egree only from the present.
_The True Sun_, for which Dickens essayed his first reportorial work, and
later _The Morning Chronicle_, were both influential journals, and
circulated between them perhaps forty thousand copies, each bearing a
penny stamp impressed on the margin, as was the law.

The newspapers of London, as well as of most great cities, had a localized
habitation, yclept Newspaper Row or Printing-House Square, and other
similar appellations. In London the majority of them were, and are,
printed east of Temple Bar, in, or south of, Fleet Street, between
Waterloo and Blackfriars Bridges. To borrow Johnson's phrase, this is the
mart "whose staple is news."

_The Times_--"The Thunderer" of old--was housed in a collection of
buildings which surrounded Printing-House Square, just east of Blackfriars
Bridge. In 1840 _The Times_ had, or was understood to have, three editors,
fifteen reporters, with a more or less uncertain and fluctuating number of
correspondents, news collectors, and occasional contributors. These by
courtesy were commonly referred to as the intellectual workers. For the
rest, compositors, pressmen, mechanics, clerks, _et al._, were of a class
distinct in themselves. The perfecting press had just come into practical
use, and though the process must appear laboriously slow to-day when only
2,500 _perfected_ copies of a four-page paper were turned out in an hour,
_The Times_ was in its day at the head of the list as to organization,
equipment, and influence.

The other morning and evening papers, _The Post_, _The Advertiser_, _The
Globe_, _The Standard_, _The Morning Chronicle_, and _The Sun_, all had
similar establishments though on a smaller scale.

But two exclusively literary papers were issued in 1840--_The Literary
Gazette_ and _The Athenaeum_, the latter being to-day the almost universal
mentor and guide for the old-school lover of literature throughout the
world. _The Spectator_ was the most vigorous of the weekly political and
social papers, now sadly degenerated, and _Bell's Life in London_, which
had printed some of Dickens' earlier work, was the only nominal "sporting
paper." Church papers, trade papers, society papers, and generally
informative journals were born, issued for a time, then died in those days
as in the present.

_Punch_ was, and is, the most thoroughly representative British humourous
journal, and since its birth in the forties has been domiciled in Bouverie
Street,