Page 231 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 221
order. Governments largely abandoned attempts to regulate the radical press
through seditious libel law by the mid 1830s because they found that libel
prosecutions were often counter-productive. They relied instead upon the so-
called security system (requiring publishers to place financial bonds with the
authorities) in an attempt to exclude ‘pauper’ ownership of the press, and press
taxes designed to price papers beyond the pockets of working-class consumers.
The objectives of these fiscal controls were frustrated, however, by determined
resistance. During the early 1830s, radical publishers successfully evaded both
the security system and press taxes. This was followed in the next two decades
by the organized pooling of financial resources by working people in order to
launch and also to purchase newspapers which the authorities sought to exclude
from them. People clubbed together on an ad hoc basis to buy newspapers,
exerted pressure on taverns to purchase radical papers, and bought left papers
through branches of political and industrial organizations. As a result of this
collective action, leading radical newspapers gained circulations far larger than
those of their respectable rivals throughout most of the period 1815–55.
The expansion of this radical press played an important part in the cultural
reorganization and political mobilization of the working class during the first
half of the nineteenth century. Radical newspapers linked together different
elements of the working-class movement, fragmented by sectional affiliations
and local loyalties. They extended the field of social vision by showing the
identity of interest of working people as a class in their selection of news and
analysis of events. By stressing that the wealth of the community was created by
the working class, they also provided a new way of understanding the world that
fostered class militancy. And by constant insistence that working people
possessed the potential power through ‘combination’ to change society, the
radical press contributed to a growth in class morale that was an essential
precondition of effective political action.
The radical press also directly aided the institutional development of the
working-class movement. Radical papers publicized the meetings and activities
of working-class political and industrial organizations; they conferred status
upon the activists of the working-class movement; and they gave a national
direction to working-class agitation, helping to transform community action into
national campaigns.
The Left press also helped to radicalize the working-class movement by
providing access to an increasingly radical analysis of society. Initially
its critique was limited since it was derived largely from middle-class attacks on
the aristocratic constitution and focused mainly upon corruption in high places
and regressive taxes. Conflict was defined in these early papers largely in terms
of an opposition between the aristocracy and the people (including working
capitalists). During the 1830s, however, the more militant papers shifted their
attack from ‘old corruption’ to the economic process that enabled the capitalist
class to appropriate in profits the wealth created by labour. Their principal
targets became not merely the aristocracy but the capitalist class as a whole, and