About Felix Farley's Bristol Journal

Felix Farley's Bristol Journal

Felix Farley's Bristol Journal was a Bristol weekly newspaper launched by Felix Farley in March 1752, its first issue dated 28 March 1752, and published for just over a century until 31 March 1853, when its run ended with its merger into the Bristol Times. It was one of Bristol's most enduring newspapers, reaching its 5,650th issue in March 1853, and it belonged to the Farley family, who pioneered news media in provincial England. Continued after Felix Farley's death in 1753 by his widow Elizabeth Farley until 1774, the paper's history encompassed a celebrated libel prosecution in 1757 and a chain of later amalgamations that led, through the Bristol Times and Mirror and the Bristol Evening World, to the Bristol Evening Post. Its story is inseparable from that of the family that founded Bristol's press.

The Farleys and provincial journalism

The Farley family pioneered news media in provincial England. Until 1695 the British government had prevented the establishment of printing presses in the provinces; when the Licensing of the Press Act lapsed, provincial newspapers became possible. The historian R. M. Wiles, in Freshest Advices: Early Provincial Newspapers in England, recognised three newspapers as the pioneers in English provincial journalism: the Norwich Post, the Bristol Post Boy and Samuel Farley I's Exeter Post Man, of which the earliest extant issue is from 1711. Samuel Farley I, born about 1675 and died in 1730, was the patriarch of the family. He published the pioneering Exeter Post Man and was a founding publisher of Sam Farley's Bristol Post Man from 1715, which was replaced in 1725 by Farley's Bristol Newspaper. In Bristol the sequence began even earlier with William Bonny's Bristol Post Boy, started in 1702; a 1704 edition in the Bristol reference library is the oldest example of a British provincial paper still in existence. The governing Whigs came to see provincial newspapers as auxiliaries of the Tory opposition in London, and from 1726 the Comptroller of the Post Office was mandated to institute surveillance, with all English, Irish and Scottish newspapers purchased for examination by the Treasury Solicitor. The print wars that followed shaped the world into which Felix Farley's paper was born.

Jacobite print wars and the family inheritance

The Farleys paid a high price in those print wars. Samuel Farley I published the Jacobite Hague Letter in Farley's Bristol Newspaper in 1716 and kept it in print despite the government's orders for censorship of the letter; the government lost its censorship case in 1731 and ceased intervention in provincial newspapers until 1736. His son Edward Farley II published the Jacobite Persian Letter in Farley's Bristol Newspaper in the 1720s, likewise kept it in print despite censorship orders, and was imprisoned for high treason. He petitioned Queen Caroline for his release, and the Attorney-General, Philip Yorke, later first Earl of Hardwicke, issued a pardon, but Edward Farley II died in gaol before his scheduled release, becoming in effect a martyr for press freedom. Another son, Samuel Farley II, born about 1699 and died in 1753, was a founding publisher of Sam Farley's Bristol Journal, which was continued as Farley's Bristol Journal and then as the Bristol Journal. An earlier F. Farley's Bristol Journal had been launched as a fortnightly Saturday newspaper in late 1742, evolving from the existing Farley's Bristol Journal, becoming weekly in August 1746 and closing in late December 1747. Felix Farley, born about 1708, jointly edited the Bristol Journal with his brother Samuel from 1748 to 1751. The brothers' partnership then broke.

Launch in March 1752

Felix Farley's Bristol Journal was launched in March 1752 after Felix broke ties with his brother Samuel, with whom he had jointly edited the Bristol Journal from 1748 to 1751. Its first issue is dated 28 March 1752. Felix Farley was a founding publisher not only of this paper but also of Sam Farley's Bristol Journal and of Farley's Bristol Advertiser. Bristol Museum's account of the city's newspaper milestones notes that Farley used the new journal to advertise his quack medicine business, a reminder that an eighteenth-century provincial newspaper was simultaneously a news sheet, an advertising medium and a vehicle for its proprietor's other trades. Saturday publication, the pattern of the earlier Farley journals, suited a weekly that gathered London and foreign intelligence arriving by post together with Bristol's own commercial and shipping news for a port city whose merchants needed both. The paper's immediate distinction was longevity: launched by a proprietor who would be dead within about a year, it outlived him by a century.

Elizabeth Farley and the 1757 libel case

Felix Farley died in 1753, and his widow Elizabeth Farley, born about 1710 and died in 1779, became publisher of Felix Farley's Bristol Journal, a role she held from 1753 to 1774, more than twenty years. In 1757 she was prosecuted for libel and defeated the prosecution; reference accounts describe her as the first British journalist to be prosecuted for libel and to defeat it, and Bristol Museum's timeline likewise marks 1757 as the year of the first Bristol newspaper libel suit against a Farley editor. The distinction matters beyond Bristol. At a time when the provincial press operated under Treasury surveillance and when the family's own history included Edward Farley II's death in gaol after a prosecution, a widow publisher's successful defence of her newspaper was a concrete precedent for press freedom, won not by a London grandee but by a provincial printer continuing her husband's business. Elizabeth Farley's two decades in charge also make the paper one of the notable examples of women's work in the eighteenth-century British print trade, a subject now studied in its own right by projects on women's print history, which have documented the Farley family's feuds and the Bristol print trade in detail.

