The Snobs and the Soaks (Marr 2004)
‘The typical journalist seemed to be a cheery middle-aged man having trouble at home, who drank
pretty freely, had a constant inch of cigarette jammed between his fingers, the nails of which were
blunt and damaged from years of ill-treating typewriters’ p.1
‘reporters have always been volunteer exiles, people who have left a secure working-class or
professional world in order to live a more precarious and interesting life’ p.2
‘In Britain...Journalism is a chaotic form of earning, ragged at the edges, full of snakes, con artists and
even the occasional misunderstood martyr’ p.3
‘Journalists often choose long hours and insecurity as the entire price for a certain lightness of being’
p.5
‘Some say that journalists are people who attempt to search out the truths about the world around
them, and then inform the societies they inhabit’ p.5
‘As early as the 1620s there had been the corantos – as in ‘current’, as in ‘current affairs’ - which were
semi-regular bulletins of news from the Continent’ p.6
‘The largest group of early writers who wrote for themselves and published weekly, sometimes daily,
fare were the dissenting pamphleteers of the seventeenth century’ p.6
‘in 1665 the Oxford Gazette, the first official newspaper that we would recognise as such, appeared –
to L’Estrange’s fury.’ p.7
‘However, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 opened the floodgates. The arrival of a coffee-house
culture, where party politics, Whigs against Tories, began to be played out, marks the real start of
informed public opinion.’ p.7
‘By the early 1700s there was a real newspaper market in London. The Courant, the first daily paper,
with a circulation of 800 a day, struggled against another eight rivals, including the London Gazette.’
p.8
‘To put it crudely, the Victorians did four things which made Britain the newspaper-mad nation it
remains even today. They cut the taxes and lifted the legal restraints which had stopped papers being
profitable; they introduced machinery to produce them in large numbers; they educated a population
to read them; and they developed the mass democracy that made them relevant.’ p.13
‘The stamp duty on papers had kept the entrepreneurs who were making fortunes from iron, steam
and railways away from the newspaper business – paying all that tax to the government made it
simply too expensive and risky to bother with.’ p.13
‘The abolition of newspaper stamp duty in 1855 was the break-through moment. It came after
decades of campaigning for an end to ‘taxes on knowledge’, both from radicals and conservative
reformers who thought that education and information would keep the rising working class from
revolution.’ p.14
‘A survey in 1867 concluded that the working man with his penny newspaper is by its aid a man of
fuller information, better judgement and wider sympathies than the workman of thirty years back’
p.16
‘The typical journalist seemed to be a cheery middle-aged man having trouble at home, who drank
pretty freely, had a constant inch of cigarette jammed between his fingers, the nails of which were
blunt and damaged from years of ill-treating typewriters’ p.1
‘reporters have always been volunteer exiles, people who have left a secure working-class or
professional world in order to live a more precarious and interesting life’ p.2
‘In Britain...Journalism is a chaotic form of earning, ragged at the edges, full of snakes, con artists and
even the occasional misunderstood martyr’ p.3
‘Journalists often choose long hours and insecurity as the entire price for a certain lightness of being’
p.5
‘Some say that journalists are people who attempt to search out the truths about the world around
them, and then inform the societies they inhabit’ p.5
‘As early as the 1620s there had been the corantos – as in ‘current’, as in ‘current affairs’ - which were
semi-regular bulletins of news from the Continent’ p.6
‘The largest group of early writers who wrote for themselves and published weekly, sometimes daily,
fare were the dissenting pamphleteers of the seventeenth century’ p.6
‘in 1665 the Oxford Gazette, the first official newspaper that we would recognise as such, appeared –
to L’Estrange’s fury.’ p.7
‘However, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 opened the floodgates. The arrival of a coffee-house
culture, where party politics, Whigs against Tories, began to be played out, marks the real start of
informed public opinion.’ p.7
‘By the early 1700s there was a real newspaper market in London. The Courant, the first daily paper,
with a circulation of 800 a day, struggled against another eight rivals, including the London Gazette.’
p.8
‘To put it crudely, the Victorians did four things which made Britain the newspaper-mad nation it
remains even today. They cut the taxes and lifted the legal restraints which had stopped papers being
profitable; they introduced machinery to produce them in large numbers; they educated a population
to read them; and they developed the mass democracy that made them relevant.’ p.13
‘The stamp duty on papers had kept the entrepreneurs who were making fortunes from iron, steam
and railways away from the newspaper business – paying all that tax to the government made it
simply too expensive and risky to bother with.’ p.13
‘The abolition of newspaper stamp duty in 1855 was the break-through moment. It came after
decades of campaigning for an end to ‘taxes on knowledge’, both from radicals and conservative
reformers who thought that education and information would keep the rising working class from
revolution.’ p.14
‘A survey in 1867 concluded that the working man with his penny newspaper is by its aid a man of
fuller information, better judgement and wider sympathies than the workman of thirty years back’
p.16
