Sheffield Register

The Sheffield Iris was an early weekly newspaper published on Tuesdays in Sheffield, England.

The first newspaper to be published in Sheffield to see any degree of success was the Sheffield Weekly Journal in 1754. This was bought out in 1755 by the Sheffield Weekly Register, and was thereafter published in Doncaster.

The Sheffield Register was the next newspaper to be established in the town. It was founded by Joseph Gales, a Unitarian, who supported various Radical causes, advocating religious tolerance, Parliamentary reform and the abolition of slavery, and opposed boxing and bull-baiting.

Gales met Tom Paine, who encouraged him to found a radical newspaper. In June 1787, he began publishing the Sheffield Register, initially in partnership with David Martin, from offices in Hartshead. The newspaper focussed on reporting local news, and on reprinting tracts by reformers such as Paine and Joseph Priestley. This was a novelty, as most provincial newspapers of the day simply reprinted stories from the London press.

In 1789, Martin left the partnership. Gales' politics became more prominent, and the newspaper celebrated the French Revolution and acted as the mouthpiece of the Sheffield Society for Constitutional Information, an artisan-based political organisation established by Gales in 1791 which called for radical reforms.

The Register was extremely popular in the early 1790s, selling up to 2,000 copies of each issue. Gales established a companion fortnightly political journal, The Patriot, in 1792. The same year, the poet James Montgomery was appointed as clerk and bookkeeper for the newspaper offices.

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