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Advertising and the Press in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: James Perry and the Morning Chronicle 1790–1821

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Ivon Asquith
Ivon Asquith
Affiliation:
University College, London
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Extract

The thirty years during which James Perry owned and edited the Morning Chronicle, the leading Whig daily newspaper, were marked by important developments in the history of the press. In the early nineteenth century there was a notable growth in the spirit of political independence among newspaper proprietors, and they developed the classical liberal roles of the press: die impartial dissemination of news and the expression of public opinion. Professional editors and reporters came to replace the old all-rounders like William Woodfall who had combined the tasks of printing, editing and reporting; and individual proprietors supplanted the unenterprising ownership of syndicates. There was a rapid expansion in the number of daily evening and of Sunday papers and, though the number of daily morning papers remained fairly stable, dieir circulation increased steadily after about 1800. A well-conducted newspaper could serve, not simply as a side-product of a printer's or bookseller's business, or as an advertising medium for its proprietors' interests, but as a lucrative business venture in its own right. There was an extraordinary rise in the capital value of successful newspapers: the Morning Chronicle and the Morning Post, which were bought for a few hundred pounds each in die 1790s, were sold for £42,000 and £25,000 respectively in the early nineteenth century. Despite the heavy weight of taxation, which was successfully designed to restrict the sale of newspapers, proprietors were able to prosper thanks to die increasing profits diey made on advertisements. It has now been possible to calculate, from the ledgers of die Public Advertiser and Gazetteer, and from the office copies of the Morning Chronicle, some part of a newspaper's profits from advertising in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

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Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 18 , Issue 4 , December 1975 , pp. 703 - 724
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1975

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References

1 For an introductory survey of these developments, and of Perry's career, see Ian Christie, R., Myth and Reality in Late-Eighteenth-Century British Politics and other Papers (1970), pp. 311–58. For a more detailed study, see Ivon Asquith, ‘James Perry and the Morning Chronicle 1790–1821’, University of London Ph.D. thesis (1973). I am indebted to Professor Christie for suggesting Perry's career as a subject for research.Google Scholar

2 Perry to William Adam, 8 June 1792, Blair-Adam MSS, Blair-Adam, Kinross-shirc.

3 Morning Chronicle, 22 Mar. 1794; Oracle and Public Advertiser, 21 Apr. 1794. For the breakdown of costs see Appendix A.

4 [Morison, S.], History of The Times (1935), 1, 39–41.Google Scholar

5 Bentham MSS, University College London, box cvii/a, fo. 27, n.d. [c. 1794].

6 Morning Chronicle, 26 Apr. 1797.

7 Ibid. 3 Sept. 1807.

8 Ibid. 20 May 1809. Statutory authority was necessary if the newspapers were to retain the 16 per cent discount on stamps purchased in bulk, which they had been allowed in 1797 provided they did not raise their price above 6d.

9 Morning Post, 20 May 1809; British Press, 22 May 1809.

10 Howe, Ellic (ed.), The London Compositor (1947), p. 374.Google Scholar

11 Morning Chronicle, 8 June 1815; Aspinall, A., Politics and the Press c. 1780–1850 (1949), p. 126. Perry's claim that he would have to raise the price to is. was an exaggeration, because with a sale of only 1,500 this would yield an additional £206 5s. per week, which approximates to the average weekly profit from advertisements of £200.Google Scholar

12 Morning Herald, 3 June 1815; Morning Chronicle, 13 June 1797.

13 Howe, , The London Compositor, p. 374Google Scholar; £Aspinall, , Politics and the Press, p. 295, n. 10.Google Scholar

14 The sale of 4,000 copies per day, each at 1/2d. profit, would yield £50 per week.

15 Grant, James, The Newspaper Press (2 vols., 1871), 1, 279.Google Scholar

16 This did not apply to weekly newspapers, which as vehicles of entertainment or discussion, rather than news, were cheaper to produce. The Examiner made a profit in 1820 of £886 2s. 51/2d., of which only one-fifth, £179 os. 6d., came from advertisements (British Museum Add.MSS 38,108, fo. 203).

