THE PENNY PRESS IN ENGLAND.

Lyttelton Times, Volume VIII, Issue 488, 8 July 1857, Page 3

THE PENNY PRESS IN ENGLAND.

(From the Neio York S&rald, Jan. 3.) Nearly two years have elapsed since the ! newspaper tax was repealed in England } and the effects of that measure have had time to be fully tested. Several newspapers have been started at low prices, and considerable efforts have been made to force them into general circulation. Some of these have

died. Others still survive ;. but, if we may judge from their appearance and the general tenor of the reports concerning them, they are not in a healthy condition. In a word, so far as appears at"preseiit, the experiment of cheap newspapers in the British capital has been a failure. Yet it is quite certain that cheap literary food and news are a commodity for which a large demand exists in London and the whole of England. It follows that the cause of the failure of the penny papers has been, not the wrongness of the basis upon which they have "been ! started, but some errors in the "mode and manner in which they have been "conducted. On examing the principal penny papers of London, such as the 'Star,' and the ' Telegraph,' the first thing which strikes the eye of one accustomed to the New York press is that they are miniature copies of the 'Times.' They have the same heavy | editorial, about the same heavy Parliamentary subject, written in the same conventional British newspaper slang, and intended for the. Private reading of a select circle of politicians. Again, they have the same heavy Parliamentary debates, whole columns of solid small type about Maynooth grants, or the rights of the Bishops, filling iip one side °of the paper. Their news is on the same plan. Their foreign correspondents entertain them with grave and strictly gentlemanly conjectures about the probable designs of certain foreign courts. Their domestic reporters acquaint them with the fact that there was an eclipse visible from the dome of St. Paul's, and that his H.R.H.P. Albert went out shooting, attended by divers lords and colonels in livery. Their advertisements, even, are cut in the same solid block, and penned with the same strict eye to British propriety. We have serious announcements that the Typhus Assurance Company is prepared to take lives at the shortest notice and on the lowest terms; that the ship Enterprise will sail for Calcutta, on such a day ; that Mr. Robins sells a Paradise on Tuesday, and a phaeton and pair (the property of a gentleman removed to the continent) on Wednesday, at ten. Now, we cannot speak confidently for our trans-Atlantic neighbours, but we strongly suspect that this sort of reading is not more interesting to them than it would be to us. The class of society whioh enjoys elaborate leading articles full of double entendres and delicate allusions, Maynooth grant debates, and cozy soporifics about the designs of the Court of Berlin or Austria, can afford to pay ten cents for the ' Times,' and rather piques itself on subscribing to the most expensive newspaper. To attempt to wean the sturdy British commoner, the man of acres or bank stock, from his ' Times,' is certainly to lose one's pains. On the other hand, the class which would be glad of a penny paper does not care for any of these heavy matters. It wants news, but light, agreeable, popular news; not stupid political speculations, but accidents and murders, and battles and shipwrecks, and runaway matches, and the like. Then it wants editorials, not about the private squabbles of lords, but about the high price of fish and the Sunday music,, and the great spread of scarlet fever, and the reasons why the marines haven't got their prize money, and the consequences of emigrating to America, and the right of everybody who can read to vote, and so on, through all the range of subjects which form "the ordinary conversation of the intelligent poor. It should not do violence to these people's minds, by attempting to cram down their throats things they don't like; but should lead them, gently, luring them by a promise of familiar to a knowledge of better things. So for domestic news. A paragraph is all that Parliament deserves. The rest of the domestic news columns should be devoted to the reporting of such meetings as we always give in full here, and they never notice in England, and to a record of the " short but simple annals of the poor." A paper fiamed on this model would, we think, be likely to succeed in England at the price of a penny ; and in the course of ten years it might have a revenue of £10,000 to £12,000, and would be a power in the realm greater than the 'Times' or the House of Lords. Bui the idea, hitherto, seems to have fallen upon stony ground.