Sarah Farley, Hester Farley and the sale of 1775

The family's involvement did not end with Elizabeth. Sarah Farley, born about 1699 and died in 1774, a granddaughter of Samuel Farley I, was also a publisher of the Bristol Journal. Hester Farley, born about 1750 and died in 1806, was the daughter of Felix and Elizabeth Farley. In 1775 Hester sold the Bristol Journal to George Routh, William Routh and Charles Nelson, and the Bristol Journal was continued as Sarah Farley's Bristol Journal. Issues of Felix Farley's Bristol Journal survive in collections spanning the whole of its middle life, with recorded examples from 5 May 1759 through the 1760s, 1770s, 1780s and 1790s to 30 January 1802 in a single auctioned run, showing the paper as a continuous weekly presence in Bristol through the American war years and the wars with revolutionary France. Historians of Bristol and the American War of Independence have used the city's newspapers, including Felix Farley's Bristol Journal, Bonner and Middleton's Bristol Journal and the Bristol Gazette and Public Advertiser, as indispensable sources for local reaction to the war, even though the Farley paper's comments on local happenings were neither regular nor exhaustive.

A century of Bristol life

Across its century, Felix Farley's Bristol Journal chronicled a great Atlantic port. Bristol's own newspaper history, as summarised by the city's museum, moved around it: the Bristol Mercury was launched in 1790, James Acland's short-lived Bristolian accused the council of corruption in 1827 at the cost of huge prosecution sums, Joseph Leech launched the Bristol Times in 1839 with 500 pounds advanced from his inheritance, and in 1852 Bristol papers ran the first stories sent from London by electric telegraph. The Farley paper belonged to the older, weekly world that preceded the daily press in the city: the Western Daily Press did not become Bristol's first daily until 1858, five years after the Journal's run ended. A directory of a later generation still described Felix Farley's Journal as established in the eighteenth century and recorded its incorporation with the Bristol Times, by then under Joseph Leech and Thomas David Taylor at offices in Small Street, publishing the Daily Bristol Times and Mirror. The weekly Journal had been the senior title absorbed into a daily age.

Final issue and merger in 1853

Felix Farley's Bristol Journal reached its 5,650th issue in March 1853, just over a century after its launch. Its last issue is dated 31 March 1853. In that year it was merged with the Bristol Times to form the Bristol Times and Journal. A later directory dating of the incorporation to April 1858 appears to reflect the formal consolidation of the titles rather than the Journal's last independent issue, which the bibliographic record fixes in 1853. Either way, the independent century of the Farley title ended in the 1850s, as Bristol's press consolidated around fewer, larger papers. The name on the masthead preserved the founder's Christian name to the end, an unusual survival: newspapers commonly shed founders' names at sale, yet Felix Farley's Bristol Journal carried the name of a man who had died in 1753 through a hundred years of weekly publication.

The chain to the Bristol Evening Post

The merger of 1853 began a chain of amalgamations that connects the Farley paper directly to Bristol's modern press. In 1865 the Bristol Times and Journal was merged with the Bristol Mirror to form the Bristol Times and Mirror. In 1932 the Bristol Times and Mirror was merged into the Bristol Evening World, the paper launched by Lord Rothermere in 1929, which had provoked a bitter circulation war answered by the launch of the Bristol Evening Post in 1932 in opposition to it. In 1939 Bristol United Press was formed, amalgamating the Evening World and the Evening Post, and in 1949, on the Farley family's published genealogy of titles, the Bristol Evening World was merged into the Bristol Evening Post; the Evening World finally merged with the Evening Post in 1962 in the museum's chronology of the city's papers. Through each step, part of the merged business descended from the weekly that Felix Farley had founded in a family quarrel in 1752. Few provincial newspapers can trace so long and so well-documented a line of descent into a surviving city title.

Legacy

Felix Farley's Bristol Journal is remembered for three things. First, for its sheer duration: a weekly founded on 28 March 1752 that was still publishing its 5,650th issue in March 1853 is among the longest-lived of England's early provincial newspapers. Second, for its publishers: Felix, who broke with his brother to found it and used it to advertise his medicines; Elizabeth, who ran it for over twenty years and defeated a libel prosecution in 1757; and the wider Farley family, whose members had pioneered the Exeter and Bristol press, defied censorship of Jacobite letters and, in Edward Farley II's case, died in gaol under sentence for his printing. Third, for its afterlife in merger, which carried its business through the Bristol Times and Journal, the Bristol Times and Mirror and the Bristol Evening World into the Bristol Evening Post, so that Bristol's newspaper history from Bonny's Post Boy of 1702 to the twentieth-century evening papers runs, in one of its main strands, through the journal Felix Farley launched in 1752.