Other people formed themselves into ‘newspaper societies’, in which people clubbed together to buy a regular paper: the Monthly Magazine in 1821 said there were ‘not less than 5,000’ groups of this sort, and thought that this might mean there were as many 50,000 families who had contact with a society.10 Other, more social, clubs started with similar aims: in Edinburgh, the ‘first thing that induced us to join in a society was the reading of…Spectators’, said one of the founders of the Easy Club.11 The simplest and the least restricting way to get the news was to go into a pub or a coffee house, where the paper could be read for the price of a cup of coffee and 1d. Most coffee houses had reading rooms, which could be joined for anything from 1s. a year upward, and they kept newspapers and books for their readers - by 1742 booksellers were already complaining about the ‘the scandalous and Low Custom that has lately prevail’d amongst those who keep Coffee houses, of buying one of any new Book…and lending it by Turns to such Gentlemen to read as frequent their Coffee house’. In 1773 Thomas Campbell went into the Chapter Coffee House because he heard it ‘was remarkable for a large collection of books, & a reading society…I…found all the new publications I sought, & I believe what I am told that all the new books are laid in.’ He later saw a whitesmith, or tin worker, ‘in his apron & [with] some of his saws under his arm, [who] came in, sat down and called for his glass of punch and the paper, both of which he used with as much ease as a Lord’.12 Pubs were equally welcoming, usually just hanging a sign ‘requesting gentlemen not to monopolise the current day’s paper’ for more than five minutes at a time.13
By this time, coffee houses were part of the landscape. The first coffee house in England may have appeared in Oxford, but the first of which we have any concrete information was in London. A merchant who had lived in Smyrna found, on his return in 1657, that
The Novelty of [the coffee his Greek servant made for him] drew so great Resort to his House, that he lost all the Fore-part of the Day by it; insomuch that he thought it expedient to rid himself of this Trouble, by allowing his Greek servant (in conjunction with his son-in-law’s Coachman) to make and sell it publically [sic]. They set up their Coffee-House in St Michael’s Alley in Cornhill, which was the first in London.14
They were on to a winning thing, for over the next five years another 83 coffee houses appeared; by 1801 there were 500 in London alone, and they had developed as places to drink coffee and meet friends, and, equally importantly, as places to conduct business.
Outside London, much social life was maintained in these coffee rooms: they were centres of information and news, and they served a wide range of readers, from the whitesmith to the idle dandy. By 1833 the Manchester Coffee and Newsroom took 96 papers a week, plus several periodicals and reviews; it cost 1d. to sit and read, 2d. with coffee thrown in. The Exchange Coffee House, also in Manchester, riposted with 130 papers a week, 186 on Saturdays, as well as a range of foreign papers.15 The upper classes had their own coffee houses, particularly in the spa and resort towns. In 1739 Tunbridge Wells had three coffee houses that we know of, perhaps more, where for 5s. visitors could have ‘the use of pens, ink, paper &c.’ In Bath, the fashionable coffee house was Morgan’s, where, jibed one satirist, regular customer
…cannot drink his coffee with a goû t, ‘Till he has read the papers thro and thro…
Another visitor
…joined by a whole unthinking crowd, At least once ev’ry day calls out, aloud, Boy, does the London post go out?16
What time the post went out was becoming an increasingly important question for newspapers and their readers. As we saw above, newspapers were transported by an elaborate system of stagecoach routes in the early part of the century. From the beginning of the eighteenth century, newspapers had been carried post-free, as a way of increasing the circulation of pro-government papers around the country. By 1782 the Post Office was sending 3 million papers a year from London to the country, and in 1788, a parliamentary inquiry recommended that a separate newspaper office be set up by the Post Office to deal with the volume. The Post Office was happy to comply: fraud was keeping its income down. In 1710 the Flying Post newspaper had routinely left a section of the page blank, so that people could write a message of some length and then legitimately send the paper on through the post without paying for it.17 This had been halted, but there was still nothing to stop individuals slipping letters between the pages and posting the newspapers on without charge. It was hoped that a separate department could give better oversight to the problem.
Certainly it could improve the delivery service. The old system of post boys had asked them to travel at a rate of seven miles per hour in summer, five miles per hour in winter, but this was next to impossible to achieve, given the state of the roads. Ralph Allen, from Bath, had done as much as was possible. One of the early eighteenth-century developers of Bath as a leisure town, he had been a shareholder in the Avon Navigation System, and he had furthermore acted as postmaster for the town. By 1719 he had taken charge of all the post roads nationally - that is, the six roads that carried the inter-city posts, which were, in theory, partly maintained by the government. By the time Allen died, in 1764, he had overseen the development of these six roads into a network of nearly twenty main arteries that now reached the new manufacturing towns as well as a number of subsidiary routes. He had also begun to regularize deliveries so that an extensive six-day-a-week service was beginning to emerge.18
After his death, however, the system stopped improving and simply stagnated. The post was still being carried by boys on broken-down packhorses, or on small carts. Twenty years later, a letter sent from London to Birmingham on a Monday could not be acknowledged that same week.19 John Palmer, who held a patent for theatres in Bath and Bristol, grew impatient with the state of communications along the roads and determined to follow in the footsteps of his Bath predecessor. In 1784 he presented to William Pitt, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, a system he had devised to set up contracts with stagecoach owners, who would carry the post in newly designated mailcoaches at between eight and nine miles per hour, providing changes of horse as necessary. They would have an armed guard to sit next to the coachmen, and commit themselves to meeting exact schedules, which would mean that each postmaster would now know exactly what time his post was leaving - and would arrive.* To increase speed still further, these mailcoaches would also be exempt from toll fares along the turnpikes. Pitt agreed to a trial, and the Bristol-London route was chosen. The coach was to leave Bristol at 4 p.m., and was scheduled to arrive in London at 8 a.m. the next morning. It arrived well within that time and, with Pitt’s help, by early 1875 mailcoaches were running in Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, and on the cross roads between Bristol and Portsmouth. By the summer, Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool had their own coaches; by October, mailcoaches had reached Milford Haven and Holyhead, Birmingham, Carlisle, Dover, Gloucester, Nottingham, Shrewsbury and Worcester. (Now that letter from London to Birmingham could be acknowledged in a mere two days.) By the following summer the 400 miles between Edinburgh and London could be traversed in 60 hours, down from the 85 it had taken 25 years before. (Further development in Scotland had to wait because its road improvements lagged behind England’s: until 1800 there was only one all-Scottish mailcoach route, Edinburgh to Aberdeen, which after some years was finally extended to Thurso, then to Inverness and on to the Highlands.)20
Time, and the spending of it, began to take on more urgency. (It would become a more compelling subject still with the arrival of the railways; see pp. 194-5.) Advertisements