The Guardian’s first ever edition (5 May 1821) – annotated
The Guardian’s first ever edition – annotated

        
          The Manchester Guardian
          Saturday 5 May 1821
          Page 1
          The Guardian began life as a weekly publication comprising just four pages. The front page was covered in ads, and would remain so for more than 130 years.
         
        
          Printer and publisher
          Jeremiah Garnett was a printer by trade who, like the Guardian’s founder, John Edward Taylor, cut his teeth as a reporter at Peterloo, the 1819 Manchester protest that turned into a massacre. He joined Taylor at the Manchester Guardian as publisher in April 1821, five weeks before the first issue came out, and would later become its editor.
         
        
          The first newsroom
          Taylor rented premises for his new paper below a cutler’s shop in Market Street in the centre of Manchester. The rent was £31 10s a year.
         
        
          Cover price
          Equivalent to a little under £2 in today’s money, this was a steep paywall for the times, affordable only to the wealthy middle classes, and circulation started at just 1,000 copies. But there was a reason the price was high: 4 pence went to the government in stamp duty. It was only when stamp duty was abolished in 1855 that the Manchester Guardian was able to publish daily, at a price of just 2 pence.
         
        
          Lost and found
          Technically the first item ever published by the Manchester Guardian was this lost and found concerning a dog. So it could be said that the Guardian has gone from live dogs to live blogs in the space of 200 years. The front page would continue to be covered in advertisements until 1952.
         
        
          Ad lib
          More banal classifieds in the shape of this ad for hernia belts. Other front-page classifieds extol the virtues of gingham umbrellas, venetian carpets, Irish linens and lacy garments.
         
        
          Eat your greens
          It is supremely appropriate that in its very first edition the Manchester Guardian should do something as Guardianesque as promoting vegetarian cuisine. It is unclear if this volume sold many copies in 1821. It may have been 200 years ahead of its time.
         
        
          Page 2
          Major news dominates the inside left-hand page – first foreign affairs, and then parliamentary reports – with the leader in the sixth column.
         
        
          Old news
          The news starts here with information from the London Gazette, a journal of record of the UK government. The Guardian was a Manchester paper and hence had no qualms about reproducing rather old London news from the journal of record or even other commercial titles such as the Times as a service to its readers. This practice of using other newspapers’ copy persisted, particularly in foreign news, until well into the 20th century.
         
        
          Made in 1821
          Reports reach the Manchester Guardian of the independence movement in Latin America. The Guardian was not the only thing founded in 1821: several postcolonial states, including Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala, trace their origins as independent states to that year.
         
        
          This week in parliament
          Three days’ worth of reporting on parliamentary proceedings ensue, but alas they are several days old. In the early years, editors had to wait for stagecoach mail to bring London newspapers north so they could assemble parliamentary reports for the Saturday paper. By midcentury, the advent of rail services and the telegraph made it possible to publish parliamentary reports the day after they happened.
         
        
          The Guardian view
          Essentially the Manchester Guardian’s first editorial. Note the careful double negative way of backing into an expression:
          “It will readily be believed that we are far from being devoid of anxiety in laying before the public the first number of a new weekly journal.”
          Tens of thousands of editions later, editors still have acute anxieties about laying editions before the public.
          The rest of the leader spells out a Guardian approach that has endured, even if it has not always resulted in the desired outcome.
          “We are enemies of scurrility and slander, and though we will not compromise the right of making pointed animadversions on public questions, we hope so to deliver as that even our political opponents shall admit the propriety of the spirit in which they are written.”
          Future editorials would carry the edition number prominently above the column. Today’s Guardian 200 years later is the 54,337th edition.
         
        
          The first review
          From day one, the Guardian made it its business to reflect the world of letters back to its public. The first book review?
         
        
          Page 3
          Assorted miscellany ranging from news briefs to births, deaths and marriages.
         
        
          Northern soul
          It’s worth remembering that the Manchester Guardian was first and foremost a newspaper for the city’s mercantile middle class. It carried far more news about Manchester in the early decades than about foreign affairs, for example, some of it with a distinctly 'local news' feel about it.
         
        
          Theatre of the absurd
          The Guardian’s first literary spat – the first of many. An unusual situation in which a theatre director butchers a performance of Byron’s The Doge of Venice after being banned from putting it on.
         
        
          Lines of duty
          A long article essentially denouncing the use of police entrapment tactics using long discredited undercover agents. A policy of critical detachment towards law enforcement was apparently present in the Guardian newsroom from day one.
         
        
          Dog deserts man
          The news items on page three descend into some pretty sketchy esoterica: the nesting of a colony of rooks, a heavily pregnant dog deserting its new owner, a ghost supposedly exciting residents of Truro, and a Northamptonshire man jumping quite a long way.
         
        
          Phantom menace
          Spare a thought for Sergeant-Major Candy of the Royal Miners regiment in Truro, whose night was disturbed by the ‘mischievous freaks of a ghost’. According to this account, stones were hurled at buildings breaking panes of glass and, despite the whole town turning up to be entertained by the spectre, no assailant was detected - leading to windows being boarded up to prevent further assault.
         
        
          User-generated content
          A piece remarkable for two reasons: firstly for the insights it shares on early 19th-century understanding of currency fluctuations and purchasing power, still relatively hazy concepts at the time; and secondly that it was submitted by a reader and hence is certainly the first piece of user-generated content published by the Guardian.
         
        
          Data blog
          The sixth column on this page is taken up with large amounts of useful data, but intriguingly the editors were not just preoccupied with ever-present items such as births, deaths and marriages, but in reasons for hospital admissions. Two centuries later, it’s back in the news again.
         
        
          Page 4
          An exclusive – and a long list of bankrupts.
         
        
          Spotlight on poverty
          The single most substantial item in the first edition of the Manchester Guardian sets the tone for the bread-and-butter reporting that was to dominate domestic news in the paper for the next 200 years. Leaked figures exposing a social evil (in this case child deprivation) that was far more widespread than people believed at the time. Two centuries later, Guardian reporters have repeated the exercise.
         
        
          Poetry corner
          Early editions of the Manchester Guardian regularly featured poetry. The Irish lyricist Thomas Moore has the inaugural verse.
         
        
          Debt and debility
          A regular column that would remain a staple of the newspaper for decades, probably because it served a useful social and commercial purpose.
         
        
          Strange weather
          An unusual weather report that digresses into a description of ‘electric fluid’ that passes through Liverpool, knocking down workers, tearing up brickwork and shattering glass.
         
        
          Hard sell
          Early distribution of the 3,000 copies of the Manchester Guardian was limited to denizens of the city itself. Circulation topped 20,000 in the 1850s, 100,000 in the 1940s and half a million in the 1980s. In 2020, the number of monthly unique browsers accessing Guardian journalism topped 200 million.
         
       