Birmingham Post from 19th Century goes online
The Birmingham Post has gone online once again - only this time it’s showing news from the 19th Century.
You can now see the very first edition of the paper printed in 1857 online thanks to a new service from the British Library.
Headlines include stories about bathing machines, children as young as nine smoking and drinking and zero per cent income tax, among other fascinating stories about the city from the time.
The paper was described in Henry Fox Bourne’s 1887 book English Newspapers: Chapters in the History of Journalist as having “both interpreted and educated the temper of this thriving and enterprising part of England”.
The paper will be online as part of a new internet archive of more than two million pages of newspaper from 49 national and regional titles in the UK.
This is the first time you can scan archived pages of the papers without having to visit newspaper libraries or reading rooms.
At the time of its release the paper was sold for only one penny, making it one of the first papers to offer cheap news to a mass audience.
Its proprieters, John Frederick Feeney and later his son John Jaffray, also published the Saturday paper The Birmingham Journal, and founded the Saturday Evening Post - designed to appeal to working class readers.
Simon Bell, the British Library’s head of product development, said: “There’s a huge appetite for wider online access to this kind of resource, which is already well-used by readers at the British Library and by people in higher and further education.
“The new pay-as-you-go service will enable users across the UK who don’t wish to travel to our reading rooms in London or Yorkshire to delve into this unrivalled online resource.”
Simon Fowler, editor of Ancestors Magazine, said: “This new service really does open up a major new resource for family historians.”
The service is available at http://newspapers.bl.uk/blcs/
