Friends used to club
together to reduce the great expense of buying a single copy, and
agents hired out copies for the sum of one penny per hour. The only
effect of the stamp duty had been to cut off the poorer classes from
all sources of trustworthy information.
In 1834 not a single town in the kingdom with the exception of London
possessed a daily paper. The invention of steam printing, and the
introduction of shorthand reporting and the use of telegraph and
railways, revolutionized the whole world of journalism.
Charles Dickens, on the occasion of his presiding, in May 1865, at
the second annual dinner of the Newspaper Press Fund, gave his
hearers an idea of what newspaper reporters were and what they
suffered in the early days. "I have pursued the calling of a reporter
under circumstances of which many of my brethren here can form no
adequate conception. I have often transcribed for the printer, from
my shorthand notes, important public speeches in which the strictest
accuracy was required, and a mistake in which would have been to a
young man severely compromising, writing on the palm of my hand, by
the light of a dark lantern, in a post-chaise and four, galloping
through a wild country, and through the dead of the night, at the
then surprising rate of fifteen miles an hour. . . . I have worn my
knees by writing on them on the old back-row of the old gallery of
the old House of Commons; and I have worn my feet by standing to write
in a preposterous pen in the old House of Lords, where we used to
be huddled together like so many sheep--kept in waiting, say, until
the woolsack might want re-stuffing.
Pages:
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129