A Fleet Street In Every Town

Abstract

At the heart of Victorian culture was the local weekly newspaper. More popular than books, more widely read than the London papers, the local press was a national phenomenon. This book redraws the Victorian cultural map, shifting our focus away from one centre, London, and towards the many centres of the provinces. It offers a new paradigm in which place, and a sense of place, are vital to the histories of the newspaper, reading and publishing. Hobbs offers new perspectives on the nineteenth century from an enormous yet neglected body of literature: the hundreds of local newspapers published and read across England. He reveals the people, processes and networks behind the publishing, maintaining a unique focus on readers and what they did with the local paper as individuals, families and communities. Case studies and an unusual mix of quantitative and qualitative evidence show that the vast majority of readers preferred the local paper, because it was about them and the places they loved. A Fleet Street in Every Town positions the local paper at the centre of debates on Victorian newspapers, periodicals, reading and publishing. It reorientates our view of the Victorian press away from metropolitan high culture and parliamentary politics, and towards the places where most people lived, loved and read. This is an essential book for anybody interested in nineteenth-century print culture, journalism and reading.

A Dataset for Toponym Resolution in Nineteenth-Century English Newspapers

“…After the repeal on the 'taxes on knowledge' in the 1850s and 1860s, the provincial press proliferated; its readership expanded as did the number of titles, trumping the London-based press in size. Despite this plethora of available materials, to date historians have mostly favored the Metropolitan papers at the expense of the local press, which remains largely understudied (Beelen, Lawrence, Wilson, & Beavan, under submission;Hobbs, 2018). As shown in Lieberman, Samet, andSankaranarayanan (2010) andColl Ardanuy et al (2019), the distribution of places mentioned in newspapers varies considerably depending on their intended audience (grounded in a certain place and time), hindering the resolution of ambiguous place names.…”

Intersection Design to Prevent Congestion

“…This setting can reduce or eliminate conflict points at intersections by separating the movement of traffic flows at different times. Hobbs (1979) explains that the tabs of junction capacity in all conditions are impossible to implement and often the capacity at the track is more comprehensive than the capacity of the closed area. However, road meetings will largely secermine the limits of capacity and security of the entire track.…”

“…Transportation problem is one of the problems facing Makassar City. One of the important factors in the effort towards a good transportation infrastructure system is the ability of road performance, especially the performance of the intersection as one part of the road system as a whole [1]- [5]. Problems of congestion and queue in Makassar city generally occur at intersections (either signaled or unmarked intersections), especially in the area before or after the intersection [7].…”

The piston and the pen: poetry and the Victorian industrial worker

“…As distinct from the talk delivered as the Warton Lecture, I have chosen to focus the second half of this essay in-depth on two individuals discussed in that talk, rather than moving between a larger number of examples but with brief attention to each. My arguments throughout rest on the foundational scholarship on working-class poetic cultures produced by Martha Vicinus (1974), Brian Maidment (1987), Florence Boos (2008), Michael Sanders (2009) (co-investigator on this project), Andrew Hobbs (2012Hobbs ( , 2019, and others, and on the recent findings of related projects, such as Simon Rennie's 'The Poetry of the Cotton Famine'. 1 As these scholars have demonstrated, and as I argue myself elsewhere, working-class poets in Scotland and the North of England wrote poetry for many reasons.…”