17 For the number, gross receipts and profits of advertisements, see Appendix B (1). The office copies of the Morning Chronicle, in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, have rhe charge written on each advertisement. On the second, or occasionally the back page of each issue, is written the total number of advertisements and the total charge for them. Unfortunately the series of annotated copies is not complete, but there is no blank period after 1798 longer than two and a half years, so it has been possible to obtain an overall impression of the growth in receipts. There are occasional minor discrepancies of not more than a few shillings between an addition of the charges written on the advertisements and the sum written in the margin. Where the occasional issue is missing, the number and receipts have been averaged. It is possible that the total advertising revenue was greater than that indicated by the office copies. Perry had two bank accounts in 1806, with Ransom, Morland of Pall Mall, one of which, held jointly with his co-proprietor Robert Spankie, may have been for advertising income. Almost £14,150 was credited to the account in 1806, which is nearly £2,000 more than the gross receipts from advertisements. Of this, £4,968 was debited in twelve monthly instalments to a Mr Harris, which approximates to the amount of advertisement duty paid in that year. It is possible that some puffs and articles were paid for without the charge being written on the office copies (Barclays Bank Archives, Lombard Street, A6/14, pp. 1, 896–8).

18 Christie, , Myth and Reality, pp. 319–23, p–31.Google Scholar

19 Stuart, to Mackintosh, James, 30 May 1807, BMAdd.MSS 52,451, fos. 178–9.Google Scholar

20 Grant, James, The Great Metropolis (2 vols., 1836), 11, 91–2Google Scholar; Christie, , op. cit. pp. 320–21.Google Scholar

21 See Appendices B (2) and (3). There do not appear to be any detailed earlier records of newspapers' advertising revenue, and there is only one paragraph on advertising receipts in Walker, R. B. ‘Advertising in London Newspapers, 1650–1750’, Business History, xv, 2 (07 1973), p. 130.Google Scholar

22 Cf. Rea, Robert R., The English Press in Politics 1760–1774 (Lincoln, Nebraska 1963), p. 176Google Scholar; Dilke's claim that the Public Advertiser's sale rose by 60 per cent from 1765 to 1768, and by only 12 per cent during the appearance of Junius's Letters, is very misleading, since his figures are based only on the sale for the first and last month in each period, and not on the average daily sale throughout the year (Dilke, Charles Wentworth, The Papers of a Critic (2 vols., 1875), 11, 28–9).Google Scholar

23 Cases when the profits for the second half of a year are lower than for the first half of a preceding year do not of course reflect a decline, on account of the parliamentary session in the first half of a year, when circulation and advertising custom were at their highest.

24 E.g. the profit in February 1809 was £330, compared to profits of over £660 in April, May and June.

25 Hunt, to Brougham, Henry, 16 July [1816], Creevey MSS (microfilm), University College London.Google Scholar

26 It was argued in the mid-nineteenth century that it was better to insert miscellaneous advertisements in class journals with a small circulation, and ‘looked-for’ advertisements in general papers, but the lack of class or trade papers in Perry's lifetime meant that both general and classified advertisements were inserted in papers with the largest sale (An Advertiser, A Guide to Advertisers (1851), pp. 8–10).

27 The profit for January, April, May and June in 1795 was, ’1,591 19s. For the same months in 1798 it was only £1,433 Ios SM in 1799 £1,502 2s.; and in 1800 £1,533 5s. 6d.

