Family Herald

a popular London-based weekly ‘domestic magazine of useful information and amusement’ (as it described itself), founded in 1843 by a Scot, a Mr Smith of Strathaven, Lanarkshire.

In the period before the passing of the 1870 Education Act, and even more after it, there was a good deal of concern on the part of the middle classes about the quality of the reading matter, mostly newspapers and periodicals, of the working classes. James Hole wrote of their standards in 1870: ‘The improvement … has, during the last ten years, gone on at a greatly accelerated ratio. Since that time, the London Journal and the Family Herald (the periodicals of largest circulation among the operative classes) have greatly improved;…’ (see the available extracts from his book Light, more light!