analyse the political content of newspapers (Thomas 2005), important as these are, than to explore in detail the responses of readers to newspapers across time.