Short-lived newspapers: reassessing success and failure in the nineteenth-century press

This collaborative PhD project aims to reassess what we understand as success and failure with regard to the nineteenth-century press, arguing that short-lived newspapers represent an important and critically overlooked sector. Newspapers were just one part of a rapidly expanding publishing industry, driven by new markets, developing technology and an evolving industrial economy and society. The orthodox view of the nineteenth-century press is too readily 'determined by what the newspaper became' in the twentieth. In other words, 'success' is associated primarily with the long-running, London-centred mass daily media, supplemented by local papers, most of which were launched in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Recent work has begun to challenge this orthodoxy. George Brock, writing of the evolution of journalism as an endeavour subject to political, societal and legal developments, opines that 'periods of stability are the exception and not the rule.' This thesis will argue that the nineteenth century was characterised by fundamental instability which was reflected in its restless, constantly evolving print media; a business in which newspapers appeared, adapted, merged and disappeared in often bewildering numbers. Dismissing such a large proportion of this cultural phenomenon as a failure simplistically, on the sole basis of a short life in print, places historical scholarship in danger of misrepresenting the complexity of the newspaper press as experienced by the nineteenth-century reader. It is the aim of this project to seek to redress the balance by arguing for the place of short-lived papers in our understanding of the press.