The ignominy of the News of the World’s closure in 2011, itself preceded by years of hacked celebrity gossip and sleazy scandals, has tended to obscure the newspaper’s social and cultural significance in previous eras.

It was a national Sunday title with a long history, a goodly portion of which was anything but unsavoury. As with all popular papers, by recording the interests of its large readership, it reflected and amplified developments in society.

The News of the World (NoW) arrived in 1843 as a broadsheet boasting that it was “The Novelty of the Nation and the Wonder of the World” and claiming to offer “rich man’s journalism at a price suited to the poor.”

In fact, despite its cheap cover price, which matched that of its competitors, the poorer masses could not have afforded a paper targeted at the newly literate Victorian working class and the lower middle class.

By providing a mixture of news and entertainment, it was unashamedly populist. However, throughout the 19th century and into the early 20th century its content was not as sensationalist or titillating as some commentators have tended to suggest.

Aside from its comprehensive news coverage, which included serious articles on domestic and foreign politics, it ran reviews of theatres, music, books and journals. It is undoubtedly true that it also carried a great deal of crime, mostly from court reports, but it was not as down-market as several of its rivals.

Indeed, when those rivals reduced their cover prices in 1861 to one penny the NoW maintained its two penny price, suggesting “that it saw a distinction between its type of coverage and relative gravitas, and the more popular, sensational language of the penny press.”

Indeed, across the 19th century the paper “which in the twentieth century was so much defined by its sensationalism, was the least audacious, most respectable and ‘calmest’ of the early Sundays.”

That’s the view of two contributors to a new book that charts the paper’s history, The News of the World and the British Press, 1843-2011.*

Billed as “the first extended, scholarly treatment” of the newspaper’s history, it contains 16 essays that deal with what the book’s editors argue was the paper’s centrality, at certain points, to the cultural life of Britain.

There are fascinating insights into the NoW’s charting of the role of women, its contribution to political cartooning and its largely impartial, unracist reporting of Britain’s imperial expansion. One chapter highlights the cautious support for the lengthy Victorian campaign against “child slavery”.

Another relates the paper’s fractious relationship with the Irish Republic, where it was banned from sale for 30 years, until 1961, for publishing “indecent” material, including adverts for contraceptives.

At several points, authors such as Martin Conboy, Chris Williams and Julian Petley, who deal with the more sensationalist 20th century content, touch on the editorial formula that led to the NoW becoming the world’s largest-selling English-language paper, reaching a sale of more than 8.4m in 1950.

By that time, writes Conboy, “the NOTW had established a tangible and cosy place in the affections of the nation, as an intrinsic and widely recognised part of the national narrative.

“Its populist, innuendo-driven ribaldry was a perfect complement to two other characteristic British entertainments of the twentieth century: McGill;s saucy seaside postcards (1902-62) and the Carry On films (1958-79).”

In those years, the NoW published tantalising headlines, usually over stories culled from criminal and divorce court cases, which hinted at sordid behaviour and then left the details up to their readers’ imaginations.

The following decade marked something of a change, however. The paper did start to carry more salacious details and, as Williams notes, “the pressure to find exclusive stories became more intense”. He contends that the paper’s “eventual demise” could be traced to its 1960 serialisation of the memoirs of Diana Dors in return for £35,000 (£700,000 today).

Its newsgathering techniques broke through conventional ethical - and eventually, legal - boundaries as it sought to publish ever more scandalous stories.

Rupert Murdoch acquired the paper in 1968, first befriending the owner, Sir William Carr, and then ousting him once he was in control. Similarly, he tipped out the man who had edited the NoW for 10 years, Stafford Somerfield, partly on the grounds that he was “even nastier than me.”

The final chapter deals with the downfall of the NoW, a story told many times over, not least in the Guardian, which revealed the paper’s phone-hacking activities.

It bears re-telling, although I’m uncertain whether it should be viewed through the prism of the digital revolution, as its author, James Rodgers, chooses to do. It tends to confuse the issue by muddling criminal activity with technological change.

The cabal at the News of the World responsible for intercepting the voicemail messages of thousands of people were guilty of unethical and illegal behaviour, which itself should be seen as the culmination of practices that were developed many years before.

Sadly, the book does not include an essay on that issue, which would surely cast more light on popular journalism in the late 20th and early 21st century.

Instead, one has to pick out only occasional references to shady newsgathering methods. For example, in the 1890s, the paper’s crime reporter (and later assistant editor), Robert Power Berrey, “presented a bottle of whisky to the duty inspector at Scotland Yard” every week “with a view to getting exclusive scoops on the latest crime news.”

By the 1970s, NoW reporters were regularly using covert filming in order to obtain stories, such as the Lord Lambton exposure that the Press Council regarded as an unacceptable intrusion into the junior defence minister’s private life.

It was noticeable that revelatory memoirs by News of the World reporters, such as those by Gerry Brown, Graham Johnson and Mazher Mahmood do not even feature in the bibliography.

Aside from that unfortunate omission, the book is required reading for all those journalists who misguidedly believe the NoW was the rogue paper of the British press throughout its entire history.

*The News of the World and the British Press, 1843-2011, edited by Laurel Brake, Chandrika Kaul and Mark W Turner (Palgrave Macmillan)