Pennies, Profits and Poverty

Book excerpt: Fleet Street in the 19th century was home to a variety of publishing interests - expensive newspapers, periodicals and books aimed at the upper classes; but more importantly radical publishers who campaigned for political reform, a free press and the repeal of newspaper taxes; and a growing market in cheap and sensational literature - penny bloods, story papers and popular magazines and books aimed at the masses. This was Bohemian Fleet Street - which took in not just Fleet Street itself, along with its courts and alleyways, but also neighbouring thoroughfares such as the Strand, Holywell Street and Paternoster Row - where some publishers grew rich while others were forever in debt, and where coteries of struggling journalists and hack writers eked out a living, providing millions of words for the cheap press but living and dying in obscurity and poverty. This book charts the lives and careers of around 150 of these publishers and writers. It highlights the comparative wealth of those who grew rich with the poverty of those who struggled. It also reveals a great deal of new biographical information, not only for the better-known, filling in gaps and correcting mistakes in previously-published biographies and directory entries, but also for those whose lives have been hitherto unrecorded, but who played an integral part in the development of cheap, accessible and popular literature.