Abstract
Review of Andrew Hobbs, A Fleet Street in Every Town: The Provincial Press in England, 1855-1900.
Highlights
Any study tracing nineteenth-century reception histories must find a way to avoid two problems
ISSN: 2632-4253 economics of the provincial press, and considering instead what an analysis of ‘real’ readers can reveal about networked reading communities and “the national structure of the local press” (9). This approach does lead Hobbs to conclude that the local paper had “a greater influence on Victorian culture than any other type of print” (4), and unequivocally discredits the long-standing hierarchy of form that has prioritised a study of the London papers, based on the anachronous conflation of the “national press” with the “metropolitan press” (385)
Even when testimonies are scarce, Hobbs’s diagram (63) – which subdivides readers according to the proximity of their relationship to the local paper, thereby distinguishing “the majority of readers” from “active readers” and journalists – is useful, offering a means of acknowledging the heterogeneity of newspaper readers and nuancing the idea of an ‘imagined community’ even when individuals are unknown
Summary
Any study tracing nineteenth-century reception histories must find a way to avoid two problems. ISSN: 2632-4253 (online) economics of the provincial press, and considering instead what an analysis of ‘real’ readers can reveal about networked reading communities and “the national structure of the local press” (9).
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