28 The gross duty paid in 1795 was £36,283 16s., and in 1798 £32,286 12s. (Aspinall, , ‘Statistical Accounts of London Newspapers in the Eighteenth Century’, English Historical Review, LXIII (04. 1948), 208).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 Asquith, , James Perry and the Morning Chronicle, pp. 118–19.Google Scholar

30 The gross produce of advertisement duty paid by London newspapers in 1821 was, £59,892 3s. 6d., whereas in 1820 it had been, £61,779 IIS., and in 1819, £60,097 16s. (Aspinall, , ‘Statistical Accounts of the London Newspapers 1800–36’, E.H.R. LXV (04. 1950), 226).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31 E.g. in 1802 the average monthly profit for July–December was £442 2s. 6d., but the profit in July was, £746 17s.

32 When advertisement duty was doubled in 1757, there had been only ‘a slight, temporary decline in advertising’ (Aspinall, , E.H.R. LXIII (04. 1948), 204). When the duty was raised in 1789 the number of advertisements in the Gazetteer declined slightly, but profits actually rose, since charges were increased in excess of the additional duty.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33 Haig, Robert L., The Gazetteer 1735–97 (Carbondale, Illinois, 1960), p. 211.Google Scholar

34 Lane, George, ‘Newspapers’, Gentleman's Magazine (Sept. 1838), pp. 274–5.Google Scholar

35 Two hundred is George Lane's estimate (ibid. p. 276). In 1811 Coleridge expressed astonishment that the British Press found purchasers, ‘so utterly dry and worthless is it’ (ibid., June 1838, p. 587), but Scamp Office surveys showed that it shared a sale of 3,000 with the Globe in 1811, and 2,500 in 1821.

36 The Stamp Office figures for 1811 are in Haig, ‘Circulation of Some London Newspapers 1806–11: two documents’, Studies in Bibliography (Charlottesville), vii (1955), 190–94Google Scholar, and those for 1821 in Annual Register, LXIV (1822), 351.Google Scholar

37 Morning Chronicle, 27 Feb. 1792, 13 June 1806, 16 June 1817, 28 Apr. 1820. It was not July 1822 that a successful free supplement composed wholly of advertisements was produced The Times (History of The Times, 1, 324–5).Google Scholar

38 Morning Chronicle, 22 Mar. 1794. However it was not until 20 January 1800 that Perry he was widening the Chronicle's columns not only to include debates, but specifically ‘to accommodate our Advertising Friends’.

39 Ibid., 22 Jan. 1810. The volume of advertising was not sufficient to enable the Chronicle always to be published at its new size; it reverted to its old size 105 times in 1810 and 81 times in 1811, but only 3 times in 1812. The smaller issues usually occurred during the recess.

40 Parliamentary Debates, xiv, 27 04. 1809, col. 267.Google Scholar

41 History of The Times, 1, 414. Its columns had already been lengthened in 1812, and widened in 1813.Google Scholar

42 Contrary to John Trusler's view in 1790 that newspaper proprietors charged 6s. for the first 18 lines, and then only id. for each further line (London Adviser and Guide (2nd ed., 1790), p. 137).

43 Morning Chronicle, 28 Apr. 1797. Proposals for a graduated advertisement duty were again successfully resisted by newspaper proprietors in 1815. Perry was exaggerating in putting 2s. as a high average profit; as has been seen in 1800 the average profit on each advertisement was 3s. 3s£d. The extent to which taxation encouraged long advertisements is illustrated by an estimate in 1824 that if the duty were halved, advertisements ‘exceeding twenty lines, might not much increase in number; but short ones, from five to ten lines, would increase at least three times’ (The Periodical Press (1824), pp. 57–8).

44 Stuart, Daniel, ‘Anecdotes of Public Newspapers’, Gentleman's Magazine (July 1838), pp. 25–6Google Scholar; Hindle, W., The Morning Post 1772–1937 (1937), p. 83.Google Scholar

45 E.g. the number of advertisements increased by nearly 50 per cent from 1798 (22,869) to 1806 (33,428), whereas the amount of the paper filled with advertisements increased from 50 per cent in 1798 to only 53 per cent in 1807. John Walter the elder also appears to have preferred small advertisements, for he charged '‘a small matter more than our contemporaries’ for long ones (History of The Times, 1, 44).Google Scholar

46 However Perry said that with all respectable newspapers ‘there is a regular charge according to the length of advertisements’ (Morning Chronicle, 8 June 1815), and it would seem that some attempts were made to base the charge on the exact number of lines, for occasionally the number is written on the margin of the office copies. It is possible that, as Sir Matthew Ridley complained, advertisements were charged more for speedy insertion, but this cannot be verified(Part.Debs., xxi, 7 June 1815, col. 663).

