The Taxes on Knowledge

In 1919, Thomas Russell, who had been the advertising manager of the Times and founder of the Incorporated Society of Advertisement Consultants (1910), taught the first academic course on advertising in Britain at the London School of Economics.Footnote ⁷ In his second lecture, he traced the origins of the verb to advertise “in its limited commercial sense.” The historical use referred simply to making something known or attracting attention. The old use lingered on, yet Russell thought it was “easy to see how advertising—that is, giving notice of—a reward, or of anything else, being extended to announcements of goods for sale, might push the more general use of the word… aside, and give it the specialized meaning which survives.”Footnote ⁸ The term advertising had certainly assumed a “commercial sense” by the time of Russell's lectures, but in the years preceding, its meaning was an open question. When applied to newspapers, the “commercial sense” was a particularly challenging question. Newspapers had become a fully commercial, capital-heavy enterprise. Their pages included a variety of material that was, therefore, all, in one sense or another, commercial. What defined advertising in that environment? The campaign against the “taxes on knowledge,” which opened up the race of commercialization, was a central legal arena in which the “commercial sense” of advertising was elaborated. Its terms of art set the stage for the struggle of capitalist owners themselves with the problematic of advertising's boundaries.

The “taxes on knowledge” banner referred to the newspaper stamp duty, paper duty, and advertisement duty. It was a radical cry against keeping the multitude in the dark by making newspapers too expensive, thus securing an antidemocratic political status quo. The campaign against the taxes saw one peak in the 1830s, and a second in midcentury; the taxes were finally repealed between 1853 and 1861.Footnote ⁹ Accounts of the campaign straddle the history of the newspaper press, and that of politics and fiscal policy.Footnote ¹⁰ In the history of British advertising, the repeal of the advertisement duty is typically noted together with the repeal of other taxes as a functional turning point that opened up competition in the newspaper market, and led to a sharp rise in newspaper advertising and an increasingly powerful stand of advertisers. The cultural significance of the campaign in conceptualizing advertising, however, has been overlooked.Footnote ¹¹ Before turning to examine it in the next section, I briefly recount the background; it contextualizes the campaign, and clarifies the concerns that have attracted the attention of historians, and deflected it from the conceptualization of advertising.

The taxes were legislated in the Stamp Act of 1712. The Act was a source of revenue, but also, according to a common Victorian interpretation, another means of political control of the newspaper press, fewer than 20 years after prepublication censorship ended.Footnote ¹² Efforts to remove the taxes animated the early Victorian era; best known are the violent unstamped papers campaign of the 1830s. The government reformed the tax regime in 1836 in a manner that Martin Hewitt describes as partly responsive to moderate radicalism, yet retaining controls on the popular press. The advertisement duty was reduced from 3s 6d to 1s 6d per advertisement, and remained at that level until midcentury.Footnote ¹³

The campaign was rekindled in 1848. The year had seen revolutions across Europe, which sparked fears in Britain that Chartists would unleash violence at home. Hysteria receded when Britain remained stable, but the danger that 1848 represented was not overlooked. Instead, it encouraged a reformist agenda both outside of and in government. From outside, a radical revival was pressing for financial and electoral reform, and enjoyed receptiveness as a more palatable alternative to the Chartist threat to social order. From within, the Whig Prime Minister John Russell, who was then premiering a weak government, endorsed the view that reforms responsive to social demands were necessary; indeed, in his view these were the historical reason for Britain's escape from revolution, and the only guarantees against the dangers of a full democracy.Footnote ¹⁴ In that context, Hewitt describes the encouragement that campaigners found in recent reforms, among them the 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws and removal of duty on glass. Campaigners also built on the invocation of “taxes on knowledge” as a cross-class political agenda after the fragmentation of Chartism. The campaign involved a number of organizations, including the Newspaper Stamp Abolition Committee (NSAC), a reorganization of dismantled Chartist movements, headed by metropolitan radicals who had been involved in the 1830s campaigns. NSAC created a national agitation, and was supported significantly by the Daily News and a few radical provincial papers. In Parliament, Anti Corn Law League veterans, John Bright, Thomas Milner Gibson, and Richard Cobden, headed the campaign, supported by a diverse group in the Commons. The London Committee for Obtaining the Repeal of the Advertisement Duty, supported by a number of newspaper editors and owners, joined NSAC.

The historical background that encouraged campaigners also explains the challenges that they faced. The shift to free trade left the government dependent on taxes for revenue while the protectionist threat to prove free trade a mistake and reinstate the Corn Laws was still looming. The government was guarding against deficit in the face of what Jonathan Parry describes as an unofficial radical-protectionist combination against fiscal policy. Doing so and also responding to agitation was not an easy path to navigate.Footnote ¹⁵ The campaign not only drew on key concerns of its time—both democratic consciousness and fiscal reform politics—but was also undermined by their broader scope and real politics. As Hewitt shows, motions in 1850 failed, and the campaign fragmented; the radicalism of NASC and its insistence on tying the three taxes together alienated more conservative voices. To overcome fragmentation, the campaign was reorganized in 1851, and NSAC was subsumed under the Association for the Promotion of the Repeal of the Taxes on Knowledge (APRTOK). APTROK mobilized a diverse set of interest groups to petition Parliament, and attacked the inconsistencies in implementation by the Board of Inland Revenue (hereafter the Revenue). The pressure led to the establishment of a select committee headed by Gibson in 1851, which issued a critical report calling for repeal.

Agitation continued as governments changed. In 1853, Lord Aberdeen was prime minister of a Whig-Peelite (anti-Tory) coalition, and William Gladstone was chancellor of Exchequer. The divisive issue of fiscal policy was the use of taxes for redistribution while avoiding debt. Gladstone viewed indirect taxes, the advertisement duty included, as part of a needed package within a broader goal of balancing the budget to retain political stability. In his 1853 budget, he opted, albeit not without hesitation, for a reduced advertisement duty over repeal. Thus, the prospect of repeal was once again drowned in broader political stakes. However, the government was defeated on this point in a night of parliamentary maneuvers, and the advertisement duty became the first of the three taxes to be repealed.Footnote ¹⁶

As this brief review clarifies, the advertisement duty was only one—and in retrospect the easiest—goal in the campaign. It was not consistently conceived of as a separate theme, but rather as part of tax inhibitions on newspapers, the ultimate focus being democratic consciousness.Footnote ¹⁷ Nevertheless, the need to discuss each tax in itself and engage in political maneuvering led to devoted attention to the duty. Even then, some of the attention addressed issues that exceeded the meaning of advertising, particularly questions of just tax policy. The inconsistency of the tax, which applied to newspapers but not to other advertising media such as handbills, posters, or magazines, and its regressive character—a flat tax, more prohibitive for small advertisers, small advertisements, and newspapers with small circulations that could not attract advertisers—were all arguments mobilized in the process.Footnote ¹⁸ At the same time, the highly active and publicly visible campaign pushed participants to debate the category of advertisement and its significance. The most interesting and successful element of the efforts turned on the social benefits of advertising, examined in the next section.

The Communication of Wants

Consider the two following celebrations of advertisements, one early in the campaign and another summing it up. They represent two versions of the theme that won the day: the communication of wants.

As these examples suggest, advertisements were framed at once practically and ideationally. They were a practical exchange of individualized information among persons whose market-oriented “wants” were givens, but who were barred from revealing and so realizing them. At the same time, the exchange was elevated speech, humanity's expressive capacities beyond its physical needs.

The communication of wants was a conceptual framework increasingly elaborated with the pressure to separate the three taxes on knowledge. Early campaigners often rested their position on “the dignity of a public principle” of knowledge and education for the people.Footnote ²¹ Gibson continually maintained that the taxes were connected, as the governmental history of dealing with them together proved. However, difficulties in Parliament led him to accept a separation and to encourage members to vote without feeling committed to the full length of his campaign.Footnote ²² When pressed to discuss the advertisement duty on its own, the dominant view was that it was only indirectly a tax on knowledge in the political sense of the campaign.

