Provincial periodicals

Abstract

From the 1830s to the 1890s the majority of English periodicals and newspapers was published outside London. Although sales figures for individual titles may have been lower than their London counterparts, from the early 1860s until the 1930s, the total sales of provincial publications were greater than those of London periodicals. When this less London-centric, more dispersed nineteenth-century media geography is acknowledged, it changes many aspects of current scholarship, not least the implicit cultural hierarchy that privileges a metropolitan minority over a provincial majority. We need to appreciate how provincial periodicals were qualitatively different in form and content from their metropolitan rivals: they catered to distinctive and complex local markets; they represented places and people known personally to most readers, consciously appealing to readers’ sense of place and local identities, and when they remediated and republished content from elsewhere it was selected on distinctively local criteria.