47 Ibid. It is surprising that the Whigs should have wondered at the cheapness of political advertising in 1809 (Aspinall, , Politics and the Press, p. 284, n. 1).Google Scholar

48 Some newspaper proprietors evidently gave concessions to regular advertisers, for the proprietors of the General Evening Post resolved in 1783 that in view of rising costs ‘for the future all Persons advertising in the General E. Post be put on an equal footing’ (8 Jan. 1783, BMFACS 761 (unfol.)). The proprietors of an Amsterdam thrice-weekly paper in the late 1730s, the Oprechte Haarlemse Courant, did not always base their charges on the length of an advertisement, and did not give discounts to frequent advertisers (Couvée, D. H., ‘The Administration of the “Oprechte Haarlemse Courant”1738–42’, Gazette. International Journal of the Science of the Press, iv (1958), 102–3).Google Scholar

49 John Bell reduced charges when the circulation of the Universal Advertiser declined as a result of its liability to stamp duty, but without success (Prince, Peter, ‘John Bell and the Universal Advertiser’, Business History, x 2 (07 1969), 95).Google Scholar

50 There were a few short-lived ventures such as Cobbett's Porcupine (1800–1), Fenwick's, John Plough (1801)Google Scholar, Holt's, T. Morning Star (1805–6Google Scholar), and the Aurora (1807?). The Aurora was founded as an advertising medium by West End hotel keepers, but it soon failed (Jerdan, William, Autobiography (4 vols., 1852–3Google Scholar), 1, 83, 86, 89–90; Lennox, Lord William Pitt, Celebrities I have known (4 vols., 1877)Google Scholar, 2nd series, II, 7–8; Redding, Cyrus, Fifty Years' Recollections (3 vols., 1858), 1, 97).Google Scholar

51 Bentham, to Bentham, Jeremiah, 10 Apr. 1789, BM Add.MSS 33,541, fo. 45. The evening papers were the Star (3 May 1788), Courier (22 Sept. 1792), Sun (1 Oct. 1792), Traveller (1801), Globe (1 Jan. 1803), Statesman (Feb. 1806), Pilot (1 Jan. 1807) and Alfred (17 Apr. 1810).Google Scholar

52 Heriot, to Stephens, Philip 26 Sept. 1792Google Scholar, P.R.O. Admiralty MSS 1/5120; Haig, , The Gazetteer, p. 315, n. 21.Google Scholar

53 For the number of government advertisements in the Chronicle, see Appendix C. There were minor cases of government discrimination against Cobbett's Porcupine in 1801, by the Post Office, and against The Times in 1805, by the Custom House (Aspinall, , Politics and the Press, pp. 127–8)Google Scholar. Cobbett's claim in 1801 that the secretary of the Post Office's discrimination ‘creates, as it ever must do, a strong temptation in every news-printer to truckle to his will’ might have been true with a struggling paper like the Porcupine, but not with an established paper like the Chronicle (Melville, Lewis, Life and Letters of William Cobbett (2 vols., 1913), I, 128).Google Scholar

