The heading on this paper reads
The Bedford Times and General Advertiser for Beds, Herts, Hunts, Bucks, Cambs, and Huntingdonshire. It looks interesting ...
I am posting this to warn you that such headings can be very misleading - so to illustrate the point I scoured the paper for all the references I could find to Hertfordshire. I first turned to the back page where there is a listing of where the paper can be brought, and
Messrs Paternoster, of
Hitchin (which is close to the Bedfordshire boundary) was the only one. I then spotted an advert for a
large sale of live and dead stock at Temple Dinsley, at
Preston, near
Hitchin. Digging deeper a very large advert revealed that the Paris Chocolate Company was looking for new agents to sell their products and they has already recruited
Gilbertson & Son at
Hertford, and
W. Bull, a chemist at
Royston. And if I was unwell I could buy
Dr. Pascoe's Infallibes [sic] Globules from Roberts of St Albans, Walker of Hitchin or Bully of Baldock.
But was there any real Hertfordshire News? After much searching I found one block of news "sound bytes" which squeezed a two sentence mention of an incident in St Albans between single sentence reports of discoveries at Pompeii and a funeral in Belfast.
The real truth of the matter is that the Bedford Times was a local paper, almost exclusively dealing with the Bedford area - apart from the national, parliamentary and international news which nearly all pre-1855 local newspapers covered. And until the stamp duty on newspapers was removed in 1855 many local papers had a rather limited coverage of the town where they were printed!
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