Taxes on knowledge

The Liverpool administration actively discouraged certain sections of the press, with prosecutions, including those for seditious libel, aimed at editors and writers.

[4] It was aimed at the journalism of William Cobbett, the Hunt brothers (The Examiner), and Thomas Jonathan Wooler (The Black Dwarf).

It had a negative effect on the English provincial press, i.e. newspapers outside London; and drove out cheap political papers.

It tested the boundaries of the government's willingness to enforce the duty, recruiting hundreds of paper sellers and flaunting its illegal status.

[11] John Crawfurd in 1836 attempted an account of the "taxes on knowledge" total, including amounts for taxation of paper and advertisements, and postal charges.

[15][16] John Francis of The Athenaeum was a persistent campaigner against taxes affecting publications, as they stood in the later 1830s, including paper duty at 1½d.

In line with O'Connor's views, the taxes on knowledge were marginal to the main thrust of a decade Chartist agitation, until the late 1840s.

[23][24][25] The campaign against "taxes on knowledge" made further progress in the 1850s, after more fundamental Chartist political agitation dropped back.

[30] John Watts researched parliamentary questions for Milner Gibson, the Member of Parliament who chaired the 1851 Select Committee on Newspaper Stamps, but who then fell foul of Jeremiah Garnett, editor of the Manchester Guardian.

[33] William Gladstone, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, repealed the paper duties, but only after a false start in 1860, when the House of Lords rejected his bill, against conventions on financial issues.

[34] The repeal of "taxes on knowledge" was one factor in a number promoting an increase of publications in the United Kingdom, in the second half of the 19th century.

[38] The Bookseller in April 1861, just before the repeal of the paper duty, gave statistics on London newspapers: in 1830 there had been 64, of which three were for a working-class readership; in 1860 there were 177, eight being for the working classes.