Stockwell Toilet Watch

"From 1830, illegal, unstamped and abusively class-conscious papers - 

like the Bonnet Rouge, the Destructive, and the Poor Man's Guardian - 

appeared on the London streets.  They dismayed respectable reformers 

and outraged the guardians of the peace, but by 1836 their sales far 

surpassed those of the stamped  press.  This study describes the 

unstamped press and the turbulent underground radicalism of the Reform 

years from which it emerged. It analyses its style and its heroes, its sellers 

and its finances, and its elaborate economic and political theory: and it 

shows how this Pauper Press helped to form the language and create 

the leaders of Chartism".

Clock too the above repro from COLLET DOBSON COLLET's (1933) study "HISTORY OF THE TAXES ON KNOWLEDGE - Their Origin and Repeal".  The unstamped press came into being because the 1830's Regency pre Victorian State -- enforced a high stamp duty tax on every single individual newspaper on purpose which made them (including THE TIMES) too expensive for the UK poor either to purchase or themselves produce. The Regency era ruling class were absolutely set against the democratic working class political aspirations of those times being publicised and promoted by using media of any kind - and the high stamp duty was enforced to absolutely stop those aspirations. That was an absolute limitation on the freedom of the press.  Aspirant working class activists no matter produced very many cheap editions of their own which charged no stamp duty and so were illegal altho thus affordable. These working class producers and their vendors were systematically rounded-up and over a thousand were imprisoned for their democratic principled activism. And here we are now in pre Leveson 2012 being offered acres of utter media garbage BY JOURNALISTS that the UK press has never been shackled or restricted.  Never mind the utter bollocks lets have some truth!!