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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), Edward Jacobs

English Faculty Publications

John Cleave's Weekly Police Gazette (1834-36) [hereafter cited as WPG] was by most accounts the best-selling unstamped newspaper of the so-called 'War of the Unstamped Press' in the 1830s, one of the first unstamped papers to adopt a broadsheet format similar to those of the stamped newspapers, and one of the first to mix political news with coverage of non-political events, such as sensational crimes and strange occurrences.² Perhaps because WPG's circulation reached around 40,000-well beyond that of most other newspapers of the 1830s, whether stamped or unstamped - it was also the most frequently prosecuted of the unstamped …