THE PURSUIT OF AN UNSTAMPED NEWSPAPER: INTERACTIONS BETWEEN PROSECUTION AND THE EVOLVING FORM, POLITICS, AND BUSINESS PRACTICES OF JOHN CLEAVE'S WEEKLY POLICE GAZETTE (1834-36) 1
[...]Cleave had been in prison for about six months before Place's letter to Hume, and the probability that the annotation on the 18 April 1835 copy at Glasgow is by Place suggests that he was 'helping' Cleave to publish WPG from King's Bench at least one month before writing to...
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| Published in: | Publishing history 2009-01, Vol.65, p.41-III |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | eng |
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| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | [...]Cleave had been in prison for about six months before Place's letter to Hume, and the probability that the annotation on the 18 April 1835 copy at Glasgow is by Place suggests that he was 'helping' Cleave to publish WPG from King's Bench at least one month before writing to Hume. Since WPG manifestly becomes more political from the 14 March 1835 number - only one month before the annotation and two months before Place's letter to Hume, but five months after Cleave's initial sentence - it seems reasonable to infer that Place began 'helping' Cleave to publish no later than 14 March 1835, and that Place hence played some significant role in the decision to heighten the paper's political content and focus from then onwards. [...]if by the time of the seizures 'Wakelin' - whether a real person or a front for Cleave - owned Shoe Lane, then his use there of the press that Cleave had registered on 3 January 1834 (or of any other press) would have been technically 'unregistered' under the terms of the 1799 Act, as Cleave's version of events insisted the seized press was.35 It thus seems as likely as any other scenario - if one accepts Cleave's version of events - that his unnamed printer was 'Wakelin' at 1 Shoe Lane, who was operating in 'unregistered' fashion the press that Cleave had registered there in his own name on 3 January 1834 and that remained there so as to avoid the labour and cost of moving it across the Thames to Pearl Row. According to the 13 March 1836 issue of the Radical (p.7b), Cleave was arrested while carrying '33 quires of unstamped newspapers' bearing 'the date Sunday, March 6' from 'a hired cabriolet' to 'the door of Mr. [George] Purkess, a publisher', in 'Compton-street, Soho'.38 Cleave pleaded 'that the Stamp Commissioners would see reason for not pressing for a conviction in the present instance, as the Government must have his body in a few days under the Exchequer process' of 4 February, but the magistrate, Sir Francis Roe, said 'he had nothing to do with the process of the Court of Exchequer' and committed him 'for three months to the House of Correction'. 240 or less, they amounted to less than half of the enormous amount imposed on Cleave by the Exchequer process of February 1836. Because the Committee advertised that it was formed for the purpose of 'procuring penny subscriptions to pay the Exchequer fines' of both men (Twopenny Dispatch, 20 February 1836, in FPC, f.357), it could not on political grounds have paid Hetherington |
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| ISSN: | 0309-2445 |