Birmingham Journal (nineteenth century)

The Birmingham Journal was a weekly newspaper published in Birmingham, England, between 1825 and 1869.

A nationally influential voice in the Chartist movement in the 1830s, it was sold to John Frederick Feeney in 1844 and was a direct ancestor of today's Birmingham Post.

The newspaper was founded as a Tory newspaper by a printer called William Hodgetts in 1825 to provide an alternative to The Times, whose editorial line was controversial locally.

Historical copies of the Birmingham Journal, dating back to 1832, are available to search and view in digitised form at The British Newspaper Archive.

The newspaper's political tone changed dramatically in 1832, however, when it was sold to prominent Unitarian and Radical Joseph Parkes, who appointed R. K. Douglas as editor. Douglas was a national figure of the reform movement: the secretary of Thomas Attwood's reformed Birmingham Political Union and the author of the Chartist National Petition of 1838. With its close connections to the leaders of Birmingham's reform movement—which itself was at the forefront of national political life—the Journal gained a high profile and wide circulation. Its sales peaked at 2,500 per issue; and with the majority of newspaper readers during the era reading or listening to newspapers in communal reading rooms rather than buying their own copies, it was probably reaching about half of the population of Birmingham. The appeal of Chartism meant that its influence also stretched well beyond the local area: in 1839 it sold seventy-one weekly copies as far away as Dunfermline.

With the decline in local agitation for reform in the 1840s the newspaper's circulation dropped dramatically however. By 1844 it was only selling 1,200 copies per week when it was sold by Parkes to John Frederick Feeney.

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