If advertising was not knowledge like other newspaper content, that was not because it was merely a funding source for newspapers, of a lesser order than political knowledge. On the contrary, advertising was conceptualized as a special kind of knowledge, less abstract and more directly involved in social interaction; taxing it was “more generally onerous than taxes upon knowledge, since it taxed commerce, agriculture, literature, and the social wants of the community. It taxed opinions, and the transactions between man and man. It went further; it taxed the arts, and even religious communication.”Footnote ²³ The Lady's Newspaper and Pictorial Times explained the conflation of knowledge with what “would be a better word” in discussing advertisements—information: “To the servant or youth who wants a place, all ‘knowledge’ converges to the centre of his particular need.”Footnote ²⁴ Although the banner of knowledge remained the effective header of the campaign, the emphasis regarding advertisements was more akin to information, a realm of factuality and transparent communication ideally freed of contextual complexity.Footnote ²⁵

Gibson, whose oratory skills did much for the campaign in Parliament, wedded the practical communication of wants with higher ideals when he described the tax as a ban on free speech: “A tax on advertisements! A tax providing that no man may say what he wishes, or tell what he wants, in the way of business transactions, without being fined eighteenpence every time he speaks through the only channel by means of which he can make himself generally heard.” He continued: “There is nothing a man has to sell which some other man does not want to purchase, if they could only be brought together.”Footnote ²⁶ Trade, like citizens, required freedom of speech. How can trade be free, asked the Bradford Observer, “if the merchant may not tell the world that he has goods to dispose of?”Footnote ²⁷ The tax on free speech in trade, it was argued, was worse than limiting political free speech, because “the stamp and advertising duties are fines, not on opinions, but on facts.”Footnote ²⁸

Punch saw the amusing side of these formulations; early in the campaign it printed an ironic rendering of an “enormous meeting of Advertisers of all dominations” who gather noisily to agitate against the advertisement duty. The comic characters attack the duty as a “blow at habeas corpus,” one that “if the Queen only knew it” would not be allowed. Footnote ²⁹ Yet the association of advertisements with freedoms to communicate foundational information was effective. It could be tied to foregone revenues for the state. APRTOK also argued that the denial of “means of communication” not only prevented revenues, but actually destroyed value, because “[t]housands misemploy their time from mere ignorance of the wants of others.”Footnote ³⁰ The tax was a veil of darkness, a structure of miscommunication.

By the time of repeal, the synonymity between the advertisement duty and the banner of communication of wants was broadly familiar. The Era summarized the achievement: “A tax injurious to the spread of information… is on the point of extermination. The revolution which the abolition of the long obnoxious eighteenpence will probably be very great, and a vast impetus will be communicated to the extension of business of all kinds…Common sense, the principles of common justice and reason, and the at length received conviction that the advertisement duty was a clog upon intercommunications of mutual wants…were the allies by whose help the victory has been achieved.”Footnote ³¹

The communication of wants was a market paradigm that captured not only commodity selling but also market employment. Opening up the job market by notifying workers across the country about numerous job opportunities was an important element in advertising, not yet singled out as a distinct classified section, and useful in the campaign. George Jacob Holyoake's the Reasoner, for example, relied on the poor governess trope to deride the regressive tax, which required her to pay as much as “a wealthy insurance Company or a prosperous mercantile establishment.”Footnote ³² The Newcastle Guardian was happy to take it to the extreme: “If a poor orphan lad thinks he could get a job…or a girl on the verge of prostitution or beggary fancies she might hear of a situation, by putting an advertisement in the paper, the Government steps in…and…swells the long catalogue of crime.”Footnote ³³ The downward trajectory to crime could end even more badly: “How many have sunk into a premature grave from the…cause.”Footnote ³⁴

The poor employee trope was ambitious. Some mistook it to imply that only classified advertisements for lower-class employment should be exempted from the tax.Footnote ³⁵ However, its role in the campaign was to construe all advertisements as carriers of speech in the market, “a medium of universal communication”Footnote ³⁶ extending abstractly the imagined face-to-face interaction of the market square to a national level. In the debate in Parliament that finally led to repeal, Gladstone argued that the tax was on trade and, to a lesser extent, labor, but Cobden resisted. No, he said, it was a “tax on the intercommunication of wants and wishes, which, in a commercial community, strikes at the foundation of all transactions.” What would be said, he continued, “if it were sought to lay a tax on every bargain made, or attempted to be made, on the Exchange, between merchants who meet there at four o'clock, if the asking the rate of exchange between London and Hamburg were to render the broker seeking the information liable to a tax? Yet that is what you do under the advertisement duty.”Footnote ³⁷

America was the counterexample, the land of free communication of wants. Joseph Hume was envious of the tax-free American system: “He held in his hand an American paper which was sold for a cent, and contained a thousand advertisements, making known all the wants of the community.”Footnote ³⁸ Charles Dickens, who did not support repeal, ridiculed the lust for America. He was not a dominant voice in the debate about advertising: his main concern was not advertisements in themselves but that reform would unleash “blackguard,” low quality newspapers.Footnote ³⁹ Nonetheless, after the repeal, he published an ironic rendering of Cinderella for the age of platform professionals. In Dickens's Cinderella, the prince advertised for the women of the kingdom to try on the glass shoe. Recalling the campaign's references to America, the narrative voice soaked in irony: “for, the advertisement duty, an impost most unjust in principle and most unfair in operation, did not exist in that country; neither was the stamp on newspapers known in that land—which had as many newspapers as the United States, and got as much good out of them.”Footnote ⁴⁰

The communication-of-wants construction emphasized a number of elements: discrete communication over collective meanings, information over persuasion, and strict factuality over imagination. It thus limited the discussion of advertisements’ cultural role. The benefit was in two complementary appeals: the communication of wants soothed the radical edge of the campaign with market individualism, and offered an appealingly rational vision of national life.

The radical motivation, it should be reiterated, was feared. Withdrawing governmental limitations on newspapers therefore had to be seen as a pacifying mechanism: knowledge had to be explained as a nonrevolutionary tool, an appeal that resonated in the aftermath of 1848, but was also true in the 1830s, when some radicals argued that all unrest would cease if only the newspaper press was not taxed.Footnote ⁴¹ Supporters of the campaign argued that “[p]ower, as was shown on all hands, was rapidly passing into the possession of the multitude; and it could only be made safe by the accompaniment of knowledge.”Footnote ⁴² The communication of wants described market-oriented individuals, separately seeking to sell, buy, and work according to their separately predefined wishes; set against fears of the multitude, it was particularly unthreatening. It simultaneously legitimized advertising for the masses, and more broadly their consumer agency, and delimited its implications to a thinly formal market paradigm.

Alongside the soothing individualism, national life emerged as a peacefully rational coordination through free speech, cutting across political discord, and providing a clear and agreed-upon picture of progressive realities. In an 1852 Parliamentary debate, William Clay glorified the information provided by advertisements over that of news: “No one could doubt the great ability manifest in the leading articles in the Times, or its admirable arrangements for the collection and prompt diffusion of news from all parts of the world; but if you went into the shops and warehouses and counting-houses of men of all shades of political opinion, and asked them why they took the Times, you would find them all concur in one reason…it was indispensable to them to take in a paper in which they found such a vast amount of information as was supplied in its advertisements…”Footnote ⁴³

The information, it was repeatedly argued, allowed an understanding of the progress and character of the country. Some accounts argued that advertisements communicated not just the progressive condition of national life, but also local culture; they allowed people to be part of their immediate surroundings, beyond the pale of London. William Ewart, for example, explained during sessions of the Select Committee that advertisements allowed local communities “to know what they are about, and what is doing around them.”Footnote ⁴⁴ In these versions, advertising was a democratic representation and form of inclusion.

