The recent Times supplement on royal weddings carried little boxes giving, among other snippets of information, the price of the newspaper at the time.
1795 4½d
1816 7d
1840 5d
1863 3d
1893 3d
1922 2d
1937 2d
1947 3d
1981 48d (20p)
2011 240d (£1)
What a story that tells:was the high price of 1816 the result of post-war inflation? – then little change for a century after 1863, (when prices dropped because of the abolition of taxes and improvements in the technology of printing) until the great twentieth century inflation after the oil price shock of the 1970s.
Things get even more interesting when w e look at the circulation
1795 4,465
1816 6,222
1840 16,218
1863 63,246
1893 38,546
1922 163,107
1937 192,220
1947 241,816
1981 297,787
I wonder what happened in 1893? My guess is competition from the more popular press, from papers such as The Daily Mail.
