Poor players? The role of short-lived newspapers in re-evaluating success and failure in the nineteenth-century periodical press

Abstract

This thesis aims to reassess conventional ideas of success and failure traditionally applied to the development of the newspaper press during the nineteenth century, focusing on the role played by short-lived newspapers in the evolution of print culture.

Working with a combination of digital and physical newspaper archives drawn mainly from the British Library’s newspaper collections, together with curatorial and commercial catalogues and directories, this work combines data analysis approaches with detailed case studies. On the basis of the findings, this thesis offers a challenge to orthodox views of ‘success’ which have been associated primarily with long-running, London-centred newspapers, in particular those that continued into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

By arguing that, collectively, short-lived newspapers represent a substantial, critically-overlooked segment of the press, this thesis explores how the nineteenth-century’s fundamental instability was reflected in its newspapers, which appeared, adapted, merged and disappeared in bewildering numbers. Seeking to recreate the palette of choices available to nineteenth century buyers and readers of newspapers, this work argues that dismissing the substantial numbers of shorter-lived papers as de facto failures perpetuates a distorted narrative of the success and progress of the newspaper press as represented by arguably exceptional long-running newspapers. More importantly, this work proposes that a reassessment of the parameters of success and failure with respect to the nineteenth-century press is essential to develop historical periodicals scholarship, which has tended to focus on individual newspapers and, by doing so, has inadvertently oversimplified the complexity of the newspaper press experienced by nineteenth-century readers.

Date of Award	2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Edge Hill University
Sponsors	Arts & Humanities Research Council
Supervisor	BOB NICHOLSON (Director of Studies), ANDREW MCINNES (Supervisor), Elizabeth Gaskell (Director of Studies) & Mia Ridge (Supervisor)