Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain. Judith Flanders

rock, or a ‘situation’ of thrilling interest, in which the figures look as if they had been taken in a spasm, and were suddenly petrified.⁶⁵

      This type of fiction was to prove lucrative for newspapers in general, and for William Frederic Tillotson in particular. He was the proprietor of the Bolton Evening News, which he established in 1867. Soon he also owned the Bolton Journal and Guardian, and then local editions of this paper (renamed the Bolton Weekly Journal), which served a number of towns in Lancashire. In 1872 he published in his Saturday paper a weekly serial called ‘Biddy MacCarthy; or, the Murder of the O’Haras’. This was not substantially different from tales published by his many colleagues, but his next move was. The following year he set up a ‘fiction bureau’, becoming a broker of fiction, or agent, buying work from authors and selling it on to other newspapers. By the early 1880s he had over sixty established authors on his books for serialized work, including Harrison Ainsworth, R. M. Ballantyne, J. M. Barrie, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Rhoda Broughton, Wilkie Collins, Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Eliza Lynn Linton, Captain Marryat, Mrs Oliphant, Trollope, Charles Reade and H. G. Wells. By the 1890s he had agents working for him in the USA, in Europe and in the British colonies.⁶⁶ Tillotson’s reach meant that authors’ work was seen in local papers that, without his centralized selling, would not have had a chance of acquiring the work of such successful writers. For example, in 1900 a short story by Arnold Bennett appeared simultaneously in the Queen; the Evesham Journal, the Nottingham Guardian, the Manchester Weekly Times, the Weston-super-Mare Mercury, the Cardiff Times, the Newcastle Courant, the Carlisle Journal, the Sheffield Independent and the Huddersfied Chronicle. But Tillotson’s work was not finished, and the story was then reprinted in the Aberdeen Free Press, Irish Society, the Blackburn Times, the Deal Mercury, the Birmingham News, the Batley News, the Stratford News, the Salford Chronicle, the Barnsley Independent, the Bradford Telegraph, the Tiverton Gazette, the Portsmouth Telegraph, the Hartlepool Mail, the Sunderland Echo and the Bury Visitor.⁶⁷ The financial stability of many small newspapers now depended on the quality of their fiction.

      These papers had survived despite the London - now national - papers being easier to come by than ever throughout the country. The Post Office was still carrying newspapers without charge, but as early as 1827, two years after the opening of the first railway line, a shareholder in the soon-to-be-running Stockton and Darlington Railway wrote to Francis Freeling, the secretary (or administrative head) of the Post Office, notifying him that the railway ‘coaches were going as fast as any mail in the Kingdom, with one horse and fifty passengers’. With the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830, Freeling was in touch with the postmasters in both cities to suggest that they enter into discussions with the railway to carry post; and only months after the line opened, and the first commercial train ran, a contract was agreed.* Within a decade, carrying the post by train was the norm: the London to Preston postal route, which had previously taken 24 hours from post office to post office, could now be travelled in 10 hours and 46 minutes.⁶⁹

      But long before this, in 1831, the Liverpool and Manchester was carrying newspapers between the two cities - without charge if the printers dropped them off at the station, and the newsagents collected them at the other end. The ‘without charge’ part didn’t last long, but the railways gave greatly reduced rates - up to half the going parcel-post rate - in return for volume and daily orders.⁷⁰ A London newsagent, William Henry Smith, saw his chance. He and his brother Henry, ‘Newspaper Agents, Booksellers and Binders’, ran a business in Little Grosvenor Street that they had inherited from their father. In 1821 they opened a reading room in the Strand, stocking 150 newspapers, journals and reviews, and charging a stiff 1 guinea annual subscription. By 1826 they still had not quite found their niche, and were calling themselves ‘Stationers, Travelling-case and Pocket-book Makers, and Newsmen’. (In 1828 Henry left the business.) William understood that getting the news out first was what mattered. When daytime stagecoaches began to replace night coaches, he hired carts to collect the newspapers directly from the printers and deliver them, wrapped and addressed, to the stagecoach offices first thing in the morning. He advertised in The Times:

      The Times, published on Saturday, the 1st inst., at half-past eight o’clock in the morning, was forwarded, by special express, to Birmingham, where it arrived in time for the inland mails, by which subscribers to the above paper in Birmingham, Liverpool, Chester, Warrington, Manchester, Rochdale, Preston, Lancaster, &c., obtained their papers 14 hours before the arrival of the London mail. The above express was sent by Messrs. H. & W. Smith, newspaper agents, 192, Strand, London, who have sent several expresses since the Parliamentary sessions commenced.

      On the death of George IV, in 1830, Smith hired his own boat to carry the news to Dublin, twenty-four hours ahead of the Royal Messenger - or so he boasted.⁷¹