How Liverpool Got Its News in 1808

Liverpool's newspaper week

The 1808 Stranger’s Guide gives its readers what amounts to a weekly newspaper timetable.

To modern eyes, the absence of a daily paper seems extraordinary.

But newspapers were expensive products in Georgian Britain. They were printed by hand, distribution was comparatively slow and government taxation increased their price. For most Liverpool newspapers, weekly publication remained perfectly normal.

The result was a rhythm to the news. Monday brought one paper, Wednesday another, Thursday another and then two appeared on Saturday. For someone living in Liverpool, different days of the week brought different opportunities to discover what was happening locally and farther afield.

News in a maritime city

Liverpool newspapers had another particularly important function. This was a port.

For Liverpool's merchants, shipowners, insurers, brokers and traders, information could have considerable financial value. They needed to know which ships had arrived, which vessels had departed, what cargoes were available, what goods were being advertised for sale, what prices were changing, what was happening in London and, crucially, what news had arrived from overseas.

A newspaper could therefore contain an extraordinary mixture of material. Alongside politics and reports from elsewhere in Britain might be shipping intelligence, commercial notices, auctions, property sales, public announcements, births, marriages, deaths and advertisements for everything from imported goods to missing property.

Read together, these old newspapers provide something remarkably close to a weekly snapshot of Georgian Liverpool.

Gore's newspaper

One of the best-known names on the Stranger’s Guide list was Gore’s General Advertiser.

The Gore name became deeply associated with Liverpool publishing, particularly through the famous Gore's directories that documented the town's businesses and inhabitants.

The newspaper was particularly valuable in a commercial port because of the amount of shipping and business information it carried.

Imagine a Liverpool merchant opening Thursday's paper in 1808. Among the reports and advertisements might be information capable of affecting a business decision that very morning.

In that sense, newspapers weren't simply entertainment. They were part of the commercial infrastructure of the town.

A newspaper without advertisements

The Stranger’s Guide makes a particularly interesting observation about another title.

The Liverpool Herald, it tells readers, carried no advertisements. Instead, it concentrated on political and literary discussion.

That immediately distinguished it from newspapers whose advertising and commercial notices occupied substantial amounts of space. It also reminds us that Georgian Liverpool's press wasn't a single voice. Newspapers could have different audiences, interests and political sympathies.

And politics in Liverpool during this period could be fiercely contested. The abolition of the British slave trade in 1807, parliamentary elections, war with Napoleonic France and arguments over commerce and political reform all provided subjects capable of provoking intense debate.

The people printing the guide were part of the story

There is another lovely connection hidden inside the book we're following.

The 1808 Picture of Liverpool; or, Stranger’s Guide was itself printed in Liverpool by Jones and Wright.

The guide therefore wasn't being produced by detached observers looking back at Georgian Liverpool. Its printers operated within the same local world of printing, newspapers, books and circulating information that the guide describes.

That makes the book itself part of Liverpool's publishing history.

News didn't stop with the person who bought the paper

We should also be careful not to imagine that one newspaper meant one reader. Copies circulated. They could be found in coffee houses, reading rooms and institutions where numerous people might read the same paper.

We've already encountered one particularly important example earlier in this series. The Lyceum on Bold Street, featured in Stranger’s Guide #8, maintained a substantial coffee and news room containing London, provincial and foreign newspapers, reviews, magazines and maps.

A Liverpool resident didn't necessarily need to subscribe personally to every publication to encounter the news. Information was shared socially. People read, discussed, argued and exchanged it.

In that respect, perhaps Georgian Liverpool wasn't entirely different from Liverpool today. The technology changed. The arguments probably didn't.

The newspaper missing from the list

There is also an intriguing clue to how quickly information could become outdated.

The Stranger’s Guide lists five newspapers. But another Liverpool newspaper appeared in 1808: the Liverpool Courier, first published in January that year.

So why isn't it included?

The most likely explanation lies inside the guide itself. Although the edition carries the date 1808, its preface was completed in October 1807.

The newspaper information therefore appears to have been compiled before the Courier appeared. Unless further primary evidence establishes the reason, we shouldn't state that as absolute fact.

But it raises an amusing possibility: Liverpool's new guidebook may already have been slightly out of date when people began using it.

Some problems in publishing apparently haven't changed in more than two centuries.

Waiting for news from across the world

Perhaps the biggest difference between 1808 and today was not what people wanted to know. It was how long they had to wait.

News from London could take time to reach Liverpool. Information from America or the Caribbean might have crossed the Atlantic aboard a sailing ship before reaching a Liverpool newspaper office.

Something could have happened thousands of miles away weeks earlier, yet for the person opening a newspaper in a Liverpool coffee room, it was today's news.

Liverpool's position as a great port nevertheless gave it an extraordinary window onto the world.

Ships didn't carry only goods and passengers. They carried letters, newspapers, rumours, prices, political intelligence and stories.

The docks were therefore gateways for information as well as commerce.

Reading Liverpool's everyday history

More than two centuries later, surviving newspapers give us something that grand histories sometimes cannot. They give us ordinary Liverpool.

Advertisements tell us what people bought. Property notices show where people lived. Shipping columns reveal the constant movement through the port. Public notices expose disputes and regulations. Births, marriages and deaths introduce individuals otherwise absent from history books. Even the prices tell stories.

And because original Liverpool newspapers from this period survive in archives, we can still sit down today and read some of the same words Liverpool residents were reading in 1808.

That makes newspapers one of our greatest windows into the everyday city encountered by readers of the Stranger’s Guide.

The method of delivering news has changed almost beyond recognition. The desire to know what's happening around Liverpool — and to argue about it afterwards — hasn't.