The success of the communication of wants was born out by the failure of opposition to articulate an alternative conceptualization of advertising. Most of those who did not support the repeal nonetheless expressed support for the substantive arguments of the campaign, and explained their choices by resorting to over-riding considerations, typically political loyalties, or the financial needs of the government. The only resounding argument came from landed paternalists who drew on little more than traditional suspicions of “puffery.” Here was Henry Drummond: “And what do you want? Why, you want the advertisement duty to be taken off; you want to be puffed off in the newspapers.” Let the laborer have his beer in the evening if you care for him, he argued, not a newspaper.Footnote ⁴⁵ Even less powerful was the Earl of Clancarty, who appealed to advertisers’ interests: “the practice of advertising certainly requires no encouragement; its very excess defeats in a great measure the interests of advertisers…”Footnote ⁴⁶ With such limited alternatives, the conceptual account won the day. The first edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica after the repeal, in 1878, could confidently assert that repeal was “[i]n compliance with all but unanimous voice of the public.”Footnote ⁴⁷

The picture of midcentury bears emphasis: Advertising—one of the cornerstones of capitalist culture and expansion—received some of the most enthusiastic support in its history through a campaign rooted in radical politics. The support reflected the sway of free-trade radicalism, but it was not limited to it. Historians, as noted, have often associated the decisive victory of capitalism with the commercial press. However, the ironic fact that radical politics themselves were implicated in this history has often been dismissed;Footnote ⁴⁸ meanwhile, the specific implication of radical politics in framing advertising has been entirely overlooked. The roots of the campaign in radicalism carried over to the arguments marshalled for advertising. Explicit support was most obvious in radical attacks on the advertisement duty from working-class perspectives, which saw advertising as a communicative means for gaining employment, and the duty as an unequal burden on the most disadvantaged. Implicit support was just as crucial: within the campaign's dynamics, the communication of wants paradigm did not meet with sustained radical challenges.Footnote ⁴⁹ Advertising was thus given justifications that exceeded its practical function in releasing newspapers from political control.

After the repeal of the taxes, the newspaper industry grew rapidly. The total number of newspapers in Britain rose about 500 in 1850, to more than 2,280 by 1914.Footnote ⁵⁰ Circulations jumped. Figures are contested given limitations of sources, but rough indications reveal the dramatic change: annual sales rose from approximately 85,000,000 copies in 1851, to more than 5,600,000,000 in 1920; the number of newspapers purchased per year per capita by persons over the age of 14 rose from 6 copies in 1850, to 182 in 1920. Even allowing for a reduction in the number of readers per copy because of the decline in collective newspaper consumption, the audience increased sharply.Footnote ⁵¹ Advertisements became newspapers’ main source of financial security.Footnote ⁵² At the close of the century, William Stead Jr. argued, “Were advertising to cease, not one in a hundred papers and periodicals would outlive the year.”Footnote ⁵³ The idea, boldly put by the MP and owner of Truth, Henry Labouchere, in 1881, that in present conditions the advertisement department was the most important one in a newspaper, was hard to swallow for the heads of the Fourth Estate. The owner of the Daily Telegraph tried to refute it, only to actually confirm: “I should say that the literary department was the most important, because if that were not efficiently conducted you could not make a good position for the paper, and attract advertisements.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Part 2 examines the pressures that newspapers faced in this atmosphere, and their responses.

Fetters of the Free Press

With the rapid expansion of advertising, we can begin to see the limits of the campaign's victory. The financial interests and political aspirations of newspaper owners required that advertisements be recognized as a distinct type of publication, separately paid for, and subordinated to their control of the medium. However, advertisers were resistant, and resistance took varied forms. An advertiser might have wanted a piece published for free; a publication originating from an advertiser might have been offered to a newspaper through other sources; an advertiser might have been willing to pay but required a say on the placement of the publication; he may have wanted to place it in news or editorial columns or asked that it be printed without conventional marks of advertisements;Footnote ⁵⁵ or he might have conditioned a contract for paid advertisements on a newspaper's willingness to include additional material that he offered. If, as the midcentury legislation confirmed, advertisements were part of free speech, an informational realm of the first order on both national and local levels, and, per the testimony of Michael James Whitty, newspaper owner and editor, “amongst the most desirable reading,” then these varied ways of resisting clear distinctions between advertisements and news were not ungrounded.Footnote ⁵⁶ Newspapers had to develop responses, which pushed back against the communication of wants paradigm.

The victory of the campaign thus initiated a dialectic: As newspapers’ business models moved from political paternalism to advertising, the need to distinguish news from advertisements asserted itself, and required a readjustment of the meaning of advertising. The power of the campaign was in forcing a dialogue with the informational ideal it posited. This section examines the shifts in the conceptualization of advertising brought about by newspapers. It focuses on the 1880s and onwards, years that capture the height of the challenge of defining advertising, after two and a half decades of newspaper press expansion. These years have been identified by historians as distinctive in two senses: commercialization—with advertising as newspapers’ financial engine—and professionalization of the British press.Footnote ⁵⁷ As these processes advanced, newspapers’ battle with advertisers over the substantive control of their medium became salient. Pressures on advertising prices and terms of contracts (commissions, credit, periods of commitment, exclusivity and moreFootnote ⁵⁸), on paid contributions to press directories published by advertising agencies, on circulation data, and most crucially on the content and form of newspapers, were all mounting. Newspapers were defending themselves against allegations that they were in the service of advertisers.Footnote ⁵⁹

The circulars of the Newspaper Society are an important source in recovering this history.Footnote ⁶⁰ The Society was established in 1836. Initially the “Provincial Newspaper Society,” the organization represented the interests of provincial newspapers until they merged with the London newspapers in 1889. In 1860 the Society had 139 members, in 1881, it had 250; by the mid-1890s there were 360 members, just under 50 of them owners of London papers; in 1900, it was claimed that the number of newspapers owned by members was 725;Footnote ⁶¹ in 1903, membership was 348, representing approximately 1,000 newspapers, which were, as the Society's circular now consistently declared, “practically all of the London and Provincial daily press, and the leading weeklies”;Footnote ⁶² in 1908 membership was up to 357, and could “speak with authority on behalf of practically the whole press of the land.”Footnote ⁶³ The declared purposes of the Society included “careful supervision over Advertising Contractors and Agents, some of whom seek to impose upon and defraud Newspaper Proprietors.” The circulars were prepared by the Society's secretary, Henry Whorlow, charged with “watching over and obtaining information about, Advertisers and Advertising Agents” and passing it on to the Society's members.Footnote ⁶⁴ Whorlow also advised newspapers individually, obtaining legal advice as needed. He estimated that between 1881 and 1903, approximately 23,000 letters were written in response to individual inquiries, largely relating to advertising.Footnote ⁶⁵ A central problematic in the circular was the categorization of publications. It ran a regular section, “Advertisements Disguised as News,” aimed to alert the unwary, and to discipline members about boundaries.Footnote ⁶⁶ It also carefully followed litigation in local and national courts involving advertisers. Its historical value lies in its double function as a detailed descriptive record, and a normative source for an un-unionized trade; it collected information from members revealing how various newspapers dealt with advertisers, and disseminated it alongside recommended policies.

Two Views of Advertising

Newspapers’ responses to pressures from advertisers involved two dominant views on the categorization of publications. According to one view, the profit motive of the advertiser was the determining question. From this perspective, if an item could enhance a business's profit, or even save it money it would otherwise spend, it was an advertisement. Any mention of a business name therefore gravitated toward the “advertisement”side. To return to the report in the introduction of this article of a legal case of forgery, in categorizing it as an advertisement, the circular did not note unusual content: neither in the complimenting description, nor in the apparent redundancy of the legal proceedings. It noted the number of “allusions to Cobden's Pills and the Drug Company.”Footnote ⁶⁷ The circular customarily flagged in the same way any mentions of business names; all of them reflected business profit interests. We might call this the “pecuniary view.”

A second approach centered on the discretionary independence of newspaper professionals, regardless of the advertiser's motive. The important point from this perspective, elaborated in the Nineteenth Century by H. James Palmer, editor of the Yorkshire Post, was not that a business was mentioned, even in commendatory terms; it was instead that the editor was indifferent to the advertisers’ interests and could equally publish criticism.Footnote ⁶⁸ We might call this the “professionalist view.”

The two views spoke to the codependent processes of commercialization and professionalization of the newspaper press. The professionalist view often came into the picture to compensate for the limits of the pecuniary one, but it also shared much with it. Both views involved an assumption that the profit interests of advertisers made their publications epistemologically suspect. The suspicion was accompanied by rhetorical insistences on the difference between advertisements and news, which were hard to support in practice. The consequence was a second commonality: a tendency to treat formal separations—in the location and marking of advertisements in newspapers, and in divisions of functions, departments, and sourcing in agencies and newspapers—as indications of difference, when they were in fact the main support for it, and often breached. The effort, throughout, was a negotiation of fine lines between observance and violation of an asserted difference between news and advertisements. The two complementary views, with all their ironies and challenges, ultimately brought about a reconceptualization of advertising. The following sections examine them in turn.

