Abstract
This chapter surveys the various activities and outputs of a late eighteenth-century press managed by Joseph Gales out of Hartshead Square, Sheffield. Founded in 1787, the press is best remembered for producing two radical newspapers, The Sheffield Register, edited by Gales, and The Sheffield Iris, edited by Gales’ protégé, James Montgomery. These papers are well recognised as making a significant contribution to the development of regional news culture. They are less well known for functioning as part of a broader business model which saw Gales’ wife, Winifred, managing a bookshop in Hartshead Square whilst Gales also used his press to furnish the Sheffield Society for Constitutional Information (SSCI) with books, pamphlets, appeals, and other items of political ephemera. In sourcing texts from London and reprinting or selling them in York, Gales actively shaped Sheffield’s literary and political culture. However, his output sees him perpetually obscuring his own agency, disguising a discrete strategy that prescribed as much as it described the character of his Sheffield readers.
The archival research used to produce this chapter was undertaken thanks to the generous support of the Printing Historical Society Grants programme.
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Notes
- 1.
I will refer to the print business operated out of Hartshead Square by Joseph Gales and his successor, James Montgomery, as the ‘Hartshead Press’. The press does not appear to have had a consistent name during this period, though it was common for the front matter of texts published by the press to state that they were ‘printed in the Hartshead’.
- 2.
According to the masthead, the paper’s full title was The Sheffield Register, Yorkshire, Derbyshire & Nottinghamshire Universal Advertiser. This long title was typical of the late eighteenth-century regional press, where such titles signalled the paper’s intended circulation.
- 3.
For a detailed discussion of book pricing in the eighteenth century, and the implication of the House of Lords 1774 ruling in favour of limited copy, effectively authorising ‘approved’ works to be sold at substantially lower prices than had previously been possible, see J.E. Elliott 2010.
- 4.
Yorke was himself tried for treason later that year. His account of the trial was also published.
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Smith, A.J. (2022). The Newspaper, the Bookshop, and the Radical Society: Joseph Gales’ Hartshead Press and the ‘Reading and Thinking People of Sheffield’. In: Stenner, R., Kramer, K., Smith, A.J. (eds) Print Culture, Agency, and Regionality in the Hand Press Period . New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88055-2_4
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