When the Provincial Press was the National Press (c.1836-c.1900)

Introduction This article suggests that using twenty -first-century ideas about the provincial and the national press are not appropriate when looking at its nineteenthcentury counterpart. 'National' newspapers were less national than has generally been assumed, while provincial papers were less provincial, and more national, than assumed. This has been acknowledged in some recent scholarship, but not analysed in detail, and the implications have not been drawn out: if we treat the nineteenth-century provincial press as a national network and a national system, it becomes much more significant, and more deserving of further study, with many implications for the history of nineteenth-century print culture in particular, and social and cultural history in general.