Acknowledgements

I love being part of a scholarly community, and I owe so much to the generosity, time, encouragement and practical help of other members of this community.

Thanks to Dave Russell and Steve Caunce for taking this project seriously in the first place, and for their excellent supervision, with the help of Dawn Archer; to other historians at the University of Central Lancashire, past and present, who have offered encouragement and inspiration to so many mature students like myself, including Annemarie McAllister, Andy Gritt, Robert Poole, David Stewart, Billy Frank, Máirtín Ó Catháin, Keith Vernon, Geoff Timmins, John Walton and Jack Southern; the UCLan MRes History students; to members of the wonderfully supportive and friendly Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, especially Laurel Brake, Margaret Beetham, Andrew King, Bob Nicholson, Brian Maidment, Jim Mussell, Patrick Leary, John North, David Finkelstein, Catherine Waters and Leslie Howsam; to members of the North-West Print Culture Research Network, the VICTORIA and SHARP-L email discussion lists, and to others who have helped along the way, given encouragement and/or read drafts: Martin Hewitt, Brian Hollingworth, Jonathan Rose, Victoria Gardner, Helen Rogers, Fred Milton, Kirstie Blair, Alison Chapman, Rachel Matthews, Carole O’Reilly, Andrew J. H. Jackson, Will Slauter, Felix Larkin, Melodee Beals, Nick Foggo and Margaret Dickinson; to the Black Horse History Society (Steve Tate, Alex Jackson and Peter Park); to the patient librarians and archivists, particularly Jacquie Crosby of Lancashire Archives and David Shuttleworth, Ann Dennison and Victoria Roberts, all formerly of the Harris Library, Preston, Jane Hodkinson of Manchester Archives and Roger Hull of Liverpool Archives; to Rachel Riggs and Adam Bennett, whose freelance commission first made me realise how much I loved history; to the members of the National Union of Journalists West Lancashire branch, who care about journalism, and to all involved in the Preston Other Paper, who believed local journalism could be part of a progressive politics of place. The Arts & Humanities Research Council funded the original PhD research on which this book is based, and the University of Central Lancashire and the Marc Fitch Fund have generously supported publication costs.