Introduction

The Sunday newspaper is an often-neglected component of the twentieth-century news media landscape, despite the fact that it enjoyed the greatest circulation success. Indeed, the popularity and profitability of Sunday papers grew to make them flagships of cultural and commercial trends and an essential complement to most national daily productions. This chapter will consider the ways in which this success drew on perspectives of social class and political stratification already established among British and Irish newspaper reading publics.

General Overview

Let us begin by outlining the traditions of Sunday newspapers. From their emergence at the end of the eighteenth century, they had always had to distinguish themselves from their daily rivals and none had a direct daily relation until well into the twentieth century. This had much to do with the rather disreputable nature of the Sunday press with its emphasis on sport, crime and sensation mixed with editorial opinions designed to appeal to a broader readership than the traditional daily press that prided itself on its appeal to a bourgeois clientele. As the nineteenth century progressed there was also more scope and time for the inclusion of illustration. In combination, this meant that the Sunday press developed along very different lines to daily newspapers. This distinctiveness could sometimes provide the financial success that allowed an owner to engage experimentally in the daily market, as was the case when Moses Levy used his Sunday Times as a financial lever to start up the Daily Telegraph from 1855 to oust The Times from its position as market leader.

So where was the Sunday press at the start of the twentieth century? Continuity came in the form of the Observer (1791), the Sunday Times (1822), the News of the World (1843), Reynolds's Weekly News (1850) and Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper (1842). A Sunday Daily Mail and a rival Sunday Daily Telegraph were introduced at the end of the nineteenth century but were forced out by sustained criticism from religious lobbies. Despite such a disappointing start for this new generation, the Sunday newspapers that continued successfully into the twentieth century bore all the hallmarks of this style of newspaper as it had peaked in the late nineteenth century.