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Print, Politics and the Provincial Press in Modern Britain, ed. Ian Cawood and Lisa Peters. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019; ix + 247 pp., ISBN 978-1-78874-430-0.
Does the subject of politics and provincial print culture warrant an entire book? Stephen Koss, one of the greatest historians of British politics and the press, thought not: 'The Manchester Guardian, for all its eloquence, spoke with a dialect (what better proves the point than its proscription of the word "provincial"?) and not with the imperial resonances of The Times'.1 For Koss, politics meant parliament and a handful of men in London.2 This edited collection, the first in the new series, 'Printing History and Culture'-published by Peter Lang Ltd in association with the Centre for Printing History and Culture-takes a much broader approach than Koss, covering all four nations, and including print beyond the newspaper, with Judith Davies's chapter on a pamphlet 'war' between Tories and Radicals in early nineteenth-century Dudley, and Paul Wilson's on the borrowers of an Esperanto dictionary from the library of Keighley in West Yorkshire (home of the UK's first Esperanto society). Another implicit definition that goes far beyond Koss's narrow view is the broad interpretation of politics, including local parliamentary electioneering but also encompassing the French Revolution, Irish resistance to British rule, the 1830s reform movement, Chartism and the hope for world peace through an international language.
The study of provincial print culture raises so many vital political questions: How do local and regional identities relate to class? While Patrick Joyce argues that such place-based identities were more important than class for most people, other scholars such as James Curran believe that newspapers, especially the new provincial dailies of the 1850s onwards, used them to hide class conflict.4 Whose interests are served by journalistic impartiality? A depolitidzed press was not necessarily politically neutral. However, such neutrality might ensure the personal safety of editors and owners, in small local worlds lacking the anonymity of London journalism. Upsetting powerful individuals or interests could lead to an editor being horse-whipped, shot at, thrown into a pond, or to a collapse in sales and the closure of the business. While 'newspapers were, in a sense, free publicity for a town's ruling classes', the study of historical readers such as...