In Search of the Profit Motive

The pecuniary view was not created out of whole cloth by newspapers; it had roots in the state practice of collecting the advertisement duty. The Newspaper Society prided itself on its “prominent part in the movement for the abolition of the ‘taxes on knowledge’”;Footnote ⁶⁹ however, the “freed” press ironically adopted the state practices that it had decried for decades, with very little critical awareness as far as sources reveal. Those practices are a good starting point for an exploration of the pecuniary view.

In 1851, the Revenue decided to apply the advertisement duty to announcements of “arrivals at hotels,” a Victorian celebrity-gossip favourite.Footnote ⁷⁰ Each hotel name would give rise to a charge as a separate advertisement.Footnote ⁷¹ The York Herald thundered: “To officially forbid this trifling gratification to the public… through fear that the Innkeepers may derive a little advantage from this mode of publicity, is one of the most contemptible movements ever made by officials of a liberal Government in an enlightened nation…” It hoped that reports of the Queen's whereabouts would be forbidden, to drive home the full absurdity of the Revenue's interpretation.Footnote ⁷² The Daily News decided to launch a local revolt, and published a list of arrivals that it brought to the Revenue's attention. The Revenue, at this high point of the campaign against taxes on knowledge, withdrew.Footnote ⁷³ The clash was not unusual. The advertisement duty was collected directly from newspapers: the stamp authorities got copies of every issue, counted advertisements, and calculated the charge; they were, therefore, in repeated clashes with newspapers. Like the Newspaper Society half a century later, the Revenue was seeking a rule of thumb that would maximize its revenue, and answer to a defensible logic. The profit motive was its solution.

Newspapers complained about the Revenue's “excessive strictness.”Footnote ⁷⁴ They rallied against what they saw as an overpowering suspicion of any private profit. The Era accused it of prohibiting reports in which there was public interest just because it was begrudging gratification to individuals.Footnote ⁷⁵ The cause in this instant was horse racing reports, but the Revenue's principle was all encompassing. A book review would become an advertisement if it mentioned a price, or if it commended the book;Footnote ⁷⁶ an article about a fair,Footnote ⁷⁷ a mention of a musical society,Footnote ⁷⁸ or a report about boat races was charged as advertisements.Footnote ⁷⁹ Newspapers summarized the principle: “paragraphs referring to events to take place… when there is a pecuniary interest in them.”Footnote ⁸⁰ To avoid liability, they were omitting particulars such as names and dates. They complained that they were being pushed to be “somewhat niggardly and stingy in our insertion of complementary paragraphs.”Footnote ⁸¹ Perhaps pantomimes would be the venue for untaxed exuberance, as Punch had it (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Evading the advertisement duty. Source: Punch, January 11, 1845, 26.

Frustrated newspapers argued for a straight line leading from the Queen's whereabouts to the sale of commodities: “Who shall say that…all news or information is not taxable?”Footnote ⁸² Alexander Sinclair of the Glasgow Herald reflected, publications “which newspapers have been accustomed to insert merely as pieces of news and as likely to interest their readers, have been suddenly discovered to be advertisements…”Footnote ⁸³

And yet, when the state no longer managed the distinction between advertisements and other content, and the interest in advertising revenue fell to newspapers themselves, they applied the Revenue's logic. We can find an analogous recommendation by the Newspaper Society for virtually any Revenue position that frustrated newspapers. If hotel names were suspect for the tax authorities, so were the attractions of a town seeking to interest tourists suspect for newspapers.Footnote ⁸⁴ The circular even warned that weather reports, which had become standard in dailies, were suspected advertisements, with “a tendency to see only the bright side of the barometer.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Fashionable “literary notes” were flagged as advertisements for books, just as the Revenue flagged reviews;Footnote ⁸⁶ if the Revenue taxed musical society notices, Whorlow remonstrated against attempts to get free notices of Brinsmead's concerts, more on which subsequently;Footnote ⁸⁷ a billiard competition notice organized by a manufacturer of billiard tables was cause for the circular's scrutiny, just as sporting events were for the Revenue.Footnote ⁸⁸ The circular routinely advised that reports of exhibitions mentioning specific products should be treated as advertisements, and that exhibitions themselves, serving as a source of revenue for organizers, were matters of debate, as fairs were for the Revenue.Footnote ⁸⁹ The pursuit of business names that stood for the profit interest was no trivial effort. Even death was not beyond suspicion: obituary notices and debates about burial methods might mention a business that stood to profit from publicity.Footnote ⁹⁰ In his 1919 lectures, Russell complained that if an advertised product happened to enter into the news, “the papers will go ever so far round to avoid naming it.”Footnote ⁹¹

Business name dropping was consistently flagged by newspapers as advertising, and the Society advised its members to avoid free mentions. More generally, the circular advocated a cynical view of advertisers’ appeals to the public interest given their private pecuniary one. Newspapers’ stakes were higher than stakes had been for the Revenue: the advertisement duty had been a small budget component and only one part of press control, but the news/advertisements distinction was a matter of survival, of power—economic and political—and of self-definition for commercial newspapers. In a context of sharp increase in advertising volume, more systematic approaches of professional advertisers than either the Revenue or earlier newspapers encountered, and the established framing of advertising as essential information following the midcentury campaign, the pecuniary view was advocated and tested across a dizzying array of challenges, which revealed its limitations.

Advertisers argued that there was a direct and general public interest in their commodities, be they survey maps of which the public was ignorant,Footnote ⁹² bicycles with which it was ecstatic,Footnote ⁹³ new inventions like safe paraffin lamps,Footnote ⁹⁴ cures for cancer,Footnote ⁹⁵ or anything in between. Styles of proposed publications varied to include business-like reports, lectures, historical accounts of the business or the branded commodity, and articles with a promotional and sensational tone. When a newspaper was recalcitrant, advertisers could be explicit: “Will you allow me to point out that…it is an advertisement not for the benefit, or only very indirectly for the benefit of the college, but very directly for the benefit of persons living in the locality…”Footnote ⁹⁶ Advertisers also pointed out that they were the only professional sources for the technical details of their products.Footnote ⁹⁷ These positions endorsed the logic of the campaign against the advertisement duty.

In many published reflections on advertising, importantly in the burgeoning literature of press directories, advertisers continued to develop the same meanings, Henry Sell, for example, argued that “to the trading community, the markets and the advertising columns…are not only significant, but indispensable.”Footnote ⁹⁸ When Clarence Moran defined “advertisement,” he said it was “primarily the expression of a want,”Footnote ⁹⁹ whereas J. B. Williams marvelled at “the plight of our ancestors” who had lived without “means of making known their wants.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Stead Jr.’s theory of advertising levelled all publicity, commercial and political: “Those who know anything of political life are well aware of this keen competition to obtain…conspicuous…advertisement.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ The levelling argument, it is worth observing, was also iterated in the structural reversal of relations between advertisers and newspapers effected by the new genre of press directories: Advertisers compelled newspapers to advertise in directories, offered essays on key themes of the industry, and most crucially, assumed the position of being the only reliable suppliers of newspaper data, represented as information of public interest that newspapers tried to obscure. If all that was not enough, the public interest argument for advertisements had to be resisted in years that saw the press's growing association of the concept of “public interest” with what the public wanted, rather than what was paternalistically considered good for it.Footnote ¹⁰² The task was daunting.

The argument for a public interest in commodities was just one challenge; a branded commodity or service could be part of a broader story of interest to the public. For example, a report about a new theater might mention the decorators,Footnote ¹⁰³ a report about a ship accident mentioned the brand of soaps floating on the water,Footnote ¹⁰⁴ and a “Ladies Column” on daily gossip noted household brands.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The issue would be familiar today under the banner of “product placement,” but the banner already assumes what historically needed substantiation; namely, that there was a way of disentangling advertisements from news within publications.

