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.
In 1794, the Government began arresting leaders of the Corresponding Societies, and Gales wrote articles decrying this. Gales was suspected of writing a letter offering to sell pikes to the London society, but was on business in Derby when troops arrived to arrest him.
Alarmed as to his safety, Gales published his final issue of the Register, before fleeing to Hamburg in Germany. His wife Winifred remained behind to sell the Register to Montgomery, who relaunched the newspaper as the Sheffield Iris and adopted a less radical editorial line. Montgomery initially used capital supplied by the Unitarian minister Benjamin Naylor.
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