The ‘Vote Leave’ or ‘Brexit’ bus which toured the UK in 2016 plastered with the blunt assertion ‘We send the EU £350 million a week’ is an infamous recent example of political disinformation. The combination of an arrestingly large figure with a brutal simplicity of messaging allowed the factually false claim to circulate widely and rapidly across the internet as well as print and television news. It was custom-made for a media ecosystem that privileges concise and attention-grabbing messages. And it was consequential. One of the architects of the claim, Dominic Cummings, afforded the bus and its message a pivotal role in explaining the EU referendum vote in 2016. It provided, he claimed, an emotive and mobilizing short-cut into all sorts of wider debates around the economy and living standards.

This article suggests that such explosive and consequential political disinformation is not a product of the internet age. It follows a simple piece of text in 1830, which usually appeared under the heading Nice Pickings. This offered a list of peers and bishops and enumerated their collective drain on the British state, a total which it calculated at £4.2 million per annum (around £300 million in today’s money). These numbers were inaccurate and their compilers knew them to be so. Nonetheless, within the booming newspaper press and the increasingly contested politics of 1830 Britain Nice Pickings went viral.

The article traces and reconstructs the journey of Nice Pickings as it moved from the radical London press to circulate widely in provincial newspapers and in the mainstream London dailies. Freshly laundered in the metropolitan press, it could then be reissued from the radical press as a series of handbills that flooded the country in the final months of 1830. Along its route, it was picked up by and endorsed or contested by a range of groups: parliamentary reformers and radicals calling for fundamental changes to the British state; agricultural insurgents protesting the immiseration of the English countryside in the biggest revolt it had ever seen; and conservatives who both feared its impact and fumed about its inaccuracies.

Nice Pickings was expertly crafted to ride the vectors of nineteenth-century print and spoke to all of these groups and more. However factually inaccurate its contents, its authors, users, and readers were nonetheless attracted to or addressed the wider truth it tried to illuminate: that inequitable organization of the polity and the economy saw the systematic transfer of wealth from the industrious classes to unproductive aristocrats and bishops. It was thus consequential as a gateway to the kinds of arguments and stories that would underpin popular understandings of reform after 1830.