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Notes
The original returns of the Stamp Duty on newspapers from about 1750 to 1855 were scheduled for destruction under the Public Record Office Act of 1877. Some returns for the period after 1815 are cited in the House of Commons Accounts and Papers. See General Index to the Accounts and Papers Reports of Commissioners &c. &c. Printed by Order of the House of Commons 1801-1852 (1938), pp. 637-639. Surviving records at Somerset House begin only with the year 1835.
"The Circulation of Newspapers in the Early Nineteenth Century," RES, XXII (1946), 29-43. See also the same author's Politics and the Press c. 1780-/1850 (1949), chapt. 1.
Occasionally a newspaper would publish a statement of its own circulation as a recommendation to prospective subscribers, but such statements were rare, and most of them must be regarded sceptically.
The title was undoubtedly adopted from the paper of 1720-21 produced by Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard. On Henry White's Independent Whig, comparable in tone and sentiments to Cobbett's Political Register, Woller's Black Dwarf, and Leigh Hunt's Examiner, see Aspinall, Politics and the Press, pp. 46n., 310-311.
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