4. The Newspaper, the Bookshop, and the Radical Society: Joseph Gales’ Hartshead Press and the ‘Reading and Thinking People of Sheffield’

This chapter surveys the various activities and outputs of a late eighteenth-century press managed by Joseph Gales out of Hartshead Square, Sheffield. Founded in 1787, the press is best remembered for producing two radical newspapers, The Sheffield Register, edited by Gales, and The Sheffield Iris, edited by Gales’ protégé, James Montgomery. These papers are well recognised as making a significant contribution to the development of regional news culture. They are less well known for functioning as part of a broader business model which saw Gales’ wife, Winifred, managing a bookshop in Hartshead Square whilst Gales also used his press to furnish the Sheffield Society for Constitutional Information (SSCI) with books, pamphlets, appeals, and other items of political ephemera. In sourcing texts from London and reprinting or selling them in York, Gales actively shaped Sheffield’s literary and political culture. However, his output sees him perpetually obscuring his own agency, disguising a discrete strategy that prescribed as much as it described the character of his Sheffield readers.