Legal cases involved businesses as has been noted. Although suspicious, the precise crossing of the line from news reporting to advertising was open to creative interpretation; in one suggestion, it only occurred with the reproduction of the case report after it had first appeared in a newspaper.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ No less challenging, business was often involved in patriotic and imperial concerns. For example, during the Boer War, the Eiffel Tower Factory asked for a publication of its contribution of 1,000 bottles of Eiffel Tower Lemonade in response to the outcry of soldiers, as it reported, to improve the bad water in South Africa. The company also offered discounted concentration to soldiers’ families, and tried to enlist the newspapers, which the circular described as an abuse of public patriotic sentiment.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ A shoe factory playing on the same sentiments when the First World War began, fared no purchase.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Schweppes's advertising agents asked for a publication of the purchase of a soda water bottle received from the wreck of the Royal George, but at least one newspaper refused;Footnote ¹⁰⁹ the Khedive of Egypt purchased a Merryweather steam fire engine, but the circular stood firm against the publication of this purchase;Footnote ¹¹⁰ the Princess of Denmark was presented with a photography book by F. and R. Speaight at Buckingham, yet a Society member forwarded the piece to Whorlow rather than publish it;Footnote ¹¹¹ and toward the coronation of George V, the “pyrotechnists” Pain and Sons argued that the historic event justified an article on their expertise, to Whorlow's frustration.Footnote ¹¹² Businesses were involved in philanthropic activity, and expected newspaper reports, but the circular resisted; one group of firms attracted the wrath of an active secretary when it sought to publish a “novel combination of charitable effort and commercial enterprise”;Footnote ¹¹³ Lever Brothers were not encouraged when they wanted publication of their presenting a ton of soap to the poor of Marylebone.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Finally, advertisements were often themselves a public issue. For example, when the London Aquarium advertised the athletic performances of Zaeo in a controversial poster, to the chagrin of the National Vigilance Association, a heated public and regulatory debate ensued; the Aquarium only drew more profits, and the Star repeated the wisdom of the circular's advocacy: “And here again the Aquarium has got two and a quarter column advertisement in the Times and a corresponding measure in all the other papers free—gratis.”Footnote ¹¹⁵

The advocacy against free advertisements did not mean that advertisers were unsuccessful; on the contrary, numerous examples revealed that advertisers successfully challenged the boundaries between advertisements and news. Publishing “gratuitous advertisements” and “free puffs” as the circular called them, was standard. The elaborate articulations of the problem only made more glaring the discrepancy between the principle of singling out advertisements by the pecuniary motives of their authors, and the inability to maintain separations in practice. Two main reasons explain the discrepancy. First, it was impossible to hunt down the profit motive for isolated items. Second, the substantive logic was unstable: there was, as advertisers argued, a public interest side to advertisements, and there was also a pecuniary side to news; these facts made it difficult to use the profit motive as a guide to distinction. I will consider the two reasons in turn.

The difficulty of isolating the profit interest could be seen in the 1892 case of Morris v. Brinsmead. Brinsmead were piano makers, who appreciated the benefits of advertising (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

A Brinsmead advertisement. Source: Daily Graphic, September 2, 1893, 11.

In the mid-1880s Morris was their advertising agent; he had published not only regular advertisements but also news paragraphs. When not paid for the latter, he sued. His lawyer argued in the opening statement that the contractual arrangement was “to supply notices to the press in the shape of ordinary news, but were really ‘puffs.’” In a letter to Brinsmead, Morris asserted: “As you are aware, the successful results of my unwavering efforts have…been most beneficial…in securing unusual publicity…portraits, memoirs, articles, notices, and flattering paragraphs in every conceivable form…”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Excerpts from two publications of the kind discussed in the trial are shown in Figures 3 and 4.

Figure 3.

A Brinsmead “puff paragraph.” Source: Era, November 14, 1885.

Figure 4.

A Brinsmead “puff paragraph.” Source: Standard, November 9, 1885, 4.

Items of this kind were published without charge in some papers, particularly London dailies such as the Graphic and Illustrated London News. The Pall Mall Gazette, itself implicated in publications of Brinsmead's paragraphs, called the case “The Paragraphist and the Piano Makers,” and Lloyd's Weekly called it “The Puff Paragraph Case.” Titles of this kind bespoke discomfort.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The John Bull promptly published denials of any connection with Morris.Footnote ¹¹⁸ As reports multiplied, and laughter in the court became laughter beyond it, the Billposter, a periodical for outdoor advertisers, enjoyed seeing a competing advertising medium in a state of embarrassment.Footnote ¹¹⁹

Things became complicated when Brinsmead, who refused to pay, argued that matters of public interest were customarily published for free, as a complementary aspect of paid advertising. They brought to the stand the cashier of the Morning Post who confirmed as much, and were about to call witnesses from the Times and the Daily News when the judge ruled that the evidence was inadmissible.Footnote ¹²⁰ The reason was not clear; an explanation in the Morning Post, which obscured its own employee's testimony, suggested that these were not expert witnesses but rather “men speaking with a respect to a particular office.”Footnote ¹²¹ Whether that was the precise judicial reasoning or an interested interpretation remains in question.

There was no legal principle that made “puff paragraphs” illegal, as the judge explained to the jury, hence all depended on the contract between Morris and Brinsmead.Footnote ¹²² Morris won the case, and Whorlow gloated in the circular about finally receiving a clear confirmation about the hidden profit: the money did not reach the newspapers, which were asked to acknowledge the public interest in the publications, but it passed between the trader and the agent, revealing the real category of the published material at stake.Footnote ¹²³ The case, however, only showed how difficult it was to put a finger on the profit motive for specific published material. The evidence showed that the terms of payment between Morris and Brinsmead were never clear, the jury had a hard time reaching a decision, and, in any case, Morris won less than 25% of his demand (£150 of £637). Whorlow was simplifying a complex picture to suit the circular's standard warnings against free puffs.

Morris v. Brinsmead revealed the tip of the iceberg with regard to the relations of businesses, agencies, and newspapers, which were too complex for the attempt to nail down a profit element that would set advertisements apart. One could see the profit motive nowhere and everywhere: relations involved implicit and explicit conditionings of advertising on news publications, for example, when Kodak suggested that if their “camera notes” were published, a large advertisement would also appear alongside them;Footnote ¹²⁴ more generally, newspapers understood that future business depended on such expectations, and were also involved in a signalling game vis-a-vis other advertisers.Footnote ¹²⁵ These demands were bidirectional, coming from newspapers no less than advertisers, in recognition of the fuzzy boundary line between news and advertisements. The Times, for example, suggested that Colonial news would be more forthcoming with Colonial advertisements.Footnote ¹²⁶ Relations also involved occasional barters, where advertisements were exchanged for commodities. One Society member, who had published a report mentioning the brand of champagne used at the Lord Mayor's banquet, did so only after he received the bottle: “I never expected it…I didn't know what to do with it. I like champagne…I inserted a two-line paragraph…”;Footnote ¹²⁷ other barter exchanges were less amused and more systematic. The relations also included conditional payments that depended on the sales generated by the advertisement.Footnote ¹²⁸ Most significantly, there were long-term credit arrangements with both end-advertisers and advertising agencies, which, as Morris admitted in court, “certainly has not lessened” his influence with newspapers.Footnote ¹²⁹ As the Builder observed, advertisers got newspaper “notices” which they themselves wrote “by paying a man who is not officially on the staff of the paper, but who has credit with them…”Footnote ¹³⁰

Isolating the profit motive was not only hopeless within these realities of business relationships, it was also often counterproductive for business. For this reason, the prediction of the Saturday Review after Morris v. Brinsmead, that “tricks…cease to be useful when they become public property” was simple optimism.Footnote ¹³¹ Unsurprisingly, a consistent position of the Society was that “they were not a trades union”; the Society's function was to disseminate information and give advice, not to enforce a uniform practice that did not fit the competitive newspaper market.Footnote ¹³² The circular advocated ideals that were breached by consent.Footnote ¹³³

Alongside the realities of business relationships that complicated the pecuniary view, the logic of this view was unstable: there was a public interest side to advertisements, and there was a pecuniary side to news.

