712 Chapter XXX
persons in the families of artisans and mechanics, and almost 400,000 in those of
tradesmen and shopkeepers. A million persons were habitually on poor relief. Ex-
tremes of wealth and poverty were very great.^4
England had pioneered in many of the developments described in preceding
chapters as characteristic of the revolutionary decade on the Continent. The “po-
liticization” of opinion was an old story, dating back to the Puritan Revolution and
before. Clubs and coffee houses served the function of reading societies elsewhere.
Pamphleteering had long been a national custom, and the periodical press was
both highly developed and relatively free. It is thought that the literacy rate about
1780, before the new Sunday School movement sought to extend it, was no higher
than in the reign of Elizabeth, since the intervening years had not been as favor-
able to the lower classes as to the upper. In the 1780’s the number of persons able
to read began to mount, and in any case, thanks largely to interest in the French
Revolution, the number who desired to read the papers, or to listen while others
read them, appears to have increased. Nine new dailies were established in London
in the 1780’s, four of these in the year 1789 alone.
Newspapers in England, however, like books, were expensive. There was a stamp
tax to be paid on every copy, raised from 1½ to 2 d. in 1789, and to 3½ d. in 1797.
The famous daily generated in Paris by the Revolution, the Moniteur, without ad-
vertising or government subsidy, was able to sell by subscription for 18 livres a
quarter, raised to 20 in 1797. This amounted to two English pence per copy. In
France such a price was thought too high for most people, for whom other papers,
weekly or semi- weekly, were provided after 1789 for a penny a copy.
In England the dailies sold for four pence in 1789 and sixpence in 1797. By the
latter year they were three times as expensive as the Moniteur. The enthusiasm of
French Revolutionaries for cheap popular newspapers was not shared by the Brit-
ish government. Little is known of circulation; the Times by 1800 was selling about
4,800 a day, but there were a dozen other London dailies; the circulation of the
Moniteur is unknown, but the Journal de Paris had 12,000 paid subscribers.^5
England was distinguished above all by its Parliament, and the traditions,
claims, powers, and prestige of Parliament were so overwhelming that issues of
many kinds, including religious, economic, and social, presented themselves in
terms of Parliament and its “reform.” The Parliament was one of those constituted
bodies, described in Part 1, against which much of the revolutionary impetus in
eighteenth- century Europe was directed. The British House of Lords in the 1790’s
consisted of about three hundred temporal peers and twenty- six bishops. The
House of Commons consisted of 558 members sent from boroughs and counties
by a variety of methods. Most “burgesses” sitting for boroughs were in fact country
gentlemen, as were the “knights of the shire.” The law, though sometimes circum-
4 Colquhoun’s tabulations may be found in his Treatise on Indigence (London, 1806), following p.
23.
5 R. D. Altick, The English Common Reader: a Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900
(Chicago, 1957), 35–77, 322–24; R. L. Haig, The Gazetteer, 1735–1797: a Study of the Eighteenth-
Century English Newspaper (Carbondale, Ill., 1960); L. Werkmeister, The London Daily Press, 1772–92
(Lincoln, Nebr.), 1963. For France see E. Hatin, Bibliographie de la presse périodique française (Paris,
1866); J. Godechot, Institutions de la France sous la Rev. et l ’Emp. (Paris, 1951), 57–61.