On 16 February 1896, Lloyd’s Weekly became the only British newspaper in the nineteenth century to sell more than a million copies.

He had created titles that sounded like newspapers, such as the Lloyd’s Penny Sunday Times and People’s Police Gazette, but these were a sham to avoid paying stamp duty.

Lloyd tried to keep his version free of stamp duty by printing the illustrations of current events without captions.

Most of the text was devoted to literary and dramatic material but, in its seventh issue, the Stamp Office spotted “news” in the theatre listings.

[6] Lloyd was determined to publish a newspaper so he decided to pay the duty and the paper was relaunched as Lloyd's Illustrated London Newspaper[7] priced at twopence, with a masthead showing St Paul's Cathedral and the River Thames in the manner of the recently launched The Illustrated London News which had been a terrific success from the start, despite costing sixpence.

He used the postal service for distribution as postage was included in the 1d stamp duty — a useful concession that also enabled him to beat off the newsagents’ demand for a 1d commission.

In his previous publishing business, Lloyd had seen the vast unmet demand for something good to read among the growing numbers of people who had learnt their letters but found nothing that they could afford except trash or sermonizing.

Lloyd’s Weekly, and indeed the News of the World at that time, were a long way from being the purveyors of scandal, crime and sensation for which they have since been falsely condemned.

[citation needed] The only regular political content in Lloyd’s Weekly appeared in a leading article on the front page.

It is also clear that he would have chosen a radical slant because the paper was intended for those who had no vote – the urban poor who owned no property.

Lloyd was so anxious to enlist his help in raising the paper's profile that he paid him the extravagantly generous salary of £1,000 a year.

Jerrold wrote gentler and much more elegant leaders than his predecessors had, but any supposed allegiance to the Liberal Party was only evident in his lack of support for the Conservatives.

Blanchard Jerrold remained in position until he died in 1885 but, as an absentee leader writer, he never played his father's important role in the development of the paper.

On abolition of the stamp duty on news in 1855, Lloyd lowered the price to twopence and his early ambition to sell 100,000 copies every week could be realised at last.

He leased the harvesting rights to 100,000 acres and set up a paper mill at Bow Bridge in East London.

Regular circulation had risen to 412,080 by 1865[10] and continued its upward path, passing the million mark in 1896[11] and reaching 1,500,000 during the 1914-18 war.

The radicalism of Lloyd’s Weekly’s early years had been considerably toned down, but the paper's views on social issues were hard to reconcile with Gladstone's parsimonious approach to the spending of public money.

However, by the 1880s, the party itself was dividing itself three ways – the social reformers later led by David Lloyd George, the more traditional tendency of the Asquith faction and Gladstone's loyal supporters.

A delay in delivery of new printing presses (Richard Hoe had died in 1886) gave Lloyd a great deal of anxiety and he fell ill, probably from a heart attack.

This time he did not recover and he died on 8 April 1890, barely a month before the new-style Lloyd’s Weekly was ready to run.