The substantive argument of advertisers was not without merit. Public life hinged on economic life, and there was no obvious way to explain how it could not bleed into news. Some publications seemed to gradually move from one category to another. For example, reports about the financial condition and business successes of companies increasingly shifted from paid advertising to news, a process some commentators were amazed to see accepted complacently.Footnote ¹³⁴ Companies, however, expectedly insisted that information about their businesses was “for the benefit of… readers.”Footnote ¹³⁵ Sports items were also a matter of debate, with some papers treating them as advertisements, and many others treating them as news.Footnote ¹³⁶ Political and economic concerns were hopelessly mixed in government advertising, which preoccupied the Society. Governmental departments required official and unofficial material to be published, for which they were not keen to pay, claiming a public interest. In discussing the question at the annual conference of 1888, the Society's then-President, Francis Hewitt of the Leicester Daily Post, admitted: “Between what is undoubtedly news and what are undoubtedly advertisements there is a very wide field of public information, where newspaper proprietors interpret their duties according to their interests.”Footnote ¹³⁷ It should come as small surprise that newspapers were especially willing to allow Colonial governmental advertisers to have a say about news columns which dealt with their colonies, as Simon Potter observes.Footnote ¹³⁸

Whorlow tried to formulate more complex indications, which were amusingly circular, assuming the naturalness of the distinction between advertisements and news, and finally reverting to the search for profit as the ultimate guide: “[I]t is not sufficient, in endeavouring the guard against the advertisement pirate, merely to keep a sharp look out for personal allusions, but a distinction must be drawn between those allusions which come naturally where news is inserted upon its merits, and those which are artfully contrived for the purpose of hoodwinking the unwary editor. A good serviceable test to apply in all doubtful cases would be to consider whether the suspected matter was calculated, either directly or indirectly, to prevent or diminish legitimate paid for advertising.”Footnote ¹³⁹

The dangers of “suspected matter” assumed radical proportions in cases that would today be classified as “fake news,” in which the conceptual instability of the pecuniary view became manifest. Thefts and fires were invented to advertise safes; a murder was made up to advertise milk; a report of a drowned body in the Thames turned out to be an invention of the advertisers of the watch allegedly found on the body; and an accident of the Lord Mayor's carriage was fictionalized just outside an aspiring silver shop.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ More challenging still were cases that we might call “manufactured news,” which confused any sense of reality. Theaters, which by definition operated in these zones of incoherence, were leaders in the field. In 1910, Frank Curzon, manager of the Prince of Wales Theatre, was responsible for one of these.

In the so-called “matinee hat incident,” Blanche Eardley and a friend came to a matinee performance wearing large hats; as the New York Times reported, hers was “nearly one yard wide, and her friend's even larger.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ Matinee hats in theaters attracted hostility, which was particularly vocal in the 1890s when the hats debate became something akin to a gender war.Footnote ¹⁴² They were widely caricatured, as in the example from Judy shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5.

Press ridicule of the matinee hat. Source: Judy, March 31, 1897, 155.

Eardley said that they had intended to take off the hats, but before they sat down, a man behind them cried “Take off those ridiculous hats.” Eardley refused, and the man soon continued, “Are you going to take off those absurd hats?” The audience grew excited; Eardley responded that she would not because of the man's rudeness. The man called Curzon, who asked Eardley to take off the hat. She refused and, after an argument, Curzon would not let her return to the stalls. She published a letter that explained that she was establishing her right as a woman to keep her head covered. Curzon responded that he would not allow the vindication of rights of women at the expense of the peace and comfort of his audience, and Eardley soon sued him for assault, claiming that he had physically held her back. The Times reported the proceedings with all the theatrical detail. Witnesses disagreed about the assault. The magistrate eventually acquitted Curzon: “It was obviously impossible for any one to get a view who sat behind the hat she was wearing. People who went to the theatre must behave reasonably.” The decision was received with applause in the court.Footnote ¹⁴³

The episode was notorious; strangely, it was often memorialized as if it had ended there, when in fact it had not. A few months later, one Thomas Lumley Dann and his wife Ethele sued Curzon for failing to pay them for “carrying out the adventure.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ It turned out that the incident was, as contemporaries described it, an advertisement: “Nobody knew how amusing the matinee hat case was until Mr. Curzon explained that the hat, and the lady, and the lady's husband were all actors in a ‘put-up job.’”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ The entire interaction, including the assault charges, were orchestrated by Dann as “an excellent advertisement both for the theatre and for the defendant himself as manager.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Ethele Dann acted as Eardley's friend. An advertiser had finally confirmed traditional suspicions that courts were being used as advertising media; Curzon turned familiar caricatures into a dramatized reality.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

Curzon admitted the setup, but denied the promise to pay. The courts were offended: The Westminster County Court, in which Dann's suit was first litigated, would not enforce the contract, yet made Curzon pay his own costs in criticism of his conduct. The Saturday Review was curious about the next round: “How far you can carry a joke has never yet been decided by a superior court.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Not very far: Curzon and Dann both appealed to the King's Bench and lost, in what became a contract casebook reference. A contract to bring a case into court merely for advertisement was against public policy, and was therefore unenforceable. The court essentially defined the event as unreal: Whether Curzon had or had not touched Blanche, there was no assault, because it was done with the ladies’ consent. The Criminal Court was therefore asked to adjudicate something which “to the knowledge of the parties had not happened.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹

Something had happened, of course. At first sight, the entire episode would seem an extreme example of the dangers of advertisers. However, as the Penny Illustrated Paper suggested, it could lead to a questioning of the status of news per se. A comic piece explored the “wonderful possibilities” that Curzon's publicity stunt suggested. The piece featured interviews with a list of characters, among them an “Amy Shortcash,” who argues that the £1,500 worth of jewellery on her was an advertising scheme; and a “D S Windell,” who tells the reporter that his fraudulent banking was an advertisement treated ungenerously.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Just as advertisements could make news, it was implied, news events could dissolve into advertisements, especially if they were motivated by an interest in money. This option was no less troubling. The critique suggested that the omnipresent profit motive was a cause of confusion rather than distinction.

This was a problem embedded, as has been discussed, in the business structures of the commercial press. It received cultural expression in no lesser a figure than Jack the Ripper. The Ripper was the mysterious perpetrator of a series of murders and body mutilations of London East End prostitutes between August and November 1888.Footnote ¹⁵¹ His pseudonym was coined in a letter known as “Dear Boss,” which the Central News Agency claimed to have received on September 27, 1888, and handed to the Scotland Yard. The letter was the second alleged communication to have reached the police; it would usher in a flood of letters, eventually numbering more than 200, across Britain, which made for the Ripper's mythology. Published by the police as part of the investigation, “Dear Boss” was exciting news; the writer taunted the investigators, as the media and public were doing, for failing to catch him; he claimed that he was “down on whores and…shan't quit ripping them” until caught; he used red ink because the “proper red stuff” (blood) he had collected “went thick like glue”; and he promised to “clip the lady's ears off” on his next “job.” Another communication shortly handed by the Central News Agency referred to a “double event,” and was also published. Earlobe mutilation (of Catherine Eddowes) and double murder (Eddowes and Elizabeth Stride) had just materialized, giving possible credence to the two letters. However, some police officials and journalists theorized that the letters were written by a journalist seeking to increase newspaper sales.Footnote ¹⁵² Because news items were fully commodified market products, journalists could be described as advertisers of their own products; according to this understanding, the categorization of any journalistic publication would defy an either/or choice between news and advertisement. The incoherent advertisements/news boundary became mixed up with the aura of horrific mystery surrounding the Whitechapel murders.Footnote ¹⁵³ And the so-called “enterprising journalist” theory lives on; recently, a forensic linguistics analysis provided new possible support for; it received wide media coverage in fake-news terms, amusing in its sensationalist tones given the history of this phenomenon.Footnote ¹⁵⁴

The implication with capitalist profit across all elements of the newspaper press was captured poignantly in John Ruskin's efforts to disengage from it. He had famously declared he would not advertise his writings; in 1872, he explained the power of individual actions of that kind to check capitalist commerce; books, he continued, should be read by advice and not advertisement; book reviews were no better, for they were paid-for opinions. Ruskin was determined to disengage from newspapers. He then went on to wonder how his readers might learn of his critical work if they had no one to advise them; failing an ideal world of lists of worthy literature created by impartial volunteers, Ruskin fell back on sending copies of his publications to the newspapers, but refusing to pay for advertisements.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Just over a year later, he admitted that that position was inconsistent, and decided not to send free copies to newspapers any longer.Footnote ¹⁵⁶

If newspapers were to resist the conclusion that Ruskin had reached, which saw them as fully contaminated by profit, a theory of substantive difference had to complement the inherent suspicion of advertisers. The professionalist view, examined in the next section, came to the rescue in such moments.

