Mind-Munitions

War and Public Opinion in the Nineteenth Century 159
by improved transport systems such as railways and, later in the
century, by the advent of electricity and flight. Asa Briggs was right
when he described such nineteenth-century developments as constituting
a genuine ‘Communications Revolution’.
It is something of a myth that the hundred years separating the
end of the Napoleonic wars and the outbreak of the First World
War was a ‘century of peace’. One need only recall the Crimean
War, the American Civil War, the Opium Wars, the Franco-Prussian
War, and the wars of imperialism to dispel that myth. But if wars
between the great powers were comparatively scarce, smaller
conflicts began to receive widespread publicity by virtue of developments
in communications. Even so, in the generation after
Waterloo a war-weary Europe tried to heal its scars by political
rather than military means as industrialization and population
increased, as nationalist movements emerged to challenge the
established order, and as revolutionary ideas began to secure a
wider audience. If the century was to be remembered as a ‘century
of revolutions’, the role of the media in society also underwent
revolutionary change. In the 1830s, the first mass newspapers
appeared. With the founding of the New York Sun in 1833, the era
of the ‘penny press’ began and, according to one authority, ‘ushered
in a new order, a shared social universe in which ‘public’ and
‘private’ would be redefined’.
In Britain, newspapers catering for a particular class of people
began to appear and, following a reduction in the Stamp Duty from
4d. to ld. in 1836, cheap popular weeklies building on the tradition
of broadsheets emerged and were put to good use by such movements
as the Chartists. The Northern Star was the principal Chartist
propaganda paper, committed to educating the working class.
Rising circulations and the numbers of newspapers reflected improving
standards of literacy. Whereas there had been 76 newspapers
and periodicals published in England and Wales in 1781,
the figure had risen to 563 in 1851. Between 1840 and 1852 the
circulation of The Times (founded as the Daily Universal Register
in 1785) quadrupled from 10,000 to 40,000 copies per issue. With
the advent of Koenig’s steam press at the start of the century, 1000
issues an hour could be produced, a rate that was increased to 8-
10,000 by 1848 when the type was fixed on to a cylindrical rather
than a flat bed. The growth of the railways in the 1830s greatly
speeded up the distribution of newspapers, while the development