Print version record.

Intro; Contents; Acknowledgements; Introduction; A Counter-Factual; Why Were Local Newspapers so Popular?; The Local Newspaper is History; Reasons to Ignore the Provincial Press; The History of Reading the Local Paper; A Place: Preston; How to Use this Book; 1. The Readers of the Local Press; Literacy; Reading Has a History; Implying a Reader; Finding Historical Readers; Age; Gender; Class; Intensity; Conclusions; 2. Reading Places; 1855; 1875; 1900; Conclusions; 3. Reading Times; The Day; The Week; The Season and the Year; Newsy Times; Short, Medium- and Long-Term Newspaper Lives

Changing TimesPeriodical Time; Conclusions; 4. What They Read: The Production of the Local Press in the 1860s; National Periodicals Ecology; Local Periodical Ecology: Preston; A Week in the Life of a Provincial Newspaper Reporter, 1865; Friday 22 September 1865; Saturday 23 September 1865; Sunday 24 September 1865; Monday 25 September 1865; Tuesday 26 September 1865; Wednesday 27 September 1865; Thursday 28 September 1865; 5. What They Read: The Production of the Local Press in the 1880s; Changes, 1865-84; A week in the life of a provincial newspaper owner-editor, 1884

Saturday 5 January 1884Sunday 6 January 1884; Monday 7 January 1884; Tuesday 8 January 1884; Wednesday 9 January 1884; Thursday 10 January 1884; Friday 11 January 1885; After 1884; 6. Who Read What; Provincial Preference; Local weeklies; Evening Newspapers; Regional News Miscellanies; Morning Newspapers; Magazines and Specialist Publications; Who Read Which Section?; Class and Gender; Conclusions; 7. Exploiting a Sense of Place; The Construction of Local Identities; Newspaper Techniques for Producing Locality; 'Us' and 'Them' and Contested Identities; Conclusions

8. Class, Dialect and the Local Press: How 'They' Joined 'Us'A Typology of Dialect in Lancashire Newspapers; Change Over Time; Conclusions; 9. Win-win: The Local Press and Association Football; Football and the Local Press; Winning the Double, 1888-89; North End Close to Collapse, 1893; Conclusions; 10. How Readers Used the Local Paper; Readers' Letters as Evidence; Read all About Us: The Appeal of Local News and Views; The Public Sphere and Other Uses of the Local Press; Other Uses; Local Identity; The Uniqueness of the Local Press; Conclusions; Conclusions; Bibliography; Archival material

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.-- Provided by Publisher.

WorldCat record variable field(s) change: 651