In Search of a Professional Ideal

The professionalist view was necessary not only at the margins of advertising inventiveness that led to fake news, but also at the center: As often as advertisers wanted free publication of items that they argued were news, they were happy to pay for them, and essentially sought to leverage their monied position to have a say about news content. It was in fact easy to complain about advertisers who refused to pay for valuable material submitted for publication, or who fabricated stories, but the situation was more challenging when they did not, because newspaper owners were experiencing loss of control over their properties. Here, there was no need to uncover the profit motive: it was plainly admitted by willingness to pay, and newspapers were getting their share. Because the profit motive cut both ways, when newspapers resisted, they had to articulate alternative ideals.

The professionalist view suggested that advertisers should not influence news and editorial content (formal presentation and arrangement included), because news involved a unique knowledge generated by professionals in journalism. The view adopted an informational ideal of veracity, and saw news as (ideally) unbiased, unlike advertisements. This position elevated news while retaining advertising as an unredeemed category.

Ideals of journalism, it should be clarified, were being debated in a broader context; in particular, the shift in emphasis from “views” to “news” and the emerging cult, as Mark Hampton called it, of facts and impartiality, were considered in the context of newspapers’ role in an expanding democracy.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ What follows examines the uses of ideals of professionalism to meet challenges posed by advertising content, and to frame advertising. The conceptual language developed in debates about the relationship of the press to political consciousness and freedom from state control could only be shifted to the distinction between news and advertising content with some conscious deliberation about its applicability; at the very least, the meaning of bias and of independence in each context needed elaboration, yet that element was missing. The substantive assumption of difference that animated the professionalist view was typically asserted rather than shown. Contradicted by the practices of the industry, its power—which is not to be underestimated—was largely rhetorical. Formal indications of advertisements within newspapers, and separations in functions, were stand-ins for the asserted substantive difference between news and advertisements. However, the difficulties of maintaining them repeatedly questioned the implied hierarchy of publication types.

The circular expressed concerns for the independence of newspapers on a regular basis. Challenges to independence from advertisers came in various forms. For one, advertisers sent orders for paid material, which explicitly dictated avoiding distraction. Here, for example, was an instruction from Sell's advertising agency:

Advertisers made these requirements regularly. Advertising: A Monthly Journal for Every Advertiser offered as expert advice that “[a] carefully worded ‘next-to, or amongst reading matter’ announcement is always effective.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Newspapers often complied; they needed advertisers, and “after reading matter” advertisements often paid better than cover ones.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Such contracts were enforced when they reached the courts, as they occasionally did.Footnote ¹⁶¹

Judicial tolerance could be seen at its limits when readers were deceived by paid editorial columns: “If you had sat here and heard the statements of widows who have parted with their money entirely on the strength of these paragraphs, your heart would have guided you as to what was right to do in the future.”Footnote ¹⁶² This was Alderman Green at the Guildhall Police Court, losing his patience with a witness from the advertising agency of Gibbs, Smith and Co. in a litigation that became known as the “Press Opinions” case. Thomas Tarrant was a fraudulent stockbroker who expanded his business with the aid of editorial endorsements obtained through his agents. The editorials congratulated the firm for “good profits,” under titles such as “Knowledge Is Power.” They were paid items, charged by the agency at 25% more than regular advertisements. Unlike cases in which only traders and their advertising agents were implicated, here the judges were troubled by the march of defrauded readers in court; by the time the case reached the Old Bailey, the practice of paid editorials was described as a scandal.Footnote ¹⁶³ Judicial moral warnings fed into the professionalist view.

Fraud cases such as Tarrant called attention to the basis of belief. Whorlow warned newspapers that the journalistic voice could induce readers to risk their money. Paragraphs of that kind required “knowledge which justifies the endorsement of their contents.”Footnote ¹⁶⁴ In the Tarrant case, one editor testified: “It never struck me that the object was to represent that it was our independent opinion.” Another, however, admitted that the item was “full of the editorial ‘we.’”Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Such practices were rampant, as were criticisms.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Interestingly, in the days of the advertisement duty, the Revenue wanted to tax editorial columns that endorsed brands. The Society was resistant, as newspapers had been to all positions of the Revenue that were later repeated, yet, acknowledging the presence of the profit motive in newspapers’ own practices, the Circular also wondered if in that case taxation did not serve as “protection against ourselves.”Footnote ¹⁶⁷

References to “independence,” and the different kind of knowledge guaranteed by journalism, were taken as self-explanatory when asserted in relation to advertising. “[T]hat independence which is the proud characteristic of English journalism” was a self-congratulating account that started with an obviousness having little to do with the challenges of advertising, and then turned to face them.Footnote ¹⁶⁸

Advertisers’ interests were assumed to be an inherent taint. One editor received an order from International Plasmon (food sellers), which required an advertisement to be “preceded by at least five inches of unpaid reading matter, and not divided from news…Market and Sporting Items…are not regarded as reading matter within the meaning of our order.” The editor wrote to the Society about the “unblushing impudence”; he considered placing the order in the wastepaper basket—the ultimate insult with which newspapers’ personnel could treat advertising ordersFootnote ¹⁶⁹—but first answered the advertiser “Your order…we consider an insult to any self-respecting newspaper…”Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Why that was so was too obvious to explain. Newspapers’ insistence on independence was often discussed in the language of a natural order: “a singular reversal of the order of things is brought about, and newspaper proprietors, and editors, abrogate their proper functions in favour of the advertising agents.”Footnote ¹⁷¹

Advertisers were adept at internalizing critique, and could turn the problem itself to use, as one Christchurch paper suggested: A piece titled “Crooked Ways of Advertising” featured a complaint about misleading editorials, only to end as itself an advertisement for Waterbury watches.Footnote ¹⁷² There was no end to creativity. Advertisers such as Gordon Selfridge combined, as the Circular put it, editorials and advertisements in new ways, as can been seen, for example, in Figures 6 and 7.

Figure 6.

Selfridge combining advertisements and editorials. Source: Penny Illustrated Paper, March 15, 1913, 11.

Figure 7.

Selfridge combining advertisements and editorials. Source: Times, February 23, 1909, 4.

The circular hesitated in the face of sophisticated forces: The “new system of combining advertisements with editorial matter…although…may be harmless within reasonable bounds…a line ought to be drawn.”Footnote ¹⁷³ Short of obvious fraud, the way to draw the line remained unspecified. The codependencies of newspapers and advertisers were such that all had an interest in rhetorically arguing for separations, without ever elaborating implications too sharply.

That said, paid material in news and editorial columns were the least of the challenges for the professionalist view. Functions themselves were often mixed. Within newspapers, a single person could be both a reporter and an advertisement canvasser; this was unsurprising given patterns of employment, which, below the editor and possibly sub-editor, were often precarious: causal or freelance, and given an absence of professional entry requirements.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ In small newspapers owners covered multiple functions. The diaries of Anthony Hewitson, who had been the owner of the Preston Chronicle and later the Wakefield Herald, include entries like this one, from 1872: “Was out nearly all day getting advertisements for paper. Sub-editing at night till 10.”Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Functions were also unstable, with new ones developing rapidly; the “press agent,” as Dann (from the matinee hat affair) was defined, was one of “these enterprising intermediaries” who puzzled the Society.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ If only “the Press rigidly held aloof from all such discreditable schemes, the ‘publicity agent’ would soon die of inanition,” Whorlow fantasized after Dann's next attempt at news making, this time with an invented poor boy-protégé, and a violinist as client.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ The professional journalist would not create such confusion. These positions were ironic, because newspaper owners were largely responsible for the ever-receding liberal ideals of professionalism, which required conditions that secured independence from managerial and owner control (choice, remuneration, job security, status).Footnote ¹⁷⁸ The circular was essentially redirecting criticism levelled at newspapers themselves for failing to meet these ideals. And even if journalists’ professional definition had been better circumscribed, expanding work with advertising agencies complicated matters, because they too combined operations, and proposed to supply news with advertisements. As Terry Nevett noted, news and advertisements supplies were closely interrelated.Footnote ¹⁷⁹