54 Lovell, to Whitbread, Samuel, 28 Mar. 1808, Whitbread MSS, Bedfordshire Record Office.Google Scholar

55 Morning Chronicle, 3 May 1792. Descriptions of advertisements may be found in Sampson, Henry, History of Advertising from the Earliest Times (1873)Google Scholar; Elliott, B. B., A History of English Advertising (1962)Google Scholar; two articles by Romer, Carrol, ‘Eighteenth Century Advertisements’, Nineteenth Century and After, LVI (07 1929)Google Scholar, which examines mid-eighteenth century advertising, and ‘Some Old Advertisements’, ibid, ci (Jan. 1927), which examines advertisements in 1820; Turner, E. S., The Shocking history of Advertising (1952)Google Scholar; the article on advertisements in the Quarterly Review, xcvii (06 1855), 183–225Google Scholar, omits late eighteenth-century advertisements as too similar to the nineteenth century. This similarity is evident in the descriptions of advertisements in the 1840s in Weir, W., ‘Advertisements’, in London (ed. Charles Knight) (1843), vol. v, 33–48Google Scholar; and in ‘The Advertising System’, Edinburgh Review, LXXVII (1843), 1–43.Google Scholar

56 ‘The Periodical Press’, Edinburgh Review, xxxviii (05 1823), 361.Google Scholar

57 Gentleman's Magazine (July 1838), pp. 25–6.

58 ‘Art of Advertising’, The Idler, no. 40 (20 Jan. 1759), pp. 224–9. But in the 1760s advertisements ‘of an indelicate or immoral tendency’ had been excluded from the Public Ledger (Elliott, , History of English Advertising, p. 108).Google Scholar

59 Collins, A. S., ‘The Growth of the Reading Public during the Eighteenth Century’, Review of English Studies, II (Oct. 1926), 430–32.Google Scholar

60 The Senator; or, Clarendon's Parliamentary Chronicle, v 691, 760, 820.Google Scholar

61 Melville, , Life and Letters of William Cobbett, 1, 124. It was argued in the 1820s that a good reason for reducing the stamp and advertisement duties was to free newspapers from financial dependence on the notices of quacks and frauds, so that they would then be able to criticize such trickery (The Periodical Press (1824), pp. 60–64).Google Scholar

62 Milton, to Fitzwilliam, , 25 Dec. 1818, Fitzwilliam MSS, Northamptonshire Record Office, box 94.Google Scholar

63 Morning Chronicle, 18 Mar. 1791.

64 Ibid. 15 Sept. 1794; History of The Times, 1, 35. The outer forme went to press early so that there would be time to compose and print the inner forme, containing the latest news, in duplicate.Google Scholar

65 Morning Chronicle, 10 Nov. 1807; The Times charged full prices in 1807 (History of The Times, 1, 93–4).Google Scholar

66 perry, to Sheridan, T., 30 Apr. 1808, BM Add.MSS 42,720, fo. 121.Google Scholar

67 Morning Chronicle, 27 Feb. 1792.

68 Ibid. 18 Apr. 1794.

69 Ibid. 18 May 1797, after 10 columns of debates on 16 and 17 May.

70 Ponsonby, to Grey, , 23 Oct. 1808, Grey MSS, Durham University; Grey to Lady Holland, 21, 25 Feb. 1816, BM Add.MSS 51,553, fos. 35, 37; Lady Holland to Francis Homer, 25 Jan. 1817, BM Add.MSS 51,644, fo. 116. (Holland House papers have provisional folio numbers.)Google Scholar

71 The proportion given to advertisements in 1798 was 50 per cent; in 1807 slightly higher at 53 per cent because of the general election; in 1808, when Ponsonby criticized Perry, 505 per cent; and in 1816, when criticism became general, 50 per cent. The proportion was slightly higher during the parliamentary session, as in 1816 when it was 55 per cent, but this was little more than the proportion during the session of 1792–3, 5·25 per cent.

72 ’[Underhill, Thomas], Triennial Directory 1817–1819.Google Scholar

73 Taylor, John, Records of My Life (2 vols., 1832), 1, 241Google Scholar; MS note, in an unidentified hand, in an 1816 edition of Holcroft's, Thomas Memoirs, p. 300, in the Mitchell Library, Glasgow.Google Scholar

74 Aspinall, Politics and the Press, ch. xvi.