John Belchem

The Neglected “Unstamped”: The Manx Pauper Press of the 1840s

By using Manx taxation and postal privileges, radicals and other activists were able to avoid the “taxes on knowledge,” to continue the campaign for a cheap press that mainland publishers, veterans of the “war of the unstamped,” had been forced to abandon in 1836. Free of stamp duty, paper duty, and advertizement tax, papers published on the Isle of Man were entitled to free postage throughout mainland Britain, a privilege extended to include re-postage in 1840. Taking advantage of these Manx facilities, publishers were able to defy commercial pressures to re-launch the “unstamped,” briefly recapturing its original political and educational mission. This paper seeks to recover this neglected episode in newspaper history. It highlights the use of Manx facilities by three broad groups of reformers, each of whom looked to the medium of the cheap press to redefine the reform agenda of early-Victorian Britain. First, those who promoted individual behavioral reform, a project that extended from temperance through various “alternative” remedies and regimes, physical and mental, to a bewildering array of “faddist” nostrums. Second, those involved in the increasing formalization of popular politics and associational culture, a process that placed print above traditional oral and visual modes of communication. Third, and closely related, those radicals who wished to expurgate earlier errors and excesses, to replace the transient tumult of the collective mass platform by individual commitment to rational reform. Each of these groups sought to benefit from Manx publication and postal privileges: through the widespread distribution of inexpensive propaganda; by the production of cheap “in-house” journals, which would provide channels of information for members of affiliated friendly societies, amalgamated trade unions, and political organizations; and by the packaging of news in cheap and attractive formats to reach the individual family home. These categories often overlapped, as did their formats; in the publications of William Shirrefs, the most enterprising of the Manx-based printers and publishers, newspaper, magazine, and “agitational” journal merged into one, providing a lively mixture of news, education, politics, information, fiction, amusement, and recreation, a comprehensive cheap package for the working-class reader. At a time of commercialization—the rise of the penny dreadful, the advent of the family magazine, and the dominance of the lurid Sunday press—the Manx press pointed towards the higher ideals of mid-Victorian Britain, providing its readership with the information and instruction to allow their personal and political development within the privacy of the home.

Priests, Publicans and the Irish Poor: Ethnic Enterprise and Migrant Networks in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Liverpool

Part of the outreach mission of one of the earliest Catholic parishes in Irish Liverpool, the St Patricks Society developed into one of the largest collecting societies in Victorian Britain, offering burial benefit to tens of thousands of poor Irish migrants beyond the reach of organised labour or industrial insurance. Growth soon led to scandal and litigation, revealing a number of fault lines within the migrant community. Catholic clergy withdrew in protest as publicans and other ‘Micks on the make’ came to the fore, secular ethnic culture brokers who accentuated the ‘Irishness’ of the Society, running it as a machine which looked less to the respectability (or religion) of the members than to their assurance of an adequately funded ‘wake’. It was this ‘Irish’ image, as much as the alleged financial irregularities, which brought the Society into disrepute (and ruin), a judgement yet to be challenged by historians. The study examines this mutualist network and explains the rise and fall of an important, but until this point, unexamined feature of the communal life of the Irish neighbourhoods of Liverpool.