In December 1896, the circular reported a new “per contra” system: An advertising agent offered newspapers a service of news at fixed rates for fixed periods, and guaranteed a quantity of advertisements to offset the cost of the news. Newspapers refusing to take the news were denied the advertisements, and some succumbed to the pressure. Whorlow warned against the loss of independence, which he saw as a forgone conclusion in France. The appetites of advertisers, Palmer was warning, only grew.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Palmer argued in 1897 that encroachments on news and editorial columns were comparatively new, apparently not having read the circular of the last decade and a half too attentively, but Whorlow agreed that the problem grew more daunting. The Society convened a meeting of the provincial dailies to discuss “per contra” offers, realizing in retrospect that this was too narrow a group: London papers too were facing increasing pressure from advertisers. It condemned the system, and highlighted the risk to independence, the unfair basis for placing advertisements, and the danger of mixing news with “puffs.” However, as in other cases, the meeting declined to take concerted action.Footnote ¹⁸¹ Episodes kept arising.Footnote ¹⁸²

An additional element, which vocal spokesmen of newspapers were not as keen to flag, was that news suppliers also played on the opacity of distinctions. The rise of New Journalism itself reflected an appeal to styles associated with advertising as a mode of news reporting, and to contents that took a broad account of popular interest, so that claims about the greater vulgarity of the advertiser, of the kind that Palmer was making with many others, were increasingly something of a misnomer.Footnote ¹⁸³ At the same time, burgeoning news agencies were quick to realize that the profits of blurred boundaries could flow their way. In September 1913, a manager at Reuters’ advertising department approached advertisers with an offer: If they shifted their business to Reuters, “it would enable [Reuters] to make representations to the newspapers for extended editorial reference to [the advertiser's] interests,” which would be a better use of money in both Britain and Australia. Reuters was in a position to persuade papers to “open their columns more readily” and offer advertisers more free publicity, it was promised.

The offer was not a novelty, but it was blunt enough, and economically significant enough, to cause a commotion.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Advertising agencies, chief among them Street and Co., which the Circular flagged for years for their efforts to obtain “disguised” advertisements, jumped to protect the inviolability of newspapers.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ They immediately notified the Newspaper Society, passed resolutions against the injury to the “prestige…of the Press,” and called on newspapers to limit the activities of news agencies to news. If the method continued, agents warned as if they had not invented it, “the impartiality and authenticity of the columns of the newspapers no longer exist.”Footnote ¹⁸⁶ The Times protested that newspapers could not be influenced in any case, but called on Reuters for an explanation.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Baron de Reuter had to minimize damages, and promptly wrote to the Society. He insisted that his “News Agency is…wholly dissevered from and independent of all financial undertakings or influences whatever.” The manager who wrote the letter may have been “a little exuberant in some passages” but ultimately the meaning was distorted; it was an “unfortunate phraseology,” de Reuter wrote, and no future confusion would arise.Footnote ¹⁸⁸

Nothing could have spoken to the difficulties of differentiating news from advertisements more clearly than the fluidity of all roles: A news agency offering advertising as news; advertising agencies that often challenged the distinctions shocked at the affront to newspapers’ integrity; a newspaper denying that anything of the kind could happen despite its own practices, and after years of reporting these happenings in the circular; and, finally, two figures, an advertiser (in Reuters) who wrote plainly, and a self-appointed news agent (de Reuter himself) who fudged the meaning of words.

The Times was unimpressed with the interpretive turn that de Reuter took, which did not “show any appreciation of the real gravamen of the charge.” Letters were flowing in from agencies and newspapers, speaking to the rampant practices of mixing advertisements and news. The Times concluded that it was time to escalate its position; it announced that “no advertisements will be accepted from agencies which supply news, or vice versa. We shall regard every agency as fulfilling one function or the other, but not both.” The heading was emphatic (Figure 8).

Figure 8.

The Times committing to stricter separations between advertisements and news. Source: Times, October 29, 1913, 8.

The Times soon declared, to avoid misconceptions about its editorial independence, that it would also refuse requests for editorial notices from advertising agents; traders and companies who wanted to have their announcements considered had to contact the city editor directly.Footnote ¹⁸⁹

The strategy of the Times was in line with a general trend to assert separations between news and advertisements by relying on formal rather than substantive grounds, while taking the substantive assumption of difference for granted. It was actually similar to de Reuter's justification, which relied on the logic of functional separations within his agency, only taking it one step further. Assertions of difference, which formal separations were supposed to manifest, in fact depended on them.

Formal separations had another merit. The process of depreciating advertisements was risky: newspapers could not delegitimize advertising completely without undermining their own financial viability, and legitimacy; if they were not careful they would have to stop publishing advertisements, or assume responsibility to screen their contents, neither of which they could afford. One of the ways to hold the stick from both ends was to rely on the respectability of the advertising agent. The implication was a division of labor: if advertisers kept to their sections, the assumption was that a serious agent provided some guarantee that the advertisements were, within the limits of their genre, legitimate.

In some instances, reliance on agencies was not enough. When the editor of Judy was convicted in 1907 for knowingly publishing an indecent advertisement, the Tribune announced that it was “as anxious to ensure the clean, bona-fide nature of its advertisements as it is anxious to ensure the accuracy of its news” and would apply screening processes to exclude fraudulent or offensive advertisements. Whorlow worried: “when it comes to enquiring into the motives of advertisers, where is it possible to draw a line?”Footnote ¹⁹⁰ The general rule, he assured members in the following year, “is to assume their [advertisers] genuineness unless the announcements bear upon the face of them unmistakable evidence of fraud or illegality.” The reason was the standard suspicion of advertisers embedded in the self-definition of the newspaper press: “The whole system of trade advertising is to a large extent made up of exaggeration and puffery, and it has never been looked upon as the duty of the newspapers to act as advertisement censors in regard to taste or strict veracity.”Footnote ¹⁹¹ A division of labor reliant on the “creditable firm” could affirm advertising's inferiority, and yet keep it within the bounds of legitimacy.Footnote ¹⁹²

The process of legitimization through advertising agencies was paralleled by professionalization in the advertising industry itself. The same years saw the rise of advertising agencies’ and advertising managers’ associations, clubs and syndicates, courses, advice books, and professional magazines, which increasingly standardized the field, and turned it into an area of technical expertise and specialist study, in the process distinguishing between legitimate and competent, and illegitimate and incompetent, advertising, and between respectable and unrespectable agents.Footnote ¹⁹³

Assertions of formal boundaries unified newspapers’ responses to the challenge of differentiating news from advertisements. Divisions of labor between advertising and journalism, and a flagging of the difference to readers through formal marks of type, heading, and location in newspapers, were necessary to assert the superiority of news. However, the levels of separations varied. For many, the new policies of the Times, which some other newspapers reportedly adopted, were too much. The Executive Committee of the Society convened to discuss the Reuters affair. It published a detailed report in the (confidential) circular, which ultimately sought to calm things down and retain a level of messiness that the Times wanted cleared up. The committee proposed a distinction between news and editorial columns, calling to its aid a long-standing debate about the relative place of values and facts in journalism, and bringing it to bear on the problem of advertising with no discussion of a basic question: Did editorial opinion, when applied to market products rather than political questions, raise different issues from news columns about the same products? On the committee's analysis, editorial notices and puffs were “part of the stock-in-trade” of advertising agents. The “obvious meaning” of the unfortunate Reuters manager was that he could obtain editorial notices, not the contamination of news. Although editorial notices were unsatisfactory, they still had “nothing whatever to do with blending advertisements with…news services.” Reuters “happily stands acquitted.”Footnote ¹⁹⁴ The distinction did not address the structural porousness at Reuters, nor did it resolve the “unsatisfactory” ambiguity of editorial opinion, nor did it explain the distinction of news. After years of dancing around these questions, the representative body of the Newspaper Society well knew that an unstable balance of powers was hinged on tinkering, gently and confidentially, with fine lines, while retaining bombastic commitments to clear distinctions as advertisements—or headlines—for the rest of the press.