The People's Journal Dundee

Well my last post highlighted the fact that William Robertson had many of his stories and poems published in The People's Journal. Here is what I found out about that publication.

According to The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry by Tim Kendall, The People's Journal "had for a long time been a radical liberal newspaper that had, especially in the 1870s and 1880s, promoted an extensive use of dialect Scots. By the 1890s it was claiming a weekly readership of one million, making it not only Scotland's best-selling paper, but one of the United Kingdom's most popular weeklies. The People's Journal had a long tradition of reader participation and, unlike the Scotsman, had been in the habit of publishing verse regularly before the war [WW1]. "

The footnote to this section of his book states that the 1 million readership would have meant that the People's Journal would have been read by 1 in 4 adults in Scotland.